Today was wash day.

I woke up happy, to a lovely rainy morning with cool breezes and a pet bird in a good mood (pet bird not in a good mood means Mom is not in a good mood).

I stripped the bed, made the rounds picking up Mommy towels and birdie towels, and trundled it all down to the local washateria, where the proprietor had the television set to CNN on full volume.

In the space of literally less than five minutes, the good mood faded as I was informed about a Secret Service sex scandal, casualties from a bombing in Afghanistan, a new form of popular plastic surgery sweeping the nation, and an attempt to tax the “haves” in this country that would most surely be quickly tabled.

My world can encourage or repel deadly emotional weather – the choice is mine alone.

Suddenly the gentle rain and dark clouds no longer seemed refreshing and nourishing to the parched Houston earth, but ominous and threatening, with a spiraling tornado of doom hidden behind every bank of dark clouds.

But this is the world we live in. It just is. It doesn’t mean this has to be the world I personally live in each and every day.

For this post I wanted to share a blog-versation between myself and my dear friend and colleague June Alexander.

June is quite literally one of the most inspiring women and mentors I know. She recovered after a 4 decade battle with an eating disorder, and as a grandmother has gone on to author not one, not two, not three, but I-have-lost-count number of books on eating disorders, recovery, family therapy, and the needs of recovering people.

June is tireless. Her passion for helping others precedes her, meaning that by the time you are actually shaking hands with (or in my case, hugging) June herself, you are already emotionally touched right to your heart with the kind and amazing human being that she is.

June is also a former MentorCONNECT mentor (she served with us as a volunteer mentor until her own schedule made it impossible logistically) and a beloved presenter for MentorCONNECT’s popular monthly teleconference series.

I was honored to be invited to share some thoughts on the value of mentoring with June for her blog, and wanted to also invite you to the conversation here!

Mentoring – A Gem in the Recovery Toolbag

Often when I am presenting at a college or organization, I spend a few minutes working with the participants in a guided exercise to demonstrate the power of our own minds when setting and achieving goals.

Our own attitude – which is approximately 50% genetic and 50% learned behavior – wields a powerful influence.

Our attitude is formed by a thought meeting a feeling, or vice versa. In other words, it is in the interplay between thought and emotion that our full power (for good or for ill) is discovered and unleashed (sort of like pulling the pin out of a hand grenade, or filling a balloon full of helium).

There are two typical pathways by which thought and emotion most frequently tend to meet:

Example A: The mind thinks a thought. That thought produces an emotion.
Example B: The body produces an emotion. The mind thinks a thought about that emotion.

In the intersection where thought meets feeling, or feeling meets thought, decision and action can then occur.

I am often asked to travel to colleges and share a program called “Beauty Undressed”. In this program, I speak about my experiences of eating disorders recovery.

Of course, whenever I am invited to speak, I automatically interpret that to mean that my audiences really want to learn about the power of mentoring in eating disorders recovery….because of course my personal recovery story is one of mentoring, and I credit the presence of a long line of mentors with helping me to choose recovery, do the hard work of recovery, and sustain my recovery over the long term.

While I believe it is very important for people to understand the specifics of what an eating disorder is, how it can develop (medically speaking), and the basic forms of treatment that are often necessary in order to facilitate healing, this is not what I speak about unless it is specifically requested.

A far greater barrier, in my personal experience, has been the inability to make the leap from “your issue” to “my issue”.

It is no secret that I am a huge cinema fan.

There are many movies and movie characters that inspire me, but in particular I have noticed that Clint Eastwood is a great mentor if you have self-confidence issues.

Some of Clint’s most famous roles, like police inspector Harry Callahan in “Dirty Harry”, war veteran Walt Kowalski in “Gran Torino”, and Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan in “In the Line of Fire”, teach us all what it means to have a sense of yourself, your talents, your capabilities, your personal “line in the sand” and your self-integrity.

Admittedly, Clint has as many great “bad guy” roles to his credit as his “good guy” star-making roles, but this too is just a metaphor for the many sides of “us”, as his movie “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” succinctly reminds us.

One of my favorite scenes is from “Dirty Harry” where the bad guys – four total – are trying to rob the diner where Harry gets his coffee each morning. To warn him, the waitress pours lots of sugar in his black coffee. Harry, reading the morning paper, fails to notice until he gets outside, tastes his brew, and spits it back out.

And promptly heads back to the coffee shop.

Your “spirit”.

What the heck does that mean, anyway?

If you are of a religious bent, you may explain “spirit” in the terms of your faith background, such as “Holy Spirit” for Christians, or “Shakti” for Hindu traditions.

If you are not of a religious bent, your definition of spirit may be more ambiguous, and you may be more inclined to describe spirit as “connection”, “benevolent good” or “universal truth”.

If you are of neither a religious nor a spiritual bent, you may simply enjoy the obvious universality of certain basic life experiences, including emotion, thought, ambition, the desire for relationship, and other fundamental characteristics you appear to share with the beings living all around you.

The important element here is not to nail down your exact literal translation of what spirit means to you, but rather to learn to express how it feels within you.

Oh boy. The heart.

The heart is about as understandable to us as the mind, if we attempt to view our physical heart and our emotional heart (aka our emotions) as one and the same.

Rather, as in the case of “mind” and “brain”, the singular key to grasping hold of the right approach to heart-healthy living is to understand that you are once again dealing on two levels – the physical and the mental.

Why the mental, you might ask?

Because thoughts and emotions are inextricably linked. What we think about will prompt emotions. What we feel will prompt thoughts. This is how we make sense of what we are feeling, and how we feel what we are trying to make sense of.

So first things first. Taking care of our heart is at its most fundamental learning the basics of care for the other most important organ in our body (besides the brain): our heart.

The next phase of learning what there is no manual to teach us but what we must nevertheless learn anyway is to learn to take good care of our brain and mind.

The first step in this process is to understand one simple and important fact:

The brain and the mind is NOT the same thing.

The mind is an aggregate of our human experience that we to date have no definition for, although many scientists, researchers, and ordinary humans have tried.

The brain, on the other hand, is the physical organ that controls our bodily functions – important functions such as sight, hearing, touch, taste, needs cues, pain and other “warning lights”, and communication.

The brain is so, so, so important – and yet to date it is the organ in our body that we still understand the least.

For people who suffer from eating disorders, abuse of substances, or other types of brain-body imbalances, taking care of the body nearly always feels like the toughest part of the four-part self-care success formula.

It’s not, but it does often feel that way to folks like us.

The truth is, the body is the simplest place to learn good self-care (which is also why we are starting with the body).

This is because, all things considered, we know far more about how the body operates than we do about the brain/mind, heart, or spirit.

While often our understanding of how our body works in part and whole is not quite as cut-and-dried as our understanding of our car (although with some of the mechanics I’ve had in the past, I might challenge that) body self-care operates basically on the same principle.

Nutrients in, energy out. Hydration in, energy out. Exercise in, lowered stress level and improved circulation and breathing out. Rest in, improved focus, concentration and memory out.

I’m oversimplifying just a bit here, but you get the point.

When I was younger, I always operated under the assumption that I was automatically doing everything wrong unless someone specifically told me otherwise.

I thought everyone around me had gotten the “how to be successful at life” manual and that whoever was handing them out a) ran out of copies before they got to me or b) assumed I was too stupid to understand it anyway and gave my copy to someone deemed more deserving.

The unnatural introversion caused by my eating disorder didn’t help any either, because I certainly wasn’t starting conversations with either friends or strangers to check out my theory.

That is why I thought, in preparation for what tends to be the most stressful season of the year whether you have an eating disorder or not, I would spend a few posts talking about what the manual hasn’t taught me but I’ve learned anyway about taking care of ourselves.

In this first post, all I’m going to tell you is that we have four major areas of responsibility when it comes to taking care of ourselves.

Those four major areas are: