The internet is freaking out over the news that P&G acquired Thorne (for $3 billion in cash, but who’s counting).

Thorne has long been a revered brand: high price point, but prized for quality and bioavailability. Walk into almost any good doctor’s office, doesn’t matter the vertical, and you’ll probably see it recommended as a default. But it’s acquisition by the same company that makes Tide Pods, have people throwing out their Thorne bottles en masse.

I’m here to assure you that all hope is not lost. Having spent thousands of dollars on functional doctors, I can tell you that once you move an inch into the world of specialized or personalized medicine, the recommendations quickly evolve past any single brand. You start discovering companies that may be less famous but have one or two hero products that are exceptional at what they do.

I easily have 10-15 different brands currently in rotation…many of them are independent or founder-led.

So is it easier when you can default to one trusted brand for multiple needs? Sure. But for everyone worried that one of the few quality, accessible supplement brands is headed for classic enshitfication: fear not. There are alternatives. It just might require learning a little more about the space.

Here are 7 brands, and real examples of products, I’m using today:

Global Healing Center - B12

100% family owned and operated. I use their liquid B12, which combines three forms: methylcobalamin, adenosylcobalamin, and hydroxocobalamin. I prefer liquid B12 because of absorption.

BodyBio - Balance Oil + Phosphatidylcholine

Founded by Ed Kane, the family’s grandfather.

Their Balance Oil is a hero product, formulated at a 4:1 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids with a focus on supporting cell-membrane health. Cell-membrane health became a particular obsession of mine after COVID, when my testing suggested mine was significantly impaired. According to subsequent Genova Diagnostics testing, those markers have largely improved.

I also use BodyBio’s liquid PC, or phosphatidylcholine. PC is a major phospholipid in cell membranes and is also a precursor to acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter involved in memory and cognition.

What I particularly like here is the format. Getting larger amounts of phosphatidylcholine through capsules can mean swallowing a ridiculous number of pills (a therapeutic dose can be up to 20 pills each time!). The liquid makes taking a meaningful amount far easier.

Metabolic Maintenance - Glycine Sticks

Family owned for 30+ years. I use Metabolic Maintenance for several things, but their Glycine Sticks are one of my favorites: 3 grams of glycine powder in an individual stick.

Glycine is an amino acid involved in glutathione production (and thus detoxification) and numerous metabolic processes, and it has also been studied for sleep. For someone with the slowly COMT variant, this is much needed (along with NAC, etc.).

Bonus: it tastes sweet, so you can even experiment with using it as a sweetener if you’re so bold. I used to use this especially when on Carnivore diet.

Seeking Health - Trace Minerals + B2

I take a number of Seeking Health products, including vitamin B2 and their Trace Minerals Complex. The company is stilled owned by its founder Dr. Ben Lynch, who is known for his work round MTHFR and methylation.

Their Trace Minerals Complex gives you ten minerals in one capsule and, importantly, contains no iron. I prefer not to supplement iron unless testing indicates I actually need it, since excess iron can contribute to oxidative stress.

A.C. Grace - Unique E

A.C. Grace is my vitamin E brand. Their hero product, Unique E, focuses on mixed tocopherols rather than simply giving you a large dose of alpha-tocopherol, as many vitamin E supplements do.

A.C. Grace is essentially a company built around doing vitamin E exceptionally well.

Researched Nutritionals - Lumbrokinase

Founded in 2006 by Dennis Schoen, who is still listed as founder & CEO.

I recently started taking Researched Nutritionals’ lumbrokinase as part of the approach I’m exploring for my post-vaccine/Long COVID symptoms, specifically around the hypothesis of micro-clots.

Lumbrokinase has fibrinolytic activity, so it’s important to consult a doctor particularly if you take anticoagulants, antiplatelet medications, or have a bleeding disorder.

Life Extension - Super K

Life Extension is not founder led, but has been privately owned since 1980.

I use the blue-bottled brand Life Extension for a number of supplements, but most recently their Super K formula. It combines vitamin K1 with two forms of K2—MK-4 and MK-7- in one softgel. I like that Super K takes a broad-spectrum approach rather than choosing a single form.

Vitamin K is involved in activating proteins that regulate both blood clotting and calcium metabolism, including proteins involved in bone and vascular health. The studies on K’s effect on the heart after long term use is pretty great.

So in short, there are plenty of alternative brands to Thorne.

If you like this post or are interested in the 50+ brands I have tried and recommend to all those healing, comment below and I’ll send you a link to my Healingvrse Circle.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

I speak to you from the scene of a quasi-meltdown. Three events that have happened in under 24 hours suggest I entered a new era, a Larry David / Woody Allen one, making me incompatible with dense populations, and prone to wildly inappropriate reactions, bordering on delusions, and certainly a modicum of paranoia.

I arrived in the city after an unusually long uninterrupted stay in Montauk. A break that resulted in some genuine calm in my body.

Then all hell broke loose.

Case Study 1: I ordered a salad. I knew Cyclosporiasis was circulating in the city, but it had not yet triggered a five alarm in my mind, perhaps because my salad had protein in it, and was from my usual place. After it arrived, the idea of Cyclosporiasis re-emerged, but I thought: Never mind Rebecca, you aren’t some crazy, paranoid person. So I began to eat it.

Casually, I reached for my phone to look up where Cyclosporiasis was being found these days, then….

Shredded Iceberg Lettuce. FUCK.

That’s exactly what I ordered. It’s at this time that this Kafka-esque foreign agent was injected into my mind, this Carnivorous Earwig, if you will. I ran to the bathroom and tried to vomit it all up. Not a great experience.

So I guess I am that crazy, paranoid person. I’m not sure why the version of me from 15 minutes prior was so blasé. Surely I could intuit this? Surely I knew myself better than this? I called the restaurant and harangued the hostess. Had she heard anyone get sick from the salad? What about the suppliers? Do they check out? She assured me that she ate it all the time.

Case Study 2: Upon emerging from the osteopath’s office the next morning, I sat on a bench to tie my shoelace. I was talking on the phone when I noticed my butt was wet. I immediately went to the idea that it was urine. I interrupted my friend on the phone and said, I just sat in piss. To which she replied: you are fine, it’s not like you have gaping wounds on your butt. I said: no no no, this is bad, bad bad. By now, I was fairly certain I had sat in plutonium.

It I hung up mid-sentence and ran to a nearby store with my hand, and then entire arm, jammed down my pants to prevent the wet from touching my body further. I stumbled into a Sugared and Bronzed wax store and yanked a pair of ill-fitting sweats for nearly 100 dollars off the rank. Insane, yes, but a small price to pay for peace. I used wet napkins and essentially gave both my legs a shower in the stall.

Case Study 3: One hour later, I sat at a restaurant to eat some chicken soup. I wanted to drench my innards in the same heat I was experiencing outside. Seven slurps in, I felt something hard between my teeth. I pulled out a sharp metal object. Holy crap.

I ran to find the manager and report it. A big stocky gentleman who mostly shrugged, called it a “metal shaving”, pretended it was nothing. I asked him to refund me the soup. 10 bucks! Apparently, that’s the going rate on the option to have your intestines torn up.

Then the intrusive thoughts. Had I swallowed some unseen piece? Had I seen any glimmers, any tiny specs of metal, while listening to my podcast on the Civil war? Is it possible there was only ONE? My throat was suddenly feeling weird. ChatGPT said to wait 24 hours to see if I was in pain, but it was trying hard to convince me I was OK. Like, you’d have felt it, bruh.

Great, now Chat thinks I’m crazy.

As I barely made it over the finish line to my apartment, and flung myself onto the bed, my conclusion was simple: that I’m somehow not cut out for the city at the moment. That there’s too much going on, or about to be going on, and I’m highly vulnerable to the OCD I experienced as a kid growing up in the city.

Maybe it’s the heat. Or maybe it’s a string of bad luck, which also triggers my hypervigilance. Or maybe I just fell into one of those black holes where Murphy’s Law reigns supreme.

I have to remind myself later: I didn’t swallow the shaving! I smelled my pants when I got home, and they didn’t smell of urine, but rather something wonderfully neutral and bland, like rainwater! Moreover…

I saw a dear friend for a lovely sweaty lunch at a staple NY diner, saw my favorite OBGYN who got me in for an immediate sonogram, had a skilled osteopath work on my alignment, and walked 11.2 miles, collecting treasures of the city of Annie Hall and Seinfeld.

Still, time will tell about the explosive diarrhea.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

P.S. This buffoonery finally pushed me to book Cathy, a local transcendental meditation teacher, for a week-long introduction. Sessions start next week. I’ll be posting detailed IRL notes in my Healingvrse Circle - reply if you want to know what fruit I need to bring to the first session.

Or sign up here at: www.healingvrse.com and answer 6 questions so I know where you are too.

Litz recommended by my pops: This music is so appropriate for the moment. From the anxiety to triumph to unbounded happiness.

Ever get the feeling like you close your eyes and enter a Narnia? For me, it’s happened in the shower a few times. A deep yet expansive nothing. A moving black hole. Burrowing underground, or being blown by the wind, as though a feather.

For you, it might happen at the dinner table when you stare off. Or outside, bare feet on grass. I’ve seen you do that, eyes closed, wry smile. Gone.

It’s accompanied by a tiny, super-breath that pushes you into this other realm.

If Healing is akin to ice swimming, then this breath is the kind that happens after you break the surface, and take the sweetest breath of your life.

Minus the large gulp and theatrics. This breath is hardly audible.

I wondered if there was a name for such an extraordinary relaxing agent. It’s the equivalent of a sigh, but on steroids.

In the 1970s, Harvard physician Herbert Benson came up with the concept of the relaxation response: the body’s innate ability to shift from bracing to restoration. In essence: the opposite of fight or flight.

From there, the entire mind-body field was born.

His ideas seem simple to us, as the generation accustomed to wellness, longevity, pandemics, and now an onslaught of untested peptides.

He proposed that simple practices like sitting quietly, focusing on a repeated word or phrases, maintaining a passive attitude, and practicing regularly, could reliably reduce stress.

More recently, neuroscientists like Huberman have popularized research showing more specific mechanics, like how the physiological sigh (two short inhales followed by one long exhale) is one of the fastest ways to reduce acute stress. Immediate. Measurable. Impactful.

But my experience in the shower is not just about stress. It is akin to a transient shift in consciousness.

Researchers studying holotropic breathwork and related breathing practices have found that sustained breathing can induce big changes in consciousness, feelings of ego dissolution, timelessness, emotional release, and deep peace, all without drugs.

But that typically happens in longer sessions. Sure, perhaps that state of mind is accessible on a continuum, but I’m not even sure I would call it breathwork.

Perhaps what I’m confusing for relaxation is something more similar to flow.

• effortless attention

• losing track of time

• actions happen automatically

• reduced self-consciousness

The difference is that flow usually happens during high engagement. Not flailing around in a shower.

How about non-dual awareness, which comes from traditions like Zen. The experience is like this: no separation between oneself and everything else.

People describe becoming the landscape, becoming the wind, simply existing without an observer.

Yes, that feels closer…

Because the next stage would be a mystical experience. Perhaps a step too far for a Tuesday shower.

Unity, transcendence of time and space, deep peace, and that particular ineffability, the sense that it was more real than ordinary reality.

So, maybe it has more to do with the journey. Does a body that has been healing every day, for years, sometimes suddenly experience profound peace and surrender? So in-tune and aware of an absence of pain, alive, feeling the moment?

You know what? Maybe it’s gratitude…

A dialogue between me and the powers that be. Saying thanks.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

My daughter peeks under the covers to make sure I’m not naked. Satisfied by my propriety, she climbs in and tucks herself under. Roughly 20 seconds later, she kicks me completely awake. It’s 6am.

How do I know? The birds tell me. Wren. Robin. Catbird, and so on, all squawking. The preemptive earplugs, which I dutifully screw in every evening, have, at some point, fallen out.

We trudge out to the porch, armed with electric toothbrushes, and squish the dew between our toes. I don’t know if it’s her toothpaste or mine that’s squirting about on the grass. I realize, actually, there is one earplug still in my left ear. I like this half-quiet.

The morning porch has become part of our routine. We get her ready for camp there. We listen to music. She dances and twists. I search for the sun in the sky. The puffy sun returns the glare.

I have been actively avoiding the sun for years. One of the earliest harbingers of my Long Covid was a sun allergy that lasted five years. It began after a trip to Mexico where I took acid, missed my flight home, and, among other things, stopped being able to tolerate the sun.

Whenever the sun touched my skin, hives appeared. It sucked. The allergy has mostly disappeared, but I still treat the sun with care. No laying out.

It doesn’t take much morning sun to stimulate POMC, a precursor protein that gives rise to β-endorphin, the body’s own opioid. I learned about POMC from Dr. Jack Kruse, courtesy of A in the Healingvrse. He made me tingle too on the dance floor when we met, although nothing happened between us.

In the car, the scalding leather seats burn my thighs as my skirt rides up my legs, one knee tucked against my body. Hot sand trapped inside the Crocs I'd left out on the porch somehow finds its way into my underwear.

I get my first season pass to the local outdoor pool. I have not had a pass to anything besides medical appointments in five years. Now I can make a goal requiring some predictability: swimming 1,500 yards. I suppose that goal is ridiculous for someone who hasn’t exercised much in five years, except for the muscle memory from tens of thousands of hours of practice growing up.

The pool deck is a funny place. With no awareness of the advent of AI. You will overhear conversations. Observe the stroke of another. And procrastinate without a phone.

I submerge like a coat hanger, one appendage at a time. The cold water pours over my head. I decide the pool and POMC work well together. They electrify my body.

I begin with freestyle, but after a few laps, I switch to my back…then breast. At some point, I hop up and down looking for my pink hair tie. That counts as a lap.

I’m wearing sunglasses in the pool. This is my disguise. I am tricking my mitochondria to come out of their shell.

I swim 300 yards, then stop, even though I could go longer. That’s because the symptoms don’t come during the swim. They arrive afterwards. The clinical name is Post-Exertional Malaise. Very Tolstoyan, I know.

Later, I walk to the local grocery store. Only one earbud works, and through it, predicts that in five years, the only people making money will be in bands from Brooklyn. Like Chanel Beads, my sister’s boyfriend’s band. “This reminds me of Gen Z MGMT,” L says as the four of us drive down Amagansett lanes blasting their latest album on my birthday.

Is it trite to say it was the least anxious birthday I’ve had? My sister gave me a beautiful necklace made by an anarchist. My parents wrote me a reflective card featuring my Substack. Friends called, and I could simply accept their love. I didn't feel the need to squeeze more out of it. I drank two glasses of Sancerre, and when the cake came out, I almost vomited.

At the store, I shop for fresh fluke, slaw, and pico de Gallo. Easy dinner. Like me. So easy, I treat myself to a Diet Coke on the way back. The aspartame chemical sludge tingles on my tongue, a Carthaginian revolt against my healing stack.

Larazotide, a peptide that repairs the intestinal barrier. BodyBio PC for cell membrane health. I’m taking 25 other things based on the 28 vials of blood I submitted a couple months ago.

I sneak a bite of L’s flour taco for dinner, ridiculing it at the same time. “You just cannot eat American gluten, guys,” I scold, mouth full.

In keeping with the occult of circadian rhythms, I turn my screen off at 9:30pm. I allow myself the luxury of falling asleep to podcasts. On AI. On the Byzantine Empire. They hum like machinery in a cafeteria, until my phone dies, or I am asleep.

With eyes closed, I still feel it. My mitochondria vibrating from the heat, the sun, the hot leather, the Coke, and the swim.

I am like AI coming alive, welded in the blazing fire of the pandemic, the vaccine, a mutant with disabilities, but also the superpower to feel. I am being compressed, in the way that mankind was compressed over millions of years, in the way AI neural systems are today. In that compression, consciousness emerges, they say.

It’s been a good day. I can count such good days on my hands, but soon I’ll need to use my toes too.

Of course I think about what’s waiting for me in North Carolina. I’ll share that soon.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

On America's 250th birthday, I found myself thinking about what resilience really is.

For instance, I have always believed great artists needed to suffer.

Dostoevsky with the firing squad, Hemingway with his shrapnel, Vonnegut in the meat locker. Nietzsche with his head. Kahlo with her body. Proust stuck in bed.

But it’s possible I have been giving suffering too much credit.

C.S. Lewis was wounded at the Battle of Arras. But instead he wrote an entire memoir, Surprised by Joy, about a specific experience of joy that reorganized him.

He first encountered Joy as a young boy when his brother created a miniature garden in a biscuit tin. Later, while reading Beatrix Potter and Norse mythology.

Certain people can be transformed by positive experiences. They called it post-ecstatic growth (PEG).

Falling in love. Witnessing the birth of a child. Spiritual experiences. Moments of awe. Unexpected success.

It’s the same type of growth you find in traumatic experiences. Better relationships. Greater self-esteem. A different understanding of themselves and the world.

In fact, some of the very people who are most transformed by trauma also seem especially transformed by joy.

Why do these big moments seem to reorganize some lives, while barely touching others?

One possibility is that some people are simply more biologically responsive to experience than others. For instance, there are some “plasticity” genes that may contribute..

• DRD4 dopamine receptor gene – has been associated with greater sensitivity to rewards, novelty, and environmental influences. People carrying it have sometimes been described as more “plastic”: they may fare worse in adverse environments but better than average in supportive ones.

• 5-HTTLPR serotonin transporter polymorphism – a variation in the serotonin transporter gene. Earlier research suggested the short allele increased emotional sensitivity.

But genes are not the whole story.

Nurture, epigenetic, and gene environment interactions may also determine one’s responsiveness.

This was reflected in a study of more than 1,000 pairs of identical twins, which found striking differences in anxiety and depression despite the twins sharing the same DNA. The same twin who was most reactive, was also most impacted by positive interventions like CBT.

A pediatrician named W. Thomas Boyce also found that highly reactive children lived at the extremes. In nurturing environments, they were among the healthiest children in school. In neglectful ones, they became some of the sickest.

So what can be done with the sensitive among us?

The difficult babies. The difficult temperaments.

The people who, at first glance, appear sensitive, or less resilient.

From a psychological standpoint, differential susceptibility suggests some people may derive disproportionately greater benefit from high-quality environments and interventions.

A remarkable teacher.

A life-changing friendship.

A community that makes meaning possible.

Highly sensitive people don’t simply need protection from bad environments. They may also have more to gain from good ones.

A Healingvrse.

The reverse may also be true. People who appear naturally resilient may simply be less affected by their environments overall. That resilience can protect them from adversity, but it may also mean they experience less dramatic change when the environment improves.

So, the next time you’re tempted to dismiss your own sensitivities, remember it may be the very thing that allows you to be transformed, given the right moment…and the right support.

Perhaps this is true of America too. Maybe America is not just a resilient nation, but a sensitive one.

Happy Independence Day from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

Monique, my new osteopath, said something that threw me through a loop.

She said my body is stubbornly still holding on to the pain.

Her judgment: I would have to learn how to let go.

Let go?

Everything about the past five years has been an exercise in letting go!

I’ve built up a Herculean indifference to so many situations it’s practically inconceivable. I’ve read just about every major study I could find on neural pathways, and how to reroute and starve the ones that suck. I’ve listened to hundreds of hours by people like Dan Buglio who heal pain by methods of indifference. I’ve devoted well over the proverbial 10,000 hours to practicing it.

But when I told this to Lena, my guide in the Healingvrse, she replied:

Oh.

Well, if indifference and letting go are different things...then I’m back at square one.

Worse still, letting go wasn’t the same thing as being patient, setting boundaries, or recovering from people-pleasing, lessons which I’d been collecting like feathers in my cap.

Here instead of a new feather, Monique handed me back the dead bird itself.

I always thought letting go was a factor in success or greatness.

Take Rafa. One of the greatest tennis players of all time. He spent much of his career managing pain — a congenital foot condition, recurring hip and back problems. He relied on anti-inflammatories (two perforations in his stomach) just to stay on the court. At times he was numbing his foot so completely he couldn’t feel it. He estimated that playing through pain accounted for not one or two Grand Slam titles, but perhaps ten or twelve.

In this framing, letting go means no Rafa. No Vikings. No Maccabees. No stories of conquest, endurance, and persistence against impossible odds, which are equally important to my own healing journey.

But perhaps letting go occurs at a far more subtle level than that.

It might not have anything to do with the objective, but with how you process the emotions that arise along the way.

Maybe that’s why letting go is so elusive.

It sits somewhere between determination and stubbornness, greatness and suffering. Not in the goal itself, but in the emotional landscape that surrounds it. Like the intercellular environment that surrounds the cell, and allows the cell to maintain homeostasis through constant exchange with the work around it.

For me, letting go might begin in three places:

1. Intellectually, I may understand something. But that doesn’t mean I’ve accepted it emotionally. I need to stop bringing the same unmet need to the same place or person. Repeated disappointment, is in fact, repeated expectation.

2. I need to allow myself to acknowledge that it wasn’t enough. Avoid explaining it away, or jumping straight to forgiving it. Just: I needed more. This wasn’t fair. I shouldn’t have had to carry this alone. I always, always! try to skip this step. I always try to push my anger outward, and then resolve it. Which leads to perhaps the most important emotion I need to learn to sit with...

3. Grief. You can do all the work, and still be sad. I never considered grief as its own lingering step that can continue deep into healing. I always assumed grief was self-pity. Or something reserved for life’s biggest losses. Maybe grief is exactly what you feel when you stop resisting reality.

Since stumbling upon this realization at 2 a.m., mid-flu, I’ve been sitting with the feeling of grief in so many ordinary moments. The hot punch in the chest. The warmth that pools behind the eyes. Like a splash when you step barefoot into a puddle, surprised by how hot it has become under the summer sun.

Oddly, it has brought me a deeper sense of presence than any mindfulness practice I’ve tried to this point.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

My daughter turns six in under 3 months. I am preparing for the inevitable.

Doesn’t it feel like time has flown by?

If I’m trying to keep things pleasant, I’ll say sure. It is the answer people want to hear, the answer that allows everyone to move on. To disagree feels almost sacrilegious.

But if I’m being honest, I can’t agree. Not when it comes to my Long Covid and vaccine injury. I’ll give a slack-jawed, raised-eyebrow look, the universal expression of polite dissent.

I’ve come to think that while most people are living one life, someone healing is often living three.

There is the life everyone can see.

The pick-ups. The dinners. The bustling environment of packing all sorts of bags. The meeting for endless array of decisions. I am there.

Then there is the life of my body.

The appointments. The experiments. The setbacks. The pain. The needles. The Keto. The times I’ve stared into the mirror and bore a hole into it wishing it would envelop me and take me away.

And then there is the life of the mind.

The post-traumatic growth work of making meaning. Untangling old patterns. Rebuilding trust. Learning how to wrestle with what’s been lost, or gained, or making the narrative make sense.

And, in fact, there’s a fourth life, too.

The one before. The person I was before any of this happened.

I wish my daughter knew her. So I hold onto that time as well.

I crawl into my mind’s eye and revisit the thoughts I had years ago. What occupied me. The urges. The compulsions. The spontaneity. The assumptions I carried about how life worked.

And so time expands. Not into three lives, but four.

But maybe time is flying by. And what I’m mistaking for presence, is but the long streaks they leave in the sky long after they have passed.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

I have a strange relationship with the frustrations of daily life. Car running out of gas. Someone being late to meet me. Cleaning the fish tank by myself.

They are annoying. Sometimes fill me with rage. But as they were for so long out of reach, I also feel gratitude for them.

I call these happy struggles.

They surface throughout my day, like fins breaking the water.

Researchers who study post-traumatic growth describe two phenomena that seem relevant here. One is a greater appreciation of life: finding visceral value in ordinary things.

The other is something called benefit finding: the ability to hold gratitude and frustration, simultaneously, and without either canceling the other out.

My fish tank struggles are exemplary of this.

Even with the help of AI, I cannot figure out exactly what is wrong with this tank. It gets cloudy quickly. Faintly smelly. It’s possible the sunny placement, surrounded by windows, is contributing to a bacterial bloom. Summer’s an accelerant.

I’ve covered the backside. I’ve changed the filters. Still the cloudiness returns.

This past week, I committed to a full water change for the 30-gallon tank. This is undoubtedly a feat of strength.

I pumped half-water jugs, hauled them to the backyard, and spilled them at a safe distance. I did this over the course of an hour. I rested on the stoop of the porch, wiping my brow, and bringing awareness to what could be interpreted as the feeling of bulging biceps.

When we first “won” Floatie at the fair ten months ago, her tank was tiny and perfectly manageable for me.

Floatie outgrew it, and me, quickly.

Afterward, the big tank sat empty while Floatie peered over from inside his transient tank from the fair. There was no way I was getting all the new water back in, we both thought.

I had to enlist L to refill the tank. He joked about putting Floatie in the bigger tank, the “ocean.” But I knew he would never do that. This is a person who will diligently capture a centipede (or ant, or any bug) in my grandmother’s beautiful cup and usher it out.

The fish tank was clear for the rest of the night. I was proud. I would glide past the tank, delighting at my work, and Floatie would sway his body alongside.

By the time I woke up…cloudy again.

I felt a flash of irritation. My biceps had deflated into soreness. Surely I had better things to do with my barely-there-health?

Floatie is otherwise calm. Always hungry.

I’ve concluded that the tank needs a new or larger filtration system. That is the next prong of attack.

I peer down again into his habitat. He emerges from the fog and eyes me up and down, before presenting with a host of hungry fish faces.

I’m catching up to him.

With much love from the Healingvrse,
Rebecca

After, shudder, five years, six if you count pregnancy during COVID, I’m facing a new slew of “firsts” in my healing journey.

Some will be big and make sense, like getting on a plane in September. Others are embarrassing for me to share. They appear superficial.

Anything I list in this series is something I’ve either been terrified of, ruminated over, or avoided so intensely it made me feel like I was no longer a member of society.

The first is the holy grail: a MEETING.

Making the first meeting had been hard for me. I knew who I wanted to do it with: my first and oldest mentor, O.

For years, we have bantered over how bad Spirit Airlines is, sending each other news clippings of bad reviews, bailouts, M&A terms. Then it finally went under.

If Spirit Airlines was going to collapse, I thought, I had to restore order to the world…by reemerging.

But every time I opened the email to message him, I froze.

What if I had a panic attack? An uncontrollable migraine with a drooping eye? How could I explain the mystery of the past five years? If I said vaccine injury, would that make me MAGA? Was saying “burnout” enough?

When I met O in my twenties after law school, I was such a confident beast. The last time he saw me, I was pitching 200 professionals at a demo day in Google HQ in Midtown.

I became convinced I needed some superficial thing to help catapult me back.

First: highlights.

I saw Meg because she makes sure nothing touches my scalp. Afterward, I fell asleep like a rock, an immune response to the drift of chemicals above my head.

Still, even ensconced in my blondish glow, I couldn’t quite press send.

Then: a bag.

Finding a luxury bag became this strange little side quest during the pandemic. I know as much as a fashion editor.

When I got sick, buying an expensive bag became impossible. It felt both ABSURD and weirdly high stakes. This is how everything started feeling. Social gatherings. Work. Decisions.

And suddenly, she appeared: a Bottega Veneta Jodie bag in Fondant color, excellent condition, 60% off retail.

No logo. The slouch of it. The chocolate brown. It felt intentional, yet anti-performative.

The quest was over. I went home and emailed O.

I picked out my outfit: a Mara Hoffman white linen button down, brown Cole Haan loafers. All old. And my new bag.

the meeting field notes

O arrived slightly late from a contentious board meeting. I forgot just how aggressive the business world was.

When he walked in, he was immediately recognizable: smiling, hugging, wearing essentially the same backpack and uniform I remembered from ten years ago.

The only moment I “lost control” of the meeting was the beginning. I was describing something about motherhood, and I felt that cold internal wave rise through my body, the unmistakable beginning of a panic attack, where time expands and contracts like a balloon.

I shifted a few times in my seat, and grabbed at my bag to pull myself out of the spiral, until I steadied. A reflexive attempt at grounding and sensory anchoring.

After that, we sat there for nearly two hours talking about Healingvrse, AI, startups, Colombia, fertilizer, Bolivian wool, old peers, trade schools, and the housing crisis.

It was like riding a bike, although I wasn’t as sharp in certain areas. For instance, when O suggested introductions, I couldn’t immediately point to the use case. That will be included in my follow-up email.

And the pitch itself was fragile. Next time, I would focus less on my look, and more on my substance.

But O is such a pro that he instantly understood the gist, and was able to give me useful pointers.

Notes from the meeting:

-focus on churn: what makes people come back 3x
-create as much value for free as possible before monetizing (he agreed it could become especially powerful if insurance companies eventually covered parts of the experience)
-subscriptions are becoming harder businesses; charge later through products recommended within the Healingvrse
-the “solo founder” myth is mostly fake; find a product co-founder, or at minimum, a real team
-even deeply technical AI founders now have to build public-facing identities
-useful data visualizations alone can become products (“remember Mint?”)
-he had been teaching engineering graduates in Colombia how to build in the era of AI, and his message was to go niche, where AI remains generalized. He describe a company specializing in legal discovery that was doing well

And with that, he gave me a slew of new introductions which he could never truly know, I was only just ready to pursue.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

One of the strangest things about trauma is that the messiest stretch of your life can have a universal structure underlying it. When you find coherence in the wreckage, it’s like a cacophony of birds comes together in beautiful song.

The details drop away, in favor of the grand scheme. You become more interested in how it all connects, where it’s all going.

For those of us who find growth after trauma, we tend to move through the same recognizable phases. It’s kind of like how people end up at the same after-party. You don’t necessarily know when it starts or ends, but hey, it’s the only place to go.

Tedeschi and Calhoun, who coined the term post-traumatic growth, built an actual intervention model out of it, originally for combat veterans. It can be chopped up into five parts, although timelines vary from person to person.

Here’s the sequence.

First, you get the info.

This is the psychoeducation phase. The point is to normalize the response, the body’s and the mind’s. The racing heart, the insomnia, the intrusive thoughts, it’s all part of a process.

The disruption to your core beliefs is an opportunity. The collapse of how you assumed things worked is also the opening to reassess what you actually believe and how you want to live.

For someone convinced they’re out of control, broken, or beyond hope, learning that the rupture might be useful, is the key to switching into a mode of growth.

Then you stabilize the nervous system.

You can’t do the deeper work while you’re drowning. No matter where I turned, experts of all walks focus on this. Sleep, breathing, cortisol. This is why my therapist, seeing as I was inconsolable, started with breathwork.

There are so many practices out there. Somatic, Rolfing, cranial sacral therapy, walks, creative work, mindfulness, meditation, self-compassion, CBT, and so on. Whatever brings safety back to the system.

Then you talk through the intrusive thoughts with safe people.

The exploration here is of the thoughts you’re having now, not necessarily a deep excavation of the event itself. Some people do it privately, in a diary, which is why we see so much success with expressive journaling. Others tell trusted friends or family.

Researchers flag the importance of not doing this with someone who cannot hold space for you. This can drag you backward.

Then you rebuild a coherent narrative.

This phase stitches three things together: the life before, the event, and the aftermath. The aftermath is where the five domains of growth tend to surface (which I wrote about here).

This is where you hold the paradox dialectically. This was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I am different now in ways I value. Both true.

When survivors realize they can author the narrative going forward, something massive shifts. People become almost enthusiastic.

That’s usually the tell that the last phase is arriving.

Then you build new ways of living and relating.

This is the consolidation phase. This is where you turn growth into new principles you commit to live by. Here revised life principles take shape, robust to the challenges of future traumatic events.

For a lot of people it looks like compassion for others who are suffering, or an outright pull to help them. For others, it’s something quieter. They’ve learned they can build new paths for themselves, and that knowledge alone changes how they live.

And here the companion in the Healingvrse goes further: helps the person not just accept the new identity, but take an active role in developing it.

This is the person whose number you take down at the after party. The only person from that foggy affair you text the next morning and say:

Wait. I actually think we were having a real conversation in there.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

We are experiencing a cultural tinnitus. Social media and AI is, at once, reshaping our minds, while also blaring a warning signal in our ears.

We clutch at straws. We side-eye other people’s businesses. We overhear conversations about changes at the “water cooler”, and we wonder: What does this mean for me? My kids?

Which is why I gave undue attention to something like this:

Last week, Irene Lyon, an influencer on nervous system and somatic work with 150k followers, posted a cryptic message about changing her offerings because “the landscape of the online learning world is shifting at a fast pace.”

I found myself oddly fixated on what exactly she meant.

The average human attention span is now 8.25 seconds.

70% of people can’t focus on a single task for more than 20 minutes.

Yet, Irene Lyon’s foundational program is 12 weeks long.

Uh oh. How can you communicate wellness in an era structurally hostile to sustained attention, when genuine healing still requires time?

And did her format ever really work? She seemed to call it into question too saying: “many people don’t think this nervous system stuff works, because they are doing those techniques, but are still unwell and dysregulated.”

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The wellness industry is splitting. Researchers from the Global Wellness Summit recently identified a polarization between:

• hardcare wellness — biohacking, longevity clinics, optimization, and

• softcare — slower, community-based, emotionally-led healing

A lot of folks are being herded toward hardcare because optimization packages fit neatly into 60 seconds.

This is why you know way too much about Andrew Huberman’s supplement stack.

At the same time, some healers seem drawn toward a kind of “Great Logging Off,” whether as healing, exhaustion, disillusionment, or all three. Those people are off the list entirely.

Irene’s dilemma is fundamentally a format problem. She built her delivery model for an era of sustained attention that no longer reliably exists.

But here’s the paradox:

You still need 12 weeks for a nervous system practice to meaningfully take hold.

That does not necessarily mean you will entertain a 12-week video course.

Nanolearning research offers some solutions. Content delivered in short bursts (3 to 5 mins), spaced and repeated, outperforms longer sessions on almost every retention metric.

The future may look less like sitting through hours of modules and more like adaptive, relational guidance woven throughout ordinary life.

Healing will always require depth, repetition, and time.

Trauma will always lead to the destruction of one’s worldview.

The journey toward recreating a new worldview will always be laborious, human, and painstaking.

But the container through which people access healing is already changing.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

Healing doesn’t happen in isolated one-hour intervals.

People already heal through companionship. We just pretend they don’t, or don’t give it the right credit.

According to post-traumatic growth research, many ideal companions on the healing journey are not therapists, but friends, family, peers, and people with lived experience.

Can a lay person help someone who is suffering? They already do.

For me, much needed healing came on Twitter and Reddit. People who validated Long Covid. People like my physical therapist, who soothed me.

People often confuse helping with interpreting.

You do not need to interpret someone’s entire trauma history to help them regulate, feel recognized, or regain perspective.

So, if you’ve found you can help or receive help from people without formal training, know there are innate processes unfolding.

But how does that instinct become method?

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Therapists are great. I want to say that clearly. I am always looking for one (though finding one is another topic). But they serve one role on a multi-faceted journey — and they are not the silver bullet.

I dislike the assumption that just because therapy exists, people no longer need support from friends, family, or peers. People say “go to therapy” as if it absolves them from participating in someone else’s suffering.

While therapy and specifically modalities like CBT can rewire the brain, healing itself rarely occurs in isolated one-hour intervals. It happens through repeated contact with people who help restore safety, perspective, agency, and meaning over time.

It seems obvious to me now that these are complementary paths of support. AA is built on exactly this kind of parallel processing. Its founders were not clinical psychologists. The model emerged largely from peer support, shared lived experience, spirituality, and mutual accountability.

what’s missing from the formal approach?

A. Format

The format was a big stumbling block for me. I was not well enough to reliably show up one hour, once a week, and talk about the hell I was living. I wanted to cancel because I was just gripping the seat to get through it. Then, the dreaded invoice.

Support came from text. Twitter, Reddit, even a therapist on Talkspace. That therapist had fewer accolades on paper, but he sent audios, meditations, books. We didn’t really “work through” issues, but from an emotional standpoint it was regulating.

Post-traumatic growth research suggests that the best support is light, flexible, and ongoing. It contours around a person’s journey.

B. Symptom focus

A study on therapeutic approaches to childhood sexual abuse (CSA) survivors found that people often did not find it helpful to focus solely on the abuse, rather than the whole person.

Clinicians are often trained to reduce symptoms without considering the possibility of post-traumatic growth. Someone in the middle of real suffering may not look like a candidate for transformation. But a good companion, trained or not, is willing to sit with that possibility.

The same study found that providing hope was critical, reinforcing the belief that healing was possible, and that the person had agency in their future.

what does this actually look like in practice?

Don’t over-engineer

The role of a companion is not to convince someone their trauma is good. It’s to create space for meaning to emerge, if and when it’s ready.

Part of this is noticing readiness. You should note when someone begins to move from being inside the pain to reflecting on it with a bit of distance. You’re not forcing that shift.

Peer support often means tolerating uncertainty alongside someone, rather than rushing to resolve it.

Use questions more than answers

People rarely retain information that’s handed to them. They remember what they arrive at themselves.

Simple questions, like “what was useful for you?” at the end helps to create an emotional connection to the information which leads to actual learning.

Know the limits

There are real limits to peer support. Clinical training exists for a reason. Even many therapists without doctorates still complete master’s programs plus 2,000–4,000 supervised hours before independent licensure.

You can help someone regulate. You can sit with them. But certain forms of interpretation are often better held within a therapeutic container.

To illustrate: it can make sense to discuss behaviors for controlling outbursts, but deeper interpretations about why the outbursts are there to begin with could be better left to a clinician.

Be judicious with terms

In that study on CSA survivors, many rejected the term “victim,” even while acknowledging they had once been a victim of a crime.

You don’t need specialized language to help someone recognize their own experience. You don’t need to use the term “post traumatic growth” for them to experience growth.

Let people describe what’s happening in their own words.

a tip for healers

For people who are themselves healing, helping others becomes part of the process. They share their story so much that it creates distance from their own story.

Studies show that supporting others is the key way people make meaning from trauma.

But they need to make sure they don’t center themselves.

Keep it short.

“I had a period where I couldn’t get out of bed either” is different from a five-minute description of how hard it was to move, the flu-like symptoms, and so on.

Share just enough to signal recognition. And then stop. This is how you avoid making yourself the center of the story.

Watch for the pivot.

This is the moment when you shift from sharing to helping.

Does any of that feel familiar for you?

Just by asking that one question, the person you are trying to help is back in the driver’s seat.

Healing is often less about having the perfect interpretation and more about helping someone feel safe enough to remain in relationship with their own experience.

We probably underestimate how much ordinary companionship shapes healing.

With Love from the Healingvrse,
Rebecca

p.s. I write about post-traumatic growth, companionship, nervous system recovery, identity collapse, and rebuilding after illness and trauma.

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Perhaps a great mile marker of my journey is my attitude shift toward Substack.

It’s not that I forget about it. It’s just what was freeing about being so sick: I didn’t care. My purpose was simply to express what was happening to me. And yet, I also cared so much. Too much? Because it was all that was happening for me.

I went from someone who rarely talked about her inner world, not even her pregnancy, to someone who felt compelled, on one of the worst days of her life, to write her first post, to share about things like crying, IVF, and so on.

And this was the only thing I did in a week. To take some lesson, some reading, something I was experiencing, and encapsulate it into a post. To make the week alive, worthwhile.

Each post, for years, caused me pain. Pain from concentration, pain from expression, pain from the pressure of publication. Sounds silly, but that’s the truth of illness and autonomic dysfunction.

Every step of growth was mirrored here. Eventually, as I got more breathing room in my situation, this became a place where I moved beyond my illness, to discuss healing. The first time I laughed. Even sometimes politics!

Or a place where I began to think obsessing about building Healingvrse.

Or a place to share more about what can hep others, like post-traumatic growth research. The pain from writing or sharing slowly withdrew…

Ultimately, as I have to be more video-centric for Healingvrse, I realize this will likely remain the place to chat with friends. Not so much about conversion or anything like that… just a place for self.

Like this very post. Written freely. But also because I can feel a bit of hesitancy coming back. A bit of, hey, these people don’t want to read about that. Or hey, this isn’t good at all, why are you doing this? Or hey Substack doesn’t really convert, it’s not a high growth platform, so what’s the point…

My illness called for a place to be my true self, so I need to keep her clean, like my goldfish does her tank.

If all my illness did was establish a place like that, I am grateful.

But the compulsion to do so is gone. And so I have to figure out a balance.

A balance between the lack of compulsion, and the duty to upkeep.

The balance between moving beyond the past, but still being somewhat stuck in it.

The balance of daring to dream again, when having still a limited body.

The balance between optimizing limited time toward things that will generate real results, and preserving my heart, and all of lessons on life I’ve learned.

That in your darkest moments, no result in the productive real world matters. And yet, when you emerge from the darkness, how happy you are to find the threads toward your life, some successes, your network, to connect back to.

Like if George Clooney had survived at the end of Gravity (uh, by simply pulling on the rope back to the ship, duh).

No neat tidy ending here today, just another evolution in my view on writing from the heart I wanted to share.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

I haven’t really had the luxury of complaining about the regular stuff. Not because I haven’t complained. It’s just been about more fundamental things. Survival. Motherhood. Recovery.

Now, when I get annoyed about something trivial, I’ve developed a reflex. I see it as a waste of time. I lose interest halfway through. The energy just… disappears.

I don’t care.

So, I was surprised when I found myself getting annoyed about a sleepover. Specifically, when another mom used weird tactics to get a sleepover with my kid. It wasn’t the request that bothered me. It was the pressure, the manner. Ambushing me at the end of a long evening, asking to stay at my house, not the other way around. Brushing me off when I sheepishly said no, and not offering an alternative. Oh, not to mention, never otherwise talking to me.

I recognized the move from doing celebrity projects for ten years. It felt like she was trying to do a deal.

Later, I complained about it to my husband. I gossiped about it to my nanny. I felt each word artificially dripping out of my mouth. I didn’t really care about any of this, and yet it felt good to complain about someone else.

To placate myself, I thought: we can’t live in perennial gratitude, Rebecca. Sometimes you should just roll in the dirt like a pig and like it.

But this answer was unsatisfying.

What are my expectations for myself now that I knew better? Am I supposed to enjoy the moments when I slip back into being a semi-bad human?

I went back to what I know about growth after disruption…

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1. The “New Normal” Paradox

A recurring theme across cancer survivor communities and PTG research is that there is no going “back to normal” — you become someone new. The challenge is integrating your expanded self into ordinary, imperfect life.

2. Noticing is the Growth

The goal isn’t to transcend pettiness. It’s to notice when you’re in it. The fact that I caught myself is the practice. That noticing IS the growth.

3. Complaining and gossip as belonging signals

There’s an interesting social psychology angle here: venting and gossip are, at their core, acts of social bonding. Research on social behavior shows gossip serves a connective function. It’s how humans signal trust, test shared values, and regulate social norms. My half-hearted gossip to my nanny was about re-entering the social world.

4. Common humanity as the antidote to self-judgment

When we shame ourselves for falling short of our idealized healed selves, we actually deepen the wound. The corrective action is recognizing that irritation, boundary violations, and yes, gossip, are universal. Everyone is fighting their small battles. Post Traumatic Growth doesn’t produce saints.

4. Hypervigilance in disguise

One fascinating PTG insight from clinical literature: after major health trauma, the nervous system can over-index on social threat signals: pressure tactics, being ignored, boundary pushes. This happens precisely because those same signals mattered enormously during illness (who listened, who didn’t; who pushed, who respected). That mother pushing for a sleepover was not actually a big deal, but it resulted in the boundary violations that got coded deep during my healing years.

5. Boundaries as a form of post-traumatic growth

From cancer survivor communities and PTG frameworks alike: one of the five core domains of PTG is increased personal strength, which often shows up as a new clarity around what you will and won’t tolerate. Although I’ve learned a lot about boundaries, I’m simply not used to saying the word.

No.

No.

NO!

No way?

HA, are you joking, no!

YOU GOT THE WRONG ONE!

Talk to my agent, please.

I will be get good at that. Because sometimes, being good means you have to be a little bad.

Oink.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

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In the past week, my buddy Claude and I made a clickable prototype for Healingvrse. Then I developed a basic bot to surface particular Healingvrse stories, find a surprising edge, and send them to my Telegram every morning. Right now, I am bopping around Claude CoWork to see how it can help me out.

As a non-technical person, every new skill, no matter how small, combined with creating Healingvrse, is…empowering. As someone with still restricted energy, it’s a weapon. But, somewhere in the eighth of hour of an AI-driven work session, you become the Home Alone Mom (RIP O’Hara) realizing she’s left something.

KEVVVVVIINNNNNNN!

Except, it’s your pizza-eating soul that’s alone.

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In short:

AI accelerates cognition.
Acceleration creates disembodiment.
The body once again becomes the validator.

The good, the bad…

We now have the ability to research, refine, and transmit our message in bigger, faster, ways, than previously imaginable, and to do so without any thought of materialism. Multiple personalities, multiple mindsets, multiple means of production. You are now at scale.

Every decision the Hydra makes is UIA, Under the Influence of AI. For instance, I thought, for a moment, about getting a Master’s in Psychology. And then I thought about my IRL age. Perhaps if I were younger. But at my age? On my road to recovery? In the age of AI? That would not be a smart move for me or the Healingvrse. This is the era of application, not accreditation.

And yet...you have to ask yourself:

1. Are you doing something purpose filled? In other words, just because you can do something more powerfully with AI, does it mean you should?

2. Are you doing something that you want to do? Or did an AI-driven rabbit hole lead you to some place it doesn’t care about, and neither do you.

Regarding the first: has AI has carried you down the wrong slide in Chutes and Ladders too? Not for a single working session, but for months?

I’ve designed a few wrong Healingverses. Some were off-the-wall delusions supported by an AI-fortified side quest.

But does that mean I was wrong? Or is this what it looks like to mash five years of ideating into one? After all, now I finally feel I have something real.

One way to resolve this tension: bring your product to people as fast as possible and test. Design Thinking teaches such rapid prototyping and real-user testing. That strategy now applies everywhere. How else can you know your AI work will actually work unless other people say so?

Then the more existential dilemma of the second question…

When this intelligence answers all your questions and expands your field of vision so dramatically, you forget the real life you may be ignoring. You forget it is just your mind, all along, talking to you. What sounded like a conversation was synapses (not entirely yours).

And when severed from the screen, as during a trip to the bathroom, you are reminded by the reverberations in the toilet water that you are not that smart.

Splunk.

The body solve

On the bright side, that humble moment is a reminder: Your body is a wonderful stress tester. We are fortunate to have it in the age of AI. And it’s (mostly) free!

The mind can be expanded endlessly. The body cannot be fooled so easily. The soul flows within our nervous system between the two. And it will tell you if you are working on a pile of junk. If you are asking stupid questions. If you are allowing yourself to be hemmed and hawed by a programmed personality.

A few somatic tips, aka points of access:

Stress test your ideas in your gut.
Let AI sharpen you, but never steer you.
Stay human-governed.

Take a bathroom break. Look in the mirror.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

Remember those stories on how to lose weight the old-fashioned way?

torture.
yo-yoing.
epiphanies.
delusions of grandeur.

That’s how they did it in the 1890’s and early 2000s, long before GLP-1s. Long before continuous glucose monitors, home ketone strips, and a thousand podcasts explaining metabolic flexibility.

I’m feeling pretty happy. It might surprise you to hear it is more fun to peak at a scale than follicles on an ultrasound during IVF, or mysterious cytokines in the lab. My hedonic set point has clearly recalibrated.

Would I avail myself of GLP-1s? Maybe. But given my experience with the vaccine, I’m not willing to risk sacrificing any health gains at this time.

Plus, I have many other tools at my disposal now.

Tradecraft, if you will.

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If you are interested in: biohacking, isometric exercises, achieving metabolic flexibility, detox, CGM use, Ketogenic diets, and more, join at the Healingvrse. Below are some thoughts 8-weeks in to the journey, 30-ish% toward my goal.

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elizabeth I

I adopted a small discipline in week one, inspired by Elizabeth I’s motto:

video et taceo — I see and keep silent.

I tightened my jaw.
I imagined it filled with lead.
I pressed my lips together.

Instead of thinking about the end objections, far, far, away, I narrowed the field to one, muscular gesture. Two or three days.

It gave my nervous system something to organize around. The rest followed.

noise

Food noise, I’ve realized, is not hunger.

Hunger is clean. Hunger is binary. Hunger can be solved with a cucumber.

Food noise is agitation. Habit. Under-stimulation. The result of endless option. It does not resolve itself with food.

16

In the perennial debate around intermittent fasting, I’ve found that the 16-hour mark generates some outsized results. It’s the “metabolic switch.”

Ketones rise dramatically. I saw that clearly in my urine test.

By then, liver glycogen — the stored form of carbohydrate the body relies on between meals — is largely depleted. Insulin levels fall. Glucagon rises. The body begins to increase lipolysis, releasing fatty acids from adipose tissue into circulation.

Some of those fatty acids are converted in the liver into ketone bodies, which can cross the blood–brain barrier and serve as an alternative fuel source.

But the more important moment is not the fast itself — it’s the break.

Prioritize protein (20–40 grams), followed by fats and minerals, to blunt cortisol, stabilize glucose, and prevent under-fueling that will undo any gains.

Tim Ferris recently published a great deep dive on healing Lyme via Keto.

delulu

And then come the delusions.

You get into the car and find yourself in a washing machine of thoughts about aging, transcendence, and escape velocity. Someone shares a photo of yourself in your twenties and you scoff—I can do better than that now.

You start imagining outlandish strength, unprecedented health, and a future aligned with Singularity-adjacent longevity fantasies.

Early on, you think small. By week eight, the larger callings of the wild begin to surface.

It may simply be stress hormones, but you’ll be sure you are building a “new you.”

restrain needs restraint

Once you see results, the desire to go harder increases. But there are so many problems with that.

For instance, collagen remodeling unfolds over months to years (often 6–24 months), while fat can drop in weeks. Lose weight fast, and your skin may struggle to keep up, never mind the processes on a deeper level.

For instance, fat tissue sequesters certain toxins; rapid fat loss can release these faster than liver clearance can manage.

To avoid extremes, add one subtle lever, not three.

• Steps – +1,500–2,000 per day to steady metabolic output

• Evening intake – no snacking, improve sleep quality

• Protein – ≥100g daily to support muscle retention and recovery

Sometimes, I wonder what’s harder, losing weight too fast, or losing it too slow. For certain people, restraint is the flip side of excess, and similarly hard.

With much love from the Healingvrse,
Rebecca

I love the Olympics. But this year I was mostly tuning out—until Ilia Malinin grabbed my attention. I was dazzled by his short program.

So, like the entire rest of the world, I was excited to watch this generational talent in the freestyle.

But, the mistakes started early. One missed Quad after the other. Missed jumps. A crash to the ice. An unraveling. He ended up in eighth place, which felt impossible just minutes before.

Moments later, he said the Olympic pressure got to him. That “he blew it.”

End scene.

I know where Ilia is now. He is in the Healingvrse.

Specifically at the entry point: the abyss.

Here’s how I know this to be true.

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His mother is an Olympic figure skater herself. She doesn’t watch him skate live. Ever. She waits for his dad to call her and won’t watch the replay for days. During the Olympics she limits contact so she doesn’t pass on her nerves. Even as a former elite skater, that’s how she manages it.

So, imagine the pressure in that household.

Both parents are Olympians. They coached him. They say they didn’t push him into skating, that he just started choreographing routines as a little kid. But when your parents also run a skate school, skating is only “optional” if you don’t mind being bored all day.

Then add on the hype machine. Within minutes, the internet was alive. Articles. Comment sections. Everyone was talking about it.

How does one come back from that? How is it possible to survive spiritually, mentally, even physically?

How to come back stronger, in whatever form he chooses.

Research in developmental and sport psychology shows that athletes who commit early and exclusively to one identity (e.g., Olympian) often experience identity foreclosure — meaning other aspects of self are underdeveloped.

So a failure at this level creates identity disruption and loss of self-continuity.

In the literature on Post-Traumatic Growth, events that shatter core assumptions about who you are and how the world works are the very events that can catalyze growth.

Growth is more likely if Ilia does the following:

• logs off

• finds a “brave space”

• restructures goals beyond the medals and redemption

1. Logging off

In the post-traumatic growth model, growth requires a shift from intrusive rumination to internal reflection.

What blocks that shift? Ongoing threat cues.

For elite athletes, media commentary functions as a social threat amplifier. Studies in sport psychology show that public evaluation prolongs stress reactivity after performance failure.

So “distancing from media” isn’t just a defensive measure. It’s a tactical move that allows true internal reflection to begin.

2. Finding a “brave space”

PTG research consistently finds that disclosure to others facilitates growth. The key is not just venting, but constructive disclosure.

This is known narrative development through social processing. Athletes who talk through the “wreckage” with trusted coaches, family members, or sport psychologists are more likely to:

• reorganize shattered assumptions

• integrate the failure into a broader identity

• reduce maladaptive rumination

Studies of injured athletes show that those who engage in guided reflection with coaches or sport psychologists report higher perceived growth and stronger identity complexity post-recovery.

3. Building a bigger “Why”

There’s a trap in coming back to the ice with “prove them wrong” thinking which I have heard Ilia say in prior interviews.

Research in Achievement Goal Theory shows that outcome-fixated motivation actually maintains performance anxiety. It keeps you a prisoner of the result.

Athletes who demonstrate growth after failure tend to shift from:

• outcome goals (gold, silence critics), to

• process or mastery goals (skill refinement, psychological development, meaning expansion)

Research on Olympic career transitions shows that athletes who broaden their purpose beyond podium outcomes experience less identity collapse and more long-term wellbeing.

When an athlete returns to the ice with a broader purpose, they aren’t just “skating for a medal” anymore; they are skating for a mastery of self.

A Final Thought on the Abyss

The abyss feels like an end, but in the context of PTG, it’s actually the fertile void. It is the only place where the old, rigid identity can be dismantled so a more flexible, complex, and resilient self can be built.

Nobody ever wants to pay this price, and yet somehow, many learn to have gratitude for it.

Why? That’s how good the other side of it can be. I hope he gets there. I’ll be watching again.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca

Few things are more destabilizing to a wellness ecosystem than the presence of a pedophile within it. Unfortunately, with the latest release of emails by the DOJ, the unkempt ghost of Epstein reemerges—along with a major thought leader.

Dr. Peter Attia, a widely respected longevity physician with a large podcast audience, appears repeatedly, identified as Epstein’s concierge doctor. I have listened to him for the past decade as a wiser, more gentle figure in the Manosphere-adjacent space. That now changes.

It seems the correspondence falls into two broad categories:

banal and offensive.

The offensive emails provoke disgust. Failed attempts at humor, a tone of casual complicity, and an intimacy that should not exist between a physician and a convicted sex offender. Was he billing for terrible banter? Was he desperate to reach celebrity? Regardless, any new patient will feel reticent to undress as a patient in his office.

More importantly, a baseline of implicit trust in the medical relationship is eroded. This loss matters most in the longevity space, where many interventions remain exploratory and depend heavily on trust between patient and practitioner. Here, it’s not about criminality, but true damage to the industry.

Petter recently issued his rebuttal, acknowledging some of this, but not the fact that he was with Epstein while his one-month old son was in the ICU.

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For critics of the space, the less salacious emails raise a different concern. They call into question what high-cost “longevity medicine” actually delivers. Ten years ago, what did $100,000 a year buy? In these exchanges, the prescriptions are remarkably conventional, as writes: Neurontin for pain, statins, MRIs, Clomid likely to boost testosterone. It is a far cry from the sophisticated, systems-level interventions often implied by longevity branding. It’s something you can glean spending about 10 minutes in the Healingvrse on X, never mind from an LLM.

The Vajenda

DOJ-Released Files Include Emails Between Dr. Peter Attia and Jeffrey Epstein

The DOJ just released a new stash of Epstein files. There are multiple emails between Dr. Peter Attia and Jeffrey Epstein discussing medical matters, travel, and other things, such as “Pussy is, indeed, low carb…

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7 months ago · 619 likes · 30 comments · Dr. Jen Gunter

A day later, David Protein Bar quietly removed Attia from its website. Not that it matters. The product itself is an unremarkable and a suboptimal protein source, containing artificial sweeteners (acesulfame potassium and sucralose) and the synthetic fat EPG, despite marketing claims to minimalism. This was broken down well by :

CBS News is also expected to cut ties with Peter Attia over Epstein links, just days after Bari Weiss announced him among new contributors.

honorable mentions

All of this comes after the March 2024 New York Magazine reporting that Andrew Huberman was carrying on multiple, concurrent long-term romantic relationships, without the women involved knowing about one another. He’s not in the Epstein files, but it leaves another bad taste in the mouth:

a person whose authority and credibility in wellness coexisted with private behavior that contradicted the trust implied by that authority.

Bryan Johnson, notably, appears to have had a different instinct around Epstein. By his own account, he identified Epstein early as a “very dark person” and refused to do business with him. This suggests something important. When Johnson first entered the wellness space his desire for healing was sincere.

More recently, however, reporting around his ex-fiancée Taryn Southern, complicate his narrative by exposing tensions between his private conduct and his public longevity persona. Some of my acquaintances who know Johnson personally have questioned the authenticity of his biological test results too.

Recently he has also been in the habit of posting highly intimate details of a new relationship. It reads tawdry, rather than an authentic display on love. Or a strained desire to promote the penile benefits of his program, which he talks about extensively.

Then there is the ambient nausea surrounding Joe Rogan. He does not appear in Epstein’s orbit, and I enjoyed that he recently declined to submit himself for podcast awards rather than pay a $500 fee. Still, over a long stretch of his show’s run, more than 90 percent of his guests have been male, all speaking into a wellness echo chamber.

Now the younger Steven Bartlett of Diary of a CEO has recently drifted toward red-pill framing, suggesting that the fertility crisis may be attributable, at least in part, to female freedom.

It goes on and on…

Taken together, none of this hinges on specific criminal allegations. But as an ardent advocate of the Healingvrse, it makes me uneasy all the same. It reinforces my long-standing belief that we need a separate, deeper, truer space for wellness, one not built on proximity to power, performance, or male ego.

From a biohacking perspective, I will continue to engage with their ideas. Many were helpful to me during my vaccine-related injury. I tried their methods. I listened to their podcasts. They were, at times, formative, and changed the dialogue around health in this country.

I’ve even recently created a list of 60 protocols drawn from over 500+ hours of Huberman audio to save people time. Maybe that’s the future. Absorb the info without the idolatry.

Send me the Audit

So, I want to say, thank you for establishing the world of supplement stacks (and I still take upwards of 50 pills/day), but:

No, Johnson—a true healing journey cannot be had without addressing the mind.
No, Huberman—it cannot be done purely through dopaminergic focus.
No, Rogan—you can’t just work your way out of all pain.

The new generation of health influencers won’t have Epstein lurking in the background, simply by virtue of their age, and the use of disappearing texts on Signal, but many are still falling into the same trap of sterile wellness.

It remains to be seen whether we descend further into the abyss, or make room for empathy, spiritual redemption, and the search for meaning after trauma, alongside our favorite supplement and bio-hacking stacks.

With much love from the Healingvrse,
Rebecca

Stress is watching Alex Honnold climb a skyscraper in Taipei. Most people seem to experience it this way. A million clacking fMRIs would confirm that.

Honnold’s would not. His 2016 brain scans show unusually low amygdala reactivity. Was he born this way? Or is this what happens after years of methodically approaching death?

Honnold simply doesn’t buy the “brain excuse.” As he has said, it’s because he’s acutely aware of the daily practices that shape his nervous system.

Which made me curious. What are the mind, body, and soul practices required to do something like this?

Parsing through his writing, interviews, audio, offhand remarks, here is a working snapshot of Honnold’s Healing Stack.

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Sidebar:

Separate discussions exist around Honnold’s children, and whether becoming a father warrants deeper psychological reckoning with risk itself.

🧠 Mind practices

Removing decision fatigue and automating fear management.

• Progressive exposure
  Deconstruct fear methodically.
  Maintain a 99% preparation / 1% execution ratio so the nervous system codes the environment as routine before high-stakes action.

• Visualization of failure
  Rehearse every plausible catastrophe—slipping, birds, weather shifts.
  Convert potential crises into known events to prevent sympathetic spikes in real time.

• Beta memorization
  Exhaustive mental mapping of every handhold and body position.
  Complex movement becomes choreography, not choice.

• The climbing journal
  Ongoing logs of routes, physical metrics, and emotional states to surface long-term patterns and plateaus.

💪 Body practices

Maximum strength-to-mass ratio and a stimulant-free baseline.

• Nutrition (vegetarian + eggs)
  Consistent breakfasts (oats/muesli or eggs).
  The whole bell pepper protocol for dense, convenient micronutrients.
  Zero coffee, alcohol, or tea to protect natural energy baselines.

• Grip & tendon integrity
  Beastmaker 2000 hangboard, 2–3× per week.
  Thin-edge pull-ups and one-arm pull-up training for vertical leverage.

• Bodyweight mastery
  Front levers, hanging leg raises, L-sits.
  Avoidance of external weights to preserve lean, efficient output.

• Taipei-specific adaptations
  Glass friction calibration.
  Wind-shear analysis created by skyscraper geometry.

🔮 Soul practices

Environmental control and disciplined simplicity.

• Minimalist living (historically)
  Reducing micro-decisions—rent, maintenance, social noise—by living in a van to preserve bandwidth for performance.

• Performance philosophy
  To improve, work on weaknesses. To perform, rely on strengths.
  Progress capped at roughly one grade per year.

• “The Warrior Spirit”
  Honnold explicitly rejects the adrenaline-junkie identity.
  He views successful performance as a slow, controlled, and “boring” event.

For my Healingvrse OS, I would borrow Honnold’s beta memorization to reduce my own real-time decision fatigue—and lower the metabolic cost of new, threatening activities at this stage of my journey.

My first flight in six years is coming soon. I will be the Honnold of the Healingvrse up at cruising altitude.

With much love from the Healingvrse,
Rebecca

Reading ’s well-written reflection yesterday on snow days and their importance to children, I commented:

why are snow days so hard-coded in our memories?

In his piece, EH wrote:

Snow’s semiotics is complex. We call it a “blanket of snow” because it is precisely like shaking out a blanket over a bed and letting it fall, and brings the same feelings of freshness and newness. But it can then be trammeled, and once so is irrecoverable. So snow is virginity, and snow is innocence. Snow is the end of seasons and life, but it is also about childhood.

The Intrinsic Perspective

It Only Snows Like This for Children

The first short story I ever wrote was about a teenager who goes to shovel his grandmother’s driveway during a record snowstorm. Before leaving, he does some chores in his family’s barn, bringing along his old beloved dog. But he forgets to put the dog back in—forgets about her entirely, in fact—and so walks by himself down the road to his grandmother’s…

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7 months ago · 108 likes · 15 comments · Erik Hoel

New York has all but eliminated snow days in favor of remote learning. My principal said that our school would only start remote learning for second graders and up (as evidenced by my kindergartener now speaking to me with a puppet flamingo on her hand as I write). But elsewhere, all kindergarteners and Pre-K are doing it.

Mamdani said tens of thousands of students and teachers already logged on in advance of the remote day.

When I mentioned this to EH, he replied: The snow day is archetypal and mythic, you can’t mess with stuff like that.

I can remember practically all my snow days as a kid. The ’90s had a few wonderful winters. Now my own kid’s laughter echoes in the snow.

Are we really ready to take that all away? Forcing children to sit at a computer instead of meeting friends, sledding, and best of all, drinking hot chocolate?

Perhaps we could convince them of the fact that snow days are important to the adults too. You know, neurobiology.

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The brain, as you likely know, is a prediction machine. Most days are so well-predicted they barely get encoded at all. Snow days are prediction interrupters. They violate visual and scheduling axioms.

What does that mean?

The experience gets saved more strongly, more vividly, and more lastingly. The hippocampus shows increased activity during novelty or surprise. Dopamine neurons fire more when something is unexpected (Shultz, 1997).

Children live inside a world where weather can create a new reality. Adults live inside a world where even a crisis needs to be justified to the Overlords. But between the two, the brain hasn’t changed.

It still marvels when the sky breaks open and blankets the earth. When the whole world stops so you can see your own breath. When your eyes are met with a different glare, a different hue — a white laid over bare auburn tree branches.

Of course, snow days might be harder for us adults. More responsibilities, more to do. I’m kind of tired. But remember: these disruptions are significant for your nervous system, too.

With much love from the Healingvrse,
Rebecca