The SPIRAL Ascent Process

The SPIRAL Ascent Process is a compassionate and empowering way to shift your food habits.

It works with your body’s inner wisdom to shift the roots of your addiction and reconnect you with a felt sense of aliveness.

It guides you along a peaceful, flexible path that is uniquely your own, so your food choices are aligned with your values, not someone else’s.

• SPIRAL: “Settled Presence, Inner Relating, Aligned Living.”
  • Settled Presence: finding calm and grounded connection within yourself, so you can notice what’s happening without being overwhelmed.
  • Inner Relating: listening with patience to the multiple, conflicted parts of yourself, and processing the feelings & beliefs that drive unwanted coping strategies.
  • Aligned Living: making choices that reflect your goals and values; not just eating healthier, but building a life full of meaning & purpose.
• Ascent as in climbing a spiral staircase out of the dark dungeon of despair towards the bright light of freedom.
• Process refers to the continual unfolding of life itself, where change happens gradually as you notice and integrate your experiences over time.

This approach is based on proven, powerful healing modalities that are used to treat trauma and substance addiction; and integrated into a system that’s easier to learn and build into your daily life.

This iterative process is like ascending a spiral staircase, revisiting each phase again and again, yet uncovering deeper insight and self-awareness with every turn.

While it may feel like going around in circles, each cycle allows you to meet your habits and cravings from a calmer, more grounded place. One day, you wake up one day and realize cravings are no longer running your life!

Settled Presence

We start by helping you feel steady and calm in your body.

Simple nervous-system exercises support you in noticing your sensations, emotions, and impulses without getting swept away by them.

This phase builds inner safety, trust, and the ability to pause and feel what’s happening inside you.

Inner Relating

Next, you learn to relate to your inner experiences in a curious and compassionate way.

You’ll notice the felt-sense of the “parts” of yourself that drive cravings, urges, and self-criticism. With gentle guidance, you learn to talk to these parts as if they were separate voices inside you, listen to what they need, and respond with care.

This helps you loosen stuck patterns and understand the feelings behind your addiction.

Aligned Living

Finally, you take what you’ve learned and bring it into everyday life.

With a clearer sense of self and gentler inner relationships, you can make food choices from your own inner sense of what’s right for you, instead of following someone else’s script.

Practising small, mindful actions and better body awareness builds new habits that feel natural, freeing, and aligned with the life you want to live.

We Go Slow to Go Fast

This work isn’t about quick fixes; it is about building a solid foundation of inner safety and trust. We focus on going slow to reach the root of addictive patterns, rather than just treating symptoms.

While it may feel like you’re not moving at first, each small step inward is a powerful leap forward in building new habits. This gentle, mindful pace allows for deep, lasting change that serves you for life.

The SPIRAL Ascent Process is based on these well-established practices and healing modalities:

• Polyvagal Theory: Lasting change starts with cultivating a sense of safety in the body.
• Focusing: A gentle, felt-sense parts work practice that helps you listen to the wisdom of your body.
• Nūma Breathwork: A powerful, body-centred practice that helps you access and release deeply held emotional tension.

I also teach from these evidence-based paradigms:

• Neurobiology of Craving: The dopamine system is the brain’s natural reward pathway.
  • When you eat something pleasurable, your brain releases a hit of dopamine, telling you to do that again. This is a normal, healthy process.
  • However, highly processed foods are engineered to deliver a dopamine hit far greater than anything found in nature.
  • Your brain, in an attempt to maintain balance, pushes back by reducing its natural dopamine receptors. This creates a tolerance, so you need more of the food just to feel normal.
  • By understanding this process, you realize it’s not a moral failing; it’s a hijacked biological system.
• Learning model of Addiction: Addiction is not a disease or a genetic condition you’re born with; like any habit, it’s a behavioural pattern that is learned over time.
  • It starts as a simple, powerful response to a specific trigger, like feeling sad, stressed, or bored. Your brain learns that highly processed food is a reliable way to get a quick hit of comfort.
  • The more you repeat these behaviours, the stronger these habits become.
  • The good news? Every time you make a deliberate choice that aligns with your values and goals, you’re building healthier habits. Eventually these become the new pattern, and healthy eating becomes automatic.
• Gut Microbiology: Your gut is home to trillions of microorganisms, and they have a powerful influence over your cravings.
  • When you regularly consume highly processed foods, you feed the bacteria that thrive on sugar and refined carbohydrates.
  • These bacteria “hijack” your craving system, sending signals to your brain that demand more of the foods they want to eat.
  • As your eating improves, you increase the diversity of your gut and starve out the hijackers, sending new signals to your brain that support your health and well-being.
• Food Industry: In the 1980s, Big Tobacco took over the processed food industry.
  • They brought their whole arsenal of chemical engineering and deceptive marketing. Using decades of research on habit formation, they learned how to create food products that are as addictive as possible.
  • They engineer “bliss points”, which are perfect combinations of fat, sugar, and salt that bypass your body’s natural satiety signals.
  • By understanding these powerful tactics, you realize it’s not a lack of willpower that you’re up against, but a multi-billion dollar industry that is literally working against your best interest.

These lenses inform my worldview:

Attachment Theory: This framework helps us understand how our early relationships may have shaped our nervous system and created our current coping mechanisms. This work is about building a secure, compassionate relationship with yourself, so your body no longer needs to use food to find a sense of safety and connection.

Integral Theory: This model helps us understand how individuals evolve and grow. I use this lens to meet you exactly where you are on your unique healing journey, honoring your current worldview without judgment. It helps us find the most effective tools to support your next step.

Tantric Philosophy: Tantra is about embracing all of life’s experiences, from cravings and pain to joy and bliss, with presence and awareness. This philosophy informs my approach of mindfully turning toward your inner world rather than fighting it, trusting that your body’s wisdom holds the key to your freedom.

Spirituality: I believe there’s a deep connection between having a spiritual practice and living a meaningful life. This lens informs my focus on helping you find a deep sense of meaning, purpose, and connection to something larger than yourself. As you do, you’ll naturally find less and less need to seek fulfillment through food.