Healing Paths: Fusing Yoga and Therapy for Comprehensive Eating Disorder Recovery
By Stacy J. Bryant, Guest Contributor
I never imagined I’d be someone who wrote about healing. For most of my life, I danced on the edge of self-destruction, disguising my suffering with perfectionism, silence, and a carefully curated smile. My name is Stacy Bryant, and I’m a writer, a daughter, a friend, and more recently—a woman in recovery. I didn’t arrive here by accident. Healing, I’ve learned, is less of a destination and more of a path made visible only as you walk it.
I began my career as a copy editor, carefully pruning the excess from other people’s stories, never realizing how desperately I was doing the same to myself. I was good at vanishing. I didn’t eat much, I didn’t sleep well, and I never asked for help. But words—those were always my anchor. And through the years, I began writing small, private essays about the way food haunted my mind and how I feared fullness—not just of my body, but of emotion, life, and experience.
In that quiet, vulnerable space, I started to name what I was going through: disordered eating. At first, the term sat on my tongue like foreign salt—bitter, strange, yet familiar. The kind of word that feels like someone gently turning on a light in a room you’ve been sitting in for years. I wasn’t just struggling with food. I was struggling with being. But recognizing the truth was only the beginning.
Like many people, I didn’t wake up one morning with an eating disorder. It crept in like a fog, slow and soft, wrapping itself around my thoughts in high school, then tightening its grip in college. I remember the thrill of skipping meals, the illusion of control. I told myself it was healthy, that I was “just being disciplined.” But the truth is, I was terrified—of failure, of judgment, of not being enough.
The real danger, I found, wasn’t in the food or the mirror—it was in the shame that lived underneath it all. I learned to measure my worth by numbers on a scale or compliments that praised how “slim” I looked. But disordered eating is cunning; it doesn’t announce itself loudly. It whispers in comparisons, hides in wellness trends, and sometimes even disguises itself as self-care. For years, I functioned under its influence, smiling through the hunger, pushing through the exhaustion, and ignoring the wreckage it left behind.
I reached a breaking point during the pandemic. Isolation peeled away my distractions, and the noise in my head grew louder. I couldn’t sleep without obsessing over my calorie intake, and I cried after every meal. One night, curled up on my apartment floor with a spoon in one hand and guilt crushing my chest, I decided I needed help—not tomorrow, not next week. That night.
I began therapy with a gentle-voiced psychologist named Erin. From our first session, she made me feel seen—not analyzed, not corrected, just witnessed. We began using a combination of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), digging into the roots of my patterns. For the first time, I spoke aloud the things I’d only whispered in the dark: my fear of being loved, my terror of taking up space, and my belief that I could only earn rest through restriction.
Progress was slow, sometimes painful. I didn’t have a movie-montage recovery; mine looked more like stop-motion animation—jerky, uncertain, with moments of relapse and reckoning. And then, somewhere in that storm, a friend invited me to a beginner’s yoga class. I almost said no. The idea of moving my body in a room full of strangers felt unbearable. But something in me, maybe a flicker of that girl who wrote secret essays late at night, said yes.
Yoga, in its earliest moments, felt awkward. I trembled in downward dog. I stared at the exit. But somewhere between child’s pose and savasana, something softened. My body, which I had warred with for years, began to speak to me—not through shame or fear, but through breath. That hour on the mat became a portal, not to escape, but to arrive.
As I deepened my practice, I began to notice something unexpected: yoga didn’t just complement my therapy—it enhanced it. Therapy helped me untangle the cognitive distortions, while yoga helped me feel through them. In therapy, I learned language. In yoga, I learned embodiment. The two together created something neither could alone—a sense of integration, of wholeness.
Each week, Erin and I would talk about how yoga was bringing awareness to places I hadn’t noticed—how I held grief in my hips, how my breath shortened when discussing body image, how I felt safest curled inward. My therapist began incorporating somatic tools into our sessions, and I started to understand that my body wasn’t the enemy—it was the archive. And through mindful movement, I could begin rewriting my story.
Today, I still attend therapy. I still roll out my mat. Some days are messy. Some days, healing feels like walking barefoot through thorns. But more often now, it feels like choosing myself—not because I’ve hit a goal weight or eaten “perfectly,” but because I’m learning to live inside my body with compassion. Yoga gave me the silence to hear my own truth. Therapy gave me the courage to speak it. Together, they gave me a path—a healing path that continues, with breath and presence, one step at a time.
Stacy J. Bryant is a content writer and a mental health advocate. She believes that mental health is something everyone should be aware of, and she hopes to spread awareness through her writing. She has several years of experience as a content writer and has written for several websites. She is currently the contributor for Fresh Start Behavioral Wellness, a blog that helps people with mental health problems. In addition, she also works for Springhive, particularly as a content creator for their Mental Health Care clients, to help them get ahead in their industry through SEO-friendly content. During her free time, she likes to read and write. And do activities to maintain her mental health.