I always thought heart healing was such a buzzword.
Until I found myself in the middle of a profound experience of it.
After a recent episode of PVCs (premature ventricular contractions), I’ve been looking very closely at how I’ve been using my energy, where I’ve been overgiving, and how much I’ve been pushing myself through things that are actually depleting me.
There’s nothing like a health experience to make you reconsider the way you’ve been living.
And what I’m discovering is opening up an entirely new relationship with my heart, my body, my beauty, and the way I want to experience my life.
The relationship between beauty, depletion, and aging
One of the things I’ve become deeply interested in is the relationship between stress, accelerated aging, and our capacity for replenishment.
When I work with women, I see so many expressions of depletion. Chronic fatigue, skin dehydration, changes in facial contours, tension, dullness, changes in hair quality, and the feeling that they’re aging faster than they expected.
There are many reasons these changes can happen, including hormones, genetics, health, and the natural aging process. But chronic stress and inadequate restoration are important pieces of the picture, and ones that deserve much more attention.
We spend so much time thinking about what to put on our skin, what treatments to get, and how to preserve our appearance. Meanwhile, how much attention are we giving to the resources our bodies need to maintain themselves?
How much are we giving away?
How much are we actually receiving?
Because if we’re constantly expending energy without replenishing it, that has consequences for how we feel, how we function, and potentially how we age.
And I find that incredibly expensive.
I’m approaching 40, and I’ve become acutely aware that I don’t want to spend the next chapter of my life operating from the same patterns of depletion that I’ve been carrying for years.
I want to be juicy. Radiant. Strong. Supple. Deeply nourished.
I want to feel beautiful because I am experiencing the pleasure of being in my body.
Cultivating yin and nourishing Shen
I’ve been working closely with my acupuncturist and exploring the relationship between yin, yang, and Shen in traditional Chinese medicine.
I’m still learning, and Chinese medicine is an incredibly rich and complex system, but there’s something about this framework that is resonating deeply with me.
Yin is associated with cooling, moisture, nourishment, receptivity, and restoration.
Yang is associated with heat, activity, movement, and outward expression.
Both are essential.
But I’ve realized how much of my life has been spent in a state of output. Working, creating, sharing, giving, exercising, thinking, managing, and worrying.
So much yang.
And now I’m becoming fascinated with cultivating yin. With deep replenishment, moisture, softness, and allowing myself to receive.
In Chinese medicine, Shen is often described as the spirit of the heart. It’s associated with consciousness, emotional presence, and that unmistakable quality of radiance that shines through someone’s eyes.
I’ve always been fascinated by this expression of beauty.
That luminous, rested, deeply nourished quality that you can feel in someone’s presence.
I explored this inside my Embodied Beauty Collective a couple of years ago through something I called Shen Fest, an experience devoted to drenching the heart in love, nourishment, and restorative care.
And now I’m experiencing this work from an entirely new depth.
I’ve been noticing my skin looking especially glowy, my hair feeling softer, my eyes looking brighter, and a greater sense of calm in my body.
I can’t attribute those changes to any one practice, but I can feel how different it is to prioritize restoration so intentionally.
To me, this is such an exquisite dimension of beauty care.
The beauty of a woman who is deeply replenished.
The exhausting cycle of overgiving
One of the biggest realizations I’ve had is how often I’ve been giving to others in hopes of receiving that same energy in return.
I see it in my relationships, my family, my marriage, and my work.
I offer people protection in the form that I want protection.
I offer women reverence, gentleness, compliments, and celebration in the ways I long to be celebrated and cared for.
And in my business, I’ve noticed something particularly revealing.
When things get quiet, when bookings aren’t coming in or I don’t have reassurance that things are moving, I fill the space with more marketing.
More content. More sharing. More giving.
As though if I give enough, eventually I’ll receive what I need.
But I’ve been realizing that this pattern is incredibly depleting.
I love my work. The actual experience of working with clients is restorative and nourishing for me. I feel deeply connected to the women I work with, and I find the exchange beautiful.
It’s the pressure I place on myself around everything else that has needed attention.
The constant availability. The self-doubt. The feeling that I should be doing more.
And the rumination!
Self-doubt is such a thief of vitality.
How much energy do we expend questioning something we’ve already done, worrying about how we’re being perceived, or anticipating circumstances that haven’t even happened?
I’m learning to trust the quiet.
To let myself rest without filling every available space with output.
To take powerful, aligned action when I genuinely want to, and allow that to be enough.
Replenishment is about rhythm
Something else I’ve been exploring is my relationship with rhythm.
The rhythm of my heart. The rhythms of the earth. The natural cycles of activity and restoration.
I’ve spent so much time pushing when I wanted to rest, or making myself rest when I actually felt inspired to do something.
I’m learning to listen more closely.
Sometimes that means an intense, sweaty workout where I feel like an absolute powerhouse.
Other times it means a bath, a slow walk, yin yoga, meditation, stretching, or lying in bed with my hands over my heart.
I’ve been spending significantly less time on screens, reducing caffeine, exploring acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and making more room for the restorative energy practices that are already such a central part of my work.
I’ve also been working with my own energy healing modality, Threads, to create a sense of softness, spaciousness, and connection in my body.
There’s a beautiful relationship between movement and rest, effort and receptivity, expression and quiet.
I don’t want to be calm all the time.
I want to experience the full range of my life without constantly exhausting myself.
And I want my restorative practices to support that capacity.
Restorative beauty is a whole-body experience
This is something I’ve understood through my work for years.
The face is connected to the whole body.
The way we breathe, hold tension, move, sleep, and experience stress can influence the way our face feels and looks.
It’s why my restorative facial sessions incorporate so much more than facial massage.
I work with the fascia and connective tissue, lymphatic fluid movement, craniosacral-style touch, and the energetic and emotional dimensions of relaxation.
When the body begins to soften, the face can soften too.
There can be less tension in the jaw and forehead, reduced puffiness, more ease through the neck, and a brighter, more rested appearance.
But there’s something even more beautiful that can happen.
A woman starts to experience herself differently.
She gets to feel what it’s like to be cared for, to receive touch without having to give anything back, and to experience her body as a place of pleasure, restoration, and connection.
This is the relationship between beauty and healing that I’m so devoted to.
Beauty practices can become an opportunity to replenish the very body we’re so often judging.
Experiencing existential beauty
Perhaps the most profound experience I’ve had recently was lying in bed, holding my heart.
I was listening to it, breathing, and offering myself the tenderness that I so freely offer other people.
And suddenly I felt this overwhelming love for my heart.
It was almost like I was holding this beautiful, innocent, tender creature in my hands.
This incredible organ that has been beating inside me for nearly 40 years.
And I started thinking about how much time I’ve spent worrying about the exterior of my body.
How I look. How I’m aging. The decisions I’ve made about my appearance. The body I wish I had, or the body I think I should have had.
And here I am, inhabiting this extraordinary living body.
My consciousness is here.
I’m experiencing the world through this body, at this moment in history, with these people, this life, these particular circumstances.
What are the odds?
I felt such immense gratitude, reverence, and love.
For my body exactly as it is.
For my heart.
For the experience of being here at all.
I felt deeply connected to Source, to God experiencing itself through me, and to the extraordinary mystery of being human.
And I thought, this is existential beauty.
It was a profound experience of loving my body without needing to change anything about it.
And I want more of that.
What kind of life are you actually healing for?
I’ve spent years exploring body image, beauty, self-care, self-love, and the process of reclaiming ourselves.
And something that’s been coming up for me lately is what happens after all that healing.
After we’ve begun to make peace with our bodies.
After we’ve learned to trust ourselves.
After we’ve stopped negotiating with the past and started moving forward.
What’s next?
What kind of life are we actually healing for?
What kind of woman are you becoming?
Because at some point, I think the work becomes about how fully we’re willing to experience our lives.
How much pleasure we’re willing to receive.
How much beauty we’re willing to experience.
How much truth we’re willing to speak.
How much energy we’re willing to reclaim from the people, patterns, and obligations that have been draining us.
And how much love we’re willing to offer ourselves along the way.
I’ve been having some of the most honest conversations of my life with my husband. I’ve been expressing what I need, listening to what he needs, and feeling the beautiful clarity that comes when there’s less being held back.
I’m sleeping more deeply. I’m becoming more comfortable with quiet. I’m learning to experience boredom as something pleasurable rather than something I need to escape.
And I’m allowing myself to become more discerning about where my energy goes.
Because I want to have enough of myself left to actually enjoy my life.
I want to feel nourished, beautiful, strong, radiant, and deeply connected.
I want my work, my relationships, and my self-care to be expressions of that.
And I want the women I work with to experience that kind of replenishment too.
This is the beauty of coming back into relationship with your own life force.
And perhaps the deepest heart healing is learning to offer yourself the tenderness, reverence, and devotion you’ve been giving away for so long.
In this episode, Existential beauty, heart healing, cultivating yin, deep replenishment, and reclaiming your life force, I’m sharing much more about my personal experiences, the practices I’ve been exploring, and the beautiful connections between restoration, aging, heart healing, energy, and embodied beauty.
If you’d like to experience this work personally, explore ways to work with me.
