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A few days ago, I was asked why I’ve had episodes on embodiment, Human Design and most recently Astrology. How are these topics related to nutrition, gut health, hormones, avoiding environmental toxins - all the topics I usually talk about here on the show, this person asked?

So, I want to spend today making these connections.

This show is based upon my education - things that I’ve learned about academically, as well as through my life experiences. 90% of what I talk about here on the show I’ve actually experienced myself because it would be difficult for me to talk about things I haven’t personally experienced.

Seven years into my self-healing journey, and 16 years into my foray into living a healthy lifestyle, which by the way, can be two very separate things, I’ve come to learn the hard way that you can eat the cleanest foods, you can workout so much so that it can actually be detrimental to your health, and even with doing these things, you can still not be well.

I’ve come to learn that if your mind and spirit isn’t in a healthy place, eventually your body won’t be either.

So how do you get your mind and spirit, and by spirit I mean your emotions, your internal self, how do you get these things in a good place?

Again, based upon my personal experience, it requires self-awareness, and mindset shifts. So let me ask you this.

Why are there yo-yo dieters out there? Why, every January, or ever September, do people set out to eat healthy, start exercising, “new year, new you”, and then by the end of February, they’re back to their old habits? What stops them from being successful, from other people who are?

What makes someone who suffers with an autoimmune condition, who says over and over again how much they need to focus on their health to get better, yet doesn’t make the dietary and lifestyle changes that will improve their quality of life on a daily basis?

Or, why do people automatically count themselves out of being able to do something before they even try?

There’s not just one answer in each of these scenarios, but a commonality in each of these situations are the person doesn’t have the right mindset to be successful at whatever it is they want to do.

And, they might not even realize it. They might not even have the self-awareness that they’re the roadblock that’s in their own way.

In hindsight, this is how my self-healing journey with adrenal fatigue started.

I was exhausted all the time. No amount of sleep relieved this. This rundown feeling kept me from keeping up with life, and with work. As a result, I constantly felt overwhelmed. My body was slow to recovery from workouts and injuries. And I was gaining weight despite running dozens of miles every week, training for marathons, while also doing strength training twice a week with my personal trainer.

So when my functional medicine doctor determined that I was struggling with burnout and adrenal depletion, we addressed my diet and made necessary adjustments especially after identifying food sensitivities.

I was forced to cut back and eventually stop training altogether, which was extremely hard to do.

I took soooo many supplements, I swear I felt like a walking pharmacy.

Took all the lab tests - the ones covered by insurance and the expensive ones that were not.

I switched to using non-toxic cookware, cleaning materials, and beauty and personal care products.

And all of these things were essential steps in my self-healing journey, yet I never felt fully healed.

I wracked my brain trying to think of what else I could try.

Okay, stress is a big deal that you have to manage so I tried meditation, saw a therapist - again, all things that were necessary, but again, not feeling fully healed.

As a side note, when it comes to a lot of conditions, but especially fatigue, burnout and adrenal depletion, I don’t think there’s ever a single moment of saying, “I’m healed.” At least for me, these are going to be ongoing things that I’m always going to battle, and need to be vigilant in making sure I keep myself in check on.

So when you take a functional approach to health, ultimately, you’re looking for the “root cause” of the condition you’re trying to solve.

More often than not, no matter what the condition is, the root cause is going to be some form of stress. I’ve talked about how we can have different kinds of stress responses, from food sensitivities, overtraining, reaction to a toxin we’re unknowingly exposed to, for many people, it's a collection of things, among them is one's mindset.

And I actually think one’s mindset and emotional health is more at the root cause of things than anything else.

Think about it -

If you’re a yoyo dieter, or struggling with an autoimmune condition, and you know that simply cutting out sugar from your diet can have a massive impact on your health, but but don’t do it because, “its too hard” or “you’re not disciplined enough”, well, those are actually mindset issues.

So yes, maybe your hormonal imbalance is the cause of your problems, and eating sugar is causing the hormonal imbalance, but the fact that you are unwilling to stop eating it because it's too hard - well that is the root cause of your problem.

When it comes to fatigue, burnout and adrenal depletion, we know that stress is a root cause. So what is causing your stress, and what are you going to do about it? What are you willing to do about it?

This is where self-awareness is so important, because these are internal factors that no one else can address but you.

So how do you develop self-awareness and shift your mindset?

Well, gratuitously speaking, this is the value that a coach can provide. There’s a misconception that a health coach is going to heal you. Ummm, no - you heal yourself. While a coach can offer you education and guidance, for the most part, a coach isn’t going to tell you any huge bombshell that you don’t already know.

But what a coach can do is to hold you accountable, and help you show up for yourself and hold space for your discovery and growth.

A coach can help you see aspects of yourself and your situation that may be blind to you.

But you can also use tools like embodiment, Human Design and Astrology to help you discover or validate aspects of yourself that you either weren’t aware of, or haven’t allowed yourself to explore yet.

These tools can help you peel back the layers of yourself and help you understand who, innately, you are.

Because when you’re dealing with fatigue, burnout, and adrenal depletion, its usually a sign that you’re out of alignment somewhere in your life.

So when you think that you can’t do something or change something because “you’re not disciplined enough”, maybe there’s something in your Human Design or Astrology profiles that can help you identify or again, validate something about yourself and you can use this information for a different approach and maybe, hopefully, still get the outcome you’re looking for.

Here’s a few ways that it’s helped me:

It’s been about four years since I last trained for a race, but prior to that, I trained non-stop for a solid 8 years. It took its toll on my body, especially the fact that I’m not a natural athlete or have the constitution for long distance running.

I worked really hard, but had quite a bit of injuries along the way, some of which I still struggle with. Guided embodiment sessions have helped me address some of those long-unaddressed injuries through gentle movement, prana breathing, meditation and yoga.

Its helped me marry these injuries with long held, unaddressed emotions. Addressing these physical and emotional things has felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders, releasing deeply embedded stress I wasn’t aware that I was holding on to.

Through this work I’ve examined deeply held beliefs and challenged why I carry them, how they came to be, and in fact, if they are truly my beliefs, or what I was conditioned to believe.

Self-awareness and mindset shift. I have two episodes on embodiment work Episodes 117 and 131, which I’ll link to in the show notes for this episode at www.livefablife.com/145.

As I’ve shared many times, I’ve struggled with sleep from childhood. I’m not a good sleeper. I’ve tried all the sleep supplements, I’ve tried meditation, I’ve tried keeping a notebook beside the bed, I’ve tried diffusing essential oils, I sleep with an eye mask,

I’ve switched my bedding to organic bedding and my mattress to a non-toxic mattress, had acupuncture treatments. You name it, I’ve tried it. At some point, I got obsessed with tracking my sleep, which I think only made things worse.

A few months ago, when I had my natal reading, my astrological birth chart reading with Julien Elizabeth, who was a guest on the last episode, Episode 144, she mentioned that it's important for me, rather than try to force myself into routines, to open myself up to developing rituals instead.

At the same time, my acupuncturist was encouraging me to try taking afternoon naps to make up for the 2-3 hours of sleep I wasn’t getting at night. At first I kept telling myself the same stories I’ve told myself since I was kid, that I can’t take naps.

But then I realized that was possibly a self-limiting and sleep-sabotaging belief so I gave it a try and guess what - I had about a week of glorious naps! So I tried to create a routine around it, but with my schedule, I really wasn’t able to, and I was getting frustrated about it.

So when Julien mentioned in my birth chart reading that rituals are really good for me, it was like a light bulb went off and I realized that I could create a ritual around my afternoon resting time and that it didn’t need to be the same every single day. Again, self-awareness, mindset shift, and releasing stress by getting more sleep - it was like this weight was lifted off of my shoulders!

When I learned that in Human Design, I’m a Projector, and by the way, I’ve also had two episodes on Human Design, episodes 130 and 142 which you can go and listen to if you haven’t already, and as a Projector, I have an open chakra system and I don’t have my own energy sources. This means that I get my energy from others. It also means that because of this, Projects are only meant to work half a day, Then spend the other half of the day learning their craft, whatever their expertise is.

This was a major a-ha for me because for years I’ve been working a full-time, high-demanding tech job, building multiple side hustles as a health coach and Beautycounter consultant, while also producing this podcast entirely on my own. I was working 12-14-16 hour days, seven days a week.

When I learned that I was a Projector, and what being a Projector meant, the first thing that came to mind was, “no wonder I’m tired all the time!” I don’t have the energy to live this way!

And for the first time, it felt okay to give myself permission to not have a timeline to get things done; to not have to take action on every single idea that pops into my head; to not hold myself to someone else's standards and do things how “they’re supposed to be done.” This is where I leaned into my guided embodiment sessions and asked myself, “why do I believe this has to be done this way?” Who made this rule? Do I really believe that it has to be done this way, or have I been conditioned by someone on the internet?”

Self-awareness, mindset shift, and stress relief.

And lastly, this podcast. I missed the fact that last month was the 3 year anniversary of the show. And for the first three years, I brainstormed the topics, wrote the content, booked the guests, recorded, edited and published every single episode. Wrote the show notes, created social media posts - you name it, I did it. It really could be a full-time job. But I already have one of those, and I’ve purposefully chosen to keep this podcast sponsor-free which means I don’t make a penny of it. It's truly a labor of love.

And as you can imagine, I was feeling burnt out about it and questioned if it was something I should continue. Then I learned about being a Projector, and this really gave me the permission to outsource production of the show.

What does that mean?

Well I had a podcast production company cold-call me. I normally don’t respond to cold calls, but it couldn’t have been more perfect timing so I paid attention. We jumped a Zoom call, they shared their services with me, and truly, it's what I needed. So leaning into the fact that I’m not meant to work full days, I hired this company and now, after recording the episode, I send the files off to them every Thursday for editing and production, and I get the finished file, along with show notes back on Mondays for publishing on Tuesdays. It has been life-changing where I feel like I’ve gotten my weekends back! My only regret is that I wish I’d done this sooner, but the timing wouldn’t have been right.

And the other thing is that as I contemplated I should continue doing this show, besides learning I’m a Projector in Human Design, I also learned that in my profile, I’m a ⅓. This means that I have deep desire for learning and what I learn, I dive deep into, and I’m meant to share what I learn with others.

It also means that I best learn through trial and error.

Doesn’t that summarize this show? Functional Nutrition, gut health, environmental toxins, stress, mindset - these are all topics that I have immersed myself in and spent the better portion of the past 5 years truly diving deep into.

And now I share my learnings with you, here on the show, by sharing my own personal experiences, and through real people stories of the guests that join me.

Having my Human Design profile validated for me that what I’m doing here on the show, and in my work, truly is what I meant to do. I deeply feel that it’s my calling and it's why I continue to show up for you every week with a new episode.

Self-awareness, mindset shift, and stress reliever.

These are just a handful of experiences where the systems, tools and approaches that I’ve shared with you can be just as impactful as your diet and lifestyle choices.

This is what we mean by taking a functional approach - looking at the big picture of our health and well-being and taking into considerations all the ways that we can support it. And I’d argue that there’s no greater way to do that than by shifting your mindset through self-awareness, and as a result, releasing some stress that burdens us physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

When we can do that, that’s what brings us in alignment with ourselves, and that’s when we can truly thrive and be happy, healthy people.

I hope that answers the question of why I talk about these topics, and will continue to talk about them, as I will all the other topics you’ve come to expect to hear on this show.

And I hope you’re here for it, alongside with me.

As always, thanks for listening, I know you’re busy people so I appreciate you taking the time your of your day.

I’ll see you next week - bye!