excerpt from: Abundantly Well: Seven Medicines

Nourishment is the basis of health and the fuel for healing.

Nourishment is more than what we eat and drink.
Sights, sounds, smells, sensations, emotions, and energies, meals, stories, ceremony, safe space, affection, honesty, and beauty nourish us. Lifestyle Medicine is choosing what we allow in.
How simple Step 3 would be if we had only to look on the light side and concern ourselves with joy and ease and the absence of problems.
Abundant health is wholeness. Wholeness includes our shadows, rages, fears, and mourning cries. Opposites intermingle and engage to create health/wholeness/holiness.
We love all of ourselves. We nourish and strengthen all aspects of ourselves: good/bad, positive/negative, attractive/ugly, sane/crazy.
When we encounter "difficult" feelings — abandonment, betrayal, deprivation, inadequacy, jealousy, desire, greed, rage, embarrassment, loss, fear, revenge - Step 3 advises us to "feed the demons."
Nourish those emotions, listen to them closely rather than try to shut them down. Respond to their needs.
 If given a safe home in us, unsavory aspects paradoxically nourish the best parts of us and we become abundantly well.
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excerpt from:
Abundantly Well: Seven Medicines , pg 91

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