#9: Healing From Healing

Where I am now with diet and skincare

Experimentation is a beautiful thing.

So is walking down paths that, when things seem to fail and flail, end up being part of our journey bearing the commitment fruits of wisdom, experience, and truthfully, answers.

Many of the subscribers to this newsletter were initially here because we met via Instagram when I was formulating, manufacturing, and selling herbal skincare. I had done so on the foundations/niching of low PUFA (polyunsaturated fat) oils and zero essential oils (I type this as I pull out my aromatherapy roller) in any of my products with a focus on in-house herbal extracts and saturated oils as the staple behind the brand.

What was also really tied up with skincare was the prometabolic (PM) food community — there was a lot of crossover between my customers and consumers of the PM diet, myself included.

Remember this post about my experience with the “pro-metabolic diet”?

It was my most loved/hated (two sides of the same coin, baby), and reposted/engaged post. If I were to talk about this on social media again today (I wouldn’t!) I would approach it very differently.

Despite the “mistakes” I made on my end regarding the “diet,” my desire to throw accountability on the influencers and nutritionists promoting/prostituting bioenergetic nutrition/the work of biologist Dr. Ray Peat as a diet was stronger.

And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who is preaching what and consuming this or that. What matters is how I choose to stay separate from it and metabolize (pun intended) things slowly and uniquely to my intuition and needs.

Experimentation is great. Gaining a bunch of weight because a fit influencer says they eat 3-4k calories a day and have sugar first thing every morning and so you do it too is actually okay and also probably a great thing… because we can learn from this.

But then we separate.

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I Speak Upon What I Like

Separating as a practice has sown leaps and bounds of fruitful findings for me. Especially in highly triggering realms… like food.

One of my teachers said that the things we need most to survive, proliferate, and thrive in this world — money, birthing, spirituality, food/diet, sex, and health — are the very things that hold worlds of immense pain within humanity. These are very charged spaces. I’ve learned to proceed with caution and protection over the content I intake in any of these realms using a trick I’ll share with you after the jump. 

A quick peruse of any popular food/skin influencer’s comment section will show you comments such as:

What ingredients/supplements/vitamins do you (should I) take? What brands? Should I do xyz for my pregnancy? Is xyz safe while pregnant? What times of day/how many meals a day/how many calories do you (should I) eat? What should I do/eat/treat for xyz skin condition? What skincare/ingredients do you (should I) use/avoid/recommend/love/hate? What kind of exercise do you (should I) do? How often? When?

There is so little autonomy and separateness over what and how consume in online spaces. Understandably, we lose our grounding as soon as we enter these charged arenas. Especially in the tiny little squares on Instagram, we get trapped by the shiny carrot (a beautiful person with a beautiful life!) without any discernment of our intuition and needs.

Discerning With My Time

I encourage you to track what’s going on behind a lot of the larger accounts in any of the spaces you take part in: what are the majority of their comment sections like? Obsession? Fights? Anxious desire? What are their business models and foundations built from? Is there a sort of worshipping/pedestaling going on? (The flip side to that is hatred from super-triggered fans.) These are huge observations, and nothing is good or bad — just something for us to play with in observing.

So often, we see things as we want them to be, not as they are. We stand for one thing while obliterating its “opponent.” I remember a quiet and brilliant skincare formulator I loved who said, “You shouldn't have to ‘other’ to sell products.” I think that sentiment is important in all aspects of life, too. Politics, religion, diet, self-care/therapeutic methods, parenting, on and on. Can you believe in something and stand for it without hating its "opponent”?

It takes immense skill to oppose something without energetically matching it and tearing it down. Like… Jesus, MLK, Ghandi levels of skill. A lifelong practice of grounding, clearing, separating, and calling back what is ours alone to hold. This is how change is created.

Yes, And?

So what am I doing now?

First, a psychic trick I learned from one of my teachers that I like to have running when listening to people speak/share on charged topics, or when working with any teacher, and when reading/watching charged content is keeping a rose (or three roses) between me and the thing.

Inside that rose goes all of the content that I am consuming (reading, watching, listening), and it separates and filters into what is useful for me to know at this specific moment in time, what is useful for me to know and integrate at a later time, and what is not useful for me at all in this lifetime.

I also do this all the time with family members or around people with strong constitutions so I can have some separateness. In that separateness, I am also able to say a psychic “hello” to them, in time. Being able to say “hello” to people psychically (aka seeing them as they are, not how you want them to be) is also the work of a lifetime and something that ripples out. We can allow them to stand for something we don’t agree with without running away, fawning, or pushing out/arguing over it. Again… immense skill.

So! What am I doing about skincare and diet?

It doesn’t matter :) (But you knew that!)

I will say my skin drinks up jojoba oil and rosewater hydrosol daily. I use a stainless steel gua sha tool because the weight is divine and it’s actually changing the shape of my face.

I dry brush my body, use castor oil packs occasionally, use a wooden acupressure tool from China on my back, and use the BareHands nail kit and balm/oil on my nails and feet. I have tons of greys growing in (I plan to try He Shou Wu soon though as I do want to slow this process, lol) and that’s essentially my “routine.”

I feel most beautiful when working intentionally with flower essences and adaptogenic tonics from a Daoist/Five elements lens. Through working with a dedicated plant teacher and my own intuition, I am learning to first cultivate a relationship and ask the plants if they even want to work with me. I then ask what the plants want to teach/show me, not what they can do for me. Through this unfolding my life has changed.

I use a specific aromatherapy blend, one that kept showing up over and over again synchronistically, a wink that this specific plant wanted to work with me in different ways and had a message for me. Angelica. When I was unknowingly in the depths of my tapering journey I had a neighbor who answered a frantic knock at her door when I was home alone and having the biggest panic attack of my life. She invited me in and hugged me while I cried. Her name was Angel.

I won’t give you any speeches about feeling “the most beautiful and free of capitalistic and patriarchal standards I’ve ever felt” because that’s not why I stopped skincare/makeup/hair dying/nail painting. It’s mainly because I’m deeply lazy and uninterested and spend my time elsewhere like lying in the grass, going for long walks, researching my favorite topics (hi 1/3’s in HD!), or writing this newsletter.

I learned a ton from Jessie the Glucose Goddess, Mindy Pelz from Fast Like a Girl, and Jess DeFino of The Unpublishable. Paying attention to insulin spikes and sugar intake has been helpful, especially if we do not need or use the excess energy. Fasting has been an incredible tool and one that is making a difference in my energy — I won’t go into it here but the book explains why fasting with the female hormone cycle is an incredible tool for health and longevity. The branding of beauty products and its vast implications has impacted generations of woman so much that we have lost connection with our largest organ and her tailored needs: our skin. I’ve been impressed with my own experimentation with the insights from these women and their incredible work.

I learned a lot from leaning far into one kind of dogma such as the prometabolic community. I learned to see sugar not as an enemy but rather as a tool, and for pleasure, strategically. I learned about excess estrogen and iron in the body and how they’re contributing factors to the growing infertility crisis. I learned that most people aren’t lactose intolerant like they think and that milk in its pure form has incredible benefits for the human body. I learned about certain supplements like fat solubles and their benefits in our lacking industrial world.

I learned much more and used what worked for me on top of other tools like fasting with my hormone cycles and paying attention to glucose. I enjoy sugar but now with the wisdom of insulin spikes and how we want to be mindful. I now understand I can go many hours without food and that my specific hormones, depending on the day, love it and thrive when I do, just like my ancestors before me. I see that I don’t need skincare at all as my skin makes the best and most beautiful ceramides, collagen, oils, and peptides all on her own. I’m grateful for everyone who crossed my path and imparted me with some wisdom on health and skin. When I had a business I made friends in these spaces and if you’re reading this you very well know who you are — I appreciate you and everything you have taught me.

It’s also the smaller, more intentional things I find most helpful: noticing my food, where it came from, how it got to me, and who was involved. Eating outside or next to an open window. Eating slowly, savoring the bites, noticing the textures. I don’t always do this, I love TV and have it on when eating a lot of the time, but the mindful moments that connect me to the food and its origins make everything more nutrient-dense, at least in my mind.

Spending time gua sha-ing and dry brushing to my playlist below in a dark room. Touching my skin and feeling the sensations of the heavy stainless steel gliding across it, the acupressure in my back. Slowly inhaling the oils I’m working with, connecting with the plants and what they gave. Presence, curiosity.

Again, it’s pure experimentation and if there is anything I am not in this life, it is a perfectionist.

Cheers to forever learning. I will never say I know for sure, I will never say it’s done. And how delicious is that?

Tracy