Grace Bell, MA

Guide, Facilitator, and Certified Counselor

Hi, I'm Grace.

If you've landed here because something in your life feels like it has its foot on your throat and you can't quite get free, you're in exactly the right place.

Maybe it's food. Maybe it's drinking. Maybe it's the way you reach for your phone, or a cigarette, or another glass of wine, or a relationship that keeps pulling you back even when you know better.

Maybe it isn't a substance or behavior at all — maybe it's just the relentless noise of your own mind, the anxiety that won't quiet, the grief that won't move, the loneliness that sits in the chest like a stone even when the room is full of people.

Whatever form it takes — you know what it feels like when something has more power over you than you'd like. And you're tired of it.

There was a decade of my life when food had that kind of power over me.
I was bulimic through my twenties. I ran harder, ate less, binged, purged, and told no one. I was hospitalized. I tried Overeaters Anonymous, psychoanalysis three times a week, hypnotherapy, nutritionists, affirmations, and every program that promised to fix what felt permanently broken in me. Some of it helped. None of it healed.

What healed it was something I didn't expect: not managing the behavior, but understanding what was underneath it.

When I stopped treating compulsive eating as the enemy to defeat — and started listening to what it was trying to tell me — everything changed. The compulsion itself dissolved. It didn't need to be white-knuckled away. It simply left, the way a fever breaks when the body finally stops fighting and starts healing.

That was several decades ago. And I want to be clear about what that means, because it matters enormously: I do not think about what I ate yesterday or what I'll eat tomorrow. There is no food noise. No vigilance. No careful management. I think of eating the way I think of breathing — natural, unremarkable, and entirely in the background of a life that has become genuinely interesting.

This is not what it looks like to cope better with an addiction. This is what it looks like when the wound underneath finally heals.

And here's what I've come to understand after decades of this work — both living it and teaching it:

The behavior was never really the problem.

Whether it's overeating, overdrinking, smoking, pornography, compulsive scrolling, or the relationship you can't leave — every unwanted behavior is a messenger. It is the psyche's attempt to soothe something that hasn't yet been seen, named, or met with understanding. It is trying to help. Clumsily, painfully, at great cost — but trying, nonetheless.

No meal plan addresses what the messenger is saying. No elimination protocol gets underneath it. No amount of willpower reaches the wound. Most programs work from the outside in — they hand you a structure and ask you to follow it. This is a bandage on something that hasn't been looked at.

My work goes the other direction: inside out. Starting with the thoughts, the beliefs, the feelings — the innocent and often ancient stories we carry about whether we are safe, whether we are loved, whether we are fundamentally enough. When those are met with honest inquiry and genuine understanding, the compulsion loses its reason for being. Not because you become stronger than it. Because it no longer has a job to do.

This is, at its deepest level, a path of spiritual awakening. And it is available to you — whatever brought you here.

I have a Master's Degree in Applied Behavioral Science and have been a Certified Counselor in Washington State since 1996. In 2007, I became one of a small number of Certified Facilitators of The Work of Byron Katie worldwide — a method of self-inquiry that forms the spine of everything I teach.

I've been running self-inquiry retreats since 2012 and Eating Peace programs since 2014, and over nearly three decades I've sat with hundreds of people in the middle of what felt like impossible — and watched them find their way through.

You can work with me through self-paced courses, the live Eating Peace Foundations program, Year of Inquiry — a small ongoing group for anyone ready to question the thoughts that are running their life — or one of five annual in-person retreats, including the Eating Peace Retreat specifically.

If you're new here, the gentlest place to start is one of my self-paced courses. Private, unhurried, yours to move through at your own pace — a first step before anything live.

The people I work with are smart, spiritually curious, and have usually tried many things. They understand their patterns. They've done the reading. They know the answer isn't another program that tells them what to do. They're right.

If you've spent years managing something — and you're tired of managing it — I'd like to show you what freedom actually looks like.

It looks like the lilies of the field. Unhurried. Unguarded. Fully alive.

Explore all ways to work together at workwithgrace.com