Survival Body Chemistry: Creating the Conditions for Real Healing

In this episode I'm introducing a concept I've been circling for years and finally have language for: survival body chemistry. It's not a diagnosis. It's not something wrong with you. It's what happens when a body has spent so long adapting to difficult conditions — mold, trauma, grief, financial stress, broken sleep, chronic undernourishment — that survival becomes the priority instead of repair.

I walk through what that actually looks like physiologically — why digestion gets less efficient, why sleep gets lighter, why hormones get less resilient, why some systems overcompensate while others quietly run on empty. None of it means your body failed. It means your body got incredibly good at surviving conditions that never fully resolved.

I also get into why I don't believe in one-size-fits-all protocols, even when two people have nearly identical patterns on paper. The same physiological need can show up completely differently depending on the person, their pace, their capacity, their history — which is why I think the real work is creating conditions and then learning to steward them, not matching someone to a fixed plan.

Along the way I talk about my own garden, the herbs I grow and forage with regularly, my son's relationship with plants like mullein and sage, and why I think we've gotten backwards about using herbs only as emergency rescue instead of daily relationship. I also bring back the seven pillars — light, air, water, movement, nourishment, connection, purpose — as a reminder that none of these work in isolation. They're not seven boxes to check. They're one interconnected ecosystem.

This episode is a little more musing and unfolding than some of my others — less thesis statement, more real-time thinking out loud. If you've been waiting for proof that your healing work is actually doing something, or wondering why your body keeps producing the same pattern over and over, I think this one will speak to you.

If something in this episode lands for you, I'd love to hear about it. You can DM me through the link in the show notes, comment on Spotify, or leave a review on iTunes — it genuinely helps other people find their way here.

And if you're ready for more individualized support, this is the work I do inside Minerals & Microbes — a four-month container with weekly check-ins and functional testing, where we look at your actual terrain instead of chasing a single marker.

Transcript

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Well, hello, hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Rewild of Bonus Podcast. I'm your host, Lydia Joy. Here we are. We just had the summer solstice yesterday here in the Northern Hemisphere. And I want to talk a little bit about what this actually means, why it matters for a second. Because it does impact us biologically, evolutionarily, especially for anyone on a more rewilding journey. You know, it's just one of those things that if you are trying to rebuild from chronic health issues, it actually deeply matters more than most people realize. Before I get into that, I wanted to say something to everyone who does tune in and listen to this podcast consistently, especially if you reach out to me, it really does mean a lot because this podcast is listener supported. I don't run ads, I don't have any paid sponsorships or anything like that. But when you do reach out, when you do comment or text me, it really means a lot. It genuinely matters. And it even helps other people find the podcast too. This week I actually got a comment and I wanted to share it. It really warmed my heart. Um someone wrote in and said, I love every single episode you share. Um, every time I end up making a new herbal infusion, adding a vegetable, or just calming down about all the information overwhelm out there. And so that just really made my day. It always is so nice to hear what people take away from the episode. So if you have been listening, something has shifted for you, even if it seems small to you, I'd love to hear it. You can DM me directly through the first link in the show notes. You can comment on Spotify, you can leave a review on iTunes, you can DM me on Instagram. I read every single one and it genuinely helps other people find their way here too. Okay, so back to the solstice. And this weekend, I intentionally decided to spend the majority of time like stepping away from like the computer and work mode and just be outside. Um I even like took a pen and pad and went outside and you know started sussing out my thoughts for all of this uh episode on a notepad. Spent hours and hours and hours and hours just outside in the garden. I do that all all the time. However, I just it was like all in this weekend. I wanted to be just really intentional about receiving all this light that we're getting right now, right? Um, because we are at the most light saturated point of the entire year for those of us in the north. Um now I'm very like I have built up my solar callus. I've spent a lot of time in the sun. So obviously, everyone needs to build their tolerance for light appropriately for their own body right now. Okay. I've been doing this for a really long time. So I'm not trying to encourage going out, overdoing it, because suddenly we have all this light, right? But what came through for me um sitting out there with my notepad hour after hour is what I'm about to share with you. So here's where my head was. Sitting out the outside all weekend. I have this like whole herbal apothecary going on in my garden at this point. I have so many herbs and plants. I have, you know, rosemary and thyme, oregano, lavender, chamomile, calendula, dill, parsley, sage, chives, uh, lemon balm, uh, catnip, bee balm, echinacea, uh, anis hysop, lemongrass. There's so many. There's probably a bunch more I could say. There's even the wild things that I can forage in the back lot right behind our property and in the trails that I go to. I've got a lot of access to things like nettles and cleavers and mullen and so on and so forth. Enough that I have what we could say is like plenty of medicine, right? Like readily available to me. Now, I don't see that as just like remedies sitting in my cupboard, waiting for one day when I need them. Um, because if you think about all of this from more of an ecosystem perspective, each one of those plants has powerful medicine within them, but also a role to play. Uh, and they're not just there for us when we're sick, they're always there for us. Especially, you know, when they're, you know, producing and, you know, in season and all that jazz. They, for me, here have become a part of the landscape, part of the rhythm of how I'm living in this landscape, right? And here's what I keep coming back to. I I don't think that we appreciate the medicinal properties of plants or the the real value of plants, like especially the list that I mentioned, um, until maybe we're already feeling badly or sick, right? This this is culturally speaking, right? It's usually not until something goes wrong that many people suddenly remember, oh, there's this plant that helps with that, right? Maybe lemon balm will help me feel less anxious, or maybe nettles will help me with like hit allergies or whatever, right? And then suddenly we're like, I feel so bad, I need it now, and we go and we get it, right? But the thing is, is these plants are always there, and therefore so is their medicine. And we just aren't always paying attention to them as um available to us until we like need to be rescued, right? And so for me, growing all of this is about being able to use these plants on a regular basis, not like have them sitting in a cupboard as a one-day remedy, right? That's actually the real difference that I'm circling here is using a plant as a remedy, which don't get me wrong, they do have their place for that. I'm not saying they don't, um, versus using a plant as a daily ongoing support or like layering different plants in seasonally and letting them be deeply nourishing in the background of your life. Right? If you're somebody who struggles with anxiety and you wait to reach for lemon balm in the moment, it feels unbearable. Like, why not keep it in the backdrop instead? Why not let it be a part of your rhythm long before you're in crisis? This weekend I kept thinking about a pattern that I see constantly. It's not just any single person, right? It's kind of a cultural conditioning. It's it comes up over and over again with so many people that I work with. My own son is actually a good example of this. Um, he actually has, you know, he grew up with me, so he's been exposed to many things, right? He even is interested and looks into things on his own over time. Um, recently, some of the ones that he was into was like mullen. He kept bringing up mullen. He had found out that was good for a cough. Um, and so usually when something specifically resonates with him based on what he's going through and he researches it and tries it, it it does bring him comfort. Like he genuinely feels really good about being able to help himself that way. And I love that. But here's what I've noticed. Um, he, not just him, but like I'm giving you him as an example. He doesn't ask me about any of it on a regular basis. He asks me when he's already not feeling well. When something's bothering him and he wants to feel better so he can keep enjoying his life. That's when he speaks up. And I see the same thing with clients. Um, someone tells me they reach for a specific herb when they're in a flare-up of a specific symptom, right? Um, somebody might say nettles when their allergies flare, someone might say cleavers when they're feeling like congested and needing some cleansing, right? And almost every time it's like that same shape, right? People found something that's genuinely provided them a remedy. It's genuinely helped them in the moment. They know that it works, but they're only reaching for it in the moment that things are already loud and uncomfortable. So I found myself sitting there thinking, if this consistently helps someone, why are we waiting until something goes wrong? Right. And but it's yet it's a pattern. Okay, because here's where I think we've got it backwards. We treat plants like emergency interventions, like herbal pharmaceuticals, something we reach for only once a symptom is already demanding attention. Again, there is a time and a place for remedies. Don't get me wrong. But when you have the need for it over and over and over, just like separated apart, right? Like maybe it's not daily, but maybe it's like monthly because you have a pattern, right? This is what I'm getting at. So I this is what I want to speak to because I personally have like I don't live with them that way anymore, right? It's a it's like a reconditioning. So let's think about an example, right? I've been in the health space for a really long time. And early on, one of the big ones, especially in gut health, was oregano, the biggie, therapeutic oregano. Um, now that can be incredibly strong. In fact, I think it can be too strong, especially in many people's sensitive systems, and if it's approached too long, right? However, we have fresh oregano, right, that we can grow. What if we were to just consume more of these things on a regular basis? Perhaps we wouldn't find ourselves needing the remedy version and the therapeutic version all the time. Do you see what I'm saying? It's a completely different relationship. It's no longer a treatment, it's more of nourishment, right? It's more of a microdose instead of a megadose. And it's a responding in two different ways. It's a relationship instead of a rescue. And so the more I sat with that question, the more I realized like, this isn't even really about herbs at all. It's about the difference between treating a condition and creating conditions. Now, I want to be clear about something before I keep going. I don't like I feel like I've said this. I don't think it's always wrong to treat a condition. There are absolutely moments where we need relief, where we need care, where reaching for something in the moment is exactly the right thing to do. What I am talking about is something different. I'm talking about the chronic long-standing pattern piece of it, right? The thing that keeps showing up over and over. You know this, right? Like it's keep trying to get your attention. It's like, hey, hello, I'm here again. Here I am again, year after year. That's the piece that needs a different lens entirely, which is why I think it's worth talking about something that I'm gonna go ahead and call survival body chemistry. Okay. And here's what I mean. Um, our bodies are constantly responding to the conditions that we are living in, always the whole time we've been alive. It's one of the most real, most intelligent things about us. We don't just like sit here and like suddenly break down when life gets hard, right? We we are literally always adapting. Our body often will redistribute things, it may compensate in certain ways, but whatever it takes to keep functioning through whatever like phase and layer of our life journey we're on, it's gonna be doing that. And what I think we we might misunderstand is it's not like there's just this survival switch that flips all the way on or all the way off. It's much more nuanced than that. When I look at someone's HTMA, when I look at someone's biome effects, when I'm sitting with people, what I'm actually seeing is this adaptation that can be very uneven. And there can be more compensatory areas than others. Some parts of our body or our system becomes overly strong or overly reactive or overly dominant, while other areas of our body systems quietly weaken in the background and they are have been like undercompensated, if you will, or like running on a lower reserve, if you will. Um, and you end up with deficiencies in some places and excesses in others, all of it trying to reconcile back toward balance, right? Um, not like a fixed static balance. I don't think that that's ever entirely true. I think we're more homeodynamic than ever like always perfectly balanced. We're because we are living, we're moving, we're constantly adjusting, balancing, right? Um, so it's not static, right? So let's say you're somebody who's you know, you've dealt with the experience of living in a uh water damage house with mycotoxins and it affected you deeply, right? And you have that whole story that, or you have like a whole unresolved trauma situation in your life. Maybe you've gone through severe relational disruptions, uh, divorce, death, whatever it may be, uh-huh, or long-term grief, or um major financial instability, um, housing instability, uh, chronic undernourishment for whatever reason. There's so many potential ways we can be chronically undernourished. Um, years and years of disrupted sleep for whatever reason, uh decades or more of overgiving and under-receiving, right? Like I could go on and on. Your body responds to every one of those layers. Um, and it doesn't always respond like evenly, right? Like some part of some part of you does get stronger to compensate with all of that. And some part of you gets quietly depleted in the process. And I don't really think most of us are sitting around thinking, like, oh, I am broken because I have these chronic things. I think, you know, a lot of times what happens is we're thinking, okay, like, is something diagnostically really wrong with me? And if so, what? Like, because I I just think we don't understand what's happening in our body. So oftentimes we're jumping to an like any conclusion that makes sense to help us to aim towards, right? Like to give us some level of clarity. But what's really happening underneath in our body, in our terrain, are these ongoing imbalances trying to reconcile with us, like with our us ourselves, right? Um, does that make sense? It's gonna be different for each person. It may have a certain presentation, but one person that has that same presentation that could fit into a label. So there's so many these days, like everyone's getting running out to figure out what they are because it's so hard to understand your body anymore. Right. Um, but the and that's the reason why we're doing it. Because we feel that when we know, we can get the correct support. Um, because we likely have gone through many, many seasons without enough of the correct support. Right. And some of us are even born into the conditions that weren't conducive to begin with. Like it's not always that something good fell apart. Sometimes the support just was never fully there. And without that support, it gets harder to get through whatever comes next, right? So some people go through a difficult time, whatever it may be, and seem like they bounce back, right? Um and they maybe did bounce back, but maybe there was something in the backdrop that wasn't quite right. Um, our bodies are so resourceful. So this can happen many ways, many layers, many times over years, season after season. When I speak with people and get their health history, they usually say, Oh, I used to have this thing for like five years or 10 years, but I don't have that anymore. But it still matters to hear it in the history because your body had to compensate and organize around that, right? Um and it takes a lot sometimes to deal with that, right? Like we have to have the resources, the reserve in our system. And, you know, so one day after many years of like, oh, I had these problems for a bunch of years and they went away, but then they resurfaced 10 years later, but then they resurfaced differently, right? And maybe they each time got more extreme. And that's because one day the body's like, I can't adapt the same way anymore. The reserve just isn't there anymore. And, you know, your body is really smart because it's like trying to get you to listen, right? Because some of it has never been truly properly dealt with. Um, it hasn't been fully integrated. And a lot of times what happens is we've run out of some of the things and overcompensated for others, and now we've like just hit this crazy tipping point. That's usually when people end up with the chronic health patterns that they they're to the point where enough is enough, and that's when they find their way to me. Um, and here's the distinction that matters so much to me. Our bodies get incredibly good at surviving whatever conditions are present. That is not failure. Okay, that's exactly what our bodies are supposed to do. Okay. Totally doing the right thing. The problem isn't that the body suddenly did your body, my body, our body suddenly did something wrong when we get to this point of like where where we feel like, oh my gosh, something is really wrong, right? It's not that it suddenly did this, it's the problem is that it's the underlying conditions that allowed it to arrive never got fully resolved prior, right? It's just a long-term um compounded adaptation year after year until that pattern becomes chronic enough. Someone's now living inside of it saying, I cannot do this anymore. And this is also where my garden kept showing up for me this weekend because I think the way most of us um in the collective, like if you've watched any gardening videos, I don't know if you guys are into gardening or not, but I'm like deep in it, right? Like this is year two of like full-on, I'm growing as much food as I possibly can. So you can watch the videos, you can observe how people garden, right? And the way many people treat the land is a lot like the way we are treating the human body, right? This default instinct in both places is to look for something to fix when something goes wrong. So, say, for example, you have like a struggling plant. Um, like a let's say everyone's got tomato plants right now, probably, right? Summer. And suddenly like the leaves look weird and bad and brown and crispy edges and curling leaves or whatever's going on. It looks like something's really wrong. The plant looks really sad.

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Right.

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So we're like, oh, what do I need to spray on it? Right? Like, what do I need to add to this plant? Like, how do I treat it? Right. Because suddenly I'm like, oh no. Um, we do the same thing with a struggling body. We're like, oh my God, what do we take? How do we suppress this thing that's showing up? How do we treat it, right? Okay, because that is what our conditioning in this culture has taught us all along. It's the same conditioning, it's the same disconnection because we've been trained in both places to reach for an intervention before we ever ask the more basic question, which is often like, okay, well, hold on, let's let's pause instead of react and observe and say, well, what's happening with the soil? What's happening with the water? What's going on with the light, airflow, like the whole ecosystem around the plant that's struggling or the person. And that's the unlearning that I'm talking about. I again, I think there's a time and a place to treat conditions, but I think we've overplayed that card in this culture. Um, and it's often where we start by default, and it's rarely where the deeper answer actually lives. And that's the shift that I want to keep talking about in every possible way that I can, and I want us to sit with. We're not treating conditions, we're creating them. Okay. So if survival body chemistry is a big modern problem behind the scenes, and most of the clients that I work with, right? Which means our bodies are compensating unevenly, if you will, right? Like some systems. Systems over compensating others quietly running low. Um, so that the natural question becomes okay, what actually shifts this? What are the real conditions? Now, I don't remember when it was. It was within the last couple of years, I started organizing this into what I call the seven pillars. And looking back, I don't really, I mean, they we can consider them health habits if you want to, but I really think of them as conditions, right? Like they're the actual environmental inputs that the human body evolved expecting to have consistently throughout the year, right? Um, and when those inputs are present, our bodies have what they need to move, like to not be in full-on survival mode, right? To be able to be in repair mode. So, but when these things are missing, the survival chemistry has nowhere to go but deeper, right? And so I want to bring them back up briefly as I continue to expound on this because I think it's important. And the first pillar is light. And I don't just mean light as in, you know, being able to see light is information, right? The sun. It's uh the primary signal that humans are designed to have, it literally sets our circadian rhythm. Our biological clocks are dependent on sunlight, right? It governs the timing of nearly everything else in our body, right? Like when cortisol rises, melatonin rises, digestion is supposed to be active, repair is supposed to happen, right? Without consistent real like light exposure, natural light exposure, the whole timing of our system drifts and everything downstream of it drifts with it, okay? Um, so you know, we just hit the solstice, right? Which is the most light of the year. We got to that point, and now we're going to be going back to the descent to the winter solstice. So we've hit the peak of light right now, which usually is everyone's telling me they're feeling a lot better. And I say, Great, this you've got the wind at your back when you have the most light of the year, especially for those of us in the north. And it's a great time to really be deeply, deeply supporting ourselves because we have that resource so on point, especially if you're spending plenty of time outside, you're getting out of the buildings, yada, yada, yada. So here we are. We're at that key point of the year with light being so readily available to us if we take advantage of it. Now, the second pillar is air. And I'm not just talking about oxygen per se. I'm talking about the quality of what you're breathing, the rhythm of how you're breathing, even the actual environment you're breathing in every day, right? There's so many things we could be breathing in that aren't necessarily ideal. But breath is one of the most direct ways we can even just influence our nervous system in real time. And so there are so many layers of how our survival mode, survival patterning, modern uh life really has us in survival mode, right? Um, and that affects how we're even able to breathe because of how our bodies are holding in these different chronic stress states, right? So this is a big deal too. Um then we think about the next pillar, the third pillar being water. And of course, this is deep. It's not just about drinking enough water, right? It's not the simplest sense, like, okay, it's I know I'm supposed to drink water. I drank a, you know, X amount of ounces per day. It's really quality, obviously. I mean, quality is huge. Of course, that's been very much a problem in the modern world, too. But it's also how well your body can hold the water, use the water. Uh, of course, that depends heavily on minerals and so many things. Um, right. So the the water, how are we actually, you know, being able to utilize that properly? A lot of people really are having a difficult time holding water properly. So that's another piece, of course. Uh the fourth pillar is movement, right? Our circulation, our lymphatic flow, our moving through our days, like moving our bodies. It's how our bodies stay adaptable. Um, if we don't move, we slow down, right? Um, and and we can lose some of our capacity to respond and recover when we become more sedentary or when we move only in certain ways throughout the day and don't like give our body more movement that um allows it to stay strong and flexible throughout our lives, right? And the modern world has definitely created specific movements that we all do that are causing compensations, right? Um, the fifth pillar would be nourishment, and that can be the actual raw materials, the nutrients, the building blocks, um, minerals, the things that the body actually needs to repair our tissues, to produce our hormones, run every single process that we've been talking about today. I think that all the things that I just listed up until now are also nourishment for our human bodies as well. The sixth pillar would be connection, and this is where we get into relationships, relationships with ourselves, with other people, with nature, um, community, families, partners, something outside of yourself, right? This isn't like a soft optional add-on, obviously, because we were designed to live, we are social creatures, right? Isolation is is and is such a physiological stressor. I think that the way the modern world is designed has changed how we relate to our fellow humans and nature and so on and so forth. It has become quite an odd thing. Um, and so it's important to just think about, you know, the way we connect with others because it does help us regulate our nervous system in ways that are just as real as anything else on this list so far. And the seventh pillar is purpose. This is your reason for getting up. This is the direction that gives your life meaning. This is like you being the full essence of you, right? Like it sounds like the least biological of all of them. And yet I'd argue it's deeply tied to everything else. Because people with a strong sense of purpose tend to have different stress physiology than people who feel aimless or stuck. And here's the thing about all seven of these: none of them work in isolation. They're not, you know, uh seven separate boxes to check, because they influence each other constantly because they create conditions, right? So light affects sleep, which affects your hormones, which affects your digestion, which affects your mineral absorption, which affects your mood, which affects whether you have the energy to move your body, which affects your relationships, which affects your sense of purpose. So it's not a list, it's uh it's an ecosystem, really. And here's what I notice like there are specialists out there for basically every one of these pillars individually, and even more micro than that, right? You've got all the movement people, right? You've got someone who only talks about breath, you've got someone who's deep in circadian biology, you've got someone who only talks about food. Listen, that's all fine and good because all of that is valuable. Like they all have value, and that's that person's lane in their area of expertise. But what I want to say is that we are so conditioned to separate all of this out into its own little box. And I think that that separation is actually part of why we get stuck in our patterns. Like, we can't see the forest through the trees because we've been taught to only look at one tree at a time. And this is a lot of what I actually work on with people more intimately. Like, where are you at in your journey? What can you realistically focus on right now? Because sometimes you can only hold so much at once, and the health world is loud, and there's a lot of people talking, and there's easy to like collect a list of shit you should be doing that you aren't doing. And that's okay, right? Because certain pillars support other pillars. You don't have to fix it all at once, simultaneously today. Okay. So, what I've noticed in my own garden this season is that it works the same way. Like, you don't establish every layer of the garden ecosystem all at once. Okay. And some plants, you know, specifically can put down roots and spread quickly, and some take longer. And some only really thrive once maybe another plant nearby has already established itself and they like co-collaborate well, better together for various reasons, right? Then, like, you know, you also can only tend what you can tend, right? You can only steward so much at a time. You only have the capacity uh within one year to do whatever you can do, right? Um, but the thing is, is over time, what you build doesn't stay something that you have to always hold up together forever, the same way that you do when you first initially start, right? Like you first initially start and you build towards one aspect, and that becomes a part of your life. So now you've created this condition within your life, right? So now you're like, oh wow, okay, I get that. That's good. I'm solid. Now let me bring in this other aspect that I haven't quite honed in on yet, a little bit more. And you work with the capacity that you have. And over time, this becomes part of your conditions, your terrain, and what you're now operating from instead of something you're constantly working towards. Okay. And that is actually a huge part of the work, right? Especially when you're working to move from survival body chemistry into resilience and restoration. You're not just like, I don't know, adding pillars one at a time. You're, you're watching all of them slowly become a more established, stronger, solidified baseline that you're living from, right? Like we always look at growth as a spiral, right? And it's always, you can always kind of like like keep going, like iterating. And that's exactly where I want to take this next. Because when I am working with people, I am looking at like the whole picture. Like when this person is sitting with me in this particular moment at this point where they're like, I'm ready to get to move forward, get help, yada, yada, create a plan. I'm looking, well, where has this person's body had to adapt? Right? Because all of us have some degree of that different from each other. And then, you know, where can I see where their reserve is still running low? Where can we see how they've had to overcompensate for however long and it's now running in the backdrop of the whole system while something else has quietly been, you know, kind of neglected, perhaps. And that's not, that's just a statement, right? I'm I'm just looking for the evidence of the survival body chemistry. I've talked about this before in the cell danger response language as well. There's so many ways we can look at this, but it's really the places where a particular person's body with their particular history has been reallocating what it has just to get through. Okay. And here's something that I want to be honest about. I am not trying ever to match a person to a protocol. Every time I've tried to do that to find the thing that worked for someone else, or the the protocol that's being recommended by this specific um lab, or, you know, I sit with different um educators uh to help us understand the developments in the microbiome research and the and the lab report and all that jazz. And every single one of them does it completely differently. Um, and they say, here's the protocol. This is the protocol that you're supposed to do for these things, right? And, you know, it's it's really interesting because um you can hand a protocol to a person, but then you can find out very quickly why it won't work the same in five different people, right? Because that's not actually how this works. It's not exactly um a match to each person, right? And what we have to do here is observe. We have to actually understand all this kind of overarching um body chemistry that I'm talking about. We have to then actually watch what each unique person's body is currently doing inside the life that they are living with the conditions that are happening, right? And factor in what we're seeing and slowly recreate the conditions that make it possible for them to A, have their adaptations unwind, B, to be able to sustainably implement and steward um and respond well to over time, right? And when we are doing it this way, some of the conditions that need that actually need to change, some of them like are surprisingly simple to change, but some of them take real time and real presence to work through and a lot of observation because I will say each person has something that they need to see in their own life and face and be honest about that the chronic pattern is trying to reveal. And so there's no protocol that can fix that part, right? And so it's not just about creating the right conditions once, it's about also moving forward in your life and stewarding them, right? Like staying with them long enough for your body to actually trust that what you what they what it needs to uh restore and to heal are not going anywhere. Because when we have the that long-term compensation, the the survival body chemistry, when we've had it for a really, really long time. So it could be a year, it could be decades, we don't reorganize the moment something improves slightly, right? Like, so say like you see a symptom go away that you didn't like, right? Like you're one month into your new plan with someone, and you're doing all these great things and something goes away, and you're like, yes, right, that's great, that's a win, but you still need to steward your body because your body needs evidence, it needs repeated, consistent evidence, it needs reserve, resources, all these things before that it believes the conditions have actually changed enough for it to stay, you know, um the symptom or whatever, just to like be able to stand down, right? So instead of starting with a very specific exacting scientific protocol and hoping a person fits it, don't get me wrong, I think the protocols are needed for frameworks and understanding, and there's many ways to put them together. Um, I'd rather start by understanding why we're making any particular change in the first place. Um, you know, looking at the hierarchy of the body and how it can reorganize, right? Understanding like that cell danger response piece is another thing. Um, you know, bringing down any inflammation so the body doesn't have to keep responding to that and let it do its thing, right? So we're letting the body's own response guide how we reorganize conditions from there. We're always letting the body lead, not the protocol. Um so this takes a lot of patience. It takes patience. Something our culture isn't really all that great at. I'm not that great at. And honestly, it can feel kind of strange to work this way because it's not really what we've been conditioned to do in this culture. But I think it's closer to how we would have actually lived before everything got so standardized. And I want to be clear about something. I am deeply grateful for the research we have access to now. I use it constantly. Tools like HTMA and the Bioma Facts give us genuinely valuable maps of a person, right? Like real intel, real patterns, a real starting point. And I am not interested in dismissing any of that. But here's what I've learned: the longer I do this work. Two people can come to me with almost the exact same physiological patterning, right? Showing up on paper. But the way that like what gets applied for them and the way their body actually responds to the same support can look completely different. Right? Like one person tolerates something perfectly fine, no problems. Another person's like, oh, that didn't feel so great for me. Right. Um, another person needs smaller amounts for building up over time. Someone is like, I'll just go straight in. Um, someone needs far more time with something, someone needs less time with right. And I think both of those people deserve to be guided through their own actual unfolding and not a generic version of like what somebody else decided through research and data says should happen. So alongside whatever the research tells us, I think we have to work with timing, with seasonality, with pace, trust. These are very real variables, right? Like capacity, even our mindset, like where someone actually is in their life right now. Right. Some people come to me still like, oh my gosh, I want to hurry up. I want to rush through everything. And what they actually need is to slow way down. And then I have some people who come in, they move so cautiously that what they actually need is a little encouragement to actually be okay with like picking up the pace and staying with it and like actually facing the things that they've been circling. And that's really what I'm doing alongside someone. I'm not just like applying a protocol. I am observing. We are listening closely enough to their actual life to know which pivots and adjustments make sense and when, without overwhelming them and without underwhelming them either. And that's the work I do inside minerals and microbes. It's a four-month container, weekly check-ins, monthly sessions, the two functional tests, me walking alongside you the entire way, paying attention to your actual pace, what you're telling me, not just the data on a page. Um, so if anything in this episode has felt familiar, like the waiting, the compensating, the wondering why nothing seems to be working, even though you're doing a lot of things. Or maybe you know a lot of things you should be doing, and you for some reason don't feel ready to do them. I'd love to help you understand what your own body has actually been adapting to and help you start creating the conditions that let it finally um come back into a place of resilience. So you can learn more through the link in the show notes below. I hope you found something of value in this episode to take away, to sit with, to chew on. I appreciate you for being here. And until next time, keep rewilding and you know, stewarding your own personal conditions and terrain. Um, and I'll be back real soon with more for you. Take care.