Episode 11

Written By Jessica Ash Wellness

Hungry For presence - Part 2

the fully nourished podcast | Episode 11

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Transcript

Welcome back to the Fully Nourished podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Ash, Functional Nutritionist and Integrative Health Coach, coming to you with a scientific and spiritual exploration of what it looks like to awaken our feminine radiance by becoming deeply and fully nourished in a world that wants to dull us down. You ready?

As a reminder, everything in this podcast is for education and inspiration only and is not intended as medical advice. Please talk to the appropriate professional when necessary, and please use common sense before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle. 

So this is really part two, continuing on in our discussion about this deep burnout and what's driving this intense need to stay in our masculine energy and succeed and succeed and achieve and achieve and accomplish and accomplish and accomplish. You know, fundamentally, we have this feeling driving us of not being good enough. So many women I talked to resonate with that experience of nothing ever feels good enough. And it's leading us into these states where we're just seeking and seeking and we're constantly trying to figure out a better option. We're constantly trying to kind of manically perform in a way. And our life is driven by a group of shoulds. We're so enchanted by all the things we should be doing that we forget to ask ourselves what we want to be doing. Of course, I understand that there's so many of us that have found lives that we feel completely in alignment with, we're not after perfection here. We're not after lives that are just like, oh my gosh, everything's deliriously and gloriously happy, because life is hard. And life gets hard. What I'm talking about is, the women that I am connecting with are just, they feel so burned out, they are just feeling like they're going through the motions. Like so many women just feel like they have to just keep moving in order to survive. So many of you share these stories with me of just where you're at hormonally and physically. 

What Women Are Missing

The stories that I've read are just incredible, because we have women that have been spending 10, 15 years jumping from naturopath to naturopath and nutritionist to dietician to all these different modalities and practitioners, they spent tens of thousands of dollars on supplements. I remember I got one message from a lady who said she's $272,000 in health and wellness debt. Or all the women that I've worked with and talk to who are slaves to their student loans. And they don't even want to be working this career, or they don't even want to have a job anymore. But they only have to for the reason of paying off their student loans. And this is like decades after they graduated college. I've seen just the pain that this type of insatiable drive we have of nothing ever feeling good enough. Where it has led us and I think a lot of us, I'm having these conversations with you like woman to woman, bringing these things up not because I know the answer, not because I think I know the answer or have it all figured out. But more like, this is just a conversation that needs to get started. 

I do think a lot of it has to do with what we talked about in the last episode, which was this kind of overarching, deep, insatiable hunger for nurturance, a hunger for guidance, hunger for presence, for someone to see us for who we really are, and call it out of us and nurture it and gently nudge it out of us. So many of us desperately needed that growing up. And when we don't get it, it leads to adult children, right, like we are of adult age, but we are children mentally. I understand that all of us are that child in some way in our mind's eye and that's normal and natural. But for a lot of us, we don't know how to nurture or care for ourselves. I think if there's one thing that I have learned from working in the health and wellness space, and just working with a lot of people and trying to help them change their habits and change their behaviors, what you recognize is just how much people don't have pattern or behaviors of nurturance in their everyday life, because they never learned it. We legitimately cannot take care of our basic needs. Like we can't cook for ourselves. We don't know how to feed ourselves. We don't know how to put ourselves to bed, to have a proper wind down routine. And we don't know how to cope with stress. We don't have techniques or modalities like making ourselves a warm cup of tea or taking a bath. We don't know how to cook for ourselves. I mean, some of us don't even know how to brush our teeth and wash our face every night. Some of us don't know how to clean properly, you know, some of us don't know how to fold laundry or do laundry. 

What I mean by this is maybe some of us have had to learn it out of survival. There's a difference of learning things out of survival, and learning things out of like a sense of community and a sense of womanhood and like coming into your own and being gently guided into your womanhood, which would be an exciting time. You know, as women, so many of us, we experienced so many times in our lives where we felt alone, and we had to go through things completely alone, whether it was body changes, or getting our first period, or even sex or things like that. A lot of us were so hurting for some type of guidance and nurturance. And having those conversations with women, you know, women to women, looking us in the eye and having those real, raw, gritty life conversations where we're working out, you know, we're working out the kinks in ourselves and our wants and our desires. And we have older, more mature women guiding us through the difficult challenges of life. I think for some of us, we don't even realize this is something that we needed. 

If you're listening to this, you're like, oh, man, I have never even thought about that. But sometimes I think once we become aware of that we almost need to grieve it in a way. Grieve what we didn't get and feel the feelings of disappointment and how unfair it was, and all of those things. I think it's important for us to recognize this is not something that we're going through on an individual level, this is a societal problem, we have been starving for this type of guidance for multiple generations. Now, we are the third generation, some of us, maybe even the fourth generation, that are feeling this way, that have experienced this on a cellular level, it is now ingrained in our very DNA to survive, to, in a way be abandoned, and have to figure things out for ourselves, which was never supposed to be a part of the human experience. Ever. 

We require more than just physical presence. We require emotional and energetic and spiritual presence, which is, one of the powers of a woman in her feminine nature, within her feminine energy. And I think some of us need to hear that it's okay that we feel like we're floundering around, it's okay that you felt that way, or you still feel that way. That's normal, that's natural. A lot of us and not every single one of us had the same experience. Some of us were worse off than others. I know that's our society's favorite thing to do right now is compare pain, like who's who has had the more painful experience. But I think we all at the end of the day really need to come together as women and see it for what it is, which is bullshit. And instead of playing the blame game and whining about it, and complaining about it, and being victims to it, which are all part of the process, right, like those are the things we need to flow through and move through. But at some point, we as women, and I've talked about this in multiple episodes, is it time for us as women to rise. You know, it's time for the wild woman, the warrior woman, the matriarch, the wise woman, to roar out of you. 

Mothering Ourselves

If we're craving change, and we want something different, let's alchemize our pain, the things that we have been through. The hormonal issues, we've been through the gut issues, the autoimmune issues, the health issues we've worked through, and let’s use them as the catalysts that they are because they have acted as a catalyst to push us to the next level of awareness. A lot of us as we begin to nourish ourselves, it's a part of the nurturance process, it opens doors and acts as a gateway in a way where we go from not knowing how to take care of us ourselves to slowly understanding the importance of our physiology and how our physiology works, and then how to feed ourselves. Then oh, it's important for us to get sleep. And then it goes on to this point where now we are nurturing ourselves without even realizing it. We've been nurturing ourselves all along. And we are capable of mothering ourselves. We've shown that to be true. We've proven that to ourselves, there's evidence in our life of it. And so if you're not quite there yet, and you haven't realized yet that if you're an adult, now it's time for you to do what your mother didn't do, and heal the wounds yourself because you're able to offer yourself exactly what you need on a physical level. 

Then as you begin to understand your femininity on a deeper level, you start to recognize that it's very difficult to be in your feminine energy and feel all alone and feel like you carry the burden yourself. It's actually, let me be clear with you and real with you, it is impossible for you to be in your feminine energy, which requires a deep amount of surrender and trust, without trusting that there is something out there bigger than yourself operating for your highest good. So your higher power, and that in and of itself, is woven into our biological needs, right? That the need to feel safe and stable and taken care of. And so really, it's time. The first step to not only really healing our trauma, but also just healing on a deeper level metabolically, is to begin to mother ourselves and practice our mothering on ourselves, practice our nurturing on ourselves. Our deep biological need to nurture, well, it's time to practice it on ourselves. So that's the first thing that we can start doing. And that's where nourishment does come in. But the next part of that is really healing. It’s what I like to call generational spells. 

Generational Spells

So a lot of people call things “generational trauma.” And we touched on that in the last episode, you know, usually when women are on this journey, as they've started to explore what drives their patterns and behaviors and what's behind their patterns and behaviors and blah, blah, blah, right? We start to realize, ooh, some of this is not me, like some of this is not stuff I've experienced, it's stuff that has been passed down to me, whether that is from the behaviors of the women in my life, or there's something that I didn't experience that I really struggle with. I think it goes deeper than just something that I've experienced personally. Really, what in my opinion, what generational trauma is, is really actually generational spells. 

And before you're like, “spells, oh, my gosh, witchcraft, she's a witch.” That's not what I'm talking about. I'm actually talking about how words themselves operate as spells. And if we don't believe that, we're actually doing ourselves a disservice. Because many of us operate in this kind of autopilot mode, where we have these things that we believe about ourselves, or we believe to be true, or some of us have these deep, ingrained, shoulds, like women should be this, you should be this, you should be doing this, you should be doing this should, should, should, should, should. I think we all can relate to that. There's kind of these deeply ingrained auto pilot patterns that we just operate and behave from. And sometimes it really feels like women are living lives that they don't really want to live. They're completely disconnected from their experience. They're completely disassociated from their body, their bodies are screaming at them through symptoms, like hormonal imbalances, and fertility issues, digestive issues, their gut is just a mess. And they're trying to do these, like SIBO protocols. And you're just like, we need to go a little bit deeper than that. This autopilot I'm talking about is really how I see spells. We all have these stories and beliefs about ourselves that have been told to us, or taught to us, especially of our mother, right? Some of us can even hear our mother's words or phrases ingrained into our heads or our fathers or people in our family, and they're playing over and over and over again. And they absolutely warp our sense of reality, they warp our perception of ourselves, they warp our perception with others. In fact, sometimes they get in the way of our relationships with others. 

These spells, these generational ideas and beliefs that are passed down, can be changed. And when we're “healing generational trauma,” I believe that's what we're really doing. We're reprogramming the many lies and deceiving beliefs that we believe about ourselves in the world. And we're reprogramming them to what is actually true, what is actually reality. I think that's why some of us have such a hard time because when we're healing, we're stuck between two different realities. What is familiar to us, but not necessarily serving us, not necessarily true, not necessarily healthy. And then we have the new, the unknown, the things that we're trying to move to. The new belief systems that are true, that are completely different, that feel completely different feel almost foreign to us. And it's taking all of our energy to get ourselves to that place and creating this new pattern and creating familiarity within that pattern. It takes a lot of work at first, to shift your perspective and just shift your mindset after it's been ingrained in you for so long, maybe even generations. 

This very much extends into the physical. And that's why I bring this stuff up is because I think it's relevant. I think a lot of us have kind of gotten sick of just talking about the same old things like detoxification and how to eat perfectly. And all of these things it's like, here we are, we're just sharing more and more information and sharing more and more tweaks and trying to get stuck in the details and the minutia. And, in fact, we don't need to be wasting our time or energy there, we need to go deeper, our body is inviting us to go deeper. It’s the reason you keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and you feel like the information is just all the same. It's because people are stuck at this level. They're, they're stuck at the shallow kind of level, and they're not doing the hard work to go deeper. And that's why it keeps feeling like you just keep hitting a wall and you keep going on the same hamster wheel over and over and over again. Because until you're willing to start to really see through what you need to see through and break these patterns up, you're gonna stay on the same wheel, and it's just going to keep spinning around and around, it's going to become a vicious cycle. 

Social Media Illusions

And I can't speak for you, but I am guessing you might be able to relate is right now-  the wellness world and the kind of wellness influencer space and every single space, it just seems like it's just so vapid, so shallow, so vapid, such a shell, like many of the women that we are seeing on social media. And unfortunately, that is our exposure to community. A lot of us don't have a strong community of women. I don't mean like we need dozens of awesome women - I would settle for just one amazing woman in my life, I have a few. But it's taken, oh, I would say more than a decade, to really find these women and develop deep relationships with them. It doesn't just happen overnight. But a lot of us are getting fed what a woman should be through social media. But so many of the women that we are looking up to, or are operating as influencers in our life, or that we're allowing to influence us and influence our thoughts and our choices and our behavior patterns are living extremely vapid and shallow lives. They are living lives that are completely different than what they are showing you on social media. And we know, we know, we know, it's like, oh, it's only a highlight reel. But I don't think we really deep down believe that. And there are women that we look at and we really, really look up to them, because they have maybe the life that we want or we have to really evaluate what we're after. 

Really, on a basic level, as women we are attracted to goodness and truth and beauty. It is part of our gifting to be able to make things beautiful and to, in some way, bring beauty to situations. We really like the discovery of truth, we want to bring truth into the light. And we also have this kind of fierce benevolence about us. I think I mentioned before that one of my mentors describes femininity as “fierce benevolence.” And we use that as one of our descriptors when we when we discuss femininity because we fiercely want good for society, we fiercely want good for our children, we care so deeply about it to the point where it breaks our soul, and pierces our soul if we really allow ourselves to want that and think about it. 

All of those parts of us are amazing and beautiful, right? We have imagination and vision. And those are things we care about on a deeper level. It's ingrained within us. But social media, and the way that we share information, unfortunately, is tailored to inducing a stress response within us. And for a lot of us, we're looking up to women and allowing women to influence us that do not deserve that position. And it warps our sense of reality. It plays on our most basic instincts and biological needs to have safety and stability and taken care of and starts to warp our sense of reality of what that actually is. 

As women we can easily jump into masculine energy which becomes extremely competitive very quickly. So we go from being collaborative and being inspired. And then if we hop into any type of adrenaline state or we hop into our masculine energy, that collaboration or that inspiration is going to immediately turn into competition and then what's going to happen that competition is going to start to immediately play into that basic, fundamental, gaping hole of “I'm not good enough, I'll never be good enough. But I'm going to keep trying and trying and striving and striving and going and going and going.” And until we become aware of it, until we say, I have had enough of this, and become aware of our nature, and really understand how different things within our society influence our very physiology and impact our ability to express our feminine energy and our own nature, we will feel constantly stuck. We will constantly feel like there's this deep gnawing hunger inside of us that nothing is ever good enough. And we will keep seeking and seeking and seeking and seeking looking for more. 

At the Hormonal Level

It's interesting, because when you look at the actual nature of the hormones, estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, you see that we've hit on this before, but I say it over and over again, you know, estrogen is kind of that hormone of endless potential, right? Like it will keep growing and growing and growing and building and building and proliferating at absolutely no thought to the cost. It will just keep going and going and going and growing and growing. And progesterone is the hormone of consciousness that comes in and says no, no estrogen, we need some type of structure here, we need to move estrogen in the right direction and have an act upon the right tissues. And so progesterone comes in and adds a consciousness to the growing and growing and building and building a presence in a way. 

Then as women, we also have smaller amounts of testosterone, we need testosterone for libido. And there are certain times of our cycle where we do need the motivation and the drive. And so we do have little hints of that motivation and drive. And that kind of around or like the parts of our masculine energy that we need to protect us is going to come in too, but when you look at specifically our main hormones, that are estrogen and progesterone, which we have a lot more progesterone than we have estrogen, we see that if we're stuck in this state of going and going and going and nothing is ever enough, you can see how on an energetic level, that's going to lead to more estrogen than progesterone. Because progesterone is the hormone of presence and consciousness and fertility, it really is the hormone of femininity. And when we don't really want to be in our feminine energy and our body is kind of in that state of having to sustain this constant, just vicious cycle of going around and around on the merry go round, we're going to definitely end up producing way more estrogen and way more testosterone. And this is why you see so many women in this place. 

We have women that are struggling with all types of estrogen dominance symptoms in our society, like most women now are in some way shape or form estrogen dominant, and they cannot detoxify estrogen, or they're not making enough progesterone to balance out their estrogen, or they're not metabolizing estrogen properly, they're just having a hard time utilizing the progesterone properly because adrenaline can block the cells use of progesterone. So when you are in your masculine energy, what you find is a hormonal state that that drives the high adrenaline, the more testosterone the more estrogen, more cortisol, it's going to take us further away from the presence that is required to be in our feminine energy and therefore nurture ourselves and nurture those around us. That basic biological need for safety and stability is absolutely going to impact and affect our symphony of hormones that are continuously rhythmically cycling.

 And if we want the rhythms to shift smoothly, we want to really rhythmic flow to our hormonal state, we absolutely need to be in a place where we feel safe enough to surrender to the rhythms of nature, surrender to the things that are bigger than ourselves, and how are we going to do that if we do not feel safe enough to let go of control. And then on top of it, you know, bringing it back to who we're allowing in our life to kind of create vision for us and warp our sense of reality and help create our sense of self when we don't have a strong sense of self. When we scroll, when we're watching women on social media, we start to morph and shift because we as women can really operate like shapeshifters if we don't have and we haven't developed and taken the time or had the nurturance and the guidance to develop a strong sense of self as we already talked about, then we can be easily shaped and molded and guided by what is around us. 

We started this episode by talking about how a lot of us do have this core sense of abandonment, where our mothers weren't emotionally present to ourselves and women to women. I keep saying that I'm kind of getting annoyed at myself for saying it. But I'm saying it because I care for women so much, and I care for you. And when I go on social media, and I have a really hard time, like, I'm still really trying to get back to a healthy relationship with it, because when I go on social media, I get so sad. I mean, I get stressed, because I'm just like, oh my gosh, I feel immediately heartbroken for just the confusion and overwhelm that people are feeling with the information overload that's out there. But then the second thing that happens to me is, I just get so sad. I get sad at the state of women, how women are just literally complaining about their husbands and putting them down and just emasculating them and eviscerating them, and feeling so incredibly self important and self righteous for doing it, because they feel like a sense of I have all this burden on my shoulders. And so therefore, I'm just gonna eviscerate everybody else they're operating from just this place of rage and just need to control. 

And then we also just see this huge increase, you know, I don't necessarily see I think there's a lot of people that think that the return to the Tradwife and this kind of idea of moms baking bread, again, mom's cooking at home, like now she's staying like a stay at home mom, and all of those things can be incredibly wonderful. I think a lot of women do find complete fulfillment in that because it allows them to live within the rhythms of their desires a little bit more, the rhythms of their body, we'd say.

You know, I think there's some confusion on that, that people think that living within the rhythms of your body is just doing whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it. No, that is entitlement. I think living within the rhythms of your body and your biology as more, you get to spend your time doing the things that you naturally feel excited to do and gifted, that don't put a lot of pressure on you physiologically, and make you feel in alignment. And even if you're exhausted, or you're making a lot of sacrifice, at the end of the day, you're lying there feeling fulfilled. That can look different for every single woman. 

Consciously Choosing Motherhood

But what we see right now is sort of this kind of return to “traditional values.” And you see a lot of women just popping out so many children, just baby after baby after baby after baby. Again, there is no judgment there. If that is what's right for you, and you feel amazing in that place, that's amazing. I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the women that are repeating the same patterns of their mothers, without even realizing it, they're doing it in a new way, just because they feel like they're physically present. Maybe their mother wasn't physically present. But now they're physically present, or they're cooking everything from scratch. They now feel like they are breaking generational patterns. But we have to make sure that we are physically present and emotionally present. Because it doesn't matter what we're doing if we're physically present, but we are emotionally or energetically or spiritually absent, that also has its own impact. 

I see that on social media right now. It's interesting, because it's all about babies. It's all about birth, and babies and babies and birth and babies and having babies and trying to conceive and babies, babies babies. And I find it interesting because babies do grow. And babies go from needing nurturance. And of course, you are the center of their whole world. They go from needing nurturance to then needing guidance. And babies are great. I'm not gonna lie, they are luscious. They're beautiful. They are special, and they are a gift and they are incredible. But babies turn into children and children turn into young adults. Then those turn into the adults of our society. We as women have the responsibility to ask ourselves, do we just want a baby? Because that's a biological desire, you know, our ovaries kind of scream at us every time we see a baby. And there's a biological desire to have babies that ensures that we do have them, or most of us have them. But the question goes beyond, do we want a baby? We need to ask ourselves, do we want to be a mother? Because I don't think enough women are asking this question. I don't think enough of us are asking ourselves this. And I think some of us haven't even got to the point where we know how to mother ourselves.

A lot of us are being shaped by the sense of accomplishment that comes with having a baby. That's like the next step, you gotta check that one off your list. And so for some women it’s operating as an accomplishment, it's the next thing in their pile of shoulds. Or for some women, you see this as they are very much in their masculine competitive spirit were, in a way, having a baby feels like a big win, they have to have a baby in order to “win.” Because when you're in your masculine energy, every single female relationship is going to feel like a competition, or for some of us. So it's the validation that comes with children or the attention. And let's be honest, right now, there are women on social media that are having children so that they have content. That is the sad and weird state of the world that we live in. And so we need to really get down in the dirt with ourselves and stop glorifying shallow womanhood. It's not about what we're doing. What we do is not what defines if something is feminine or masculine. It's the spirit and the energy that we show up in. And right now we're living in a place for the reasons that we've talked about up to this point, where a lot of women are completely alienated from their nurturing and their feminine side, that part of them that allows them to show up and be here and be vulnerable, and to look you in the eye and be present with you. That is really what nurturance in a way requires. 

It doesn't require perfection, it doesn't require stuff, it doesn't require material possessions, it doesn't require really much at all. But nurturing does require us to be within our feminine energy. That is one thing that really powerful nurturing requires. And a lot of us, whether it's in the past, or presently, we're physiologically in a place that doesn't allow us to be present. Whether we're in that fight or flight mode, or we're in that freeze mode, or our body is stuck in a survival state because of things we're communicating to it, whether that be something as simple as the way that we're eating, or the way that we're talking to ourselves, or maybe our priorities, whatever it might be, a lot of us are operating from a place of absolute fear, absolute overwhelm, absolute need to control and nitpick every little thing in our life. We're pumping out adrenaline and testosterone and cortisol, our metabolism has shifted to actually having to lean on our backup systems in order to function and generate heat. When we're in this place, it's incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to be in the present moment, because we're constantly either stressing about something that has happened in the past, or we're worrying about the future, we are not there in our bodies, we are not associated, we are completely disconnected. 

We are in a completely different time, really, time is not linear. And that's really hard for our human brains to wrap around. But we have the ability, with the state of our emotions and the state of our hormones to legitimately travel through time. We could be physically present, but existing in a completely different time, you know, our past or our future. It pains me that we as women have allowed social media to shape our perception of ourselves so much that because we don't have a strong sense of self, we really don't know who we are at the core of our very being, we have become like the shapeshifters. Just making and living on autopilot, operating and making choices out of all of the shoulds - should do this and should do this and should be this and should do this and be this, that we don't even know what it is that we truly and innately desire. And then of course, outwardly and healthwise, we're having symptoms because our body is screaming at us. It's feeling one thing, and we're cut off from it. We're numbed off from it, but it's feeling it and so it's having to speak up and let us know. And whether we are mothers or we want to be mothers, this podcast is really about discussing the feminine experience, what it is to be in feminine energy and what does that actually mean?

Taking Action

So many of you have asked for what's the action stuff, what do I do about it? Like I want to be in my feminine energy and it's just like I mentioned this a couple episodes ago, but it just starts with understanding our nature, exploring our physiology, how we function. What are the parts of us that beat to a specific drum? There's a certain type of order and nature to us, no matter what our personality is or how different and unique we are. There are basic things on a cellular level on a biological, physiological level that have us operate in a certain way. I talked about the different feminine archetypes in Episode Five. And one of the archetypes is the mother - that is a part of our very nature. 

No matter how disconnected we are from it, no matter how dissociated we are from it, no matter how much we've been told, over and over again, that we're just not nurturing, or we're not meant to be a mother, or no matter how many times we've told ourselves that, no matter if we want to be a biological mother or not, the mother archetype is a part of us. That part of us that needs to nurture something outside of itself, that makes that bone deep sacrifice, in order to have something beyond itself continue to exist after it's gone, and to pass on the wisdom and the lessons and the guidance. Because you care so deeply, you are willing to make sacrifices personally. So that whatever it is, that you care so deeply about, can continue on, that fierce mother as a part of us and nurturing something outwardly. 

You know, if we already have children, that's a great place to start. If we feel it's very hard to nurture ourselves and mother ourselves, and we haven't gotten to that place yet. It's a beautiful thing to start nurturing something else and taking care of something else on a physical level, because it can help fill us with a sense of purpose, it gets us into our feminine energy. And it's a place where we can really practice being present. When we're in our masculine energy, nurturing feels like a burden, taking care of something else feels like a burden. It feels like an absolutely crushing weight. Because there's a sense of competition and accomplishment there. That motherhood and mothering requires collaboration, it requires community, it requires connection, it is our instinct to guide, to correct over punishment that's part of the mother. We discipline in a very different way than the masculine. 

We also are very relationship-oriented over territory, right? Masculine energy is very territorial, because it has to, in a way, protect, protect, protect, protect, whereas the feminine is protected. And so the feminine is now free to focus on relationship. Finding fulfillment in relationship really does require that presence, and so nurturing our children or nurturing something else, an animal or another human being or somebody and caring for their needs, although exhausting and although a sacrifice, can be an incredible way to fill up our cups. I see a lot of women right now who are like, How can I balance everything I need to do in a day on top of take care of myself? I think that's where if we feel like we're in a funk, especially I think mothers - and I'm not a mother, so mothers, you can take this for what it is - but if you're in a funk and you're feeling low energy, and you know, you're not showing up the way you want to, because I know that even in my life in my relationships, when I know that there's something stressful about just taking care of myself. And sometimes we do need to be selfish in a way. 


But once you're a mother, and once you have a child, I think there's a basic biological instinct to take care of their needs first. And I see a lot of women, especially in the pro-metabolic space, where they feel like they have to focus so much on themselves and fix themselves before they can take care of their children. And they keep kind of hitting a wall. I sometimes wonder if the stress from putting yourself above your children, sometimes maybe biologically feels stressful, and it feels better to take care of their needs first, before you take care of your own. Maybe that's something that women need to get out of their funk. You know, we do as women find purpose and fulfillment in nurturing something else. And we can get really, really miserable when we're just completely self focused and hyper focused on ourselves.

When our body is in alignment, our hormones are balanced. We often feel connected to our experience all of the time. We don't need to be constantly self focusing on ourselves there, there does need to be some type of practice to reconnect. And in my opinion, in my experience, it's more actually about constantly getting back into alignment with my higher power, constantly getting back into alignment with God, like I have to trust in something greater than myself because I am always stepping into that place of feeling like everything's a burden. I have so many things that I have to carry on my shoulders and it's like wait, I need to stop stressing and worrying and trying to control every little detail of my life. I will feel a lot less stressed and I will be a lot freer to focus on the things that need to be focused on, to mother the people that need to be mothered in my life. 

Our society has gotten really weird, because as “pro women” as we are, we really do leave mothers to kind of fend for themselves. It has gotten a little bit better. But now with the rise of the trad-wife, and it's kind of like we have this new competition. Like, “Oh, I bake bread. Oh, I baked bread and croissants. Oh, I make my sauerkraut from scratch. Oh, I grow my own cabbage and make sauerkraut from scratch and grow my own wheat and make my own sourdough. And I travel up to Mount Everest to collect my water. Because it's beautiful snow melt.” You know, we're just getting into this masculine energy. And we're not showing up in the right energy. 

So no matter what we do, no matter what we wear, no matter what type of peasant prairie dress we wear while making our bread, it won't matter if we are not showing up, present and focused on what matters. And remembering that the most important gift we can give ourselves sometimes that can make a huge difference hormonally, is just to focus on being present. Let's not abandon ourselves. And let’s not practice self abandonment. But let's also not abandon the people that rely on us most. I think if a lot of us shifted our perspective, and we focused on building up each other in this way, our lives would start to be very, very different. I hope today's episode about relearning how to nurture really resonated with you. 

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Jessica Ash Wellness
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