Hi beautiful,

A woman came to see me a few years ago, and on paper there was very little wrong.

Her gut had settled, she was sleeping more than she had in months, and by every physical measure she should have been feeling better.

She sat across from me and told me she felt heavy, like she was moving through water.

We had repaired a great deal of the biology and something was still unwell, and it was not bacterial, it was not a deficiency, and I could not put a pathology form on it.

That is the part of getting well that we tend to forget, and it became the heart of what I taught in the Vitality Clinic Conversations this week.

When something feels off, we reach almost immediately for a physical cause.

We think about what we ate, whether we are run down, whether we caught something.

All of that matters, and I spend most of my clinical life there, as you know.

This week I wanted to talk about the other half, the part that does not show up on a blood test, which is what I mean when I talk about spiritual immunity.

Let me be clear about the word, because I know "spiritual" can make some of us tense up.

I am not talking about religion and I am not asking you to believe anything in particular.

I am talking about your inner world, your emotional and energetic state, and the simple clinical truth that this state has a measurable effect on the body.

You have a physical immune system, the one we feed and rest and protect with things like vitamin C, lactoferrin, zinc, N-acetylcysteine and vitamin D3 with K2.

You also have what I think of as a spiritual immune system, which is your capacity to stay settled, loving and open rather than being pulled down into fear and held there. When that capacity is strong you are more resilient to the things around you, and when it is depleted you are more vulnerable, in a very real physiological way.

This is not woo, and I want to ground it so none of you think we have wandered off into something vague.

When you sit in fear, in chronic anxiety, in resentment or anger you cannot put down, your body does not treat that as an abstraction.

It releases cortisol and adrenaline, and sustained cortisol suppresses secretory IgA, which is your gut's first line of immune defence, the antibody that lines your mucosal surfaces and meets pathogens before they get any further.

So a prolonged fearful or hostile emotional state genuinely lowers your physical immunity.

Chronic stress and hostility are also among the best established contributors to cardiovascular disease in the whole of modern cardiology.

The emotion you think you are only feeling, or only projecting outward at someone else, is being felt by your heart, your gut and your immune cells.

This is where my training in traditional Chinese medicine and the modern science meet.

Chinese medicine has taught for thousands of years that every organ carries an emotion, and that the organ and the feeling are two views of the same thing.

When the organ's energy is flowing you get the gift of that organ, and when it is stuck or depleted you get the shadow side.

Take the liver, because it is the clearest example. When your liver energy is flowing you are driven, you have vision, you can plan and move forward and see where you want to go.

When that same energy becomes stagnant it is like driving behind a huge truck you cannot see past, and it brings up frustration and anger, and when that anger is held too long it harms the liver in return.

The feeling and the organ shape each other.

The heart, the fire element, gives warmth and joy when it flows, and anxiety and a scattered, overwhelmed mind when it is disturbed, and this matters in 2026, a Fire Horse year, when there is so much cardiovascular stress about.

The spleen, the earth element, gives steadiness when it flows and worry and rumination when it is stuck. The lung and large intestine, the metal element, give us the capacity to take in and let go, which is why we sometimes see coughing and constipation show up together when there is grief that has not moved.

The kidney, the water element, gives deep reserves and willpower when it flows, and fear when it is depleted.

You do not need to memorise any of that.

I give it to you so you can see that this is an old and coherent system, and that what you feel is not random and it is not a character flaw. It is energy moving, or energy stuck, in a particular part of you.

Underneath all of this is the simplest truth, the one I find so clarifying.

There are really only two emotions, love and fear.

Every positive emotion you can name is a form of love, and every negative one is a form of fear.

Anger is fear wearing armour, jealousy is fear of not having enough, and resentment, anxiety and control all trace back to fear, while warmth, gratitude, joy, calm and connection are all forms of love.

You do not have to analyse forty different feelings in the moment.

You only have to ask yourself one question: am I in love, or am I in fear?

Your body usually knows the answer before your mind does. We are feeling beings.

And then the question that gently guides you back is simply, what would love do?

To yourself as much as to anyone else, because if your inner mean girl is loud, what would love do is to treat yourself the way you would treat your beautiful baby or your best friend.

The goal is never to feel positive all the time, which would be neither possible nor honest.

A feeling that moves through you quickly does little harm.

A feeling that sticks around for a long time is a different matter, because that is when the physiology I described starts to take its toll.

So the work is to notice where you are, several times a day, the way you would notice a symptom, and when you catch yourself low and fearful and heavy, to gently lift yourself up.

It does not take anything dramatic.

Putting on music and letting yourself dance, calling a friend, going for a walk, making a proper cup of tea and actually sitting with it, reading something that moves you, learning from someone who is themselves in a high, warm state, making something with your hands, being in the garden.

Each one is a small movement from fear back towards love, and your body registers the difference almost immediately.

The cortisol eases, the shoulders drop, the gut gets a little reprieve, and you are, in the most literal sense, tending to your immunity.

It is as much a part of your medicine as anything I will ever put on a prescription.

I want to tell you why this teaching matters to me, because it is not abstract.

I was dropped at boarding school at fifteen, and I did not see my mother again until I was twenty-two, so the mothering stopped almost overnight.

I still remember the first night, lying on a squeaky bed, staring up at the moon and realising that no one was coming to rescue me, that I was in this alone and would have to figure it out.

Years later, after I had moved across the world and had my son, my marriage ended in a way that left me the breadwinner, the mummy and the daddy all at once, with no family in the country and the support I had counted on gone.

There was real shame in those years, and what I learned slowly is that shame cannot live in a shared space.

The moment we say out loud what happened to us, it begins to lose its grip, and we can take ourselves out of victim and back into a place where we can actually make the changes we need.

Every one of those emotions and experiences was here to teach me, and I would not be the woman I am without having gone down into that darkness to bring it back up into the light.

That is also why I keep saying that high vibration is contagious.

If every one of us lifted just one person today, or stepped slightly beyond our own four walls, towards a friend, a neighbour, a coffee for the woman behind us in the queue, the world would be a warmer place.

We have normalised numbing and we have normalised division, and the quiet work of choosing love over fear, in ourselves and then outward, is how that turns around.

While I was teaching this on the Tuesday and Thursday calls, the same thread kept showing up in your clinical questions, which is exactly how it should be, because you cannot separate the psyche from the soma.

One of you asked why she had suddenly developed gingivitis she had never had before, four weeks after having her Mirena removed.

The answer runs straight through this teaching. Any intervention that disrupts hormones takes roughly three menstrual cycles, about three months, to fully clear, so at four weeks it can still be causing havoc, and the thing that suppresses the immune system even more than a pathogen is the nervous system.

The Mirena hits the nervous system hard, the nervous system takes the immune system down with it, and you see it surface in the gums.

The mouth, by the way, is the single most powerful site in the body for systemic inflammation, so a cavity or gum infection is the easiest route for infection to travel everywhere else.

The fix in her case was simple: vitamin C with hesperidin, which treats gingivitis, alongside the gut support that was already healing, sealing and repairing.

Another of you walked into her GP with the letter I had written, asking for a trial of cyclical oral micronised progesterone, with seven randomised placebo-controlled trials attached, and walked out with a prescription.

There was a teaching point in that too.

Progesterone modulates the immune system, turning down autoimmune reactivity and modulating estrogen's proliferative effects, so when you are actively fighting a pathogen it is sometimes wise to hold the progesterone for a short while and let your immune system rise to full strength first.

And the philosophy underneath all of it is "and", not "either or".

This is not natural medicine instead of hormone therapy, or hormones instead of antibiotics. We live in a modern world with access to all of it, and the most intelligent thing is usually "this, and", chosen for your own unique biochemistry rather than a rule applied to everyone.

Jan (my beautiful husband) took two of the conversations this week as well, and I want you to hear what that means.

While I focus on the biology and the prescriptions, he is the one helping you bring it to life, into the kitchen and into the family, because a protocol is far more than its prescription.

He talked through how to set up a pantry so that dinner stops being a daily decision you dread, with good oils, vinegars, a proper spice rack, a couple of salts and fresh herbs, so that whatever lands in the pan tastes good and you never run out of choice.

He showed the Meal-o-matic he has built for the clinic, a little helper that takes what is actually in your fridge and pantry and gives you something easy, tasty and lovely to look at in about fifteen minutes, built around protein and fibre and good fat.

He shared the Hierarchy of Help, a kind of first aid kit for the moment something comes up at home and the doctor is not nearby, and a Vitality Tracker many of you are now sharing with your partners and fathers and brothers, because so much of your health is shaped by what happens around you, not only by what you do yourself.

And both calls ended the way ours so often do, with a card.

One spoke about taking the leap when your soul is ready for something new and trusting that you will land softly.

Another asked the question so many of us find hardest of all: can you say out loud that you have a need, ask out loud for it to be met, and then allow someone to actually meet it. Most of us are far more practised at giving than at receiving.

Which brings me to the quiet thing I want to leave you with.

Reading all of this back, you may notice that what is happening on these calls is rarely one woman and a single answer.

It is a letter written to your GP and the trials to back it, a prescription adjusted in real time, a teaching that reaches the part of you a blood test cannot, a kitchen made simpler, a village widened, and a room of women lifting each other.

It is the one of you who asks the question, and the support that meets her, and the two or three others who quietly needed the same thing and now have it too.

If you have been reading this and recognising yourself, in the heaviness that does not show up on a test, in the symptom that flares when life gets hard, in the dinner you dread deciding, in how much easier it is to give than to ask, then you already know where that support lives.

Have a gorgeous week, and notice where you are.

Love, or fear.

When you find yourself low, choose one small thing and let it carry you back up. It matters more than you think.

With so much love, Dr Kirstey Holland OMD