What is Meditation and the Benefits of Living A More Spiritual-Forward Life [Episode #812]

Summary: In the October Solluna Power Hour episode, Kimberly discusses the theme of building resilience and strength across physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. She emphasizes the importance of daily practices, nutrition, and emotional well-being in fostering a holistic lifestyle. The conversation covers the significance of heart coherence, the impact of food on immunity, and the role of spiritual growth in achieving inner peace and resilience. Episode Sponsors FATTY15 OFFER: Fatty15 is on a mission to replenish your C15 levels and restore your long-term health. You can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription Starter Kit by going to fatty15.com/KIMBERLY and using code KIMBERLY at checkout. USE LINK: fatty15.com/KIMBERLY LMNT: OFFER: To get THE PUREST, MOST DELICIOUS PLANT-POWERED protein blend, infused with real vanilla and harmonizing adaptogens go to Animamundiherbals.com and use code: KIM20 to get 20% off your purchase! USE LINK: Animamundiherbals.com and use code: KIM20 to get 20% off your purchase!   Episode Chapters 00:00 Building Resilience and Strength 12:10 Food Cornerstone: Strength and Immunity 22:39 Body Cornerstone: Movement and Stability 29:45 Emotional Well-Being: Heart Coherence 38:48 Spiritual Growth: Inner Resilience   SOLLUNA PRODUCT LINKS Glowing Greens Powder™ Feel Good SBO Probiotics Feel Good Detoxy Feel Good Digestive Enzymes Feel Good Starter Kit Feel Good Skincare KIMBERLY’S BOOKS The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts Chilla Gorilla & Lanky Lemur Journey to the Heart The Beauty Detox Solution Beauty Detox Foods Beauty Detox Power Radical Beauty Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life You Are More Than You Think You Are OTHER PODCASTS YOU MAY ENJOY! How to Believe in Your Self Worth with Jamie Kern Lima How to Raise Your Standards In Your Love Life with Matthew Hussey How to Eat to Beat Your Diet with New York Times best selling author Dr. William Li The issues with consuming vegetable and seed oils with Dr. Catherine Shanahan How the Power Foods Diet helps with Weight Loss with Dr. Neal Barnard How Not to Age with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Greger How to eat to reduce anxiety with Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo How to Optimize Your Metabolic Health with Dr. Casey Means TRANSCRIPT: Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:00.91)Hi everyone and welcome back to our October Power Hour Show where our theme this month is building resilience and strength physically, emotionally and spiritually. So just a reminder, this show is now once a month, the first Thursday of every month where we talk about our month’s themes and tips and tools across our four cornerstones, food, body, emotional well-being and spiritual growth to support you in the month ahead to feel your very best. And I have to say, I’m very excited about October in particular. It is one of my favorite months. It’s definitely one of my kids’ favorite months. They have been talking about Halloween and all the adventures and all the different parties and, you know, decorating everything already for a few weeks. There’s a shift now. It’s starting to feel like we’re really into fall. There’s a shift energetically. There’s a shift in the weather. And there’s a lot that we can do to build resilience and strength on the inside, which we’ll talk about today, which takes place across many layers of our being, so that we can feel centered as we march forward into the rest of the year, into the rest of the fall. We support our immunity, we support our gut health, we support our emotional stability, so that we continue to feel more clear, more energized, and we will enjoy our lives more and more which is really what feeling good means. It means that we can go through life being open, open-hearted. We feel more light, we feel more connected. And this really is possible the more we encompass our holistic Four Cornerstone lifestyle. So before we get into our show today, a little reminder that the show notes for today are at mysolluna.com, M-Y-S-O-L-L-U-N-A.com. You can check out the research, links to other articles, podcasts I think you would enjoy. If you haven’t yet signed up for our newsletter, I highly recommend that you do so to stay on top of community happenings. We give out recipes, we have community events, we have special deals. So it’s really amazing to come deeper into the community. I’d love to invite you deeper in. And also, little announcement that the hidden power of the five hearts. My latest book is now out in paperback. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (02:22.766)So can check it out wherever books are sold. All right, let’s get right into our theme today, which really has to do the core is resilience and strength, which comes from the inside of us. So when I think about resilience, when I think about strength, I now think about it in terms of staying centered. So what I mean by that is there’s a lot of things. that life will throw our way. Everything is constantly in a dynamic flux of shifts and change. Maybe we go to the grocery store and they’re out of a lot of the vegetables and things that we wanted. How can we stay centered and shift and not get rigid and upset or lose our center if there’s a huge traffic jam or if we’re getting barrage of emails or texts that you know can feel unexpected. When we are off our center, when we start to let the thoughts run, a lot of getting off center has to do with the mind which is why our heart work is so important and heart coherence which we’ll also talk about today. What happens is that we start to secrete more stress hormones and cortisol and this has a direct impact. Stress, which comes from thoughts, has a direct impact on lowering our immunity and also breaking down our cells and our organs and aging us in many different ways. So this month is a wonderful month before we get fully into the holidays. And while we’re still a little bit transitioning to the beginning of school, maybe still a little bit at the end of summer, which we talked about in our September power hour show. This is a really great month to root down into our center, into resilience, into our daily practices so that we build and can continue to build this resilience, which is inside of all of us, right? We can tap into this potential inside of all of us. Instead of feeling like we’re bracing for change or we’re just more susceptible to whatever’s being passed around, whether it’s Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:42.904)you know, cold or flu around your kid’s school or around your office or whatever it is, right? We start to build the inner terrain. And again, we’re going to talk about this physically, emotionally and spiritually, and they all very much work together. So what’s happening in terms of ancient wisdom, how Aryavita talked about fall and October is that we’re starting to really come into Vata season, which is air and wind. And this can start to increase feelings of anxiety, restlessness, also dryness and feeling more scattered. So from a Ayurvedic standpoint, it becomes even more important right now to support your Agni, your digestive energy with warm foods and steady routines, which is known as Dinacharya. Even though the outside starts to feel like, okay, there’s a lot going on. And I can say that for myself, I tried to keep up with, there’s WhatsApp groups for both of my kids’ classes. And of course there’s all the chess and the tournaments and my little one’s swim classes and work and scheduling and just so much, right? And I know you have so much going on, but we create this steadiness in our practices, small, simple steps. I always start with a warm drink in the morning. Maybe it’s hot water with lemon. Maybe I start to add ginger. I take my probiotics first thing. These daily self-care practices are building resilience just by virtue of doing them consistently. And it starts to feel really good emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Doing your daily meditation, taking time for stillness. Traditional Chinese medicine. teaches us that fall is governed by the lungs, which is linked to grief and immunity. So I used to think of grief only in terms of bigger things, like when I lost my mom, and there’s these life events. But there’s many smaller things that we can grieve and let go of all the time. We can even grieve the end of a day or, you know, the end of a wonderful Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (07:04.654)dinner or get together with a friend. We might be feel a little bit reluctant to say goodbye. We may say feel a little bit of grief even when we say goodbye to our kids when they go off to school. And so it’s really important to allow grief through, which means that we need to let it be felt. And we can do that. We’ll talk about this more in the emotional well-being cornerstone. We can feel things deeply and still feel that resilience. that comes when we’re centered in our hearts. It’s the thoughts again saying, you know, I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want this to change. I don’t want to let go of this. That really keeps grief as an energy trapped in our body. So it prolongs it. It causes suffering. It lowers our energy. And so it’s really important that we actually learn to let things through us. And again, when it comes to immunity, we’re going to be talking about that a lot. through all our different cornerstones because immunity means we’re less, we’re not as susceptible to being taken down by what is in the outside world, so to speak. So that could be, you know, different circumstances. It could be viruses and bacteria. It could be, you know, more wind and different weather. We start to build that resilience within what we’re doing. and the practices that we are following and the lifestyle choices that we are making. And this is enormously empowering and enormously effective. We cannot control everything in the outside world. There are definitely going to be colds being passed around. There is going to be perhaps cold rain that comes or, you know, unexpected shifts, which could feel, you know, lots of things out of our control. So what we really do, the wise, the wise one, and I know that we’re all working on building our wisdom together as a community here in our feel good community, our saloon a community is that we turn our attention inside because the more we remain centered and resilient, the more life can shift and life can change. We have our center and we are healing and building our own inner terrain. So Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:27.026)And I will say, and I was gonna get right into the cornerstones, but I can’t help but talk about the heart just a little bit, which we’ll get into more as well. When we think about the center of our being, I probably touched my heart a couple times already during this podcast. Our center, our heart is closer to our true self than our head is. And of course we wanna use our brilliant mind. We want to be able to have thoughts and to process and to… you know, rationalize things and to go through the world and have rational thoughts. But at the same time, when our hearts are coherent with more coherence, more connection with our brains and our nervous systems, we don’t have to feel the overwhelm. We don’t have to feel all this reactive energy. We’re not meant to be machines. Something happens and then we immediately fly off the handle or we immediately get stressed or the thoughts start spinning. We break these patterns. which for many of us could be going on for many years and decades by coming back to our center, breathing, keeping awareness, relaxing into the moment while we focus on our hearts. And then we’ve become more and more clear about how to handle what life brings us. So we’ll talk about this more in a moment, but perhaps as you’re listening to the rest of this podcast, You can even start to relax into your heart right now. You might be walking your dog, you may be doing the dishes while you’re listening to me. You might be driving in your car down the freeway. Wherever you are, just take a moment to relax into your heart and notice how that shifts the way that you receive this information and even relax your shoulders, your chest, your hips, your jaw, anything that feels a little tight. And this is a way to keep growing even in resilience, the more tension we start to release, tightness. It’s like a tree branch that doesn’t bend in the wind. So it ends up breaking, right? Tension and stress carry through all different areas of our life. So even when we’re listening to a podcast, even when we’re here together, use these moments to consciously release. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (11:46.518)and relax your body, relax your mind, relax into your heart. And this will start to carry over into the rest of your life as well. So our food cornerstone, let’s go into that first. And here we want to talk about building strength and immunity and agony, digestive fire and gut health, because this is a really important month to really turn this up before it starts to get even more windy and even deeper into the vata season. We can start to notice if we’re already starting to feel a little bit off, certain imbalances might show up as sugar cravings, maybe your appetite is erratic, maybe your digestion is off, you’re starting to feel a little bit more constipated, more bloated, or just a bit more scattered. You may start to feel your immunity is dipping down a little bit, or a lot, depending. So it’s really important, some of the things that we want to work towards. tangible symptoms, tangible markers rather, is that our appetite is regular, our elimination is regular, we need to be eliminating every single day for some of us multiple times a day but definitely every day we want to be releasing toxins, we want to strengthen our immunity and so it becomes you more and more few and far between when we actually do get sick. And we want to just feel this inner sense of groundedness that is something that you have to experience for yourself. For me, it starts to feel like I’m a bit more set back when stuff is coming across my desk or in my life or, you know, things that is brought to my attention by my husband or whatever. just a bit more, again, just seated in myself and not as caught up in stories, not as reactive. It’s such a powerful place to be. And that groundedness and that sat-backness, if you will, if I can describe it as such, means that strength, real strength, which is an energy. It’s a force field, which makes you strong. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:09.942)resilient to handle what life is bringing to you emotionally. Again, like our show title. Physically, you’re not going to get sick. You’re not going to break down from things that are happening, busyness at work or whatever. And spiritually, you start to build more trust of the universe, God, source, life, however you like to think of it. Just deep, deepness, right? Wisdom is growing. So one of the things, one of the tangible things that we can do from a food perspective is to add the warming spices. I love warm elixirs. This is such a great time to use this as a self-care modality. Heat up water, keep some of these spices on hand, mix them in, cook with them, use them in your soups. I’m talking about ginger, cardamom, turmeric, all of these stimulate agony. They boost circulation. Cinnamon is also really great as well. It’s also great for helping us to metabolize sugar. I use ginger in definitely my elixirs now. I’m all about lemon and ginger water, hot water. And I use it in a lot of different soups and I throw it in for my kids and I cook with it in big chunks usually and then I pull it out of their bowls. Sometimes I’ll even chew on a big chunk and I think it’s a really important It’s one of those really important and expensive ingredients that you can always stock in your kitchen. And if you feel like you need to up the ante, have hot water with lemon and possibly raw honey and ginger several times a day. Another really great plant, a food to boost your immunity is spirulina, which comes from the water. And I think it’s such an amazing, powerful, nutrient-dense food. It has iron, has vitamin A, it has amino acids, builds protein strength in the body in a way that your body can actually absorb. And it’s one of our key ingredients in our glowing greens powder, which by the way is a synergistic formula that blends plants from the land and plants from the sea. And yeah, it’s potent in antioxidants, it’s wonderful food. So I highly recommend bringing it into your repertoire now and going forward. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (16:34.838)And then back to what our Uveda teaches about warm, warming foods. I remember when I was a raw foodist in New York for a couple of years, and there were moments when I felt really good and it was usually in the warm months. And I was trying so hard to stick to this diet and a lot of my friends were on it too. And I really remember wanting warm vegetable soup, but being like, no, no, no, it’s cooked. And I think that’s what happens sometimes when we want to. stick to a certain protocol and it starts to override our natural inclinations, our natural intuition. And so you’re probably already drawn to warm soups. And I encourage you to check out the many recipes we have at mysalina.com. All our recipes are super simple and easy, which is how I cook. It becomes even more simple over time actually, because I think that when food is simple, you’re celebrating the flavors. and it’s easier to digest and it’s more in keeping with our lifestyle, which is that simple, is energy efficient and opens up the greater Shakti, the greater energy to run through your body and to run through your life. We don’t need to overcomplicate things. You don’t need a lot of stuff. You don’t even need millions of products. You don’t need millions of skincare items. You don’t need millions of steps in your recipes. And so please check out our, again, our recipes online. And the other thing I wanna say about food is this is the time to veer away from the iced coffee, the iced drinks, the processed snacks, having excess caffeine. You may have gotten into a habit, which is a good time to be aware of, to bring awareness to it now. Maybe just having two, three cups of coffee, and it’s a really good time to say, all right. I really enjoy my coffee when I drink it. I’ll have one cup. And after that, let me switch to something else because a lot of times we just really like the warm drink and maybe we just don’t need as much caffeine as we think we do. So I encourage you to check it out because caffeine, as we know, in excess can just start to overload your system. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:51.886)And it can lead to excess pitta. can aggravate vata as well. You start to feel more scattered. And again, this is about resilience and inner stability. So I want to call out a few research links. One is a 2022 study in Frontiers in Nutrition that showed spirulina supplementation enhanced immune cell function and reduced markers of oxidative stress. I love the research that shows the know, the age-old, the time-old wisdom, the plants being so powerful, right, because it just shows that nature has such a high level of intelligence. Again, back to not over-complicating everything. We just need to align more to nature. The International Journal of Arduvator Research found that warm cooked food support, Agni and resilience during vata season. No surprise there that the Arduvator Magazine is backing this up. But I wanted to point to this article, which is quite interesting. And then also a 2023 publication in nutrients linked dietary diversity to greater microbiome stability in immune adaptability. So we’ve talked about this a little bit in prior episodes, but I want to call it out here that it’s a really good idea to rotate your vegetables. We’re coming into a different season, which means there’s different foods which will be in season. I love going to the farmer’s market. It’s funny, I was joking about this. Sometimes it’s more expensive and sometimes it’s the same and sometimes it can be a little bit cheaper, but no matter what, it’s definitely more fresh. So for me, it’s like a treat. I’d rather go to the farmer’s market than to most any restaurant these days. It just tastes really, really good. And then you just get a instant sense of what’s in season without having to think about it so much. Also, I wanna call out digestive enzymes, which some of us take, some of us haven’t tried yet. I wanna talk about how important they are because I think that… Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (21:00.546)They are not really, there’s a lot of misunderstandings about what they do and their purpose. So first of all, our resilience and our centeredness is based on how much Shakti and energy is flowing through us as a total system, right? We can talk about acupuncture, meridian points, Marma points, whatever it is, but there’s energy flowing through the totality of your system. This is one of the reasons we take detoxi and eliminate because we don’t want waste inhibiting that flow. Another thing that is very energy intensive is digestion. Everything from mastication, chewing all the way to elimination. So when you take digestive enzymes, every time you eat, the enzymes help to break down the food so you’re not using your body’s energy. This is a huge secret, if you will, way to age less quickly. you want the enzymes to help break down the food. It also helps to prevent bloating. It also helps to absorb more nutrition. But a big part that I don’t think people get is it will help you preserve your own body’s energy, which again can then be re-channeled into immunity, resilience, warding off inflammation, cellular degradation, many things. So I encourage you to take the enzymes. We have amazing feel-good saluna enzymes which are researched. They have three times more lipase. They also help to break down fiber. Before you eat, I keep them now in my purse and in my car and I take them every time I eat for these very reasons. Okay, now let’s talk about our second cornerstone which is body. Strength through movement and stability. So when we are… Resilience in the body comes from both of these things. We want to be, we want to have mobility, right? We want to be able to move in different directions and we want to feel a level of strength in our core, in our bones. We want to be consistent as well. And I admittedly, I’m not as consistent with lifting weights, but it’s something that I’m working towards because I know it’s really great for joints and our bones and our muscle systems. and Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (23:20.814)I remember and I shared this with you when I interviewed Dr. Suhas, who’s an Ayurvedic physician, Vaidya. He talked about prescribing me weightlifting because I have a lot of vata energy. can get, you know, I’m very creative, but I can also get, you know, spacey and very airy and I tend to, you know, I can run very thin. And so he said weightlifting will actually help your mental and emotional constitution to feel more grounded. And so to be honest, I am not always consistent, I’m working toward it. So one thing that I did is I started to keep a set of weights, which for me is five pounds each, right? I’m starting light, but just doing some basic arm exercises, triceps, biceps. I kept a set, I keep a set near my son’s sandbox. And so when we’re out there playing and it’s still warm enough here in LA where we can play outside, I’ll do some of those exercises and it just makes it really practical. I also kept a set. I also keep a set in our bedroom next to one of our house plants on the side so it doesn’t look ugly, it’s not out of place. But sometimes while I’m filling up the bath and my kids are doing Legos or playing, I’ll do a couple sets then. I see them. I’m like, yeah, I remember. So I’m always honest with you guys. Do I do it three times a week every week? No. But because I keep the weights in a place where I see them, do I do them more? Yes. So I encourage you, however you want to think about, you know, building strength, starting to bring in weights, maybe for you, it’s doing a class, you work into your schedule or you go to the gym set times, you know, whatever it is, consistency is a really wonderful way to build that strength and that routine. And this helps so much with, again, the strength, the resiliency. And this also helps with everything, including sleep on your body is balanced in the way it’s being worked out and, you know, moving in different ways. It just starts to, you start to cycle between rest and movement and rest and movement. And there’s just more natural rhythms that you can start to build in. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (25:46.136)For me, walking is my favorite way to move. And I walk in the middle of the day and I walk outdoors and there happened to be a lot of hills where I live. So it feels like a level of strength training in that way. If you don’t live in a place with hills, maybe there’s a place where there’s some stairs. You you can go up and down the stairs a couple of times because I do, I used to do beach walks every day. And then we moved. to the mountains. And I really notice, okay, I’m doing the walk at the same time, but I do feel that strengthening element of hills. So I think if you can work that in, and again, any sort of strength training that feels good for you, any type of exercise or class or yoga asana class, I think it’s really great. It’s not just about cardio as we know, but resilience can really come from the ways in which we strengthen our bodies. I also think that, you know, going back to body for a moment, We notice that dryness that comes in. So it’s a really great time to maybe add two layers of moisturizer to your skin and your feel good moisturizer. If you checked it out, our Saluna one has really beautiful plants, non-toxic, high powered formula. This is a great time to do Abayanga or at least to oil the bottoms of your feet before you go to bed. which our Yovita teaches helps to ground energy and it also helps to just rest your nervous system. And it can be really nice to stretch your body before you go to bed so you don’t go to bed stiff and wake up with an even stiffer neck. Again, I don’t do it every single night, but if I have a couple of minutes to stretch and bring out my yoga mat, it feels really good. We can decompress. We can release a lot of energy through our bodies and breath work. And when you do that before bed, it’s a wonderful practice that can feel really great as well. So a couple of research studies I wanna call out. 2022 British Journal of Sports Medicine study found that 30 to 60 minutes of strength training per week reduced the risk of cardiovascular disease and all cause mortality. And I wanted to call this out because it’s per week. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (28:01.654)So I think to myself, if I’m lifting weights about 10 minutes, because that’s what I’m doing right now, if I, if I’m when I do do it a couple of times a week, that’s doable, right? Sometimes I think I’m not going to go to the gym and spend hours. And to be honest, I’m not going to the gym period right now at this moment in my life. But if I keep the weights around next to the sandbox and I do it a couple of times a week, that adds up and that has impact. And I hope that’s inspirational for you as well. A 2021 study in pediatric research found that morning light exposure improved sleep quality, and energy regulation. So this is so powerful. If you can spend a couple minutes in the morning, sometimes me and my kids play a couple rounds of soccer on our lawn. Sometimes I don’t do it first thing. I have to drop the kids off at school. But then I come back and I’ll be doing some work on my phone and I’ll sit outside for a couple of minutes or I’ll try to meditate outside. And I know it’s not always possible. not maybe rainy where you live that day or it’s not sunny or whatever. But when you can get some morning sunlight, it really is medicine. Just get it on your limbs. Just get it in and it feels really good and it does help to set you up for great sleep that night. And lastly, a 2025 review in the Journal of Aging and Physical Activity found that walking improves cognitive resilience and executive function. Alright, now let’s talk about our third cornerstone, is emotional well-being. And this is what I was talking about. This is the heart of what I was saying at the beginning of the show, because yes, we can definitely eat. Our lifestyle is holistic and integrated. So we want to eat foods that are strengthening our gut health. We want to lots of fiber. We want to have spirulina. We want to take our SBO probiotics, which is important for that inner resilience and supporting mood regulation. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (30:04.654)We want to lift the weights and move our bodies. But I really feel like a huge missing piece in most people’s holistic wellness is emotional well-being. And emotional well-being has a direct impact on mental health. The mind. Why? Because it’s our emotions and our feelings which are creating many of the thoughts. When we still ourselves emotionally and we can learn to digest emotions, which in my work and in my research can be done in a very effective way through learning about the power of the heart and heart coherence, we start to shift our perspective. The outer world doesn’t have to change for you to feel more resilient, for you to feel more grounded, more happy, more content, more fulfilled, more at peace as you move through the day. And that’s a big part of shifting from the propelled heart stage, which I talk about in the Hidden Power, the five hearts, to the steady heart. The propelled heart is the stage in life where we are on all the time, go, go, go, make it happen, know, burnout and working all night and always on and constantly scrolling. We’re so attuned to the outer world that we don’t have the energy to place the focus on the inner world. And then wisdom starts to grow and information comes in and hopefully from our Feel Good Podcast can help contribute to that. Because what I’m doing here is passing on to you what has really helped me and what I’m so grateful to have learned about. So then we learned that hold on here. If I’m trying to make everything better in my life to feel peaceful, everything has to be just so, so I’m happy. I’m never going to be happy and peaceful. Things are always changing. So emotional resilience, which directly affects your immunity and your physical resilience, comes when we can be more neutral with what is happening before us in our lives. It doesn’t mean that we don’t interact. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have ideas and inspirations and we don’t take inspired action. But what it does mean is we don’t have to feel so up and down, so reactive, so extreme. Emotions and feelings will come. But this is what we want to Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (32:29.698)We want to work on daily life, being our teacher, not just meditation, which I’ll talk about in our spiritual cornerstone, which is important. It is a nice anchor. It’s a baseline, but then there’s the rest of life. Right. And I talk about this in the steady in life chapter, steady in life practice in the book. It’s not a chapter to practice in the book, which has helped me so much is when we start to feel inner disturbances. you know, this road is closed. have to take a detour or the parking lot is full. This is super annoying or whatever is coming up for you. You can use your heart as an anchor, right? Which means you focus on your heart. Sometimes I even put my hand on my heart. You start to take some nice deep breaths. You become aware that there is an emotion there. You don’t try to push it down or suppress it or wish it, wish it away. You let yourself relax. into the heart as you also allow the frustration to be there. You’re not buying into it. You certainly don’t want to keep that energy going by the thoughts. Ugh, why can’t a parking lot spot open up? Why is it so crowded? Why are all these people here? Whatever it is, move your attention away from the thoughts, move it into the heart, and then just relax. It’s really simple, but it really works. Try it for yourself more and more. You just breathe nice and slowly and you relax. And what happens is that energy starts to dissipate. And as you work with the heart, which is closer to your true self, which is the soul, the spirit inside of you, the part of you that’s even observing all of this happening, which is actually untouched by the outer world, right? The true self is not the ego. It’s not the fluctuations of the mind. There’s a steady part of you. that start to align with more and more. You start to let those emotions dissipate. Let them be there again. You’re not bypassing or pretending they’re not there. You let them be there and you let them have their space and dissolve. And then you can stay more centered because clarity comes. Your perspective and your thoughts shift and change. And then you can say, well, I guess I’ll just go to the lot next door or maybe I’ll park across the mall. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (34:56.01)I know it’s not crowded and I’ll have a 10 minute walk and it’ll be nice. Right? It’s not being so reactive. This is where the stress builds that breaks down our immunity and our strength and resilience. There’s a billion zillion things that can happen in your daily life that will take your energy if you are not watchful. Right? If you’re not really paying attention. And you can start to notice If there’s just more, I would say, pitta, fiery energy building up, you’re more moody, you’re more irritable, you’re more anxious, that’s because anxious energy is building inside of you. That’s because irritability is building up inside of you. So you don’t want it to be like a gasket that blows, right? You want to let it through, let it through just like you digest food. And again, this is the power of the heart. And I can’t tell you how impactful it’s been on my life, not just the heart aligned meditation, which I teach, but also just the daily practices in life, the steady in life practice. So then all of this is in the hidden power of the five hearts. You can also listen to it. There’s paperback, there’s hardcover. It really teaches in depth about how you can start to really work with your heart, which is a brain, but it’s so much more than that even. It’s an energetic power center. And then you can feel much more resilient and adaptable. Like you’re just flowing down the river. Okay, a rock comes and you just flow around it. You don’t have to get into this big kerfuffle. You don’t have to get, like this angst. Just breathe and release, breathe and release. Focus on your heart and heart coherence again, it can be measured in HRV patterns that are smooth, sign like waves. They’re not erratic and jagged. which emulate what’s going on in the inner state, right? And it colors, all of this colors how you see the world. The more we become centered and we allow our emotions to come through us, the more we will see beauty in the world and we will see through to the hearts of others and the light in others, where we would have judged, where we might have been harsh with ourselves or others, we start to feel more compassion and softness, where we might’ve… Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (37:16.726)you know, rushed through and missed a moment to be kind or connected. We take that moment to speak to a stranger or to acknowledge the person in front of us in a deeper way. And so all these micro moments build into a more fulfilling life, a more resilient life, a more joyful, peaceful life. And again, it all starts in the inner terrain. So there’s some interesting research studies I want to call out here. One comes from the Heart Math Institute, which is the institute that we did our research study on the heart aligned meditation actually. And it founds that heart coherence helps to lower cortisol, improve emotional resilience, and stabilize heart rate variability. So there’s lots of research on the physical benefits. as well as the emotional benefits. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Education found that journaling improves mood and helps to reduce depressive symptoms. And I didn’t talk about journaling specifically yet, although I do want to say here that journaling is something that I absolutely love because there is something releasing about writing something down and getting it out of your head. and onto paper where you can start to digest. You can sit with those emotions or feelings that were brought up and you can work with your heart as you journal. So what I do is I write, I take pauses, I breathe. I literally work on seeing things from my heart’s perspective. I reframe. It’s really powerful to do that. And there’s some really great journaling prompts in the new book as well, if you wanna check that out. Okay, so our fourth cornerstone. spiritual growth. And spiritual growth means to me that we become more anchored to the stillness, to the steadiness inside of us instead of to the external world. To be worldly we can say means we’re expecting the world to make us happy. We are looking to the world. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (39:36.354)to find solutions to all of our so-called problems and challenges. And when we grow spiritually, the more we realize that there’s this wholeness and this completeness inside of us, and again, a very potent access point is through our hearts, where we’re actually not lacking anything. We need to tap in more to that inner resilience and that inner strength instead of expecting life to give it to us, instead of trying to take more. from the moment, take more from our relationships, take more from any opportunity that’s in front of us. Instead of taking and taking, we’re more at peace and we’re more, again, this feel good starts to take on deeper and deeper meaning for me, which has been the name of our podcast for many years. But to me, feeling good means this is a spiritual high state where we are okay. with what life is bringing us. We’re less attached to things. Feeling good is open, connected, more lightness. So we do this, we create this from, first of all, meditation. And as I mentioned just now with our emotional cornerstone piece, emotional wellbeing cornerstone. It doesn’t mean that meditation is everything because there’s the rest of daily life. So we want to work with our emotions as we’re flowing through life and our feelings, which then impact our thoughts. And that’s part of part of spiritual growth as well, which is why everything is interconnected. But when it comes specifically to this cornerstone, which is really wonderful about meditation, is that it gives us a glimpse to be really in tune with that part of us, the true self energy, which is unchanging, which is the truth of our nature, which is powerful. is kind, which is loving, which is again whole and complete. And the more we spend time in there, and the Heart Aligned Meditation is only eight minutes by the way, and then you can do other practices or you can spend more time in there, you can expand it, we start to really increase our baseline of coherence. We become less easy to trick, to be duped, to buy into all our feelings and thoughts as reality, all the stories we tell ourselves. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (41:56.716)To buy into the world has to make us happy. The world has to be just so. This is such a huge way to be resilient because we are not as tied to the external world. Of course, we have goals. We want certain things to happen or not happen. But with a much less stringent level of attachment, rigidity starts to fade. Again, remember the analogy of the tree branch that breaks into more strength and softness, which are the qualities of the heart. There’s so much softness when you think about love, right? And compassion and care. There’s this strength in being adaptable, like water, it shapes around the boat, it shapes around the rocks. And so this means you’ll be literally more resilient inside your body, your inner terrain, your immunity, your gut health, everything strengthens. as you find this spiritual level of attunement, knowing that no matter what, you ultimately can handle what life brings you. You ultimately are going to be okay. So the Heart Aligned Meditation is a really powerful practice that I can offer you. We will link to it in the show notes. Another thing that I feel really helps me now more and more is AWE, A-W-E, right? finding more awe in daily life. Because it breaks us out of the cycle of thinking that this has to go a certain way and this propelled heart energy has to be like this and how dare that person talk to me and blah blah blah. Like all the inner dialogue that can feel really tumultuous. In these tiny moments, if we realize, we bring it back to the fact that we’re on a rock spinning through space and we aren’t in control. And life is moving along, right? And someday we’re all going to pass. Can we come to this moment and find awe and just seeing a patch of sunlight or awe just watching our dog run across the floor and the fact that they move in such a way or awe that this pile of sprouts was able to Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (44:21.102)push through the soil and create this incredibly nutrient-dense food right or whatever is in front of us. These tiny, so-called tiny things are all miracles. And I talked about this on a recent community Zoom. There’s a difference between appreciation and gratitude. Gratitude is very wonderful as well. And there’s a lot of research on gratitude taking us into a deeper place. But appreciation, which is the… energy that we work with in the heart aligned meditation is very opening in a slightly different way because it’s gratitude and it’s thankfulness, but there’s awe in it, right? It’s just like, appreciate that tree so much. I appreciate how my child is so happy or just bounces into the room. I really appreciate how my cat is snuggled up to me. So find these moments of awe. as you’re driving to work, as you’re sitting in line at the bank. And you can just find more of that and you realize that there’s so much magic in each and every day. And you can be more centered in each and every day. You don’t need such specific things to be happy. And this will build your resilience and your strength so much as well. In tandem with our other cornerstones, know, practicing your heart aligned meditation every day, taking your SBO probiotics, know, strength training, healthy foods, all the things we talked about, we talked about today are going to help you be resilient right here at the top of the month as you sail into October. It’s going to be a wonderful month. I hope that these tips and tools inspired you. I’m excited for you to hear, to hear more of your feedback. I would really appreciate a podcast review on Apple or Spotify, which is such a wonderful way to support the show. So thank you in advance from the bottom of my heart. I’d love a review as well for the new book if you happen to have read it yet, or again, please check out the new paperback. not, I will be back here on Monday for our next interview show. Again, lastly, check out the show notes at mysaloon.com. Join our newsletter list. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (46:41.292)so you can come more deeply into the community. I look forward to connecting with you. I’m really grateful, really appreciative that we found each other. And so I’ll see you soon. Take great care and sending you so much love.  

Week’s Episode Special Guest: Dr. Erika Schwartz About Dr. Erika Schwartz In this engaging conversation, Kimberly Snyder interviews Dr. Caroline Leaf, a renowned neuroscientist and author, about her latest book, ‘Help in a Hurry.’ They explore the profound distinction between the mind and the brain, emphasizing the importance of understanding the non-conscious mind and its role in managing thoughts and emotions. Dr. Leaf shares practical tools for self-regulation, particularly in moments of stress and regret, and discusses the impact of our thoughts on our physical health. The conversation highlights the power of self-awareness and the ability to create positive energy in the world. Guest Resources: Website: https://drerika.com/ Podcast: Redefining Medicine podcast Book: Don’t Let Your Doctor Kill You: How to Beat Physician Arrogance, Corporate Greed and a Broken System   Episode Sponsors: MOMENTOUS OFFER: Head to livemomentous.com and use code KIMBERLY for 35% off your first subscription. That’s code KIMBERLY at livemomentous.com for 35% off your first subscription. USE LINK: livemomentous.com Code: KIMBERLY for 35% off your first subscription.   FATTY15 OFFER: Fatty15 is on a mission to replenish your C15 levels and restore your long-term health. You can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription Starter Kit by going to fatty15.com/KIMBERLY and using code KIMBERLY at checkout. USE LINK: fatty15.com/KIMBERLY   Episode Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Hormonal Health and Dr. Erica Schwartz01:52 The Importance of Bioidentical Hormones05:57 Misconceptions and Historical Context of Hormone Therapy09:50 Empowering Women to Understand Their Bodies13:53 Navigating Hormone Therapy: Timing and Longevity17:40 Balancing Hormones for Fertility and Overall Health19:30 Understanding Hormone Supplementation21:46 The Role of Hormones in Aging25:39 Proactive vs. Reactive Hormone Use28:11 Hormones and Disease Prevention30:30 Muscle Health and Aging33:53 The Importance of Supplements and Lifestyle   SOLLUNA PRODUCT LINKS Glowing Greens Powder™ Feel Good SBO Probiotics Feel Good Detoxy Feel Good Digestive Enzymes Feel Good Starter Kit Feel Good Skincare KIMBERLY’S BOOKS Chilla Gorilla & Lanky Lemur Journey to the Heart The Beauty Detox Solution Beauty Detox Foods Beauty Detox Power Radical Beauty Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life You Are More Than You Think You Are OTHER PODCASTS YOU MAY ENJOY! Wellness Insights: How to Listen to Your Body for Nutritional Guidance How the Power Foods Diet helps with Weight Loss with Dr. Neal Barnard EP. 877 How Not to Age with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Greger How to eat to reduce anxiety with Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo   Powered and Distributed by: PodcastOne Transcript: Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:02.595)Hi everyone and welcome back for our Monday show. We have a very special guest here with us today. I’m so excited to chat with Dr. Erica Schwartz, who is a bestselling author. She’s the founder of Evolved Science, a world renowned medical practice based in New York City, built on the recognition that bioidentical hormones are the foundation for better health. She has eight books out. She’s been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Daily Mail, Vogue. Town and Country, the New York Post, and regularly on many television shows. goes on and on. Dr. Erica, thank you so much for being here with us today and sharing some of your wisdom. Dr Erika (00:44.782)Kimberly, thank you for having me. It’s such a pleasure. kidding? I think you have accomplished just as much, if not more, than I have. So I think that’s pretty impressive. You’re impressive. And I’m really honored to be on your show. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:55.631)your energy is so beautiful, Dr. Erica. I can feel your heart. I can feel your authentic, really wanting to support, especially women. I feel like, you now, Dr. Erica, there’s so much discussion around hormones. When I think about my mom’s generation and my grandmother, especially in different parts of the world, you my mom’s side is from the Philippines. I feel like we didn’t talk about hormones that much. And now all of a sudden it’s sort of like everywhere. You’ve been talking about this for, wow, yeah. Dr Erika (01:30.798)30 years. So yes, it’s, you know what I say, I am thrilled to have lived long enough to see it happen. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (01:39.822)Yes. Dr Erika (01:39.886)because 30 years ago when I started working with hormones, people thought I had lost my mind. And I was like, no, all this data is wrong. Everything that they’re coming up with is wrong. And it was really rough. now it turns out that I have patients who’ve been with me for more than 30 years, that I’ve been taking hormones more than 30 years. And it turns out that it was the right thing. And it’s just… Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (01:56.877)Wow. Dr Erika (02:04.82)unfair for these poor women who still suffering because the information is still missing. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (02:11.661)Yes. Well, let me ask you, Dr. Erica, let’s talk about some of this information because I know you’re a proponent of lifestyle as well and healthy food and exercise and all these aspects, which I want to talk about. But since, you know, the bioidentical hormones, is this something that we should pursue only when we start to feel adverse symptoms? Is it possible for many women to not feel those symptoms, to sort of glide through perimenopause and menopause? Dr Erika (02:21.07)Thank you. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (02:39.339)Or is it something that’s more your opinion proactive? Dr Erika (02:44.6)Kimberly, that’s such a great question. So this is the thing. I think that everybody should be on hormones. I think that when you go on hormones, depends on your own individual needs. I think that because there’s such confusing and mixed messaging coming around, but there’s more and more realistic stuff coming through. I think it depends on, you know, there are a lot of women who don’t even know that there are such things as symptoms around menopause. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (02:50.244)Mmm. Dr Erika (03:13.262)They don’t even know that that exists. So if you start having symptoms, by all means you should be on hormones. You should see a doctor or a provider, nurse practitioner, SPAs, they know how to provide services because they know how to take the bloods. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (03:13.646)Right. Dr Erika (03:32.438)evaluate you, you want to find somebody who cares about you, individual, the person, and who actually knows what they’re talking about. Because recently, there’s like a total on, you know, onslaught of Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (03:36.845)Yes. Dr Erika (03:49.464)hormone experts. And the truth is they’re not because they haven’t known about it long enough to know what do. You know, I teach at the American College of Anti-Aging Medicine, A4M, and we train a lot of doctors and a lot of providers. But the thing is, there’s still many, many more who need help. And in the conventional medical system, the medical education is completely zero on it. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (03:54.945)Wait! Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:11.097)Right? Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:19.001)Wait. Dr Erika (04:19.408)no education, the North American Menopause Society, the menopause practitioners, they really are very, far behind. And I’ll give you an example that when this whole thing started in 2002 with that study that really put us behind the eight ball, was the, they sent out, and this is the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology in North America Menopause Society, where all women turned to, and I’m a conventional doctor, trained doctor and what they did is they sent out this like a pamphlet telling women that what you should tell your patients since you couldn’t give them hormones anymore was that they should wear layers they should stay in dark rooms Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:50.093)Yes. Dr Erika (05:12.078)It was so offensive to me because I was working with hormones already. I couldn’t believe it. But you have to think that this is where they’re coming from. And that was only in 2003. So you’re talking about 23 years, 22 years ago. So there’s a long way to go to get the information out to everybody and get the right information out. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (05:34.848)That study you’re referring to, doctor, was linking hormones to cancer, correct? Dr Erika (05:41.482)It was a study that did not use bioidentical hormones. They used a synthetic form of hormones that came from Franklin Horse’s urine. And that study said that came out stopped early because supposedly there was an increased incidence of breast cancer. in the study and strokes and, you know, strokes and blood clots. The truth is that the study was wrong. The women that were studied in the study were women that were older. They were more than 10 years after menopause. They were, a lot of them had pre-existing conditions, meaning like there were smokers, they had all kinds of other medical problems. So, Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (06:19.567)Huh. Dr Erika (06:30.05)the study was just wrong. The fact that it was wrong, it just was wrong. And then what happened is that the principal investigators did take back the information, but unfortunately the media never covered that. So doctors never knew about it. The women never knew about it. And it took until in the past four or five years, 10 years maybe that Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (06:31.695)It was spewed. Yeah. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (06:45.827)Hmm. Dr Erika (06:58.344)Women are now talking about menopause, peri-menopause, they’re talking about hormones, and the information is very clear. And you know, the surgeon general and the FDA right now, they’re taking off the black box warning off of estrogens because there was no connection between taking estrogen and breast cancer and taking estrogen and getting ovarian cancer or whatever. It was just crazy. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (07:00.45)Yes. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (07:22.829)Great. Dr Erika (07:26.816)The truth behind it is that it was all about money and it was about Big Pharma having paid for the study that was supposedly the government sponsored study, but it wasn’t. It was Big Pharma paid for it. And Big Pharma paid for the hormones that they were using in the study. And then they thought that it was going to be the eternal, you know, the fountain of use, but it turns out that it wasn’t. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (07:36.047)Mmm. Dr Erika (07:54.198)It wasn’t even right because it was the wrong population. So anyway, make our long story short, they got scared because the last thing they wanted was for the public to know that it was the government had taken money from big pharma to conduct a study that wasn’t right. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (08:14.937)So Big Pharma didn’t want women to know about bioidentical hormones so they could potentially sell other medications or aids for women to deal with the symptoms. Is that sort of the gist? Dr Erika (08:26.784)Right. So, yeah, that’s the gist because essentially, and this is the funny thing, know, women get antidepressants when they’re perimenopause. I mean, women take more antidepressants than anything else. And you think about it, are we missing antidepressants in our system? Well, I don’t think so. I bet you don’t think so. We don’t have antidepressants there. There are a lot of ways to get rid of the depression and Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (08:54.671)Great. Dr Erika (08:55.342)lifestyle being the number one that you talk about so eloquently and so correctly and Diet exercise stress management everything you talk about and talking about for 30 years So I agree with you a hundred percent and then hormones you missing hormones when the hormones start going out of whack Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:06.018)Yes. Dr Erika (09:17.878)That’s what you need to do is balance the hormones, not give women antidepressants and basically take them out of the workforce, take them out of society, make them basically unnecessary. It’s terrible. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:23.18)Right. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:33.325)Let’s get a little specific, Dr. Erica, when you say hormones, you mentioned estrogen. Are we also talking about progesterone, testosterone? Dr Erika (09:42.306)Thyroid, adrenal, yes. We’re talking. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:44.495)So there’s a whole mix that you would have to meet with a doctor such as yourself to see what’s right for your body. Dr Erika (09:50.124)Well, I think it would be best to do that. People become their own doctors. you know, sometimes that’s not so bad, because I think that in the conventional world, we’re not helping our patients. You know, I have this book coming out, re-released actually, September 2nd, it’s called Don’t Let Your Doctor Kill You. And it’s the truth. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:57.465)right Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (10:07.524)Hmm. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (10:15.915)What a great title. Dr Erika (10:17.886)Thanks. But you know, it’s coming back out and we’ve expanded. The first time it came out was like 10 years ago. And then we added COVID and AI and a lot of pieces to it and more stories. And the thing is that in the conventional world, you really don’t get the help you need. And women, and I think that one of the most important messages is you live in your own body. I don’t live in your body. The doctor doesn’t live in your body. So listen to your body, learn to listen. And once you listen to your body, then you can actually follow advice or not. It’s your decision. And in the conventional world, unfortunately, Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (10:36.239)Mmm. Dr Erika (11:02.892)That decision is based on fear because it’s about intimidating the woman, scaring her into, my God, I might have cancer that I’m missing so I can have a million tests. But at the end of the day, nobody stops to see what’s going on inside. How could I improve my life because I live in here? So that’s kind of the goal. My goal is to eliminate fear. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (11:19.748)Wait. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (11:29.944)Yes. Dr Erika (11:30.08)and to empower women to learn as much as possible about themselves. And yes, you’re right. You do need a prescription for estrogen. You might not necessarily need a prescription for progesterone. You do need a prescription for testosterone, for thyroid, adrenal. You may not need a prescription because they’re supplements. But the thing is you want to work with someone who cares about you. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (11:52.587)Yeah, it’s just even hearing you say all these things, Dr. Erica, it just, I don’t know, for me, and I haven’t gone into this yet, it just feels like someone being their own doctor when hormones are so specific, that feels scary, like you’re just kind of prescribing to yourself. So let me ask you some specific, yes. Dr Erika (12:01.801)Yeah. Dr Erika (12:11.192)Well, can’t. You can’t prescribe for yourself. But if you understand how your body’s functioning, you’ll start living inside your body, right? That’s what you teach, is live inside your body. Be present, understand. Don’t react to the outside, react to the inside. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (12:24.749)Yes, be present. Dr Erika (12:32.593)then you can get right help because then you can, you’ll go to a doctor, let’s say, or some kind of provider and they say stuff that doesn’t make sense. You’re not going to be intimidated. You’re not going to be afraid. You’re not going to make a mistake of like, okay, I’m going to follow it. You’re going to say, well, that doesn’t make sense. Let me run. Go somewhere else. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (12:55.631)So Dr. Schwartz, I’m gonna ask you a three-part question. And if you forget one of them, don’t worry, we’ll go back. as you’re… Oh, sorry, sorry. I’m so sorry. Dr. Erica. Dr Erika (13:01.736)This is not much work, it’s my god. I’m just kidding. I just have people to call me like the shorts as much as I don’t like it. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (13:10.959)Might sound so formal, right? We’re sisters here. Yes, yes. So three parts. Number one, which is a fear women have once you start taking the hormones, do you have to be on them for the rest of your life? So we’ll talk about timing a little bit, because I read something recently, you have to start before 60. Number two, the symptoms. Dr Erika (13:14.154)Yes, we are. We’re all one. We’re all one. That’s it. Dr Erika (13:21.463)Yes. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (13:37.453)that we keep referring to, if we could elaborate a little bit more about when we know something’s off. And number three, I’d love to know not just about alleviating symptoms, but potential further benefits, whether that’s protecting our bone health. Like you talked about mental health, physical health. So if we could go into those three more specific things, Erica, I’d love to hear. First one, do we have to be on hormones forever? Dr Erika (13:53.774)Great job. Dr Erika (14:00.302)Okay. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:06.593)timing wise, like some people may experience symptoms in perimenopause. Some people, I think my mother went through menopause in her mid-50s. Dr Erika (14:16.862)Yeah, that’s because you’re half Filipino. The Filipinos go into menopause later in general. But let’s answer. So first of all, Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:20.184)Yeah. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:25.752)Okay. Dr Erika (14:29.684)Yeah, you should stay on hormones forever because you want to stay young and healthy, right? It’s not about chronologic age. It’s about physiologic age. I’m 75. I don’t think my body looks or feels or I feel the same I felt when I was 40 only maybe 35 only I work a lot harder at it. You know what I mean? What I do Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:32.345)Got it. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:42.702)Wow. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:54.721)Adrienne, it’s amazing. I mean, you look like you’re in your 40s. Dr Erika (14:58.674)I love you. you know what? They have that new app that my one of my grandchildren had and about what your age is, right? And you put it up and it said 48. It’s funny that you said that. That was the sweet. No, but I have to tell you. So yeah, if you stay on hormones, your chances of staying healthy and staying well. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (15:06.349)yeah, yeah. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (15:10.18)Wow. Dr Erika (15:20.982)are much higher. So why would I ever stop hormones? I started at 46 and I can promise you, I will die with my taking hormones because look at how I feel, look at what happens. But it’s not just the hormones. We’ll talk about that. So anyway, so the other part of it is you don’t have to stay on hormones or anything forever. You could do whatever you want. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (15:36.856)Yes. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (15:52.152)Yeah. Dr Erika (15:55.146)And I mean, most of my patients are now 30. You start having symptoms of hormone imbalances as a teenager. When you get acne, when you first take the period, you get PMS, those are hormone imbalances. And they’re all very easily treated with very low dose progesterone, very low dose. And it’s really easy. So if you have somebody like my first book, The Hormone Solution, that… Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (16:03.801)Right. Dr Erika (16:20.662)That’s what I wrote in it and that came out in 1999. think about, no, maybe 2002. So it’s so obvious that it’s a continuum, right? I mean, why don’t we address the fact that it’s a continuum and it’s okay. Yeah, go for it. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (16:36.889)But Dr. Schwarz, now you’re talking about that young, what about worries with fertility if you start taking progesterone or messing with hormones, let’s say before you have your kids? Dr Erika (16:51.128)Kimberly, you’re not messing with them, I promise you, because what I’m gonna teach you is how to support your system. You know, when you’re messing with them is when you’re taking birth control pills. And when you take birth control pills, it suppresses everything and you’re creating a menopausal hormone levels, which is not okay, right? So when you’re taking progesterone, by the way, that’ll help with fertility. As a matter of fact, if you do IVF or something like that, Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (17:02.539)Yes, which… Yeah. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (17:10.797)Yes. Dr Erika (17:20.172)they will give you additional progesterone. And most women who get pregnant that are under like really good medical care will take supplemental progesterone for up to 20 weeks of the pregnancy. So progesterone will never harm any future pregnancies. that’s… Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (17:34.424)Really? Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (17:38.979)Well, my doctors who were very, I just say conventional, never prescribed for my pregnancies. I never took any of that. Dr Erika (17:45.39)I think we should move you away from that. Yeah, I’m sure, but you know what? Maybe we should move away from that, because that didn’t work out well. It worked out well for you, but it doesn’t work out. I have patients right now, I have three patients who are in their 30s and they’re all three pregnant. And we have them all three couldn’t get pregnant, they were gonna do IVF. They wound up not doing IVF because we balanced their hormones. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (17:55.63)Yeah. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:13.411)Wow. Dr Erika (18:13.632)And one of the things they got was progesterone. The other one was thyroid. The other one was DHE. But there are a lot of things you could do to help women get pregnant by balancing their hormones. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:18.142)yes. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:25.807)That’s amazing, doctor, and that gives people a lot of hope. Is there any downside to taking progesterone, let’s say that young, you start in your 30s for the next 60 years? Dr Erika (18:28.846)the end Dr Erika (18:34.094)No, no, no, you know what, but you take it when you need it. You take it like when you’re in need. Yeah, or you take it just like for PMS, you take it for four or five days before your period. That’s the only time you need it. So it’s not gonna stay in your system. It leaves your system. It goes away, goodbye, it doesn’t exist. So it just supports, it makes your system better. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:39.859)you cycle it. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:46.703)Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:54.927)Wow. Dr Erika (18:59.106)You know what I mean? So that’s one thing. The other thing is, remember, when you think birth control pills, you’re putting women into menopause. So all this stuff. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (19:07.297)Yeah, I never did it, doctor. It always felt, for me, not the right choice. Dr Erika (19:12.396)Right. No, I agree with you. Me too. I agree. But women will take it because what other options do you have? I mean, I tell everybody to put an IUD and, without hormones. But the thing is, it’s really hard. And think about it. We, you need something. You don’t want to get pregnant anytime, really. So think about that. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (19:35.819)There’s always good old, you know, we call pull and pray. Dr Erika (19:39.19)Yeah, pull and pray. The rhythm method, yes. There’s a lot of praying going on there. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (19:47.543)Not so exacting, yeah. Dr Erika (19:49.836)No, right. all right, so we’re still on number one. Okay, so number one was, can you take it forever? You should take it forever. If you don’t wanna take it, you could stop any time, and that’s what you were saying, right? You could stop any time. Nothing will happen because… Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (19:53.358)Yeah. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (20:00.109)Wow. Dr Erika (20:12.64)It goes out of your system within a few days. So within a few days, you go back to what your baseline is. So if you have symptoms, they’ll come back. If you don’t have symptoms, they won’t come back. The thing is that I have a lot of patients that I’ve encouraged over the years when they said, I don’t think I need it anymore. I don’t think this, you know, cause once you feel good, everybody thinks, I don’t need anything. So I will say stop taking them. And then within a month, a week, three weeks, three months, they’ll be back and they’ll say, okay, well, you know, what do you think? Now, to go to number three. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (20:50.533)wait, hold on, before we move on from number one, Dr. Erica, this is so interesting. Can I ask you one more detailed question? So sometimes you hear this, and I know it’s different sorts of compounds and hormones, know, with melatonin, for instance, what you take, you don’t make. So there’s, know, people are taking so much melatonin and then they get off it and then it sort of messes up their sleep. And I know it’s different for men. My husband was on testosterone. Dr Erika (20:56.128)You can ask me as many as you want. Dr Erika (21:07.982)Thank you. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (21:18.103)and then he tried to get off it, he got off it so we could get pregnant and then his levels went down because he was on it so long. So he had to get back on it. So what about this idea that, yeah, when your body gets used to not making something when you’re taking it. Dr Erika (21:34.786)But I’m not suggesting that we’re overriding the system. So melatonin, I’m not a big fan of, especially as you get older. Whereas the problem with melatonin is that we’ve been giving the dosing that you could get, that you buy from whatever stor

Summary: In the July Solluna Power Hour episode, Kimberly discusses the importance of embracing creativity over hustle, emphasizing that everyone has pure creative potential. She explores the concept of flow versus hustle, highlighting how a holistic lifestyle can enhance well-being and creativity. The conversation delves into the Four Cornerstones of well-being: food, body, emotional health, and spiritual growth, and how they contribute to a nourishing environment for creativity. Snyder shares practical tips for maintaining energy and creativity through mindful eating, movement, emotional regulation, and spiritual practices. Episode Sponsors LMNT: OFFER: Right now, for my listeners LMNT is offering a free sample pack with any LMNT drink mix purchase at DrinkLMNT.com/FEELGOOD. That’s 8 single serving packets FREE with any LMNT any LMNT drink mix purchase. This deal is only available through my link so. Also try the new LMNT Sparkling — a bold, 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. USE LINK: DrinkLMNT.com/FEELGOOD GLOWING GREENS POWDER OFFER: Go to mysolluna.com and use the CODE: PODFAM15 for 15% off your entire order. USE LINK: mysolluna.com CODE: PODFAM15 for 15% off your entire order.   Episode Chapters 00:00 Embracing Creativity Over Hustle10:07 The Four Cornerstones of Well-Being21:13 Nourishing the Body for Creativity28:41 Emotional Well-Being and Creativity36:16 Spiritual Growth and Inner Guidance   SOLLUNA PRODUCT LINKS Glowing Greens Powder™ Feel Good SBO Probiotics Feel Good Detoxy Feel Good Digestive Enzymes Feel Good Starter Kit Feel Good Skincare KIMBERLY’S BOOKS The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts Chilla Gorilla & Lanky Lemur Journey to the Heart The Beauty Detox Solution Beauty Detox Foods Beauty Detox Power Radical Beauty Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life You Are More Than You Think You Are OTHER PODCASTS YOU MAY ENJOY! How to Believe in Your Self Worth with Jamie Kern Lima How to Raise Your Standards In Your Love Life with Matthew Hussey How to Eat to Beat Your Diet with New York Times best selling author Dr. William Li The issues with consuming vegetable and seed oils with Dr. Catherine Shanahan How the Power Foods Diet helps with Weight Loss with Dr. Neal Barnard How Not to Age with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Greger How to eat to reduce anxiety with Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo How to Optimize Your Metabolic Health with Dr. Casey Means TRANSCRIPT: Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:00.846)Hello everyone and welcome back to our July Feel Good Podcast Power Hour, this very special show which only airs once a month on the first Thursday of the month. And July, here we are, we’re talking about flow over hustle and nourishing your creative core. Why does this matter? Because you are a creative being. No matter what your job is or what you’re currently doing in your life. In your core, you are pure creative potential, your pure creativity. And when you really tap into that, you can create a much more continually elevated experience of life, I say, where there’s more vitality, more life flowing through you. You create your experience, you create your meals, you create in each moment. Are you elevating your joy and your bliss? Or are you elevating suffering and ego? So the more we tap into our creativity, the more we realize that we really are the creators of our life. We can apply that creativity in our moment to moment experience or, and I should say and or, we apply that creativity to bigger projects. If we want to create something new, if we are creating a different type of project at our work, if we’re creating a different experience as a parent, we’re creating in our household. There’s a million different ways that we create and we also create higher and higher levels of health, well-being, and energy and vitality at any stage of life and any age. Here in our Feel Good Saluna community, we go beyond numbers. We go right to that creative potential. We go right to energy, which is always creating. And we need not get fixated by the mind’s ideas of certain stages or certain ages or limitations or lack. Instead, we go beyond and that is the power of this lifestyle. So today we’re going to be talking about the four cornerstones, food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth. How when we live this highly intelligent, holistic lifestyle, we don’t have to get caught up in pushing and over pushing, pushing and hustle and trying to pack more and more into each day, which I’ve definitely tried in my past and realized that Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (02:24.386)Burnout and getting depleted are not the space for the highest levels of creativity and your best ideas and your best outcomes. You do not manifest your best life when you are just pushing and pushing. That is not the way. All the spiritual texts as well, from the Bhagavad Gita to the Dao De Ching, right? Talk about this incredible energy, this Whatever you want to talk about it that’s latent inside of you. And so when we live a lifestyle where we allow it to come up and out, there’s an easefulness and at the same time just this incredible building and building of energy. So I want to talk about all of this. I’m so excited. I do want to mention that the reason we talk about creativity, particularly in July, there’s so much light, there’s so much sun, there’s so much water. If you’re swimming more, you’re drinking more. So this is very much in alignment with what’s happening this month. And as such, starting July 15th, we are also launching a brand new detox and nourish bundle, which is really exciting. It’s going to feature our detox 2.0 formula, our glowing greens powder, and our research-based heart aligned meditation as a bundle, along with a very powerful companion guide, a 30 day checklist to help to support you through this really powerful process. Because part of nourishing creativity is this building up, this breaking down of the old, right, which is happening on a cellular level, anabolism and catabolism are constantly taking place. So you want to create a very fertile environment inside of you for creative potential, for health, for vitality to rise up and out. So please check out, be on the lookout for this. It’ll be on the front page of our website starting July 15th. Please also join our newsletter if you haven’t yet already so you can stay on top of all our different community happenings. All right, let’s get right into our show today. First, let’s talk about it from a macro perspective. What does it mean to be in flow versus in hustling? So when we think about the natural processes that are happening in our body, when our body is in flow, when we are in tune with what our body needs and our natural processes, our day could go something like this. We wake up naturally, right? Closer to the rising sun. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:48.844)We have a bowel movement. Our digestion is functioning at optimal levels. We have great energy. We don’t need to drink excessive amounts of caffeine. We’re hydrating through the day. Our energy stays pretty steady through the day into the afternoon. And then there’s a natural wind down period where we start to rest and we start to become more inward. And then we prepare for sleep and then we sleep really well. When we’re in hustle mode, we’re pushing and pushing against our natural capacity. So it means we may wake up already feeling anxious. We have lots of caffeine. We have energy crashes through the day, which we fortify with sugar or caffeine. We have trouble sleeping at night. So we may take sleep aids, we may take melatonin or prescriptions. We don’t feel good. in ourselves. don’t really feel worthy unless we’re achieving. We end up comparing ourselves, judging, looking on social media, feeling bad about ourselves. So hustle culture seems like it’s getting us ahead and we’re trying to be more productive and we’re trying to do more. But that’s really created from the mind’s idea. It’s created from ego. It’s that propelled heart energy that I talk about in The Hidden Power, the five hearts, always on, always running. And guess what? Your body doesn’t respond well to that. So your body starts to shut down. You may notice symptoms like adrenal exhaustion, getting more dark circles under your eyes, your hair not growing in as well, just feeling like something is really off. I know for myself, because I’ve been in hustle culture, or the propelled heart, as I’ll call it, for a lot of my life, my best ideas never came from that place. When I look back and I was backpacking around the world, this is where I felt so alive and expansive. And when I came back, even though some may say I was behind, a lot of my friends that graduated from Georgetown already had six figure jobs and they were doing all these fancy things. I just started to create from such a place of just pure creativity, right? Without all of mine’s ideas. And things came together fairly quickly. I started getting book deals. I started working with celebrity clients. And I’ll say now, Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (07:16.12)I just got back from Hawaii yesterday. There’s so many ideas I get when I’m just sitting in the forest or I’m walking around with, you know, trimming the cacao trees or doing things that don’t necessarily seem productive from the outside world. But then I just, you know, create ideas. This whole nourish and detox bundle, for example, came about from really watching my trees and seeing they need the soil. to build, they need the sunlight, they’re building up just like we build every day. And then they need all these scrub trees, which are so invasive and so pervasive at the same time and the beetles cleared away to be in their full potential. It’s sort of like that analogy of the lotus rising up out of the mud, right? In Buddhism, which has a lot to do with shedding, you know, mind’s ideas and ego and getting caught up in thoughts, right? We keep shedding and shedding. This mud, we’re detoxing on so many different levels and yet we’re nourished deep, deep, deep below. We’re rooted in something deeper and then we come up into the sunlight. So the more we’re in flow, the more we’re in tune with our body. Our body is a very powerful tool for helping us to be more creative. We need more love. We need more self-care, real self-care, which isn’t, again, hustle culture means constantly scrolling on social media. looking at a million different people’s ideas, getting more and more confused, thinking that we need a million different devices, we need a million different supplements. We don’t. We need to simplify again and get more in tune with our bodies and with nature. I just want to touch on self-esteem for a moment before we go into our cornerstones. There’s so much around being in hustle, being in noise, the world we live in with social media. where it’s easy to place our self-worth and how much we’re doing, how much we’re achieving, how many likes we get in a day versus really sitting back and understanding that our worth is something that cannot be tampered with. It can’t really be taken away from us. Only our thoughts and our ideas create self-doubt and keep us away from really feeling that fullness and that wholeness, our birthright, which is in our hearts. It’s inside of us. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:38.444)Right? And so the more we tune into that and tune out these external ideas which are depleting us, the more we blossom in this creative potential and the more we shine and the more we radiate and the more energized we feel. So in practical terms, let’s get into our Four Cornerstones now. The Four Cornerstones serve us through every theme in our life because it roots us in the everyday. know, Swami Sri Yukteswar once said, and I’m paraphrasing here, We need to have our feet firmly planted on the earth in this lifetime, in this moment. We are here on earth having an embodied experience. Yet at the same time, we’re spiritual beings. We have this soul, we have this, you know, eternalness, but we need to function in the place where God placed us, which is right here right now on earth. There’s a groundedness to the food and body cornerstones. And at the same time, to the emotional and spiritual cornerstones, we’re able to create this holistic approach. Otherwise, a lot of wellness philosophies, so to speak, or health philosophies are incomplete. They’re missing this, all the aspects of self. So we start with the groundedness, we start with the food. And when it comes to our creativity, when it comes to being in flow, we need foods that are going to sustain us in very real ways through the day. And we need whole foods, need fruit, need vegetables, we need hydration, we need lots and lots of fiber, we need the intelligence of plants to sustain us and to nourish us because there is an intelligence in everything we eat. And sometimes that intelligence is based on chemicals and man-made, you know, food dyes and preservatives and horrific seed oils which depletes the intelligence in our body, is misguided and it takes us away from our goals. There’s a lot of research around this, for example, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, there was a study on whole foods and cognitive performance. And it was found that when we eat, getting back to basics, whole foods, our brains literally function better, we have more focus. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (11:58.188)It’s not about all the supplements. It’s not just about, you know, some of these fancy biohacking devices, but it’s about moment to moment, step by step, what are we choosing as we open the fridge, as we order what we’re having for lunch, or as we sit at the cutting board and we start to think about, what am I gonna put in my body today? These are the moments that create the building blocks of your life. There was another research study in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience, and it found that blood sugar stability directly impacts our brain’s ability to function optimally. The study showed that people who maintain steady glucose levels through balanced, nutrient-dense foods experienced 23 % better cognitive performance and significantly less afternoon brain fog compared to those consuming high-sugar processed foods. Again, it goes back to moment to moment choices and also making sure that we are preparing for these choices. So a little bit of food prep, a little bit of planning our food shopping, making sure that we’re sourcing food every week. For me, because I live in very remote places, very far from grocery stores, I tend to order food a lot. I go to the farmer’s market and I’ll get fresh food. But staples I tend to order in advance so that I have enough chia seeds. I have enough organic almonds to make my almond milk. I have lentils to make my dal and my soups. I plan, and it doesn’t take a lot of planning, but it is a really essential part of creativity and wellness. So when we’re nourished, And these are some of the benefits and the reasons that we do want to plan a little bit, whether it’s looking at a couple of recipes, thinking about getting certain ingredients or just stocking up. I do both. Sometimes I say, hey, really want to make that pesto this week. So I better get basil. And sometimes I just order very sort of what seems randomly, but what looks good, what looks fresh. And then I just create from that. So I do both. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:12.62)Right? So think about if your body is craving a certain recipe, you do have to plan ahead, of course, and get certain ingredients, or you can just get what looks great and build your meals, substitute certain vegetables and certain recipes, make modifications, and play and plan and cook that way. When we are nourished, you will have more steady energy through the day. It’s like having the battery of your life force charged at all times. It feels amazing. It means you can show up moment to moment and pivot and flow with life. You’re less reactive, both in your eating and in your emotional outbursts, because you can sit back and more of this steadiness, yogic quality of equanimity. You are more intuitive about what needs to be said, what you need to eat. And you can carry this through the afternoons. A lot of us can start to slump by three o’clock. And so what are we doing in the morning to prevent that? What are we doing in the mid afternoon? What are we doing at lunch? How are we moving our bodies? How are we eating and hydrating to make sure that by three o’clock, there’s still a good chunk of the day, right? By three o’clock, I still have to pick up my kids from camp or in Hawaii. I’m with them all day, essentially. You know, we still have play, we still go to the playground or we may… you know, go out in the field or feed the goats or play a game of soccer and then I have to get dinner ready and then there’s bedtime. There’s a big chunk of the day. So we want that sustained energy and we certainly do not want to rely on caffeine in the mid afternoon. So what do we do in practical terms? So it’s important how we start the day. I suggest starting the day with your glowing green smoothie, ideally with this incredible booster of the glowing greens powder. which has ingredients that are not in your smoothie like amalaki and ashitaba and spirulina and cordyceps mushrooms. So you get fiber and you get deep nourishment to take you into the morning and afternoon. If you start the day just grabbing a random protein bar or skipping breakfast, you’re setting yourself up for not a great pattern throughout the day. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (16:28.224)It’s really important to start the day, take that extra time for yourself, or make the Glowing Green Smoothie for a couple days, it’ll stay in your fridge covered and fresh and cool. So you really give yourself that incredible nourishment. I can’t emphasize this enough. There are certain things in our lifestyle which don’t shift and change much, and this is one of the staples of our community. Fiber, greens, nourishment, lemon juice. water. All of these things are in the glowing green smoothie and it’s something that is such an incredible gift for yourself. Throughout the day, one of the things that I’ve been doing is soaking almonds overnight. It’s one of the most incredible revered ingredients in our uvata for prana. So I make almond milk a couple times a week. I also save some of the soaked almonds and it’s a practice to peel them. The skin slips right off if you soak it. and to just eat a couple of those soaked almonds throughout the day. It’s incredibly energizing. It feels great and it will give you energy. Another great food to make for snacks, so easy, is chia pudding. I was making some last night. I use chia pudding, actually it’s chia eggs, if I’m baking something for my kids. You can also snack on chia pudding. It’s really filling and these healthy fats feel great. for your digestion, for your skin. It’s one of my favorite foods, honestly, in the summer as a snack, because it doesn’t take time away in making something really, you know, laborious. And at the same time, it feels like, you know, it’s great all time of year, but it feels like summer to me. There’s so much water, there’s so much hydration, there’s so much hardiness and resilience in those chia seeds. And you can check out the recipes that we have for different varieties if you’re interested. Also, hydration is really important. I drink a lot of coconut water in Hawaii. We have a lot of different coconut trees. And if we’re at the little store, as we call it, or the little, you know, stores around, I get the coconut water, which comes from Hawaii, locally. Of course, not all of us live where there’s coconuts. So choose coconut water that is, you know, the most fresh and Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:48.824)feels like it’s harvested sustainably. I like Harmless Harvest a lot as one of the brands that I choose. And there’s different smaller ones as well. But also drinking lots of room temperature water during the day. You can put lemon, can infuse it with strawberries or coconut or cucumber rather. And then planning these meals. So I wanna call out a couple of recipes that are really alive in me right now and I just want to say that all year round I eat soup and sometimes people only call for it in the sun in the winter. But I think soup is so hydrating. And if you look at countries like Thailand, they’re having their soups all year round. When you’re having hot soup, sometimes it can cool your body. I don’t necessarily recommend having a lot of chilies and super spicy soup in the summer, which can aggravate your pitta, the fiery qualities inside of you. But we have lots of different recipes for, you know, doll, even kitchery is great in the summer, my everyday awesome soup which came from the Perfectly Imperfect book. I had that last night for dinner with squash and lentils and carrots and kale and we usually have rice made in our home, very Filipino, how I grew up or quinoa and so it becomes very easy to just make a soup you know while you’re you know for us we play we do a lot of puzzles in the kitchen So while you’re doing something with your kids and then come back and the soup is ready, the flavors enhance over time. There’s also our amazing zucchini pasta salad where you spiralize the zucchinis. Zucchini in Ayurveda is considered one of the best cooling foods. It tastes really delicious with a nice sauce on top. We also have a great summer strawberry beet mescaline salad, which is so great for digestion and circulation. It’s got lots of antioxidants. It feels like summer. and our cucumber water elixir, which again, feels like pure nourishment to put in your body this time of year. So I really recommend that you check out some of these incredible recipes that we have at mysalina.com. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of recipes on there and see what your body’s calling for right now. But what an amazing time to nourish your body with intention, with wholeness. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (21:13.326)And with this idea that every day you’re building more and more creative potential inside of you. Okay, so let’s talk about the body cornerstone. This is a time for circulation and gentle movement. Hustle Culture says, keep doing those high intensity workouts, do two back to back. I remember when I was teaching at Wanderlust in Mexico, I think a year and a half ago now, they had all these different classes, including mine. My classes were lectures. but there was yoga classes and there was breathing classes and there was pretty much everything you can imagine. And I met this woman and she was going from, you know, the class, which is, you know, we’ve had Taran Tumi on here, which is a very high intensity sort of free form movement to the, you know, the most intense yoga class that was taught there by my friend Skylar Grant and then another class. And I just looked at this woman who was, you know, felt like she was really wanting to be in shape and she was wanting more and more and more. And I just wanted to hug her heart to heart and say, you know, it’s great to do some of these classes, but also don’t forget to breathe and enjoy and just, you know, walk around and maybe take a walk on the beach and be here in the moment, right? So it’s okay to have, sometimes your body calls for intense cardio. but there’s also lots of space for walking and stretching and going on a hike with a friend and playing with your kids outside. You know, this past trip to Hawaii, my kids’ activities constantly shift and change. I used to walk a lot. We hike, we go to the waterfalls, but my older son has gotten into tennis recently. So I found myself playing tennis every day. We would play mini a lot, so just half court, but it was, you know, fun and not so intense, you know, just, you know, having those moments with my kids and my little son would be, my younger son would be sort of circling around the court in his tricycle. It’s just these moments that are really, you you feel alive, you’re pivoting and you’re flowing with life. Things shift and things change and your interests can change and your family life can change. What’s really important though is getting that cerebral Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (23:38.808)blood flow, which enhances circulation, it enhances your thinking. So there’s research as well from PLOS1, we’ll link to all these research studies by the way at mysalina.com, that when we are in movement and circulation, it enhances and supports our creativity and intelligence by showing greater blood flow to brain regions associated with functions relevant to the creative process. So we don’t want to sit on our couch or at our desk or in our cars all day and start to feel stagnant. I know that as a mom, there can be a lot of driving kids around. Now, one thing that I do for my older son’s chess classes is I will walk the neighborhood with my younger son while he’s in chess class. And I noticed some of the other moms are doing that as well. There’s one mom in particular, and she puts her headphones on. And she’s power walking around while our kids are playing chess. So if we think about natural ways to weave movement into our lifestyle, maybe if your kid plays baseball, you can watch part of the time or you can go out in the grass and do a little bit of stretching, right? Or instead of just scrolling on your phone, you can find ways to utilize that time to allow that circulation to move through your body and your life. And you can find creative ways to connect with your partner instead of just sitting at a coffee shop. Maybe you go for a walk in a different part of town or you explore a new park or you do a walking tour. I remember being in London and doing a million walking tours, right? So there’s so many ways to support your body’s natural movement. When we’re in burnout and hustle, we feel like our body is just hurting all the time. Our body may be begging for rest and we’re just pushing and pushing and doing the same sorts of classes all the time. We feel stiffness in our jaw and our neck and our hips. Our body is suffering. This is not normal. Sometimes we may feel a little bit of natural soreness, but the chronic pain that comes from hustling is not serving our bodies. And also for dreading movement rather than craving it. I used to dread running, but I still ran all the time because I felt like Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (25:59.714)This is how I’m gonna burn calories. This is how I’m going to stay thin. And it never worked very well. So one of the things that, again, our body can help to unlock creativity is just, and I’ve been putting on Instagram some of my favorite movements, stretching and opening the hearts, doing twists. very simple movements that I do sometimes in the middle of my work day to just get energy flowing through my body and again stimulate my brain and my heart brain and just these feelings of potential is you can just take a 10 minute break, five minutes even, go outside. Sometimes I wander around in the garden and it really resets my mind and just walking down there I ground a little bit, I go barefoot, I’m alone. In Hawaii I’m out in the fields all the time with the cacao. You can stretch, get out in the sunlight, just take mini breaks as well. And then also try different types of movement in the summer, especially this month. Maybe Pilates or yoga or just biking by yourself or with your partner, with your kids, instead of just being inside doing these same workout classes. Sometimes that may feel good, but sometimes you may want to break out and try something different. It’s also really great to get some morning sunlight in. This morning, even before shooting this podcast, before my kids were up, I got outside and just had a couple moments breathing in the sunlight and it felt so good. And not exercising so late at night because we don’t want to over-stimulate ourselves and start to wake ourselves up when our body should be resting and going down into more of a rest cycle. We also want to try dry brushing. and some Epsom salt baths to clear energy, to get circulation going. I have to admit that I go in and out of my brushing. Sometimes I just move away from it and I just don’t do it, if I’m totally honest. But this time of year, that invigoration feels really good. So I’ve gotten the brushes back out and it doesn’t take very long, but there’s a lot of power in moving the lymph. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (28:11.182)through your body, moving stagnation back to the detoxing part. We can think about the movement as nourishing circulation, nourishing prana to move through you, and then helping the detoxification process with the dry brushing. And of course, taking detoxi, check out that Nourish and Detox Bundle. It’s going to be really powerful to support you in these anchors and just moving waste out through your body. Now let’s talk about emotional well-being. And I feel, I have a lot to say about this. And I, you know, I think about running Saluna, which has spanned now the birth of both my sons, writing all these books and having this podcast and being a mom full time. When my first son was born, I was in hustle mode still quite a bit. And I remember, you know, the days after he was born, lying in bed and doing the page proofs for Radical Beauty, the book I wrote with Deepak Chopra. And then there was a picture I posted online and I got some sort of negative feedback, which I was defensive to at the time, but it was a picture of me typing on my computer, nursing my son on one breast and pumping the other breast. And at the time I was like, look at how much I can do. I’m not slowing down. I’m able to keep creating and creating. And some people were like, you know, why don’t you just take the time to nurse your child? And it didn’t resonate with me at the time, if I’m totally honest. I had such strong ideas. And then as time went on and my heart started to open more and more, started to grow a lot spiritually and so much of this heart led work has helped me see, opens up the third eye, right? The third eye in the heart. We can say I really relate it. And I started to see… that there was so much of that perfectionism still in there, that over ambition, that more, more, more, I’m not gonna slow down, I’ll show everybody how much I can do. And by the time Moses came along, there was a lot more resting and spaciousness in my day. But in that spaciousness come the best ideas, right? So having an idea for a project or a course or… Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (30:34.124)you know, really aligning with this new branding. of you that are watching this on YouTube can see our new Feel Good podcast sign behind. If you look on Spotify or Apple, you see we have a whole new vibe that we’re rolling out and it’ll take, you know, eight, nine months to get the new packaging and the new website up. But all of this has come from stillness and feeling this rebirth energy coming and not trying to pack more in the day, flowing. letting some people flow in and out. We have some new team members at Saluna. It just feels more up-leveled, more easeful, better communication, more professional. mean, things just keep growing, but out of this flow and out of a lot more stillness. So there’s a lot of research now around perfectionism and burnout. Sometimes we talk about this on the podcast and certain guests. Burnout… does not facilitate great creativity. There’s research showing that in the field of neuroscientists showed that unlocking cognitive processes and creativity come when we are feeling more spacious, when we have less of this, you know, feeling like we have to pack things in all the time. There’s also studies on emotional reappraisal and creativity. showing that when we are more centered in our emotions and emotional intelligence, there’s more creativity that comes from that. And there’s a lot of research in the new book around, you know, heart intelligence and heart coherence. The heart aligned meditation shows as well, we researched it and we showed just a higher level of heart coherence in as little as four weeks. So creativity, I just wanna remind us all, doesn’t mean I’m just… churning out this project, it also means what am I creating in my relationships? Am I creating a peaceful experience and a really connected dinner? Or is there a lot of drama? My emotions are out of whack. I’m exhausted. I’m reactive. I’m pushing. I’m angry. There’s resentment underneath. I haven’t cleaned up a mistake. I haven’t said sorry. I haven’t accepted someone else’s apology. There’s so much energy in emotions. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (32:54.594)that can really deplete our creativity. When we’re caught in drama, we’re in that heaviness and circular thinking and we’re not in expansion and outward listening to our intuition and our ideas. There’s a great dark cloud that comes from that. There’s also lot more self-doubt and overwhelm that comes when we’re in that pushing mode. So to be really confident and to move and to transcend There’s a lot of confidence that comes from being more peaceful and spaciousness and listening to ourselves more and really feeling into what kind of person do I want to be and how can I live that more in the world. So daily journaling is a really great way to reflect, to really process what’s going on in the life inside of us. And at the same time to then read back what we were going through even a few days ago or a day ago or a couple hours ago. and to create insight and wisdom and realizations, to regularly have time for breathing and some of these simple practices like the heart holding technique. The first thing I talk about, first practice in the Five Hearts book is to just touch our hearts and to remind ourselves that we’re more than our thoughts. We don’t have to identify with our emotional experiences that we do. There’s a steadiness in us beyond the ups and downs and the emotions of life. So it’s very powerful to just take a couple moments to breathe into our hearts, to let the emotions start to sink down and settle, to let ourselves get centered and calm before we react, speak, send an email. I remember we live again, a very remote part in Hawaii, and this big truck came onto our lands and sort of, you know, for my nervous system felt this, you abrasive sort of angry, scary man was in this truck. And I just had to settle in, you know, Aloha, what were you looking for? And just sort of meet that moment without letting the fear get overwhelmed and calmly say, okay, you’re in the wrong place. You know, that’s our neighbor’s house, you know, mile up the road. Right. Sometimes we don’t have time to just say, I’m going to, you know, chill out here for half an hour or five minutes or 20 minutes. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (35:21.122)But these practices have really helped me stay centered more and more in the moment so that, again, the more coherent we are, don’t waste energy, we don’t deplete ourselves, which can take, again, in the book there’s a research study that shows five minutes of anger can deplete our immunity for up to six hours. So we wanna just stay as centered and centered as we can in our emotions. Again, The Hidden Power, the Five Hearts book can really support you in this process. So I highly recommend you read it or listen to it if you haven’t yet. And if you have and you love it, please leave a review. I appreciate reviews so much. It helps other hearts find this work. And finally, spiritual growth, our fourth cornerstone. What really matters with creativity is the inner guidance. And this is the ultimate way to tune in to the best, most unique ideas for you, which no one else can bring to this planet. No one else can bring to this earth. Right? So when we are in tune with our hearts, with the messages inside, what it feels like is not having to get bogged down in judgment, fear, being overly competitive, but really feeling into a new approach. or a way that we can bring this idea to life. This is the creative power that God, Spirit, Universe, however we like to think of it, gave us. It’s inside, but we don’t access it unless we carve out the space for spaciousness. When we’re in hustle culture and every minute is filled with packing and meetings, phone calls, we’re constantly texting, we’re in line at the grocery store, and we’re scrolling, instead of maybe taking a moment to breathe and to be present to life and to look around, right? We can fill our time endlessly with screens or maybe we just take five minutes to sit in the sunlight, to watch the birds. know, practice Eckhart Tolle talks about just being alive and present in nature. We start to feel this incredible joy in the very little moments. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (37:39.552)Not in these big achievements, look at how much of my to-do list I crossed off today, or look how many likes I got on this post, which is great too, I’m not minimizing that. But to not feel so tied to all these external happenings, which can bring us up and down, depleted and elated dopamine hits, but then also down in the dumps. There’s a steadiness and a consistency which can come from the inside. And this also relates very much to your creative power, prana. You start to get more and more energy from the inner world. Food, yes. Exercise, sunlight, yes. Healthy relationships, yes. Community, but also from being in touch from the inner light. So how do we do this? Practice and consistency. Taking eight minutes to do your heart aligned meditation. or another meditation that really resonates with you. Making sure to have some spaciousness in your day. I promise you as someone who is a very full life, I have created more spaciousness. Say I’m only recording this amount of podcasts a week, said no to a lot of things, and yet more and more is naturally coming to me. More and more is being created in easefulness and spaciousness. And it seems so ironic, it almost seems impossible from the egoic mind. But it is the truth of, I think, the nature and the way that God created us to have that stillness of quality over quantity. When you have the best ideas coming from inside, it doesn’t mean if, it doesn’t matter if you have 20 ideas that you’ve sussed out, rather the one quality one that you act on. Whether it’s a way that you approach your family life or the meal you’re gonna create, or again, what you bring into an idea, how you’re gonna get that. project to completion, what you’re going to put out in the world that day. So allowing more space, saying no to more things that don’t really matter, that you don’t really want to say yes to, simplifying how you cook, simplifying your life. It’s funny because in Hawaii, we have no furniture practically. We sleep on a mattress on the floor and we don’t have a couch. We have this huge pillow and Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (40:04.972)you know, a couple chairs on the porch and it’s so amazing. And we come back here to our home in California, which I think is pretty cleansed of clutter, but it feels like there’s a lot of stuff and you know, it’s beautiful too. And I love it here, but the more simple, I do get my best ideas. I do feel my most creative in Hawaii, to be honest. And I think it’s because there’s just way less added on top. Right? So think about what are we adding on top? I start to notice that I’m adding on top when I’m scrolling, excessively my favorite stores and I’m online shopping and why I don’t do that. There’s something about the nature and just being so raw. And we can create that no matter if you’re living in an apartment, you’re listening to this in the middle Chicago or New York city, thinking about scaling back, thinking about more space, just sitting. We talked about journaling, doing your meditations, and how you can create that because that is where creativity lives. It’s not gonna live in pushing more and more and more. So as we close out, I just wanna remind you of this incredible creative potential which is inside you. It’s different to everyone else’s expression in the world. how creative you, how much you tap into this creativity will really impact your experience, your vitality, your health, and your day-to-day moments. So with this intention, Please review, contemplate all these four cornerstone ideas and think about implementing them in your life in practical ways. Movement, whole foods, emotional regulation, more time for spaciousness and spirituality and stillness. And reminder that our amazing Nourish and Detox Bundle is coming your way July 15th. Look out for it. It’s directly tied to supporting you in your creativity, in your health. It’s going to be amazing. Again, it will include a companion guide. checklist, our detoxi 2.0, Glow in Greens powder, Heart Align Meditation, so much support. I send you so much love and I will be back here in just a few days with our guest. So till then, sending you all the best. Remember how unique and creative you are and sending you so much love. Take great care.  

Summary: In this episode of the Feel Good Podcast Power Hour, Kimberly Snyder discusses the importance of entering June with intention, embracing seasonal changes, and understanding Ayurvedic principles for summer health. She emphasizes the significance of nutrition, body movement, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth, providing practical tips for listeners to enhance their holistic lifestyle and well-being during the summer months. Episode Sponsors LMNT: OFFER: Right now, for my listeners LMNT is offering a free sample pack with any LMNT drink mix purchase at DrinkLMNT.com/FEELGOOD. That’s 8 single serving packets FREE with any LMNT any LMNT drink mix purchase. This deal is only available through my link so. Also try the new LMNT Sparkling — a bold, 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. USE LINK: DrinkLMNT.com/FEELGOOD FEEL GOOD SBO PROBIOTICS OFFER: Go to mysolluna.com and use the CODE: PODFAM15 for 15% off your entire order. USE LINK: mysolluna.com CODE: PODFAM15 for 15% off your entire order.   Episode Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the Feel Good Podcast Power Hour01:54 Embracing Seasonal Changes and Intentions06:09 Understanding Ayurvedic Principles for Summer12:08 The Importance of Food and Nutrition20:04 Body Movement and Exercise Adjustments27:01 Emotional Well-being and Lightness in Summer33:47 Spiritual Growth and Letting the Light In   SOLLUNA PRODUCT LINKS Glowing Greens Powder™ Feel Good SBO Probiotics Feel Good Detoxy Feel Good Digestive Enzymes Feel Good Starter Kit Feel Good Skincare KIMBERLY’S BOOKS The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts Chilla Gorilla & Lanky Lemur Journey to the Heart The Beauty Detox Solution Beauty Detox Foods Beauty Detox Power Radical Beauty Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life You Are More Than You Think You Are OTHER PODCASTS YOU MAY ENJOY! How to Believe in Your Self Worth with Jamie Kern Lima How to Raise Your Standards In Your Love Life with Matthew Hussey How to Eat to Beat Your Diet with New York Times best selling author Dr. William Li The issues with consuming vegetable and seed oils with Dr. Catherine Shanahan How the Power Foods Diet helps with Weight Loss with Dr. Neal Barnard How Not to Age with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Greger How to eat to reduce anxiety with Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo How to Optimize Your Metabolic Health with Dr. Casey Means TRANSCRIPT Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:00)Hello and welcome to our Feel Good Podcast Power Hour for June. I love doing this show. A reminder that instead of having a Thursday Q &A every single week, we’re doing this really incredibly jam-packed show on the first Thursday of every month that will give you the top tips and strategies around the four cornerstones, food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth to have the most amazing month ahead and to enter the month with intention. So we will continue to build up this show so definitely stay tuned as time goes on we’ll incorporate even more ⁓ community ideas, comments, questions from you guys, we’ll do some giveaways. So definitely this is a show that is this you know has so much creative potential and I’m really grateful for you tuning in with me today. You may have been with me for many years. I know that we used to do this ⁓ Thursday Q &A show every week. I used to do it with Caitlin and our Saluna team. There’s been many different iterations. You may be brand new to our community and if so, congratulations to me and to you. I’m so excited to find each other and welcome to the community. We have so many offerings and including this very show. So I’m so excited to dive right in. Just a little reminder that our main hub is at mysolluna.com, our website where you can find literally hundreds, thousands of recipes that are going to boost your energy and your digestion, articles, ⁓ other feel good podcasts, the show notes to today’s show, and our amazing digestion focused supplements, including our SBO probiotics and detoxi. We have courses, we have our amazing waterfall cleanse. We have our Heart Aligned Meditation, so there’s so much over there for you to explore and to go further into our community. So here we are in June, which is such an incredible month because we are transitioning into summer. We have Summer Solstice coming up in just a few weeks, and this is really ⁓ the midway point of the year. So there’s a very important energetic transition that’s happening now. We see it in the collective nature all around and it’s happening inside our bodies. And so one of the most important things that we want to keep in mind is to enter June with intention. And I say intention because otherwise we get swept up in the excitement of yes, there’s longer days and more light and maybe more activity outside and lots more fun. But if we are intentional in balancing our energy, which is a very, our you’ve aided concept, which we’ll talk about in a moment, it’s very important to balance our energy each season. If we don’t watch it, we can actually get more burned out, we can aggravate our pitta, our fire energy, we can deplete ourselves, we can accelerate aging, we can get our digestion, our worn down, we can feel more dehydrated, bit more irritated. So it’s really important to maintain this balance, which does shift season to season in our practices, which is why it’s really important, again, back to our show every month, to really reflect and be intentional about some shifts that we’re making in how we eat, how we exercise, how we take care of our body, our emotional and spiritual wellbeing, and this makes a huge difference, right? Self-care is not just one and done, here’s everything I do, it’s the same thing for everybody because that’s not how nature works, right? And we’re part of nature. So we see this in evidence in terms of how there’s different fruits and vegetables in season, how there’s a fullness to the plants in certain seasons, and then there’s the shedding of the leaves. I’ve seen an incredible rebirth in the last few months in my area in California from the fires, right? Going from the scorched, of raising it down to the ground, and now there’s so much greenery. So we really want to take care of ourselves and our vitality in this very holistic way. And I promise you, you will get the best results when you look at things in this way. Now, as I mentioned, seasonal wisdom is a core part. It’s a core tenant of Arya Veda. And I have been a student of Arya Veda now for many years, for over a decade, including a pretty intense four-year ⁓ practitioner course that I went through with Vaidya J. ⁓ And so I love incorporating Ayurvedic concepts into our philosophy here at Solluna, which by, and the Feel Good podcast, which by the way, Saluna means the sun and the moon. So it’s really this holistic approach. And I created Saluna actually in the aftermath of when my mom passed away. And it was a really intense time. And I was going through so many different emotions of gratitude and grief and just feeling really alive on a whole other level. And so when we’re talking about feeling good, we’re not just talking about being giggly and happy all the time, we’re talking about this authenticness, this bliss and this balance that’s underneath the ups and downs of life. There is this stability and resiliency that you can start to access within your own body, within your own emotional resilience, within your heart. And so that’s really the goal of our lifestyle, to create that real wholeness, which results in more harmony and more abundance in your life. And it’s less and less dependent on other people, on what the world is doing that may not feel right for you, what your, you know, even your friends and your loved ones are saying or doing or their opinions. There starts to be this real confidence in your moving forward in your own life. And it’s really beautiful. So, Arya Veda, I’ll just give a really quick summary means the science of life. And it’s based on balancing these elements, which are the same elements in nature, the same elements that are in your body. So this is the Pancha Mahabhuta theory, air, space, fire, earth and water. So every season, there’s a different mix, there’s a different calibration of the energies outside. And each of us have more dominant energy. So you have more fiery energy, may have more pitta. Me, I can be a little bit more spacey and that’s definitely more Vata energy, more prone to constipation and whatnot. If you’re very grounded, ⁓ maybe a little bit more prone to weight gain or feeling depressed or slothfulness and imbalance, there’s more kafa, more grounded energy. So we want to be aware of what’s happening in our bodies. We want to be aware of the greater energies and find a way to merge and create that balance. And it’s very powerful when we do this. And this is a part ofSome of the biohacking and modern living and ⁓ it kind of can miss that. And we can incorporate all these wonderful devices and products, but we also want to respect and honor the ancient wisdom, which had so much, has so much to teach us about how to truly work on an energetic level in our bodies. Another ancient system is traditional Chinese medicine, which associates summer with a fire element as well. It’s a time for joy, connection, expression, but also staying anchored. So in Ayurveda, as we’re coming into summer, we are definitely coming into Pitta season. So there’s a lot of fire. The sun is ⁓ burning very hot and very bright for many of us in the Northern Hemisphere. There’s a intensity, there’s an outward expression, there’s an element of manifestation. But again, without intention, it can lead to burnout, can lead to irritation, to feeling fiery, to throwing our digestion off, to feeling more anxiety. So we wanna be aware that to balance the fire outside, we wanna incorporate more cooling spices, more cooling foods, more cooling practices. which we’re gonna get into right now with the four cornerstones. So let’s dive right in and we usually start with our food cornerstone. Although I do wanna remind us that they’re not necessarily in order of importance. All of these cornerstones anchor us into this holistic lifestyle. Food is and will always be a critical part. The foods that we’re taking in assimilate and become part of our bodies and part of our energy. So we can use food in this very ⁓ intentional way. I kind of veer away from saying thoughtful now because we don’t want to be full of thoughts, right? We want this intuition from our hearts to rise up and to teach us how to eat, what our body needs. And at the same time, to take these learnings and ⁓ ancient wisdom and modern science and incorporate it into our lives. So we want to be in alignment with the Earth’s rhythm. And so now understanding that there’s going to be a whole lot more sun and a lot more pitta, we want to make sure that we’re creating ⁓ this ⁓ shifting, right? Just like the earth is shifting on its axis and we shift our clothes and their seasonal foods, we also want to shift our diet. And there’s research that published that shows that how shifting your diet ⁓ and the seasonality has a big effect on your gut health as well. So a study published in Nature Communications, for example, examined the Hadza people of Tanzania, a country that I love, and found that their gut microbiome changed significantly between dry and wet seasons. And this was directly tied to their diet. They had more berries, honey, and tubers in certain months. And this highlights how seasonal diversity really does shape our microbiome, our third brain, which of course has a huge impact. on our health, on our immunity, on our moods. So we’re not meant to just eat the same rigid thing day in and day out, which would be boring, but also isn’t in keeping with nature. It’s not natural to do that. Research on a US cohort also showed that seasonal fluctuations in gut microbiome mirror shifts in dietary patterns. And again, all of this research, if you’re interested, you’d like to read research studies like I do, you can check them out. We’ll have the direct links on our show notes, which again are mysaloonamysolluna.com. So resilience is a really important word and we can be emotionally resilient, we can be physically resilient, and a lot of that physical resilience builds in our gut. We become more resilient against viruses, bacteria, infections. And also the ups and downs of life in general, right? A really steady gut can really help anchor us in life. And a study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that a healthy gut supports stronger vagus nerve tone, which enhances emotional regulation, stress recovery, interoceptive awareness, which is our ability to tune into our internal body signals. So again, if we want to have a healthy gut, which we all do, it’s a huge part of our saluna. practices and my daily practices. I start the day with our SBO probiotics. I end the day with our detoxi. I’m always eating with digestion in mind. We want to also incorporate this shifting. So if you’re listening to this or watching this right now in our YouTube channel, ⁓ I want you to be aware that even now, even as we start to transition into summer, there are some signs of imbalance that I want you to be aware of. And some of these could include overly craving sugary cold drinks, including really tall, huge iced coffees. This is your body saying, hey, I need something I’m craving to feel more balanced and the ice is a quick fix, right? Doesn’t mean you can’t have these drinks sometimes, but notice how intense the cravings can be. And notice that it’s ⁓ habitual and repeated. So you may have a nice big drink and you want another one and you’re not satisfied and so on and so forth. Also feeling foggy, heavy, bloated, feeling irritable, ⁓ especially after processed or fried meals, wanting fried meals, just this general feeling of being off. And this… ⁓ Irritability is a really important energy to keep in mind through all our energies, whether it’s emotional, physically, irritability in our gut, because again, that is a sign of excess fire. When we’re in balance, we feel stable, clear, centeredness, which means Satvik in Ayurveda. We have aligned cravings. That means our body is really wanting the glowing green smoothie. It’s really wanting these delicious vegetables, whether that’s in a soup or stew or salad, we feel good when we eat well. And we also have pretty ⁓ consistent moods and we have great smooth digestion. So there aren’t big erratic ups and downs. We’re not overly gassy. Everything is moving ⁓ consistently, shall we say. So what we want to do some protocols for this month to keep in mind is specifically are to stay nourished, to cool your system, and to enhance that ojas, which is really that glow, that vitality from the inside out. So this is a wonderful season to continue or to restart your glowing green smoothie practice. Now, Ayurveda is big on warming foods, so I will say this whilst this is part of our morning routine, I’m still a fan of starting the day with something warm to drink, hot water with lemon, hot water with lemon and ginger. something to get your Agni moving. And I don’t advocate drinking the Glowing Green Smoothie ice cold. Even as it turns into summer, I have it closer to room temperature if that’s palatable to you or if you need it really cold. ⁓ That’s okay, but still start with something really warm in your belly first. First thing should be warm. First thing in your belly should never be something really cold. It’s really ⁓ powerful. to add the Glowing Green Smoothie in our GGP as I do every day to get that chlorophyll, that extra boost. There’s spirulina, there’s ashitaba, there’s amalaki, there’s wonderful Ayurvedic as well as cordyceps, mushrooms, plants that you wouldn’t have fresh. There’s seven key plants to give you that real deep nourishment. And it’s gonna result in a glow, it’s gonna result in higher immunity, it’s gonna result in more balance. So check out the recipe if you are new to our community. You’ve never made the Glowing Green Smoothie. I can’t wait for you to try it. It’s something that I invented. Wow. 14 years ago, I think, when I was in my little apartment in New York City. This is literally how it started. And I had studied at the Ann Wigmore Institute, which is a raw food institute in Puerto Rico. Did a training there and I came back and there they make something called energy soup, which is blending greens and they add seaweed and sprouts and all sorts of things. It’s definitely an acquired taste. And I remember sitting in my apartment and I had a bunch of spinach and I had really ripe bananas and those were the two ingredients I blended together. And I blended it and then I ate a spoon of it and I was like, this is kind of good and it’s kind of strange to ripe fruit with spinach. It wasn’t something that felt necessarily intuitive for me the way I was raised. You know, eating a lot of Filipino foods, lots of Asian foods. didn’t make smoothies when I was growing up. My mother’s from the Philippines. But anyways, I took a spoon of it and I handed it to my boyfriend at the time who was sitting on our blue couch in our West Village apartment. I said, hey, try this. And he was like, wow, that’s not bad. And so really put me on this trajectory of consistently having blended food. And of course now there’s a lot more seasonality. have a lot more knowledge. I do eat a lot of cooked food as well. But the glowing green smoothie is a wonderful way, a wonderful staple to get a lot of those enzymes and vitamins which are denatured with food, with cooking, excuse me. It’s also a great time of year to incorporate coconut water. And I just got a case of coconut water myself and… I have it after my walks just to, again, cool the system mentally, emotionally, physically. And I give it to my husband. I poured him a tall glass last night as the weather’s starting to heat up. He has a lot of pitta in his constitution. And we can feel it experientially. And also, Arya Veda teaches that coconut water is one of the most cooling, ⁓ effective ways to cool that pitta. And it’s also really great for electrolytes. It’s great for our… overall Constitution this time of year. And then we definitely want to use some cooling foods and spices this time of year. Celery, chopped in a salad, example, cucumbers, fennel, coriander, mint. These are some beautiful cooling spices and elements that we can use in our foods. It’s an important time to avoid hot sauce and excessive chilies and onions and garlic. which can actually really enhance pitta and avoid those as much as possible. Sometimes in the fall and winter, I’ll intentionally use some onions or garlic, but to be honest, for the most part, these foods are very reduced in my diet just because I think modern living induces a lot of pitta anyway. Now it’s even more exacerbated. So I used to rely on those foods a lot more for flavor. But now that I’ve widened my spices and my flavoring foods and ⁓ ways in which I cook, simple, but just a lot of different variety, I feel like I don’t really need the onions and garlic, and I do feel a lot more calm. There’s an experientialness to this, which is really powerful. So. Another thing that’s ⁓ really powerful to help you digest your foods, because again, there’s breaking down that we really want to support when things get fiery and our guts can feel a little bit more imbalanced. One of the things that we want to bring in is digestive enzymes. And I just did a whole Instagram post about this, if you’re interested and like to look at little slideshows. But enzymes are part of our life. They’re alive. There’s anabolism and catabolism that’s always happening, that’s building up and breaking down. And so taking digestive enzymes before you eat is a really powerful practice. You can check out our Saluna ones, which have three times more lipase than other brands. I love them. They’re researched, powerful. They also break down fiber because some people can get bloated when they increase plant foods in their diet. So check it out for yourself. Okay, let’s move on to our second cornerstone, which is body. Now think about this excess pit to outside and just think about how our bodies intuitively would naturally calibrate. So one of the things that we wanna do is to perhaps adjust our movement, moving away from sweaty, hot yoga classes in a heated room, especially in the middle of the day. We might start to incorporate more yin practices. We might start to move our practices to the earlier morning because we start to feel more irritated or at least we get out of the really hot direct sun if we are going to work out in the middle of the day, which is still a great time. That’s when I happen to do my walks, but I wear a big hat. I carry water when I walk in the middle of the day. ⁓ We want to sweat. It’s a natural way to detoxify. It’s a natural way to feel that release. It feels really great to release toxins and to be part of that. There’s an interesting ⁓ research paper in the study of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, resulting in ⁓ having results. This is really interesting. That shows that dynamic exercise resulted in significantly higher excretion of heavy metals. like nickel, lead, copper, and arsenic compared to passive sweating in a sauna. So saunas are great. I’ve ⁓ incorporated saunas into my life over many years, but there’s something about moving and using your limbs and your body in this total way to ⁓ even enhance that detoxification. So something to keep in mind, get that sweat on. It feels really great. And also ⁓ breath work and meditation. You can use different breath work techniques while you’re working out. We had Wim Hof here on the podcast a couple of years ago. He has his Wim Hof breathing technique. When we get to the spiritual cornerstone, we’ll talk a little bit about our breathing that we can do with our heart focused breaths and our heart aligned meditation. But you want to take really nice, beautiful, full breaths through your body. maintain that balance so you don’t get overstimulated, take that fast breath work that isn’t cooling. And by the way, yoga says that there’s different energies that you pull in through the different nostrils. So the left is the pingala, the cooling, ⁓ sorry, the left is the, am I saying this right? The ida and then the pingala is the other side. So one of the breath work practices that you can do, and I believe I still have a YouTube video up about this, And we also, can search for it on our website, articles about this, is alternate nostril breathing. And this is where you would take your thumb and ⁓ I use my pinky finger. Some people use their ⁓ ring finger and you would close the different nostrils and breathe in and out. And it balances and can cool your body if you get overstimulated in the heat. So check it out for yourself. It’s really nice to do this guided. And this is one of the breathwork practices that I really love in the summer as well. So signs of imbalance in your body this time of year can feel ⁓ water retention, bloated, tension in your neck, jaw, and hips. There’s a relationship to the fascia. So you feel a tightening effect, that irritation again, sort of clamping down. Or on the other hand, just a low motivation to move. But when you’re in balance, you feel really connected to your body. You feel this aliveness. There is a glow, a clearness in your skin. There’s this energy. You can feel this. Again, I use this word aliveness without feeling overstimulated or burned out. So it feels good to move, but at the same time, you don’t feel like you’re getting too fiery. So some simple support strategies is to go for a walk in the morning before you get your day started in that nice, gentle sunlight. I really ⁓ love doing twists and simple movements. Again, on my Instagram channel, I show some of the heart movements that I do connected to different chakras. I love to ⁓ stretch a lot. So yin yoga is really great right now. You can do it in the morning, in the evenings. I do a little bit of stretching before I meditate, which is one of the protocols, these energization exercises that Paramahansa Yogananda teaches as part of Kriya Yoga. And I am a big fan of Abayanga and oiling because I think it calms your nervous system, which is very much needed in the winter, but it’s also very much needed in the summer. But the difference is that we use cooling oils like coconut oil in the summer. So you can warm the oil a little bit. I put some in a jar and in a bowl, and then I put hot water in the bowl while I’m sort of getting ready for my shower. And then I just rub it. through my limbs and my belly and my body, and then I rinse it off. It’s very simple, but it feels really good. And it’s an ancient practice, an Ayurvedic practice, this oiling of the body. So in the winter, we might use more warming oils like sesame oil, but now is a great time for the cooling, just like coconut water is cooling, coconut oil is also cooling to the body as well. Another thing is cooling baths. So not super hot, but taking baths that feel ⁓ Maybe lukewarm and you can even put salt. This is a really great time to feel energetically and physically that you’re cleansing your body like Epsom salts or Dead Sea salts, which I love very much. I’ve been to the Dead Sea and it just felt so cleansing and revitalizing even though it was really warm to get in there. I felt amazing and my skin felt amazing afterwards. So using the water element on your body is a really beautiful practice as well. And as I mentioned, just thinking about how intuitively can I refine and adjust my exercise routine for this season? What feels really good to me right now? What am I drawn to and what actually feels depleting? And sometimes it can be a little bit of a practice of letting go, if something’s really working for us, we feel really toned, we feel really great. But maybe there’s other ways that we can get that. feeling in our body but not get depleted as well. So maybe again, we shift to the times we’re working out or we shift to more walking or ⁓ different type of yoga or whatever it is this season because we don’t want to overwork our body. ⁓ Arubita does say that excess pitta is a main cause of aging, that overheating of the tissues and the cells. Okay, so let’s move and another way to flush through, can’t help but say is detoxing. which is our amazing saloon a supplement with oxygen and magnesium and vitamin C to feel that lightness, right? This is a continuation of that cleansing from spring into summer. So we don’t feel heavy and bloated, which no one wants to feel as we go into bathing suit season and getting outside and wearing shorts, right? So detox is a powerful aid right now, especially. So our third cornerstone is emotional, emotional wellbeing. And this is a time to lighten the load. I’m going to use the word light a lot and to just feel really in tune with there’s a lightness that happens in summer, right? We feel more perhaps introspective. We feel more things coming up in the winter, right? It’s a beautiful time to reflect and go deep. And this is a time for more lightness and joy. It’s a time where we don’t want to get burned out. We don’t want to get overly irritable. So we want to support that lightness, which is felt all around us in nature. We want to feel grounded. So one of the things that we can start to do is to literally ground and use the earth as an anchor while we journal, while we meditate to get outside. I went through a little bit of a like a nervous system cleanse, felt like a few weeks ago where I just felt dizzy, like vertigo, which I don’t usually feel, a little bit of tingling. So I went outside for a few days and laid my whole body on the ground, my whole spine, and just breathed and gave myself that space. And it really does feel, when you open up to it again, back to our intention, that the earth can be like this giant healing table and all those negative ions come out and soothe us. And again, what we’re doing physically, this holistic approach, also can soothe us emotionally. So this is time to, ⁓ you know, feel that freedom, that lightness to express through our voice, through our throat chakra, even to hum, to sing, to write. There is a research out of UCLA paper that found that writing or saying what you’re feeling can help to deactivate the amygdala, the fear center, and activate the prefrontal cortex, enhancing emotional control, clarity, and self-awareness. I’m a big journaler myself. I feel a lot of spaciousness and freedom when I am able to give myself that space to not only write, but to read and reflect on what I write. So every day almost, I am writing, I am reading. And it does make me feel more light. It’s like you’re offloading onto paper. You’re offloading in this really authentic way, where you don’t have to feel like you’re being judged. So some signs of imbalance can mean where you’re not being authentic, where you’re saying yes when you really want to say no, ⁓ feeling emotional crashes, especially after screen time or being social, avoiding feeling your feelings, avoiding quiet or alone time. And we can feel really balanced. We know we’re in balance where we feel more steady and consistent in our emotions and we feel inner guidance. We feel more natural joy rising up. And again, this doesn’t mean fake positivity or fake happiness, but when we feel the vulnerable emotions, like, ⁓ here’s fear coming ⁓ or there’s some shame or anger or whatever it is. And this is where there’s really powerful practice in the Hidden Power of the Five Hearts book called The Heart Aligned Steady in Life. This is where we breathe into our hearts, into our center, and we meet emotions. This is real self care. This is not abandoning ourself. This is showing up for ourselves. And then we let them digest. And sometimes we may need emotional support if we’re going through something. you know, please, therapy, counseling, coaches, whatever it is. But more and more we start to feel this resiliency where we’re not avoiding feelings that get pushed down and then can start to make us more fiery or more irritated. Has that ever happened to you? Because it’s definitely happened to me where I just take in, take in, and take in and then a really slight thing that my husband says or somebody does something and I, like I get a really big reaction, right? So we want to meet things along the way and this provides more steadiness. Again, this isn’t avoidance of feelings. It doesn’t mean that we don’t feel the spectrum as humans, but what it does mean is that we continue to metabolize more and more and feel that steadiness, which then produces this lightness and this joy, which rises up more and more as time goes on. So another thing to keep in mind if you’re a yes person, a people pleaser, is to get used to just saying, let me get back to you, instead of directly going to that go-to of yes and then taking time. for yourself to feel centered emotionally and then discern if that is something you want to say yes to. Whether it’s an outing, a project, a get together, taking something on, right? So just remind yourself to have that space. You don’t have to rush to respond. Part of self care is also letting yourself center. Take some breaths. You don’t have to answer that text back right away. And it’s really healthy to leave more time in your schedule, you don’t have to pack everything in as much. So you can allow more space for this processing, for creativity. And whilst the world will tell you like keep going faster and faster, the spaciousness is actually a way to feel more creative and just definitely a lot more alive to allow more of this joy to pour through. One sec. Okay, so let’s move to our fourth cornerstone, which is our spiritual growth cornerstone. And the theme is clearly as we come into June and the summer, let the light in. Let the light in. There’s times where we feel more of the darkness, which has a lot to teach us in the darker months, literally. But this is a time for allowing light in literally into every cell of our being and our body and letting the light teach us. letting the light come into our hearts, letting the light come into our thoughts, into our motivations. Let the light teach us to be more loving, to be more of ourselves, to be more compassionate, to choose the kind, the caring thing to do, which is harder to do when we’re fiery, right? And we’re irritable. So in terms of bringing in the light, one of the things literally, and I literally just did this right before I got on the podcast, is I got outside in the light and I did a meditation in the light. And what I like to do is, you know, wearing a sports bra right now and it’s very rural and private where I live, but I’ll take my shirt off and I’ll literally let light get on my heart, on my belly. It feels really good to get light on while you’re doing any type of spiritual practice, which could be prayer. It could be walking in nature. It could be meditating. There is ⁓ light codes, so to speak. There’s energy in the light. We don’t understand all of this. but I do believe there’s a full spectrum of colors. I think there’s a lot of healing that happens when we literally get into the light and it’s something that’s really ⁓ powerful. So I literally ⁓ go into the light and it feels really good. There was even a study in 2021, the psychology of religion and spirituality that found time that’s spending, or they found that spending time in nature and especially sunlight enhances Spiritual well-being reduces anxiety and increases feelings of awe and connection. So it’s this wholeness, right? It’s the moonlight, the sunlight. If ⁓ you don’t wanna get direct sunlight on your face, wear a hat like me. And of course, for your skin type, you can use safe practices. But I’m a big believer that the light is healing its medicine, especially this time of year. It can reawaken. It can energize and of course it gives us vitamin D. There’s a lot of vitality that can come through the light. And so it’s important that we open up to that. There’s more research from the Heart Math Institute that shows that when the heart and brain are in constant communication through multiple pathways, heart coherence, then we feel more a neurological, biochemical and energetic boosts. And this improves emotional balance, mental clarity, overall well-being. There’s a whole lot more research that I cite from the Heart Math Institute as well as other scientists. In the new book, here, the cover’s behind me if you’re watching this on YouTube, The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts, I think a lot of us intuitively know that when we connect to our heart, this power that is unleashed, this is not impractical, this is not overly emotional, but it’s the power. of the heart to connect to the true self inside of us, to actually give us wider perceptions, to allow us to have more emotional intelligence and resiliency, to feel a more zoomed out perspective. And it is in this heart’s power that we transcend a lot of the smallness of the thoughts and the reactivity and trauma, and we can live closer to our spiritual wholeness. I’m not talking about religion here. I know that we may all have very different spiritual beliefs, but I do believe in a higher power. do believe however we like to conceive of it, there’s energy connecting all of us. There’s oneness. There’s love, right? And so spiritual growth is about moving closer to that love, that self-love, that love of body, that love of God, spirit, however you can universe, however you conceive of it, love of each other, that connection. ⁓ And so we wanna be regular with our practices that work for us. There’s a steadiness that will bring us into summer. Again, intentionality. Instead of constantly trying different things and seeing what this celebrity is doing or getting on this bandwagon and moving around, be consistent. Choose and feel intuitively what works for you, whether it’s the heart aligned meditation or another practice. Really be consistent, because this consistency will build energy over time. And that’s been my direct experience. I do the heart-align meditation. I also do Kriya Yoga, which I learned many years ago through the Self-Realization Fellowship, which you can learn in the lessons that are given there from Paramahansa Yogananda, ancient practice of Kriya Yoga. It works really well for me. ⁓ I feel incredibly alive and grounded and joyful. from my practices. And let me tell you, wasn’t easy in the beginning to sit and meditate. It was very restless. But this consistency brings us these results, which isn’t linear. It can come like, wow, I feel really great. And then I have tough days. So for me, it’s the combination of the Kriya and the heart align that really change everything in my day. Another part of this ⁓ spirituality is really tuning into stillness and silence. so part of that practically means really unplugging. ⁓ Let the natural light come in and unplugging from the artificial lights and devices, going outside, having stretches of time where you’re not checking your cell phone. There’s more time in the evenings now. You can sip tea outside if that’s available to you. Go on the rooftop if you live in a city like New York. Really taking advantage of this natural light and bathing in it and soaking it in and getting off devices and the know, sometimes negativity of collective consciousness that’s in social media and the news, right? Just really allowing this joy and this light to come up inside of you. So again, there’s a lot more that I mentioned about heart coherence and using the power of our hearts, which I believe is so needed right now more than ever in my new book, The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts. which you can check out for yourself. And we really want to ⁓ move into thriving. To me, summer is about ⁓ vitality and aliveness and joyfulness and harmony. And so we don’t wanna feel like we’re surviving, we’re just sort of getting through the day or the season and we’re struggling. And when we incorporate all of these practices together, the cooling foods, the seasonal foods, adjusting our body care practices, including how we exercise and how we breathe and how we take care of our body, and really taking time for emotional support for ourselves, journaling and sitting outside and doing practices like the Heart Aligned Study in Life, which again is in the book, feeling through our feelings. So we’re not holding this burden of feelings, which can, emotions, which are energy and motion, and then results in. Lots of negative thoughts or feeling like we’re carrying a really heavy burden. And I don’t want to gloss over that. That’s why there’s a lot more information in the book about these practices because they’ve helped me tremendously. And I think that they’re needed now more than ever. And then spiritually to ⁓ come into the light and to be open to the light and to receiving more light. And there’s this quote from Yogananda that talks about, you know, holding up our vessel, what are we receptacle are we holding up for spirit universe to pour through into us? Is it a tiny cup or is it a huge pool? Right? And that means intention. It means openness. It means being receptive to the light, which is always available. We are never alone. Right? We are connected in this cosmos. Somehow this entire intelligence is moving through us. And I really believe we can connect to it through our hearts and through love and through slowing down a little bit and just being more present. And this is true medicine, right? This is allowing us to feel the joy of summer, whether that’s the simple sipping of homemade lemonade or running through the grass with your kids or running your hand through the ocean or a lake and really just feeling. the miracles of being alive. Not some big achievements you’re trying, constantly trying to strive towards, but really surrendering and receiving the joy that’s right here in this very moment that’s available to all of us. So I wish you the very best, most joyful, peaceful, wonderful, expansive of June’s into summer. And again, this doesn’t mean Happy giddy all the time. means getting deeper and more connected. And when those tough emotions rise up, whether it’s fear, you feel really vulnerable, you feel shameful, just letting them come through and starting to feel that anchoredness more more inside of you. And again, there’s so many ways we support that. There’s so many ways we talked about today through gut health, through your spiritual practices, through the foods that you’re eating. So please continue to check out all the resources that I have for you, the courses. the products, the articles, the recipes at mysaluna.com. If you haven’t joined our newsletter yet, please do join so you stay in the loop. And I will see you back here. We’ll continue to do our weekly Monday interviews. ⁓ And everybody that we’re bringing on now is related to the cornerstones, but they’re very heart led. And these conversations are transformative and they continue to evolve and get deeper and deeper, whether Dr. Tracy’s talking about the vagus nerve or Karen Eldid is talking about overcoming, striving, right? There is a through line in all of these Monday podcasts. And then this show, The Power Hour, once again, will be the first Thursday of every month. So I’ll see you back here soon. Remember to write to me, to ask me questions. I’m here to support you. I’m here with my full heart. and all my love and I look forward to connecting with you more.