Hello beautiful Reader,

Last week inside the Vitality Clinic the conversations across the four calls held something I want to bring forward before we step furrther into Week Five.

A pattern threaded itself through every room.

Several of you, on different days, used almost the same words:

"I feel broken,"

"I feel like I'm losing myself,"

"I don't even know who I am anymore."

Reader, that is not a malfunction.

That is a neuroendocrine transition state doing exactly what biology has asked it to do.

The system has to break down a little so it can reorganise into the next version of you.

I called it the Phoenix in the room more than once last week, and I will keep calling it that, because the metaphor matters.

We covered a lot of clinical ground too.

• Progesterone deficiency and the spotting that shows up five to seven days before a period;
• the inflammation that flares in the pelvis when estrogen runs ahead of progesterone;
• cyclical progesterone cream from day 14 to 28 to give the luteal phase the support it has lost.

The gut-skin axis came up more than once, and the way a closed skin barrier frees the body to direct healing back into the gastrointestinal tract.

Halitosis, the smell of your underarms, and the smell of your lady bits; all of that is one continuous channel governed by the gut microbiome, and when the good guys are in charge, the smell shifts.

None of you should have to live with otherwise.

We talked about

- tapering antidepressants slowly, slowly, slowly;

• about the Herxheimer response and a thousand milligrams of vitamin C alongside SB5B and lactoferrin so the die-off does not give you a headache;
• about journaling as alchemy (Trisha's daily practice was a teaching all on its own);
• about loving yourself into transformation rather than bullying yourself into it;
• about the 80-20 you build for your own life, not the one a fitness influencer hands you.

Mel returned from sixteen days in Sydney having found her own version of it, and gave the rest of us a reframe I want everyone to hear: when your life is structured into seasons, your 80-20 is not a daily ratio; it is a quarterly one.

Your uterus scans for danger, not only your brain; traditional Chinese medicine has been saying so for five thousand years, and the science is finally catching up.

Dr Emron Mayer's work on the gut-brain axis came up too, the part that says the messaging from gut to brain runs two-to-one.

Your gut is your first brain, and the cranium is the second.

And we talked, in one very tender conversation, about Release.

The fourth piece in the Hierarchy of Healing.

The chapter I will not stop talking about because every woman who walks into the clinic eventually has to walk through it.

This week, beautiful Reader

This is the last week of our Foundations phase, and I am so glad you are here for it. Next week we begin Repair, starting with the gut. But before we get into the tissues, I want to give you the lens I use with every woman who walks into my clinic.

This week we are talking about the biopsychosocial model. That is a mouthful, I know. The idea is simple: your health lives at the intersection of three domains. The biological (your hormones, your gut, your nervous system). The psychological (your thoughts, your beliefs, how you process stress). And the social (your relationships, your work, the environment you live inside). Real healing happens where those three circles overlap.

If you read the recap above and noticed how often a single woman's story sat in all three at once, that is not an accident.

That is the model in action.

The hip that flares with inflammation does not live only in the pelvis; it lives also in the twenty-year-old self who never felt accepted, and in the social architecture of a woman who has been in service for too long without enough rest.

Reflux is the same animal in a different costume; the oesophagus is inflamed, yes, but the nervous system has been over-functioning for years, and the family-of-origin patterns have been teaching a little girl to swallow what she should have spoken.

As for the missing period, the ovary is doing exactly what your mammalian biochemistry has told it to do when the should-loop and the single parenting and a thousand small under-resourcings tip you below threshold.

I want you to come to this call with one question in mind: where in your life is the friction right now?

Bring it to the Q&A if you would like.

Bring it to your journal if that feels better.

Either way, this teaching will ask you to see your symptoms in a wider frame than you may have been given before.

You are not broken.

You are a whole person, and a whole person heals as a whole person.

By the end of this call, I think you will feel that a little more than you did before you sat down.
​

A tool from last week's work

In one of the conversations last week, I taught a meditation that I want to offer to all of you here.

It is a release tool. You can use it for a person, a chapter of your life, a workplace, a story you have been told about yourself; anything that still has a hook in you that you are ready to put down.

Sit somewhere quiet.

Close your eyes.

Bring the person, the situation, or the story into your mind's eye, and do not edit what comes up.

Notice where on your body you are attached to it.

Sometimes it is a familiar place (your chest, your gut, your throat); sometimes it is unexpected (a hip bone, a knee, the back of your skull). Trust whatever your body shows you.

Notice what the attachment looks like.

A rope, a spider's web, a piece of string, a chain, a strange tangle of something.

There is no right answer; there is only what your body is showing you.

Choose your cutting implement.

This is the part most women do not expect.

You get to choose.

A chainsaw, an axe, a pair of scissors, a laser, a small fire, a wave of light; whatever feels appropriate for the size of the attachment.

You are allowed to be brutal here, beautiful.

You are allowed to be wild.

Cut the attachment, with sound effects if you like, and watch it fall away from your body.

Then, and this is the moment that lands the deepest, say the words: in love and light, I let you go.

This meditation is not about forgiving them, nor about pretending the harm did not happen.

What it does is help you recognise that nobody who behaves the way they behave is in their right mind.

They are deficient, and that deficiency is theirs to carry, not yours.

You let them go in love and light, because you know the only one who keeps suffering while you carry their burden is you.

When the flashback comes (and it will come, because the brain is plastic and these things take repetition), repeat the meditation in your mind's eye.

You already have your implement; you already know where the attachment was.

Cut it again, let it go again, and keep going until the cord no longer reattaches.

That is all of it.

It is simple, it is enormous, and the women in my clinic who use it consistently report that the things that used to live in their bodies start to live somewhere else, somewhere they no longer have to host them.

If you would like to bring something into this week's call to work with privately, this meditation pairs beautifully with the biopsychosocial frame.

The friction in the social or psychological circle is often what the body has been asking you to put down all along.

See you on the call.

With warmth, Dr Kirstey

P.S. If you know anyone who you'd like to join our Vitality Clinic conversations, send them this link: https://workwith.thehollandclinic.com/the-vitality-clinic/​

Dr Kirstey Holland Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine / Practitioner of Environmental & Nutritional Medicine Functional Medicine Practitioner (using precision functional testing) / Trauma Informed Health Mentor THE HOLLAND CLINIC hello@thehollandclinic.com +61 423 483 154