Episode 278: An Integrative Approach to Optimize Your Health with Human Design
What does “healthy” mean to you?
I could ask 10 people this question and get 10 very different answers. Our interpretations depend on what phase of life we're in and what we're going through at any given time, so having clarity and context of what “healthy” means to you matters.
In this episode, I take a deeper look into:
How do we gain clarity and context
What does “optimize” mean, and how do we optimize our health
How do we embrace our bio-individuality not just in physical but also in mental and emotional health (hint: following your Human Design)
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“We all have different versions and interpretations of what “healthy” means, and our interpretations can change depending on what phase of life we’re in and what we’re going through at any given time.”
Read the Transcript:
Hello there, friends. Welcome to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura.
Before we get into today's episode, I’m really excited to share with you that in just a few weeks, I’ll be dropping a brand new virtual class called “Healthy By Human Design: Bridging the Gap Between Functional Nutrition and Human Design.
I haven't had any new classes or workshops in a long time, so I’m excited to bring this new one to you. It’s going to be the first of a series of new classes that coming this year. I’ve been quietly working behind the scenes to curate a roadmap of these new offerings, so be sure to sign up to be the first to know when it's ready so I can deliver it right to your inbox.
You can sign up to be notified on the home page of my website at livefablife.com or on the show notes for this episode at livefablife.com/278.
Now, let’s get to today’s episode. We’re now nine days into the new year.
If you’ve set “getting health-related goals” - how's it going? How is it all coming along?
Let’s do a bit of a check-in by “backing things up.” We often use the phrase, “back things up,” in Functional Nutrition, so let’s walk through what this is.
If you’ve set a goal of “getting healthy,” what does that mean? What does “getting healthy” mean - to you? What does that look like? Many people associate “getting healthy” with losing weight, but they’re actually two different things.
So, let's back things up. Ask yourself, “What does getting healthy mean - to me?”
Then back that up further and ask, “What does healthy even mean?”
What does healthy mean to you? What does it look like to you?
We all have different versions and interpretations of what “healthy” means, and our interpretations can change depending on what phase of life we're in and what we're going through at any given time.
I have a goal of “getting healthy,” and for me, at the moment, that means healing my broken toe. You may have heard that I broke my toe in October; it's the first time I've ever broken a bone in my body. I dropped a 15-pound weight on my foot, and my toe was broken, and the toenail was bruised and is completely black and bruised.
I had to wait seven weeks before seeing a podiatrist who I saw the podiatrist in December. They said it was healing but not quite there yet and scheduled me for another follow-up in six weeks. By that time, 13 weeks, i.e., a quarter of a year will have passed.
So, for me, getting healthy means healing my broken toe and the toenail so I can wear shoes again and get back to moving in the ways I'm used to. I can’t wait to start practicing yoga again - I haven’t been able to do downward dog, any of the warrior poses, or even a child's pose.
I want to be able to do pilates and HIIT workouts and start running again! Ironically, the night before I broke my toe, I’d gone out for a run, my first run in ages, and it felt so good that that evening, I planned to start running again, especially since Fall and winter are my favorite times of year to run.
But the very next day, I broke my toe. I’ve never missed doing cardio as much as I have over the past eight weeks, and I’m quite frankly anxious to get my heart pumping again.
Getting healthy, for me, also means continuing to work actively on improving my sleep. That means prioritizing sleep by turning off the television, shutting down the laptop, and putting away my phone ahead of time so that my body has enough time to wind down to let my body naturally fall asleep versus fighting it even though I'm tired.
There have been times that I’ve fallen asleep with my phone in my hand and other times where I'm falling asleep but for one reason or another, like wanting to finish the show, forced myself to stay up only to fall asleep anyway, and then having force myself to get up and get ready for bed.
This creates a habit of disruptive sleep, so my goal is to start my pre-bedtime routine before falling asleep. This means that I'm going to have to shut down all of my devices and start my pre-bedtime routine earlier so that when I start to fall asleep, I'm already in bed.
This is cyclical for me, and this is a great time of year for me to work on this because the winter days are shorter, and the longer nights make it easier to align my natural circadian rhythm.
Fostering the healing of my broken toe and nurturing better sleep will only help to balance my parasympathetic nervous system so that it’s in a rested and relaxed state. This means that’s important to pay attention to the things that cause me stress - physical stress that can impair the speed of bone healing, and mental and emotional stress that can keep me up at night with anxiety and worry.
The point I'm trying to make is that I could ask ten people, “What does ‘getting healthy’ mean to you? and “What does healthy look like - for you?” and I’d likely receive ten very different answers.
This is why having clarity on what healthy means to you matters. And this is why it's important to have a context of what healthy looks like - for you. It matters.
To have clarity and context, you need to be aware of your current state of health. What's reality and not what you think it is or wish it was? This is why a practice of self-observation and in the spirit of self-compassion, with non-judgment, is essential.
So, what we just did - asking how your goals are going, what getting healthy means to you, and what healthy looks like for you, well, this is how we back things up.
We peeled back the onion to get to the root of it, and this is what functional nutrition is - peeling back the layers to get to the root of what's at the core root.
This was a long-winded way to bring us to today's topic -A Holistic Approach to Optimize Your Health with Human Design.
Okay, I admit, that is a bit of a word salad. So, let’s peel the onion to break it down.
I visited dictionary.com because these days, who has a good old-fashioned hard copy of a dictionary? So, I visited dictionary.com and looked up the word “holistic.”
There were multiple definitions: All aspects of well-being, including the physical, psychological, and social, rather than with diseases and symptoms in isolation, often using natural or traditional remedies. An adjective that describes things related to the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The entirety of something must be considered instead of just considering its parts.
As a listener of this show, you understand, or at least have an idea or perception of holistic health - at least what we've commonly come to think of it.
We think of things like Chinese medicine, meditation, Ayurveda, supplements - essentially all things wellness. It also comes with an aversion to Western medicine, for some even a disdain.
However, and I’ve shared this opinion before, I think there’s a lot of narrow views of what holistic means. if we look at the definition of the word “holistic” again, and it says, “to often use natural or traditional remedies,” it doesn't say, “to only use natural or traditional remedies.”
The definition describes the idea that all things are related and an approach that considers all aspects of well-being and does not treat things in isolation.
If you think about it, in this sense, the problem with Western medicine isn’t necessarily its treatments but the way the system is organized and how it operates, right? It treats diseases and symptoms in isolation, which is why we have dermatologists, allergists, or neurologists, yet the body is one system that operates in symbiosis. When one system dysfunctions, we can't just treat that one system; we need to understand why one part is dysfunctional, what might be causing it, and what else it's impacting. Things don’t isolation, yet that’s how our medical system operates, at least in America.
As a by-product of how it’s organized, not a lot of communication between all of the different specialists, which causes frustration.
I experienced this when I broke my toe. I initially saw a general practitioner; all he did was consult with the on-call podiatrist. He was just the in-between communication; along the way, some things got lost in translation. The whole experience was so very frustrating - hospital administrators got involved and whatnot.
Things like this create distrust in Western medicine - not necessarily the technology, but the lack of sensible structure and communication.
So, getting back to the title of this episode, “A Holistic Approach to Optimize Your Health with Human Design, the other word I looked up was “optimize.” The definition of ”optimize” is “to make effective, perfect or useful as possible; to make the best of something.”
Isn’t integrating holistic and Western medicine approaches using the best of both worlds? Isn't this the best way to optimize the resources that we have available to us?
I take this approach by having an integrative doctor who practices both holistic and Western medicines, and why not, right?
The advances in modern medicine are astounding, yet there's so much wisdom in ancient healing. When we can bring them together, that’s optimizing - having the best of both worlds.
But here's the thing: this is the part where I get to Human Design.
In both holistic and Western medicine, the focus on addressing physical symptoms vastly outweighs addressing mental and emotional health. In my opinion, healing approaches for mental and emotional wellness tend to be generalized and lacking in how we can personalize their practices.
Perhaps this is one reason many refer to some of these things as “woo-woo” and view them as being “out there” because they’re unrelatable. Some of it is perceived as not based on science when it actually is. And it’s sad because we all need “woo” in our life. It’s not just for New Age people, it can support the psychological and emotional health of everyone.
But where’s it’s bio-individuality?
Bio-individuality is the idea that we are all unique. There is no one-size-fits-all solution; one person's medicine is another person's poison. So, how do we bio-individually apply some of these woo-woo solutions to our individual selves?
Because here's the thing: the non-physical diseases and symptoms are conditioning, i.e., being influenced to adopt the behaviors and beliefs that aren't correct for us.
In the same way that one supplement might be great for you but not for me, why should only one way of meditating or manifesting work for all of us?
We're all different in every way - not just bio individually different. We have come from different backgrounds and different life circumstances, and we go through different things at different times.
Here's an example of what I mean by this:
For as long as I can remember, I was told when faced with a tough decision to trust my feelings or trust my gut. First, feelings and the gut are not the same - they're very different things.
I honestly could not understand how to trust my feelings because they changed constantly, so how could I trust them? My feelings weren’t reliable.
Everyone kept telling me to “trust my feelings,” but honestly, this advice messed with me, especially in my formative years. I was so indecisive because I couldn’t trust my feelings since they changed all the time. I felt scattered, and frankly, I was all over the place, and I was told this by the adults in my life. I was called flighty and wishy-washy and accused of being unable to make up my mind.
I had a hard time staying focused, and I was needy because I was emotionally insecure in hindsight, I can see that I didn’t have any self-confidence, which fed over to other parts of my life, which then led to coping habits like emotional eating and insomnia-induced anxiety, things I still carry with me today.
Peeling back the layers made me understand that so many of the things I struggled with, physically, psychologically, and emotionally, were rooted in in my inability to trust my instincts and to make decisions – and I use the word “instincts” with purpose, which I'll come back to in a second.
For years, I floundered, trying all kinds of “woo woo” things and feeling disappointed when they didn’t work as well for me as they seemed to for others. I thought something was wrong with me.
It wasn't until I learned about Human Design, specifically my Human Design, that things became clear to me. Learning that I have an Undefined Solar Plexus, the center of emotions and feelings, and having this center undefined means that I don't have its fixed energy. I’m influenced by the emotions of those who are around me. When I take on their emotions, the lines between their emotions and mine become blurred, which is why my emotions change depending on who I’m with and when I’m alone.
Without this awareness, clarity, and context or the boundaries to protect myself to be able to differentiate my emotions from someone else’s, well, it's no wonder that my emotions were so confusing.
I didn't know what my Authority was, i.e., .the correct way for me to make decisions, and so going back to the word I used earlier, “instinct,” now I know that I have a Splenic Authority, which is primal instincts, and so trusting my instincts is my correct way to make decisions.
My instincts show up in a very different way than your instincts show up, and most definitely different from someone with an Emotional Authorities, aka people are can trust their feelings to make decisions.
This is how Human Design provides awareness, clarity, and context to understand how we can each uniquely apply the different psychological and emotional supporting modalities to manage our emotional, spiritual, and mental health.
This is how we optimize the resources that are available to us and take a holistic approach that includes Human Design to care for our health so that we're not just surviving but thriving.
In the next episode, I'm going to take this one step further, and I discuss how we listen to our bodies. I know I’ve done one or two episodes from very early on in the podcast where I talked about listening to our bodies.
I hope you listen to those early episodes because I feel that my perspective has expanded and evolved, and it's interesting, for me most of all, to read those past transcripts and see how my understanding of these topics has deepened.
In the new class, I’m releasing soon, which I shared at the start of this episode, I’m going to dive deeper into how to bridge the gap between Functional Nutrition and Human Design and how to tactically put both into action.
Sign up to be notified when it’s released later this month at livefablife.com or on show notes for this episode at www.livefablife.com/278 for Episode 278.
This self-paced virtual class will be the first of a whole curriculum that I’ve spent months planning that'll come throughout this year. These things have been swimming in my head for the past eight years and I'm finally organizing in a meaningful way that I hope you’ll find helpful.
So, to close, we’re nine days into the New Year; I hope this episode helps you shift some perspectives a little bit or maybe expand some things you already know. And please come back and join me again next week as we continue to expand more on this topic.
As always, thank you so much for your time, energy, and attention. And I'll see you right back here again next time. Bye for now!
Naomi Nakamura is a Health x Human Design coach who’s creating a healthier society through aligned energy.
She blends a bespoke mix of Functional Nutrition and Human Design to help others shift into alignment to leverage and correctly manage their energy to support their body, mind, and spirit.
She believes that when we embrace our authenticity and lean into our bio-individuality, we naturally live a life of freedom, empowerment, and optimal health.
Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!
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