The Nourished Nervous System

Send us Fan Mail In this world that sometimes feels like it is pulling apart at the seams, how do you continue to walk the path of beauty?  How do you find resilience and purpose as a gift of the pain of human existence. This podcast episode with Maitreya Wolf is the story of an underworld journey, of initiatory consciousness and of cultivating beauty and joy as indispensable skills for survival....

Send us Fan Mail When you pay attention to the natural world around you, it can help to inform shifts and changes happening inside of you.  Tuning into the subtleties of the seasons is one of these practices. Our society can often feel focused on output, on showing up in the same ways day after day.  But when we tune into plants and animals in nature, it is clear that different seasons call for di...

Send us Fan Mail What do parenting and being an entrepreneur have in common?  Both can have fuzzy boundaries around when you are truly on and off.  Both can be all consuming endeavors that make it difficult to easily take time for yourself.  The thing is, in order to show up fully as a parent or an entrepreneur, self care needs to be a non-negotiable.   In order to avoid burn out, you need to find...

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever created a vision board or done a meditation that involved imagery or imaging yourself in a certain situation?  If so, then you have used the technique of visualization.   Visualization is touted as a tool of manifestation culture, an almost magical mystical process of visioning what you want to create and drawing that reality closer. The reality is that visualization...

Send us Fan Mail What does self care look like for you?  Really, I'd like to know.  One of the things I have been loving about hosting a podcast has been connecting with my guests and learning from them.  I love the accessibility of a podcast and how it weaves a web of connection and collaboration. I love collaborating with my guests, but I'd also like to collaborate with you.  I learn s...

Send us Fan Mail Every year between Halloween and New Years my relationship with sugar gets tested.  This relationship has grown and evolved over the years, but I still find this time challenging.  Anyone else?   I know I'm not alone because we are literally wired to seek out the sweet taste and industrialization has made it so that we can find it everywhere.  In this episode: The Ayurvedic p...

Send us Fan Mail Life in the modern world can often feel complicated.  Especially after holidays and all that they entail.  But even in the day to day we encounter experiences, periods of time and symptoms in our bodies that can feel more complicated.   What if your New Year's resolution, instead of adding more to your plate of to dos, was actually to simplify.  To say "no" more, to...

Send us Fan Mail This episode was supposed to be about sugar, but as I started it, something else emerged.  I was  thinking about the New Year and about the state of our world and how each new year just seems to be getting a bit weirder these days.  This is the nature of the world and of nature.  Nothing is fixed and permanent, everything is always changing around us, but some years those changes...

Send us Fan Mail Tea is such a common part of daily rituals.  You may even drink tea every day.  But do you ever sit with you tea, find a place of stillness and tune into your senses.  Do you ever use your tea as tool for meditation?   In this episode with Samantha Jones, (a trauma-informed yoga & meditation teacher, tea ceremonialist and retreat facilitator based in Cleveland, Ohio) we cover...

Send us Fan Mail Why are you interested in self care and nourishing the nervous system?  What is the long game?  Is it just to feel good or is there a deeper reason? These are some of the questions I've been asking myself throughout my self care journey.  The answer that I come up with again and again is resilience.  To be more resilient in my body, mind and spirit.  To be able to show up mor...

Send us Fan Mail What you eat is a part of your everyday life.  And you have probably found that certain foods work better with your body than others.  We each have a unique constitution that is partly genetics and partly the imbalances that have accumulated over time. Ancestral eating recognizes the genetic contribution of our ancestors and how that may affect how we eat today.  It is learning ab...

Send us Fan Mail Most likely you  sleep every night, it is a part of the fabric of your life, but are you getting good quality sleep?  Do you wake up feeling rested and energized for your day without caffeine?   Like digestion it is easy to normalize sub quality sleep - to think it is normal to wake up feeling exhausted or to need a cup of coffee to get going.  It may have been so long since you&a...

Send us Fan Mail So many parents that I talk to agree that parenting is hard, but I think that is only part of the story.  I think there are so many reasons that parenting is hard.  Many of the parents I know are parenting differently than they were parented, healing generational trauma and breaking cycles - this is deep and hard work.  Then layer that into a world were so many of us are parenting...

Send us Fan Mail One of the reasons for doing self care is to build resilience.  When you are more resilient you are able to move through life with more flexibility.  We all have traumatic experiences big and small at some point in our lives, but when we cultivate resilience we can find a more graceful process of healing from trauma. In this week's episode with Efan Hsieh we get into some of...

Send us Fan Mail There is a lot of focus in our culture on what we eat.  There are so many different types of diets each with claims to support health and vitality in different ways.  What you eat is important, but more important is how you digest what you eat.  You can eat the healthiest foods but if you aren't digesting them well, then you won't get all of the health benefits from them...

Send us Fan Mail We have access to so much information these days, that there is a lot of inner growth work that can be done alone.  But what about those times when you need a helping hand from someone with a particular skill set?  Who do you turn to?  Or do you just manage for as long as you can, procrastinating the work that can help you thrive? I admittedly have spent a lot of time in the procr...

Send us Fan Mail How many of us are living in an energy deficit, putting out way more energy than we are receiving or generating for ourselves?  I think this is especially true for parents.  The basic foundation for vibrancy is nourishment but I think the true long game is resilience.   In order to become more resilient you first need to understand the relationship between nourishment and resilien...

Send us Fan Mail In Ayurveda, we talk a lot about digestion.  And it isn't just the digestion of the food you put in your body, but also of the sensory impressions that you take into your mind.  What you take in each day in the form of media, news, and shows needs to be digested and can affect your nervous system. In this episode with Sarah Nelsen, she talks about how she takes the nervous sy...

Send us Fan Mail What does it mean to be a good listener?   To be present and listen without an agenda, and I believe to listen not only to the words spoken but also to body language, emotions and other subtle cues.   The same is true when you listen to your body.  Your body is constantly talking to you through subtle nerve impulses and sensations and feelings and emotions.  Your body is speaking...

Send us Fan Mail What the heck is Panchakarma, you may ask?    And why do you want to know about it?  Panchakarma is a traditional Ayurvedic cleansing practice that helps to clear the body and mind of toxins and accumulated doshas and then rebuild healthy tissues. In this episode with Kimberly Larson she will go deep into what panchakarma is and how it benefits the body, mind and nervous system. ...

Send us Fan Mail Vibrancy is a glow, a sparkle and an aura of excitement.  To feel truly vibrant is a robust, grounded and vital feeling.  Do you feel vibrant?  If not, when was the last time you truly felt vibrant?   In Ayurvedic thought the feeling of vibrancy and vitality is connected to ojas, a biological protoplasmic substance that governs immunity and vitality in the body. In this episode: W...

Send us Fan Mail Another podcast episode about meditation?  Yes!  We hear about meditation all the time from so many different sources but we can always use one more because it is just so good for us.  If you are looking to make changes in your life, big or small, meditation is a practice that can support those changes.  Not only does it help with managing stress, it actually changes the make up o...

Send us Fan Mail  You don't have to like cats to appreciate the unapologetic way they do life.  Some things that cats do really well is play, sleep and do nothing.  For us humans, doing nothing is something that is becoming increasingly more difficult as time goes on.  It is so incredibly easy to fill our idle moments with social media, shows, or games on our phones and computers. In this epi...

Send us Fan Mail We can tend to think of our bodily systems as separate - nervous system, endocrine system, digestive system, etc.  Although each serves a unique function, they all function together as a whole, so when something affects one system it can ripple out into all of them.  This is especially true in the relationship between the nervous and endocrine systems.   In this episode I talk wit...

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever envisioned something in your life and then it comes to pass?  Even something small, like the perfect cashmere sweater in a certain color and then you find it at a thrift store?  In some circles you may say you manifested it, in others you may think you were just lucky,  or you may call it a cashmeracle, but what if it has to do with your brain and how it processes in...