I’m sharing this Medicine Stories podcast episode here on Substack in the hopes that I will hear from some of you in the comments about where you’re at with all of this.

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In the years since the pandemic, many of us have found ourselves deeply fatigued- not only physically and emotionally, but spiritually. The wellness world that once felt hopeful has become crowded with endless advice, conflicting opinions, and relentless marketing, leaving many people questioning who and what they can trust.

As wellness has become increasingly commodified, it has also become harder to distinguish between what is truly nourishing and what simply captures our attention. Many are stepping back from the noise, longing for a slower, more grounded relationship with health.

And yet, the desire to feel well has not disappeared. If anything, it has become more sincere. If you’ve ever felt disillusioned by wellness culture but still deeply long to be well, this one’s for you.

An off-the-cuff solo episode, I share musings on our collective loss of trust in the wellness industry, where that leaves me as the host of this podcast, and what has remained steady and true for me in the midst of ever-collapsing paradigms.

-Ailie Jolie

I got depressed looking through images from this era, so here is American Girl In Italy from 1951

In 2002, at age 21 and just as I was intentionally starting to disengage from the popular culture that this essay examines, Danny Masterson tried to get me to go to his hotel room with him.

I did not go, and this is not another Danny Masterson story.

Although it could have become one, if I weren’t already so disgusted with Girls Gone Wild commercials, Maxim Magazine, MTV’s spring break coverage, The Man Show, and Kid Rock yelling onstage at Woodstock ‘99 that “Monica Lewinsky is a fucking ho, and Bill Clinton is a goddamn PIMP” before performing his song Balls In Your Mouth.

I am now a 45 year old mother of two daughters living in a post #MeToo world, but back then I seemed to be one of the only (non-religious) young people looking around and thinking that something was deeply wrong with the way teenage girls and young women were portrayed as nothing other than hypersexualized bodies to be openly objectified.

I’ll tell the Danny Masterson not-really-a-story before moving on, since I’m sure you’ll be curious- My friend Steph and I met him and actor Ben Foster (now married to Laura Prepon, Danny’s costar on That 70’s Show) in line to get into Altitude, the then-new but now-defunct nightclub at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe.

We were already drunk standing in line and so had the courage to talk to them, and they invited us to their VIP booth. We talked. We drank. I don’t remember dancing. I do remember that they introduced us to the product Emergen-C and told us we wouldn’t be hungover tomorrow if we drank some, and that I drank it out of Danny’s water bottle (yes, the allegations of drugging that emerged during his trial for rapes that happened in 2001 and 2003- the years bookending this incident- did raise my eyebrows, but I don’t remember feeling anything other than drunk that night).

He asked me numerous times to go back to his hotel room with him but, even though I’d always liked his character Hyde and felt cool hanging with him, I had no intention of having sex with someone I had just met. His celebrity was not enough to persuade me. I sensed that this was unsafe, an instinct that had blessedly not been bludgeoned out of me like it had for so many of my peers. He didn’t push too hard, and that’s the end of the story.

For reasons undoubtedly related to my innate sensitivity, I’ve always been very sexually self protective, very cautious. I was having sex in high school but later than my friends and only with my sweet boyfriend.

I could not understand what was motivating the girls around me and on my TV screen to make themselves so sexually available to what were clearly bad dudes, nor why the dudes were behaving in a way that would later be termed “raunch culture”.

I’ve also always felt blessed to be a girl. From a young age I had a sense of the wonder of the female body- the body that got to bring life into the world. I’ve felt in awe of and fiercely protective of girls and women and what our bodies can do for as long as I can remember.

For me, the ubiquitous and unavoidable Girls Gone Wild commercials felt like a kick in the stomach every time I saw one.

How was this allowed on TV? Where were the adults in this culture, the elders who were supposed to secure the guardrails and keep vulnerable people safe?

And why were the women on these videos subjecting themselves to this- how did the mass delusion that this was empowering, and not exploiting, women take hold so strongly?

During this same era I was at a house party in Sacramento with my hometown friends. I’d known the people at the party for decades. Our moms were friends. Our siblings were friends. We were all good buddies, and I’d never felt anything but respected and genuinely cared for by the guys there.

So why was this dude from my graduating class, who had never acted this way toward me before, putting a video camera in my face and yelling at me to “show me your tits!”?

I knew why. And I knew why every girl from a grade younger than mine did as he demanded with a smile on her face, while I quietly slipped away.

This also happened to me in front of my mother when we happened to visit the college town I’d been considering moving to during Mardi Gras. The guy who drunkenly yelled it into my face on the street wasn’t some rando- he was the sweet (now ex) boyfriend I mentioned earlier who I’d dated for a year and a half, who had spent countless hours in my home with my family, who had a great relationship with my mom, but who nevertheless did this in front of my mother.

My point is that what we were seeing all around us in the media had a palpable effect on how young men and boys were treating young women and girls in the real world. I saw the change in guys I knew, and it happened fast.

The culture had completely normalized, even celebrated, this exploitation of young women as harmless fun, as progress, as liberation.

And everyone- the guys and the girls, the old and the young- had bought in to it.

I felt very alone in seeing it otherwise.

My hard-to-articulate feelings told me something was wrong with the culture. My animal instinct told me not to go to Danny Masterson’s hotel room. But it took decades of reading, thinking, and processing to start to understand just what the hell had happened.

Why It Happened When it Happened

Many forces converged to make the late 90s/2000s cultural moment what it was.

The female body has been objectified since mass media came into existence, from ads for beauty products in Edwardian times to today, but many of us are seeing in retrospect how absolutely lawless this decade or so was. All bets were off, nothing was sacred, views and revenue and the drives and desires of 19-year-old boys trumped any shred of care or respect for our species’ life-givers, and women played into it just as strongly as men did (to be clear- I’m blaming the culture here, not the women).

To my generation, birth control was a given and the sexual revolution no longer seemed all that revolutionary. The cultural mores that had seemed oppressive to our mothers (such as chaperoned dating, saving sex for marriage, the shame of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, etc.) but had actually existed to keep young women safe from the unrelenting force of young male sexuality and the lopsided consequences of an unexpected pregnancy, had been blown to smithereens in the 60s and 70s.

(Imagine a man of my grandfather’s generation approaching a woman he found attractive in public and yelling at her to “show me your tits!”).

Our Boomer mothers- bless their good intentions- flipped the millennia long, cross cultural practice of elders holding sexual guardrails in place to keep the raging appetites and poor impulse control of young people in check.

Those of us who came after felt grateful that we didn’t have any of those fusty old values to hinder us, but we also failed to fully consider the consequences of this seismic cultural change.

When the paradigm shifted away from protecting girls and women from one of humanity's most powerful biological drives and toward ever more consequence-free sexual liberation, the darker expressions of male sexuality found unprecedented license on a massive cultural scale.

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This is what was reaching a fever pitch at the turn of the millennium, and it was reflected back to us everywhere we turned.

This was the tail end of the decades-long monoculture, when everyone consumed the same media. You couldn’t opt out of the Girls Gone Wild commercials if you wanted to watch TV, and everyone watched TV. Any time you switched the channel to MTV to catch the latest music video you were highly likely to instead be subjected to teenage girls bouncing around on a beach wearing almost nothing and making eyes at the camera, or to Jenny McCarthy’s cleavage hosting a game show. Maybe some comedy instead? Change the channel to Comedy Central and watch hot young women in short skirts jump on trampolines in slow motion while the credits roll after an episode of The Man Show. Because… comedy?

The thing I really want to emphasize is that absolutely no one in the mainstream was calling it out at the time. There were no critics, no social media commentary, no think pieces on Substack to counter the idea that young women’s bodies existed solely to please men and that no amount of exploitation ever crossed a line and that this would be allowed to infiltrate every aspect of our shared culture.

No one was asking what effect this might have on girls.

This is why the wave of recent media exploring this era (see below) has touched a nerve for so many of us and has, for me at least, felt healing.

It really was as brutal as it felt.

We really were like hunted animals, prizes to be assessed and conquered.

For women as sensitive to it as I was, it really did hurt that much to watch it happening around you and know you were powerless to stop it.

The description of the documentary Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story says that founder Joe Francis’s “impact on American culture cannot be overstated”.

The women of my generation are now coming face to face with this impossible-to-overstate culture-wide impact- with how the low hum background noise of being constantly objectified leads to disembodiment and an often overlooked female-specific form of trauma.

Something happens at midlife- all the things we’ve stuffed below the surface in our maturing phase bubble up as we plateau into actual maturity. The chickens come home to roost.

Trauma Processing Our Coming-Of-Age Disaster

After considering writing about this for a long time, it was reading Ailey Jolie’s writing about how our understanding of trauma is based on men’s wartime experiences and on animals being preyed upon in the wild- not on women’s embodied experiences of trauma- that finally clicked the final pieces of what I wanted to convey into place for me.

In what follows the italicized/emboldened words are direct quotes taken from her piece linked above comparing how trauma tends to land in women’s bodies to how it tends to land in men’s, and the words beneath each italicized phrase are mine:

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“Women's disembodiment often has no origin story”

The profound intensity of having our bodies constantly, and very publicly, sexually scrutinized (with no one ever naming how harmful it was) was just the air we breathed. It was the background ambiance to our young adult lives. The few of us who got through this era without any explicit sexual assault still came of age in this atmospheric house of mirrors, warping our awareness until we became so focused on how our bodies appeared to others- from the outside in- that we ceased to occupy them in a felt sense- from the inside out.

It didn’t happen in one moment, it happened in every moment.

“We were never allowed to learn the fight or flight responses”

There was no way to fight back against the monocultural juggernaut at that time (or at least I didn’t see anyone attempt it, and I know I felt like I had no avenue through which to express my anger and disgust), and since it was everywhere you turned there was also nowhere to flee to.

So we learned to fawn, to play the game, to believe that the totality of our value as human beings lay in how hot we were.

Jolie writes “Girls who fight back get labelled difficult. Girls who flee get called dramatic. So the nervous system learned a different way: please. Appease. Disappear into accommodation.”

The women’s actions on those Girls Gone Wild commercials perplexed me to no end at the time, but now I see that many of them were quite simply fawning.

And it wasn’t just drunk girls at a bar with a camera pointed in their face who were disappearing into accommodation- we were all doing our best to please and appease by making ourselves as sexually appealing as possible.

“You can't ‘discharge’ or ‘release’ what was never a single event”

Therapy culture is everywhere now, but how many of us have sat down and processed this background noise of our youth with a therapist? Sought out ketamine or EMDR therapy to help heal from the mass media culture from 2 decades ago? How many of us have ever even articulated it to ourselves? It’s not a question on the ACE test; the DSM doesn’t point to it specifically.

I am not saying this issue should be covered by ACE or the DSM, I am just pointing out that the nature of this collective mindset was so diffuse that none of us can articulate it as a trauma the way we can with other things that have happened to us, with single events that have a communicable narrative structure. By its nature it is more amorphous, more obscure, and therefore perhaps more insidious than many of the more common traumatic events that are familiar to us all.

There is an “impact on the nervous system of being constantly assessed”

For years most of us have believed that trauma lives in the body’s tissues- your shoulders are tense because of that thing that happened, you cried during body work because trauma is being exhumed out of the spot being touched.

But a new understanding is emerging that more accurately reflects the truth- trauma causes persistent changes in the nervous system and brain-body communication (which then, of course, can affect the tissues).

Trauma is best understood as an adaptation of the nervous system, not a memory lodged in the body’s tissues.

Our disembodiment, our people pleasing, our chronic illness, our body shame and anxiety about the fading of our youthful beauty and what that means about our worth- all these and so many more issues commonly experienced by today’s midlife women speak to this nervous system impact.

There are many reasons that perimenopause seems to be so much worse for my generation than those previous to us, but I believe that decades of nervous system assault is a part of it.

How can we feel our bodies, be attuned to our needs, when we learned to disembody half a lifetime ago?

Jolie writes that

“Women’s bodies don’t keep score. They keep the story”.

We are now reckoning with the fallout of the way the stories told about women by mass media at the turn of the millennium- and the way those stories shaped both female and male behavior- embedded in our nervous systems.

Past, Future, & What Gets Passed Down

I have been moved by recent documentaries exploring the media culture of the era we were young in. One reason is the insight and even healing that it has brought me to see other women my age process these things- to realize that it really was that harmful, and that I am not alone in feeling the need to come to terms with the impact that it had on my life.

But what I really love is how a documentary keeps a record of the passage of time through the faces of its subjects. No matter what the doc is about, it happened in the past, because the laws of physics dictate that whatever is being explored happened before the film was made. Sometimes we’re looking at the recent past, but usually its farther back than that.

When a woman who felt wronged by Girls Gone Wild (or America’s Next Top Model or The Biggest Loser) sits in front of a camera to talk about her experience, she is decades older than she was during the living of that experience. The images on screen bounce back and forth between her then and her now.

And I find so much value in witnessing how she has transformed in that time, in her words, in her body, and in her changed perspective.

I love seeing my own aging process reflected back to me, and I feel such a connection with each woman because we grew up in the same discombobulating culture and are living through a similar midlife realization about it all.

I love that these women are willing to vulnerably share their hard-earned wisdom with the world, to face the consequences of their own participation- naive and exploited as it was- in the culture that they never questioned at the time because nobody else was either.

I find myself wanting to sit down with each one of them and talk about all of this for hours, but I will take these internet conversations over the void of fawning silence that preceded them.

We’re finally talking about all of this, and for many of us it’s happening just as our daughters enter adulthood.

Another point that Jolie makes in her list of what gets overlooked when we focus trauma conversations solely on research done in men is that

We miss what gets passed down

In my work as a podcast host nothing lights me up as much as talking and hearing stories about the invisible threads that connect grandmothers to mothers to daughters to granddaughters. Much of my focus is on nourishment and connection- to the Earth and to each other- and one of the things that disrupts these intergenerational threads the most is trauma.

Our young grandmothers may not have had men yelling in their faces to lift their tops while others stood by cheering instead of intervening, but women have experienced female-specific trauma for ages. We have always had to deal with the fact that men are bigger, stronger, and more sexually driven, and that the way we adapt ourselves to survive the differing degrees to which those factors have threatened us embeds in our nervous systems and changes us.

What’s new is that we’re talking about it. We’re sharing what happened to us with our daughters and granddaughters so that their instincts can be sharpened upon the whetstone of our stories.

And we now understand how events experienced by one generation can affect future generations- say how a mother’s trauma-impacted nervous system might affect how she parents her children- and we’re talking about that too.

In my work, and I know I’m hardly alone, I’m committed to noticing what gets passed down, to processing it with my daughters (and I would with my mother if she was still here as well), and to facilitating healing whenever possible.

Though the way unchecked male sexual aggression runs through culture has shape-shifted since the 2000s, it is still very present among us (our daughters are also unlikely to be approached by a man screaming at them in public to show their tits, but that’s because the media monoculture has fragmented into billions of individual algorithms and those boys can watch brain-and-relationship-destroying porn on the little box in their pocket whenever they desire), and we are still lacking elders to hold guardrails in place on a societal scale.

It is up to us, as individual mothers and women, to keep talking to our daughters and- perhaps even more powerfully- our sons about these issues.

We are tasked with the sacred responsibility to be the elders we were lacking then, to collectively re-mother the culture (nbd) as we attempt to understand and heal what happened in our own bodies when no one was keeping watch over us.

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RESOURCES:

Documentaries exploring 2000s media & culture (I’m not linking to them because hosting platforms change and are different in different countries- just google where to watch):

Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story

Rich & Shameless: Girls Gone Wild Exposed

Sex Before the Internet, Season 2, Episode 6- Girls Gone Wild Revealed

America’s Next Top Model

The Biggest Loser

There are two Woodstock ‘99 docs- Woodstock ‘99: Peace, Love, and Rage and Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 (watch the doc Lilith Fair: Building A Mystery to compare the difference in subculture and atmosphere between a male-centric and female-centric gathering at that time- fascinating)

Articles & Books:

The Body Keeps the Story by Ailey Jolie (was not paywalled when I read it but seems to be now- you can read her Note summarizing for free)

While writing this I came across the article What Porn Taught A Generation of Women, which mentioned things I’d forgotten from this era and made me realize that it was even worse than I’d remembered. This is a piece from The Atlantic but I’ve linked to it on archive.ph to remove the paywall- it might look weird at first but it’s legit. (I chose to keep porn out of this article to so I wouldn’t lose focus but it is an essential part of this conversation- the reason Girls Gone Wild eventually crumbled was not because men lost their appetite but because porn became ubiquitous).

The Case Against The Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry

I haven’t read it but my friend who is a mother of boys highly recommends Off Limits: A Parent’s Guide to Keeping Kids Safe From Sexual Abuse for learning how to talk to boys about their responsibilities in this arena

Tara’s Instagram and Substack, Slowdown Farmstead, is followed and admired by tens of thousands of people. Tara and her husband raised their three daughters on their beautiful Canadian farm, lovingly tending to and butchering their own livestock in order to nourish their family and community. Deeply acquainted with the cycles of nature, Tara has a perspective on the interconnectedness of life and death that was the daily reality for our ancestors but eludes most modern people.

But that did not prepare her for what could happen when a drug that is now bred to be as strong as any pharmaceutical- and which is often misunderstood as being a benign herbal medicine- snuck its way into her daughter’s life at a vulnerable time and completely rewired her brain in a matter of months.

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It is our hope that sharing Mila’s story will make more people aware of the increasingly common psychosis that is a side effect of the new high-THC strains of cannabis on the market, and especially of its dangers for the developing teenage brain.

Tara's essay What Happened To Our Daughter- don't miss the dozens of resources about the risks of cannabis at the end

How Weed Became the New OxyContin: Big Pharma and Big Tobacco Are Helping Market High-Potency, Psychosis-Inducing THC Products as Your Mother’s ‘Medical Marijuana’

Patreon bonus conversation w/ Tara- What We Want Our Daughter To Know: women, restriction, chronic illness & more on Tara’s metabolic journey

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GNM is an alt health trend that has grown in popularity in recent years. It is attractive to so many (including me and my guest, once) because it acknowledges the role that emotions and trauma play in physical health and symptom manifestation, something that mainstream medicine still somehow refuses to do.

But just because some aspects of an ideology are true and helpful does not mean that the entire framework is valid. Critical thinking and humility are essential tools for navigating information overload and complex frameworks, especially when it comes to health.

The allure of certainty and specialized knowledge can lead people to adopt rigid belief systems that don’t hold up to critical thinking, and the the zealotry of believing that your group’s belief system will save the world only further strengthens unconscious confirmation bias (along with other logical fallacies common in GNM- loading the language, heads you lose tails I win, us v them thinking, bizarre antisemitic conspiracies, etc).

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But what might be most worrisome about this growing movement is the purity mindset demanded of its more extreme adherents- the belief that nothing outside of us can affect us if only we believe strongly enough in our own omnipotence and prove our righteousness and purity by attaining a total lack of symptoms.

What is viewed as radical sovereignty and empowerment is really just outright magical thinking reinforced by an absence of humility, mystery, and the reality that ultimately we are not in control of what happens to us. The body is not a closed system; we are deeply embedded in overlapping ecologies.

This episode has been years in the making, and I have been asked time and time again for my take on GNM. When I was sent Demetra’s essay on the subject I knew that I had finally found the right person to have this conversation with. Her past cult experience, and my years of deep dives into culty thinking and behavior, provide a lens through which to view this phenomenon.

Every Morning the Sun Rises

The Culty Fraud of German New Medicine

“Oh, that’s just the healing phase,” she said authoritatively, looking at the rash that had spread itself across the backs of my hands - deeply infected and weeping fluid…

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2 years ago · 18 likes · 5 comments · Demetra Gray

Though we do not claim that GNM is a cult in the traditional sense, cultishness is a spectrum and GNM is definitely on that spectrum.

Also its tenets are demonstrably false, and have led to death in some cases. NBD.

In our Patreon bonus conversation Demetra shares her cult story- joining what she thought was a good thing, slowly realizing it wasn’t, leaving, being attacked by the leader and other members, and the long “deprogramming” and stabilization process that all cult survivors undergo.

Demetra's Cult Story

You already know what it is based on the title- it’s the sacred instruction to never, ever comment on your daughter’s body size or shape (commenting on its abilities- like strength or flexibility- is encouraged).

This makes sense. This has merit. This is a reaction to all the mothers of the past who have made disparaging remarks about their daughter’s bodies, seeding insecurities deep enough to lead to body shame, dysmorphia, and the whole host of issues that can spring from those. It’s real.

But I mean truly, of the dozens and dozens of issues in the “mommy wars” that divide women online these days, this is the only one I’ve never seen anyone offer an alternative consideration on. We all know to fall in line, lest we be accused of causing body image issues.

But here’s the alternative consideration I am here to offer: if you suspect disordered eating or notice that your daughter is getting too thin, SAY SOMETHING.

I speak from personal experience, and with the permission of my 18 year old.

I can’t tell you how happy it made me just now when, in considering art for this piece, I remembered this image that she sent me last week

Before I share our story, let’s look at the big picture.

After years of the culture at large paying lip service to body positivity, the new class of weight loss drugs has rendered all of that irrelevant, passé. Skinny is back. Skinny AF is back (please see: Ariana Grande’s ribs in Wicked, as just one example).

Young women with eating disorders are worshipped online (please see: Eugenia Cooney, or maybe don’t- I wish I never had).

Disordered eating is rampant among teenage girls and young women.

Their mothers are noticing.

But many are following the One Mothering Rule You Must Not Question, having convinced themselves that saying something would fall under the umbrella of the dreaded body shaming and that that would actually be more dangerous than standing silently by as their daughter succumbs to an insidious, sometimes deadly, disease.

Um, no.

There is a field of mothering that I hold within my home, and within my relationships with both of my daughters. I want that field to feel safe, welcoming, and nurturing. It is my job to let them know that they are seen, that I am paying attention to their lives, and that their wellbeing is my highest priority.

Two years ago this month, as the midwinter sun set, I realized that I hadn’t seen my 16 year old daughter eat that day. And I had been home all day, aware of all kitchen activity. For months I’d been worried about her eating habits, as she’d outgrown my control over things like whether or not she ate breakfast before she got in her car and drove herself to school. She had just started living with me full time a few months earlier, and I knew the food and meal culture had been different in her other home and was giving some time for adjustment.

All moms of teen girls know what a fine line it is we’re always walking.

But I’d given the situation some space and allowed myself time to observe for long enough- it was time to say something.

This was at the height of her withdrawn, sullen teenage behavior, when I lived in a state of constant worry*, and she seethed with suspicion as I crossed the threshold into her private domain. I sat on her bed, probably closer than was comfortable for her at the time, and looked her in the eye. My body language conveyed the seriousness of what I was about to say.

“You can’t go a whole day without eating. I’m not sure what you’re going through, but I love you too much to let you starve yourself. I am here to help you, and I am going to ensure that you’re eating enough food from here on out.”

I was putting this into the relational field between us- I will not let you not eat. I don’t care if you’re mad at me. I don’t care if you hate me. I will go to the ends of the earth to make sure you are nourished.

I don’t remember her exact words, but she in turn used body language to convey her annoyance, made an excuse for why she’d been too busy that day, and was soon in the kitchen (ravenously) eating something.

This wasn’t the end of it. But it was a beginning.

She wasn’t happy with me, but I had done what every instinct in me told me I needed to do.

She never again went a whole day without eating, but she still wasn’t eating enough. I waited and watched, and ensured she knew I was watching. I knew we’d have to go slow.

A few weeks later I was sitting in front of the fire alone in the dark, seconds before going to bed. She came into the room and said “Mom, can I talk to you?” and then she laid down AND SNUGGLED UP to me (something she hadn’t done in a long time) and poured her heart out to me for the next couple hours.

It was way past my bedtime, but I wouldn’t have moved for the world.

It was a turning point in our relationship (back toward the closeness of her young childhood), and in her overall wellbeing. There was a long road ahead, but we had stepped onto the path.

I later asked her if my going into her room that night and confronting her, in a loving but firm way, had opened the door for her confiding in me in front of the fire that night. She said yes. (I even double checked last week, this essay forming in my mind but not wanting to publicly pat myself on the back too hard if her take on the situation was different).

I now see that bedroom talk as the issuing of an invitation. It let her know “I see you. I know you’re struggling. I love you. I will help you.”

Caveat time- I know, of course, that every girl and every mother will have a different experience, a different story. I remember as a teenage girl in the 90s watching an episode of Oprah on eating disorders and realizing just how deeply psychological they are, and how the farther along they are the harder they are to heal. I identified more with the mothers on that show than with the girls who were my age, and it instilled a deep fear that this might happen to my own daughters one day.

I am aware of the highly complex and individualized nature of disordered eating, and I am not saying that every mother can or could have saved her daughter with this approach.

I am saying that every mother should try, that we should dump the “don’t comment on your daughter’s body” advice in the case of disordered eating, as long as the commentary is loving and attempting to pull the daughter in a healing direction. These girls need to be witnessed and held, and the sooner after the behavior begins the better. I don’t know what would have happened if I had waited any longer.

In fact, you might notice that I actually didn’t comment on my daughter’s body that first night, just on her eating habits. I am still framing this essay around that idea because a) I see overlap between them online- mothers who are afraid to comment on the body are also afraid to comment on food intake, and for the same reason and b) discussions focused on her body shape and size (i.e. how she had lost weight) did surface in the months after that initial talk and I wasn’t willing to avoid that conversation over fear of body shaming since it was wholly relevant to the disordered eating.

I’ve gotten a lot of good parenting tips online since the mid-2000s days of proto forums and Yahoo email groups, but sometimes ignoring outside voices in order to prioritize our own instinctual knowing about our children is the best advice we mothers can give one another.

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*I will post a follow-up essay soon on where she’s at now and the correlation she recently made between the state of her mental health and how much food she eats. My hEaLiNg JoUrNeY with food and hers have overlapped, and we are both focused on tending to our long term metabolic health (though she does still sometimes convey her annoyance with me if I talk about this stuff too much- ha!). No words can capture my gratitude for where we’ve ended up.

Except that this is the second month now where I am laid low with a banger of a headache on day 11 of my cycle, when estrogen starts rising in preparation for the Great Egg Release that is only a few days away. Last month the headache lasted four days (until ovulation) and I’m sure I can expect the same this month. My liver/gall bladder area hurts (I have confirmed gallstones- and a 5k hospital bill to prove it!- and undoubtedly a sluggish liver so the estrogen doesn’t get detoxed as it should and causes all manner of symptoms) and I barely slept last night. The headache pain is beyond. Sitting on my computer never helps when I am in this state but since nothing helps actually and I have some faint hope that writing out my thoughts and feelings might move things along, here I am.

Everyone talks about perimenopause but few realize that minerals underlie hormonal processes. Minerals, in fact, lie under everything the body does. The literal building blocks; it does not get any more elemental.

My situation is typical for a metabolically unwell woman in her 40s- estrogen dominance (meaning the ratio of estrogen to progesterone is off), the aforementioned clogged detox pathways, low minerals (though my magnesium is up and I am out of the Four Lows pattern my calcium, sodium, and potassium are still low), blood sugar imbalance, low thyroid & adrenal function. My situation is textbook at this point, yet so many women are stumbling looking for answers and help.

Also did you know that 88% of Americans are metabolically unwell? I would bet that it’s skewed higher for women, and especially for older women. So rather my situation is typical for a woman in her 40s (no need for the “metabolically unwell” qualifier), in the states at least.

I want to help them all, especially as I foresee a tsunami of women seeking help over the next few decades. Perimenopause wasn’t a thing for the boomers of my mom’s generation. I mean I’m sure it was for some individuals (if they were lucky enough to have found the help to understand what was happening to them), but it was not the cultural phenomenon it is for my generation. And each generation is metabolically worse, so unless we make some quick changes culture wide (and, I mean, ha) this tsunami is coming (is already here, really).

I have shared about the slow approach I am taking to healing, and the faith it takes. Today is one of the many days where that faith is severely tested. I have healed some big things in the last year and a half, but so much remains.

I am experiencing deep, lasting envy for the first time in my life. Not just a flash, not just a moment of jealousy that inspires me to reach for a goal, but extended and painful yearning for what other people have.

In my lowest moments I hate (certain) people who are metabolically well. I see people living their summer lives on social media, and I want to scream. Why do their lives get to be normal? They can just eat any old food any old where and not react? They can sleep in a strange place? They can sleep at home? They can be at a fireworks display surrounded by thousands of strangers and not feel overwhelmingly… overwhelmed?

I see women in their 20s and 30s who have no idea that their health and beauty aren’t products of their superior lifestyles and good genes, but of their youth. Or maybe that is me projecting onto my own youth and how I had no idea what was coming. Those poor frumpy women in their 40s, they should eat a better diet.

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I have a friend who is 15 years younger than me, in her late 20s. Last summer we were in a clothing shop together. I was too fat for the few pieces I tried on, an experience I’ve gotten used to ever since my weight ballooned in a matter of months at 41 as my body de-energized and all systems went haywire.

She looked amazing in everything she tried on. I felt like her mom, telling her “You HAVE to buy those jeans. I will literally lend you the money. No one has ever looked so good in a pair of pants.” (She did buy them). As I’m showering her with truthful praise, I’m thinking that she has no idea that her robust health and its attendant beauty are a product of youth, which will fade. I didn’t know it either at her age. She’s the one friend who does not really understand what I’m going through, though her care for me is real, because she still has abundant energy and wellbeing.

I see these young women in real life and online and think “Just wait little babe! Just you wait.” And it’s not that I want them to suffer, it’s that there’s an 88% chance they will and I am envious that they are still at the stage in life where they don’t know that yet, where they haven’t felt that in their cells yet.

me at the beach in my home town of South Lake Tahoe, age 25

And I think about how I ignored the menopause conversation for decades of blogging/podcasting because I wasn’t in that stage of life yet (still am not, as menopause is defined as the day you haven’t bled for 365 days and I am still cycling regularly), but how perimenopause is actually what women are talking about when they are seeking help and resources for this stage of life.

What I’m really wanting to express is- I’m depressed. My energy is depressed. Depression isn’t a purely emotional phenomenon, it isn’t just long term sadness.

Depression is a low energy state.

My Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis reports reflect my state of mind- you can see depression it in the mineral status of the body. Because (to put a complex matter very simply) low minerals = low energy and low energy = depression.

I miss newness, excitement, novelty. I miss possibility and magic and the unknown. I miss socializing, people. My health has made my world small, has collapsed possibility after possibility. I am almost always at home, too unwell to be out. I am lucky enough to work from home and to have a husband/business co-owner who oversees operations and our two godsend employees.

Our family recently started sharing our location with one another indefinitely on our phones, and the joke is that its kind of pointless for me to have mine on because I am always home.

I want to acknowledge here that so many people have it so much worse than I do. I’ve been listening to those with chronic illness for long enough now that I just can’t not acknowledge this fact, even though I’m also aware that we all have the right to share our stories even when others’ are worse. They occupy the farthest reaches of hell on the spectrum of metabolic unwellness and, while an eventual turnaround/significant healing still seem in the realm of possibility for me, there are many who know that that isn’t likely for them.

On top of all this, my mom still hasn’t called. She’s still not here. It must be real. Almost nine years later and I still can’t believe it’s real. The more psychological work I do in this healing process the more I see what role loss has played in my declining health. And aging is loss. My Grandma Inie used to say that the thing about getting older is you lose so many people.

Put another way- “time is grief”, a brief sentence that I read last night in the beautiful book As Long As You Need: Permission to Grieve by J.S. Park.

Another quote from that book- “None of my trauma, really, made me tough. Only tired.”

I miss myself almost as much as I miss her. Both of the people I knew are gone. She popped out of existence. I unraveled. I meant those as two separate things but they are related, A led to B. She popped out of physical existence in an unexpected instant, and I was never, will never be, the same.

I grieve for us both, for the loss of her entire being and for the loss of who I was. Two people who I will never get back.

But I am still here, so there is hope. She cannot be recalled, but perhaps some of my vitality and essence can.

This is why I sit down to type even when it might exacerbate my flaring symptoms. Previously unconscious connections get made, and I end up offering myself insights and comfort that I didn’t know I needed or that I had in me.

It bolsters the faith I need to get through.

I thought about all the judgements this woman must face on a daily basis and all the other physical and emotional challenges her body size must bring with it, but how

her child doesn’t give a shit what his mom’s body looks like

He cares about how it feels. How she feels. Her energy, her love, the mothering field that she holds is everything to him. He has no concept of her body being “wrong”. It is simply his mom.

My 7 year old daughter waits outside the shower for me every morning so that she can hug my “squishy belly”. She heaps verbal praise upon my body daily while looking adoringly into my eyes and squeezing me. “Mama I love your belly, your boobs, and your butt SO much!” squeeze hug sigh

I asked her recently where she feels safest and she replied “When I’m hugging your squishy belly.”

us in 2016, when I posted this photo on Instagram with thoughts on body image and struggling with baby weight (I would now love to be this size again!)

A few nights ago she was lying half on top of me before bed while we both breathed and felt our hearts entrain and our systems settle (I live for these moments) and she said “Your body is like paradise to me Mama”.

I remember going into the bathroom as a kid when my mom was in the bath, and the sense of awe I felt at seeing her naked body. I know now that she thought she was hideous, but I had a deep internal- unverbalized- sense that I was in the presence of the goddess herself.

Feeling her boobs squish against me when we hugged is one of the things I miss most about her.

A few years ago a friend was telling me about her youngest daughter, who is the same way- wants to be close constantly and just lavishes love on her mom’s body. “I’ve never had a lover pour such adoring attention on to my body as she does; I feel utterly perfect just as I am” she said to me.

Motherhood will change your body forever. There is no going back.

The maiden’s body belongs to her, matured but unchanged since childhood. Familiar and known. She holds dominion over it.

The mother’s body has become Earth for her babies, and remains the ground to which they are tethered as they grow and grow. The dominion is also theirs. It is shared space now.

Venus of Laussel, 25,000 years old

What we think about how our body looks- what we fear others perceive when they see us- is nowhere in our children’s perceptions of us. They, more than anyone, see us for who we truly are.

Last year I casually remarked to my teenage daughter (it was relevant to whatever we were talking about) that I’d gained about 40 lbs since my energy loss the year before. “Really!?” she said, “No way.” At first I was surprised that she hadn’t noticed (and wasn’t maybe even a little embarrassed of me?), but then I realized that she’s still my kid, even though she’s almost an adult. She sees my body the way my little one sees it, the way I saw my mom’s body. My weight gain came up again last week when we were talking about summer clothes and she said “You look great Mom- you look like a mom in her 40s”.

Why would I expect to look any different?

Then I thought about my own mother, and how now that she’s gone and I’m in my 40s I hold a bigger perspective on her life. I thought about her body at age 30, when she had me, and her body at 64, when she died. It had changed a lot. I see that now. But while she was here, I hadn’t noticed, and wouldn’t have cared if I had, and wouldn’t have wanted anything to change anyway because then I’d lose the deeply comforting squishy hug experience.

The culture is unwell, and the culture celebrates the forever maiden body. If we know that the culture is unwell, why is it so hard to remove its warped narrative about women and body shape from our psyches? It is up to us mothers to center our children’s experience of us over the unrealistic and unhealthy cultural ideal.

The squish on women’s bodies is love, comfort, fertility, and nourishment.

How we feel to our children is more important than how we look to others.

I would absolutely love to read your thoughts and experiences with your own children and/or mothers here…

She also worked nights (dealing black jack and roulette at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe), and was herself raised on processed food by a single working mother. Because of these things I grew up in a house with zero culinary culture, where I almost never witnessed food preparation, and where almost everything I ever ate was highly processed and lacking nourishment.

Cereal for breakfast, whatever horror was being served for hot lunch at school, Top Ramen after school, and for dinner either a processed low fat frozen meal or pizza or fast food (if my dad was up for an outing) or perhaps he’d fix the one dish he ever prepared for me and my sister- eggs scrambled in a bowl then topped with Velveeta cheese and microwaved.

My mom was also the most loving and wonderful person who ever lived, and I live my life and mother my daughters in honor of her memory. If she were here, she’d be walking this path of discovering nourishment with me, and every post is a communication to her just as much as it is to you.

My interest in health started young and was an unintended side effect of my mom’s own desire for health and the food fear instilled by the culture of her time. When I was 17- around the time I was first diagnosed hypothyroid- she brought home the book Total Health Makeover by actress Marilu Henner, and I (never one to let printed material sitting on the table go unread) devoured it.

I had been vegetarian since age 12 (not for my health or even for the animals, but because I hated the texture and taste of meat- I now see this as a symptom of nutrient deficiency, on top of and due to the lack of cooking in the home), but I became vegan after reading this book.

I loved the idea that I could achieve optimum health through lifestyle- mostly dietary- choices. That belief stayed with me for decades, and since then I’ve read countless books and blog posts, listened to endless podcasts, etc., constantly making small tweaks to what I ate to further “optimize” my health.

I remained vegan through my first pregnancy, birth, and postpartum at age 25. I nursed my daughter for 2.5 years. She was deliciously chubby and vibrant and beautiful, and I was an emaciated, anemic, undernourished mess.

Mother Nature in her fierce wisdom had ensured that my baby was as nourished as possible, and my already-low nutrient reserves were swiftly exhausted.

At this time I undertook an herbal apprenticeship with Kami McBride. At one of our first classes she pulled up a chair next to me on our lunch break, looked me in the eye and said “You’re vegan, aren’t you?” When I said yes she lovingly said “I can tell by looking at you” and went on to explain how I was under nourishing myself by eschewing animal products as a childbearing woman.

Her words poured into me like warm honey (which, not being a totally insane person, I was still consuming).

I had known that something was wrong, but had not guessed that my super healthy and morally superior vegan diet could be the problem. It was optimal!

But each word she spoke rang like truth throughout my being.

She asked me if I’d eat sardines if she went into the house and got me some, then and there, and I said yes.

And I did. And something inside of me woke up again.

This is when I first started to think about what nourishment really means (spoiler: still figuring that out, writing this Substack to help me figure that out).

Here I will check my tendency to ramble on for paragraphs and instead sloppily list out the things I cycled through during the following 15+ years that are relevant to my health now- separation, broke & hustling single motherhood, my mom’s sudden and devastating death, getting unexpectedly pregnant a couple weeks after her accident and having a second daughter with my now husband Owen (born ten years after the first), plowing through exhaustion during my second pregnancy to barely- both financially and time wise- buy us a small home, the explosive growth of our herbal business during my youngest’s first couple years of life, starting a podcast, and trying to address the baby weight and the exhaustion I was ignoring by turning once again to gurus and experts who promised to help me optimize my health- from years 2 to 5 of my second postpartum I rotated through paleo, keto, low carb, intermittent fasting, and long term fasting (a practice I had first dabbled in in my early 20s and did not use to restrict calories, but rather because I truly believed I was giving my body a break and a reset that would boost my wellbeing- I was optimizing!).

The piece of health information that was going to save me was always just around the corner (in the next book read or podcast episode listened to).

I was always just a few tweaks away from optimal health.

Except that, over time, the opposite happened.

By my early 40s this approach to health had backfired big time.

I had tried so hard to do everything right, truly wanting to nourish myself and support my health so that I could show up for my family and my business, and instead I had decimated my metabolism/body’s ability to make energy by limiting a rotating cast of foods, fasting and also unconsciously undereating, and living in a state of constant doing.

Stress, undernourishment, and lack of self attunement had depleted me at the cellular level.

Just before my 42nd birthday I collapsed in utter exhaustion and completely lost my vitality.

If you’re interested in understanding the mineral and metabolic roots of energy and fatigue please read this incredible booklet from the 80s- oh how I wish my mom had somehow stumbled upon it then and followed this advice instead!

I remember my teenage daughter (yes, the baby in that photo, who is now almost 18!) coming into my room as I lay crying on the floor two winters ago. “Are you okay Mom? What is going on lately? I’ve never seen you like this.”

For the first time in my life I answered “I am not okay”, but I had no idea why.

About a month later I started doing regular hair tissue mineral analysis (HTMA) and blood work labs (more on that below), and have been amazed by how they accurately reflect my felt sense of energy every single time. I also began an inner, psychological healing process to accompany the more scientific and behavior-changing approach.

I began caring more about nourishment than restriction, to focus on how food could help me instead of how it could hurt me.

Decades of listening to everyone but myself had had profound consequences, and I had lost the plot.

I had, rather, lost myself.

Today I am constantly walking that fine line between learning from others about what ails me and what might help, and learning to discern and oftentimes tune out knowing that isn’t my own.

My approach to food these days is generally in line with the bioenergetic understanding of cellular health and energy, also called pro-metabolic.

This article is both an excellent introduction to this approach and a takedown of how it is commonly misunderstood and misapplied. My biggest takeaway from it, supported by my own experience and walking with many other women on this path, is that it all come down to bio-individuality.

I endeavor to support my cellular metabolism- the basis of health and wellbeing- by figuring out which foods work for me at this moment in time (noting the irony that had I not restricted so many foods over the year I would probably have less food reactivity now), making sure I’m consuming enough calories every day, and slowly working to heal my most problematic low energy symptoms (gall stones, frequent night waking, and weight gain still beleaguer me, while the utter exhaustion of the last couple years and constant pain I was in for 25 years have mostly resolved as I’ve remineralized my body).

I also had to radically change how I was spending my time in order to re-pattern my stress response. I restructured my life in order to heal, or rather to move toward healing.

I pushed through stress and my body’s signals to slow down for so many years (I always say that I was living on caffeine and cortisol) that my body finally forced me to stop. I spent late winter, spring, and early summer of 2023 in bed.

My husband- who already had a full plate- had to step up big time when it came to our children, household duties, and our business. The mom guilt consumed me (especially when I got my youngest daughter’s HTMA- hair tissue mineral analysis- results and saw the mineral inheritance I had passed down to her- but that’s for another post!).

I was in the darkest corner of a cave, barely any life emitting from me. I had no hope, no joy. Trusting that I could be well again was a stretch, but I’d seen other women do it. And I had my family, who love me and need me.

Every marker on my first thyroid labs showed an under-functioning thyroid, with very high levels of Reverse T3, which is what slows bears down and forces them into hibernation- in other words, nature’s way of telling a body to go into that cave and REST.

If someone had told me a few years ago to slow down or else pay the metabolic price, I would have brushed them off. “Okay buddy, how about you live my life for a week and then tell me it’s possible to slow down?” (Now when I look back at the first HTMA I ever did, about six months before my crash, I clearly see that I was in what is called the “alarm stage of stress”, where the body is trying desperately to keep producing energy despite plummeting mineral reserves).

This hypothyroid state has been reflected in numerous follow-up HTMA tests that I’ve taken over the last year. I am in a “four lows” pattern, with the four most important energy-producing minerals (calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium) well below the levels needed for healthy cellular functioning.

These electrolytic minerals are vital for both the thyroid and the adrenals- the body’s main energy producing organs- to function. This is why an HTMA can so accurately assess a person’s energy.

There is no end to the list of health problems that a low metabolic state can cause.

Likewise, a person with robust metabolic health is unlikely to experience many health problems.

And metabolic unwellness is rapidly increasing in the population as our soils and food become ever more depleted of nutrients, we are exposed to a tsunami of toxins that overburden our depleted bodies, chronic illness and autoimmune disorders skyrocket (even among children), and the stress of modern living continues to wreak havoc on our nervous systems.

This is why I am sharing my thoughts and my very personal, (tediously boring?) story here.

Because so many of us, mostly women, are experiencing something similar.

Because it’s so hard to find the balance between learning from genuine experts who can help us and falling under the sway of inept influencers who can harm us (I SEE YOU DAVE ASPREY).

And because this metabolic unraveling is happening to younger and younger people.

No matter what I do for my children- how I feed them or what values I instill- while they’re still at home, the culture is an overwhelming force.

And the culture is deeply unwell.

May this space create small ripples in the culture that just may, someday, help to change our species’ metabolic future for the better.

And if not that lofty goal, at least help more women and mothers feel less alone in their struggle to regain metabolic wellness in a world that seems intent on undermining it.

I am finding my way to wellness again, but I will never be who I was.

We don’t heal backward into who we were before we were ill, we heal forward into someone new. And I aim to heal not just for myself, but for my mother and my daughters as well.

I would love to hear from anyone who read this far-

*if you’re willing to be public with your thoughts, please comment on the post rather than reply to the email (ten minutes after publication I’ve gotten so many great email responses!)*

What was the food culture in your home growing up?

Did you absorb the food beliefs or behaviors of your caregivers?

What is your definition of nourishment?

You also have a father’s mother’s mother’s father’s mother’s father’s father’s mother’s etc. etc. etc. lineage, and so on using every combination you can dream up back into the mists of time (many of these ancestors start to overlap as you go further back).

The mother and father lines tend to get more attention because a) they’re conceptually easy to understand and b) they each play an important and unique role in the inheritance of our DNA.

Valley of Ancestors by Vajra

Females have XX chromosomes and males XY. The Y chromosome is inherited from the father, who inherited his from his father, and on and on. This is why testing the Y chromosome can tell a man about his ancient paternal DNA. Women cannot test for this as we don’t have a Y chromosome.

(I had both my father and my mother’s brother test theirs to give me an idea of where both of those fatherlines- which also led to me, even though I have no Y-DNA- came from.)

Both women and men inherit 100% of their mitochondrial DNA from their mothers, and both can have their mtDNA tested to find the ancient origins of their motherline. Here is a gushing post I wrote back in 2012 when I first got my mtDNA test results.

(These tests differ from the more commonly used autosomal DNA testing, which gives a very rough and ever-updating percentage breakdown of where your people- going back about ten generations- hail from. Here in an article further explaining the three types of DNA testing.)

There are two reasons that I am primarily interested in the motherline

One is from a practical, scientific, health-related perspective- this Substack will focus on metabolic wellbeing, and the mitochondria which we all inherit *only* from our motherline has a profound influence on our metabolism.

The other is that I am the daughter of a mother and the mother of daughters. I have many stories to share about my mom’s relationship to food and her body and how that has affected me, about how her life and mothering choices during pregnancy and postpartum affected me, and about what I wish for my daughters’ metabolic wellbeing as they grow up in the same distorted food culture that my mother and I also grew up in (you know- same but different, as dietary trends and dogma constantly shift but the underlying misunderstanding of true metabolic wellness remains).

99% of my audience is women, and the few men tend to be soulful, thoughtful sweethearts like my husband Owen. Some of these men have respectfully expressed to me that they feel left out by my writings and women-centered health focus.

I get this. And- I can do nothing different and still be true to what calls me.

If I’m interested in mitochondrial health, then I’m interested in the motherline.

And, though much of my writing here will be specific to the female body, the mitochondrial motherline musings will be relevant to men as well.

I was very close to my mother and to her mother (and to my paternal grandmother, and I knew both of my paternal great-grandmothers as well). I have birthed two daughters.

In a way, my focus has always been on women. Female energy has always nurtured and sustained me.

And the anchor of my motherline, especially as it extends forward now through my daughters, will always be the point of gravity around which my life centers.

I hear that these men are yearning for writings and work similar to mine but focused on the masculine (including both ancestral connection and men’s metabolic wellness). If anyone who has read this far has suggestions, please share in the comments.

I loved my dad and my grandfathers (and a great-grandfather!) a whole lot too. I adore my husband. I want men and boys to be well. We are all made of the same ancient elements and all occupy these human bodies for a brief time. We are truly in this together.

(I wrote this yesterday but had to wait for those email list imports to finish before I could publish it…)

Last night was yet another sleepness one. Of the many symptoms I’ve experienced on my long, slow recovery from the same deep burnout, mineral depletion, and metabolic unwellness that plague so many of the women in my generation (born in 1981), the constant night waking is my least favorite.

But lately, I’ve seen the small gift in it. It’s alone time, which this introverted mother sorely misses. If I am going to spend hours awake on most nights, I might as well drop the “what is wrong with me!?” fretting and embrace the glorious solitude.

I have been quiet online for a long time now, longer than any other fallow period since I began blogging in 2008, when my oldest daughter was 2 years old.

That blog was called Nourished Mother, and was focused on birth, herbalism, and my journey away from the veganism that had left me depleted and under nourished and toward traditional foods. There I shared my evolving understanding of what nourishment meant now that I had brought a daughter into the world.

That I sit here 16 years later to write about the same thing on what is basically this decade’s new & improved blogging platform feels bittersweet.

(Image: Raymond Douillet)

Sweet because I absolutely love thinking, learning, and talking about true nourishment and the mineral inheritance handed down to us over eons from the heart of exploding stars through the bodies of our grandmothers and mothers.

Bitter because in the intervening years I became lost in a culture of information overwhelm and the idea that I could achieve “optimum health”, and now find myself once again depleted and exhausted, feeling my way toward genuine connection with my body and a deeper, slower understanding of nourishment.

This Substack has been percolating for a long time, and last night’s wakefulness provided the space to start dreaming up the name. I did consider resurrecting Nourished Mother, but it didn’t feel right.

One of the biggest things that 43 year old me has learned that 27 year old me hadn’t yet is that my life, my understanding of things, and my state of wellbeing are always changing.

Back then I thought I had reached some pinnacle of health and of understanding, and my posts we of the “you should do this” “this works for me so obviously it will work for you” “this is the right way to think/behave/feed yourself” variety.

Now I know that everything is different for everyone, and that things are in constant flux for each individual as well.

I no longer want to preach. I am not all that nourished, truthfully (but I’m getting there).

I want to share stories. My personal medicine stories, so that others may take what resonates and perhaps find solace or inspiration in it.

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Stories nourish me. Stories nourish human beings.

I have learned that, as I walk the road to recovery and ever-deepening self attunement, I have to balance logical-minded learning about health and nutrition with mythic-minded immersion in story (fantasy or memoir, novel or biography, book, show, podcast, film- any narrative I can lose- and find!- myself in).

Over the course of a day or a week I will go from reading an in-depth article on thyroid by Kaya of Fundamental Nourishment to listening to the incredible Andy Serkis narrate Lord of the Rings to tuning in to a podcast about how stress impacts mineral status to reading books by depth psychologists such as Marion Woodman.

This is in contrast to decades of almost always living in my rational mind, driven to take in as much information as possible so that I could be as healthy as possible, forsaking the imaginal realm and the inner exploration that I’d always loved.

As you already know, this instead had a catastrophic effect on my health.

I thought up dozens of possible names in the darkness last night and wrote down the best ones in my journal this morning. But none seemed right.

Then I opened Substack to finish the set-up process I had started weeks ago and, when prompted to type in the name of this publication, my hands/subconscious/grandmothers gave me “Nourishing Motherlines”.

Nourishing Motherlines > Nourished Mother

Nourished is static and, perhaps, unproveable.

Nourishing is an ever evolving state, a mysterious destination that I will always be dancing toward.

A mother is a singular person in the vastness of spacetime, but a motherline spans eons and can be conceptually extended as far back as the explosion of the supernovas that sent their minerals flying toward our solar system and, eventually, into our cells, and as far forward as we can hope the descendants of humanity will remain.

The heart of this endeavor will be looking at the state of metabolic unwellness that so many women find themselves in today- from both the story brain and the logical brain- and how this phenomenon is connected to both our ancestors and our descendants (and, really, all of life).

How can we do better for our daughters? What healing can we find for ourselves and our foremothers? What does nourishment even mean?

For now, perhaps you will enjoy episode 91 of my podcast Medicine Stories The Mineral Matrix & the Motherline That Made You with Hamid Jabbar, the Matriarch Substack by Clara Wisner, and the above picture of my maternal grandmother, my mother (both have passed and are back in their elemental form now), myself, and my firstborn daughter on the day she joined us.

The story of her birth was the very first piece of writing I ever put online a couple months after it happened in 2006. A couple years later it was my first ever blog post in 2008. And it now lives on my website Mythic Medicine.

I love when things come full circle like this.

I’m writing again, about the same ol’ things. Spiraled back to where I’ve always been, with a deeper understanding of these topics but also an unfolding realization of just how much will always remain unknown to me.

More to come.

Thank you.

Love, Amber

P.S. I believe that I have put together a huge piece of my insomnia puzzle in just the past couple days and will be sharing that soon, as it is related to everything I’ve written & will continue to write here about nourishment.