Episode 16- You Can’t Heal the Land While Ignoring Yourself

If you’re drawn to regenerative agriculture, it’s likely because you want more than better soil—you’re here to heal the land, nourish your community, and build a meaningful life. But what happens when your old habits, mindsets, and stress patterns follow you onto the land?

In this deeply personal episode, Christine Martin shares the biggest lesson from over a decade of land stewardship: you can’t grow thriving roots in fractured soil—and you can’t build a thriving operation from a fractured sense of self.

We often focus on grazing plans, soil health, and inputs, but leave out the most powerful leverage point in our system: ourselves.

You'll hear:

• Why burnout, over-efforting, and “tool-in-the-shed” thinking are signs of deeper disconnection
• How unresolved grief, urgency, and outdated beliefs sabotage land plans
• The hidden human weak link in many regenerative systems—and how to address it
• Why true regenerative stewardship starts with healing your own relationship to time, money, and control

Whether you're new to land stewardship or ten years in, this episode is a compassionate reminder that stewardship is sacred—and that presence matters more than perfection.

 “The land doesn’t just need your plans. It needs your presence.”

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Your land is speaking. Are you listening? 🎙

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• Reading Your Land for Profit, Resilience, and Regeneration
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Let's make regenerative ranching and farming more intentional, profitable, and fulfilling. I’d love to hear your biggest takeaway from this episode—DM me on Instagram or schedule a call to chat about it!

Connect with Christine Martin:
Website: https://thrivinglandsteward.com
Email: info@thrivinglandsteward.com

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the regenerative agriculture, thriving as a modern rancher, the podcast for ranchers and land stewards looking to build healthy land, profitable businesses, and a fulfilling life. Join us as we explore regenerative practices and holistic management to help you thrive in today's ranching world.

Christine: 0:20

We're told that if we just follow regenerative agriculture principles, focus on soil health graze, right? Plant cover crops, everything will work out. But what if that's not true? What if you, your clarity, your healing, your wholeness are the key piece missing from your land plan? Welcome back to Regenerative Agriculture, thriving as a Modern Rancher. Today's episode might hit a little differently because we're not talking about grazing plans or pasture health. We're talking about your health, your wholeness, your inner alignment, because here's the truth, you can't grow thriving roots in fractured soil, and you can't build a thriving operation from a fractured sense of self. Let's talk about what's actually happening. You're checking off all the boxes, focusing on Soil health check, rotating the livestock, check monitoring, sort of making a profit, working on it, feeling exhausted, reactive, chaotic, and unsure anyway. Also, check. If you're drawn to regenerative agriculture, it's because you care about more than just production. You wanna heal the land, nourish your community, and grow real food that matters. But here's the truth, most people skip. You can't regenerate the land if you're disconnected from yourself. You can't build health and wholeness around you while carrying mindsets and habits shaped by urgency, control, or disconnection. The very patterns that created the problems you're trying to solve. Your hard work isn't the issue. The lack of inner clarity is this is the part we leave open self neglect. You want peace, profit, time with your family, a thriving landscape, but your days are packed with unfinished projects. You're chasing problems. Instead of planning with purpose, you're treating yourself just like another tool in the tool shed. Something to be used and not tended to. That kind of reactive, hustle driven management won't get you where you wanna go. It's like trying to repair a broken fence while standing in quicksand. No matter how hard you work, you're still sinking until you shift how you approach the work. Starting with yourself, you're gonna keep spinning your wheels without integrating your whole self, emotionally, spiritually, physically, you won't move forward. Here's the real reason you've separated yourself from the system. You've internalized that your value is in your output, not your alignment. We've internalized the belief that personal needs are separate from land needs, that emotions are distractions, that stewardship means self-sacrifice. But the holistic management framework includes the people piece most folks just gloss over it. We teach holistic management as a framework, but rarely live it as a way of being. Your body, emotions and intuition are part of that communication. Imagine trying to fix a broken wheel by adjusting the spokes while the hub is shattered. You're the hub, the center, if you're fractured. No amount of spoke adjustment, no grazing plan, no soil amendment is gonna make the wheel turn smoothly. Another example, you've seen ranchers who had all the tools, all the education, but couldn't move forward. Why? Because deep down, they didn't believe they were capable or they were carrying grief or shame, or simply had no clarity around their true vision. I've seen people with the best grazing plans fail. I. I've seen people with chaotic startups thrive because they were deeply aligned with themselves and their land as a steward we're part of the ecosystem, not an outsider controlling it. The most effective land stewards I've worked with weren't just managing landscapes. They were managing themselves with honesty, alignment, and deep listening. The answer to all this true holistic management means bringing your whole self to the land. Not just your skills, but your story, your healing, your gifts, your timing, stewardship is sacred. Your relationship with the land is a mirror when your whole, your land can be too. I know you've heard this in other episodes, and I've said it several times in this episode, but through the school of hard knocks, I have understood and I have incorporated this knowledge that as a land steward, we are in relationship with nature and because we are in relationship with nature and we're listening to nature. We are getting responses that will eventually, depending on how stubborn you are and how prideful you are, will eventually show you that you must change. You must change how you think. You must change how you see, you must change how you behave. When I first started my land stewardship journey, I felt I can control everything. I felt that I had this vision, and if I implemented all these steps and did all the right things, then I was gonna achieve that dream. That dream was gonna become real. The reality is that, did not happen. I spent lots and lots of my corporate salary on implementing all this these things, and. Really didn't have anything to show for it when. I recognized that I was in relationship, that I needed to read nature and then adjust my management accordingly when I was making my financial plan for the year, and I forecasted how much I was gonna produce, whether it was beef, whether it was poultry, right? And then Mother Nature, there was an event, I had predator issues and that income didn't come in. We have to adapt, we have to keep looking at things. And the biggest lesson that I've taken from this sacred relationship that we have with nature is that there were a lot of things that I was doing that was not helping me. The first one that I've already mentioned is my mindset that I can control things. We are not in control when it comes to Mother Nature. We're in relationship, so we need to be able to respond and just like our relationship with our partners or our family, right? When we hear some hard truths, we need to, sit down and listen and internalize it, and then determine how we're gonna react to that. What change needs to be implemented, what communication needs to be implemented. I recognize now that. 10 years, because it is been 10 years since I've decided that, my stewardship was gonna be for profit rather than being a hobby that I was sinking all my corporate salary on. That, I couldn't control, I. And so I had to adapt that mindset to recognize that relationship that I, needed to respond and my management needed to be constantly adaptive. I also had to recognize that when I get stressed, I, tend to disassociate. That does not bode well for land stewardship, right? Because there are a lot of stressful factors. When, we tend to the land and if we disassociate and we don't address the problem and we ignore things and we don't pay attention to things eventually that's gonna bite us in the buttocks. I also had to recognize that I had a money story that was affecting me. I had no problem with selling my items. But my money story was affecting how much I was actually saving. I was making the profit, but I wasn't necessarily saving that profit and, recognizing that and working on that money story so that I went from scarcity to abundance and changing how I was thinking about money was improving, the bank balance. So I share this with you because it's been the biggest lesson that I've had in my land stewardship. The holistic management framework does a fabulous job of. trying to manage the complexity of managing the ecology, managing the financial, and managing the human, but we don't spend enough time on the human component, right? The bottom line is humans make all the decisions. And if we're looking at things in an incorrect fashion, if we're bringing our own habits, if we're bringing our own condition tendencies, those decisions will be affected. So we need to go back and. do a lot of introspection, a lot of healing, a lot of mindset change. Possibly some education, possibly counseling, therapy. All of the above will help us be much more effective land stewards. And the beautiful thing too, that is, if you can do this for yourself, you can help others within your community who are also stewarding land, start recognizing this. And a lot of that frustration, a lot of that stress, a lot of the, despair that I see within my clients are much easier to address when we recognize what the root cause is and many times that root cause is our own self.

Christine Martin: 10:17

So here's some starting points for you to consider. Review your holistic goal or context. Does it reflect your truth? Does it reflect your values? Have you stated what your dream for your land stewardship is? Practice self-monitoring. Just like you do your land monitoring, just like you do your livestock monitoring. How are you feeling? What is causing you stress? What are you avoiding? Ask yourself, where am I outta sync with nature's rhythm? Right? Are we trying to force things to suit our schedule? Or are we working with nature? What stress is that causing seek guidance or community that supports your growth, not just your management. It's okay to ask for help. It's okay to see somebody about your grief. It's okay to talk to somebody about your stress. You don't need another spreadsheet. You need inner stillness. You need honesty. You need connection with yourself. Stewardship is sacred. Your relationship with the land is a mirror. When you're whole, your land can be too. I wanna remind you. You can't heal the land while ignoring yourself. The land doesn't just need your plans, it needs your presence. If this resonated, reach out. Send me a message on Instagram at the Thriving Land steward. Tag me on your social or share your story with me, and if you want support in integrating you into your land plan, my mentorship program is here for that too. Until next time, be kind to your land and be kind to yourself.

12:02

Thanks for listening to Regenerative Agriculture, thriving as a modern rancher. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, share with fellow ranchers and leave a review. Together we can regenerate our lands, our profits, and our lives. Until next time, keep thriving.