Over about eleven years I saw multiple dermatologists about my face, and then about my back and shoulders, and then about the dermatitis when that showed up on top of everything else. I saw one of the best gut specialists in LA. I saw Chinese medicine doctors. I saw some random holistic practitioner who measured my organs to try to figure out what was wrong with me. I had a colonoscopy, and then an endoscopy for the other end.

Holistic, not holistic, expensive, more expensive. I did all of it.

And nobody could tell me what was actually wrong.

The dermatologists never once asked me about my digestion, which is kind of insane when you consider I was bloated every single day of those eleven years and constipated on top of it. And the gut people never connected any of it to my skin. Nobody ever put the two things in the same sentence.

So I just kept treating four separate problems. Four different aisles at the pharmacy, four different people telling me four different things.

It was one problem. It was my gut the whole time.

And what finally moved it was not a prescription, it was a pot of bones.

There’s one on my stove right now, actually. It’s been going since seven this morning and it’s got bones in it, a zucchini nobody was going to eat, the ends of two onions and a truly unhinged amount of garlic. If you walked into my house right now you would smell it before you saw me.

I can’t stress enough how boring and unsexy and completely life changing this has been for me. There’s no app, there’s no subscription, there’s no discount code. It’s bones and water and time, that’s it.

And apparently I’m not the only one who’s figured this out, because the whole internet has decided to go back to grandma. We’ve been calling it nonna-maxing over on Shayna’s Kitchen and it has taken off in a way I did not see coming. Yelp put grandma-style cooking on its 2026 trend list. Everyone is suddenly making stock and growing tomatoes on their balcony and calling their grandmother to ask how she made the thing.

I have a whole theory about why. But first let me tell you what my body was actually doing for eleven years.

Eleven Years

Not eleven months, you guys. Eleven years.

I was so bloated, all the time. And I don’t mean the cute “ugh I feel a little puffy today” bloating. I mean bloated in my stomach and bloated in my face and bloated in my legs and honestly bloated in places I didn’t even know could bloat. I looked inflamed because I was inflamed.

I was constipated, chronically, and I’m just going to say that out loud because I know half of you are nodding right now and nobody ever talks about it.

I had acne all over my face and all over my back and shoulders.

And then the dermatitis showed up on top of all of it, which honestly felt like my body going okay, you’re clearly not listening to me, so here’s something itchy.

Nobody Ever Put the Two Things Together

Okay so here’s the thing that still gets me a little bit, in a productive way.

Around 40% of people with acne have low stomach acid. It’s called hypochlorhydria. Forty percent!

So the connection isn’t some fringe idea. It’s a huge chunk of the picture. And I sat in front of dermatologists and gut specialists and Chinese medicine doctors for eleven years and not one of them ever treated my skin and my digestion as the same conversation.

There’s actually a name for the connection now, the gut-skin axis, and the science behind it is so much more specific than I ever expected it to be.

Your gut bacteria make things. One of them is a compound called p-cresol. In lab studies, p-cresol lowers a protein called keratin type 10 in your skin cells, which affects your whole skin barrier. And in actual humans, when researchers took away people’s probiotics, the cresol in their blood went up while their skin moisture went down and their skin cells got measurably smaller.

So bacteria that live in your intestine are making a compound, it’s getting into your blood, and it’s traveling up to your face and messing with your skin barrier from the inside. That’s not a wellness metaphor, that’s just what’s happening.

Which is why nothing I put on my face ever really worked. I was treating the wrong end of the problem.

And there’s more. People with acne have a really consistent pattern in their gut bacteria, less Firmicutes and more Bacteroides. And the good bacteria you actually want are the ones that ferment fiber into short chain fatty acids like butyrate, and butyrate strengthens your intestinal lining and makes it less leaky. Less leaky gut, less inflammation, less on your face.

The Stress Part, Which I Really Didn’t Want to Hear

The full name for this is actually the gut-brain-skin axis, and I resisted the brain part for years because I really wanted my skin problem to just be a skin problem.

But depression and anxiety measurably change your gut bacteria and increase how permeable your gut is. And stress ramps up inflammation through your whole body, which then shows up on your skin. It’s a documented pathway, not a vibe.

Which means you can drink all the bone broth in Italy, and if you’re living in a constant state of low grade panic, you’re basically pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

I was running three businesses through the worst of my gut years while an eight year relationship was falling apart. My skin was not confused. My skin was correct.

So do the food, absolutely. And also sleep, and go outside, and please stop treating your nervous system like it’s the optional part.

The Part Where I Finally Got an Actual Answer

For most of those eleven years I was just guessing. Cutting things out, adding things in, reacting to whatever I’d read that week. Some of it helped a little. None of it ever told me what was actually wrong.

That changed when I started working with Dr. Daryl Gioffre, who’s a gut health and inflammation specialist, and the very first thing he did was have me take a GI Map.

It’s a stool test, so yes, you do have to mail your poop to a laboratory. It’s kind of gross and it is so worth it.

What you get back is a picture of what’s actually living in your gut. Which bacteria are overgrown, which ones are missing, whether there’s yeast or parasites, markers for inflammation, how well you’re actually digesting your food.

Mine, the first time? Complete disaster. Genuinely a disaster. But it was the first time in over a decade that I was looking at a piece of paper that actually explained why I felt the way I felt.

And honestly, if you’re struggling with acne or bloating or any of this, this is where I think you start. Not with another cream, not with cutting out dairy for three weeks to see what happens. Start by actually finding out what’s going on in there. You cannot treat something naturally and properly if you have no idea what you’re treating.

If you’re in the US, this is where you can get tested with Dr. Gioffre’s team. And if you’re outside the US like I am half the year, here’s an international option that ships the kit to you wherever you are.

I do one every single year now, kind of the way you’d get bloodwork, just to check in and make sure I’m still in a good place.

One thing I want to be upfront about: Dr. Gioffre founded Get Off Your Acid, whose greens and minerals I use every single day and link to as an affiliate. So you should know that relationship exists. I’d recommend the man either way, but you deserve to know.

And obviously if something feels really wrong, go see a doctor too. This isn’t instead of that.

Okay, So Why Bones

Bone broth is really rich in three things that matter here.

Glutamine, which is the main fuel source for the cells lining your intestine. Those cells turn over fast and they need to eat. This is the big one if your gut is leaky.

Glycine, which is anti-inflammatory and also feeds your body’s production of glutathione, which is basically your main internal antioxidant.

Gelatin and collagen, which are what make a good broth turn to jelly in the fridge, and what make it worth drinking if you’re vain, which I am.

Quick side note on that last one because I promised myself I’d be honest in these. The collagen you eat gets broken down into amino acids before your body uses it, so it’s not teleporting straight into your face. What it does is give your body the raw materials. I’m 34, I don’t get Botox, I don’t get filler, and I’ve been drinking this stuff for years. Take that for whatever it’s worth, which is one anecdote from one girly on the internet.

And while I’m being honest about evidence, here’s a story. A doctor once told me that in Europe they tell people to drink bone broth after a concussion to heal faster, and I loved that so much. I repeated it to people. And then I went looking for the actual study.

It’s not there! The nutrition research for brain injury is real and it’s active, but the things they’re actually studying are creatine and omega-3s and choline and riboflavin and magnesium. Bone broth isn’t in any protocol. Glutamine does show up in that research, and glutamine is in bone broth, so I think something true probably got compressed into something catchier somewhere along the way.

I’m telling you that because I could have just written the fun version and none of you would ever have known. I’d rather you be able to trust the rest of it.

Nonna Was Right and We Are All Exhausted

Here’s my actual theory about why nonna-maxing blew up the way it did.

You can see one of the post here

Your great-grandmother wasn’t making stock because it was good for her gut lining. She was making it because throwing away a whole chicken carcass would have been completely insane to her. The gut healing was just a side effect of not being wasteful.

And then we industrialized our way out of all of that in about two generations. And now here we are, collectively the most stressed and most depressed and most digestively unwell people in history, buying $60 supplements to replace what used to just be Sunday.

I’m not trying to romanticize the past, Nonna had a hard life. But she had a pot on the stove and people at the table and her food was actually food.

Making bone broth is genuinely the cheapest way to get some of that back. It costs almost nothing, it uses the stuff you’d throw out, and it makes your whole house smell like somebody loves you.

It’s So Much Easier Than You Think

Let me just kill the intimidation right now.

You put bones in water. You leave it alone for a really long time. You strain it. That’s the entire skill.

The pot does all the work, you’re not standing over it. I start mine in the morning, go do my whole day, and turn it off before bed. It’s the least demanding thing in my kitchen and it gives me the most.

And if the idea of leaving a gas stove going for twelve hours makes you nervous, which is completely fair, just use a slow cooker. Set it on low and go live your life. It’s honestly the easiest way to do this and it takes the fear out of it entirely. An Instant Pot works too if you want it faster.

I put together a little collection of everything I actually use to make broth at home, the pot, the strainer, the storage, all of it, so you don’t have to guess.

Make a huge batch. Drink half, freeze half. It keeps a week in the fridge and four months in the freezer.

And here’s my favorite trick, which honestly changed how I cook everything: stop making your rice in water. Make it in bone broth. Same with quinoa, same with millet. Same effort, same time, and suddenly your side dish has minerals and amino acids in it. You’re not adding some new health step to your day, you’re just upgrading one you already do.

The Chicken One

This is genuinely the easiest thing on earth. This is the “I roasted a chicken and now I have a carcass” recipe.

But you don’t need a roasted chicken. I buy chicken bones straight from my butcher all the time, and honestly the ones I love most are chicken feet and chicken wings. Feet especially. They look a little unsettling in the pot and they are absolutely loaded with collagen, they’ll give you the most gelatinous broth of anything. Wings are the same idea, tons of connective tissue. And a raw carcass works just as well as a roasted one, it doesn’t need to be cooked first.

• 1 whole chicken carcass, or a mix of feet, wings and backs

• 2 to 3 cups vegetable scraps (celery, carrot, zucchini, broccoli, whatever’s in the drawer)

• 1 onion, quartered

• 5 to 10 whole garlic cloves

• Herbs of your choice

• Salt and pepper

• 1 to 1.5 gallons water

Everything goes into a really big stock pot. Cover it with water, bring it to a light boil, then turn it down and let it simmer. Six hours minimum but longer is so much better, I like to go all day. The longer it simmers the more nutrient dense it gets.

Let it cool, strain it, store it. Drink it, make soup with it, freeze it.

The Beef One

This one’s richer and darker and it takes longer, and it’s the one I make when I really want the good stuff.

Ask your butcher for knuckle bones and joints. That’s where the collagen is, and collagen is what turns into gelatin. Oxtail and neck bones are great too. Marrow bones are delicious and they’ll give you incredible flavor and richness, but they will not gel on their own, so don’t build your whole pot out of them. My move is knuckles and joints for the structure, plus one or two marrow bones for flavor.

• 4 to 5 beef bones, mostly knuckles and joints

• 1 zucchini, in big pieces

• 2 onions, quartered

• 2 carrots, chopped

• 1 bundle of celery, roughly chopped

• 4 inches of ginger

• 5 to 6 garlic cloves

• A handful each of basil, rosemary and sage

• 6 whole cloves

• 1 tablespoon whole peppercorns

• Salt

Do not skip this first part: put the bones in the pot, cover them with water, simmer for 20 minutes, and then drain all that water off. That’s the blanch, it pulls out the scum, and it’s the difference between clean broth and cloudy broth.

Then everything else goes in, cover it with water at least four inches above, and bring it to a simmer. Low and slightly covered for at least 12 hours. I start mine in the morning and turn it off before bed. Just keep an eye on the water level and top it up so it doesn’t get too low.

Cool it, strain it, fridge for a week or freezer for four months.

And you can absolutely throw beef and chicken bones in together, it’s even more flavorful. Honestly just use what you have, that’s the whole spirit of this.

What to Throw In (Just Rotate, Don’t Overthink It)

This is the part where it gets fun instead of feeling like a recipe.

Save your scraps. Keep a bag in your freezer. Onion ends, carrot tops, celery leaves, that broccoli stalk you were about to throw out, herb stems. That bag is your broth base and it costs you literally nothing.

Rotate your aromatics. I love ginger and turmeric when I want it warming and anti-inflammatory. Whole cloves and peppercorns for depth. Sage, parsley, thyme, oregano, basil, bay, all of them have their own benefits and they all make the broth taste better, so honestly just use what you have and rotate through them.

My two secret ones are nettle and dandelion. Nobody puts these in and I don’t know why. Nettle has been used as a natural antihistamine forever and there’s actual research behind it for allergy stuff. Dandelion is my liver herb, it adds this whole other detoxifying layer. I throw a handful of each in and it makes the broth feel like it’s doing something extra.

A parmesan rind if you have one, which is the most Italian thing I do.

Add a splash of apple cider vinegar at the beginning, it helps pull the minerals out of the bones.

Salt at the end, not the beginning. It concentrates as it reduces and you will absolutely overshoot it.

The fridge test: if it sets into a jelly when it’s cold, you did it right. That’s real gelatin. If it stays liquid, just simmer it longer next time, or use more knuckles and feet. That wobble is the whole point.

A Quick Word on Histamine

I know a lot of the wellness world is scared of bone broth because of histamine, so let me talk about it, because I’ve been drinking this stuff for years and I don’t have issues.

Here’s the thing that took me a while to understand. The histamine isn’t really coming from the long simmer, it’s coming from bacteria getting to your bones before they ever hit the pot. Histamine forms when bacteria break down an amino acid called histidine, and that process starts the second your bones start sitting around.

So the freshness of your bones matters more than anything else you do.

Buy your bones fresh from a butcher and start cooking them the same day. Don’t let them sit in your fridge for four days first. Don’t leave them out on the counter. And avoid bones that have been frozen and thawed over and over.

Cool your broth fast and freeze it. Within a couple of hours. Histamine keeps building in the fridge, just more slowly, so freezing is genuinely better than fridging if you’re sensitive.

If you’re someone who reacts to everything, or you’ve got mast cell stuff going on, a shorter cook of four to six hours will be gentler on you. A pressure cooker or Instant Pot is great for this, it gets you a lot more out of the bones in a lot less time. It won’t gel as well, that’s the tradeoff, but you’ll still get real nourishment out of it.

And if you know you react, please just talk to your practitioner before you go making gallons of this.

Just Start This Weekend

Go buy some bones. Most butchers will basically hand you beef bones for nothing. Or roast a chicken on Sunday and use the carcass, which is exactly what your great-grandmother would have done without even thinking about it.

Put it on in the morning, forget about it, strain it at night.

Then have a mug of it on an empty stomach the next morning and just pay attention over the next few weeks. Your digestion first. Your skin after that, because your skin is always the last thing to catch up.

Eleven years of examination rooms. Four problems that were actually one problem. And in the end, a pot of bones.

Bone broth is step one of my full 14-day Skin Reset, which is the protocol I run every single time travel wrecks my gut and my face announces it to everyone. The whole thing, every supplement, the exact morning and evening order, plus a printable checklist, went out to paid subscribers on Sunday. It’s the most detailed thing I’ve ever written down.

And tell me in the comments, are you a chicken person or a beef person? What goes in your pot? I want everyone’s weird family additions. Somebody’s nonna is doing something none of us know about and I need to know what it is.

A quick note on links: a couple of the things above are affiliate links, which means I make a small commission if you buy through them. I only ever link things I actually use in my own kitchen.

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You paid for a weekly letter and I disappeared into wedding season and a cookbook shoot and a version of myself that had absolutely nothing left to give by 8pm. I’m not going to make a whole thing of it. I’m just going to say it plainly, and then I’m going to give you the most useful thing I have.

This is the protocol I’ve been asked about more than anything else in my life. It’s the thing people DM me about after they see a before and after. And it’s never been written down anywhere in full until right now.

First, the backstory

I have struggled with acne since elementary school.

Not a few spots before an event. Real acne, on my face and all over my back and shoulders, since I was a kid. It’s been on and off my entire life. Under control for a stretch, then completely out of control again, usually with no obvious reason why.

I tried everything you’ve tried. Stripping cleansers. Washing twice a day. Spot treatments that burned. The whole thing.

None of it touched the actual cause, because the actual cause was never on my face.

It was in my gut.

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And I mean my entire life. In second grade I had a boyfriend for over six months. In fifth grade, close to a year. My dad always thought it was the funniest, most endearing thing about me, this little girl who was somehow always in a committed partnership. Then came my high school sweetheart, six years of him.

Between nineteen and twenty one I was single for the first time, deep in my party phase, and honestly I loved it.

And then at twenty one, I met the man I would spend the next eight years with.

The Eight Years

He was sixteen years older than me. Successful, wealthy, fairly well known in the States. At twenty one I got dropped into a life I had no framework for, and I grew up very fast.

I want to be clear about something, because I think women get pressured into telling these stories as if they were all bad. It wasn’t. There was real love there. There were beautiful years, beautiful moments, and that relationship shaped who I am in ways I’m still grateful for.

But there were also emotional challenges that I let go on far longer than I should have. And it took me years to understand why.

I didn’t know my worth.

Which is a strange thing to say out loud, because if you had asked anyone who knew me then, they would have described me as confident. Outgoing. Beautiful, even. And I probably would have agreed with them.

But there’s a difference between the confidence you perform and the thing underneath it that actually knows your value as a woman. I had the first one. I did not have the second one.

And you can always tell which one someone has by what they tolerate.

I was allowing behavior that, if I had actually valued myself, would never have made it past the first month. Not because I was weak. Because I truly did not believe I was worth more than what I was being given.

Leaving at Twenty Eight

When I finally left at twenty eight, I didn’t go looking for another relationship. For the first time in my life, I went looking for myself.

I went deep into my spiritual practice. And I mean deep. I started unpacking things I had been carrying since childhood, because my childhood was not an easy one in a lot of ways, and I knew that if I didn’t touch those parts of me, I was going to walk straight into the exact same thing again with a different face on it.

That’s the part nobody tells you. You don’t heal a relationship pattern by finding a better person. You heal it by finding out why you kept choosing the last one.

The List I Thought Was Delusional

For a long time I genuinely believed that what I wanted in a partner wasn’t realistic.

I wanted someone successful. Someone younger. Someone who takes care of himself, who’s hot, who has beautiful eyes. Someone who tells me I’m beautiful six times a day and means it every time. Someone who puts me first. Someone who loves me more than anything in this world.

I had a whole list. And every time I looked at it I thought, okay Shayna, be serious. You can’t have all of that. Pick two.

Here’s what I know now.

The list wasn’t the problem. The list was fine. The problem was that I was treating it like a shopping order instead of asking myself why I wanted any of it.

Because underneath every single item on that list was a feeling I had never had.

Safety. Being taken care of. Being loved deeply and out loud instead of having to guess. Being able to be completely, unguardedly myself without managing anyone’s reaction to it. Being with someone who wanted me to become the biggest version of myself instead of a manageable one.

That’s what I actually wanted. The beautiful eyes were just the wrapping.

And this is where I see so many women get stuck. They write the list, they light the candle, they say the affirmations, and then nothing comes. Because a list of traits is just a list of traits. What changes things is going after the wound underneath the wanting.

The Pattern I Couldn’t See

It took me a long time and a lot of practice to finally see mine.

Every single man I had chosen was, in some way, not fully available.

Different personalities, different circumstances, same energy underneath every time. Great in a hundred ways, and always with one foot pointed toward the door. My eight year relationship was the biggest version of it. He didn’t want to get married. He didn’t want kids. Some years were good and some years really weren’t, and I kept waiting for the version of him that was all the way in.

I wasn’t unlucky. I was consistent. I was choosing the exact same man over and over because on some level, a man who never fully chose me confirmed what I already believed about myself.

That’s the ugly part. But you have to look at it, because you can’t stop repeating something you refuse to name.

How I Knew My Practice Was Working

I used to joke with my girlfriends when I was single that I could tell exactly how my spiritual practice was going by the men showing up in my life.

Good month? Grounded, doing my rituals, actually praying, actually resting? The guys who appeared were completely different. Slipping, overworking, ignoring myself? Right on cue, here comes another beautiful man with one foot out the door.

I said it as a joke but I meant it completely, and I still do.

Your internal reality builds your external one. Every time. Your beliefs about what you deserve set the frequency, and then you meet people who match it.

Now, to be very clear, this is not me saying you’re responsible for how people treat you. You can absolutely be hurt by someone who behaved badly, and that hurt is theirs to own. But you are responsible for what you keep saying yes to. And for how long. And for what you’re willing to call normal.

What Actually Works

So if you want to manifest your dream partner, here is the whole thing, as plainly as I can say it.

Focus on you.

Not as a consolation prize while you wait. As the actual work.

Build the life you want. Do your practice. Sit with the childhood stuff. Look at the pattern. Raise your own standard for how you speak to yourself when nobody’s watching. Get to the place where being alone is genuinely fine, because that’s the exact moment you stop accepting crumbs.

Because you will always attract the frequency you are actually at, not the one you’re asking for.

You cannot request devotion, safety, and deep love from another person while abandoning yourself daily and expect it to arrive. The universe isn’t cruel about this, it’s just precise. It sends you your match.

So become the match.

Where I Am Now

I’m writing this from a completely different life than the one I was living at twenty eight.

I’m married. To someone who gives me every single thing on that list I thought was delusional, including the six times a day part.

The detail that gets me most isn’t any of the big things. It’s that when we first started dating, he protected my slow mornings. He never once made me feel like needing an hour and a half to myself before the day started was too much, or high maintenance, or weird. He just gave me the space.

And then, without me ever asking, he started meditating on his own.

That’s the whole difference. I spent eight years trying to earn a version of love that was always slightly out of reach, and now I’m with someone who just hands it to me, every day, without me performing for it.

I’m going to write about the wedding next week. But this piece had to come first, because you can’t understand what that day meant without knowing what I walked away from to get there.

If You’re Doing This Work

The limiting beliefs are the whole game. The stuff from when you were young, the things you decided about yourself before you were old enough to know you were deciding anything. That’s what’s setting your frequency, and it’s very hard to see on your own, because you’re inside it.

That’s exactly what the DECODE Method is built for, and it’s what we do together inside She Who Returns. Not affirmations on top of an unhealed foundation, but actually going into the layers, with other women doing the same work and facilitators who can see what you can’t yet.

You are so much closer than you think. Usually there are only one or two beliefs standing between you and the thing you’ve been asking for.

Go get them.

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If you’re in this chapter right now, single and doing the work and wondering if it’s ever going to happen, tell me in the comments. I read every one. And if you’ve already met your person after doing this work, I want to hear that too, because those stories help more than anything I could write.

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I am not a professional astrologer.

I do not have a certification on my wall. I have never charged anyone for a reading. What I am is a woman who has been obsessed with astrology for eight years, watching it map my own life with a kind of accuracy nothing else has matched. I track my own transits every week. I check the sky before I make decisions that matter. I have done my own chart, my mother’s, and the chart of every woman I love. I read every book on my shelf at least twice. The reason I built She Who Returns the way I did, and the reason I am sending you this Forecast, is because this work has changed my life over and over and I want it to change yours.

OK so before we get into the actual Forecast, let me share my perspective on what I have come to believe about astrology over those eight years. This is just my truth. Take what resonates with you and leave the rest.

There are two layers to astrology, and I think most women only ever interact with the first one. Which is why most women feel like astrology is sometimes spot on and sometimes makes zero sense.

Layer one is the collective. It is the transits in the sky right now, the energies moving through ALL of us. When Instagram tells you Mercury is retrograde and to expect tech glitches, that is the collective. When your favorite astrologer says the full moon is going to bring up big emotions, that is the collective. It is real. Those transits are real. There is even some real accuracy in the basic sun sign horoscopes, the daily ones written for each of the twelve signs, because the overall energy of each sign is a real thing too. The Forecast you are about to read is built on this layer, because the collective field matters. I have watched myself ignore a transit and pay for it. I have also worked WITH the same transit and watched everything fall open.

Layer two is your personal chart. The exact moment and place you were born. The way the cosmos was arranged in the sky for you, and only you, the second you took your first breath. Your Sun. Your Moon. Your rising. Your Venus, your Mars, your Mercury, your Saturn. The houses they sit in. The specific placements that no Instagram horoscope can ever speak to, because they belong to you.

Now astrology is one layer, but it is not the only one I weave together in this work. There are two more that have been some of the most important things I have ever learned about myself, and the magic is when all three start speaking to each other.

Human Design is the second. And this is where it gets interesting, because Human Design is not actually calculated from the moment you were born. It is calculated from a specific window in the womb, about 88 days before your birth, when your personality essentially crystallized. It is a different system from astrology, even though they work together. Human Design brings together astrology, the I Ching, the chakras, and Kabbalah, and what it gives you is your energetic blueprint. How you are designed to operate. How you make decisions correctly. How you receive and give energy. How you are designed to make money in alignment with your actual design, instead of how you were taught to make money. There are five types, and the type you are changes everything about how you should be moving through your life. Astrology tells you what is happening in the sky. Human Design tells you how you are specifically built to respond.

Numerology is the third. This is the one that finally gave me language for why some years have hit so hard and others have flowed open. Every year, you are inside a personal nine-year cycle. The seed year. The building year. The harvest year. The release year. When you know what year you are inside of, you stop expecting yourself to be in a chapter you are not actually in. You stop holding yourself to a standard that does not match the energy of where you actually are.

And the magic is when all three start speaking to each other. When your astrology says this year is asking you to release, and your numerology says you are in a Year 9 which is the completion year, and your Human Design says you are a Projector who needs to wait for invitation and rest, not push, the message becomes clear. Same theme. Three different angles. That is when this work stops being a thing on the internet and starts being your actual map.

Here is where the real magic of going deeper has lived for me in the last eight years.

Working with all three layers together has changed how I move through my life. My career. The way I make money. My relationships. The years that have hit hard and the years that have flowed open. Why some years felt like I was swimming upstream and others felt like a gift. I have found certain placements that I keep coming back to, ones that I had no idea were running the show until I learned to read them. I have a language now for why I struggled in 2019, why Italy made sense for me in 2022, why this year has asked specific things of me that other women’s years have not asked of them. None of that is because I was doing it right or wrong. It is because I was inside a specific cycle, with a specific chart, with a specific energetic design, that was asking specific things of me.

And in my experience, when you actually know all of this about yourself, here is what tends to happen.

You stop spiraling. The next time you wake up at 7am and your nervous system is on fire and your first thought is why the fuck am I off today, instead of going into the victim spiral, instead of the panic of what is wrong with me, you can pull up your chart and the transits and say okay. This makes sense. The Moon is in my eighth house this week. Saturn is squaring my Venus. Of course this feels heavy. Of course I am in my feelings today.

And the second you can name it, the energy softens. Not because the transit is gone. Because you stopped fighting it. You moved out of the victim story and into the logical, embodied understanding that you are inside an energy, and you get to choose how you work with it.

That is the gift of going deeper, in my experience. That is what eight years of obsession with this work has given me. And that is what I hope opens up for you too, if any of this calls to you.

If you want a free taste of what going deeper into your own chart actually looks like, I offer a free Cosmic Reading at She Who Returns that gives you a snapshot of your astrology, Human Design, and numerology, with mini readings for each one. If you want the full version, I built the personalized dashboard and the Cosmic Advisor inside the She Who Returns app, based on everything I have learned over the last eight years about what actually helps women understand themselves. Both live at shewho-returns.com. The Forecast you are reading right now is enough on its own.

What The Forecast is

The Forecast is the monthly letter I send readers, and there are two things woven into every edition.

The first is the actual transits. What is happening in the sky, the cycles we are inside of, the cosmic anchor for the four weeks ahead in plain English.

The second is what I am personally channeling for the collective that month.

That second part is what I want to be honest about with you, because it is the part that makes this Forecast different from anything you would read on Cafe Astrology or in your weekly horoscope.

I am a Projector in Human Design, which means I am built to see systems and patterns and to bring wisdom forward as a guide. Projectors are born teachers. We do not have the constant energy of a Generator. What we have instead is access. When I sit down to write The Forecast, what comes through is more than just the transits. It is what I am being shown is moving in the collective field that month. What is up for women right now. What feels true about the energetic terrain ahead. I have been channeling this work in some form for years, and what comes through has always landed with whoever was meant to receive it. I trust that whatever I am bringing through in any given month will hit the right people at the right time. Including, possibly, you.

The Forecast lives here in our space, monthly, on the third Wednesday of every month.

In this edition, June 17 to July 17, you will find a week-by-week read on the transits coming through in plain language, the big one of the month (Jupiter moving into Leo on June 30), the Summer Solstice on Sunday June 21 and why it carries more weight than usual this year, the Solstice ritual I will be doing that morning that you can do too, and what I am channeling for the next four weeks.

If you want one read on the month ahead, here it is. On Sunday, the Sun moves from Gemini into Cancer. For the rest of the month, your most accurate answers are going to come from your body, not your head. This is a month for decisions made from how you actually feel. The Solstice ritual you will find below is built around exactly that.

The cycle we are inside of

Two things to know about 2026 if you have not heard me talk about them yet.

The first is the Year of the Fire Horse in Chinese astrology, the most volatile and most generative year in the 60-year cycle. The Fire Horse is bold movement. It is the body that knows what it knows. It is impatient with anything performed and reverent toward anything real. If something has been on your shoulders for a long time and you are still carrying it because it is what you said you would carry, the Fire Horse year is not gentle with that. It will keep applying pressure until you choose. The good news is that what you choose this year tends to take.

The second is Universal Year 1 in numerology. Every nine years, the collective begins again. We are at the very beginning of a brand new nine-year cycle that runs through 2034. The seeds you plant in 2026 are not for this year. They are for the next decade. This is the most important context for everything I am about to say below. What you are doing right now is seeding.

Half of you reading this are tired. The first half of 2026 has asked a lot, and it has not always been kind. If you are feeling that, you are not behind. You are right on time.

The Solstice on Sunday

On Sunday, June 21, the Sun reaches its highest point in the northern sky and pauses there before it begins to retreat. This is the Summer Solstice. It is the longest day of the year. It is also the year’s energetic mirror.

In the wheel of the year, the Solstice is the moment to look at what the first six months have asked of you. What you actually built, lived through, lost, loved. The body of work the year has made you do already.

I notice a lot of women rush through the Solstice. They mark it on the calendar, maybe light a candle, and move on. What I have come to believe, especially inside this Fire Horse year, is that what you choose to carry into the second half of the year on Solstice morning is what the rest of 2026 is going to harvest. So it is worth slowing down through it.

In my experience, this does not need to be heavy. The ritual I am sharing below is short, light, and embodied. It does not require you to set the room or schedule the hour. It just asks you to actually do it.

What is in the sky, June 17 to July 17

A short read on the transits, in plain English.

This week, June 17 to 20. Mercury and the Sun are both in the last degrees of Gemini, moving toward Cancer. Energetically, we are at the end of an information cycle. Conversations that have been on repeat for weeks finish themselves now. If you have been waiting to send the message or have the conversation, this week is for that. If you have been waiting to stop having it, this week is for that too.

Solstice weekend, June 20 to 21. The Sun ingresses Cancer on Sunday. This is the Solstice. The energy shifts from outward to inward. From doing to feeling. From the head to the body. If you have any room in your weekend, leave it open. The most accurate decisions of the next month will be made in this window.

The week after, June 22 to 28. Mercury enters Cancer mid-week. Conversations become more emotional and less linear. This is also the week of the DECODE Method post, which will land in your inbox on Wednesday the 24th. If you have been wondering about the framework I spent eight years building, every spiritual teaching I have lived through consolidated into a six-step process that I am now finally sharing with the world, that post is for you.

The week of the biggest transit, June 29 to July 5. Jupiter moves into Leo on Tuesday, June 30, and this is the one I want every woman to be tracking. Venus enters Cancer around the same time. The combined energy of these two transits sets the tone for the rest of the month.

Early to mid July, July 6 to 17. The Sun is in Cancer and Jupiter is in Leo, an unusual and powerful combination. Trust the body in this window. Move it. Feed it well. Sleep more than you think you need. Mercury enters Leo on the 11th. The Sun follows around the 22nd. We are moving from the inward depth of Cancer to the outward expression of Leo. What you have been feeling will begin to want to be said, made, shown. If you have a creative project that has been waiting, the second half of July is the window to bring it forward.

The big one of the month: Jupiter into Leo on June 30

The transit I want to make sure you are tracking this month is Jupiter moving from Cancer into Leo on Tuesday, June 30. Jupiter sits in each sign for about a year, which means we have not been here since July 2014, and we will not be here again until 2038. Jupiter is the planet of expansion. Of abundance. Of opportunity. Of growth. Leo is the sign of creative expression, heart-centered confidence, leadership, romance, and the courage to be seen.

When you put those two together, what is on the table for the next twelve months is this. The version of you that has been hiding gets to come forward. The creative project you have been protecting gets to be made. The love you have been waiting on gets to be received. The voice you have been censoring gets to be used. Jupiter in Leo expands whatever you have been being brave about in private, and it asks you to be brave about it in public too.

If your Sun, Moon, or Rising is in Leo, this is a Jupiter Return year for you and the next twelve months are going to be significant in a way no other twelve months in the last decade have been. If you have Leo placements anywhere else in your chart, those parts of your life are lighting up. And for every woman reading this, this is the month to start thinking about what you want to grow into, because Jupiter spends the next year setting the soil.

The Solstice ritual

This is what I am doing on Sunday morning, and what I want to share with you in case it resonates.

You will need three things. A small bowl of water. Nine seeds, any kind that calls to you. (I am using sunflower seeds, but wildflower, herbs, vegetable, anything works.) A piece of paper and a pen.

Wake up before the sun is fully up if you can. Drink water. Step outside. If you cannot get outside, sit at a window where the sun will be coming through. Feet on the grass if you can, on the floor if not. Hands on your belly. Take three slow breaths.

When you feel ready, write on the paper what the first six months of 2026 have asked of you. Not what you wanted them to be. What they actually were. The hard, the heavy, the beautiful, the surprising. Write until you have nothing left to say.

Hold the page. Read it back to yourself, softly, out loud. See her. Tell her thank you for surviving every one of those months.

Then place the paper into the bowl of water. Watch it begin to dissolve. This is the release.

Now the nine seeds. Hold them in your hand and bless them. Speak whatever comes through. What you are seeding for the second half of this year. What you are seeding for the nine-year cycle ahead. The seeds do not all have to mean different things. They are the energetic representation of you putting nine years of intention into the earth.

Plant them. In soil, in a pot, in a garden, in a jar of dirt on your windowsill, wherever feels right. Bury them gently. Pour the water from the bowl, with the dissolved paper, onto the soil.

Here is the part that matters most to me about this ritual, and the part I want to make sure I share with you.

If the seeds do not blossom, it does not mean what you are seeding will not come to fruition. The blossoming is not the point. The act of blessing the seeds and putting them into the ground, giving them over to Divine Mother Gaia and to the universe, that IS the prayer. Once they leave your hand and enter the soil, your job is done. The universe takes care of it from there. Your only job is to trust, with full complete certainty, that what you have asked for is being held.

Close with hands on your heart. Sun on your face. Whisper thank you.

The ritual is complete.

What I want you to hold for the month

For the next four weeks, in case any of this is useful for you to carry. You do not have to start over. You are allowed to be honest about what is no longer working without already knowing what comes next. The Fire Horse is moving fast on the outside, and you are allowed to move slow on the inside. The seed you are planting in Universal Year 1 does not have to look like anyone else’s. The whole point of this nine-year cycle is that it is yours.

If anything from this Forecast lands, my hope is this. The collective field is real and worth paying attention to. AND the second layer, your own chart, your own design, your own cycle, is where the precision lives. The more you go inside of YOU, the more both layers start to make sense. That has been my experience over eight years, and I am sharing it in case it is useful for yours.

Where I am

I am writing this from my kitchen in Florence. The light is long here in June, the kind that does not go down until almost ten. The land outside is in full summer. The olive trees are flowering, which means the harvest is coming. We do not get to control whether the year produces. We only get to control whether we are inside the practice of receiving when it does.

This Sunday morning, I will be doing the Solstice ritual outside, on the grass, with the sun on my face, with my nine seeds in my hand. If you would like to do it with me, I will see you there.

With love,

Shayna

P.S. The next major piece in our space is the DECODE Method post on Wednesday June 24. If you have been waiting to understand the framework behind She Who Returns, that is the one.

That was the whole point. The intention I set in January, in the middle of a long stretch in LA building toward the She Who Returns launch, when I sat down one morning with a candle and a notebook and wrote what I wanted 2026 to be. Slower. More writing. More space. Less production.

What actually happened is that I underestimated the work. She Who Returns is a brand new platform I built myself, and like any new business it needs constant attention. Updates, adjustments, things to build and rebuild. The matcha cafe in Florence with the man I am marrying moved into construction. I locked in our wedding date in Kenya for August 1st. I shot my first cookbook with Hay House. And somewhere in there, I disappeared from Substack for a full month.

The version of me who set those January intentions would be furious.

The version of me sitting here today, at home outside Florence with my feet just out of the grass and the sun still on my face, is not.

She Who Returns, as a practice, names what I have been learning for years. Returning is the act of coming back, again, after you have gone. I went. I am coming back.

For the women who have been here from the beginning, who saw the Sunday Reflections appear and then disappear, thank you for being patient with me. For the women who are new, you are walking into the middle of a sentence I started writing years ago and have not finished.

Let me catch you up.

The first week of May, I had to be in LA briefly for work. Then I flew straight to Puerto Escondido, Mexico, for a week with my closest women for my bachelorette. I gave myself permission to be all the way in it. No emails. No work. No checking the platform. Just my women, the ocean, and the version of myself I wanted to walk into this next chapter as a wife.

I came home the next day and walked into a ten-day intensive cookbook shoot in my kitchen here in Florence. An incredible photographer. Recipe development with the kind of intention I had not given to my food in years. The slow pleasure of creating something with my hands. The photos turned out beautifully. Here is a glimpse of what those days actually looked like.

I had to be all the way in both of those things to do them well. Being all the way in them meant being out of everything else. The Sunday Reflections went quiet. The Practice went quiet. The whole space I hold in my head between posts went quiet too.

The shoot ended on June 2nd. Since then I have been catching up to everything that waited for me while I was inside that month. And here I am, finally, returning to this page.

What I have come to understand in the last week, after looking honestly at what those weeks asked of me, is that being all the way in two things and out of everything else was the only way to do either of them justice. The year is asking everyone, not only me, to be honest about what we are choosing. 2026 is a shedding year. We are in the Year of the Fire Horse, a 60-year cycle in Chinese astrology that asks for momentum from a body that knows itself. We are in Universal Year 1 numerologically, a brand new 9-year cycle, the seed year for everything that will unfold through 2034. And spiritually, the collective is in a moment of awakening I have not seen in my years of doing this work. People are decoding lifetimes of conditioning in months.

What 2026 is asking from you is that you become honest about who is doing the doing.

She Who Returns exists for that question. The work I have built over eight years and now teach to a community of 2.3 million women rests on one premise. Most women are living from programs they did not consciously choose. Programs about what they are worth, how hard they have to work to be loved, what a successful life is supposed to look like, who they are allowed to be when no one is watching. Those programs live in the mind, in the body, in the nervous system, in the energetic field. They drive the patterns and make the decisions. They are why the same kind of partner keeps appearing, why the same financial ceiling keeps holding, why the feeling of something just out of reach never quite resolves.

The work of She Who Returns is to help women come back to themselves. To see those programs clearly. To learn their unique energetic blueprint, their Human Design, their astrology, their numerology, their body’s wisdom. To design a life from who they actually are instead of from who they were told to be.

That is what this platform exists for. That is what I will be writing into here on Substack in the months ahead.

This Wednesday I am sending the first edition of The Forecast for paid subscribers. An honest read on the rest of June, the astrology of the Solstice on the 21st, the Year of the Fire Horse and Universal Year 1 in plain English, and a ritual you can use. The Forecast will be a monthly anchor here from now on.

Next Sunday, on the longest day of the year, I am writing into the thing I have not written about publicly yet. What it is to become a wife. What it asks of me. What the Solstice has to do with marriage, if anything.

And on Wednesday June 24, I am sending the full piece on the DECODE Method, the six-step framework I built over eight years and now teach inside the platform. We will get into what it is, how it works on the patterns and triggers showing up right now, and why the days after the Solstice are the right time to begin. If you have been waiting to understand the method behind She Who Returns, this is the post.

If you have been reading on the free tier and you have been on the fence about upgrading, this is the week. The Forecast and the DECODE post are both behind the paywall. A paid subscription is $8 a month or $72 a year. The annual is the better deal if you are planning to stay for the next chapter, which I hope you are.

This is the rhythm I am committing to. Sundays for the personal essay. Wednesdays for The Practice or The Forecast. The promise is consistency. The practice is returning.

I went. I am coming back.

If you would like to come with me, that is what this space is for.

If you are feeling the year ahead of you in your body, I want you to know you are not alone. We are halfway through 2026 and there is a moment that hits when you finally look up. The “I cannot believe it is already June” moment. I have been feeling it. The women in our community have been feeling it. You are right on time, even if it does not look the way you thought it would.

For some of you, this year has not gone the way you planned, and you are wondering how much time is left.

For others of you, this year has gone exactly the way you planned, and a quiet feeling is rising anyway, because the next thing on the list is the thing that was supposed to make you happy.

Both of those are normal. Both of those are part of being a woman in this body, in this time, on this path.

What I have learned, through years of doing this work and through being around women and men who have built everything they thought they wanted, is that the chasing rarely ends at the number we promise ourselves it will. It ends when we choose to be in gratitude for what we have already created and lived through.

That is what this midyear is offering you. Not a chance to start over. A chance to look back at the last six months and see her. The woman in January who set the intentions. The woman in March who got the first hard news. The woman in May who held it together when she did not feel like it. Look at her. Tell her thank you. She has done so much, and she rarely lets herself notice.

And one more thing I cannot say enough, because I needed to hear it for years before it finally landed.

Do not compare your journey to another woman’s.

The deeper I go into Human Design, astrology, and numerology, the more I see how truly unique each of us is. Different blueprints. Different timing. Different chapters of the same lifetime. The woman you are watching is on her path. You are on yours. There is so much freedom waiting on the other side of that surrender.

If you want to start seeing your own blueprint, take the free Cosmic Quiz I built. It maps your Human Design, your astrology, and your numerology into one snapshot so you can finally see what you have been working with all along.

Take the Cosmic Quiz

If you are looking for a way into the rest of this year that does not feel like more pressure, here are three soft invitations for the week ahead.

One. Make a gratitude inventory. Open a fresh page and let yourself list what you have lived through, built, or held together in the first half of this year. The big things and the small things. The launched project and the conversation you finally had. The morning you finally cried. The week you got through that you did not think you would. When the list is done, take a breath, and tell yourself thank you.

Two. Try a yes-or-no audit. At the top of a new page write “What am I no longer willing to keep saying yes to?” and let yourself write for five minutes without lifting your hand. Do not edit. The first answer is rarely the real answer, and the page knows what you have not let yourself say out loud yet.

Three. Pick one hour this week that belongs only to you. Not an hour you are doing for someone else. Yours. Block it. Protect it like you would protect a doctor’s appointment for a child you love. That is the practice of choosing yourself, and it is enough to start.

If this letter found you in the middle of something you have not been writing down for yourself yet, share it with one woman who needs to read it.

I would love to know:

What did you say you would do less of this year, and what did you do instead?

Tell me in the comments. I read every one.

With love (from a quieter morning than I have had in weeks),

Shayna

P.S. If you are new here, the best place to start is The Morning Practice That Saved My Nervous System and the Morning Practice Toolkit that followed it. Both are still up. Everything else builds from there.

If you read Sunday’s Reflection, you already know the philosophy. Your morning practice is how your nervous system stays regulated. Whether you’re at home in LA, on a farm in Italy, in a hotel in Mexico City, or somewhere in between, the same nine things in the same order tell your body where you are. They tell your body it is safe.

In February I shared a longer essay about the morning practice that saved my nervous system. Hundreds of you wrote in asking for the full protocol. The exact order. The brands. The products. The science. What to do when you only have ten minutes.

This is that toolkit.

Before we get into the nine steps, one thing worth naming up front, because it’s the thing I think most morning routine content gets wrong:

Body first. Mind second.

Most morning routines you’ll read online tell you to meditate first thing. To set intentions before you’ve had water. To journal before you’ve fed yourself. I tried versions of that for years. They didn’t work for me, and I don’t think they work for most women.

The body wakes up before the mind. The body wants water, minerals, light, food, and earth, in roughly that order. When you support the body first, you can actually meditate and journal without forcing it. When you try to force the mind to be still on a hungry, dehydrated, ungrounded body, you fight yourself for thirty minutes and call it a practice.

The order in this protocol is built around that one principle. Take care of the body. Then sit with the mind. Then plan the day.

Below you’ll find the full nine steps, in order. Each one with the biology behind it, the specific products and brands I use, the timing, and the mistake to avoid. Three versions of the practice for three different kinds of mornings. A travel-version troubleshooting guide for hotels and other people’s houses. A printable cheat sheet you can save to your phone. And an audio version of me walking you through it.

This is the practice that has held me through a Saturn Return, a major business loss, a transatlantic move, a long-distance relationship that became this engagement, and a cookbook deadline that is currently trying to kill me. It works.

It works for me. It will work for you.

Read more

By dinner that night I was in LA. By 9am Friday, sixteen hours after landing, I was at my doctor’s office in Santa Monica getting bloodwork drawn and an IV of glutathione and immunity nutrients dripping into my arm. By the time I walked out, my body felt better than it usually does on a Friday at home.

I’ve been traveling like this since my very early twenties. Hundreds of flights. Vacation, work, continents, time zones, very different rhythms of life. Long enough to learn what works and what doesn’t.

What I can tell you is that almost every time I’ve gotten jet lagged, the flight wasn’t the problem. It was something I did wrong on the first day.

When I follow the routine I’m about to share, I land, I sleep, I wake up the next morning at 6am, and I’m fine. Better than fine, sometimes. Some of my clearest mornings happen the day after a long flight.

When I don’t follow the routine, when I let myself nap on arrival or stay up too late that first night, I pay for it. Three or four days of feeling underwater. A nervous system that can’t tell what time zone it’s in. A body that wants to sleep at 4pm and be awake at 4am for half a week.

So I follow the routine.

Here’s exactly what it looks like.

Step 1. Get on your destination’s clock the moment you board the long-haul flight.

This is the most important rule and almost no one teaches it. Jet lag mostly comes from your body refusing to leave the time zone you started in. You can fix that mid-air.

Going from Europe to LA, the math runs one way. When I boarded my Munich to LA flight, it was already 3:30am LA time. So in LA terms, the only window where I should be asleep was the next hour or so. I gave myself that nap. One hour. Then I stayed up the entire rest of the flight (work, a movie, a meal, more work) exactly the way I would on a normal day in California.

By the time we landed in LA in the early evening, my body was already running on California time. It thought it had been awake all day and was getting tired right on cue.

Going the other direction, LA to Italy, the math flips. The flight usually leaves LA in the evening and lands in Europe in the morning. By the time we board, it’s already late at the destination. So instead of staying up, I sleep as much as I can on the plane. The whole flight if I can. Then I land, and the rule becomes the same one as always: do not crash, do not nap, ride the day out until a normal local bedtime.

Step 2. Bring your own food and your own matcha.

I don’t eat airplane food. I haven’t in years. On a long flight your body is already dealing with altitude, dryness, EMF, and hours of sitting still. The sodium and processed stuff they hand out makes all of that worse. So I pack my own.

What’s in my carry-on every flight:

Homemade trail mix. I make my own with pumpkin seeds, almonds, pecans, walnuts, goji berries, and dried coconut, plus whatever else is on my personal green list. I toast the nuts and seeds first because it gives them so much more flavor.

A quick note on the green list: a few years ago I did a specific immunity blood test that measures how your immune system reacts to different foods. It gave me a personal red, yellow, and green list, and the results have stayed consistent over time. I try to stay on my green list as much as I can, especially when I’m traveling and my gut is already taking a hit from the flight. If you want me to write a full piece on the test (what it is, where I got it, what it changed for me), tell me in the comments and I’ll add it to the calendar.

A protein bar, different brands depending on whether I’m in Italy or the US. (Specific brands coming in next week’s paid post.)

Dark chocolate.

Hydrolyzed water tablets. Flying dehydrates everything and these are the difference between landing tired and landing wrecked.

Fresh fruit that travels well. Bananas, pears, blueberries.

Beef jerky and meat sticks from Lineage, who also make great protein bars. They sent me a care package in Italy this time and it made the whole trip easier.

Pre-baked muffins, always gluten free, made before I leave when I have time. Egg muffins, blueberry muffins. They travel well and feel more like a real meal than a snack.

I also travel with my own matcha. Always. I bring my own because every other matcha I’ve tried sucks. Airport cafés serve dyed green sugar water. Even most “good” coffee shops use matcha that’s older or oxidized. I’d rather skip it than drink it badly.

I use the matcha from my own brand, Shayna’s Kitchen, which I source from a small farm in Uji, Japan I’ve been working with since 2019. I make it on the plane with hot water from the flight attendants. In airports I stop at any coffee shop and ask for hot water plus a warm unsweetened plant milk if they have one. I carry a small travel kit and make it right there. Either way, I get one consistent ritual no matter where I am.

This sounds small. It isn’t. The food and drinks you put in your body during a long flight either support your nervous system or stress it. I choose support every time.

Step 3. Do not nap on arrival, no matter how tired you are.

This is the part that’s hardest. You walk into the apartment, you smell the bed, and every cell in your body says just twenty minutes. It is a trap. A nap on arrival rewinds everything you just did on the plane and your body has no idea what time zone it’s in for the next three days.

So you power through. Going west, that means staying up until a normal LA bedtime. Going east, it means staying up until a normal Italian bedtime, but it also means not going out late that first night. Especially in Europe, the temptation is to meet friends for a long Italian dinner because you’re finally back. Don’t. Get to bed at a normal hour or you’ll sleep through the next day and pay for it for a week.

I stayed up until 8:30pm on Thursday in LA, completely fried, but I made it. I went to bed at a reasonable hour, slept through the entire night, and woke up the next morning at 6am feeling clear. My mind was online. My nervous system had picked a time zone and stuck with it.

The trick is being willing to be exhausted for one evening so you can be regulated for the rest of the trip.

Step 4. Do not skip your morning practice on the first day. Especially on the first day.

This is the same routine I run at home. Water before anything else. Tinctures and greens. Meditation, prayer, sun on my face. A real breakfast (protein, fiber, something warm) before any caffeine. My matcha after. The same nine things in the same order I do every morning.

When I do that, my body says oh, we’re home. It doesn’t matter that I’m 6,000 miles from the kitchen I usually do this in. The familiar carries me.

I also love that travel mornings tend to start early. Both directions, I’m usually up by 5 or 6am the first few days. That extra morning time, sun coming in, no one needing anything from me yet, is some of my most grounded time of the whole trip. I treat the early wake-ups as a gift, not a curse.

Step 5. Get your bare feet on the ground.

As soon as you can after you land, find a patch of grass, a beach, a piece of dirt, and stand on it barefoot. Ten minutes if you can. Five if that’s all you have.

Physical grounding after a flight does something my words can’t fully explain. The body regulates almost immediately. There’s research on it now, but my body knew before the science did. If I can’t get to grass, I’ll touch a tree, walk barefoot in a garden, anything to physically connect to the earth. It is the single fastest reset I know.

Step 6. Travel with a frequency box.

This is the one most people don’t know about. I travel with a frequency box that I keep on me during every flight and wherever I’m staying after. It blocks EMF and holds my body in a more regulated frequency the whole trip. You can change the setting depending on what you need (rest, energy, calm), which has been a game-changer for how my body actually feels during and after long flights.

Flying does a lot to the body we don’t always feel in the moment. Pressure changes. Recycled air. Low humidity. Hours surrounded by EMF and other people’s stress. Having a frequency box on me changes all of it.

I’ll share the exact one I use along with my full LA wellness stack in a paid post soon.

Step 7. Treat the first day or two as a body day.

Whenever I land back in LA, I treat the first couple of days as wellness days. Italy is many things, but it isn’t a place to get advanced bloodwork or IV therapy easily, and I miss that here. So when I’m in LA, I take advantage.

This Friday it was bloodwork and an IV drip with my doctor in Santa Monica. Next week it’ll be the bodywork, the lymphatic stuff, the foods I always restock, and a few other rituals I do every time I land.

I’ll share my full LA wellness stack in a paid post soon. The doctor I see, the IV protocol I get, the bodywork I book, the places I go for the foods and movement that bring me back online. The whole list with names, places, and links.

What I know now

After years of getting this wrong, I’ve come to understand that jet lag is mostly about how regulated you were before you got on the plane.

A dysregulated body that flies six hours stays dysregulated. A regulated body that flies fifteen hours snaps back into rhythm fast. The work happens in your kitchen at home, every morning. The plane just tests it.

This is also, I think, what She Who Returns has always been about. Not a place. Not a country. Not even a community. A returning to the part of yourself that doesn’t change when the geography does.

On Wednesday

Paid readers will get the full Morning Practice Toolkit. The entire 9-step protocol I just described, with the exact products and brands, the apps I use, a printable cheat sheet, an audio of me walking you through it, and a travel-version troubleshooting guide for hotel mornings.

I promised this for March 1st. It is now May. Here we are.

If you’ve been waiting for it, you can start a 7-day free trial before Wednesday and the toolkit will land in your inbox the moment it goes live.

In the meantime, I’d love to know:

What’s the one piece of your routine that holds you no matter where you are?

Tell me in the comments. I read every one.

Love,

Shayna

Not the gentle “maybe take it easy today” no. The full-system shutdown, I-can’t-do-this-anymore no.

I’m currently in Italy, but I’m flying to LA next week for work. Then straight to Mexico for my bachelorette. Then straight back to Italy for a 10-day cookbook shoot that can’t be rescheduled.

And by the end of every day, I’m completely wiped. Pushing myself past capacity. Feeling so overworked I could cry. My anxiety is through the roof. My Oura ring is screaming at me with stress scores I haven’t seen since 2019, back when I was running three businesses simultaneously while going through an 8-year breakup.

And I realized: I’m doing it again.

The pattern I thought I’d healed. The belief I thought I’d released. The thing I swore I’d never go back to.

I’m only worthy if I’m busy. I’m only valuable if I’m productive. I’m only successful if I’m doing it all.

And May 2026’s astrology? It’s calling bullshit on all of it.

The Cosmic Setup: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Portal

May 2026 is rare. Like, genuinely rare.

We have two full moons in one month, which doesn’t happen often. But what makes this even more significant is the timing and the signs they’re in:

May 1st: Full Moon in Scorpio (11°20 Scorpio) May 31st: Full Moon in Sagittarius (9°55 Sagittarius) - also a Blue Moon

Scorpio asks us to face what we’ve been avoiding. To look at the shadow. To release what’s been festering beneath the surface. It’s about transformation through letting go of control.

Sagittarius asks us to expand beyond our limitations. To seek truth. To release the beliefs and stories that keep us small.

Together, these two full moons are opening a portal for us to release overdoing, overgiving, and the toxic belief that our worth is tied to our productivity.

And if that wasn’t enough cosmic pressure, we’re also navigating:

• Pluto retrograde in Aquarius (started May 6th) asking us to question who our “changes” really benefit

• Mercury in Taurus squaring Pluto (May 5th) stripping conversations down to their core truth

• Mars in Aries squaring Jupiter in Cancer (May 4th) - the push-pull between action and nurturing

Oh, and let’s not forget the bigger picture:

We’re in the Year of the Fire Horse in Chinese astrology (started February 17, 2026). A year that comes around once every 60 years. A year of rapid momentum, bold action, independence, and... restlessness. The Fire Horse doesn’t do slow. It gallops. Fast.

And numerologically? 2026 is a Universal Year 1. A brand new 9-year cycle. Fresh starts. New beginnings. The seed year for everything that will unfold through 2034.

Translation: The universe is basically screaming at us to let go of old patterns and step into something entirely new.

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My Pattern: Worthy Only When Busy

Here’s what I’ve been grappling with all month.

I overloaded my schedule. She Who Returns is launching. Shayna Kitchen needs attention. I’m creating content. I have a cookbook shoot coming up that I can’t reschedule. I’m flying between countries - Italy to LA to Mexico and back to Italy - in the span of two weeks. I’m managing operations. I’m showing up for my community. I’m getting married soon and planning a bachelorette.

And somewhere in all of that, I completely lost myself.

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Negative thoughts. Stressful thoughts. The kind that want to hijack your whole day before you’ve even opened your eyes. She Who Returns launch stress. Shayna Kitchen inventory concerns. That email I haven’t sent. The thing I said yesterday that I’m now replaying on a loop.

You know the feeling.

A few years ago, I would have grabbed my phone immediately. Scrolled Instagram. Downed coffee. Pushed myself through an intense workout to “burn off” the anxiety. Carried that frantic energy into my entire day and wondered why I felt like I was constantly in fight-or-flight.

But this morning? I got up, looked at myself in the mirror, and said “I love you” three times. Then I said out loud: “It’s going to be the best day ever.”

And then I did my practice.

Because when your mind is already spinning before you’re even out of bed, that’s exactly when you need to ground yourself the most.

This is what a morning practice actually does. It doesn’t make the hard things disappear. It just gives you a way to handle them without completely losing it.

The Before: When Mornings Were Chaos

Let me take you back to 2019, when I was building the CBD company, launching Shayna Kitchen matcha, and working as a full-time content creator posting recipes as a holistic chef and nutritionist.

Three businesses. All at once. All requiring everything from me.

Oh, and I was also going through an 8-year breakup.

So yeah. My nervous system was having a time.

I would wake up already anxious. Grab my phone before I was fully conscious. Scroll through emails and DMs while still in bed. Chug coffee. Force myself through a stressful workout because I thought that’s what “discipline” looked like. And then I’d carry that activation, that cortisol spike, that chaos into my entire day.

I was running on adrenaline. Constantly. My nervous system thought everything was an emergency because I was treating everything like an emergency.

I couldn’t slow down. I didn’t know how.

The only practice I managed to commit to back then was the 5-Minute Journal. That’s it. Five minutes. And even that felt hard some days.

But those five minutes? They started to shift something. They led to five minutes of meditation. Which eventually led to more. Which eventually became what I’m about to share with you.

The Shift: Italy Taught Me I Could Choose

When I moved to Italy in 2022, after closing the CBD company and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars to people I trusted, I was burnt out in a way I didn’t fully understand yet.

Italy forced me to slow down. Life there just moves differently. You can’t rush an olive harvest. You can’t speed up the seasons. The entire culture operates on a rhythm that doesn’t give a shit about your American hustle mentality.

And I realized: I have the ability to create my schedule however I want. That’s the whole point of being an entrepreneur.

I didn’t have to wake up in chaos. I didn’t have to start my day reactive. I didn’t have to carry stress like a badge of honor.

I could choose something else.

So I did.

My Actual Morning Practice (The Real, Unfiltered Version)

Before I share this, I want to say: I know everyone’s life is different. I don’t have kids. I have the privilege of controlling my own schedule. Your mornings might look completely different than mine, and that’s okay.

But I do think making some sort of morning routine a priority is worth it, whatever that looks like for you. If you have kids, maybe that means waking up 30 minutes before they do. If you work a 9-5, maybe it’s just 10 minutes before you have to get ready. Find what works for your actual life.

Here’s what my mornings look like now, whether I’m in LA at my apartment, in Italy on the land, in a hotel, or anywhere else:

6:45am: Wake up (without an alarm when possible)

I’m a projector in Human Design, which means I need more rest than most people. Learning this completely changed how I approach not just work, but my entire life. I love my 9 hours of sleep. The lady in me needs that extra recovery, and I’m not apologizing for it anymore.

I also follow my circadian rhythm as much as possible, so I’m in bed by 10pm most nights.

First thing: Water

Before I even brush my teeth, I drink water. Rehydrate the system.

Skincare routine

This is part of the practice too. Intentional. Slow. Taking care of myself.

Tinctures and greens

I go downstairs and take my morning supplements, all tinctures right now, plus greens. Nourishing my body before I ask it to do anything.

Meditation and prayer

This is the core. I sit. I meditate. I pray. I talk to something bigger than myself, God, Creator, Universe, whatever you want to call it.

I try to get sun on my face if there’s any available, even if it’s just sitting by a window. Light matters.

Some days this is 10 minutes. Some days it’s 30. I use the Open app for guided meditations when I need support, but a lot of the time I just sit in silence and let whatever needs to come up, come up.

And I pray. I give my worries to the Creator. I remember I’m not carrying this alone. I surrender the illusion of control.

This part saves me from spiraling. Every single time.

Creating a sacred space

For the past 7 years, I’ve had a sacred space in my home that I come back to every morning. For me, it’s my coffee table. I sit on the floor. It’s simple, but it’s mine.

I keep my favorite things there: a non-toxic candle, incense, palo santo, sage, crystals. Whatever feels good that day. It doesn’t have to be fancy or Instagram-worthy. It just needs to be a space that feels peaceful, somewhere your nervous system knows it can relax.

Having this one dedicated spot matters more than I can explain. When I sit down there, my body knows what’s about to happen. It’s like a signal to my nervous system: we’re safe here. We’re grounding now.

You don’t need a whole room or some elaborate altar. Just one corner. One spot. Somewhere you can return to.

Gut-loving breakfast

Eggs, protein, fiber. I eat to nourish, not to restrict or punish. My gut has been my greatest spiritual teacher (whole other article), so I feed it well.

Matcha

Then, and only then, do I have my matcha. Not coffee. Not first thing. After I’ve grounded, after I’ve eaten, after I’ve connected.

Journaling

If I have time before work starts, I journal. Sometimes it’s stream of consciousness. Sometimes it’s prompts. Sometimes it’s just processing whatever came up in meditation.

Movement (varies by day)

Some days I work out before diving into work. Some days I move later. I lift weights three times a week. I walk. Right now I’m obsessed with “The Class” in LA for shamanic dancing.

Every day is different based on my schedule, but I always try to fit in movement daily. It’s how I process energy that gets stuck in my body.

Then (and only then) do I look at my phone

Usually around 8am or later. After I’ve had at least an hour and a half of nothing. Of just being. Of grounding into myself before the world gets its hands on me.

This is the practice. It’s not perfect. It’s not Instagrammable every day. But it works.

What Happens When I Skip It

I track everything with my Oura ring, mostly for cycle tracking, but it’s also been incredibly helpful for tracking stress and sleep. And let me tell you, the data doesn’t lie.

When I skip my morning practice, my stress levels spike throughout the day. I don’t handle challenges as well. I’m more reactive. More easily triggered. More likely to spiral into worst-case-scenario thinking.

My body knows the difference.

And honestly? So does everyone around me. My partner knows how important this practice is. When we first started dating, he was so supportive of giving me space for my slow mornings. He never made me feel weird about it or like I was being high-maintenance.

And now? He meditates too. On his own. I never asked him to. Never pushed it. But he saw the ripple effect in me and started his own practice. Sometimes he even beats me to it when we’re traveling together, which I absolutely love.

That’s what happens when you commit to something that actually changes you. People notice. Not because you’re telling them to meditate or trying to convert them, just because you’re calmer, more grounded, less reactive.

The Tools That Actually Help

Here’s what’s in my actual toolkit:

• Open app for guided meditation and breathwork

• 5-Minute Journal (where it all started)

• My regular journal (nothing fancy, just a notebook)

• Oura ring for tracking sleep, cycle, and stress

• Tinctures and greens (I’m very specific about gut health)

• Sunlight (free, incredibly powerful)

• My voice (literally talking to myself in the mirror, saying “I love you,” telling myself it’s going to be the best day ever)

• Prayer (talking to something bigger than me)

• A sacred space (my coffee table where I sit on the floor, with candles, incense, palo santo, sage, crystals)

• Time (the most important one, giving myself at least 1.5 hours before work)

None of this is expensive. None of it requires special equipment or a perfect setup. It just requires commitment.

This Morning (And Why I’m Telling You This)

So back to this morning, when I woke up with my mind spinning.

I could have let those thoughts take over. Could have grabbed my phone. Could have spiraled into stress and carried it through my whole day.

Instead, I got up. I looked at myself in the mirror. I said “I love you” three times. I told myself it was going to be the best day ever.

And then I did the practice.

Drank water. Skincare. Tinctures. Meditation. Prayer. Sun on my face. Breakfast. Matcha. Journaling.

By the time I sat down to write this, the negative thoughts had shifted. Not gone, just not in control anymore. I’d given my worries to something bigger. I’d remembered I don’t have to carry everything alone.

The practice worked. Again.

What I Want You to Know

You don’t need to copy my routine exactly. Your morning is going to look different than mine, and it should.

But here’s what I know: Everyone needs something to ground them. Whether you’re building a business, working a 9-5, raising kids, going through a breakup, or just trying to make it through the week without losing your mind.

Something that helps regulate your nervous system. Something that gives you space to remember who you are before the world starts pulling at you.

Start small. Maybe it’s just five minutes with a journal, like it was for me. Maybe it’s just water before coffee. Maybe it’s one deep breath before you grab your phone.

Just start somewhere.

The way you begin your day really does set the tone for everything else.

Want the complete Morning Practice Toolkit? I’m creating an expanded guide for paid subscribers launching March 1st, with meditations, journal prompts, troubleshooting guides, and all my favorite resources. Become a subscriber (box below) and you’ll be the first to know when it goes live.

And as always, if this resonated, I’d love to hear about your morning practice (or lack thereof) in the comments. What works for you? What doesn’t? What are you struggling with? Let’s talk about it.

This is the longest I’ve been in LA since I moved to Italy in 2022, and honestly? It feels strange. Good strange. Like I’m holding two versions of myself at once, the one who ran away to Italian olive groves to heal, and the one who’s back here in the chaos, building something completely new, feeling more aligned than I have in years.

But let me back up, because if we’re going to talk about entrepreneurship, we need to talk about the whole thing. Not just the highlight reel.

The Part Where I Built Something Beautiful (And Got Robbed)

Most of you know Shayna Kitchen, my matcha from Uji Japan, and olive oil company, born from my actual land in Umbria, Italy. What you might not know is that back in 2020, around the same time I was planting those seeds, I launched a CBD company.

And I loved it. Like, loved it.

I showed up to every part of the process, seed, sprout, farm, extraction, formulation. I wanted people to understand how powerful hemp could be when it’s done with care, and how toxic it could be when it’s not. I was obsessed. It was pure passion, the kind that wakes you up at 5am excited to work.

We had so much success. Customers who swore by the products. People asking when we’d restock. The kind of community you dream of building.

And then in 2022, right after I moved to Italy, the farmers I was in business with stole a few hundred thousand dollars from me.

I’m just going to let that sit there for a second.

A few. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars.

The timing was strategic on their end, they knew I wasn’t going to fly back to the States to fight them in court. I was across the ocean, starting a new life, vulnerable in all the ways that matter. And they took advantage of that.

It felt like the biggest betrayal. Like I’d poured my heart into this thing, into these relationships, into showing people the beauty of this plant, and in return? A massive stab in the back.

I had to close the company. Customers reached out constantly asking if I’d bring it back. Part of me wanted to. Part of me still does sometimes.

But here’s what I realized when I was deep in that grief and rage and confusion: I was already on my way to burnout. I had no idea what actually lit me up anymore because I was just... surviving. Performing. Pushing.

So I closed it. And honestly? It took me a long time to stop feeling like I’d given up or let them win. But eventually I understood, I wasn’t giving up. I was choosing what I had energy for. I was choosing to not pour myself into something that had been poisoned.

The Thing About Being Your Own Boss That No One Tells You

Here’s the real talk: when you’re an entrepreneur, you are the only one who will show up and get things done.

Not in the inspirational quote way. In the “it’s 11pm and the website crashed and you have a launch tomorrow and there’s no one to call” way. In the “you’re sick but payroll is due” way. In the “everyone else gets to clock out and you’re still thinking about conversion rates at dinner” way.

You are the accountability. The motivation. The problem-solver. The cheerleader. The one who has to keep going when everything feels impossible.

And your nervous system? Oh, your nervous system is going to have opinions about this.

I cannot stress enough how much harder nervous system regulation becomes when you decide to build your own thing. Your body is constantly in a state of low-level activation, always scanning for threats, always ready to respond, always vigilant. Because when you’re the boss, the stakes feel existential. If you don’t show up, nothing happens.

This is where you need your spiritual toolbox. And I mean that, you actually need it. Not as a nice idea or something to post about. As real tools that keep you functional.

For me, that’s my morning practice. And I’m not talking about needing hours, honestly, a 5-minute meditation is better than no meditation, and some days that’s all I’ve got. I love using the Open app for meditation and breathwork when I need guidance. But what I mean is: a real, committed practice of grounding myself before the day gets its hands on me.

Meditation (even short ones). Journaling. Grounding, literally putting my bare feet on the earth when I can. Connecting with my inner world before I connect with my inbox.

And prayer. Or if that word doesn’t land for you, talking to something bigger than yourself. God, Creator, Universe, Source, whatever feels true. Because when you feel like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, you need to remember: you’re not.

Pray more. Trust more. Give it to a higher power.

This isn’t about bypassing the hard work or avoiding responsibility. It’s about remembering you’re not doing this alone. Even when it feels like you are.

Four Businesses (And What They’ve Taught Me)

So let me give you the full picture:

The CBD company taught me about betrayal, boundaries, and letting go. It taught me that passion isn’t always enough. That you can do everything right and still get burned. And that sometimes closing something is the most powerful choice you can make.

The agriculture company in Italy, my land, my olive trees, my literal roots in Umbrian soil, taught me about patience. About building something that will outlive me. About connecting to the earth in a way that makes all the online chaos make sense.

Shayna Kitchen taught me how to blend worlds. How to take something ancient (olive oil, matcha, traditional practices) and make it accessible. How to build a brand that feels like an extension of who I actually am.

And now She Who Returns, my newest baby, my true calling, is teaching me about the future. About building something that actually feels aligned with who I am and what I’m here to do. About creating a space for women to come back to themselves.

She Who Returns (To Herself)

The name of my new business isn’t an accident.

“She Who Returns” is about coming back. Coming back to yourself after burnout. After betrayal. After losing your way. After building things that weren’t quite right. After running away to Italy and then coming back to LA and realizing both places are home.

It’s about the return to your intuition. Your power. Your knowing.

She Who Returns is an online community for women who love spirituality, personal growth, and meaningful connection. It’s a space to gather, explore, laugh, reflect, and evolve together—without pressure to be broken or in a crisis to belong.

This is for the woman who’s curious, self-aware, and open-hearted. She wants to deepen her relationship with herself, connect with other like-minded women, and move through life with more presence, pleasure, and purpose.

Inside, you’ll find live new moon and full moon gatherings that feel ritualistic, nourishing, and fun. Meditations and embodied practices to help you feel more grounded, open, and connected. Workshops and conversations around spirituality, self-growth, relationships, and inner power—shared in an accessible, real way. Guest teachers and facilitators bringing fresh perspectives and tools you can actually use. And a warm, conscious sisterhood where connection, honesty, and expansion are the foundation.

She Who Returns is a place to come back to yourself, and to each other. To grow, explore, soften, expand… and enjoy the journey while doing it.

& she’s launching to the public Feb 20, 2026 (eeeee, im so excited)

Because here’s what I know now that I didn’t know in 2020 when I was building that CBD company with my whole heart:

The ugly parts are part of it. The betrayals, the failures, the closed businesses, the 2am panic spirals, the moments where you question everything, they’re not detours. They’re the path.

Every entrepreneur who makes it look easy on Instagram? They have these moments too. They just don’t post them.

But I’m posting mine. Because I think we need more honesty about what this actually takes.

What It Actually Takes

It takes a morning practice that you commit to like your life depends on it (because your nervous system does).

It takes spiritual tools that ground you when everything feels chaotic.

It takes a relationship with something bigger than yourself, so you can surrender the illusion of control and trust that you’re being guided.

It takes learning when to hold on and when to let go. When to fight and when to walk away. When to push and when to rest.

It takes surrounding yourself with people who won’t steal from you (literally and energetically).

It takes knowing that you’re the only one who will show up, and showing up anyway.

And it takes returning. Again and again and again. To yourself. To your vision. To your calling.

Even when it would be easier to quit.

Why I Keep Building

Someone asked me recently why I keep doing this. Why I keep starting businesses when I’ve been burned. Why I keep putting myself out there when it’s vulnerable and exhausting and sometimes feels impossible.

And the truth is: I don’t know how not to.

This is who I am. I’m a builder. A creator. Someone who sees what could exist and can’t rest until it does.

But it’s different now than it was in 2020. I’m not building from depletion anymore. I’m not building from proving anything. I’m not building from fear.

I’m building from overflow. From alignment. From this quiet, steady knowing that this is my path.

She Who Returns is my true calling, I feel it in my bones. And Shayna Kitchen is my love letter to the earth. And my land in Italy is my anchor. And all of it together is this beautiful, messy, imperfect ecosystem of who I am and what I’m here to do.

So if you’re reading this and you want to start something of your own, do it. Please do it.

But do it with your eyes open. Do it with a morning practice. Do it with spiritual tools in your back pocket. Do it with people you trust. Do it with the understanding that it’s going to be hard and beautiful and devastating and incredible, often in the same day.

And when it gets heavy (and it will), remember: you’re not carrying this alone.

Give it to something bigger. Trust the process. Return to yourself.

That’s the whole thing, really.

Over the past year, a lot has shifted for me. Some of it I noticed immediately, and some of it took much longer to understand. There wasn’t a single moment that I can think of that hit the most. It was more of a gradual process of noticing what no longer worked and paying closer attention to what my body and intuition were asking for.

2025 has been a transformative year for many people. For those who are more sensitive, intuitive, or spiritually connected, it has been especially hard to ignore what feels out of alignment. There has been less tolerance for forcing things, pushing through discomfort, or staying in situations that no longer feel honest.

For me, this year has been deeply connected to the integration phase of a very intense Saturn return. (Im now 33 years old.) What that experience taught me is that growth is not always about building more. Sometimes it is about recognizing when something you worked hard to create no longer reflects who you are. That realization can be confusing, especially when there is pride, effort, and identity tied to what you are letting go of.

There is also a form of grief that comes with outgrowing parts of your life that once felt meaningful. That grief does not mean you made a wrong choice. It usually means you are changing.

Read more

But my gut was falling apart.

Bloating that lasted all day. Digestive issues that made me dread meals. Fatigue that no amount of sleep fixed. Anxiety that lived in my stomach like a permanent knot. I’d lie awake wondering what I was doing wrong. I was eating cleaner than ever. I was working out. I was “taking care of myself.”

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see the truth: my body wasn’t broken because of what I was eating. It was breaking because of what I was living.

That relationship, even though it held real love, had been emotionally intense, high highs, low lows, constant adrenaline. Leaving it was necessary, but it was also grief, identity shift, survival mode on overdrive. My nervous system had been running on cortisol for years. And no green juice in the world can heal a body that doesn’t feel safe.

That period in LA—when everything looked healthiest on paper, was actually when my gut was at its absolute worst. And it became my greatest spiritual teacher.

It took me almost eight years to piece together my gut health puzzle. Eight years of trial and error, elimination diets, supplements stacked like Jenga towers, and endless doctor visits that left me with more questions than answers. I’d feel better for a stretch, energy up, bloating down, only to crash back into symptoms that felt like betrayal. Four steps forward, three steps back, over and over. I was so focused on the “what” (food, toxins, microbes) that I missed the “why” staring me in the face: nervous system regulation.

This was the absolute key to my healing, the missing link that unlocked everything else. My body had been wired for fight or flight since I was a little girl—survival mode from a chaotic childhood, carried into intense relationships, a high-pressure LA life, and even the stress of building my own world after leaving it all. It became comfortable there, like an old habit you don’t even notice until it starts breaking you. Getting out wasn’t a quick fix; it was a slow, patient unraveling. Learning to soften, to breathe into safety, to let my system downshift from constant alert to rest and digest. Without that foundation, no amount of bone broth or probiotics could stick. My gut couldn’t heal in a body that felt under threat.

And here’s where the science gets fascinating: the gut-brain axis. It’s this bidirectional superhighway between your brain and your digestive system, connected by the vagus nerve, hormones, and trillions of microbes. When stress hits (chronic or acute), your brain signals “danger,” and your gut responds by shutting down non-essentials like proper digestion. Blood flow diverts to muscles for “fight or flight,” stomach acid production drops, and motility slows. It’s a brilliant survival mechanism short-term, but long-term? It creates chaos.

That’s why it’s so common for stressed-out bodies to struggle with breaking down food—we literally can’t produce enough hydrochloric acid or enzymes when cortisol is spiking. Undigested particles slip through, feeding the wrong bacteria or letting pathogens set up shop. Things like candida, SIBO, or leaky gut thrive in that environment, causing inflammation that loops back to more stress, more symptoms. For me, it was a vicious cycle until I addressed the root: regulating my nervous system to signal “safe” to my gut.

Yes, moving to Italy was truly the beginning of it all for me. It started teaching me how to slow down in a way I never knew I needed. I built this morning routine that actually let me connect with myself first, before anything else. And that’s when I really saw how bad my anxiety had been. Being out here in the quiet countryside, with nothing but nature around me, it all came up. No more endless online shopping or ordering food with one click like in the US. Everything just became more intentional. The way I ate, moved, rested. I finally wanted to tend to that anxious side of myself I’d been pushing through for years.

Grounding my feet in the grass or soil every day turned into something I craved. There’s real science showing how it calms inflammation and the nervous system, but mostly it just felt good. Journaling and meditation helped me reflect without rushing. And now breathwork is my favorite thing. It shifts stagnant energy, supports the gut through the vagus nerve, and opens up my lungs like nothing else.

Once I had these in place, the food and supplement shifts actually started to work. Here are some of the simple things that helped me most—stuff anyone can try right now if they’re dealing with gut stuff:

• Homemade bone broth daily. I usually do chicken bones—it’s soothing for the gut lining and full of good minerals. My recipes are all on shaynaskitchen.com if you want them.

  BONE BROTH RECIPE

• Olive oil and lemon shot first thing when I wake up. Gentle way to wake up digestion and support the liver.

• Glutathione and probiotics that I trust. They helped with oxidation and rebuilding my microbiome. I’ll link my favorites below.
  

  SUPPLIMENTS HERE

• Cutting gluten, dairy, corn, and processed sugars for a while, especially when symptoms were rough. I was strict when I needed the reset, and now I have real sourdough, goat or sheep cheese, and natural sugars here and there without problems.

• A solid collagen every day. Great for gut repair and that inner glow. Link to my go-to below.

  COLLAGEN I LOVE

• Focusing on nutrient-dense meals with plenty of fiber to feed good bacteria, protein for building, and healthy fats for balance.

And honestly, the one thing I wish I’d done sooner: get a GI Map test. It’s a deep stool analysis that shows your microbiome, pathogens, inflammation—everything. No more guessing with random protocols. It gave me the clarity I needed after all those years.

If you want to get a GI Map and have an amazing holistic healer, my dear friend Dr Gioffre is THE BEST.
You can get a GI MAP and work with him here.

GI MAP TEST

Looking back, my gut really was my greatest spiritual teacher. It didn’t just show me what foods or supplements worked. It showed me where I wasn’t safe in my own body, where I was still running on old survival energy, and how to finally come home to myself. Healing digestion opened up so much more: clearer intuition, deeper trust in life’s timing, and this quiet radiance that comes from feeling regulated inside. It’s not perfect every day, but it’s real. And it’s possible for all of us when we start listening.

This is the first in a little series I’m sharing here—reclaiming the parts of ourselves that survival mode took. Next, I’ll open up about finding my voice again through writing (something I never thought I’d do with dyslexia). If that’s calling to you, stay tuned.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments: Which practice or tip from this post are you feeling drawn to try first? Or what’s one way stress has shown up in your gut lately? I read and reply to every single one—it feels like we’re in this together.

It’s kind of wild to look back now and realize how many lives I feel like I’ve lived already, how many chapters I’ve moved through, how many versions of myself have existed by this age. And even though my life isn’t exactly where I once imagined it would be, I can sit in so much gratitude for the path I’ve been on. I feel genuinely happy, peaceful, grounded in a way that’s new for me. I understand my body now, what it needs, how it reacts, how it tells me when something isn’t right. I understand how I function, how I work, how I make money, and how important it is for me to actually feel regulated while doing all of it.

A lot of this understanding came through spirituality, especially astrology and human design, and later the Gene Keys, which I’ll share more about another time. They helped me understand myself in a way I never had before, and gave language to things I had felt in my body for a long time but didn’t know how to name.

I was really young when my life changed in a very public way. At 21, I got into a serious relationship with a very well-known person in the States, and for most of my twenties, I was defined through that relationship whether I wanted to be or not. The relationship itself held a lot of love and beauty, but it was also emotionally intense, with really high highs and really low lows. I don’t think I realized at the time how much that intensity was shaping my sense of self.

Read more

Many of you have been with me for years, mostly through Instagram or TikTok, watching pieces of my life unfold one square at a time. I’m deeply grateful for that space, for the community, for the women who’ve grown with me, and for the unexpected path I stepped into when I became a full-time content creator back in 2020. Sometimes I look back and feel like I’ve lived ten different lifetimes in the past six years. So many chapters, some witnessed, some held quietly, some I’m still making sense of.

Sharing your life online is a strange experience. People see so many pieces of you, and yet it’s still only a fraction of who you are. The part that’s easy to talk about. The part you’ve already walked through enough times to explain clearly. And then there are the pieces no one sees, the things you’re healing or questioning or growing through in real time. There were parts of my life I kept to myself for a while because I was still going through them. I didn’t have the words yet. I was still trying to understand what they meant to me.

As the months passed, I realized I wasn’t the same woman I had been. Nothing about this shift was gentle. My Saturn Return came in like a full-body initiation. It lasted longer than I ever imagined and pulled apart everything I thought I knew about myself. It was uncomfortable, confronting, heartbreaking at times, and it cleared the way for who I am now. I’ll share more about that journey in another post because it deserves its own space.

All of this created a kind of internal reset for me. A deep reevaluation of how I show up, what I share, and what I actually want my work to feel like. I’ve grown so much behind the scenes, and I’ve felt this quiet insistence inside me, a calling to be more honest, more expressive, more spacious with the things I’ve lived through and learned. I’m ready to bring more of myself forward in a way that feels grounded and true.

Also, a little surprise for you, I’m writing a book.
A spiritual lifestyle cookbook that I’m creating with Hay House.
It still feels surreal to say that out loud. This project has stretched me, softened me, and made me fall in love with writing in a way I didn’t expect. I’m genuinely proud of myself for stepping into this new chapter. It asked me to slow down, to sit with my thoughts long enough to really hear them. It reminded me how much I love sharing the tiny, meaningful moments that make up a life, the rituals, the food, the inner work, the spirituality woven into daily rhythms. It all began to show me a new way of speaking, a new way of sharing.

Eventually, I realized I needed a different kind of home for my voice. A space that wasn’t rushing me. A space where I didn’t have to compress myself into short clips or two-sentence captions. A space where depth wasn’t something I had to fight for. A space where I could breathe and actually say what I mean.

Substack feels like that home.

I want to write about things that deserve time, healing, gut health, nervous system support, spirituality, food as ceremony, the rituals that bring us back to ourselves. These aren’t things that belong inside fast-paced platforms. They belong to the slower parts of life, to reflection, to honesty, to women who want to understand themselves more deeply.

So if you’re here, reading this first letter, thank you. Truly. It means you’re willing to meet me in a new way, one that’s more spacious and more intimate. I want this space to feel like a journal you open when you need grounding. A letter from a friend. A moment of stillness in the middle of a noisy world.

This feels like the beginning of a chapter I’ve been preparing for quietly for a long time.
I’m grateful you’re here to step into it with me.

With love,
Shayna