Befriending Your Body

Course Summary

A first-of-its-kind approach to healing your relationship with food, your body, and yourself. What if recovery wasn’t just about “managing symptoms” but about learning a whole new way of being with yourself? Grounded in Polyvagal Theory and the evidence-based practices of interoceptive awareness, self-compassion, and mindfulness, the Befriending Your Body Program offers an integrative, holistic path to lasting healing.

What Makes This Program Different
Not therapy. Not a support group. This is a psycho-educational program that teaches you practical skills for regulation, embodiment, and compassion.
You’ll learn how your brain, nervous system, and body work together—and how to listen again to the inner communication that’s often lost in disordered eating.
Each group is kept intimate (no more than 15 participants) to foster safety, connection, and common humanity.
The program is based on Dr. Ann Saffi Biasetti’s doctoral research, book, and 30+ years of clinical expertise in somatic psychotherapy and eating disorder treatment.

How It Works
Weekly Lectures & Practices: Each week, you’ll learn the principles of recovery and embodiment—paired with guided practices and reflections.
Companion Book: We’ll move through Befriending Your Body: A Self-Compassionate Approach to Freeing Yourself from Disordered Eating together (1 chapter per week).
Experiential Learning: Instead of focusing on stories, we’ll focus on in-the-moment experience—building real-time skills you can carry into daily life.

What You’ll Take Away
A new, respectful, and trusting relationship with your body, food, and self.
Skills of self-compassion and embodiment to help you regulate anxiety, fear, and other emotions that keep you stuck.
The experience of being part of a small, safe group where you’ll discover you are not alone.
Practices you can integrate alongside food addiction recovery or other healing work—so you never leave your body behind again.

Key Promise
This is the first program of its kind: integrative, research-based, and deeply compassionate. It’s about moving beyond “coping” and into lasting freedom, growth, and connection with yourself. This isn’t just recovery—it’s reclaiming your body, your voice, and your life.

Quote from a participant
"This program was what I had been longing for. It provided a gentle space in which to move away from self-criticism and toward self-compassion, through practices grounded in compelling research. As I developed greater interoceptive awareness and understanding of my nervous system, in every session, I discovered a new facet of my own resilience. The healing I found through the BFYB program is a testament to the power of self-compassion and the remarkable wisdom our bodies hold when we learn to listen to them. This program has been the key to unlocking a lasting healing, defined by self-compassionate action and a deeper relationship with my body. Ann's book and practices remain invaluable companions on my journey."

Course Curriculum

This 8-group program guides participants step-by-step through recovery, embodiment, and self-compassion. Each stage weaves together teachings, reflections, and embodied practices to rebuild trust with the body, food, and self.

Group One: Learn the history of the mind-body divide and Polyvagal Theory.
First skill: embodiment through somatic awareness. Explore the components of self-compassion and how to sit with confusion and uncertainty.
Takeaway: Recovery begins with grounding and redefining health and strength.

Group Two: Building Compassion from the Outside In
Practices for reframing, discovering stuck points, and finding containment. Awakening compassion when it feels absent; learning common humanity vs. isolation. Explore your relationship with food and begin befriending your nervous system.
Takeaway: Compassion can be cultivated and embodied through connection.

Group Three: Embracing Power & Independence
Practices like Body as Mountain and walking the line of truth. Explore needs, behaviors, and developing a real relationship with your body. Teachings on forgiveness, no “good or bad,” and facing the truth.
Takeaway: Power grows through honesty, compassion, and honoring needs.

Group Four: Becoming Embodied Deepening grounding, exploring embodiment and body image.
Practices for feeling emotions in the body, finding the neutral, and embodied cognition.
Takeaway: Embodiment brings healing from body image struggles and anchors recovery.

Group Five: Discovering Self-Compassion
Practices like Heavy Head, compassionate embrace, and noticing the small things. Explore mindfulness, states of mind, and self-compassion in disordered eating. Reflections on your compassionate story and what you’ve learned.
Takeaway: Self-compassion is central to softening shame and supporting change.

Group Six: Approaching Recovery with Self-Compassion
Teachings on change, ups and downs, and a self-compassionate recovery process. Practices for softening and letting go, and meditations for what’s next.
Takeaway: Recovery is not linear—self-compassion helps us embrace the unknown.

Group Seven: Believing You Are Worthy of Healing
Practices: gentle body scan with movement. Teachings on self-esteem, shame, unworthiness, and the power to shift self-worth now. Reflections on shame’s roots, softening/soothing shame, and acting more deserving. Takeaway: Healing requires seeing yourself as worthy of care and belonging.

Group Eight: Finding Healing, Wholeness & Self-Love
Teachings on home, spirituality, integration, and full healing.
Practices of self-love, appreciation, integrity letters, and Metta meditation. Explore the difference between self-compassion and self-love in recovery.
Takeaway: Recovery matures into wholeness, integration, and the capacity for love.

Participants move from feelings of brokenness to embodied self-trust, compassion, and self-love, gaining practical tools to regulate emotions, befriend the nervous system, and integrate recovery into a fully lived life.

Clarissa Kennedy

Course Pricing