Body Image Empowerment From the Inside Out with Ximy Gonzalez

A Personal Note From Orion

I’m over the moon excited to share this powerful episode with the brilliant Ximy Gonzalez. Ximy drops some serious wisdom gems on how to cultivate a sacred, sensual relationship with your body.

For over 24 years, Ximy has blazed inspiring trails in the territories of holistic health, fitness, beauty, media and entertainment. As a coach, consultant, author, producer, speaker and founder of Bombshell Formula, she has lit an inextinguishable fire under thousands to heal their painful relationships with food, exercise and body image.

Our relationship with food and body image often becomes strained, leading to feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt. In this conversation, we explore pleasure as a pathway to reclaiming your sovereignty, how to alchemize pain into power, and why true health is a divine harmonizing with source energy.

Get ready to be inspired to fully inhabit your “underworld” experiences as portals to freedom, self-trust and bliss. Ximy’s embodied insights on food, archetypes and “instinct injury” healing are not to be missed! Enjoy this stellar transmission, beauties. Let it activate your radiance from the inside out.

In This Episode

[02:16] – Orion welcomes Ximy Gonzalez to share her journey to self-love and body acceptance as a holistic health coach.
[06:47] – Ximy talks about her journey of transforming from sickly to healthy through self-discovery and trusting her body.
[13:44] – Orion shares insights on the collective consciousness, highlighting the importance of separation from external influences.
[20:25] – Orion and Ximy discuss taking ownership of one’s life and perceptions and the power of intention and archetypes in shaping one’s reality.
[26:57] – Ximy explains her transformation method and the tools she uses.
[32:55] – Ximy describes the archetype of the enabler in codependent relationships, elaborating how it can maintain a dynamic of victimhood and disempowerment.
[42:50] – Ximy recognizes the significance of allowing yourself to navigate your own underworld rather than seeking rescue from others.
[48:01] – Ximy speaks about food as a powerful tool for healing instinct injury.
[63:50] – Ximy explores defiance in her vegan experience, connecting it to her inner child and ego.
[70:40] – Ximy enumerates her top three tips for living a stellar life.

Jump to Links and Resources

Hey, Ximy. Welcome to the podcast. It is such a pleasure having you here. Thank you for being here.

The pleasure is mine. Thank you so much for having me.

Before we begin, can you share one of your best childhood memories?

Being on the beach, barefoot, full of salty water on my skin, tangled hair, sun-kissed, and just feeling wild, free, and freely connected to the source. That’s my childhood memory that I treasure the most, and doing all of my inner work.

Did you grow up by the beach?

No, I would go to the beach often during the holidays. That was my most cherished memory. As I’ve done my inner work and reconnected with my inner child, I felt the call to move next to the beach. And now, I live right on the beach. So, I get to experience that bliss every day.

Before we started, you tilted your computer, and I saw the view. It was breathtaking—just a beautiful beach, white sand, beautiful water. I was like, “I want to be there.”

Right now, I’m in Miami. It’s raining, and it’s gray, so thank you for living through your view right now for a second. It was pretty. How did you become so interested in women empowerment and transformation?

It all started with my own journey of disempowerment. I was very sick as a child. When I was eight months old, I was diagnosed with asthma and then chronic sinus infections. I was in and out of the hospital, on the verge of dying a couple of times.

I felt like I wanted to reclaim my health. One of the things I realized was that health is basically one of the biggest forms of freedom that we can experience. By not having my childhood and health, I was very motivated and curious about what would be possible if I could become healthy, free to enjoy life and reclaim my innocence and childhood.

In that journey, the first thing I did when I was 18 years old was to decide that I would go on a vegan diet because I wanted to take charge of my health. While it helped initially, eventually, it destroyed my health.

So here I was, once again struggling with my health. Then, I eventually started to study holistic health, and that’s how I reclaimed my health. I started first with exercise, then with food and lifestyle. Then, I started to understand the emotional aspect, which was very beautiful because as I started to explore one realm, I started to see the limitations in that realm, and I became curious about another realm.

Learn to respect what our bodies tell us. Honor it and then take action based on that.

Eventually, that led me on a beautiful and very interesting journey to understand that this is an inner process, we may start in the physical realm and then go inside ourselves—we talked a little earlier about doing shadow work and meeting those parts of us.

That’s how I started. I had the opportunity to coach women on holistic health and help them recover from different conditions. I worked in media as a fitness bombshell while writing magazine articles and lecturing internationally.

I had the opportunity to explore the area of health, fitness, and beauty, not just through the holistic health and fitness realm but also through working in entertainment with private clients, lecturing, and being magical. This is just me trying to summarize my 46 years of being here. That’s basically where it all started.

How did you move from being so sickly to being probably the poster child of health? How did you do this incredible shift?

It was a whole journey. The journey was really to experience a lot of what isn’t. From that place, I started to recognize what it is. For me, ‘what isn’t’ is having other people tell you what to do and how to manage your body, while ‘what is’ is going on inside ourselves, becoming experts in ourselves, understanding the language of symptoms, and learning to respect what our bodies tell us, honor it, and then take action based on that. That was a whole journey that took many years to get to that point. Today, I facilitate that process for women, so it doesn’t have to take them how many years I took to get there.

It’s about learning to trust ourselves, learning to trust our body. My body has been my greatest teacher, my greatest guide. To be honest, yes, I’ve learned from a lot of different people, but I always learn the concept, and then I use my body as a lab.

I’ll put it to the test, and I will allow my body to tell me if this is true or if it applies to me. Then, by going through that process over and over again, I’ve gotten to a point where I’m so blessed and so grateful to enjoy robust and amazing health.

That’s incredible. Many people look healthy, but then you look in their eyes, and there is no spark, no joy. They look the part, they smile, but something is missing when they see you. Look at you. You feel very whole to me, probably because of all your inner work. What was your relationship with your body before and today?

First, thank you for sharing your experience with me. Second, I would like to suggest something that you may see in me as I think it’s called a life force.

For me, I understood that it’s about cultivating a life force. It’s not about ‘healthy’ in the context that they teach us about meeting some markers and numbers and being compliant with that. But it’s about tapping into something deep inside us that ignites that connection with the source and life. And you know how to cultivate that life force inside of you. You are, in my opinion, 100% correct. It is the result of deep inner work.

Amazing. Are there relationships with your body and body image? How did that shift?

Cultivate that life force inside of you.

Yes. I grew up in the 80s–90s. I remember it was around the time when all the supermodels became very popular—Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer—and all these little girls who were obsessed with these characters and looked up to them.

I remember at some stage in my life just feeling very confused as to what I needed to do to look like that because we project ourselves onto these outer images. Because we see these women are in an environment where they’re getting attention, affection, belonging, etc., we start projecting ourselves onto them. We start thinking like, “Oh my God. I want to look like that. But do I want to look like that, or do I want the things that come with that?”

That was my introduction to this concept. Also, Colombia—where I’m from, Colombia, South America—has a huge culture of beauty queens. The whole country would stop like the Miss Colombia pageant would come out. We’re being bombarded heavily.

We just moved here to wherever we were a few months ago. But before, my neighbor—she’s in her 50s—would go to Colombia every year to get plastic surgery. That was just what she did. That’s incredible.

It’s fascinating because my experience with Colombian women is that they are naturally magical and beautiful. All women are, but I speak specifically about this country and my culture.

I think that there was a moment when the drug culture really permeated the mainstream in our country. What do I mean by that? Initially, it was the drug dealer’s women who had a ton of surgeries, exaggerated, big breasts and all these things. Then, it just became mainstream. It somehow became aspirational for a lot of women. It just became this thing where women started to really become obsessed with these external enhancements.

As we start going into where we want to go with this conversation, which is into the inner work, what I want to offer is that the seduction of that is an invitation into what I will be speaking about, which is our underworld. It’s an invitation to go through a process of transformation. I’ll just leave that part there.

Growing up in all that culture, for some reason, never appealed to me. When I adopted the vegan diet, I became extremely skinny. I felt like, “Wow.” I’ve reached this place.” By the way, all the positive reinforcement from the outside world, like, “Oh my God, you look so skinny. What are you doing?” And eventually to realize how malnourished and how sick I was.

Just to give you a reference, I don’t particularly weigh myself. I don’t even have a scale. But I know what my body is. I’m probably 60 kilos, which is 132–135 pounds, something around there. I was 100 pounds.

That’s not good.

That is not good. I was very malnourished and sickly. I had gut and hormonal issues. I was on a blood sugar roller coaster. It was a mess. When I came to that realization, I started to connect with what you just said. Some people may look good to the outside world and the beauty standards we’ve been given, but when you take a deep dive into reality and their health, it doesn’t match.

Some people may look good on the outside, but when you take a deep dive into their health, it doesn’t match.

It’s so true for anything, whether you look at successful or spiritual people. You never know what goes on behind closed doors and what they’re really like.

I love what you said about inner work. It’s always about coming back to our inner work and what’s good for us. This is what matters. What you’re sharing about Colombian women, it’s almost like they tap into an idea in the collective consciousness. They took it as their own, which we always do because we all watch the news or are aware of what’s going on in the world to some degree.

Sometimes, we can lose ourselves to what’s out there, even other people’s thought forms, and adopt them as our own. But when we are more centered and connected inside, we can find what is ours and what is not.

We can even ask the question, “Is this even my belief? Or is this the belief of my mother? Or somebody I saw online? Or somebody in the collective consciousness?” And make this beautiful separation to own who we are.

I also really like what you mentioned about being rebellious twice in different ways. I totally resonate with this because the way to get me to do something is to tell me not to do it. Now you know my secret. Every time in my life, people have been trying to tell me what to do since the age of 15 because, before that, I was very much a follower. But when I rebelled, I rebelled completely.

Even today, I do a lot of the opposite of what mainstream is doing because I go inside more. I do my research, and I make my own decisions. Even before I was rebellious, whatever, a person like me is very easy to get sucked into what’s out there and not have this separation a little bit blurry.

What you just described is totally archetypal for all of us. It’s a part of our upbringing, except the minute that we have an external authority figure like a caregiver, a part of us initially learns how to belong by giving ourselves away and becoming compliant. It can happen. Most often, it happens during our teenage years that we realize we’ve given ourselves away. Then we go into the polar opposite, the other extreme, and become defiant and rebellious.

Then, we get invited into ourselves truly and realize that defiance and compliance are two sides of the same coin. We’re still making choices based on the outside world and external authority figures. That’s when we get invited into ourselves to start challenging, questioning what you were describing, and then realize that the path is not the path of the heart, not from compliance, not from defiance, but from our own experience because you’ve actually gone through that process of internalizing information and then finding yourself through it.

I can totally resonate with what you’re saying because I was extremely compliant and became defiant, and then I was like, “Okay, well, now I’m curious. If I’m not compliant and if I’m not defiant, who am I?”

This is one of the reasons why I’ve decided to, “Can I ask my body? Or can I ask my soul? I’m going to ask nature. I’m going to take it away from humans and bring it back to us.”

The food you consume coaches you. It will show you that it’s about the pain you’re carrying that you project onto food.

That’s beautiful. You went through a transformation. What’s your definition of transformation?

I’m going to share a story that I feel very connected with. That is the story of Persephone. In Greek mythology, she’s the daughter of Demeter. She represents the daughter archetype and the maiden. She represents her naiveness.

Basically, she gets kidnapped by Hades and taken into the underworld. Hades is the underworld as well. While there, she’s given a choice, basically through the experience, to stay as a naive maiden or to go through a transformation process and transition from helplessness and disempowerment into becoming the queen of the underworld, taking on the challenge, confronting the shadows, the fears, calling her power back, becoming the queen of the underworld, and becoming a guide to others through their own underworld.

For me, the Persephone story represents the loss of our naiveness and a transition into higher levels of power. This is where we step into, going through a rite of passage into womanhood, eventually to become the wise crone. So our painful relationship with ourselves that we project onto other people in relationships, onto food, onto body image, onto exercise, cosmetic procedures, you name it.

All of those things are invitations. The pain created by those things is invitations that take us down into Hades, gives us the opportunity to be victimized and stay lost in our pain, or use these as tools for self-discovery so that we can look at the areas of our lives where we’re leading our power and where we’re losing our power, go through the transformation, and then rise on the other side as fully embodied crones and wise women.

The name of my company is Bombshell Formula. That’s what, for me, is a bombshell, a queen of her underworld. It doesn’t mean that you never get invited back into the underworld. It doesn’t mean that you don’t experience pain. It doesn’t mean that you don’t experience fear. It means that because you’ve been there, you’re familiar with the process, and you trust yourself that you can navigate the underworld regardless of how many times life takes you there.

Yes, and life will take you there many, many times. Every time you go there, you get a bit wiser and stronger. I love what you said about how we can all feel like victims. It is so easy to feel like a victim. It’s about taking ownership.

When we take ownership, it’s not about pointing the finger out. It’s about pointing the finger at ourselves and seeing, “What’s in me is there.” Everything that is going on in the external world is a reflection of ourselves.

Pain from our past gives us the opportunity to either be victimized and stay lost or to use these as experiences for self-discovery.

Even though we cannot control external situations, we can always control how we really act and the story we tell ourselves about the situation. Mostly, the story we tell ourselves is about ourselves: “Am I a victim in this situation? Or am I going to be stepping through the warrior archetype? Or stepping through the queen archetype? Am I going to take charge, or am I just going to be like that little maiden and live my life small and complain? Okay, it’s happening. I cannot control external situations. What can I do now to make myself feel more empowered to transform and step into those archetypes?”

Even by intending to step into a stronger archetype, we can become stronger.

I love what you just said; it reminds me of a prayer I say every day. Whatever people want to pray to, meditate on, or send intention to that’s up to each person. The way I say this divine, sacred, magical source is, “Please grant me the serenity to accept the things you don’t want me to change, the courage to change the things you do want me to change, and the wisdom to discern the difference.”

That means that the outside world is not up to me to manage. I can’t control the outside world. What I can do is manage my perception of the outside world. I can change my story and my circumstances through action through perception.

The other thing is that when it comes to archetypes, I also loved how you talked about going from one archetype to another. That gives us options. People think, “Oh, I’m just a victim.”

It’s very popular to be a victim lately. It’s almost like a virtue signal. “I’m a victim. Yay.” However, you should not be rewarded for being a victim.

I’m Jewish, and we definitely have some victim mentality in our culture, but we also survived so many times. We were a victim, physically a victim of genocides and murders throughout the years. And yet, if you see the Jewish nations, they are 0.2% of the world population, which is like 15 million out of billions.

Still, regardless of how many times they went through that melting pot, they always cherished life, taught their kids about life, and moved from their homelands. They never looked back, and they were just like, “Okay, we’re here now. How can we survive? How can we make life better? How can we live a more ethical life? How can we raise ourselves to be more and do more, no matter how many times throughout history they were crushed?”

You see, big nations, like the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Greek Empire, come and go, and this tiny percent of the population still keeps their head up. I think this is exactly because of that mentality of yes, we were victims, but we’re not going to let that change our lives.

Even now, when anti-semitism is rising like crazy—I’ve never seen it in the US—people are actually going and learning how to protect themselves. Like in my community, there’s the holocaust, there’s the Never Again, and people are buying guns, going to tactical training, and putting more security around their facilities. We cannot be like, “Oh, poor us.” We have to protect ourselves. We have to rise.

The outside world is not up to you to manage. You can’t control it, but you can manage your perception.

For me, it’s epigenetically imprinted, a little bit of the victim and survivor mentality. In my personal life, I don’t want only to be a survivor, I want to strive. I want to succeed. I want to be more, do more, and excel. I don’t want to look back on my lineage the suffering, and measure myself as a person who’s just a survivor. But I definitely want to be more and do more.

What you just described is a perfect example of when a group of people get taken collectively into the underworld, how they navigate the underworld and how they can rise above. “Does it make us closer together? Does that make us curious about what could be? How could we become better in every sense of the word?”

That’s a perfect example or representation of an epic group going down into the underworld together. “What are the lessons? What have we learned? And what are we going to do with this experience?”

You can apply the underworld to an individual, a group of people, and everything. It’s just this thing that activates this desire to thrive and live. When you’ve been through a process of death, then you get inspired to say, “Okay, how can I live more? How can I rise above?” That’s a beautiful example.

What are some tools women can use to help them with transformation? I can share mine, but you could share yours first.

In relation to the archetypes, when we connect, for example, the archetype of the victim, we all have victim-like experiences—all of us. But the beauty of it is we can tap into a whole bunch of other archetypes. I was saying that if I define myself just through this archetype, I’m missing out on the possibilities of embodying the other archetypes that will help me come out of there.

One of the things that I do with clients is use journaling as one of my main tools to navigate the underworld. I invite everybody to connect to the victim first and give it a voice. You’ll sit down, purge, and write how you felt you were wronged and all the things you feel hurt you. You give that a voice. If you do not acknowledge the part of us that has felt victimized, and then we just go straight into, “This never happened,” or “I’m going to sugarcoat it,” or whatever, it’s always going to be there.

There’s a book, and I love the title, Feelings Buried Alive Never Die.

Oh wow. It’s a good title.

Yeah, I love the title. It’s about us visiting that part of us and allowing it to speak. Oftentimes, our victim held things back, so give it a voice. Then, you reparent the victim through different archetypes. It could be the alchemist archetype.

If my question as the victim is, “Why did this happen to me? Can I use a different question as the alchemist?” Then, ask, “Why did this happen for me? Can I give it purpose by taking it from the realm of the literal—what happened to me in this physical world—to the realm of the symbolic—what happened for me? Can I find purpose?” Then, as I find purpose, I understand that the purpose of going into the underworld is to meet the parts of us that have lost power and that we can reclaim that power.

If our life experiences disempower us so that eventually we connect with true power within, then for me, that serves a powerful purpose. It allows me to acknowledge, yes there’s a part of me that felt victimized, but yes there’s the other part of me that has reparented and that I have now transformed into a high-level of wisdom, that allows me to, in my work, guide others through their underworld.

Power by Ximy Gonzalez

If I look at all the experiences that I’ve had in my life that have been painful and have brought me literally to my knees, and I get lost in that, I could be missing out on the opportunity to go through the transformation so that I could eventually have the empathy and compassion of knowing what it feels like to be there, and at the same time having the tools to know how to get out of there, so that I can share that with others.

If the purpose of my pain and suffering was to eventually give others the tools to come out of that place and learn how to navigate their underworld, then for me that’s served its purpose, and I’m okay with things that I have experienced in my life. That’s how I would say that.

That’s really beautiful. My new website design, I told you, is all about female archetypes. Then, I did this very short Tony Robbins program. Even Tony Robbins is now talking about archetypes, how to step into them, and how to embody them.

One thing that he said that resonates with what you said is that the quality of our questions determines our lives. If I can come from a victim place and ask, “Why is this happening to me? Or how I can be better and step into a higher place because our brains will always answer and come up with an answer. Why am I a victim?” You’ll get a big answer for why you are a victim. “How can I be stronger?” You’ll get a different answer.

I love stepping through the archetypes and asking questions through the archetypes. As a warrior, I will be in the physical world, protecting myself, taking martial arts, and doing whatever I need to do to protect myself and my family. But as the alchemist, I can connect to a higher consciousness, God, and maybe take some of this burden off my shoulders and just give it to God, angels, a higher source, the infinite something, whatever.

Everybody has a different name for it—infinite intelligence—and be okay. I surrender to you, whatever you are, and I will allow some of this burden to be taken off my shoulders. Then maybe I can connect to the lover archetype, just connect more to love, and see everything happening from a lover’s or mother’s perspective.

When a mother sees her child, even when he’s misbehaving, she has more compassion toward him. As I integrate all those parts of myself, I am more whole, and I’m not only in the rebellious part, which I tend to go to a lot, which does not always serve me, but I can experience so much, like you said, so much more than just one aspect of life because there’s so much more to who we are and who we can be in this world.

It always comes back to love and connection. I see that infinite something as love. It all comes back to love for me.

I can resonate with that. This is a journey. As I think I mentioned at the beginning, it is for us to experience what isn’t so that, eventually, we can connect with what is. That love is what gets the world really moving. It’s a huge source of inspiration. It inspires poets. It inspires music. It inspires us to get up and go about our day. It’s what is for me as well.

Going back to the archetypes, what we were talking about, and it being part of our collective consciousness, I think that, as you said earlier, going back to the whole concept of the victim, one of the biggest challenges is the archetype of the enabler. When we have a victim and we have an enabler, this becomes a blood donor-vampire-type dynamic.

It sounds yucky.

Yeah. What happens is, basically, an expression of co-dependency because the victim needs the enabler, and the enabler needs the victim so that they can maintain the dynamic.

Being a bombshell means you trust yourself and that you can navigate the underworld regardless of how many times life takes you there. Click To Tweet

One of the things that we’re seeing is that our society has become very enabling of victim consciousness. While the enabler may seem so good and virtuous, what it does is weaken and disempower us. If we get enabled in our pain and protected and caressed in that, we get motivated to stay there because it’s okay, and we learn to get our emotional needs met through that.

It’s interesting how, as a society, we see the enablers as good and virtuous, and we see the people who challenge and trigger us as the evil ones. But what if the purpose of the triggering is for us to become aware of the wound, sit in the discomfort of the wound, realize we’re bleeding our power, and be inspired and motivated to heal the wound instead of expecting everybody to walk on eggshells around our wound?

Do you want to know what it is for you to feel disempowered? Expect someone to walk on eggshells around your wounds. It won’t. Just step on them harder and harder and harder. Imagine now becoming aware we’ve got that wound, healing it, then people can walk and crush over it all they want, and we won’t need our power.

Beautiful. I love that. I really like that. It reminds me of a concept from Kabbalah called The Bread of Shame. It’s when you give a 15-year-old a Mercedes. They didn’t earn it. They didn’t do anything. Let’s say Lamborghini. Let’s make it more expensive. And they didn’t earn it. They didn’t work for it. They just got the gift for free. Then, they grow up expecting things to fall into their lap.

But if you take the same teenager and you take them to volunteer in a homeless shelter, have them work and earn money, they will learn. They will become much stronger and more adapted to life than the kids who just got everything handed to them. Those kids will have different moods. It doesn’t serve them to get everything.

As a mom, I try not to buy my child a dollar, a little car, or a toy wherever we go. It’s really hard. I remember this concept, and I really try to raise him to earn things. We’re not there yet. He’s four. Redemption is when he grows up. He will learn to earn more on his own and will understand. I try to teach him about the world, other people, and how other people live.

Also, my childhood. I grew up extremely poor. We had to put buckets in the winter because the roof was leaking. But I grew out of that. Right now, thank God, I have good abundance in my life, and I want to teach him that nothing is given, everything is earned, and if you get something, it’s a gift from God because you did something special.

You have to take the right actions to create a really good future for yourself. It’s up to you, and you have the power. If somebody grows up to learn that everything is given to them for free, they will never, as you said, learn the lesson of going into their wounds, staying in pain, and healing their wounds so that nobody can hurt them again, that they are bleeding because they found their strength on their own.

If you define yourself just through a single archetype, you’re missing out on the possibilities of embodying other archetypes that will help you emerge from there.

It’s like the metaphor of the butterfly and the caterpillar. If you help a butterfly get out of the cocoon, it will die because it never strengthens its wings enough to be able to fly.

You might look at this little butterfly in the cocoon and say, I can just do a cut and just help him, and he can just go and fly. But no. You’re hurting somebody when you’re enabling them. You’re cutting their wings because they will never be able to soar unless they do some serious work. We’re talking about humans. They will never be able to soar and just will be in this very weak space for the rest of their lives.

That’s beautiful, and I can connect with that one. One of my mentors would say that when we rescue somebody, we teach them to give up because we’re there to rescue them.

Wow. That is so strong.

This part of us obviously doesn’t like to suffer over other people’s suffering. If we go deep down inside ourselves, it’s part of why we want to up others; it is because we don’t want to suffer over other people’s suffering.

One of the hardest things in the coaching business and why we often get into this profession is because we don’t like to suffer over other people’s suffering. We have a rescuer archetype.

Eventually, we learn to experience that we can’t rescue anybody from themselves and that attempting to is doing them a disservice. Trying to take somebody away from the pain is interfering with what could be maybe the rock bottom that is needed for them to sober up from a very disempowering experience.

Going back to how we’ve been taught to see things and what-ifs, one of the most loving things we can do and one of the hardest things we can do is allow somebody to experience their pain to find their way back. It doesn’t mean turning your back. It doesn’t mean witnessing them. You know when you can offer a bit of help with limits and boundaries around that help. If not, it becomes a rescuer codependent relationship.

What builds self-esteem is falling on our butt and then picking ourselves up because it teaches us self-trust. If I go and pick somebody up, they’re not going to trust themselves. They’re going to expect me to do it over and over and over again, and then we’ll have codependency. I’ll get my emotional needs met by picking them up and feeling significant. Then, they’ll get their emotional needs met by being picked up and not having to do any other work, basically enabling their pain.

What I’ve learned in these years of coaching is that it’s about giving people tools so they can pick themselves up, and they build self-respect and self-esteem through that process. There’s a purpose why we get invited into Hades and take the Underworld, fall on our knees, and have our rock bottom.

Oftentimes, what takes us down there is the things we get high on—the relationship, drugs, alcohol, whatever, often takes us right back into that underworld. The smack we get sobers us up and inspires us to navigate life through different choices and course corrections. Interfering with that process can lead someone in a very weakened position.

As the extremely loving and caring person you are, how do you put down in your coaching where your instinct just goes to, “Oh, I want to rescue them. How do you set the boundaries? How do you step back and allow the person to be in pain?” It’s easier said than done. How do you handle that emotionally?

First, I understand that their pain is theirs, and it serves a purpose. I also understand that I have been invited to witness and walk along, not to mother or to father them. I am a witness, and I am a companion through their underworld. I share tools, and they work with those tools. I can’t take people deeper than what they’re willing to go. They’re in charge of their process. The minute that I think that I can control the process, that it’s my time, that their healing will look like what I think it should look like, that I’m involved in it.

One of the things that I do with clients is to have everybody read a book when I start the process. One of my books is called Power—one of the things I say in that book is coaching-training, yes, you. I’m not really a coach; I’m a teacher. I teach people how to coach themselves. That’s one of the things I explain.

I’m not here to be an authority figure that you can project mother and father onto so that you can comply and defy me. This is about you going into a self-discovery journey to move beyond compliance and defiance, learn to assert yourself, and understand the consequences. What consequences are you willing to live with, and which ones are you not?

If I try to rescue people, I say to them, “Don’t make this choice.” But what if they’re willing to live with the consequences of that choice but not the consequences of the other choice? I am basically choosing their life path for them, and then I will be responsible for the consequences of their choices.

Instead, what I do is say, “Okay, this could be a consequence here. What other consequences can you think of?” Then, out of all of those, which consequences are you willing to live with, and which ones are you now? Based on that, you can make your own choices.

It always brings everything back to them. For example, if we’re working on food and they’ve gone off and had a binge, I’m excited when they do things like that. I go, “How did it feel?” Because the invitation is inside themselves so that they can feel the consequences of their choice. Then, they can be inspired based on the consequences, and by feeling them in their flesh and blood, they can decide how they want to feel.

If I say good or bad, they’ll make their choices based on my values, not on their values and experience. So it’s always about bringing it back to them.

It makes a lot of sense. Now, do you still have coaches? Are you still being coached by people? Do you have coaches?

I have one coach. His name is John McMullen. It’s interesting because when I feel like I’m struggling to find an answer or something, I call him. His role is to ask me questions when I can’t ask myself questions. I work very diligently to ask myself those questions because he won’t be here someday, and I need to learn how to do this for myself.

Everything around me, as I see it, is a coach for me. I’m learning from my food garden, which I’m growing, and it coaches me about life. I’m learning from this conversation. I’m learning from my clients. Those are my greatest teachers: my parents, my siblings, my friends, and my husband.

Our society has become very enabling in terms of victim consciousness.

Everybody, as I see it, is a teacher to me. I’m always in this position of humbleness, curious about what the next second is going to teach me. And because I see life archetypally, I don’t see it as my husband or you. I see it as the divine, using a character to deliver a message and a lesson for me so that I can deepen my understanding, so that I can grow, so I can connect with my blind spots, so that can learn more and more about myself. So I’m being coached 24×7 by the divine through other people.

I love that. It’s so beautiful. I really love that aspect of coaching, like everything is a coach. It’s so beautiful.

If I may just add something to that, that’s why I use our relationship with food, exercise, and body image. The food coaches you. In other words, it will show you that it’s not about the food. It will show you that it’s about the pain you’re carrying that you project onto food. Food is a coach.

Maybe you can share some tools for relating to your body as your coach and how to relate to your food as your coach.

I get goosebumps with that question. It’s so beautiful. One of the most painful relationships that we have is with food. I could list a million things why that is.

One of them is definitely the confusion that exists amongst experts and the different opinions. That contributes for sure, but the first thing we do when we’re born, and we’re crying—we’re in this new realm, and we’re in distress—is we suck on our mother’s nipple for milk and for comfort. So we self-soothe through our mother’s nipple. If, throughout our formative years, we’re not given the tools to learn how to self-soothe, we will use our mouths—food, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, biting our nails, sex, you name it—to self-soothe.

When we start looking at our relationship with food, and oftentimes I see in my clients a very painful relationship with the mother energy and with nourishment, one of the things that food teaches us is how we give our power away to others so that they soothe us instead of us learning to soothe ourselves.

This is why we look for somebody to tell us what to eat. This is why we try to outsource everything related to our food. We don’t want anything to do with our food—not growing it, not cooking it. We want somebody else to parent us through that. We could go on and on and on.

One of the things that I’ve realized is that food is one of the most powerful tools for healing our instinct injury. This is important. What is instinct injury? As I understand it, it doesn’t just refer to our instinct. It refers to all of our inner guides—instinct, innate intelligence, intuition, and integrity.

What is instinct injury? Instinct injury is when I feel like I’m walking around with a broken inner compass because I can’t trust myself or my inner guidance. Then I feel infantilized. As I go into my child’s psyche, I feel like I need external authority figures to guide me and tell me how to live. So, I give my power to them for guidance, and I don’t trust myself. I trust them.

You are an ecosystem, and you have the power to create paradise and heaven through your choices. Click To Tweet

One of the things that I’ve understood is that the journey is to learn to trust ourselves about other people, food, and anything in the outside world. For me, food is a powerful tool to help us heal from instinct injury and learn to trust ourselves and our bodies.

When you eat, your body communicates through the language of symptoms. A symptom is our body’s communication system, which lets us know if our choices favor our survival or compromise it.

When I have a good meal, I feel energy, clarity of thought, and no cravings. I am emotionally stable and satisfied, have great digestion, and have a flat belly. All this lasts from when I eat until the next 4–6 hours. That’s a response to a good meal. That’s what your body’s innate intelligence is telling you. “Good job. We like what you fed us.”

Now, suppose I eat something that makes me sleepy. In that case, I can’t focus, I can’t concentrate, I am bloated, gassy, craving foods—sugar in particular—unsatisfied, moody, et cetera, after the meal because many things could trigger that, but I’m talking about shortly after eating, is that my body telling me what you ate doesn’t favor our survival. It compromises it.

The purpose of symptoms is to activate that compass and go, oh wow. My body doesn’t like me to eat that because it makes me feel horrible. Let me correct course. But if I enable myself and tell myself stories—we’re talking about the stories earlier—about, “Oh, you only live once, oh everything in moderation, oh blah-blah-blah,” even though my body—the highest form of intelligence that I possess—is telling me don’t do that or else, but I try to dismiss it, and then I take a pill to numb me so I disconnect from the messenger, I’m going to feel lost.

We can take that example with food and apply it to every other area of life. This is why I love working with food. It’s physical. We start at the basic level of our being, the material realm, and we learn the process through that. Then, we can start going deeper and deeper into other realms and areas of our life. But food is a great tool for us to become honest with ourselves.

Our bodies don’t lie. They are instruments of truth. We can try to deceive them. We can try to deceive ourselves. But eventually, our body will find a way to speak to us. That, a health crisis, for example, or becoming very overweight, or a digestive issue, can take us into that underworld. So, we learn to become honest with ourselves, call our power back, and stop falling for self-deceit. That’s out of everything. That’s what I think we’re here for.

I will quote Dostoevsky, “Above all, do not lie to yourself.” The underworld will show us all the areas of our lives where we lie to ourselves and where we set our chessboard to checkmate ourselves.

Feelings Buried Alive Never Die by Karol K. Truman

Beautiful. You were talking about connecting to our bodies as a campus, and while this is good for me, it is also bad for me. How do you take it deeper into connecting to your body as a source of pleasure?

For me, food represents an archetype—the archetype of Venus for the Romans and Aphrodite for the Greeks. She’s the goddess of beauty, pleasure, and comfort. She’s the muse and inspiration. She’s about feeling good, about connecting with our body, sex, all that. For me, eating is a very Venusian experience.

What do I mean by that? I love food. I grow my food. I cook my food, and I’m in touch with my farmers. When cooking, I connect with the senses, like with the smell. I’m looking at the colors. The sounds the food makes as I’m preparing it, it’s sizzling, the smell that comes through. All of that is like sex. You are stimulating your senses and preparing to sit at a dinner table and bring something into your body.

It could be a man’s genitals, or it could be food. I prepare myself through a ritual by thanking every item on my plate and inviting it into my body, then having this dance of the senses where I am tasting, where I am enjoying, where I am present to what I am eating, instead of dissociating and leaving as I’m stuffing my face to numb my body.

Do you see the difference between the two? And the way that we’ve been taught to relate to food is to turn it into a mathematical equation. Count your calories, count your grams, blah-blah-blah. Left brain it as much as you can, and that will be the easiest way to disconnect from that feminine energy, that Venusian experience of actually connecting with the pleasure of the experience of eating.

If you are in that state of stress, turning it into a mathematical equation, you’re putting yourself in a sympathetic state, a fight or flight. That interferes with digestion. If you see it as a loving, pleasurable experience, you become parasympathetic. I’m just salivating talking about this.

I’m salivating. I’m like, “What are we going to eat today?”

We’re preparing your body for digestion. To receive, to accept. You’re inviting, and you’re not rejecting. This is part of the painful relationship that people have with food. They’ve intellectualized it.

One of the things that I like to do with my clients is to get to that place where we can enjoy what we eat. We love it. It makes us feel amazing. On top of that, it also gives us aesthetic benefits. All of that is Venus. The enjoyment of the taste, the feelings of having life force flowing through you, and then connecting with your beauty through what you’re eating.

When you eat well, it should support your skin, your hair, your shape, everything. Of course, you couple it with exercise and other things, but it’s a foundation. It’s about pleasure, love, and connection. That’s the keyword—connection. That’s instinctively healthy for me.

That’s beautiful. I love everything you said there. I also like the idea of connecting to our bodies. I usually eat probably 90% organic, grass-fed food. I do not use a microwave, and I don’t eat after 7 pm or 8 PM, usually.

You’ve been lied to about what health is – it’s not sterile, restrictive, or mathematical.

The other day—it was 10 PM—I felt like my body needed energy. I broke my own rules. I grabbed one of my husband’s TV dinners because he’ll eat those. It was a Trader Joe’s vegan green curry. I put it in a microwave and ate it at 10 PM. It was one of the best meals of my life. It was so good, and I felt great afterward.

My husband said, “Why are you eating so late? It’s not good for your blow.” I said, “Shut up. I’m listening to my body right now.” I ate it, and I felt amazing afterward. It was just okay. It was okay to not follow my own rules at that moment. My body, at that moment, just needed something. It was very delicious, and I really enjoyed it.

I believe in enjoyment because we can think about all the wrong things we did. It was late at night, it was microwaved, it was a TV dinner. But the level of joy I got from that tiny meal was so tremendous that I’m sure it did magical, incredible things in my body, even though it wasn’t the right thing to do. What do you think about that?

Well, I want to ask you a question, which is why this part is so important. It’s the ideas that I navigate my relationship with food through. Where did they come from? Was it that somebody assigned those ideas to me or through me hearing this, me hearing that, doing research? Or is it that I have put every one of those things to the test, and I have reached the conclusion of this and this and this, like by having my body tell me this?

Everybody’s different. Let’s just start with that. Maybe there was something missing from your body in that experience, or maybe it was that somebody else had given you certain rules. Then you became compliant to those rules, then defiant for a moment, and because you said you had this relationship with compliance-defiance, maybe that was right.

This is so important to learn because we can see if I am being compliant with rules that were given by the outside world. Then I’m going to have to defy those rules. I’m going to be dancing between compliance and compliance.

Now, here’s the next level. Can I put myself through a self-discovery journey, feel what I’m eating, let my body go through everything that I put in my body and monitor it? Do I feel energy, clarity of thought, no cravings, emotionally stable, satisfied, no digest of distress after I’ve eaten it?

From a physiological perspective, that is, as I call it, I hit the spot. But from the emotional perspective, I am first complying, and then I defy. I’m going to get pleasure in that defying even if, in that particular case, you didn’t have an adverse reaction. But let’s say that you would have felt tired, sleepy, and craving other foods. It would have sent you on a whole downward spiral. Do you see the difference?

This is why I’m asking you this. How would you define that experience after having gone through this thought process? Was your digestion, energy, clarity of thought, cognition, and everything really good after that? Did you sleep really well? What happened? Or did it make you sleepy?

Our bodies don’t lie; they are instruments of truth because they will always find a way to speak to us. Click To Tweet

This is how I see it. The choice of organic food and whatever I eat that is good for me is based on listening to my body and all the knowledge I gathered throughout life about food, what’s good for me, and what’s bad for me. I like biohacking, and I’m really into learning about my body and what’s good for me.

What I did at that moment was defy not somebody else’s rules but my own rules that I made up for myself regarding what’s good for me or bad for me. I felt amazing after that meal, and I slept really well.

What did you learn?

I know that when I eat gluten, for example, I feel horrible. Sometimes, I do let myself eat gluten, but I know it’s not good for me. For me, the gluten is sometimes a struggle. But I learned that it’s just okay to be okay with doing the wrong thing every once in a while. And as long as I’m mostly, “Okay, I’m fine.”

Let me ask you a question. If your body felt really good on it, why is it wrong?

Oh, it’s not wrong. It was wrong because I know that my microwaving food is not.

Yeah, I understand that part.

Why is it wrong? It’s wrong because it was wrong according to my own rules. But looking at it, it wasn’t wrong. It was actually fun, and I enjoyed it. It’s not like I’m going to do it every night, but at that moment, my body was like, I want it. I want it now. I’m hungry. We didn’t eat much today. This is the most accessible, available, delicious thing I can have right now, so let’s do it.

I can see so many aspects of this, and it’s amazing to get to do this and witness it here. What I would say is this. I would sit with the experience and ask myself about my compliant-defined relationship with food. Why is there a part of me that needs to have experience defying if I’m the one who’s setting up these ideas?

Because I’m an Aries and I like drama.

There you go. This is the theme. When we create rules that we feel are restricted by those rules, we become authoritarian to ourselves because this is the mother ego, father ego, and child ego. If I apply the authority to these rules, then the child’s ego is going to find a way to defy those rules. Then we feel, oh, okay, I got my power back from this experience.

It’s so interesting. I have so much more to dig deep into this. But you see, I never would even think about the depth of your questions on my own. I mean, that’s the 80/20 rule. This is really powerful.

Take food as a teacher about who you are.

It’s about taking food as a teacher about ourselves, our underworld, why we make the choices we make, and our compliance-defiance. I’m so grateful that you gave yourself the opportunity to go through that process.

It was also to defy my husband. I’m a coach, and I know what’s good for me. I will listen to my body because this is what I teach. Or, as you say, it’s just like the little child is like ‘no.’ Super cool. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing this with me.

By the way, I’m totally connected with you, pasture-raised. One of the things that I learned from my vegan experience is that I don’t do very well on plant foods. I do phenomenally on a lot of fat and protein, like dark meats, all that stuff.

What’s interesting—you were asking about transformation earlier—was that the first time I ate that meat, and one of the things that I learned, like you’re saying, the depth of these questions, the vegan experience taught me a lot about our relationship with food.

One of the things that I learned was when I realized that my body was in a mess and I needed to start eating meat. A part of me couldn’t get me to do it. Even though I had already done my research, I understood why I needed to do it. I couldn’t do it because I wasn’t eating a vegan diet. I was a vegan. I complied with an ideology. I was in defiance of the rest of the people around me. Eating that meat would have represented this question: if I am not a vegan, who am I?

My entire sense of self was attached to that experience, so I went through a death and a rebirth. This is one of the things that taught me the power of the body and our innate intelligence.

Everybody said to me, “When you eat that meat, you’re going to feel so sick. It’s going to be so bad for you, blah-blah-blah.” I put that piece of meat in my mouth, and it was the first time in eight years that I felt like I had eaten it.

Let me put it to you this way: I eat large amounts of food. I’m not one to eat two bites of it. I would sit down with a bowl of salad, rice, and beans. I would eat. I had to eat so much food to feel what I thought at that time was satisfied, which was bloated and ready to explode.

Then I had this meat, a small serving, and I was satisfied. I didn’t have cravings, and my belly didn’t bloat. It just completely knocked all of my ideas out of my head with that one experience of bringing it into my body.

But then I had to go through the whole process of reparenting myself because even with that experience, I was so indoctrinated and attached to ideas and loyalty to a group of people, and the fear of what they would think if I started eating meat and all that, that it was a process.

Wow. I got goosebumps when you talked about the whole identity, food as a source of tribal connection, and feeling like an outsider if you don’t follow a certain diet or ideology or think like everybody else. It’s an incredible journey of transformation every day, right?

When we create rules that restrict us, we become authoritarian towards ourselves.

Yeah, and it shows us that eating is visceral. It’s our solar plexus. It shows us our relationship with control. For me—I’m not speaking for anybody else—I realized it was an eating disorder. Throughout my upbringing, some of me felt out of control, and I realized that the only thing I could control was food. I would find significance in, oh, why are you eating like that?

We’re talking 1995 Columbia. Nobody even knew what a vegan was. Yes, there were a few vegetarians here and there, but it was this whole sense of significance, being different and paying attention to all this. Then it was about first controlling meat, but then it became about wanting to control others and what they ate. I became the food police. It taught me so much.

When I observe the arguments that go on online between vegans and meat eaters or whatever, I can see myself—remember I say everything is a coach around me—I can see parts of myself. I remember how I felt, how I used to think, how I used to relate to food. But this was a teacher—one of my greatest teachers, this experience.

Incredible. I see so much of myself in you, and this is like, really, I love this woman. And I appreciate you. Before we say goodbye for now, what are your three top tips for living a stellar life, and where can people find you?

The first thing is when you’re being called into your underworld, take the calling. Go in there. It may seem scary, but once you let yourself go through that experience, you will develop a deep intimacy with yourself. You will learn to trust yourself. You will learn to respect yourself. The level of power that you find in your underworld is something that nobody can give to you. Nobody can take it away from you. That’s empowerment, in my opinion. That’s true power. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is to learn to trust your body and learn to create the most cozy, delicious, beautiful home in your body because that is the vehicle that you’re going to have and have had from the moment you were born until the moment you go. Make it cozy. Make it a space you want to live in. I can’t think of anything more painful than not being happy with our home, with our body.

I love the analogy of the hermit crab archetype. I’ve learned to create a beautiful little shell and crab. I take that little shell with me everywhere I go, my body. I nourish and care for it, and it’s my safe spot. So, if you want to learn how to feel safe, you can have your own external house, your country, your group of friends, and your tribe, but your ultimate place of safety is yourself, your home.

I love to walk people back to their homes and invite them. They are the only ones who can walk there, but I love to invite people to build a safe, cozy home inside their bodies and themselves.

Then, the other thing that I would say is that you’ve been lied to about what health is. You’ve been told that it’s this sterile, disconnected, restrictive, painful, mathematical thing where you have to meet these numbers for your cholesterol and for your this, and you have to count these events.

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Health is being so connected to the source that you have a life force flowing through you. It means that you are in harmony, resonating at the level of sacred geometry, connected with the divine and that the water in your body can express what we would see in those images from Masaru Emoto with the crystals.

I’m sure you’ve seen the images with the crystals of Masaru Emoto. That is what you are creating in your body. You are a terrain, an ecosystem. You are the gardener or the keeper of that terrain, and you can choose to create literally hell in your body or create paradise and heaven through your choices.

The choices are your thoughts and feelings, what you eat, how you sleep, and how you relate to the sun, the earth, nature, and everything. You are an ecosystem, and you have the power. You have the power more than anything out there, and this is a journey for you to come back to yourself and to your power. Those are the three things that I would say.

Those were probably like a hundred things already, but they were amazing. This was such a mic drop. I love that. I can listen to this little part over and over again before I go to sleep and become the most empowered person on the planet. Thank you.

Thank you. And where they can find me on Instagram, @bombshellformula, or my website, bombshellformula.com. If they want to read the Power section, it’s the first module of my program, Power. They can download the link in my bio on Instagram. Or you can send me a DM, reach out, let’s connect. I’m here to serve, be your witness, and offer insight to those who want it.

Perfect. Well, that was fun. I enjoyed every moment of it. Thank you for sharing your beautiful wisdom, being here, and being such a light in the world.

Thank you, Orion, for doing what you do. Thank you for inspiring others. Thank you for being so authentic. Thank you for letting me take you through that little journey with the food experience. Thank you for putting out this medium for people to connect with different perspectives that trigger their curiosity about themselves. So thank you for that.

Thank you, and thank you, listeners. Remember to take on the calling into the underworld, learn to trust your body and make it a space you want to live in. Your ultimate place of safety is within you. Health is being so connected to the source that a life force flows through your body. Take everything you got from this interview and everything that resonated with your body, pun intended, and have a stellar life. This is Orion till next time.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

{✓}View challenging experiences as opportunities for growth and self-discovery. These encounters serve as paths that reveal your shadows, fears, and disowned parts.

{✓}Make your body a cozy, nourishing home, and learn to trust and care for your physical vessel. Evaluate which types of food, environment, and practices allow you to feel at home within yourself.

{✓}Redefine health as a feeling, not just data points. Aside from monitoring your vital stats, tune into your body’s signs of energy, vibrancy, and ease of being as well.

{✓}Be more conscious of your eating habits by observing your body before, during and after a meal.

{✓}Explore and embody different archetypes to embrace your multidimensionality. Don’t get stuck in just one aspect of yourself.

{✓}Practice self-parenting through journaling. Give a voice to your inner child and reparent yourself with compassion.

{✓}Get curious about your conditioned beliefs and stories. When you find yourself following rules dictating how you should eat, dress, behave etc., pause and examine their source.

{✓}Notice patterns of compliance and defiance. Often, you rigidly conform to external expectations and then rebel against them by doing the opposite.

{✓}Find pleasure and sensuality in nourishing your body. Eat with reverence and joy by making meals a multi-sensory ritual of appreciation—savoring aromas, textures, and tastes.

{✓}Explore Ximy Gonzalez’s website, bombshellformula.com, to learn more about her holistic approach to wellness and discover resources to support your journey toward healing.

Links and Resources

People

Further Resources

Bread of Shame

Kabbalah

About Ximy Gonzalez

Ximy Gonzalez draws from her 24-year career in holistic health, fitness, beauty, and media/entertainment to empower women to heal their painful relationship with food, exercise, and body image. She is a coach/consultant, author and producer of 7 Body Basics, mentor to holistic health coaches, international speaker, TV wellness bombshell, and founder of Bombshell Formula.