How To Achieve Optimal Health Using The Four Cornerstones [Episode #572]

This week’s topic is: How To Achieve Optimal Health Using The Four Cornerstones

I’m very passionate about the Four Cornerstones, which are food, body, emotional wellbeing and spiritual growth. As I’ve continued on this journey of health and wellness and teaching different ideas and philosophies, the more and more it becomes cemented and obvious to me that we need to take a holistic approach to get the best results.

To feel and look our very best and to feel the flow of energy going through our bodies. That power that we all have access to that has the ability to shape our lives, to manifest what we want, including health and energy. It’s not about going deep in just one area.

I’m passionate about sharing how to apply the wisdom of the cornerstones into your daily life. And tapping into all areas of your beautiful whole self to just reach your highest potential and feeling and living your best life.

Have you been wondering about this very topic? If you want to know the answer to this question and 3 more sent in by Beauties just like you, listen now to find out!

Remember you can submit your questions at https://mysolluna.com/askkimberly/

[Questions Answered]

Megan – Texas (food)

Is there anything I need to be aware of in each of the Four Cornerstones that could improve my overall hair health? I’ve read that protein makes a difference when it comes to hair health. I’m starting to go bald a little in the front and need to do something about it asap!

Linda – Montana (body)

When it comes to your four cornerstones, where does the body fit in? What I mean is, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Should our body come first or mental health, etc?

Georgina – Tennessee (emotional wellbeing/mental health)

If there’s a history of mental illness in my family, including personality disorder, is it possible to avoid this eventuality? I don’t want to “think my way into a disorder” but I do want to take precautions.

Sue – Canada (spiritual growth)

When I think of spiritual growth I think of the scriptural quote where “that by God’s power we have everything we need”. I’m not very religious. Is it possible to grow spiritually without the systems of religion?

I LOVE HEARING FROM YOU!

There are lots of ways to share your responses or questions about the podcast:

• Comment below
• Connect on Twitter: @_kimberlysnyder
• Follow the conversation on my Instagram
• Comment on my Facebook Page
• Ask a question: mysolluna.com/askkimberly

Be sure to Subscribe to the Podcast and follow me on Soundcloud, so you never miss an episode!

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE

You may be really intrigued by podcasts, but you may just know how to listen or subscribe. It’s very easy, I promise! To listen to more than one episode, and to have it all in a handier way, on your phone or tablet, it’s way better to subscribe so you never miss an episode!

Want to know what to expect from other episodes of the “Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder”? My passion is to inspire and empower you to be your most authentic and beautiful self. We offer interviews with top experts, my personal philosophies and experiences, as well as answers to community-based questions around topics such as health, beauty, nutrition, yoga, spirituality and personal growth.

The intention of the Feel Good Podcast is to well…help you really Feel Good in your body, mind and spirit! Feeling Good means feeling peaceful, energized, whole, uniquely beautiful, confident and joyful, right in the midst of your perfectly imperfect life. This podcast is as informative and full of practical tips and take-aways as it is inspirational. I am here to support you in being your very best! I have so much love and gratitude for you. Thank you for tuning in and being part of the community :).

LEAVE A REVIEW ON ITUNES

Listeners really respect the views of other listeners, so your response helps people find good material they are interested in! If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell your friends and give us a rating or review. Many thanks in advance.

Inspirational Thought of the Week

The more you connect with your true self, the healthier and happier you will become.

[RESOURCES]

• SBO Probiotics
• Detoxy
• Digestive Enzymes  
• Feel Good Starter Kit
• FREE Gift: 7-Day Meditation Series (DIGITAL COURSE)
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• Be a part of the community Join the Feel Good Circle
• Kimberly Snyder’s Books
• Four Cornerstone FREE Guide: Text the word GUIDE to +1-855-741-0602
• Additional resources in transcript

Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• Spring Detox: Practical Tips to Cleanse Your Life and Body
• Tips to Improve Hair Health!
• Managing Heightened Emotions
• 5 Signs of Spiritual Awakening

Powered and Distributed by: PodcastOne

Banyan Botanicals: Banyan Botanicals was born out of love for the deep wisdom of Ayurveda. As a certified B Corp, Banyan is committed to creating earth-friendly products. Save 15% on Healthy Hair Oil and all my favorite Banyan Botanicals products at www.banyanbotanicals.com/solluna

Feel Good SBO Probiotics: Use code: wellness15 for 15% off

Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly : Hey Beauties and welcome back to our Thursday, Q&A show where our topic today is How To Achieve Optimal Health Using the Four Cornerstones. And I just got back from Hawaii. I am feeling so much strong energy and vitality from soaking in that waterfall vibration and the jungle and the earth. And I’m feeling really, really inspired right now. So I’m extra excited for our community show today where all the questions come right from you guys. And I love to hear what you’re thinking and wondering and how I can best support you. And I am very, very passionate in particular about talking about the four cornerstones, which are food, body, emotional wellbeing and spiritual growth.

Kimberly : Because as I’ve continued on this journey of health and wellness and teaching different ideas and philosophies, the more and more it becomes cemented and obvious to me that we need to take a holistic approach to get the best results, to feel our very best and yes, to look our best and to feel the flow of energy going through our bodies through ourselves, that power that we all have access to that has the ability to shape our lives, to manifest what we want, including again, the focus of our podcast today, which is health and energy. And it’s not about going deeper and deeper into just one area. I often find that when people keep asking me more and more specific food questions, I say, “Hey, let’s not talk about food anymore. Let’s talk about some of these other areas of life.”

Kimberly : I know this very well because I was very obsessed with food for many years. Those of you that have been with me on the journey for a while, know that my first two books were food focused, completely food focused. And then with my third book, it started taking this wider turn and then started to incorporate the emotional health aspect and the spiritual health aspect and body as well. Everything besides food, really taking care of our bodily temples since we are having an embodied experience. So I’m so passionate about really sharing how to apply the wisdom of the cornerstones into your daily life, into tapping into all areas of your beautiful whole self, again, to just reach your highest potential and feeling your best, living your best life.

Please leave a review on iTunes

Kimberly : So before we dive in, a little reminder, please be sure to leave us a review on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you listen to our podcast, it’s a great way to support the show. We all know that reviews are important. And so from the bottom of my heart, I thank you so much for taking the time to do that. And while you’re over there, please be sure to subscribe to our show, which is free and easy and just helps you stay tuned in that way you don’t miss out on any of these shows or our Monday interview podcasts as we get swept into the flow of busy life, it’s always a good thing to subscribe. All right, let’s get into our show today. How to achieve optimal health using the four cornerstones and again today in a very practical sense?

Question #1 around the topic of: How To Achieve Optimal Health Using The Four Cornerstones: Is there anything I need to be aware of in each of the four cornerstones that could improve my overall hair health? I read that protein makes a difference when it comes to hair health, I’m starting to go bald a little in the front and need to do something about it ASAP.

Kimberly : So the first question comes from Megan and she is from Texas and she writes, “Is there anything I need to be aware of in each of the four cornerstones that could improve my overall hair health? I read that protein makes a difference when it comes to hair health, I’m starting to go bald a little in the front and need to do something about it ASAP.” Megan, thank you for your question. I think that this is something that is quite common. A lot of us wonder, worry about our hair health. It has a lot to do with our internal state and as we transition through different periods, whether it’s periods of anxiety or childbirth, nursing, hormonal shifts, we can see a difference in our hair. And there’s definitely a lot we can do from the four cornerstone perspective.

Kimberly : So the first is food and by the way, it doesn’t mean foods the most important. This is just the order that I tend to go through the cornerstones. But from a food perspective, yes, protein is important, but the kind of protein that we ingest our hair is largely made up of protein. But when I say the kind we ingest, we want to have foods and protein that are easily assimilated into our bodies. So they make it throughout our entire system, including to our hair follicles. If we continue to clog and congest our bodies, if we eat a lot of very dense protein, I eat a lot of animal protein. There’s a clogging effect that starts to happen throughout the body. The blood starts to get congested and therefore the little capillaries start to get clogged that transports nutrients and oxygen to all different parts of our body.

Kimberly : So power protein smoothie, beans, kale, broccoli, almonds, almond butter, all the different variety of plant-based foods that we recommend. And our Solluna beauty, detox diet are definitely going to help to release, strengthen your hair. Any recipe inspiration you’re looking for we have hundreds and hundreds of recipes over at mysolluna.com. So yes, protein. The other one we hear about a lot is B vitamins, B vitamins are essential for hair health. I’ve never been one that recommends taking a million different pills, but across the board, if you are taking, or you’re ingesting nutritional yeast, which is very rich in B vitamins, that’s wonderful for your hair. You’re going to get that biotin in there as well as the other B vitamins, which are meant to work synergistically as a B vitamin complex. You can also, if you’re taking a prenatal or you’re continuing to do that throughout nursing, which I personally am, you’re going to get those B vitamins as well in a very well-designed whole food based multivitamin.

Kimberly : So just make sure you’re getting your B vitamins in. And also the last thing I’ll say is hydration. If your body is chronically dehydrated, that is really going to affect your scalp health and the health of your hair follicles. And that can very much easily, that can lead to hair loss, difficulty in hair growth. So make sure that you’re getting in that water, that room temperature, water, that herbal tea, the hot water with lemon, the juicy, especially this time of year, raw fruits and veggies, those salads. And that’s going to do wonders for your hair. From a body perspective, one thing that I’ve incorporated in the last really just year or two or not even two, I would say the last year, I didn’t really do this with Bubby, my older son, Emerson, nickname is Bobby. I did not name my son Bubby, but with Moses, I did notice what you’re referring to here Megan, a little bit of crown hair loss, which is quite common with new mamas.

Kimberly : And so I started incorporating scalp massage, and I started to notice tremendous results. When we massage our scalp and you can do it with your fingertips. I do it at nighttime. It helps to bring blood flow and circulation to the scalp. This is something that is an ancient ayurvedic practice. So I try to do it a couple of times a week. You can use Sesame oil or an herbalized hair oil. There’s a healthy hair oil by Banyan that I love that I personally use. And you just need a few drops and you can wash your hair afterwards, or you can leave it in overnight like me. And it just feels great. And it’s the combination of using these stimulating oils and the scalp massage that something you can do physically to your physical body, that’s wonderful for your hair.

Kimberly : Emotional well-being, wise. Stress, as we know, affects everything. And it is true that in periods of stress, people’s hair tends to go more gray. It tends to fall out and it tends to thin. So here’s where everything starts to come together in that beautiful holistic way. If we want our hair to be healthy, we really need to manage our emotional health. We want to process our feelings. We want to breathe and feel and digest our feelings. Journaling is something I really recommend five, 10 minutes in the morning and at night, just to make sure you’re not pushing down that stress, pushing down again, those emotions, which don’t leave. If you push them down and you don’t digest them, they stay as potent energies in your body. We don’t want that to build up.

Kimberly : You want to look at your relationships and make sure that there’s anything you need to clean up. If you need to apologize or move away from draining relationships or create healthy boundaries, which create certain relationships that can be quite stressful to you right now. You want to take the steps that you need to create an environment for your own emotional health and wellbeing. And this very much will affect your hair. Finally, spiritual growth, the practices, the awareness, and the emphasis on self-knowing, self-realization, meditation, stillness. This crosses into journaling, spending time in nature. When we are more connected to ourselves, we are not as effected by the outside world. We are less reactive. We are less stressed and this is a hundred percent going to help your hair. And I know it’s funny to connect meditation with hair health, but again, one thing I bet all my chips on, it’s that when we take a holistic approach, things work better.

Kimberly : And it’s true across the board. If let’s say we just focus on getting the best shampoo or we focus on just taking the biotin, you may see some improvement, but you’re not going to see the lushest gloriousness of the locks that could be coming when we go wider, not just deep into one cornerstone. So think about how you can carve out time in your life for meditating and diving deep within yourself. And again, you become more connected, strong within yourself, and it does affect everything. It has a profound impact on your health. They’ve started to research meditation in many different contexts. They found blood markers for meditators. This was a study that came from [inaudible] and Harvard. And I think there were six different institutions that participated in this study and hundreds and hundreds of other studies now on meditation.

Kimberly : So we know there is a physical impact on your body and your organs and your dishes and your blood, and inevitably your hair as well when you start to really tune in and embody that self-knowing. So there you have it. I hope this helps Megan and I definitely recommend taking one step in each of the cornerstones for really working to improve your hair health. And I can’t wait to hear how you do. Keep in touch with us and let us know how it goes. Sending you a big, huge virtual hug, wherever you are, and so much love.

Question #2 around the topic of: How To Achieve Optimal Health Using The Four Cornerstones: When it comes to your four cornerstones of true beauty, how can I best take care of my body to feel good outside of what I eat? I have been eating clean, but I just don’t feel good.

Kimberly : All right, next question comes from Linda, who lives in Montana and she writes, “When it comes to your four cornerstones of true beauty, how can I best take care of my body to feel good outside of what I eat? I have been eating clean, but I just don’t feel good.”

Kimberly : So this is very, very common Linda. And this is what happened to me. Most of us start with a food cornerstone, because again, food is tangible and we have to eat every day unless you’re doing a fast, but we are humans in a human body that is supplied by food partially. So what we eat is a natural starting point on the pathway of wellness, but it does not end there. The path does not start and end in the same place. It’s important to clean up the diet. There’s a lot of direction and conversation in yoga about what to eat and an ideal diet for the yogi, because it has such a profound effect on our mindset and our meditations and our ability to feel light and energized and to feel our vitality, but that’s one of the teachings. And then it goes deeper and deeper into all the other aspects, including pranayama, breathing in and filling your Prana and Pratyahara and Dharana and Samadhi and all these different aspects of yoga.

Kimberly : And so I would say the same thing here, Linda, the food is the beginning path, but what I would say is to focus, first of all, let’s go through the rest of the cornerstones with your body, connecting to your body. And it’s so important to have wonderful digestion to feel good. If there’s one thing I know is if we are constipated or if we are bloated, we do not feel good, even if we are eating well. And so I really recommend taking Detoxy and eating lots of fiber, drinking water, doing whatever you need to do, taking your SBO probiotics to really, really hone in your digestion. And then I would encourage you to find body practices that feel good, movement practices.

Kimberly : For me, it’s walking. I love to walk. I love to be outside. Sometimes I’m called to the asanas. I really dip in and out of them, the poses of yoga. But right now I’ve been on this walking streak for the last few years, really. And it feels good to be out in the sunshine in nature and to move my body and to breathe. And we’re meant to be dynamic. We’re meant to be part of nature and to flow. And so making sure that our bodies don’t feel stagnant, both in digestion and in movement is important. And emotionally, like I said, a lot of the denseness that we feel in our day-to-day life comes from unresolved, emotional issues, anger, pain, resentment, shame, guilt, all these things that we hold onto. So what I recommend is a next time something triggers you. And when I say trigger, something bothers you, you start to get a feeling in your body. It could be something someone says or you see something and it triggers something that makes you feel an emotion, so-called negative emotion or darkness or not enoughness or whatever it is.

Kimberly : I invite you to sit in that discomfort and to feel it, and to breathe into the part of the body where you start to discern where it arises instead of getting caught up in your thoughts and defending yourself or lashing out or projecting, just really sit in that discomfort that is akin to emotional digestion. And when I started to do that more, more and more, we’re not taught to do this typically, we are taught to go call a friend or rant to our brother or our husband or wife, or to put on Netflix or to go and TikTok or whatever it is. We are taught to turn away from discomfort, but that doesn’t process and digest these emotions, which then we continue to carry like a bag, a sack of rocks. Every time we sit and let that feeling work itself out, we become lighter on the other side, like taking one rock out of the sack.

Kimberly : And I started doing this and I started to notice the triggers I had around not being seen, wanting to be validated. I started to be aware on the other side of the trigger, I would feel a feeling it would subside, and then I would self analyze or I would journal about it. And what happened was I started to notice patterns. I started to be again self-aware and more and more over time, I just became lighter and lighter. And I started to let go more and more and more. And that was the pathway for me, just feeling immensely better in my day-to-day life. In the quiet moments where you were driving in the car, or you’re doing the dishes, or you are playing with your child, or you’re having a conversation with a friend over dinner, sometimes this heaviness comes up or you can’t explain it and you can’t understand why.

Kimberly : You could be doing something that should be so joyful and it’s not, it’s all this old stuff that we haven’t digested. It’s like the physical toxins that we can carry in our GI tract. So it’s so important to do this process of emotional digestion. And over time we start to feel better and better and better. And then the biggest one of all, the biggest one of all, Linda is spiritual growth. So much of our suffering comes from being disconnected from the true self. That actually that is all the suffering. In my opinion, it’s when we don’t know ourselves, it comes from thinking, we are the surface. We are what we look like. We are our jobs. We are how much money we have, or how popular we are, how many followers we have in social media, how great our vacations are or whatever. And that is the eternal chase of trying to get more and more trying to get thinner, trying to get a bigger booty, trying to look younger, trying to have more money.

Kimberly : It’s endless and endless, right? We live on the surface of life. And so when we start to really connect in, there is a very stable center inside of you. There is a place of peace and joy. So instead of looking outward, we go deeper inside. And when we access that, then we become so resilient. We become so peaceful. It is literally a sanctuary that we start to carry around with us. So I still get thrown off of course, I’m human. I still have triggers, but the level of trigger and heaviness and denseness that I feel today compared to two years ago, five years ago, seven years ago is not even comparable because what’s happened I’ve eaten clean this whole time. So my diet has not changed that much. And I’ve always moved my body. And I’ve been focusing on digestion now for 10 years, but what’s really shifted is what I just spoke about the emotional digestion and a huge emphasis in my lifestyle on meditation.

Kimberly : And it keeps growing and growing, getting deeper and deeper. So I, 100% advocate that is the pathway to feeling amazing. And when you do that, you will glow. Your skin will look different. There will be a light in your eyes that comes through, and it is something that you cannot acquire. You cannot get it from food alone. It has to come from this integration of starting to know your true self, starting to tap into that energy. We have so many free meditations for you over on the free app, which is in the app store. The Solluna by Kimberly Snyder app. So I invite you to check it out, check out the meditations or any others that speak to you and to really make this a part of your life on a daily basis and watch boom, how the joy and the peace and the filling gut starts to rise in you because that is our natural state.

Kimberly : Our natural state is love and expansion and infinite bliss, but it gets covered up with all this stuff. And all the things that we think are important and things that we chase endlessly. And so when we start to burrow, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, we start to go deeper and deeper instead of more and more and more on the outside. Then we access that. And that is the game changer. So thank you so much, Linda, for your question, sending you so much love out there to Montana. Let me know how you do, let me know how you progress. And I’m always here for you my love.

Break

All right, Beauties, we’re going to take a short break. And when we get back, we have two more questions for you guys on this topic, achieving optimal health with the four cornerstones.

Question #3 around the topic of: How To Achieve Optimal Health Using The Four Cornerstones: I truly feel my obsessive thoughts are really affecting my health. Every day, I wake up feeling anxious and down. I’ve been trying to journal, but I see how negative I have been. Any tips on how to handle my emotional state?

Kimberly : All right, next one question. We’re back from our break. Love this topic. Our next question comes from Georgina, who lives in Tennessee and she writes, “I truly feel my obsessive thoughts are really affecting my health. Every day, I wake up feeling anxious and down. I’ve been trying to journal, but I see how negative I have been. Any tips on how to handle my emotional state?” So thank you so much Georgina for your very candid question. And I can feel the anxed. I can feel that trapped energy there, and it’s something that most all of us have experienced, or maybe a lot of us are experiencing it right now. So thank you so much for bringing this up. Anxiety tends to build and build and build. So, as I was saying earlier, when we distract all the time, when things are coming up, it may feel okay in the moment.

Kimberly : It may feel like a very temporary way to sooth ourselves, but it never, never gets to the bottom. And we never really, really heal well. So it’s important to be self-aware. So, first of all, it’s a good idea to journal when you are not feeling negative for one to self-analyze to reflect back and say, okay, these are my anxieties. These are some of my triggers when someone does this, or when this comes up, or I see an image of this, just to sort of lay a map of inner awareness. Carl Young talks about, deep diving into our own shadow and bringing it up to the surface so it doesn’t control us anymore. So the only way we can start to do that is when we can start to see. So I recommend really doing that self analysis first.

Kimberly : Otherwise, we can constantly blame, it’s all this crazy stuff going on in the world or such and such. It’s their fault. They stress me out, they suck. This happens. So it’s important to do a little bit of self analysis when we’re not in a triggered state. And then we can step back and say, oh, well, this is what’s been bothering me. And these are the patterns and it’s really like XYZ. And this comes up over and over again. And then I would pick one or two to start that you really want to focus on taking down. Let’s say it’s a trigger about feeling triggered or when someone else is going on a trip and you feel like you’re being left out or whatever it is. You just sit in that discomfort like I was saying with Linda in the last question. In that moment is when we can start to release anxiety and we start to retrain the pathways of the brain.

Kimberly : And that means we start to become a little bit closer to freedom being awake, enlightenment. So that means that next time a trigger comes, you sit and you breathe and you feel that discomfort and you don’t try to distract. And this is really important. You just are silent for a moment. You don’t react, you don’t speak, you don’t lash out and you don’t try to really do anything except let it be digested. And that is the pathway for starting to heal anxiety. And of course, if there’s a larger issue at play, or there’s really big trauma, I do recommend of course, speaking to a professional, but a lot of us have, daily stresses and triggers that we can start to work on healing on our own in our day-to-day life.

Kimberly : So sitting and doing that analysis. And then in the moment feeling when you’re triggered and then breathing and letting it go instead of holding on, instead of replaying a thought over and over again, “Oh, this shouldn’t have happened.” That victim mindset over and over and over and what’s happened to me is I’ve uncovered a lot of just hidden resentment, things from my childhood, different relationships with different relatives. And just so many limiting beliefs started to come to the surface when I started to do this, and I realized how much that stress was affecting my health. When we have these anxieties that we play into and that we just keep, they keep going over and over again, it starts to steal a little pockets of our energy and it starts to just spin round and round and round. And it doesn’t really go away. It’s like a snowball. It keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Kimberly : So we have to step to the side and look within. Otherwise, we’re caught in that same story. We can’t see our way out. And that’s when we start to see a real imbalance to our hormones. That’s when we start to see more difficulty maintaining homeostatic balance in our body, whether that’s with our digestion or immunity starts to drop, we start needing more caffeine. Our sleep gets off. So it’s so important to really pay attention to this aspect of health, to really, really start to understand yourself. And this is something that we dive deep into on a daily basis in our Solluna circle. So if there’s one place I can support you very, very deeply. It’s in our circle where we have tips every day. There’s a special part of that Solluna app. That is the membership portal where there’s discussion every day.

Kimberly : And then we hold a live circle every month. There’s meditations and audio is every month. So we can deep dive in and really start to go into this self-analysis, which is the pathway to freedom enjoy. So if you’re called to that, I recommend that as well, Georgina, otherwise try this method and also try reading the book, Letting Go by Dr. David Hawkins, which I talk about a lot. And he explains this process and different aspects of it as well. So sending you much love sister, you’ll get there. Sending you all the joy and strength that is inside of you to connect to that really is the way through this. And you can do it. You can overcome your anxieties. You can overcome your fear, just take it one day at a time, do your practices one day at a time, focus on your emotional wellbeing, but also incorporate your practices like meditation and stillness and going into nature. And that will really support you as well.

Question #4 around the topic of: How To Achieve Optimal Health Using The Four Cornerstones: How does spirituality affect my health? And is it possible to grow spiritually without the systems of religion?

Kimberly : All right, next question comes from Sue, who lives in Canada and she writes, “How does spirituality affect my health? And is it possible to grow spiritually without the systems of religion?” So when I speak about spirituality and I know sometimes people use spirituality and religion, synonymously, that is not what I’m talking about. They are not synonyms when I’m using them, sort of like juice and smoothies are not synonymous. They are very, very different. Religion is as you say here, Sue, organized systems and some of us are drawn to them and some of us are not. But spirituality is literally about connecting to the spirit inside of you, the soul, the essential essence. So you can do that within a system of religion if you are religious, or you can do that without a system of religion, if you are not religious, so it can be layered on top or it can stand alone. They do not conflict at all.

Kimberly : And this is one of the reasons I was really drawn to the path of Paramahansa Yogananda, the great yoga guru who came to the west. I personally, was raised Catholic and I loved Jesus. I still love Jesus. I pray to Jesus. And I also am a Yogi and I meditate. And while I personally don’t subscribe to a particular religion per se, I pray and I meditate and I connect back in and it is beyond for me. And again, this is personal, but again, for me, it’s really not about organized religion, but it’s about this deep, deep connection to the true self. And this is why I’m such an advocate for meditation. This is why I’m so passionate about talking about it all the time. Because some people still really know me for nutrition and food. And it’s always an important part of this whole lifestyle.

Kimberly : I’m always there to support the food journey, but I wouldn’t be authentic. I wouldn’t be sincere in being able to support you and all the amazing beauties in our community. If I didn’t talk about spirituality as the real path to feeling good, because food will take you so far. Food will support the spiritual journey. But ultimately, if we are disconnected from the true self. We will never be really happy. We’ll find one thing then we’ll chase another. And then even when we get the things that we thought were going to make us happy, there’s more and more and more. So it affects our health when we connect inward. Because as I mentioned in an earlier question, it changes everything in life.

Kimberly : It is an essential source of joy and energy. So what happened to me was when I started to really connect in my obsessions and food cravings and just being so into food naturally started to melt away. I love food still, but it isn’t this huge driving force, which used to occupy so many of my thoughts. And even when I became healthier, just still, there was this a struggle there, if I’m being truthful about treats and wanting certain foods and this lifelong journey that we have with our relationship with food, especially as women, but it started to really heal on a profound level because it’s still something that we’re trying to put beyond our nutritional needs, food does shift our energy. There’s an energy to food there’s taste. So it affects how we feel it.

Kimberly : We look at it as a mood shifter largely, but when we start to feel connected from within, we don’t need food as much to do that for us and everything really reach a level of equanimity. So there’s more stabilization. So your blood pressure doesn’t go up and down, which means inflammation in your body starts to reduce. And it means that all the different systems in your body, from your cardiovascular health, your respiratory health, your immune system, your endocrine system, your circulatory system, everything starts to elevate because besides food and besides exercise, our internal state is hugely, hugely impactful on all our systems, right? So we know that stress creates this acid in our body and it just shifts everything. So in contrast, when we go to a deep or deeper place. And it’s like, I’ve used this analogy before, but we’re scuba diving on the surface and it’s choppy and it’s rough.

Kimberly : But then when we start to go underneath, things are calm and lovely and peaceful. And so go deeper and deeper within yourself. And the more calm we are, the better our health and everything will start to stabilize. And we will not age as quickly. [inaudible] teaches this excess fire. This Pitta is a primary cause of aging and Western science backs that up with all the different studies and all the different research on stress today. So to answer your question, Sue, it is profound how much these practices like meditation and just getting to know your true, beautiful, perfect whole complete self will do to your health. It will help to stop this endless comparison, this eternal search for something that we don’t really know what it is because we get it, then it’s something else on another thing.

Kimberly : And I did this panel last week, and as you guys know, there’s these chats and for asking questions, and one woman said she got a procedure. I don’t know exactly what she was talking about, kind of a facelift or something. And then she said, then she got another one. And then she herself said, “I don’t think this is ever going to end. I don’t feel good about myself. And I don’t think it’s ever going to end.” And to be honest, it isn’t, if we just keep on the surface, there’s so much depth and beauty inside of you that unless you tap into that, it’s like little tiny band-aids on the outside. Just like little things we’re doing versus there’s so much inside of us. And that is the truth. So on that note, I want to leave you with a quote of the week, which is, this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot and writing about. And so you’ll hear me use this term more and more the true self, but the true self is this essential essence inside of you.

Thought of the Week

Kimberly : And so the quote or the thought that I just want you to sit with is that, “The more you connect with your true self, the healthier and happier you will become. The more you connect with your true self, the healthier and happier you become.” The easier it is to manage your diet. The easier it is to manage your weight. I promise you, I promise. The easier it is for you to feel light, to feel creative, to feel joyful in all the little moments of your life. Not just when you’re eating ice cream or watching a funny movie or drinking wine, but in the little moments, it’s such a rise up this natural state of joy, the more you connect with your true self, the healthier and happier you become.

Kimberly : So I’ll leave it there. I send you so much love. I am so inspired by each and every single one of you. I love our community. I am infinitely grateful that we are connected. So I’ll see you on Monday for our next interview podcast. Remember to check out our Solluna app, also the website, mysolluna.com and social at underscore Kimberly Snyder. Love you. Love you and see you back here soon. Take great care.