The Elimination Diet: Gossip, Judgment, and Drama

“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.”— Maya AngelouWe spend so much energy watching what we put into our bodies — the food, the drink, the supplements. But Jacqueline and I have been asking a different question lately: what’s in our emotional and spiritual diet? And when we looked honestly, we found some things worth eliminating. Gossip. Judgment. Drama.Here’s what we keep coming back to. Underneath gossip is a hunger to belong. We bond with someone over a shared opinion about someone else, and it feels like connection — but it’s a counterfeit. The belonging we’re actually starving for is belonging to ourselves, and every helping of gossip and judgment takes us further from it, not closer. We get enmeshed in the outer world, outwardly focused, and — in the language we love — our frequency drops.But something remarkable happens when you take those things off the menu. With nothing left to project outward, you’re left sitting with your own discomfort. You turn inward. You meet your own shadow. And your frequency rises. Because what we judge in other people is almost always a part of ourselves we haven’t yet accepted.So today we want to go on an elimination diet together — and see what kind of freedom is waiting on the other side of it. Why do we gossip and judge in the first place — what are we really hungry for? What happens when we stop projecting and finally sit with our own discomfort? And is it possible that self-forgiveness — self-love — is the whole point?All of this and more in the next hour.