My Stop the Drops Program

At some point, we have to stop practicing being a patient and start practicing being alive.

I said something like this recently while coaching a client, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Because I think there’s a point in a healing journey where healing itself can become the thing your entire life revolves around.

What am I eating?

When am I eating?

What is my blood sugar doing?

Did I sleep enough?

What supplement do I need?

Is this light messing with my circadian rhythm?

Why am I bloated?

Why am I hungry?

Why do I feel this sensation?

What does this symptom mean?

What do I need to fix next?

And listen, some of this matters. I have spent years teaching people how to understand their bodies, stabilize their blood sugar, support their metabolism, change their light environment, improve their sleep, support their nervous system, and give their bodies what they need.

I still believe deeply in that work.

But I’m becoming increasingly interested in another question:

What happens when getting well starts taking up just as much mental space as being unwell did?

I was talking to a client recently who has been dealing with symptoms and obsessive mental chatter around food and her body for almost 20 years.

I asked her to imagine that all of it was gone.

She wakes up rested. She eats breakfast. She takes a walk. She feels energized. She goes to a workout without wondering whether she can tolerate it. A meeting runs late and she doesn’t panic because she hasn’t eaten yet. She spontaneously calls a friend and goes out to dinner. Maybe they stop for ice cream. She isn't thinking about food or her body all day.

She's just living.

And then I asked her:

What would be there for you if all of these problems were gone? What would you feel?

And she couldn't answer.

She told me it was such a hard question because she'd been dealing with the same mental chatter for 20 years.

She talked about how much of her mind is consumed by hunger and food, and how the other half is consumed by thoughts about her body. She hates how her clothes fit. She feels bloated. She looks in the mirror and criticizes herself.

And she said something that stopped me:

"It's hard to envision a reality when all of that is freed up."

So I tried something different.

I told her to forget about herself.

Imagine another woman who has the exact same problems you have. We'll call her Jessica.

Jessica is struggling. She's hungry all the time. She's frustrated with her body. She's thinking about food constantly. She's freaking sick of it.

And then, magic wand.

Jessica gets better.

She's free.

What is she like?

Immediately my client had answers.

She has more mental space.

Freedom.

Confidence.

There's an aura about her because she feels so good within herself that other people can feel it.

Peace.

She could imagine it for Jessica.

She just couldn't imagine it for herself.

And that has cracked open something enormous for me.

Because I think there are a lot of us walking around saying:

I want to feel better.

I want to heal.

I want to lose the weight.

I want the relationship.

I want more money.

I want my business to grow.

I want to feel confident.

I want my life to change.

But what if getting the life you want and being able to experience the life you want are two different skills?

What if the thing you want actually arrived?

Could you receive it?

Could you enjoy it?

Could you feel it?

Could you stay there?

Or would your attention immediately find the next thing that's wrong?

What does your personality continually orient your attention toward?

This is where the Enneagram has become fascinating to me in a completely different way.

I’m an Enneagram One.

And if you know anything about Ones, you know how easily our attention finds what is wrong.

What needs improvement?

What isn't quite right?

What should I be doing?

What could be better?

What haven't I handled yet?

I can be sitting inside something objectively beautiful and my attention will locate the freaking crooked picture frame.

And I don't think this is only about Ones.

Every personality structure has places attention automatically goes.

What is wrong?

What is missing?

What could go wrong?

What do people think of me?

What do I need to accomplish?

What do I need to understand?

Where could I lose my freedom?

Where could I be rejected?

Where is the conflict?

Where am I not safe?

So I've become interested in a question that goes deeper than personality typing:

What does your personality structure continually orient your attention toward, and therefore what parts of being alive does it make difficult to experience?

Because whatever repeatedly captures our attention becomes a huge part of the life we actually experience.

My client gave me such a perfect example of this.

She was leaving for SPAIN the next day.

An incredible trip.

And as she was packing, what was taking up her attention?

None of my clothes fit.

I hate my body.

How am I going to wear a bathing suit?

She knew there were a million things she could experience joy around. She was genuinely excited about the trip. And still, her attention kept getting pulled back toward what was wrong.

Spain was already there.

She didn't need to manifest Spain.

She needed the capacity to experience having Spain while also having a body she currently wished were different.

That distinction feels huge to me.

Because how much goodness can your life contain if you can't let yourself experience the goodness that's already here?

“I can't feel that until this is resolved.”

Later, I asked her what it might look like to create some of those feelings she had identified, freedom, peace, confidence, right now.

And she said:

“I don't know how to turn all of the mental stuff off until it's been resolved... it always feels like I have more work to do.”

There it is.

I can feel peace when this is resolved.

I can feel confident when my body changes.

I can relax when I make enough money.

I can enjoy my business when it becomes successful.

I can date when I lose the weight.

I can be spontaneous when my blood sugar is stable.

I can live when I feel better.

I know this pattern because I have been doing it too.

I've been treating my actual life like the waiting room for the life I'm eventually going to have.

And there is no someday.

So I asked my client something else.

In those 20 years of struggling, had she ever experienced a fleeting moment of joy?

Yes.

Had she experienced peace?

Yes.

Connection?

Yes.

Confidence?

Yes.

So I told her:

I want you to consider that you don't have to be fixed in order to create a sense of what we're talking about here.

Then we practiced it.

We slowed down. She closed her eyes. She breathed. She relaxed her face and shoulders.

Within a couple of minutes she noticed excitement about her upcoming trip. She felt more space. More ease.

Then I asked her to bring to mind someone who was incredibly easy for her to love.

Her face changed.

And I pointed it out to her.

You just created a sense of love or happiness.

Nothing had been fixed.

Her body hadn't changed.

Her symptoms hadn't disappeared.

Her circumstances were exactly the same.

But for a moment, her experience of being alive changed.

And lately I've become obsessed with that.

How good can you let it feel?

I've spent a lot of time learning how to feel the emotions I used to avoid.

Anger.

Grief.

Fear.

Disappointment.

Rage.

Shame.

And that work has changed me.

But recently I realized I had never really asked the opposite question:

I have developed a much greater capacity to feel pain. Have I developed an equally large capacity to feel good?

Can I tolerate joy?

Can I tolerate pleasure without waiting for it to disappear?

Can I feel love without immediately analyzing it?

Can I experience hope without protecting myself through pessimism?

Can I experience gratitude without turning it into “but I still need to...”?

Can I feel possibility without demanding evidence?

Can I feel proud of myself without qualifying it?

Can I enjoy my body before it looks the way I want?

Can I enjoy my business before it reaches the number I want?

Can I enjoy my life before I've “earned” permission?

How good can I let it feel?

And importantly, this is not about trying to live in some artificially positive state all the time.

I don't want to use joy to avoid grief any more than I want to use grief to avoid joy.

I'm becoming interested in increasing our emotional range.

Can I grieve deeply and still let love in?

Can I be scared and still experience possibility?

Can I want my body to change and experience pleasure in my body today?

Can I want more money and still experience abundance in my life now?

Can I experience disappointment without deciding hope was a mistake?

Can I know that something I love is temporary and let that make me more present with it instead of less?

Maybe the goal isn't ultimately “feeling good.”

Maybe it's becoming increasingly available to life.

Healing cannot be the rest of your life

This is becoming a much bigger part of how I think about hypoglycemia and healing.

Of course I want you to stabilize your blood sugar.

Of course I want you to be able to go longer between meals, exercise again, sleep well, travel, tolerate stress, and stop feeling like you need to carry emergency food everywhere.

But I don't want to create people who become incredibly skilled at managing themselves.

I want you to get your freaking life back.

Because at some point, we have to stop practicing being a patient and start practicing being alive.

And then comes the question I think we don't ask nearly enough:

If your blood sugar stopped being the organizing principle of your day, what would you want your life to feel like?

Free?

Spontaneous?

Strong?

Peaceful?

Sexy?

Playful?

Adventurous?

Confident?

Alive?

And what if we don't have to wait until every symptom disappears to begin practicing some of that now?

That is where Stop the Drops is going.

Yes, we're going to work on blood sugar.

Yes, we're going to understand the physiology.

Yes, we're going to work with the fear and learned threat patterns that can keep the body stuck in loops long after they begin.

But we're also going to work on something bigger.

Getting you out of the waiting room.

Helping you stop organizing your entire life around what's wrong.

Creating the capacity to feel what you actually want to feel.

And asking what might be the most important question of all:

If I got my life back, what would I do with it?

If you've been dealing with hypoglycemia symptoms, food fear, constant hunger, blood sugar anxiety, or the feeling that managing your health has slowly become your entire life, Stop the Drops is for you.

We're not just trying to stop the drops.

We're creating the conditions for you to step fully into your life.

[JOIN STOP THE DROPS HERE]