When I was 17, I decided exactly what I wanted to do for a career. Throughout high school I suffered from an intense preoccupation with food, exercise and my body. At age 16, my mom called the hospital for help. On the phone, they asked my weight, and because it wasn’t low enough to be considered an eating disorder, they didn’t have anywhere to send me.
A passionate teenager, I began looking at the people in my life. I saw so many people suffering from the same preoccupation, but just because our weight wasn’t low enough, we were supposed to go on with our lives as though our behaviour was normal.
After a friend recommended a life-changing book to me, Eating in the Light of the Moon, I began learning about what is called disordered eating, the gray area between an eating disorder and wellness. At 17, I decided I was going to attend university to learn to be a practitioner that helps those in the gray area return to wellness from disordered eating.
At university, I finished a degree in Psychology that I personally tailored to the subject of disordered eating. I then became a certified life coach and nutritionist, and had my own private practice for 5 years in which I helped individuals heal their relationship with food and their bodies.
Then I had my daughter, and I found myself not able to watch sad or disturbing movies anymore because my heart had opened up so much from motherhood. I was looking for a way to change my career from treatment to prevention. That is when I met Saleema Noon. She was looking for someone to recreate the self-esteem section of her iGirl workshop.
For the workshop, I took the metaphors that I had been using to represent the ego, soul, and emotions in the workshops with my adult clients, and turned them into playful images for kids. The kids deeply connected with the metaphors, and for parents and teachers, the metaphors provided a way to talk about deep psychological concepts in a simple, digestible manner.
A few years later when my daughter entered Kindergarten, I not only had to help her with her own friendship challenges, but I myself was flooded with painful memories of bullying at that young age. So I decided to create iKid, a workshop for kids in grade K-3 that used the metaphors to explore kindness to oneself and others.
It was for iKid that I wrote The Girl and The Sun children’s book. The book offers the sun, cloud, and rainbow metaphors that I used so long ago in my adult workshops, and for many years in iGirl and iGuy, in a playful and universal way so all individuals can understand and easily use them in their communication. Essentially, so parents, teachers, and kids can talk to each other about their emotions, thoughts, and hearts. The Girl and The Sun is an endearing story for kids and for the adults who read to them.
Learn more about The Girl and The Sun
Learn more about the sun, cloud, and rainbow metaphors
The sun, cloud, and rainbow metaphors that make up the story in my children’s book The Girl and the Sun were molded piece by piece from my own pain and subsequent drive to overcome it. I use these metaphors every day to parent myself and my children. They are not my own ideas. They come from many teachers along the way: Anita Johnston, Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Jeff Foster, Tara Brach, Marianne Williamson, and many counselors and colleagues who guided me along my journey. Through The Girl and The Sun I can now share them with the world. Please visit www.ashleyandthesun.com/free-handouts-parents-and-teachers for free handouts and www.ashleyandthesun.com for a thorough explanation of the sun, cloud and rainbow metaphors.