And please pass this information along to anyone you know of who would benefit from attending. These Open Houses are specifically designed to get teens, women, parents and whole families talking about serious issues with addiction/eating disorders and start the process of reaching out to get help and support.

NOTE to EVENT COORDINATORS: If you would be interested in co-hosting with us an Eating Disorders Open House event in your area, please see below for contact info, or hit 'reply' and let us know and someone will be in touch with you very soon!

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Feature Editorial: Being Pro-activ(e) About Your Life

Recently I had a horrifying outbreak of a condition familiar to most of us by the time we reach our mid-teens - acne. 'Adult onset acne', to be precise....'Adult onset' indeed!', I said to myself. 'I've already paid my dues!, I complained to my doctor, to my family, to my friends. 'Why me, oh whyyyyyyyyy poor me?!?'

Didn't matter. No amount of whining seemed to clear it away - darn it. So I went to the doctor and got some very expensive 'treatments'. For months I popped pills that made my mouth taste like ash, my head pound, my stomach turn....my eyes ache, my appetite disappear (a dangerous no-no for recovered anorexics as we all know), and my energy plummet.

But I just couldn't have those breakouts continue. I was willing to do ANYTHING.

One day a sympathetic friend told me about a company called Proactiv, which sells a 3-step topical acne treatment formula on TV infomercials and is touted by celebrities the likes of Jessica Simpson and Sean 'Puffy' Combs as THE miracle cure for problem skin. I was skeptical. I'd been paying $150 a pop for my doctor-prescribed treatments...this stuff was $39.99 over the internet. Never mind the fact that I remained unconvinced Jessica Simpson had ever had a bad-skin (or hair or anything else) day in her whole life.

It just kept getting worse. I ran out of the latest treatment and had no money for more. But I DID have enough to try just one round of Proactiv. I logged on, read the testimonials, and of course purchased my first kit.

Within a couple of weeks my skin was almost clear. Almost.

The Proactiv website, and the endless reams of literature that arrived with the bottles, explained that for a little while, the breakouts might get just a bit worse before they get better. A 'bit worse', indeed. I swear - for those first few days, it felt like a pimple army had descended on my face. And, to make matters worse, not only was I just the tiniest bit hypersensitive to each new breakout by that point, but each time a new zit popped into view, I would pounce on it like a freed mexican jumping bean, mentally screeching, 'WHY ARE YOU HERE?!? YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE GOING AWAY!!!'

Until it dawned on me that that's exactly what the Proactiv stuff is supposed to do - bring UP the impurities under the skin so they can be CLEARED. This is the process - the impurities are brought up to the surface by the topical treatments. Then they are dried up and cleared away. The Proactiv solutions were doing exactly what I had paid for them to do - the process was WORKING - and yet here I was impatiently yelling at my own skin each time it produced an impurity for the purpose of clearing it away???

Ohhhhh.....some of us will always learn things the hard way. Or at least I always will. But that doesn't really matter in the end. What matters is that I did learn. As a matter of fact, I learned quite a lot of valuable lessons from this experience, including:

1. Being 'Pro-active(e)' about my life means not just settling for, and continuing to pay for, a professional medical opinion, if that professional medical opinion is making me sick, and isn't solving the problem I went in for.
2. Being 'Pro-activ(e)' about my life means signing up for the PROCESS, not just the end result. This means enduring the interim times when stuff is being flushed out, when I see impurities in my body/mind/emotions/heart/spirit come up to the surface in order to be FIRST healed and THEN restored to right functioning/thinking/feeling/intuiting again.
3. Being 'Pro-activ(e)' about my life means checking things out for myself - if everyone I know is telling me 'drugs didn't work for me/my kid's/my friend's skin problems, but this stuff called Proactiv did', then it doesn't matter if it's sold on the internet or endorsed by celebrities with perfect skin. If what I'm trying isn't working, even if it's not Proactive itself, I must be willing and ready to TRY SOMETHING ELSE!

A friend of mine, Jessica Weiner (www.jessicaweiner.com), who will be featured in my upcoming book, Beautiful, said something unforgettably wonderful the first time we met. She said to me, 'You don't see farmers in the field, standing over their strawberries, yelling at them, 'GROW!!!' No, what do they do - they feed them, they water them, they nurture them, they let the sun shine on them, they let time and space pass by. And when the crop is ready they reap the rewards of it.'

So it must be for us as well. We must learn to trust the process of it all. We broke over time, didn't we? In the same way, we will heal over time. We will grow over time. We will learn and progress and discover and uncover and expand and move in the direction of health and life over time. And, similarly, as strawberry seeds with infinite, lush potential to produce amazing abundant fruit, we must choose our field, and our farmer(s), well - we must carefully, consciously select the places and people we let into our life to guide, empower, inspire, encourage, mentor and teach us the way in which we must go to reach for and achieve the life of our dreams.

With much love and respect,

Shannon

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Question of the Month
I receive many wonderful questions each month from women I mentor, and I will share one question, and a summary of my answer, each month in Good News. (If you have a question you would like to submit to be answered in a future edition of Good News, please follow the link below to submit your question for consideration)

This month’s question is:
Q: Dear Shannon - I am really starting to question what recovery really means and if I was even in recovery in the first place. I am wondering if I was ever really in recovery or if I just changed my life and my eating habits to accommodate my eating disorder. Are there places that you still slip up big time or situations that you still avoid?

A: You might disagree with me now, because I know you are in pain at feeling like you’ve failed in your recovery, but I honestly believe your ‘relapse’ is not a relapse at all, but an opportunity for even deeper continued recovery. Day-by-day steps towards success often look like failure if we don’t see it with the right eyes....like layers of the onion, as we peel back each layer, the layers themselves appear to look the same, and we peel and peel, feeling after awhile like this is all we will ever do! But what we can't see that IS changing is the distance between our 'masks' (the self-protective barriers we have erected between ourselves and the world/each other/our own pain that are causing our addiction/eating disordered behavior) and our vulnerable, wounded hearts! So we must simply dig in and continue to work, peeling back layer after layer, trusting that even if we can't see it, healing is taking place....and then just at the point we are beginning to despair of ever 'getting anywhere' in our recovery, we finally peel back the last layer and presto - our shining clear heart's light breaks through.

You may think I'm kidding - but this is exactly how recovery happened for me. For me personally, and for everyone I've ever talked to who has achieved recovery from a serious addiction, we have found that recovery itself is a very un-glamorous daily process of being willing to fall down again, to break again, to cry again, to get up and try yet again until 'success' manifests as ever-greater sustained healing.

It is also very easy to forget that your body is not you – it is easy to convince yourself that your body and you are the one and the same. But maintaining this mental distinction is another non-negotiably essential part of any lasting recovery. No matter what spiritual tradition you come from, or even if you are more of the scientific type, the body = the garden (and the garden = a collection of individual systems that take nourishment from the environment around them to sustain the life within them). The Spirit = the conscious awareness of being you. The mind = the gateway through which the Spirit communicates guidance about what the body needs to continue functioning to the body's caretaker - the gardener - you. ‘Hunger’ is an indicator that you, the gardener, are receiving the Spirit's guidance in the area of nourishing the garden of your body. It really is this simple – if we live this way, eating will become a simple, peaceful daily act that is just like brushing our teeth or going to sleep at night and waking up in the morning.

It is GOOD that you are questioning what recovery really means. It is actually essential. We learn what recovery is by considering, and experiencing, what it isn’t. We also learn what recovery means to us by considering what we WANT it to be, which is actually a measure of our dreams of respecting and caring for ourselves in the future in ways we cannot respect and care for ourselves yet in the present.

And, to answer your question, YES – I still have places I slip up big-time. I have my triggers, my stressors, my 15 years of disordered eating that are always ready to come back and keep me company the moment I say the word. Ask me how I even know to write to you of these things! I have had to, and in some areas of my life am still learning to, live out these things, day by day and question by question, by trial and error. There is no other way. I have had days, even months, where I questioned whether I was recovered at all. I have had days, and sometimes months, where I didn’t want to be recovered – where even living with the eating disorder again seemed easier than attempting to recover from it. Recovery is a HARD thing that we try to do! And we live in a society that will NEVER affirm our desire to be slender not skinny, nourished not starving, curvy not emaciated, okay the way we are not striving for ephemeral ‘perfection’. And yet somehow I look back now at all the years since I was first that 11 year old anorexic girl, and I see steady, uphill progress in my body, mind, heart and soul that convinces me that ‘recovery’ is still going on in my life, one day at a time. I trust in that when I can’t trust in the challenges of a particular day.

You will be ‘just fine’ – I have no doubt of it. But you will have to relax your standards of what ‘just fine’ looks like into the process of continued recovery that you are in now and will be in for some time yet. You are on a journey. You are in the midst of a process. You are no doubt doing SO much better in some areas – enough that you write to me with talk of 'relapse' rather than an initial effort to heal - better enough that you now have energy and attention and courage to look into some new areas where you still need to grow. BE ENCOURAGED. Be prepared to ‘mess up’ again – possibly many times. But if you can start working with your mind now to stop seeing it as ‘messing up’ and start seeing it as a new and deeper layer of recovery offering you a new lesson in healthy self-care and a healthy sense of separation between 'body' and 'self', you will be energized and encouraged when you hit hard times to not give up, and to trust the process of recovery you have embarked on as providing just the right experiences to teach you just the right lessons at just the right times that are faithfully leading you day-by-day towards your recovery goals.

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Contemplation of the month
How do you feel about yourself when you get angry? The Dance of Anger (see below for more information on this wonderful book) outlines two categories of managing anger that women (for Good News readers who are women) tend to fall into - the 'nice lady' and the (to paraphrase) 'not so nice lady'. The 'nice lady' responds to her own anger by staying silent, or by becoming tearful, self-critical or hurt. The 'not so nice lady' responds to her own anger by inappropriately venting, complaining, nagging and blaming.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with '1' being 'nice lady' and '10' being 'not so nice lady', where do you fall? Why do you think this style of getting angry does or does not work for you? What if anything do you feel you need to learn about anger management - for instance, are you afraid of your anger? Do you know how to share feelings of anger productively and appropriately with those who may have brought up those feelings in you? Is anger, on the whole, constructive or destructive for you? And, if you currently struggle with eating disordered or other addictive behaviors, how does your anger relate to those behaviors? Be honest with yourself - you do not need to be frightened of yourself, or of your angry self, and you do not need to explain, justify, or hide any of your emotions from yourself. Expressing is the key to releasing, which is the key to healing. Learning how to do this in a healthy way is the expected, right self-effort that occurs once we realize we've uncovered another area where we need to do some self-work.

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Recommended by Shannon

Print: The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships by Harriet Goldhor Lerner, Ph.D. This book offers women a wonderful, healing, guided exploration of the value and usefulness (or conversely, the destructiveness) of anger in feminine life. Un-acknowledged, un-expressed anger is like emotional poison - and unnecessarily so, when we have been given the emotion of 'anger' for a healthy purpose. All we need to do is learn to own, channel, use and then let go of anger as a tool to use on our journey.

Web: www.lauriebethjones.com. Laurie Beth Jones has written several best-selling books - her latest, The Path and The Four Elements of Success, address a topic often left by the side of the road in today's image-driven society. What is your path in life? What is your personality type and how can you use it to your advantage? How does 'being you' fit perfectly into the greater tapestry of your family, friends, community and world? How can you find peace and joy in who you are free from constant worries and fears that you should be other/better/different in order to be acceptable to yourself and others? Laurie Beth writes from a place of 'been there, seen that, done that, learned from that' and her words will be a blessing and a true help to all who read any book she writes.

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Good News Community Updates/Contacting Shannon

Hosting a Key to Life event in your area – A Special Message from RGC Entertainment: From time to time we receive inquiries about how to bring Key to Life, and Shannon, to your area. RGC Entertainment exclusively handles all scheduling arrangements for Shannon & Key to Life, and is an expert at turning a request for Shannon to visit into a successful and inspiring event. Learn how to host Shannon’s visit to your area. Learn how to get the word out about Shannon’s music & life-saving message and draw a good crowd of those who need to meet her and hear what she has to say about choosing life. Make a difference in your community today by volunteering to host Shannon & Key to Life in your area!

Contact RGC Entertainment at for more details, or click this link to fill out a simple one-page REQUEST FORM: https://key-to-life.com/booking.html

Shannon continues her work on Beautiful: unmasking the lie of addiction and reclaiming the real YOU. Beautiful highlights Shannon's story of healing and the inspiring stories of others who have recovered from life-threatening addictive behaviors. Click here for more information about Beautiful, including how you can contribute stories and ideas for possible inclusion, and to read an excerpt from the introduction of Beautiful: https://key-to-life.com/Beautiful.htm

Questions, Stories & Ideas!: Do you have question, story or idea you would like to see featured in a future edition of Good News? We welcome your questions, stories and ideas for possible future publication. Follow this link to submit: https://key-to-life.com/ask.html (all correspondence will be kept in strict confidence and will be read by Shannon personally)

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Until We Meet Again….

Remember, Good News and key-to-life.com are created with you in mind and heart, and I do the work that I do for only one reason - because I know first-hand what it feels like to have a life-threatening addiction and I never want one other person to feel as alone as I did during those dark years. It is my honor, privilege and blessing to stand with you and your loved ones as you wake up each day and choose LIFE, light, healing, hope, love and the promise of future joy in exchange for a temporary sacrifice of time and effort in overcoming your life-limiting behaviors. You can do it. If I could, anyone can. I believe in you! Let me know how I can help, pray for and support you –

With love and heartfelt respect for your courage in choosing to walk this path of life with me,

Shannon

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