From Judgement To Joy is an in-depth, bespoke, structured, transformative coaching solution to your body image problem. It's:
The aim of the Programme is to help you break free from shame, obsession and insecurity when it comes to your appearance, so you can start enjoying your body and your life to the full. This means you'll no longer make your happiness contingent upon your appearance meeting certain bogus standards, and you'll be free to live the life you want without being burdened by body image concerns.
In the Programme, I'll support, guide and encourage you to:
❤️🩹 unlearn all the rules about how people are 'supposed to look';
❤️🩹 question all your beliefs about what makes someone attractive and become open to a fresh, healthier perspective;
❤️🩹 worry less about what other people think of the way you look;
❤️🩹 worry less about what you think of the way you look(!);
❤️🩹 not become derailed by seeing your reflection in the mirror or seeing photos of yourself you don't like;
❤️🩹 deal with other people's judgements, whether real or perceived, of your appearance, so that they no longer crush you or determine your behaviours;
❤️🩹 recognise that your negative opinion of your appearance is the legacy of a lifelong process of toxic brainwashing that has eroded your ability to see yourself clearly;
❤️🩹 navigate painful feelings, including disgust, shame and despair, about your body, wisely, so you become less afraid of them, and they no longer hold you back from living a full, meaningful and enjoyable life;
❤️🩹 discern which thoughts to respect and pay attention to, and which ones to leave alone, so that you stop torturing yourself with your own thinking;
❤️🩹 start enjoying the sensual pleasures of your body now and stop waiting until your appearance 'improves';
❤️🩹 tap into the healing power of authentic creative self-expression;
❤️🩹 find a true refuge within yourself - a place of calm tranquility, inner freedom and emotional safety - and hang out there more often;
❤️🩹 uncover your real priorities, values and interests and align your life with these;
❤️🩹 become a role model for self-love and self-respect for everyone you interact with.
The programme is taken in 24 one-to-one coaching sessions, each lasting 90 minutes.
These can be scheduled at a frequency of your choosing (e.g. weekly, twice a week, monthly etc.). You can also change the frequency during the programme if you wish.
All sessions will be on Zoom.
Each session will take one of my blog posts as a starting point for discussion. These blog posts comprise the programme modules. You can find the list of topics that will form the syllabus below.
Each blog post ends with a series of questions. I'll invite you to share your reflections on these questions during each session.
I'll provide coaching guidance to help you identify blind spots that might be too difficult for you to see yourself, and emotional support and encouragement if the discussion brings up painful feelings.
Each module is designed to help you have insights that will change the way you relate to your thoughts and feelings about your body. If one of the topics doesn't feel especially relevant to you, you'll be free to bring up other issues - we can take the discussion in the direction it needs to go to meet your needs.
Please be aware that I will continually review and refine the course content. Nevertheless, this outline will give you a very good idea of what we'll cover.
Click on the headings below if you'd like to read any of the topics.
Modules
There will be no mandatory homework in addition to the 24 coaching sessions.
If possible, between sessions, you'll try and make some time to reflect on what we discussed last time and read the next module (takes approx. 5 minutes).
You might wish to jot down any insights/thoughts/questions that arise and bring them along to the next session. However, this is not mandatory.
I can also make suggestions of things you can read or listen to between sessions to reinforce what we've discussed. This is likely to consolidate your learning and accelerate your progress. However, looking at these is optional and will depend upon how much time you have.
When we're suffering with negative thoughts and feelings about the way our bodies look, we are suffering from the impact of believing painful lies about what attractiveness is, who we truly are, and where our worth and wellbeing come from.
Most of us will have picked up these lies, or misunderstandings, from the culture in which we live - parents, relatives, friends, romantic partners, bullies, the diet / fashion / beauty industries, (social) media etc.
When we see through these lies, we free ourselves from their grip and experience a fresh perspective, and our suffering - and all the attitudes, feelings and behaviours associated with it - falls away. Sometimes this happens suddenly. More commonly, it's a gradual process of awakening.
The truth will set you free.
The Programme is thus designed to help facilitate you having insights - deep shifts in your perspective on your body and life itself. You can have insights at any time - during a session, or between sessions e.g. while in the shower, doing the washing-up or walking your dog!
We usually have insights when we're feeling relaxed and our mind is not 'working'. My mother always used to say that when she was struggling with a crossword puzzle, the answer would come to her when she took a break. Having insights is usually like that! That's all to say that this Programme is not about lots of 'doing' and is more about 'seeing' differently.
Turning away from your habitual thoughts can feel uncomfortable and scary. It takes courage and humility. Even though they are causing you pain, they are also familiar, and leaving them behind can feel very daunting.
Having support often helps to keep you heading in the right direction. As someone who has already been on this journey, I will be there to guide and encourage you. 😊
There are both similarities and differences. As with most therapy, I will offer a confidential, non-judgemental space for you to explore your thoughts and feelings. Unlike therapy:
✅ I will share my own experience of body image suffering and healing. Most therapists are not allowed to divulge anything about their own lives. I don't think it makes sense to hold back from sharing about the insights that helped me make peace with my body.
✅ I won't diagnose you. When it comes to body image suffering, disordered eating, exercise addition and related problems, I don't think diagnoses are usually very helpful. They can give the misleading impression that your suffering and healing trajectory is medically predetermined. I don't think that's true. See more about this in the FAQs section below.
✅ I won't primarily offer you techniques or lists of things to do. The Programme is designed for you to have insights about yourself, your experience and life itself. It's less about doing and more about seeing things differently. When you see things differently, your emotions and behaviours will naturally change. Healing shouldn't be a constant battle - it should make your life easier.
✅ Therapists tend to spend a lot of time getting you to recount things that happened in your past. While this may be fruitful in order to help you to recognise that your unhealthy beliefs came from fallible human beings and are therefore not trustworthy, I don't think it's necessary to keep going over your most painful experiences.
✅ Therapists tend to focus just on the content of your thinking. I will do this too. But I will also encourage you to get curious about where that thinking comes from and the nature of thought itself.
✅ Therapists tend to completely leave out the spiritual dimension to life. But we are all spiritual whether we use the word 'spiritual' or not. Our spirit is what animates our body and it's what differentiates us from a corpse! Everything that makes life worth living is intangible and invisible i.e. love, kindness and wisdom. The Programme will take a deep dive into this truth. For me, this exploration of the spiritual is what took me from feeling like a victim of my body to real joy and genuine freedom!
✅ When treating Body Dysmorphia Disorder, some therapists appear to accept cultural biases around attractiveness. They appear to believe that body image suffering stems from someone having an inaccurate perception of how well their appearance conforms with today's so-called 'beauty' standards. I refute this position and think it acts as a barrier to complete healing by reinforcing the ideas that give rise to the suffering in the first place.
For me, traditional therapy doesn't usually go deep enough. It doesn't get to the root of body image suffering - how is it created from identification with insecure thoughts. And it doesn't focus on where healing comes from - a rise in our level of consciousness and a stronger connection with the love and wisdom within.
It also led me to believe that certain life adverse life experiences made some degree of mental illness inevitable. I no longer believe this. I've witnessed so many people who've been through terrible traumas go on to lead happy, fulfilling lives.
The way I see it, what makes the difference between people who heal and people who don't is not the severity of their adverse experiences, but how deeply they understand how their experience of life is created and who they truly are.
Traditional therapy typically leaves out the most important thing of all - the key to healing - and that's a deeper sense of our true spiritual nature, and knowing how to relate to the thinking that takes us away from that. In this Programme we'll go deeper and look at who you really are, how thoughts create your experience of life whether you're aware of what they are or not.
This is transformative.
I would say you need to bring the following three qualities to bear if the Programme is to help you:
I recognise that the ideas we have about attractiveness can sometimes be extremely hard to change - they're so pervasive after all. And we tend to have such strong feelings about our bodies.
I've also been on many excellent courses myself on a wide variety of topics in the past and have witnessed that there are usually some people who don't appear to benefit during the course itself.
Furthermore, we're all at different stages of recovery with different levels of awareness. That means you might need / want more help after the Programme ends.
I don't want anyone to complete my Programme and feel that they'll be cut off from all support if they're still haven't had the insights they need to have a nicer experience of their body.
That's why I'll offer you FREE access to my online membership, The Lens of Love Community, FOR A WHOLE YEAR after the Programme finishes! 💝 In weekly Community meetings you'll be able to get regular, ongoing coaching support from me in a group setting.
You can read feedback from people who've worked with me here: Testimonials
£1500
To be paid in full after your FREE discovery call - see below.
If you're interested in taking the Programme, please complete this short, straightforward form: From Judgement to Joy Programme Enquiry Form.
I'll then contact you to schedule a FREE 90-minute discovery call. The purpose of this call is twofold. It will give you:
After this discovery call you'll be able to make an informed decision about whether you want to go ahead and invest in the Programme.
The ball will be in your court.
No, I am not a therapist. I do not treat or diagnose medical conditions. If you need medical advice, please consult a doctor.
I share the insights that helped me stop judging my appearance and start enjoying my body and my life to the full after a decades-long struggle with body image and disordered eating.
While I have had some traditional therapy in the past, and recognise that many people find this beneficial, I have consciously decided not to train as a psychotherapist/counsellor because that is not what helped me recover the most.
Moreover, I think the current cultural practice of issuing people with lifelong mental illness labels can have dire consequences. All too often it leads to people staying stuck in suffering as they come to identify with their own worst habits of thought. Diagnoses can thus turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.
I want to offer you something more than merely coping with symptoms for the rest of your life. I want you to realise your own healing potential, so you can have a whole new and nicer experience of your body, and life as a whole.
You can read more about this perspective in a book entitled Beyond Diagnosis: a paradigm shift from pathology to innate health by Chana Studley. My story of body image healing is featured as one of the case studies in the book.
I participated in a 6-month coach training programme with Rohini Ross and Angus Ross to study this understanding of our innate health and deepen my grounding in its key principles.
A final point about me and my way of working: Although I've found the three principles conversation extremely helpful, I'm not dogmatic about it. My abiding focus will always be to help you find whatever will help you experience more wellbeing and less suffering in your life. I recognise that we are all unique and that there are many routes to recovery. My objective is to support you on your individual journey which may end up looking very different from my own. There is beauty in our diversity!
There is no need to identify yourself as 'spiritual' in order to experience wellbeing, be a force for good in the world or live a productive, fulfilling life. I understand that spiritual language and concepts can be off-putting to many people, and there are often good reasons for that. As a result, I will do my best to adjust my language to suit your needs, as necessary.
You don't have to believe in guardian angels, use crystals, read Tarot cards, eschew modern medicine and give up all your worldly possessions to go and find yourself in the Himalayas, to realise that your thinking is making you sick and miserable! 😆
The Programme will never require you to believe anything you don't believe. Instead, it's about helping you to become more familiar with more of who you are beyond your habitual thinking. Like a scientist, you will do experiments and learn from the results. This is experiential learning and doesn't require blind faith.
The blind spots we have about our appearance can be really hard to identify, especially since they're almost universally propagated. The programme that I've created provides you with a roadmap for identifying these blind spots one by one. As we go through the common misunderstandings that lead to body image suffering together, you'll be able to free yourself from the grip of all of them in turn.
Without this structure, there is the risk is that you would continue to mistake the misunderstandings causing your suffering for truth, and see them simply as 'the way things are' and 'something you have to put up with'.
If you feel self-conscious about how you look, you are welcome to keep your camera switched off during the sessions on Zoom. You can also keep your camera on, but turn off the self-view, so you don't have to see yourself if that's what bothers you most.
I'd encourage you to be brave and switch your camera on if you possibly can as the programme progresses and you get more familiar with me, even if it's just briefly, but you'll be put under no pressure to do this.
Yes, of course. Men can struggle terribly with body image, and unfortunately the problem is becoming more widespread with each passing year. Only the details of the specific expectations for how a person's body should look differ according to gender.
We may therefore have to 'translate' some of the modules to a male experience since they were written from my experience as a woman. Nevertheless, the nature of the suffering and the solution are exactly same.
If the following apply to you, the programme probably won't be right for you at this time.
❌ You have a fundamental belief that recovery is not possible for anyone, and you find it insulting for anyone to suggest that it is.
❌ You are in a crisis and are in need of urgent medical care. Please note that I am not a doctor and I don't diagnose anyone or treat any specific medical condition. I share my experience of healing, which many people find beneficial, but it is no substitute for medical intervention. If you have concerns about your health, please consult a qualified physician in the first instance.
❌ You are only looking to commiserate with me about how awful it is to struggle with body image issues. During the Programme you'll have space to fully and openly express your pain and suffering, which is so important for healing, but I will also encourage you to explore your potential to heal, learn, grow and change.
❌ You are solely interested in finding ways to change your appearance and do not recognise the psychological component of your suffering at all. You are most welcome to do the Programme if you'd like to look different and if you are doing things to change or to try to change your appearance. But if that's all you're interested in, then this programme won't be for you.
If you're interested in taking the Programme, please complete this short, straightforward form: From Judgement to Joy Programme Enquiry Form.I'll then contact you to schedule a FREE 90-minute discovery call. The purpose of this call is twofold. It will give you:
After this discovery call you'll be able to make an informed decision about whether you want to go ahead and invest in the Programme. The ball will be in your court.
Please don't hesitate to contact me at maria@mariamorgan.info if you have any questions about the Programme, or my other offerings.
I'd be delighted to be your guide on your journey to a more peaceful, joyful and fulfilling life. 🥰
Lots of love,
Maria
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