Episode 16

Written By Jessica Ash Wellness

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. 

This discussion is a piggyback off of Tuesday's episode, which we talked about and started diving into beauty versus the beauty standard. I have some really cool studies to share with you and some interesting resources about minerals, changing our face shape and things like that. But we're going to talk about vanity and we're going to talk about when our obsession with looks becomes vanity because I think that what can happen in society is when we have too much vanity, it starts to lead to this energetic imbalance where we're so focused on looks, that we forget that one of the most important and most valuable things in life is wisdom. And wisdom can only be gained with experience and with age. You often have to bear the scars of earning that wisdom, something that our society would prefer to just cover up or erase. So where does wanting to enhance our natural beauty turn to trying to cover up the things that we're ashamed of, and then turn into giving us a false sense of value or worth? I don't know the answer to that. So let's talk about it. 

Defining Vanity

When you look at the definition of vanity, and you start to really see how it points over to conceit, social media has really led to a very vain culture. And really what vanity is, is it's not caring about how you look, it's not caring about enhancing your natural beauty. That's not vanity. Vanity is not pursuing health, vanity is not taking care of your body. Vanity is not dressing well. Those are not inherently vain things to do, right.? Those are things that can be absolutely nourishing and supportive to our overall health and quality of life. But the minute those things shift into giving us a sense of value, or shaping our perception of ourselves to be better than someone else because we look a certain way or we appear to look a certain way, that is when it immediately turns into vanity. 

And I'm being honest here. But I would say that so many women on social media operate in this place. They think that they're following or their appearance online, or what people think of them. And really it comes down to their appearance or their social appearance gives them this inherent sense of value. You do see influencers operate this way a lot where it's like, they have this inherent error about them, where they believe that they are better than you, which is why I hope that this kind of culture of influence or worship starts to shift and change. Because it's really starting to shift women's perception of themselves. They inherently think they're worth less or have less value because they don't appear a certain way. And it's becoming eerily almost disturbing. I don't know if you feel this way where I look around. I see women nowadays and you know the typical kind of influencer face where you have fillers, you have lip fillers, lashes and hair extensions, and I don't think these things are bad within themselves, right? Like we can do whatever we want. If we are enhancing our natural beauty and we feel good about it, amazing. But what I'm saying is just that it's starting to get kind of weird how so many women's faces look so eerily similar. It's like we're becoming this just sea of women who all look the same. And like we talked about in the last episode, there's a big difference between enhancing the things that you find beautiful about yourself and wanting to highlight those things, and trying to completely change your whole face, and not look like yourself at all, cover it up, get rid of it, I don't want to see what I look like in the mirror anymore. I think there's a big difference. 

What is Aging Us 

I also think there's this other added layer, where I think so many women right now are experiencing the signs of rapid aging, I think a lot of women are experiencing the signs of low progesterone, being super minerally depleted, mineral deficient, they lack nutrient density in their diet, they're not getting the nutrients they need. We're coming upon this kind of third generation where our grandmothers took the birth control pill, or hormonal birth control, you know, our mothers took it, we've taken it, a lot of us have taken it. And there's no denying those effects that hormonal birth control has which is depletion of nutrients, things like zinc and copper, and magnesium and fat soluble vitamins, B vitamins, things like that, the impact it has on the liver and the gut, our digestion and assimilation of nutrients. On top of it, our body is having to really detoxify a lot of different exposures, you know, our body's really good at neutralizing and packaging and carrying out metabolic waste and toxins. But when we are bombarded by it, and then there is this influx of additional things that our body has to get rid of through our hygiene products, you know, injectables, whatever it is we're doing to ourselves on top of what we're already exposed to just in the air, the water, the food that we have no control over. It's a lot for our systems, and it does deplete us, it is depleting. 

Then we add the extra layer of the things that we have been talking about where we as women are working 10 times harder than we ever would have 50 to 100 years ago, right? We're literally wearing all of the hats, because we have had this almost programming of you can do it all be it all. And so we said okay, I'm gonna do it all be it all. We now have so much burden on our shoulders. We're kind of stuck in this vicious cycle, and our bodies are wearing the signs of it, right? And what's that gonna look like? You know, that's going to look like hair loss, thinning hair, or hair that lacks luster, lacks color, it's going to look like thinning lips, right because our lips are muscle. And so our muscles start to really almost, I mean, I guess we can look at them as disintegrate. But really, it's, they start to be cannibalized by stress hormones like adrenal hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, our body starts to eat through our muscle tissue in order to fuel us, right? And that's why when we're under a lot of stress, it's hard to gain muscle. We tend to start looking a little bit more skinny fat. It's because our body is taking muscle, turning it into sugar, to keep our blood sugar stable, provide us fuel while we're under stress. And then our liver has to take the brunt of that to turn those proteins into sugar. 

So we'll see our energy be low, right, the whites of our eyes will get dull or discolored, will get dark circles under our eyes, our face shape will begin to change the layer of fat that goes in between our skin and our muscle tissue that all women have, that kind of reason why we have a little bit more softness or plumpness to our body that starts to go when we're under extreme stress, we start to lose our facial fat, which gives us that youthful look, we can start getting premature fine lines and wrinkles. Our jaw can start to recess when we're stressed because we'll mouth breathe at night and then our facial shape will start to change. There's this really cool book by a guy named David Card and it's called “Facial Diagnosis of Cell Salt Deficiencies.” And he talks about how our deep mineral reserves, when they get depleted, we can start to see certain signs on our face, it can be seen on our face. And that book is an incredible resource because you can look through and just look at all the pictures and how certain facial changes are correlated with different mineral deficiencies. 

And so here I see, we live in a society of women who are undernourished, burned out. We have no really strong sense of self, right? We're really drifting. I think a lot of us feel like we're just kind of drifting. Then we have the additional layer of social media kind of programming us to believe something about ourselves. We've talked about in a few of the episodes how, as women, we have incredible powerful vision, we have this ability, you know, a lot of us maybe associate this with our younger years of imagination that we possessed, right? We can build kingdoms in our head, which is why we're so good about stressing about all of these futures that haven't happened yet, right? Like we can build these huge stories in our head. None of them have happened. But we're professional worriers. And that is a reflection of our ability. We can take that in a negative direction, or positive direction. But it is a reflection of our incredible imagination and vision. 

But a lot of us right now are having our vision shaped by other people's lives, we are having our vision shaped by social media, and what we're kind of programmed to see on social media. And it's impacting our perception of ourselves, our sense of self, who we are, what our purpose is, how we see ourselves, what we define as beautiful. And all of these are having deep, deep impacts on what we value. It's shifting our whole life story, our whole life trajectory. And we see the root cause - there's something inherently wrong with ourselves or inherently something that needs to be changed or fixed or corrected. 

I'm here to just remind you that these are just symptoms of something bigger at play. This kind of overarching soul-deep burnout and cell-deep burnout, I'm talking about where we're going to feel it on a cellular level, but we're also going to start to really see it on a cellular level, because it goes back to that idea that energy begets structure, that structure and energy are intertwined. Where thought goes energy flows, we have the ability to shape our structure from an energetic level, the energy is what shapes the structure. And as our structure starts to fail, I feel like we're kind of trying to play like a sculptor, where the clay is starting to melt off, and we're just like, oh, tape, glue, tape, glue, paint, you know? It's like when something needs a whole overhaul, but we're like, oh, just paint over it. And like, it'll look okay. 

And so I don't think the discussion is like, oh, are these things vain? Or are they not? But I think it's really deciphering, what are women after? What are we trying to achieve? When we're doing all of these interventions, and I mean, right now, plastic surgery is just so prevalent, it's like becoming very, very accepted, where it's like, you don't like the way your face looks, you don't like the way your lips look, you don't like the way anything looks, your breasts look, your this looks, that looks, oh, just fix it. What women decide to do, that's not the discussion today. But I think it's really important to understand that a lot of this is happening. There's underlying reasons that it's happening. It's not just happening, it's not just what happens to women's bodies. It's happening at a younger and younger age, where we are starting to see these earlier signs of aging and stress. 

Beauty Around the World

But rewinding a little bit, you know, it's not new to care about beauty, right? Women have always been into enhancing their beauty. You know, we can go back to Ancient Egypt or Ancient Greece, where there were all these interventions and things like makeup and spa treatments and beauty treatments. Wanting to enhance our physiology from the outside and enhance our own beauty and highlight our unique features has always been a central part of the feminine experience. I even think of the Himba people of Namibia, where they live in rural Africa. In the present day, they have no exposure to the outside world, or very little, I should say. There was that journalist that went out there and took a bunch of pictures of them and you can search that on Google and look at these beautiful women, but they have no exposure to societal pressures, which is why I find their story so interesting. But what you see is the women cover themselves in this clay pigment to protect themselves from the sun. It's like they mix butter fat and this clay pigment together. And it's just it makes us deep red color and they paint it all over their bodies and their hair. They say that it protects them from the harsh desert climate, but also the women put this aromatic resin into the paste so that it's perfumed, and it smells good. And then when you look at these women, they do these intricate, beautiful hairstyles that are just out of this world, intricate and detailed. Their hair designs are something that they really take a lot of pride in. And each woman has an individual hair design, depending on their status within the tribe. I find it so fascinating that even women who have no kind of exposure to societal pressures, or the outside world, are still focused on enhancing their natural beauty and spending so much time on it. You know, some of the articles I read said they spent hours a day sometimes doing these hairstyles and taking care of themselves and rubbing this clay all over their body and their hair. No one has to tell them to do that. That is just a natural part of their feminine experience, something that they naturally desire to do. 

I think we can all say that a part of our experience is typically, you know, we pursue things that are beautiful to us. We're drawn to beautiful things. And we want to enhance our own natural beauty and the things that we naturally have and highlight the features that we find alluring and beautiful about ourselves. There is absolutely nothing vain about that. I think that is part of our feminine energy. But the question I often ask myself, and I don't really have the answer to it because I am the first to admit I don't have the answers to much. These are more just like discussions that I'm having and conversations that I'm curious about. But I feel like on one hand, there's a celebration, right? Like I think of the Himba women, they are celebrating who they are, right? They're taking the land, and the things that are available to them and they are using it to enhance who they are. It is a celebration. 

But I feel like beauty and the beauty industry and the beauty standard in the Western world and what we're exposed to regularly on social media is not a celebration, it's more of a desecration. I feel like I see it as a desecration of our temple to be beautiful and fit in with today's beauty standard. It almost requires a self declaration of war. Like we have to look like anyone but ourselves. And it's interesting because we do spend, I mean some women more than others, we put a lot of time and energy naturally into our beauty regimens and how we take care of ourselves. It's something that we naturally tend to want to spend time on. I know certain seasons of life, you spend less in certain seasons, you spend more, but at what point does beauty become vanity? It's not the amount of time we're spending on it. Right? It's maybe not the time or the amount of energy we're spending on it. But I think it's the spirit and the way that we approach it. I think a lot of us are deeply obsessed over our appearance, our body, what we appear like to other people, and we believe our appearance offers us any type of value. 

The Overemphasis On Youth as Beauty

The vanity that permeates our culture is really interesting because it leads to a total energy imbalance. You know, we place way too much importance on youth, we play way too much importance on that, like maiden archetype, the young, useful woman. I know a lot of times the response when I bring that concept up is a lot of people will bring up what I brought up in the last episode, which is like, well, that's what men like. I think a lot of women kind of have that deeply ingrained. Well, that's what men like. Men like women that are youthful. And we already talked about that so I won't hit too much on it. But I do think that in our society right now, we are so unhealthy and so depleted of nutrients and nutrition or so many women are experiencing deep hormonal imbalances. And we're so overly stressed that youth is almost the only time where there's even a hint of health because as we are adulting and as we hit real life, the amount of pressure that's placed upon women I think it ages us incredibly quickly. And in aging us, what it's doing is it's depleting our natural reserves of nutrients. It's depleting our mineral reserves, it's imbalancing our hormones so we're becoming less fertile, right? We're making less progesterone. I think there is this kind of valuing of youth because as youth, we haven't had enough time to get really depleted on a mineral and nutrient level. 

There is a certain type of energy behind youth that often gets lost as we get sucked into the kind of rat race that is modern society. Also, we don't value our elders, we don't value children. We don't value wisdom in our society. I think that's really what it comes down to, is, when a society places way too much importance on vanity and appearance, we forget the most important thing of all, which is the wisdom. Wisdom comes with age, wisdom comes with experience, and wisdom often comes with scars. The wise woman, we've talked about archetypes in episode five, but the wise woman archetype, she is an alchemizer. I don't know, I don't think that's a word. But she practices alchemy, right, she's able to take her pain and her experience and turn it into something great. That is part of being the wise woman. That's part of being a warrior. And we don't value those things in our society. We don't value the physical evidence of wisdom, which is age. 

Then on top of it, so many of us are stuck in such masculine energy, that we are constantly feeling a sense of competition. I've talked to so many women about this. And we all can kind of agree that there's this deep underlying terror of aging. We as women are terrified to age, we feel this sense deep down in us, like this idea of the biological clock. And everything is like a rush. Like we're running out of time, a lot of us feel like we're running out of time. Now that can definitely be a sign of mineral imbalances. And it can sometimes just be a sign of stress, when we're in a fight or flight state time is going to feel very different. Time is going to pass in a very different way depending on where energy levels are. But I do think there's this additional programming for women where we feel like we're on this invisible clock, we're constantly running out of time. And like, “this is our golden years. I better appreciate my youth and my beauty because it's going to run out soon.” It really shapes our sense of reality and our perception of ourselves and our ability to just enjoy our life and be present. 

You know, and I think this is something that's so important. We need to learn to value wisdom, we need to learn to value the things that come with age, and understand that health and focusing on our energy levels, focusing on our energetic potential will change how we appear on the outside, right? The female body is a shapeshifter, it shifts and changes. There's no denying it, and there's no stopping it, we're never going to look the same that we did three years ago, five years ago. And that's okay. But when we're focused on valuing the right things, enhancing the beauty that we already have, trying to highlight the things that we find alluring and beautiful about ourselves, which might shift between seasons. We might be in a different season of life where we don't find certain things that we used to find very alluring and beautiful about ourselves that alluring anymore. And that's okay. 

But I think a lot of us, what we do instead is we spend so much energy resisting - I almost picture it as someone digging their heels in the dirt - it's like you're trying to go up against a foe that you can't fight, which is time. And we kind of resist it and we hide and we cover up and we become ashamed of something that never should be ashamed of, which is the fact that we have lived. What a beautiful privilege that is. I think what a lot of women aren't realizing yet is that they're trying to cover up the, I guess we can call them “wounds” that are coming from their stress. There's a difference between who you really are and then how stress is shaping you, shaping your skin, shaping your face, shaping your body. The pressure that we're under right now especially as we maintain and stay in our masculine energy, it is going to deplete our vitality and that is going to show on a very physical level. Our lips thinning, our skin getting super pale, losing color, our hair changing color and texture, the dark circles under our eyes, the poor limb flow, appearing puffy and blotchy. Eating a diet that's just not working for our bodies. 

We're living in an environment that's aging us, you know, whether that be an emotional environment or an actual physical environment, having certain traumas and experiences that are shaping our system and kind of locking us in certain patterns. And then on top of it, our thought patterns, you know, I'm always so surprised by health and wellness influencers, and just how afraid they are. They're always trying to control every little thing in their life, nitpick every little thing. They'll go on a plane, and they'll bring their mouth tape and their blue blocking glasses and their HEPA filters. And they'll bring their water filter with them. I just don't really understand that mindset of being afraid of everything and just living your life to dodge landmines. I've never really understood it. I think it's one of the biggest reasons why so many people are having a hard time healing right now. And so I wanted to kind of dig a little deeper. 

Digging Into Our Thoughts

I found this really interesting study, because I was like, how many thoughts do people think a day? I'm just curious, do we know that? And when you look at research having to do with the mind, a lot of the research has been done to try to figure out what people are thinking. And they've come to the conclusion that it's almost impossible to figure out what people are thinking. We can't really read people's minds which, okay, they're right. But they start to shift their research to seeing like, maybe we can see how many thoughts people are thinking. And they started to look for shifts in brain activity, when somebody's thought pattern shifted to another thought pattern. This one study, I think it was done in 2020. It's linked in the show notes, so you can take a look. But they figured out that humans have around 6200 thoughts per day. Well, actually, they call them “thought worms,” meaning the chains of consecutive thoughts that we have about a certain topic. They can kind of track how we're thinking, thinking, thinking about one thing, and then boom, we switch to a whole new thought pattern. And so they call these thought worms. And it's really just the measure of when one thought ends, and another thought begins. They found that human beings have 6200 thought worms per day. And to me, this is just mind blowing, because that means that we have 60 to 100 opportunities to shift our reality. Whereas typically when we're focusing on our health and wellness, we typically think of like nutrition, the meals we're eating, the supplements, our light exposure, our sleep, our water intake, our hydration, all of these things which are so important, right? They definitely impact our physiology, and our nervous system.

But on the flip side, our meals and supplements don't hold even a tiny little blip to the amount of thoughts that we have. We might eat what three meals a day, four meals a day, five meals a day, six meals a day, compared to 6200 opportunities to shift our perspective, shift our reality, shift how we think about ourselves, our perception about ourselves and others. And how many of us are wasting these opportunities, focusing on beating ourselves up and holding ourselves to expectations that we can never possibly meet? 

You know, negativity is a practice as much as positivity and shifting the way that our thoughts think. And unfortunately, as humans, we are going to be more prone to negative ways of thinking, because that is more of a survival way of thinking. And if we're constantly stuck in a state of fight or flight, right, we're kind of constantly stuck in the state of war with our system, where we're constantly stressed, we're constantly afraid, we're constantly beating ourselves up about anything, constantly thinking about how we could have done that better. Why did we do it this way? Or why don't I look this way? Or the tiny trains of thoughts when we put on pants that are too tight? And how long does that thought worm go in that direction? And then does that lead us to a new negative thought worm about ourselves and then a new negative thought worm, and pretty soon, our power of vision and imagination is shifting this extremely negative reality around ourselves. 

On an energetic level, our thoughts are shaping, shaping our energy. And our thoughts are acting as these energetic black holes that are just sucking the life out of us. We're running these constant negative thought patterns about ourselves, about the people around us, about our environment, and it's putting us into complete survival mode. We're constantly afraid. We're constantly worried about every little thing that we don't have control over. And we're constantly living in this negative reality, this glass half full reality of our own making. This itself is really traumatic to the body, you know, you're forming neural pathways every time that you think a certain thoughts over and over and over again. You're solidifying the pathway, you're making it easier for the brain to go in that direction every single time. And so if you're stuck in those thought patterns, which most of us are, social media really does that to us. And then on top of it, when we're stuck in fight or flight patterns, or we're in these really depleted mineral patterns, because mineral patterns really solidify these thought patterns, mineral patterns, and thought patterns can kind of be seen as parallels where the minerals really help the nerves fire a specific way. And when we're depleted in certain minerals, it's going to be much easier to stay in these negative trains of thought.

So there we have, again, the things that we need to recover, to renew, to repair are being wasted on just these energetic black holes that are sucking the very life and beauty right out of our existence. We're going to frown more, so our face is going to turn downward, and our body works off of habit. So our very energetic reality, our thought reality, is shaping our physical reality. For so many of us women, we feel like everything is so hopeless and overwhelming and scary and burdensome, that's actually shaping our physical structure. And then here we are having to cover that up with all of these super invasive beauty practices that I'll put quotations around, when in reality, the answer is to get real with ourselves to start nourishing, to start replenishing, to start facing our thought patterns and to do the work to shift those negative pathways into positive pathways, start to shift our perspective, see ourselves differently, create a new vision, use the power of our imagination and our vision to shape a new reality for ourselves, for our families for the future, and focus on what do we know to be true.

I know for me and myself, it's like, I know that I am my best self when I am fed. Regardless of what that looks like, physically, I need to be fed to show up in my best way. When I've gone outside, when I've taken care of myself, as I've replenished my minerals, those are things that make me feel well internally and enhance my well being, which absolutely shows up and reflects in my vitality on the outside. Of course, it impacts my hair, and my skin and my nails, and my weight. But more importantly, it changes how I feel. And so we cannot value things more for how they look than how they feel, what the consequences are for our life, how they're impacting us. You know, vanity is really believing that something outward will give us any more value or worth than we already have, that will make us feel better. And in reality, those things often are really fleeting, and they pass because if we don't shift the root cause, the kind of dysmorphic thinking that we have of ourselves, it's just gonna keep coming back. That symptom is going to keep coming back, and we're gonna have to keep covering up, covering up covering up what we're trying to hide, what is kind of trying to come out from a deeper layer. 

It's going to lead to a society that's incredibly vain, which is a double edged sword for all of us, because we're all going to age, and then it's gonna stab us in the back. I want to live in a society where I can proudly bear the evidence of the wisdom that I've gained, where I can proudly bear my age and my wisdom, because the beauty standard and youth, it's not something that I can hold on to onto forever. I just will not be able to hold on to it forever. It's out of my control, and it's going to waste my energy to do so. And this is why I'm so passionate about talking about topics like this because they are affecting us on an energetic level, on a metabolic level, on a hormonal level. No matter how much nutrient dense food we eat, or how organic or pasture-raised everything is, how many minerals we take, how many nutrients we take, if we are in this constant state of fear, this constant state of running out, of this constant state of feeling like everything is going to run out at some point in time, or this constant worry that the clock is ticking and I'm running out of time, or this constant feeling like something's got out there that's gonna get me and I need to scan my environment constantly and control everything in my environment, it's going to keep us in a constant state of fight or flight. 

Or, we're going to get so burned out that we're going to be frozen in place, and we're not going to be able to move forward. We're gonna get to that place of such burden and overwhelm where we're just frozen in place. In this state, no amount of following the right diet or nutrition or getting enough sunlight or focusing on your circadian rhythm is ever going to get you well. I think that's why so many of us are still caught in this vicious cycle of chasing wellness, we're trying to throw this supplement at it, this supplement at it, and this thing at it. And it's like nourishment on a both physical and spiritual level is foundational, or you're gonna feel like you're just chasing your own tail, stuck on this hamster wheel that never ends and never stops. There's going to be this deep spiritual feeling of exhaustion, like you are never enough. And if you need that to change, it really starts with you. So I'm going to make a call for us to start defining what beauty really is and being proud of beautiful over the beauty standard. Beauty standards come and go. And let's start celebrating wisdom, and calling that out in our friends and the women in our lives.

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