Transform Your Relationship with Food: What Are You Really Hungry For?

This healing workshop at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, invites you to look at emotional eating through mindfulness and compassionate inquiry. It is for anyone who turns to food for comfort, reward, relief or a break from relentless responsibility, and then blames themselves for it. Led by registered dietitian, author and meditation teacher Jenna Hollenstein, the weekend asks a simple question: what are you really hungry for?

The starting premise is that emotional eating is not a failure of self-control. It can be an intelligent, imperfect attempt to care for yourself. Over three days, you explore what your hunger may be asking for, and what eating gives you in particular moments, without making food the enemy.

What to Expect

Hollenstein works with mindfulness practice, embodied inquiry, individual reflection, paired exploration and supportive group conversation. You may be hungry for food and also for rest, reassurance, belonging, solitude, pleasure, freedom, sensuality, completion, creativity, justice or a greater sense of aliveness. Some hungers can be fed. Some need sustained tending. Others ask to be acknowledged and grieved, because what we long for cannot always be fully recovered or repaired.

Together you will:

- Understand emotional eating as meaningful communication rather than personal failure.
- Explore how food restriction, inadequate or unsatisfying meals, and good-or-bad thinking can intensify hunger and food preoccupation.
- Identify the physical, emotional, relational, sensual, creative and spiritual hungers active in your life.
- Work with conflicting needs, such as connection and solitude, excitement and peace, or freedom and security.
- Practice feeding what is available, tending what takes time, and grieving what cannot be fully restored.

The program runs from an opening afternoon through a closing morning. On the first day, check-in begins at 2:00 pm, with Kripalu Yoga from 4:45 to 6:00, dinner, and a first program session from 7:30 to 9:00 in the evening. Full days begin with yoga at 6:30 am and a silent breakfast, then program sessions from 9:00 to 11:30 and from 1:30 to 4:00, with lunch between them and another yoga class before dinner. On the closing day, yoga and silent breakfast are followed by a final session from 9:00 to 11:00, then lunch and departure.

You leave with a more compassionate understanding of emotional eating, a clearer sense of what you are truly hungry for, and a grounded practice for responding with greater precision, permission and care.

About Jenna Hollenstein

Jenna Hollenstein is a registered dietitian, certified Intuitive Eating counselor and meditation teacher. She works with people who want to improve their relationship with food and body through Intuitive Eating, meditation and mindfulness. She is the author of five books, including Eat to Love: A Mindful Guide to Transforming Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Life; Mommysattva: Contemplations for Mothers who Meditate (or wish they could); and Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice.

The Setting

The workshop takes place on campus at Kripalu in Stockbridge, in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Accommodations are intentionally simple, designed to help you unplug and feel grounded. You can choose a private room for solitude and reflection, or a community-style dormitory that fosters connection among guests. Rooms are ready by 4:00 pm, and a luggage room is available if you arrive earlier. Three meals a day are served, with breakfast taken in silence.

Before You Go

No previous experience with meditation or intuitive eating is required, and the program is open to all levels. It is taught in English.

Your stay includes three meals a day, more than ten daily yoga classes, access to the Kripalu grounds and amenities, and all program sessions with Jenna Hollenstein. Healing Arts sessions, purchases from the Kripalu Shop and Cafe, and individual nutritional or medical consultations are not included.

This is an educational program, not a substitute for individualized medical, nutritional or psychiatric care. If you have an active eating disorder, significant trauma symptoms or other concerns, please consult an appropriate healthcare provider before registering.

On the day of departure, room check-out is at 10:00 am, and you are welcome to stay on campus and take part in workshops until 2:00 pm.