Episode 152: Self-Discovery Through Human Design & Health
In my health journey over the years, I’ve come to learn that the human body is so much more than what manifests physically.
The body has a cohesive flow that when there is disruption, can cause so much more damage to us than we realize.
In this episode, I share how 2020 was a year of self-discovery for me, especially as I learned about and leaned into my Human Design. You’ll hear me discuss:
How the pandemic gave me the time to reframe and redefine self-care
How I came to learn about Human Design and the synchronicities it has with other self-healing modalities I’d been using
How it helps me grow in all aspects of my life
How I’m incorporating it into my health coaching work
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“I’ve found that the more I learn and lean into my Human Design, the more energized I feel. And feeling empowered feels like freedom. It feels so amazing to feel free. When we’re living in a way that’s true to us, we’re happier and healthier people. We make better choices – daily. We have better habits.”
Read the Transcript:
Hello friends and welcome back to the show.
I'm Naomi Nakamura, and here we are for the last episode of 2020!
I don't know about you but I’m more than happy to see this year come to an end, I think this time last year none of us had any idea of what 2020 was going to bring us. But as challenging and as hard as it’s been, personally, there has been a lot of good that have come out of it for me.
If you haven't noticed, this year I’ve released a number of the episodes on self-development. I haven’t talked about self-development as much as I have with the other topics that we’ve talked about here on the show for the past 3.5 years.
And this is because I haven’t dedicated as much time to self-development in the past, as I have this year. This is what 2020 allowed me, I can even say, pushed me to focus on.
The overarching thing that came out of it, was how I’ve reframed self-care.
Now, I've had past episodes on self-care, had self-care coaches join me for interviews – and we've had conversations on how self-care is more than just massages, pedicures and workouts at the gym. Although those things are good too and lord knows how much I’ve missed my monthly massages this year.
So, with those things not really available this year, I spent a lot of time thinking about how can I still cultivate and enjoy how those experiences made me feel? How can I find ways to tap into my parasympathetic system and allow for rest and relaxation?
What that has evolved to look like for me, is a weekly meditation circle that I joined back in March, as I talked about in depth in the last episode, Episode 151.
Expanding on the Ground space meditation circle experience was one-on-one embodiment guidance sessions, something I definitely talked a lot about in the last episode.
And from there, I discovered new tools or, rather new-to-me tools, that combined with the meditation circle and embodiment sessions, really helped me come to know and understand myself in a way that made me feel seen and validated, perhaps for the first time in my life.
The tool that’s helped me the most is Human Design.
We’ve had two episodes on Human Design, Episodes 130 and 142, so if you haven’t listened to those yet, go and check them out.
I was first introduced to Human Design back in April, and ever since then, you could say that I’ve fully embraced living my design by diving deep into learning all about it, because much of my profile is about being an investigator, learning by trial and error, then teaching.
I learned that Human Design is based upon a number of different systems, from the chakra system, to I’Ching, as well as Astrology.
That made me want to dive deep into these systems too, and so I’ve spent more time learning about astrology, looking at it in a different way than I’ve had in the past, as a casual reader of my horoscope, which I spent some time talking about in Episode 144.
Today, I want to bring in some context about how this has helped me, by talking about my story for a bit.
I turned 30 at the end of 2004 and that’s when I finally committed to focusing on improving my health. Prior to that I was not a healthy person. I spent my teens and 20’s eating really crappy food, putting myself in toxic situations, etc. Being healthy was just not a priority for me.
I spent the next four years losing a lot of weight, not in the healthiest way, looking great, but to be honest, not feeling great. And I don’t mean the physical challenges I faced, that I’ve documented here in past episodes. No, I’m talking about not feeling great in my emotions and how I thought of and treated myself. I felt bothered and unsettled, not really knowing what to do with or about these feelings of discomfort.
And then, in 2012, I watched Brene Brown’s Ted Talk on The Power of Vulnerability. It had already been out for two years, but that’s when I came upon it and it affected me deeply.
Because I came to this realization that I didn’t know how to be vulnerable. I remember thinking, “Oh my god, I don’t know how to do this. It feels too scary.”
That was the catalyst for me starting to understand the mind body connection, and understand that health and wellness, while closely tied together, are two very separate things.
Back then, I was still writing on my personal blog. I had started that blog in 2007 as a way to document a trip but kept up with it. It eventually evolved to become the place where I documented my endurance training – training for full marathons and half-marathons. So, if you want to see what I was like back then, I’ll link to it in the show notes too.
It was also about this time that I started feeling burnt out. I was so tired all the time, I couldn’t sleep, I had gut issues – and the best part was that I didn’t realize that these things were problems. But you know the story there.
What I haven’t talked about as much is my deep desire, at that time to learn and talk about conscious living. But I didn’t really know what it was, I was still trying to understand it, much less know how to talk about it. I didn’t have the words, or the understanding to feel confident enough to have open conversations about it. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Plus, I was still living in it and I can’t talk about things until after I’ve gone through.
So, my curiosity on conscious living started 8+ years ago.
Now, for as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with self-doubt. I necessarily say it's been a lack of confidence, although I guess, that’s what is comes down to – a lack of confidence in that I’ve always sought validation from others, from my parents, from my teachers, from friends, from people that I looked up to, and a lot of times, those people weren’t the best sources to for validation from.
What that need for validation really boiled down to is that I lacked the ability to trust myself - I lacked self-trust. So here I was, a Type-A person, and you know, Type-A people have this need to always be in control right, yep I'm Type-A, wanting to be vulnerable but still needing to have control.
Well, I’ve come to realize that at the root of that was fear. No self-trust with a lot of self-doubt = fear. And that’s why I always sought external validation. Because I lacked the confidence in my ability to make the right choices. Add that to always comparing myself to other people, well it’s no wonder that I didn’t trust who I was.
Now, deep down, I think I knew WHO I was, but I didn’t have the courage to trust her. I didn’t allow myself the permission to love her. It wasn’t enough to just accept her.
So now, hindsight be over, if I look at that situation whole-listically, from a functional medicine / functional nutrition lens, it’s no wonder I had digestive issues like IBS and SIBO. It’s no wonder I have a fatty liver and lesions on my kidneys – kidneys are connected to anger, and no wonder I had thyroid dysfunction, because I lacked the ability to speak my truth. Holistically and functionally speaking, one of the self-healing modalities for thyroid dysfunction is to learn how to speak your truth.
In hindsight, now I can see how things are tied together.
I spent a long time looking to conventional medicine to help me with these physical challenges without much luck.
And as you know, I’ve spent the past 7-8 years using holistic and functional medicine, nutrition and lifestyle approaches. And while its had a tremendous impact on improving these conditions and helping me be better, there are still aspects that have lingered.
So, continuing with the functional medicine approach, I’m constantly looking for the root cause – what’s at the root of this problem?
Well, sometimes that root cause requires us to go deep. And by deep, I mean beyond the physical symptoms.
Now, I'm a left-brain person. My brain embraces and processes information using facts and logic. I'm not artistic, nor am I creative - though I do have my moments.
But I’m left-brained through and through, which is why, for some people who know me well, it seems conflicting that I'm an advocate for holistic and functional medicine.
They’re like, “How can you be so into woo-woo stuff?”
Well, I’ve said this before, and I’ll continue to say it again, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with woo-woo. I think people who think something is woo-woo lack an understanding of how the mind + body is connected. And that connection is actually very much based on anatomy and science. It’s looking at the body as a whole unit and understanding that our physical and mental health operates symbiotically.
This was taught to me very plainly and clearly in the Functional Nutrition program that I attended called Full Body Systems, taught at the Functional Nutrition Alliance. It’s a yearlong program, but I took it for four consecutive years, so when I say this is very clear to me, it is.
I kinda feel it's important to point that year, because this year there’s been so much drama in the wellness world of holistic vs science that at the root of it, plainly and simply, the two go hand-in-hand. It comes down to understanding human anatomy and how the human body functions as a whole unit.
So that was a bit of a tangent - where am I going with this.
Ah yes, in my own self-healing journey, there were/are, some aspects of this journey that I knew needed to happen, but I wasn’t ready to face, or knew how to face, i.e., learning how to soften and be vulnerable. There’s so much emotionally to unpack there and I just didn’t feel I had the capacity to do so – until this year.
You know, I understood the importance of nutrition. Cut out sugar and processed foods? Done.
Figure out food sensitivities and repair my gut health? Done.
Work on the core basics? Hydration, sleep, exercise? Done, done and done.
So, if I’m doing all these things, why was I still so tired all the time. Why was I still struggling with burnout and adrenal depletion? How in the world can I tap into my parasympathetic system?
How about softening, being vulnerable, asking for and accepting help, acknowledging deep rooted fears? Learning how to tap into my intuition and trust myself.
These are the things I still struggled with. How do I feel safe enough to release this fear and need for control?
I’d done a lot of reading, I'd done a lot of research, I worked with a lot of professionals on this.
What it came down to, is I really lacked a sense, or not a sense, but the understanding of who I am. Who am I, really?
It can be very confusing when people say, “Just trust yourself”, or “Listen to your body”, “listen to your gut.” Well, if your gut is in need of repair, can you really trust yourself to listen to it?
And being left-brained and needing facts and figures, I’m like, “Okay, what's the process to do that? I’m gonna need a checklist or roadmap.”
The truth is there is no one roadmap. It doesn’t exist because we're all unique. So, figuring out how to learn this, is the deep work that I had done to a certain degree, but needed to go deeper.
You all know what happened. This thing called a pandemic rolled in. It forced us to stay at home, slow down and socially distance. Living alone, that meant even more alone time. But it allowed me to create the space to do this introspective work.
It’s one thing to be aware that it needs to be done, it’s another thing to take action and actually do the work. And that’s what my 2020 has been about. Through the Ground space meditation circle, which by the way, you are all welcomed to join. It’s a donation-based event every Monday evening. Through guided sessions, Human Design gave me the framework to do it.
Like I said that initial Human Design reading blew my mind, and lord if it wasn’t the first time in my life that I truly felt seen. It’s really been the tool that’s given me the permission to accept myself and to embrace who I am.
It validates things that I've known about myself that I've never acknowledged before, that I've never accepted before, and never allowed others to see before. And so it's been this reassurance that things that I have felt self-conscious about, they’re actually my unique gifts. And these gifts? It's who I am.
And it's given me the permission to accept who I am, to embrace who I am, to love who I am, and to let others get to know this person, to appreciate, and to love these things about me. Isn’t that a little bit of what being vulnerable is?
In short, Human Design gives me a framework of how I use my innate gifts to design a life that is authentic to me.
It helps me know to approach my work, relationships, how to best communicate, and interact with others, how to bridge the gap between how people see me and how I see myself.
There’s even more advanced parts of Human Design that can tell you how you best digest food – literally and figuratively. What environments, exercise, and movements are best for you. The best sleeping situations for you.
There’s so much to it that the more I learn about Human Design, especially my Human Design, the more empowered I feel.
And that’s what energizes me, whereas before you know I said I was struggling with fatigue, burn out, and adrenal depletion?
I’ve found that the more I learn and lean into my Human Design, the more energized I feel. And feeling empowered feels like freedom. It feels so amazing to feel free.
When we're living in a way that's true to us, we’re happier and healthier people. We make better choices – daily. We have better habits.
Because often, there's this conflict between who we think we are or who we think we should be, how we think we have to live - all of these expectations that we've placed upon ourselves or that have been parented upon us.
But the more you get to know yourself and learn who that is, you’ll start to feel this freedom that comes from doing the deep work. That's how you start to release all these things that actually aren't you, that perhaps have never felt right to you.
I've been a health coach for the past five, almost six years. And with all the clients that I work with, or spoken to, even if I didn’t end up working with them - I look at the struggles that they had and at the root of the struggles for a lot of us, it really comes down to some type of internal conflict that they have within themselves.
And when left unresolved, it can turn into chronic illness, an autoimmune condition, emotional eating, weight struggles. There's always some type of internal conflict going on. And I think that this is something that we're not taught or given tools to understand and then know what to do about it. So, like I’ve said Human Design has been that tool for me, and it may, or may not be the tool for you.
And this is why I’m currently taking a certification course on Human Design coaching so I can add Human Design Health Coaching as a next level service.
I'm always going to start with addressing your nutrition and lifestyle, because they’re foundational to all health approaches. But leaning into your Human Design can amplify that work and expand upon it.
And when you are ready to take it to the next level, I’m here to help you.
Next week, I'm going to dive into my Human Design profile and I'm going to share with you how I was already unknowingly living my design, what I've come to learn and what steps I've taken to lean more into it.
And I'm going to share with you how it’s made a difference in my life, and in my health so far.
Thank you for sticking with me through this holiday hiatus. I'm so excited to be back. Since it’s the last episode of the year, Happy New Year, stay safe, and I can't wait to bring you all the exciting things I have planned in the year to come!
Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms.
Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guide clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.
She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.
Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!
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