There are a few threads that have been really present in my awareness lately:
The metabolic health crisis we are currently experiencing in the US and a lot of western countries.
The importance of reverence for family as a key to humanity’s legacy.
Healing as the expansion of our range of consciousness
These three things have been swirling around me non stop for the last month. It seems like every podcast, conversation, work meeting and discussion I have somehow brings one of these subjects up and what I’m really sitting with is the place where each of these meet.
Number 1: The Metabolic Health Crisis
Processed food has been available for about two to three generations now. I believe the harrowing statistics we are seeing like soaring infertility rates, chronic illness, autoimmune diseases, decline in quality of life and mental health, etc indicate we are very much in the midst of a public health crisis.
We can look at all these health conditions as mysterious separate occurances or we can ask, what is the root here? What is the thing at the bottom of all of these seemingly unrelated collective health concerns.
The answer is: Metabolic health.
What is metabolic health you may ask?
Metabolic health comes down to bioavailable energy. Every single cell in our body needs energy to do its job. When the energy is not there, then the body has to triage and jobs that may not be necessary to short term survival, do not get done.
For example, our body will always prioritize making stress hormones before sex hormones because if we need to run away from the proverbial tiger, it doesn’t matter if we can procreate later.
Chronic low energy states create chronic illness eg our body goes into survival mode vs thrival mode. Whether this low energy state results in a mental health condition or infertility has more to do with the individual and their constitutional weakneses, environment, genetics, all the more variable pieces, but the root cause of all of it is this ability or inability to create and utilize energy well.
Where do we get energy from?
We get it from electrons. We get electrons from food, natural light, and the earth’s magnetic field. I wrote more about this in my article The Electric Body and Evolutionary Mismatch.
There are all sorts of things we need to utilize these electrons well and efficiently.
Two of them are totally free and very much intuitive: grouding and sunlight.
Grounding requires you to touch the earth, trees, and plants with your bare skin or through natural fibers or conductive material. You can even gahter electrons by sitting in waterfall spray or the rain.
Getting electrons from sunlight also requires that natural light from the sun or moon touch your bare skin or eyes (without glasses or contacts or lasik surgery).
We get the most electrons from food that is closest to its natural form and local, eg fresh. Our bodies are wise and they know when we eat an avocado in Montana something isn’t quite natural about that.
Water is also important. The water we consume from cities has been piped in from the aquifer or somewhere else, with added chemicals like fluoride and chloride etc. The water we drink and cook with and use should be alive as much as possible, not treated and battered and stored in plastic or pipes. When water is structured, mineralized and clean, it supports more efficient electron transport throughout our body and therefore greater energy availability and utilization.
Some really good resources on this subject for a deeper dive are:
A series of Rooted in Resilience podcast interviews with Kathleen Stewart discussing the Minnesota Starvation Experiments and what happens to our bodies in a low energy state.
Number 2: Reverence for Family
I am very much rooted in the Truth that my purpose in this lifetime (and probably other lifetimes as well) is to be in service to the frequency that I call The Mother. The Mother is a mature feminine frequency that I experience as living within the body and cells.
It’s the place where my work with my physical body and with nutrition overlaps with my spiritual teachings and understanding of Life itself.
The Mother is a frequency and presence that I see as very much needed in the world right now.
In the mainstream collective culture of our times women, mothers, children and family are not intrinsically valued. There is some sort of optical valuing of “the perfect life/family,” eg that white picket fence, nice home, and luxury car in the driveway with cute blonde kids, but there is not an innate valuing of Mother and Child. We see this by how little mothers value themselves and how little mothers are supported in the greater collective culture.
We are told that mothering is a side plate and not the main course of our lives. (I wrote more about this here..) “Women can do anything men can do!!” we are told, and then we are expected to do all the things men do and raise our children without help and take care of our home.
‘Women can do everything men can do’ isn’t actually true. And men can obviously, not do everything women can do. We are perfectly different and entirely complementary, and each equally important, but definitely not the same.
When a man and a woman understand this about each other, they are in flow.
When we do not try to put one below the other, we are in right relationship, equal and opposite in a lot ways. The yin yang symbol comes to mind.
When a woman and a man come together in deep love and reverence, creation happens. That creation is sometimes a child. These two create a family. And family is a representation of their and God’s love. These two opposites coming together, supporting each other in equal, but different ways.
It is perfection and it is a legacy. Family and legacy are one in the same. Not in some sort of masculinized “I must procreate and spread my seed” way, but in a way that the thread of love is expanded upon and widened.
Life wants to extend itself. This is creation. Creation wants to stretch and grow and actualize. it is the point of Life.
That is why, I am seeing more clearly recently that I don’t only serve The Mother, I serve Family.
Family is the vehicle through which the grace and love of humanity is passed down. It is the center point of Creation and all that the manifestation of love is.
You don’t have to create a family of your own in the traditional sense to participate in family in the way I am speaking of it here. We all have family, given and chosen, you simply must revere the relationships you have and recognize the reciproicity and love you are being invited to participate in through them.
Just as I aim to be an example and beacon of permission for Mothers to claim their innate worthiness, value, and power because it is of service to do so, I also aim to be a Mother who puts her family at the center, because family is the highest form creation.
Now, I am a human with flaws, patterns, triggers, and shit I’m carrying, so I am not the perfect mother and I do not have the perfect family.
I still struggle with rejection, pain, lashing out, feeling victimized, acting out of malice and frustration. I am the first to admit not every day is easy. I am stretched on a daily basis by my life. Mostly to recieve its beauty fully but also to hold steady in the pain of it.
However, I am clear that my reverence and full participation as the Matriarch of my family is my highest honor and practice.
I was on a call with Nicole Parker today and she said, “Mothers are born and matriarchs are made.”
Meaning, there are lots of women who became mothers through the birth of a child, and that is no small thing. But to become the Matriarch, the woman who Knows her worth and the power of her presence and claims the responsibility of the leadership of her family, is a process that you must consciously participate in.
Every single human being on this planet is deeply affected by dynamics between themselves and their mother. There is no human being on this planet that didn’t come through the portal between worlds that is a woman’s cervix and pussy. This is the level of reverence we need to have for Mothers and families, because it is the legacy of humanity and that from which all humanity springs forth.
The continuation of humanity requires women and families. The culture we create and live in will be created by the mothers of the children of the future. This is the influence that every mother holds in her hands. May they know it and revere it and participate with it consciously and intentionally.
Number 3: Healing is about Range Expansion
This one is something that really dropped into my body like a ton of bricks after opening a particularly painful wound last week.
I have been on the “path of awakening” for a long time. Maybe like two decades if you count my drunken and drugged attempts to reach God. The seeking has always been there, even before that.
I got a tattoo at 17 years old that says “Create Your Own Reality” in Latin. Looking back on my life I have always been looking for something, something deeper and more basal than what any adult I knew at the time could offer me. I found it in poetry and music and expression initally and in my adult life have sought after teachers and spent hours and hours on the mat of daily practice and pattern identification.
I consider myself lucky because the constitution I came into this life with was one of not taking no for an answer. I came into this life with a willingness to go deeper and be more uncomfortable than most. I had an Akashic records channel tell me that this life is my Soul’s favorite life and that I’ve had A LOT of lives. I believe it. This life has been such a deeply rich one and I pray it’s not even close to over.
And so, when I was working with this wound somatically last week the level of sensation in my body increased until it was at a childbirth level intensity. My mind wanted to tell me all sorts of stories and spin in all directions; I stayed conscious with it, but barely.
I leaned in and leaned in and right when I thought I might pass out or explode, there was a whoosh of relief and a dissolving. I was shaken and weak, but the intensity left me and I felt how I had reached some new level of awareness because of my willingness to feel that old pain. And I could not have held steady in that spot without a thousand smaller scale experiences I have gone through. Practice was the key here.
There is no guarantee on this path of concious embodiment that things will get easier. In fact, in a lot of ways they get harder and more challenging and that is actually part of it, because you are expanding your range. As you become more awake you increase your ability to feel more. The up and down. The “good” and the “bad.”
The only guarantee is that you will get to Live more awake. More awake to pain. More awake to joy.
The last couple days, seemingly randomly throughout the day, I have experienced these levels of sustained and embodied joy and connection that were not available to me before. I have felt a level of gratitude and opening and reception I’ve never felt before.
The making of the space for the pain also made space for the joy; my range has increased. You don’t get one without the other.
On a healing path we get obsessed with “feeling better” and there is nothing wrong with wanting to feel better. This is not about self punishing.
But we forget that part of the feeling better is also being able to feel more.
Healing isn’t actually about better or worse, it’s about expanding your capacity for range, up and down, backwards and forwards.
How are number 1, 2, and 3 related?
Metabolic health, reverence for family and healing as expansion of range, all come back to orienting to a new kind of paradigm.
The mainstream views on health, family, and healing are not working.
They are outdated, rigid, and rooted in the glorification of immature masculine ideals and the small egoic mind. The holdup is people being unwilling to slow down, feel, question their minds and their indoctrinations, and be with themselves below the static layer of all they think is so urgent and important.
We can be so committed to our confusion, misery, and discontent that we miss the way Life is pouring love into us and leading us down the exact path we need to become who we were always meant to be.
On a mainstream level you bring up the word “metabolic” and people just think their “metabolism.” If they have a “good” one and they are skinny or a “bad” one and they are fat.
Metabolism and metabolic health are about how our bodies utilize energy. Energy being the baseline for everything.
Energy is prana, life force, qi.. dare I saw, creative power? Access to energy is in some ways your access to God (and I know that God is a loaded, charged word for some people, but I have never been nor will I ever be a religious person, so for me, God is just the original Creator. It is in all things. It is energy its self).
I am not implying that if you don’t have energy you don’t have access to God, but I am personally drawing the conclusion here that all of these three threads I’m discussing have a root in a disconnection from Life (God) itself.
I heard an MD say the other day that the reason we have so many public health issues is because people are living longer. He also said that we can’t do double blind studies on things like herbs and eating a diet based in whole foods and therefore can’t make public health recommendations based on them.
Do we really need a study to tell us that eating an apple is better than eating something out of a bag with 60 ingredients? Have we fallen this far away from our innate Knowing and common sense? Do we really need a study to tell us that breastmilk is a far superior food for babies than formula? Have we fallen this far into our own egoic God-complex that we think we could possibly know better than Nature Herself?
The mainstream view on having a family is that it is hard, exhausting, expensive and kind of miserable. We need coffee and alcohol to just get through the mornings and evenings with our kids. We need to put them on screens just to go out to eat. Really? Is that the best we can do for the raising of the future of humanity?
The mainstream view on healing is that is you should heal quickly and if your’e sick its probably your own fault. We should be satisfied with as little calories as possible and eat a “plant-based” diet cause it’s what’s best for the planet, no mind what’s best for your individual body! If you don’t feel energetic, happy, and look amazing all the time then there is definitely something wrong with you and you should probably get on a pharmaceutical! It couldn’t possibly that your body is struggling to produce energy and you need to have a spiritual awakening.
How is all this working for us?
I heard someone say, “Americans aren’t lazy, they’re just burnt out.”
And that really resonates with me. I don’t think people want to put their kids on screens all day, I think they literally don’t have the energy or the modeling to do anything else. I don’t think people really want to eat plant based, they’re just confused about what is healthy and have basically been starving themselves all their lives and work under fluorescent light and sit in chairs on a computer all day and so they are so dissociated they have no access to their body’s knowing.
As sick as we are, our lives are entirely too comfortable in a lot of ways, we aren’t well versed in traversing difficult situations. Healing in an integrated and sustainable way takes time, stamina, commitment, faith and trust in our bodies. It takes a playing of the long game and a trust in our own ability to hold ourselves through difficult times.
We would need to be at home in our bodies (embodied) to address healing from this angle. Our current medical system is based in a hierarchical system where medical professionals know more about bodies than we do. This is not the directionality to operate from if you’d like to address healing on a holistic level.
You have to trust your own insights and feelings first and foremost, collect information from experts and run those opinions and recommendations through your own inner knowing. It takes so much so responsibility to come at healing from this direction. That’s what most people are unwilling to take on. They would rather someone just tell them what to do.
If we would like to heal on the level of increasing our capacity to stay fully conscious in more and more situations then we will have to take a whole lot more responsibility on an individual level, as well as a collective level.
Metabolic wellness is about creating and utilizing energy well and efficiently. Family is about creating a legacy of love and creating a future consciously. Healing is actually about creating a larger capacity for Life itself. These all tie back to us having a more conscious presence and awareness of ourselves within our bodies; more God in our bodies.
The more embodied we are, we become more aware of what takes energy away and what gives us energy. The more connected we are to our bodies the less we can override them by feeding them food devoid of life.
The more embodied we are, the more presence we can have with our children, with our families, and the more capacity we have to consciously create a culture that serves the life of our families and therefore, humanity.
The more embodied we are the more capacity we have to be with the discomfort of illness, disease, or whatever challenging thing Life offers us (to teach us and guide us).
What do we need to come into our embodied nature?
The first step for most people is to slow way down. That doesn’t mean not being functional or neglecting your duties or becoming metaphorically numb or frozen, it just means brining more awareness into your life throughout the day. Feeling things as they come up just 5% more. It means brining your awareness to your body more often. Listening to your biological impulses. It means noticing and stopping the mind spin and bringing the energy back into your pelvis and asking what really needs to be done from there.
These are simple but not easy tasks. Most peoples’ minds will try to find something flashier or more entertaining to “do about this,” but the real practitioner will stay with the slow, boring and steady and lean in to the monotonousness of what it takes to make real sustainable changes.
VILLAGE | A family embodiment retreat, is a chance to slow down and be in your body for a weekend with your family. It’s a chance to truly BE together in a way you may have never been before. VILLAGE is steeped in all three of these threads: metabolic wellness, reverence of family, and healing.
We will focus on whole, local, ancestral and lovingly prepared foods eaten slowly and together. We will greet the sun in the morning and say goodbye to it at night, with our families. We will allow our bodies to touch the earth and be outside.
We will be with other humans who are also committed to slowing down and becoming more intentional as a family committed to a legacy and culture of responsibility, embodiment and intentional creation. We will experience workshops and practices that bring us further into our bodies in a way that is gentle and slow and nourishing.
If you come with your partner, there will also be opportunities for you to drop in together without kids.
For me, there is no higher priority than parenting and enjoying that parenting. This is my parenthood, afterall. May it be everything I know it can be. Joyful, painful, challenging, and expanding. This is also my children’s childhood. May it be joyful, shaping, beautiful, and exactly what they need. This is the most important thing we can do for our families, center our embodiment.
We are calling in two more families to join us. Reach out to me if you’re ready. Registration is now closing on September 12th.
What Do Metabolic Wellness, Family, and Healing All Have in Common?