I am probably not the only yoga teacher who has been asked, more than once, what I eat and drink to stay trim. It would be much easier if I could just suggest a prescribed diet, a YouTube video, or some scientific proof of a specific way of living. But that’s just not how it seems to works for me.

My approach is practicing presence in and love for my body. It doesn’t make sense, but practicing loving presence (and the vulnerability that follows) is actually much harder than a habitual way of treating the body like a lazy animal that must be disciplined and trained to operate optimally.

It’s been (is!) a long and hard journey for me to be increasingly willing to be present in my body, to feel and be with those feelings. While I am closer, I am not “there.” Sometimes I check out and refuse to feel the vulnerability and pain. I have my longstanding, habitual ways of not feeling, and despite practicing mindfulness and presence, I still slip into unconscious numbing of fear and sadness. Sometimes I really want to avoid feeling the existential loneliness that accompanies my human experience of separation from God.

So what do I do?

I do what I can to feel myself inside. I scan the energy field of my body—a lot. There is practically always something going on that feels less than peaceful. That’s who I am a fair amount of the time: less than peaceful. A lifetime (lifetimes?) of traumatic experiences created directly from my own sincere belief in the illusion of separation from God has marked me in deep ways.

The fear shows up in my body as contracted energy. Areas where energy doesn’t flow freely, and when I feel into these areas, I am sometimes transported back to an old emotional injury. Often very old and always caused by some version of, I am not feeling loved and safe. Most often dating back to a time when I was too young to keep myself safe or knew how to love myself.

Whether I really wasn’t loved and safe is irrelevant. If you see a large constrictor snake in the corner of your room, your body will contract in self-protection – whether that snake turns out to be a coiled rope or an actual snake doesn’t really matter to your body’s energy field. The contraction has occurred, and the constriction in the body may not release unless you give it conscious loving attention and deliberately release the fear that crept in.

At the risk of sounding trite: it’s all about love. For real, letting God’s love in through your own loving presence. To me, that means my strong, deliberate, immediate presence, right now, in the now, and it is how I re-connect to God, the Divine, the eternal Now. With that energy and focused presence, I am sometimes successful in melting and releasing frozen emotions that have lingered in my body.

The other day, I rode my bike here in Copenhagen to teach a class nearby. On the way, a taxi cab nearly ran me over. I fell on my bike to avoid being hit. To add insult to injury, the cab driver rolled down his window, yelled something incomprehensible at me, and gave me the finger. He apparently believed it was my fault that I went straight on the bike path when he needed to cross the path to take a right.

I didn’t have much time, so I got back on my bike to get to my class on time. Once I was seated in front of the class and guided the group, including me, into meditation, I felt the contracted, fearful energy of a near miss in my body; as I felt into it, I cried. Right there in front of my students. I explained what was going on. One student jumped up and hugged me. That felt really good. Then the energy of shock, fear, and anger moved through, and I was clear. It was a new injury, so it was easier to release than the old ones more deeply embedded in me.

The contraction would have lingered if I had not allowed myself to move the feeling through and out. It probably would have become some soreness in my body that I would have attributed to the fall. To discharge the anger energy, I might later have snapped at my partner or some other innocent person crossing my path. Knowing me, I probably also would have had an irresistible urge to eat something sweet.

Sweet is how I numb out. Well, one of the ways. I have long since given up alcohol as a numbing agent, but sugar, its close cousin, let’s be honest, entered in its place. For years, I worked in treatment centers for drugs and alcohol in Minneapolis, and the clients had often replaced their alcohol addiction with a pretty extreme sugar intake.

My point is to be keenly aware of how you cope with overwhelming feelings you are trying to avoid. Big and small and question, if even momentarily, whether you want to indulge and numb out or are willing to give your body the love it needs to feel and heal.

It’s the deep sensing into and befriending the energy in the body that allows me to be in tune with what my body needs, whether emotionally or physically. From there, it becomes easier to know whether the body needs herbs, meat, water, vegan food, a walk in the forest, sleep, or fasting. An outer teacher does not prescribe it; the body becomes the teacher in the moment.

From there it becomes pretty clear that wanting sugar is my way of avoiding feeling and not a true request from my body. From there, it starts to feel clearer what my body needs today. Not intermittent fasting on a prescribed schedule but just not eating when my body needs clarity and eating wholesome, home-cooked meals when my body needs nourishment.