Color Me Beautiful

Just announced! Shannon & Key to Life, along with Lynn Gerhard of HeartSong Fellowship, are hosting the first two in a series of Eating Disorders Open Houses this October (Tomball/Spring-Cypress/Conroe Area) and November (Houston/Surrounding Areas)! The dates/locations are as follows:

Click HERE for registration information (registration is requested due to limited seating).

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.

Shannon continues her work on Beautiful, and she wants you all to know it is going very well! She is collecting beautiful, inspiring stories from many women, and truly from the heart appreciates all the support and sharing that is flowing towards this project. Beautiful is being written with love for all of us - within its pages women from all over the world come together with the intention of working together to create a more BEAUTIFUL, hope-FULL world!

For more information on Beautiful, to share stories and messages with Shannon, and to read an excerpt from the introduction of Beautiful, click HERE

I had my colors done when I was in college. My mom brought home a book that was all the rage at the time - it was called 'Color Me Beautiful' and it was all about identifying the colors that would make you look the most beautiful - based on skin tone, hair/eye color, etc.

Talk about a bill of goods. I was NOT impressed. According to the book, my ONLY favorite colors at the time, black and white, were not on the list of my 'beautiful' colors. I was disgruntled. Discouraged. I was having none of it. And I certainly wasn't about to throw out every article of clothing in my closet (which amounted to quite a large chunk of the small salary I made hanging and folding men's undershirts and socks at the local retail store where I worked after school) just because apparently none of it 'colored me beautiful' after all.

And underneath I figured - I'd never felt beautiful anyway....so why start now???

Today if you look in my closet you will see very little black. Very little white. Apparently the book was right after all - neither of those shades much flatters my light skin and blonde-gold hair - and what's more, neither flatters my newly-gentled spirit, which craves both the intensity of variety and a much milder shade of GREY. I have a lot of grey now, as well as the rest of the color-spectrum, represented on the brown hanging bar inside my closet door - a veritable riot of brown, gold, green, blue (my FAVORITE as you can tell from this e-newsletter's color scheme!), pink, red, purple....lately I even added the once-forbidden orange (wearing it used to turn my skin tone orange-tinged back when I had black hair) into the mix! But black is reserved for events as serious and uncompromising as its shade suggests - funerals, weddings and the like - and white is only found mixed in with less starkly revealing, more forgiving colors like aqua blue, teal green, and yellow as sun-bright as the butterfly sweeping in its singularly buttefly-joyful air-circles outside my window as I type.

I used to suffer from an eating disorder, as many of you know. For fifteen long years I battled anorexia and bulimia, and the voice that fueled the disease...one of the best-kept secrets of having an eating disorder is that the behaviors of restricting (abstaining from food), binging (consuming excess calories out of proportion with actual physical hunger) and purging (using laxatives, exercising or vomiting to empty the stomach of calories consumed) are like the thin skin covering the depths of our functioning bodily systems underneath. What DRIVES those behaviors of restricting/binging/purging, and other related behaviors such as substance abuse, cutting/self-harming and promiscuity, is the viciously self-castigating VOICE underneath that we alone can hear. The 'voice' of the eating disorder used to yell at me from dawn to dusk and even in my dreams - it told me over and over again that I was worthless, selfish, ugly and fat, lazy and a big waste of space. That voice drove me to withhold nourishment, friendship, romance, fulfilment, love and joy from myself for years upon years upon years. It split my life into two categories - and guess what those two categories were?

So - small wonder I had to learn, in the process of my healing and recovery journey, to take BLACK and WHITE and mix them into

So many of the women I work with - beautiful, bright, promising spirits who are just temporarily infested with the voice of the eating disorder run riot in their heads - write to me initially for help and proceed to describe their world as split into two enemy camps - the camp of black and the camp of white. They tell me they are trapped in the black camp, and the white camp seems impossibly far away. Just like I used to do, they tell me that if they have one bad thought then they must be all bad. If they engage in one self-serving (even healthily self-serving) action, they must be all selfish. If they have one uncharitable feeling or speak one blunt word (even if it is justified by the situation in which they find themselves) they must be completely without worth or contribution.

Our work together becomes one of taking their artist's palette and adding one 'forbidden' color after another back onto the tray .... holding the handle of the paintbrush TOGETHER (no one can recover from addiction alone) and gingerly learning to mix the paints into scarily-lovely combinations. Then we, over a period of time, take the stark black/white outlines of their life and COLOR THEM BEAUTIFUL.

Won't you join us? If you or someone you care about struggles from the disease of 'black and white' [aka depression, loneliness, worthlessness, suicidal thoughts, cutting, binge eating disorder, anorexia, bulimia, alcoholism, substance abuse, gambling, internet po*n (not typing this word completely means this e-newsletter won't get caught by SPAM detectors), promiscuity, isolation] there is HOPE.

There is a full palette of colors with your name on it, just waiting for you to set paint to paintbrush and begin to create the lifelong joyful, beautiful masterpiece-in-progress that is YOU.

NOTE FROM RGC ENTERTAINMENT: Bringing Shannon's Key to Life presentation to your school, church, youth gathering, concert venue or special event is a highly effective way to reach out to friends, family members and loved ones who are struggling to be all they can be. Key to Life is not just about eating disorders (although Shannon does have special programs just for that topic if the need is there) - it is a unique, compelling and powerful program that focuses on learning to live towards a LIFEtime of hope, promise, fulfilment and JOY starting from right where you are standing now. Read below for information on how to schedule a Key to Life event for your group today.

Until Next Month...

.....may you move closer to your heart-dreams, find inspiration in the strangest and most wonderful places, and above all, know that you are deeply and unconditionally loved!

Shannon & the Key to Life Team

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