Somewhere along the way, we decided that having a sense of urgency is a virtue. If you don’t have urgency, you’re lazy. Am I right?

And since we can’t create all of it ourselves, it’s easy to run on other people’s urgencies. We stop telling the difference between theirs and ours. Notifications and expectations run our lives, and they all ping urgency.

I understand the temptation to approach life with a “healthy dose of urgency.”
It makes us look and feel responsive, engaged, and caring.
It collapses decision making fog.
It keeps us moving. And moving is another virtue, right?

It feels good to be busy.
It doesn’t, actually. But it does.
Urgency gives us meaning to borrow when we can’t find it without.

The problem is, we want peace. And that seems to run antithetical.
When we stop, instead of finding peace, it feels like we just traded anxiety (from the grind) for anxiety (from stillness).

What we don’t see is, the anxiety we feel from stillness isn’t new.
Stillness, actually, doesn’t create anxiety. It simply removes the noise that was drowning out the anxiety that was already there.
What we did was trade it for the grind.
When we get still, we begin to feel what was there, and before we can put our finger on it, we freak out and reach for our phone.

Urgency hides. It’s an effective way of not hearing the questions you really need to answer.

What am I doing?

Is this it?

What do I actually want?

It keeps you moving without pause. It’s yoga without savasana. Beethoven’s symphony without the rests. Constant urgency is the noise that buries you. And when you hear the question, what do I want? You can’t answer, and that scares you.

It doesn’t matter if your urgency is borrowed (what you do for others, for optics, for approval) or if it originates from you. While the latter is certainly better, if left unchecked, it also becomes problematic. Because even what comes from you ends up not feeling like a choice. It burns you out. Why?

Urgency trains you to find meaning, not in living, but in scarcity.

I have a self-imposed deadline to publish every Saturday. When I feel it as urgency, I know I’m stuck in performance mode. That takes me to the very last minute with more stress than necessary. When I feel it as an anchor that becomes a part of my day’s rhythm, as something I chose because this is important to me, it’s simply that: morning rhythm, deep work. This doesn’t mean I don’t keep deadlines. Nor does it mean I don’t carve time out on my calendar. I do both. The difference is in the feeling. And that feeling of this is what I do every morning versus this is what I’m trying to do, or this is what I have to get done by Saturday puts my nervous system in the corresponding mode: survive or live.

I want to live.

What I do becomes devotional. In the same way one would say, I can’t, I work during that time. Without apology; as simply fact.

Rhythm doesn’t ask you to perform. It asks you to arrive, and keep arriving, until the question isn’t what do I want? but what do I know to be true?

Eat warm, breathe slow, keep a rhythm.

– Savitree

The Huddle is daily group meditation.

An anchor. A 30-minute practice that plugs you into your inner estuary (and sanctuary), to remind you that you are not your grind.

It’s the thing that expands time and your sense of Self and possibility. You gain from it.

One member said

When I do the huddle, my days are different. Better.

That’s because it breaks open the seed containing the code that expresses your unique intelligence. It delivers you your day rooted from this lens. One that’s owned. Self-referred instead of borrowed.

Your body is a ledger, and each practice makes a deposit. The more deposits you make, the more sustainable it becomes. Dis-ease turns into ease.

How the huddle works

You don’t have to know what you’re doing.
Simply show up, do the practice together, then leave.

When you can’t join, you practice on your own.
We do the same meditation for 40 days, making this easy to do.
I provide recordings you can practice with in case you prefer guidance.

Check in on our WhatsApp group: share your Ease Rating (below) or an observation, ask a question, witness each other’s experiences.

When we meet

• Weekdays (Monday - Friday) from 6 to 6:30am central (Chicago) time.

• Exceptions: Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, and when I’m traveling (we practice asynchronously during those times).

What happens in the Huddle

I choose a meditation set, and we practice it for 40 days.

I explain the benefits of each set when we begin a new 40-day cycle.

I choose mostly mantra and breath meditations because they shift physiology first, making it easier to access the stillness that feels so fleeting.

We open by chanting Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo three times, to call on inner wisdom.
We close with one long Sat Nam, to call up your Truth.

Ease Rating

From time to time, I ask for an Ease Rating (0–5):

0 = you didn’t show up for sadhana 🤷🏻‍♀️
1 = you showed up, and that’s about all you can claim 😒
2–4 = on the spectrum between 1 and 5 😊
5 = easy to get to your meditation space today, all smooth going, you tasted source 😇

You can check in with an ease rating when you’re practicing on your own, to stay connected. Sometimes people will share a pic of where they are practicing from.

Members often share a quick note on what made that morning’s practice the rating they gave it. It lets us witness each other’s experiences and forge a deeper connection. Whether or not you share it, I encourage you to track this daily in a dedicated sadhana journal. You’ll start to notice patterns, which is the first step towards intentional change.

How to get started

1. Become an annual paid subscriber.

2. DM me that you’re interested in the Huddle, along with your phone number (including country code), to connect you to our WhatsApp group. I don’t assume you went paid for the huddle; there are multiple reasons people go paid.

3. We connect on WhatsApp, I get you up to speed on the current set, and add you to the Huddle.

4. Once you’re in, please introduce yourself!

5. Click on the title of the group at the top of the thread, and you’ll find the Zoom link there.

6. We practice together, we end, and we go on with our day. We chat in the thread.

   Ask questions as they come up at any time.

We look forward to seeing you in the Huddle!

Common questions

How do I make this practice stick?
Start with what you can.

I started sadhana once a week. Then 3 times. Then 5, then 7. The consistency builds on itself. The group inherently reminds you to come back, and the rhythm anchors you when life gets chaotic.

But here’s the real magic: Stop saying I’ll try, and start with I’m doing it. They land differently in the body and make different decisions.

If it’s not morning for me, will this still work?
Yes! The anchor isn’t about clock time; it’s about the daily rhythm. Whether it’s your morning practice, your midday reset, or your evening close, the practice works when you show up to it.

What if I miss days?
You will. Life happens: travel, illness, chaos. The recorded sessions are there, and the group is there. Practice is all about the return, and the Huddle is there to remind you.

What if I’ve never meditated before?
That’s not a prerequisite! You learn by doing, and the group holds the steady rhythm for you while you’re finding yours. The sets are designed to work whether you’ve been meditating for 20 years or 2 minutes.

What if I can’t commit to every day?
That’s not necessary. Commit to what you can and see what shifts. The commitment builds as the baseline changes. And you’ll want to show up because of what you notice when you don’t.

Eat warm, breathe slow, keep a rhythm.

— Savitree

When I sit down for my meal, I find myself sometimes reaching for more: more salt, more black pepper, more lemon, more EVOO, something... before I even taste it.

Then one day I had an epiphany: The plate didn’t need anything. I did.

So I asked myself, Savitree, what do you need? And the answer came back quietly: nothing.

Then what’s this need you’re making up?
And why does reaching to make things “better” leave you needing for more?

The reaching stops.

I noticed that when my nervous system is calm, when I’m not searching, I don’t reach. Instead, I trust, I taste, and I respond. And because I’m not distracting myself looking for more, I taste everything.

Receiving is often the only condiment necessary to make things good.

And when something is honestly missing, it becomes clear what it is, and it usually only needs a dash of one thing. The solution is often that simple, and it’s no longer a reach.

The Adjusting Hand

Our hands tell us much about what’s going on with us. The Adjusting Hand is the reflex that fixes a thing before we receive it.

We imagine that the food is the problem, that it will be bland, or not enough, so we keep fixing it by reaching for more, to embellish on it.

This is external referral. Our culture trains us to outsource “enough” with the next tweak, the next authority, the next upgrade.

In food, it might live in a bottle of Tabasco. Or an extra drizzle of EVOO.
In writing, it lives in another paragraph. Another adjective.
In speaking, it lives in more words. More explanation.
In life, it lives in another project, another idea, more gadgets, more supplements, more to-dos.

With each reach, our body keeps a ledger. It gets the message: what I have isn’t enough.

And it triggers need, looking outward, reaching for a fix. This is what’s behind the rushed lunch, the 3pm crash, the restless bedtime, the morning dread. The tight shoulders. This is the receipt.

The signal goes both ways:

Your need causes you to reach. You reach, and your need amplifies.
You stop reaching, and your need settles. Your settling eases you forward.

Start letting your body’s first signal be the authority.
Instead of preempting, let the first bite tell you what it needs. Lunch without multi-tasking gives you attentiveness, allowing you to receive; to taste your food and see what it actually needs, if anything. It gives you presence, the ability to slow down, and listen for the signals.

This is how your warm, sit-down lunch becomes a powerful place to stop the Adjusting Hand in its tracks and shift you from external to self-referral mode.

It’s easy to dismiss lunch when you’re busy. Yet the busyness is what’s locking you inside the joyless grind.

When you read, watch, work, or get swallowed up in intense conversation while eating, instead of tasting the food in front of you, you’re tasting what you’re multi-tasking. Instead of putting the work down, you add more to the food to drown out the noise, inadvertently amping it up. Enter indigestion: the 3pm shut down, the 9pm wired. The overwhelm, the frustration, the exhaustion.

That’s how lunch, the minimum viable act of self-referral, is the Trojan horse. It only looks benign. It’s not. It rewires your nervous system. It teaches presence. Patience. Trust. Signal literacy.

The upgrade to sovereignty

Here’s how to practice trusting what’s in front of you.

1. Command the First Bite Rule. Instead of starting with the salt, start with one bite. Chew 30 times. Yes, thirty. No swallowing after just two chews. Taste. Break it down. Then decide if it needs a tweak. The pause is the practice.

2. Sit down and stay seated. Take your lunch warm, on time, without screens, feet to the floor, spine tall. Treat your lunch as the Trojan horse that it is.

3. Name the urge before you act. When the hand reaches, say it out loud: “The Adjusting Hand.” Naming interrupts the reflex and delivers signal literacy.

4. Practice return rate over perfection. The miss is not the problem, the delay in return is. This is the 90/10 rule.

5. Run the evening audit. Ask yourself these 3 questions before bed:
   - Where did I reach to fix before receiving today?
   - What did I let be enough?
   - What would I change at the next meal?

The salt (or ketchup or hot sauce) isn’t what’s in question here. What’s in question is trusting what’s in front of you.

You’ve cooked up something nice. Instead of reaching for more, receive it first. Actually taste it. More often than not, what you’ve got doesn’t need more. The dream was never in more. It’s inside what already is. You’ll see how downright enjoyable it is, the moment you stop reaching.

Eat warm, breathe slow, keep a rhythm.

— Savitree

There are family moments when we find ourselves deep inside the tension between love and fear. Where the stakes feel high, and an external force demands you to let go of a position you hold stronger than almost anything else… in order to let your child live their own life.

Your position is no longer the only one on the line. The family is older now, and they have values and opinions of their own. You’ve raised them to be smart, to think for themselves, and to go after the things that are important to them.

But when other positions come to the field, challenging the ones you hold steadfast, it can feel like an ambush. And once you’re able to open up, you ask yourself:

• Does my position supersede everyone else’s… even when I’m certain that I’m the most informed to make the best choice for them?

• Do I hold firm to my position on behalf of someone for whom I would lay down my life?

• Or is this a moment where I need to let go and trust?

I’m witnessing this gut wrenching situation right now with a dear friend.

This isn’t a story about this mom, but about all moms.

We pass down truths we take for granted until the very people that got us there challenges them. What this mom is going through, many moms go through.

This witnessing took me back in time. To a promise I made to my children 28 years ago while pregnant with my first child.

This promise, stress-tested over the two decades by this similar arc, evolved into the work I do today.

When I never wanted kids

Before I married a man who dreamed of having children since he was a child, I made it very clear to my then boyfriend turned fiancé that I never wanted kids. If this was a deal breaker, he should know now.

I didn’t want kids because I was certain I’d ruin them.

Because my model for parenting was judgment, performance and optics, and pretending everything was fine.

Nine years later, I changed my mind. I decided I wanted two children.

And because my fear of ruining them was bone-deep, I became radically and persistently intentional.

I started with two questions. I answered them not just once, but over and over again:

What kind of mother do I want to be?

What didn’t I have that I know is essential?

Reverse engineering parenthood

I started with why having kids was a no in the first place. I didn’t feel safe to ask questions or express myself without judgment. I experienced love as conditional. When I ‘looked stupid,’ I was shamed for it. So I quelled my curiosities. I stopped raising my hand and stopped taking risks. Not just in the classroom, but at home. I wasn’t a pleaser, so I quietly rebelled. I became passive-aggressive. I disappointed my Asian immigrant parents who, perhaps unintentionally, treated me as a surrogate to live out their dreams. I was estranged from them.

I would not pass this on.

I decided that I would:

• Model mistakes openly. In front of us, our parents pretended everything was fine. I decided to show my kids what pivoting looks like. I knew one thing for certain: that I would make mistakes. I would have ample opportunity to model this.

• Practice unconditional love with firm boundaries. Not “good boy / bad boy” but “I love you just the same. I’m disappointed in what you did. Help me understand how you got there.”

• Ask “how do you feel about it?” before “I’m proud of you.” This was me teaching self-referral before I ever had clients. Before I ever knew self-referral was a word.

• Sit at their level during tantrums. I sat through them, next to them, until they were done and ran into my arms. No solutions, no lessons, no shoulds. Just presence.

I reminded myself that I didn’t own my kids. That I was their steward. They were gifts for me to guide, not surrogates to project myself onto. They were mirrors to show me where I needed to grow.

I kept them safe. Not for them to avoid discomfort, but so they could grow into themselves. That they might take chances I wouldn’t agree with. Skin a knee. Get back up. Discover their own path. Feel the pain of rejection. And know that one person is always in their corner.

I wasn’t perfect in execution. But perfection was never my promise.

The daily practice

Here’s the non-negotiable rhythm that supported my promise, from kindergarten through high school:

2 to 2.5 hours of yoga and meditation, ending by 6:30am; in time to step into the kitchen and start a warm breakfast, and a warm lunch to be packed for school.

Kids in the kitchen at 7am. Out the door at 7:20.

This kept their nervous systems grounded and clear. They were curious, critical thinkers who raised their hands, took full advantage of the resources given to them, and navigated the sometimes excruciating world of school and all of its parts. They would at times articulate honestly the awkwardness and frustrations of it all.

The point was never that they’d meditate or do yoga. That was my life.

It was that they’d embody self-referral. And this, they did.

The evidence

My children are young adults now. They express themselves differently than me. Better, I might add.

They test their decisions against their core values and priorities. When asked, they articulate their thought processes enviably well. They go through challenges with a little angst, but thoughtfully, and not alone. They’ve experimented with substances (I try not to dwell on this too hard) but have limited them because “my mental clarity is most important to me.”

I didn’t pass down the practices. I passed down the operating system.

The promise

I promised my children I will always be there for them, no matter what.

This promise didn’t make me soft and available on demand. It made me build the boundaries, the values, the architecture that made the promise keepable.

It was never about getting A’s. It was about becoming sovereign. Not for me, but for them. That with whatever they do, they can be certain it comes from them. That there is a difference between being considerate of others and pleasing them. That they eat home-cooked meals as much as possible. Or at the very least, make the connection between what they just ate and how they feel afterward.

The architecture wasn’t the yoga. The architecture was the promise, and everything I built to keep it.

The return

My 28 year old daughter called to share that my friend reached out to her. She was amazed by her vulnerability, asking to understand how my daughter, once she came of age, chose to walk a different path from her mother, on a conviction her mother held so deeply.

Separately, my daughter and I both told her, in different words:

No matter what decision you make, it will be the right one. And we will support you through it.

I lived the arc my friend is in the middle of right now. I imagined the worst-case scenarios. Alas, that’s what Mom’s do. The battle between love and fear is real. Whether you stand your ground or let go, trust is the ultimate call.

The quality of your architecture – your internal operating system – supports the call.

Eat warm, breathe slowly, keep a rhythm.

– Savitree

We tend to wake up and move through our day on auto-pilot, often with some sense of this can’t be it, I just need a day, or why am I feeling like this? It prompts a search for answers. We read, take courses, study our to-do lists, drink coffee… reaching for something outside of us to fix something felt inside.

Start inside.

This work starts with seeing your own patterns clearly.

The Day in the Life Diagnostic shows you where the borrowed code is running, where your capacity is leaking, and where to start the upgrade.

Take the diagnostic.

If you want the full architecture: the four anchors that make rhythm stick, the 5-day Fat + Fire meal framework, and daily group meditation to build it with others instead of alone, the annual membership is here:

Join Food as Medicine.

You’ll get:

• The Sadhana Huddle (daily group meditation, M-F, 6-6:30am CT) - annual members only

• The 5-day Fat + Fire meal framework

• Access to apply for the Anchor Circle (founding membership, capped at 12)

If you know that building a rhythm with others will make it more fun and speed up the process for you, that’s what the Anchor Circle is for. Learn more

—Savitree

When the planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, thousands of papers floated from the towers. Among them: reports, memos, contracts, and presentations. One second they were the most important thing in someone’s day. The next moment, nothing.

Most of us don’t know we’re clutching papers.

We believe the path to answers, truth, and self-knowledge is through more. More thinking, more reading, more preparing, more doing. But you get there by doing less. You find it in the quiet you’ve been avoiding.

What you’re clutching — the grind, borrowed urgency, fear, and the outdated beliefs you carry without an honest, updated audit — those are the papers. And your hands are filled with them.

I grew up attending church with my mom. I was barely a teen yet, and I remember listening to the sermons and being filled with questions. The adults I asked responded similarly, effectively disregarding my questions, telling me to simply believe; that the bible was right, the pastor is speaking truth. I stood confused. I wanted a conversation, not to be told to stop asking questions. I looked at them blankly. I turned inward to find meaning in this, and I couldn’t.

In high school, everyone thought the same things were “cool”. It was the 80s. Argyle socks, Izod shirts, Louis Vuitton purses, Ford Mustang GT convertibles, cheerleaders and athletes. Different was “weird.” I didn’t get it. I thought the whole thing was... weird. I wondered: is something wrong with me?

I was a recruiter in the late 1990s when people still went to work in suits. Many client companies insisted on MBAs for candidates. The problem was that their responses sounded rehearsed, from what I imagined to be the same page of an “MBA handbook.” It was uncanny how similar their responses were. That is, until I asked something completely “off-script,” and I’d catch a glimmer of the real person underneath.

We call it dogma when it happens in churches and cults. But dogma needs no faith. It only needs intellectual complacency. Acquiescence at best. Deferring to “normal.” What everyone else does. Questioning only everything else.

Dogma runs the operating system of our entire life: our medicine, our education, our productivity, our politics, our relationships. Most of us just don’t know it because nobody in our world calls it that.

In our first 7 to 12 years of life, when our state of consciousness is most impressionable, indoctrination begins. The imprint happens before we have the tools to question it. That’s not the problem. The problem is when we spend the rest of our lives calling it reality.

• Medicine: At 4-5 years old, my daughter suffered a croupy cough for 10 months along with multiple ear infections; one per month for 3 months. The 4th would prompt an ENT referral. The protocol: antibiotics. Problem was, they made her worse. External referral says, if that one doesn’t work, try a different antibiotic. Then another. Desperate, I looked outside the norm (it was 2001) and found some amazing holistic doctors. Removing dairy ended her 10-month cough in 3 days. Yes, three. Then two doses of Belladonna over half a day ended her ear infection. Along with it, I gave her probiotics, acidophilus, and Vitamin C, and I adjusted her diet. Neither cough nor ear infection came back. Her pediatrician said there was no correlation. He said that without antibiotics, her hearing might be affected. I saw this fear keep other parents from asking questions.

• Education: In Chicago, your kids don’t usually end up in your neighborhood school. As I searched for the right one for my child, I noticed the same pattern from high school: certain things were “cool,” and people chased them without question. Student-teacher ratio. Percentage of kids continuing to “top schools.” Nobody asked: according to whom?

• Productivity culture: The to-do list is scripture. The alarm rings, dread follows. You get up and show up for someone else’s priorities and call it productivity. When you can’t conquer that first hour, it keeps going all day. Exhaustion ensues, and you look for more ways to be productive.

• Wellness: The watch that tells you to move. The ring that reads your signals for you. The egg whites, protein supplements, HIIT-as-best-workout. This is external authority dressed up as self-care. You search for the right expert to tell you what your body already knows. The scary thing is, they sound more rational than listening in.

• Relationships: “He doesn’t take me seriously... he thinks what I do is a waste of time.” These were the women in early coaching who were sovereign inside their work, and the partner disrupted them at every turn. They were in good company. What they were experiencing still exists today: the magnetic field of external referral pulling on anyone trying to break free.

• Politics, media, and the daily scroll: What do they want me to believe? Ask it. Watch what happens. The externally-referred person will define their reality as obvious fact. “Common” sense. If you don’t have the “proper” counter-argument polished and ready, your silence becomes their proof.

Intellectually, we may already recognize these challenges, but in the course of our daily grind, we go on as usual, reaching for the same external authority we just diagnosed.

There are moments when we decide: now’s the time for change.
We carve out space to pause, see it work for a week, and then stop because life threw something “new.”
The external pull takes over again. And that’s the end of our try.
She follows through impeccably for everyone else, but she cannot hold the line for herself. Underneath all of it stood her silent conclusion: “I am not the creator of my own life.”

The papers that were so important seconds before the planes hit meant nothing.

The grind, fear, borrowed urgency, the beliefs you hold permanent, and the authorities you never questioned: those are the papers.

The spell of external referral keeps you clutching them like your life depends on them.

The paradox: The harder you work to find yourself, the more of yourself you lose. The reading, the preparing, the optimizing — the thing that feels productive is the very mechanism that keeps the spell intact.

You cannot think your way out of a belief system that installed itself before you could think.

What actually breaks it: Pausing. Sitting in the discomfort long enough. Not doing more.

The most dangerous thing you can do to a borrowed life is to sit still. Which is exactly why it works.

How to break the spell

Here are some spell-breaking questions to prompt critical thinking and expose the blind spots formed since childhood. The first is the one I started with in my mid-30s to take back my life.

The Litmus Test (the clap): Does this come from love and integrity?

I place my hands in front of me, palms up, and ask this question.
The moment I finish asking, I clap my right hand over the left.
By the time it lands, if the answer isn’t a resounding yes,
I know my mind is twisting it toward the comfortable answer.

This question works because everything else is a derivative of fear.

The other questions:

• What do they want me to believe?
  Use when watching, reading, hearing anything.
  Trace the intention behind the message.

• What about this is threatening to me? Why am I feeling so threatened?
  Use when someone ruffles your feathers.
  The reaction is data about you (your lens, your nervous system), not them.

• They can only give you what’s inside them.
  This is a thought-provoking reminder more than a question. It doesn’t excuse bad behavior. Instead, it’s meant to change how you look at it; enough to find compassion while holding the proper boundaries.

• What does this bring for me?
  There are shared milestones every month of the year: the New Year, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries. These don’t have to be prompts for a new external resolution (e.g. join a gym in January only to stop going in 3 weeks because life happens). These can be welcome wake-up reminders and opportunities to pause and ask, how can this (theme) serve me in this season of my life?

The entry point: the warm lunch

What’s the most radical act of self-referral?
Sitting down for a warm lunch.
Chewing. No book, no podcast, no screen.
Letting the vagal activation do its work.
It’s the Trojan horse: it looks like nothing, but it rewires the architecture beneath everything.

This was my entry point before I studied meditation.
After doing everything “right,” my life imploded. It was 2003. I walked away from it, replacing my four-door Mercedes for a $2000 Camry two-door stick. Our condo worth $465k, lost. My ex was working through lawsuits well over $1M. Our investments and everything money could buy, gone. What was left was our two children, our health, and a method that held us through it.

This time around, every decision began with the litmus test.
The answers didn’t come from experts, and my parents disapproved.
I wasn’t doing anything “bad.” My next steps just weren’t “normal” — been there, done that.

What emerged from letting go of the papers was a life built from my deepest values and priorities. I surrendered into them and cultivated deep trust. And the noise subsided.

At that time, a friend said something that only a close, trusted, playful friend could jest: you’re living on fumes!
But I wasn’t. Because I was full.
Out of that fullness I built a life I could call mine. And my children watched it happen.

Staying awake

My children are young adults now. They call me to talk through their decisions, their struggles, their celebrations. They share because they saw me build a life from something real. And I listen.

But comfort has its own danger. Of falling asleep. The noise is everywhere, and if anything, it’s become louder. I’m still surrounded by people running the borrowed script, and the socio-political climate has accelerated the static. The question I’m living right now is:

Can I stay awake and maintain sovereignty surrounded by so much noise?

I don’t have a tidy answer. Which is why I keep writing about it. Continuing the conversation holds me accountable. And it builds the community we need, to hear something other than the noise.

The papers are still in your hands. You didn’t put them there. But you can open them and see them for what they are: beliefs you inherited, fears you didn’t choose, authorities you never questioned. A life someone else wrote before you could read.

Sit down. Eat lunch. Let your hands go empty long enough to feel what’s actually yours.

Eat warm, breathe slow, keep a rhythm.

— Savitree

P.S. Want to see your patterns more clearly? Take the Day in the Life Diagnostic. It's a single-page snapshot of your day: what you eat, when you pause (or don't), where the external pull takes over. Taking it is itself the first act of self-referral. I read every one that comes through, and the patterns I notice most often become the essays I write next.

Kundalini yoga has a word for it: cold depression.

It’s a state of numbness, exhaustion, and inner isolation. Cold because you, nor anyone else, knows you’re depressed — you look and “feel” energized, busy, and productive instead of low energy. But you’re cut off from your body signals. Numbness (a down-regulation of your nervous system) protects you from burnout. You get stimulation from coffee, donuts, arguments, more grind, and fast thrills.

Going to bed late, waking up tired, and pushing through the day in a way that everyone can rely on — this is the sign dismissed as normal and labeled “life”. But underneath, you’re thinking when’s it my turn?!

One client put it another way: Fuck, is this it?
Followed by, I feel duped.
And he was making millions from work in commercial real estate, with many close friends.

This is cold depression.

In conversation, it can be difficult to pinpoint what’s wrong and how to break this tired.

The simplest place to start is with a warm, sit-down lunch. Make it daily, on-time, without screens or books.

• Carving out time for this sets boundaries smack dab in the middle of the day when the world demands every part of you.

• It’s a rebellious act of self-love and advocacy that will inject your system with earned dopamine.

• The sit-down without screens allows your body to stop and enjoy the meal. It will activate your vagal nerve. You won’t find yourself feeling hungry for something else afterwards because you stopped wolfing it down while responding to emails. This shifts you out of grind mode, and you’ll feel calmer, more nourished, and in your own skin.

• Warm supports digestion (your body has to work a lot harder to process cold foods) giving you afternoon energy instead of depletion.

• Because you’re used to eating in front of your screen, you’ll get bored or start feeling antsy. Following through anyway will start to move you from consumer to creation mode. In this mode, you start hearing your own signals and trusting yourself.

You’ll become self-referred. Instead of filling your days and mental space with other people’s urgencies, you’ll start to make decisions from your deepest values and priorities. You know things, and you’ll start to trust and act on them. You’ll begin to realize you’re no longer exhausted. Or numb.

I never thought I’d find myself writing about lunch. For a while, I left food alone in my coaching, and instead taught how to use meditation as support for one’s life work.

But what I found was that too many will treat meditation like another thing on their to-do list, wonder when it will start working, and then move through the rest of their day on borrowed urgency.

I realized eventually that I myself didn’t start with meditation; I started with a proper warm lunch. I started to feel light, which gave me clarity and energy. My digestive and sinus issues disappeared. I started making choices that moved me forward instead of ones I’d regret or kept me in the grind.

Once my baseline was calmer, I dropped into meditation like an intermediate.
It became easier to do the harder things in life. Curiosity peaked because I wasn’t so dysregulated. And courage to take right action became less traumatic.

I learned the importance of having anchors throughout my day to sustain steadiness and equanimity. To stop looking at streaks and instead focus on a faster return rate. It was a return to love.

The lunch is the doorway. It stops the grind right when it starts to snowball: midday.

But context matters. Lunchtime isn’t the whole picture.

Your morning dread started yesterday at lunch.
Your 3pm crash was set in motion by your morning stack, the coffee you leaned on, the night of stolen hours you never repaid.

The body keeps a ledger, and every override is a withdrawal.

The quickest way that I’ve found to get clear context is to audit your typical day. To write down, not what you want or intend to do, but what you actually do from the moment you wake up to the moment your head hits the pillow.

I call this the Day in the Life Diagnostic.

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, answers still may not pop. It may look like you’re doing everything just fine, without rigidity: slow to wake up because you got to bed at midnight to get stuff done. Coffee after breakfast. A warm lunch. A couple of cookies in the afternoon because you love cookies, they were there, and joy is important. Nothing earth-shattering. Normal.

The problem is when you stay up until midnight and wake up at 6:30 to get the kids ready for their day. You steal moments of zone-out time to somehow rev up enough energy and push that momentum forward for the rest of the day... until midnight. Quiet reactivity disguised as intention exists with every step.

Nothing really stands out as wrong, but something feels off, and that’s the crux of it. The thought of shrugging it off as this is life feels bad. You want a better life. One that is owned. By you.

You’re not the problem. The operating system you’re running is. And it’s not your fault; nobody handed you an owner’s manual for a human nervous system.

The good news is, changing that feeling to a sustainable This is my life, and I’m so blessed doesn’t take anything complicated.

It begins with a warm lunch.

And from there a few more anchors throughout the day that honor circadian rhythms and keep the nervous system regulated.

The obstacle? When you’re used to associating change with complicated protocols, expensive courses, and pills, simple becomes too easy to dismiss as something you do when you have time.

Because you think:

what does this have to do with my to-do list? How’s this going to fix my exhaustion when I don’t have time as it is, and now you’re telling me to sit for lunch?

You don’t need another course. You need lunch.

The rest of the anchors look at the context of your day. Not your life history. Believe it or not, change doesn’t require that. Nor does it need a complex business plan or another organization or productivity tool. You have those already — the software. But you’re trying to run them on distressed hardware. This isn’t luxury. It’s the most foundational next step.

Understand your typical day. It’s that simple.

The Day in the Life Diagnostic helps you to see your patterns the way I’d see them if you were sitting across from me.

It distills numerous coaching sessions into one. It asks 19 questions, and your answers knit together a solid picture of where you’re feeding depletion versus capacity. It taps into your own intelligence to determine where to start first, and what happens next.

Taking it is itself the practice — the first act of self-referral.

One reader wrote me after going through it:

“I just gave this a try and the results made me cry a little. In a good way, as I felt seen and understood and it (you!) showed me the way forward and deeper into myself.”

Having started with a warm lunch, she had noticed herself singing and dancing more. This gave her the impetus to take that next step.

Go through the Day in the Life Diagnostic.
In as little as 7 minutes, you’ll see where your energy goes, what’s working, what’s not, and get insight into your next move.

Paid members get the AI version. Here’s what another reader said:

“The concrete next steps are perfect! Yes, exactly what I can focus on w/out being overwhelmed. This was super helpful and insightful in getting into what needs to be tweaked as well as highlighting what’s working.”

Take the Diagnostic now

— Savitree

I lowered my LDL by 32% in three months. Without a statin.

Conventional medicine says diet and exercise alone will get you 10-25%, depending on adherence and the approach. A 32% drop is what they expect from a daily moderate dose statin, not from oatmeal and kale.

Since I’ve started this 90-day experiment, a few of my clients shared that they too have said “no” to statin, committed to eating “heart-healthy,” and their numbers hadn’t budged. They did what they were supposed to: the salmon, the olive oil, the salad. And it didn’t work. So they went back to their doctor, took the prescription, and that was the end of their experiment.

What they didn’t know was that heart-healthy foods are builders, not clearers. They nourish the heart muscles. They don’t remove what’s already circulating in the blood. If your LDL is high, you don’t need more building material. You need a cleanup crew.

In Ayurveda, these are called lekhana (scraper) foods. High-fiber, gelatinous foods that bind to fats and escort them out of the body. Oatmeal cooked with bone broth. Wakame. Dark bitter greens like kale and spinach, cooked until soft. Mung beans and white basmati rice. Perilla oil instead of olive oil because it has less saturated fat, and it’s a lekhana oil.

Those are what I leaned into for 90 days, and it worked.

Then I broke my foot.

But before I get to that part, here are the numbers.

The before and after

My initial blood test was on April 7. My follow-up was July 15, three months since I refused the statin and started this Food as Medicine experiment.

Lipid panel

Cholesterol – Before: 288. After: 211. Still high, but down 77 points

Triglyceride – Before: 170. After: 178. High, up 8 points

HDL Cholesterol – Before: 60. After: 43. In normal range, but down 17

Chol/HDL – Before: 4.8. After: 4.9. Still high, up 0.1 point

LDL – Before: 194. After: 132. Still high, but down 62 points. That’s the 32%.

Metabolic panel

Glucose – Before: 99. After: 104. High, up 5 points. Normal cut-off range is 99. Everything else from this panel is within normal range.

For anyone who wants a simple map of what these tests mean, here’s the quick guide I wish I’d had:

LDL
This is the “bad” cholesterol number on your lab report.
Think of LDL like trucks carrying building blocks (cholesterol) out to your cells. Too many trucks on the road for too long can cause traffic jams in your arteries.

HDL
This is often called the “good” cholesterol.
HDL is like the cleanup crew. It picks up extra cholesterol from your tissues and brings it back to the liver to be reused or removed.

Triglycerides
These are fats your body uses for energy.
They’re like extra fuel floating in your blood. If there is more fuel than you burn, it gets stored in fat cells for later. Very high triglycerides can be a sign that your system is overloaded.

ApoB
This is a blood test that counts how many “cholesterol trucks” are on the road.
Each truck that can help form plaque has one ApoB tag on it. A higher ApoB means more of these trucks are circulating.

Calcium Score (CAC)
This is a CT scan of your heart, not a blood test.
It looks for hard, calcified plaque in the heart arteries. A score of zero means no calcified plaque was seen and usually points to a lower short-term risk of heart attack, even if your cholesterol numbers are high.

What worked

My LDL and overall cholesterol levels came down dramatically.

Here’s what I ate to make that happen.

Savory oatmeal with spinach cooked in chicken bone broth, finished with fresh black pepper. Kitchari (mung beans and basmati rice) cooked with kale and digestive spices. Basmati rice with wakame and kimchi. Grilled mackerel or baked salmon with dark leafy greens. Fin fish, white beans, tofu, and chicken bone broth were my go-to proteins. I leaned more into perilla oil than olive oil for drizzling. Everything I chose was lekhana. Each meal built to scrape instead of to build.

Is this sustainable? I ate this way while traveling through Korea and Japan. While celebrating birthdays and milestones. While sitting at my mom’s table where Korean moms don’t say “I love you” — they feed you instead.

I honored what I call the 90/10 Rule: 90% lekhana, 10% life. Over the three months, I enjoyed matcha ice cream at the Golden Temple. Wagyu steak in Japan. Korean cookies my cousin gifted us in Seoul. Back home: Chicken wings. Pie. A table of unfamiliar dishes at a celebration for a friend in his 70s who summited the seven highest mountains on seven continents, the final one after 4 attempts! I wasn’t about to miss that toast.

The portions were never over-indulgent, and I went right back to my scraper foods at the next possible meal. The win isn’t to have 0% days. The win is to trust yourself to step back into your 90%. The return rate is the only metric.

What didn’t make sense

My triglyceride and glucose numbers went up, and my HDL went down.

At first glance, this made no sense. I had just dropped my LDL by nearly a third on a clean, natural, unsaturated diet with no medication. There’s no way those numbers should move me toward pre-diabetes at the same time.

On its own, an increase in triglycerides and glucose signals a poor diet heading toward metabolic syndrome. But if that were the case, my LDL would have climbed too. Instead, it dropped 32%, far beyond what’s thought possible.

And HDL? That’s the lipid clean up crew, sensitive to movement and nervous system state. The right amount of exercise and behavioral anchors that calm your system will raise it. I had maintained my anchors, so what happened?

The wild card

Two weeks before my follow-up blood draw, I fell down some steps and landed hard in front of my garage door.

I fractured my fifth metatarsal bone, the long bone in my right foot leading to my pinky toe.

My body entered what’s called Acute Phase Response. It released an acute spike of cortisol to coordinate tissue repair.

When you break a bone, your immune system instantly triggers a systemic inflammatory healing cascade. Inflammation reshapes HDL: levels fall, composition changes, and its normal cleanup functions are impaired.

During acute trauma, the body’s inflammatory healing cascade prioritizes local cholesterol availability for tissue repair over HDL production. Which means my LDL and total cholesterol drop happened before the fall.

Add to this immediate immobilization. I went from a high-activity travel and walking routine to 14 days of absolute stillness and foot elevation. This became the brake on HDL production.

There was administrative friction: doctors, insurance companies, increased dependency. Low-grade stress that keeps adrenaline and cortisol circulating. Cortisol signals the liver to pour extra glucose into your system for immediate, explosive energy, and because I’m not moving after my meals to burn it off, that surplus sugar stayed stranded, forcing the liver to convert it into triglycerides. My 5-point glucose increase is the classic signature of acute trauma, not chronic metabolic decay.

You don’t have to break a bone to trigger stress physiology. Grind state — the chronic low-grade cortisol drip of overwork and skipped meals — will do it. Skipping your walk, your warm lunch, the pauses that keep your nervous system in rhythm: that’s enough to spike cortisol and glucose production on its own.

Moving forward

My orthopedic doctor just graduated me from a splint to a walking boot. Over the next month, I’ll gradually learn to put full weight on my mending foot with the support of crutches.

The cholesterol and LDL numbers are remarkable, but those numbers are still high. So I’ll keep eating lekhana foods and finishing my last meal early until they’re within normal range. When that happens, I’ll pivot to include heart-healthy alongside the scraper foods. One builds while the other clears. Both are necessary. Both taste amazing.

The price of the future

This three-month experiment forced me to take a hard, honest look at what I was willing to pay for down the road. Protocol-driven conventional health is a consumer transaction: you check the box, you take the pill, you outsource the management. I decided I didn’t want to add any more unanchored tax to my future.

What started as a rigid, 90-day protocol has become an ongoing rhythm. This was never about willpower or deprivation. It was about operating from my own biological center, which turns out to be incredibly satisfying. When the internal channels are clear, the static drops out of the system, and real body literacy takes over.

Conventional doctors will see a set of isolated warnings: 104 Glucose. 178 Triglycerides. 117 ApoB. They will likely look at those rows and assume I spent my summer over-indulging in processed food and missing my workouts. They may not connect the broken bone in my right foot to the numbers in my blood. Their automated prescription will be an external referral: take a low-dose statin, cut back on carbs, and track your metrics on this screen.

But my 132 LDL proves that my internal architecture was already coming clear before the fall. The 32% drop that conventional math says can’t happen without a drug capsule? That drop belongs to the 90 days before the fracture. My CT calcium score of zero means no calcified plaque and low near-term risk. The arteries are clean.

The data on my report isn’t a disease but a live status update of a brilliant, intact system logging an emergency response to trauma.

Your body is an integrated ledger, not a collection of compartmentalized parts on a lab report. When you stop outsourcing your authority to an app notification or a transactional checklist, you give your internal cleanup crews the exact rhythm they need to keep you whole.

My walking boot is on. My high-fiber scraper routine is running. I’m giving my foot another 90 days to knit, and my liver another 90 days to clear the stress sugar out of the pipeline. Then we’ll run the diagnostic ledger again.

Until then, dinner’s on at 4:30pm with the screen turned off.

– Savitree

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For as long as I can remember, my father looked stressed. You could see it in his face.

The stress kept him from enjoying much of anything: his own life, the company of the people around him. When we talked near him, the conversation seemed too loud, too much; he couldn’t join it, and mostly he scowled at the chatter, or found something to criticize. I’d grown so sensitized to it that I stopped visiting for a while. I would love my parents from a distance.

When I finally visited, he looked ten years younger. I don’t mean rested. I mean a different face. He still didn’t say much. But I learned he’d taken up Asian calligraphy, and somewhere along the line, his stress had fallen away.

He hadn’t changed his diet. He hadn’t done botox. He wasn’t taking collagen or an anti-aging supplement. He had started making art and was enjoying it. He was practicing presence, and his body responded.

We do the anti-aging things. The antioxidants: blueberries, red wine, the square of dark chocolate. The serums. The water. Staying out of the sun. You read the studies, you bought the supplements, and you keep a quiet ledger of everything you’re doing right.

None of that was what moved for my father.

Because the biggest driver of how fast you age isn’t on that list. It isn’t what you eat or how much sun you get. It’s the operating system you run your day from. And if that system is the grind, you’re aging yourself, at the cell level, faster than any serum can slow you down.

I want to take you inside an actual cell, because once you see the mechanism, you can’t unsee it. And you’ll weigh the pause against the grind very differently than you do right now.

That operating system has a physical address. It lives at the tips of your chromosomes.

The telomere

Inside your cells are chromosomes: your DNA, the master scripts that run your organs, your enzymes, your tissues. Unwound, your DNA is about six feet long. It’s wound tight around spool-like proteins, folded over and over into the dense X-shape of a chromosome.

Telomeres are the caps on each tip of that X. Think of the little plastic tips on shoelaces (the aglets) that keep the lace from fraying. Telomeres do the same job for your DNA. They keep it from fraying or fusing when the cell divides. That’s their whole purpose: to be the sacrificial buffer that protects the architecture.

Every time a cell divides, the telomere gets a little shorter. When it gets critically short, the cell either goes into senescence (cellular old age) or it dies.

Telomerase is the enzyme that repairs and lengthens telomeres. You want to keep these online.

What the grind does to it

Chronic stress floods you with cortisol and adrenaline. At the chromosome tips, that flood turns corrosive. The research Elissa Epel has spent decades building shows it behaves like acid on the caps. So when the cell divides, instead of losing the small, clean amount of telomere it’s supposed to lose, it tears off a much bigger chunk. You pay a higher tax on every single division. And the chromosome sends an alarm that changes the fate of the whole cell.

The wear isn’t even. Stress goes after the shortest, most vulnerable cap first. The moment a single telomere on a single chromosome drops below a critical length, it loses its protective loop. The tip unfurls. A raw, frayed edge of DNA is left exposed.

The cell misreads that frayed tip as a break: a catastrophic fracture in the hardware. To stop a broken chromosome from copying itself, it triggers an emergency shutdown. The cell either dismantles itself and dies, or it never divides again. Instead it parks in the tissue and starts leaking toxic, inflammatory waste that damages and thins the healthy tissue around it.

Meanwhile, telomerase (your repair crew) gets switched off. Your nervous system takes it offline because it’s prioritizing immediate survival over long-term upkeep. So the cell is getting shredded harder on every cycle, with zero maintenance allowed in between.

This is how someone in grind mode ends up with the cells of a person ten years older. Not from living faster but from failing to maintain the architecture.

And it isn’t only the low, chronic hum you’ve gotten used to. Sometimes stress is acute: a sudden panic, a sharp boundary violation, an adrenaline-fueled confrontation. That acts like an acid bath. Even when the cell isn’t dividing, it can break the telomeres directly; and if it hits mid-division, a jagged chunk of the cap is sheared off in one shot.

This damage surfaces in a predictable order. Different tissues rebuild at different speeds, and the fastest ones fray first. Your gut lining rebuilds every three to five days. Under chronic stress, it’s the first infrastructure to go. This is why Ayurveda says all disease begins with digestion. Your immune cells turn over in days to weeks, so they age early. Your skin renews about every twenty-eight days and shows the damage fast. Your liver and bones absorb the cost quietly for years, a deep ledger of your choices, before they ever blink red.

Good stress (the kind that heals)

Not all stress shears you. Some of it rewires you.

Picture closing the laptop at noon. Shutting the feed. Sitting flat-footed in front of a warm bowl of soup, completing twelve slow breaths, eating with no screen and no book, while your mind screams this is a waste of time, you’re falling behind!

That friction, that low-grade panic, is real. But it isn’t cellular erosion. It’s the feeling of your nervous system being rewired. When you enforce a boundary like this, you deliberately interrupt an automatic loop. And the moment you finish those breaths and give your body a warm, cooked-food signal, your vagus nerve fires a master override. Warmth and presence prove to your gut that the tiger has been outrun. Cortisol drops. The sympathetic drive collapses. And telomerase comes back online.

The good news

Telomere erosion is not a one-way street. How you operate can raise telomerase activity and stabilize, even lengthen, the caps.

The adjustment has a name. I call it the Effective Pause. Get out of the grind, anchor into parasympathetic safety, and let cortisol drop so the oxidative stress eases. In a word: presence.

And presence is not the same as sleep. Sleep matters, but sleep doesn’t actively clear chronic stress. Anyone who’s slept ten hours through a depression knows that. Presence (parasympathetic activation) is what reverses the trajectory.

Presence also isn’t attending to everything that demands you. That’s external referral, and it erodes presence rather than building it.

The Return Rate

Now for the part that keeps you out of the panic this essay could otherwise leave you in.

Your body is forgiving. It doesn’t need perfection. It needs you to return to presence sooner rather than later. The whole game is your return rate.

Consider the chronic, low-grade leak: the grind as baseline. There’s no explosion, just a permanent low hum of shearing, with telomerase shut down for months at a stretch. The damage is quiet, cumulative, compounding. No one comes to do repairs, because the crew never gets called back.

Now consider the opposite: an intense burst of stress, but a high return rate. Something spikes you. And immediately afterward you manually override, running your anchors: the breath, the warm meal, the pause. The spike collapses. Cortisol drops. Telomerase comes back online, scans the chromosomes, and restores the caps. Your baseline holds.

Same stressful life. Completely different outcome. The difference isn’t whether you get hit. It’s how fast you come home.

Two ways to build presence

There are two I return to, again and again.

Meditation. It teaches you to witness your own tantrums and move through them without reacting: to quiet the replay of the past and the worry about the future, and drop into the only place your signal actually lives. The present. Meditation brings that signal back online.

The warm, sit-down lunch. On time, no multitasking. It teaches boundaries and follow-through, which builds self-trust, which becomes the deep sense of safety you need to live a little dangerously. And it keeps digestion online, which supports every other system downstream.

Yeah, but…

Two objections always come up here. What they are are really two ways of missing the practice.

The first: “I skip lunch and I don’t feel the stress.” That woman isn’t running a resilient engine. She’s cut the wire to her check-engine light. What she calls ‘built endurance’ is her nervous system down-regulating to protect her from burnout. She stops feeling the acute panic of a skipped meal because she’s gone functionally numb. But the tax is still being paid. The telomeres are still shortening, the gut is still thinning, the immune system is still fraying. Her dashboard just went dark. She’s mistaking the clean high of emergency adrenaline for real energy: an unsustainable loan against her future.

The second is subtler. She sits down for the warm lunch, and spends the whole twenty minutes agonizing over everything she should be getting done. Her body is doing the practice, but her mind is still signed into external referral. This is the difference between trying and doing.

Trying is a sympathetic drive. When you try to have a peaceful lunch, your mind treats the meal as a target and keeps scanning for a metric: Am I calm yet? Am I doing this right? Look at the time I’m losing. That keeps you on guard. Your body is sitting, but your nervous system is still running from the predator.

Doing is a somatic fact. You drop the demand for a particular feeling and just execute the mechanics. The jaw chews. The feet press flat against the floor. The breath drops into the navel. That’s presence. Do the mechanics. The feeling follows.

And then it went the other way

Slowly, life kept happening, and my father dropped the art. He surrendered to the stress again, got lost in it, preoccupied by regret and worry. The practice that had brought him back went quiet, and the low, chronic leak resumed. No single dramatic event. Just years of it.

He now lives with dementia, brought on by a stroke. My sister and I are certain (in the way you can be certain about your own father) that he stroked himself out of his own stress.

I watched the same man age backward, and then forward. No supplement did either one. Presence did. And then the loss of it did.

I don’t tell you this to scare you. I tell you because the mechanism runs both directions, and you still have time to choose.

Bottom line

Your chromosomes are live ledgers. When you refuse to install a few daily boundaries, you force your genes to drop their protective caps, and your body makes a cold structural calculation: locking damaged cells into permanent suspension, where they sit in your joints and your thyroid and your brain and leak inflammation into everything still healthy.

Call it what it actually is (instead of “aging”): leaving your repair crew offline while you rush through the day.

The practice is simple: a warm lunch, a few honest breaths, and a short distance between the miss and the return.

Two places to build it: come sit with us live in the Sadhana Huddle, weekday mornings, 6 to 6:30 CDT, or run the Day in the Life Assessment with the AI coach and see your own dashboard, in my voice, before you change a thing.

Your 3pm energy will tell you if it’s working.

-Savitree

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This weekend, a nation celebrates independence. Parades, fireworks, declarations. I want to talk about a different kind: the independence nobody throws a parade for. The kind where you stop outsourcing your existence to other people’s approval and start running on your own signal.

No fireworks. Just lunch.

We assume isolation happens because

We’re busy. After work, errands, and family, making time for friends feels impossible.
Or we’re in monk mode, that transitional chapter where you leave behind the world you knew and haven’t yet found people who understand the person you’re becoming.
Or you’re in a hard season with your partner, and as the saying goes, there’s nothing more lonely than being in a shitty relationship.
Or you look around and see others with friendships since childhood who keep collecting new friends while you haven’t, and that makes you self-critical.
Or you simply don’t feel understood.

These are all myths.

None of these circumstances cause loneliness. You can struggle to make time for friends, be in monk mode, navigate a rough chapter in your relationships, have a small social circle, and feel like everyone around you operates from a different frequency, and still feel completely connected.

On the flip side, you can fill your calendar with every social event, reject monk mode as self-indulgent, have a lovely relationship, a hundred friends since childhood, visible proof of external approval, and still feel like you’re watching your own life from the other side of a glass wall.

The sense of disconnection has nothing to do with circumstance. It has everything to do with which operating system is running the show.

If your OS is external referral, you require constant input from social circles, constant validation, and conformity to group dynamics. You need those inputs to verify your beliefs. To verify that you exist at all.

The loneliness delusion

What most people call loneliness is actually adrenaline withdrawal and destabilization of identity.

When an externally referred person is left alone, with no external metric to hit, no social mirror to look into, their system panics. The nervous system, wired for constant external feedback, interprets the silence as a threat. The body floods with the same biochemistry it would produce if it were physically abandoned.

And the mind, searching for a narrative, lands on “I need connection.”

But what you actually need is internal signal, a dashboard that reports to you, not to them.

The self-referral shield

When your daily infrastructure is anchored inward, informed by structural rhythms like morning alignment, deep work blocks, and deliberate physiological tracking, your system receives a steady signal of safety.

You don’t need a proxy audience to confirm you exist.

This is not about becoming antisocial. It’s about becoming someone who interacts from overflow rather than hunger. You stop consuming people to fill a metabolic deficit.

Breaking the domestication agreement

One of the most powerful agreements embedded in our cultural operating system is the belief that an abundant life requires a massive, lifelong echo chamber of identical peers.

This is what Don Miguel Ruiz calls domestication: the inherited training that teaches you to dream someone else’s dream. The agreement says you need constant company. It says solitude is a problem to solve. It says the person with the fullest calendar wins. Which is why we tend to think being an “extrovert” is the better quality, and “introverts” apologize.

Grind mode lives inside this agreement. Whether you fill your calendar with tasks or social events, the function is the same: noise. Static. Filling the silence so you never have to hear what’s underneath. When your internal feed is full of unexpressed dread, being alone feels like drowning.

You exit the agreement by refusing to run that script.

The turn

Twenty years ago, I sat in a therapist’s office, trying to get him to make a decision for me. I wanted him to tell me what to do.

He wouldn’t.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “Listen for what your body is telling you. Not what you think I’ll think about the decision. Not what anyone else will think. Don’t start with pros and cons. Start with your body.”

That moment was terrifying. It was also the first time anyone had handed me the key to my own operating system.

When you exit the domestication agreement, you begin making decisions from the inside out; from your deepest values, your actual priorities, the data your own body is sending you. You don’t become selfish, though externally referred people may see you that way. You become someone who understands and honors your own needs. And that eventually translates into understanding and honoring the real, beyond-the-surface needs of others.

This is an upgrade from “treat others as you want to be treated.” It’s critical to understand that they may not want the same thing you want. The only way to know what someone else actually needs is to first know what you need. And the only way to know that is to stop looking outward for the answers and start listening inward.

If you’re always scanning for external nods, checking to make sure you’re still a good person, still approved, still valid, you are at guaranteed risk of losing yourself. And you will feel loneliness. It won’t be because you’re alone, but because you’ve abandoned your own signal.

The real danger of being outwardly successful at this is the misinterpretation that you know yourself. What you’ve actually mastered is the agreement. You look functional, but inside, the dashboard is dark.

Where to start

It feels dangerous to exit domestication and start listening to your own body.

Paradoxically, the “normal route” is the one that’s structurally empty of inherent safety. You know this through the dread that rises when you consider being authentic and your world suddenly feels conditional and threatened.

True safety is a clean internal dashboard.

Don’t practice on large, consequential moments. Always start small and repeatable. The small practices will feel scary in themselves, and they will produce quantum shifts through the most immediate changes in your nervous system regulation. That baseline is what determines whether you default to external referral or self-referral.

The practice is lunch. Make it warm, sit down, on time, and daily.

Dare anyone to take that away from you.

Once lunch is yours, go for the other three anchors: a morning practice that belongs to you before the world makes its claims on you. A work rhythm that respects your energy instead of exploiting it. An evening close that lets your nervous system register safety before sleep. Together, these four points form the architecture. Each one is a deposit in a body that keeps a ledger.

The question isn’t whether you have time for lunch.

It’s whether you’re ready to meet the person you become when nobody is watching and nobody is approving.

Eat warm, breathe slow, keep a rhythm.

— Savitree

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My sister’s birthday falls in June, and we spent the day together at her place gardening. We had perfect weather: sunny, slightly hot in the open, perfect under the shade. She said she needs to figure out how to make simple, healthy meals for herself every day; it’s the bane of her existence.

She’s not alone. I hear the same complaint from clients who run companies, raise children, and carry the invisible load of a household. Their busy day takes them to the point of sharp hunger, and at that point, they’re faced with suboptimal options. The decision has already been made for them by the clock, the delivery app, or whatever is closest and fastest.

This is external referral in action. The culture trains us to override our own knowing in favor of external authority. We borrow our meal times from our inbox and our hunger cues from our calendar. We outsource nourishment to convenience packaging and other people’s priorities until the body sends the invoice in the form of 3pm fog, evening bloat, and morning dread.

The fix is not another meal-prep automation. It’s not a gourmet recipe demanding advanced cooking skills. It’s a single warm, on-time, seated lunch. The minimum viable act of self-referral. Architecture over state. Not a reset. Rhythm.

I wrote this essay for my sister, and for every woman who’s productive but borrowed, functional but numb, grinding through someone else’s operating system while her own life waits in the someday folder.

Why lunch is the hinge

When the sun is at its high point, our digestion is strongest. Make this your largest meal.

Still, you want to make it easily digestible because you have an entire afternoon ahead of you. If you’re working with natural circadian rhythm, your deepest work is dedicated to your morning block, leading right up to lunch, so you can flow with the natural dip that happens in the afternoon.

For optimal brain function, close the loop on your work once it’s lunchtime and fully focus on the plate. By “lunchtime,” I don’t mean when it’s time to eat, but when it’s time to transition, prep, or order. At the end of it, close that loop too. Give yourself time to sit, breathe, digest and clear your space.

Lunch either props you up for the afternoon, or it tanks you. Your 3pm state is the direct receipt for your lunch.

Breakfast sets tone. Lunch sets trajectory. If you skip breakfast, understand that conceptually the first thing you put in your mouth is break-the-fast. It sets your nervous system tone the way meditating versus reading the news does. Choose warm. Choose light and gentle. Remember that your digestion is still rising like the sun.

Dinner is the wind-down. Done by 6pm, 7pm at the latest. This single boundary allows your body to wrap up digestion before bedtime, freeing your system to focus entirely on deep restoration and cellular cleanup while you sleep. And so you wake up feeling light and rested.

Modern society loves to start dinner around 7pm and make it the largest meal of the day: (1) We start with ice-cold water and bread, turning down our digestive furnace precisely when it should be turned up. (2) We make protein the largest portion on the plate, which takes longest to digest. (3) Then we stare at our screens until we collapse, waking up our melatonin production when it should be going to sleep.

That triple combo forces low-quality sleep and a morning that demands coffee and sugar just to function, drawing your body further into debt. Your metabolism, insulin sensitivity, and baseline mindset decline. Anxiety and frustration set in. And if you’re Pitta imbalanced, you look for external blame on everything.

What’s hands-down more delicious than whatever food you keep craving is feeling good in your own body.

The formula

Similar to the concept of the Sudoku packing method, where you take nine core garments to create twenty-seven outfit combos, you should be able to take a few ingredients and pair them together, sometimes leaving one out.

The baseline scaffold is this: Base + Greens + Protein

• Your base is white basmati rice or oatmeal. White basmati is the cleanest and easiest grain for your system to break down. Brown rice is far harder to digest, which means your body overspends energy trying to unleash the nutrients inside it. Oatmeal (rolled, never instant) becomes a powerful savory anchor when cooked in bone broth instead of water.

• Your greens are dark leafy vegetables. One bunch of greens is for one person. An entire bag of baby spinach looks like a lot, but they shrink to almost nothing when heated, so don’t be shy with your portions. You might wonder why we stick to bitter leafy greens instead of common table staples like carrots, broccoli, zucchini, bell peppers, or lettuce. While those are healthy foods, many of them are either too dense and starchy (like carrots), too rough and gas-producing for your digestive fire to break down at midday (like raw broccoli), or inflammatory nightshades (like peppers). Cold lettuce douses your digestive fire. Bitter leafy greens act as immediate, lightweight sweepers that clean your system without demanding heavy processing energy. Which is what we’re going for. And, they’re fastest to prep.

• Your protein rotates between wild fish, clean tofu, white beans, or the complete protein of split yellow mung beans cooked with rice (kitchari). Notice that we specify white beans or split mung beans here, rather than heavy dark ones like kidney beans or big green ones like lima beans. Thick-skinned, dark, or dense beans are packed with complex starches that easily cause gas, bloating, and fermentation if your digestive fire isn’t running perfectly hot. White beans and split yellow mung dal (beans) are highly bio-available and easily dismantled by your system, giving you clean protein without an afternoon digestive tax.

Here’s what the rotation looks like in practice

• Kitchari with seasonal vegetables cooked directly into the pot.

• Rice cooked with wakame + fish (the fastest: clean canned tuna or mackerel) + greens and/or kimchi.

• Greens + organic tofu (cubed or cut into rectangles and pan seared with a light wipe of toasted sesame oil).

• Savory oatmeal cooked in chicken bone broth with fresh cracked black pepper + spinach.

• Grilled fish + greens.

• Japanese miso soup or Korean doenjang guk with rice + wakame or nori + kimchi.

The techniques

• Play with spices for variety. But really, just sea salt, black pepper, and garlic are all you need to do the job well when you’re feeling zero creativity to do more. Simple is super.

• Eat your greens first. The fiber and dense nutrients prime your metabolic pathway before you touch the carbs or protein, which naturally reduces insulin spikes.

• Master the one-pot layout. One-pot meals keep your cognitive load low and cleanup minimal. You can add cold ingredients (like kimchi or yesterday’s seared tuna slices) directly onto hot rice, allowing the residual warmth to heat it up naturally without a microwave. Warm food stokes agni (your digestive fire). Cold food puts it to sleep.

• Wilted greens with speed. Sauté vertical slices of fresh garlic in a hot pan with a little sea salt. Add your greens. Once wilted (takes just a few minutes), pull from heat and drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, fresh lemon juice, and black pepper.

• Replace ice water with hot fluids. Drink herbal tea or hot water with lemon during meals. Ice water turns down the digestive furnace when it should be turned up.

• Re-engineer the restaurant workflow. Skip the bread basket entirely. If you love bread, place one piece or two on your small plate and leave it untouched until you’re halfway through your entree. This fills you up on the right things first, allowing you to enjoy the bread while reducing the blood sugar spike.

• Leave processed condiments on the shelves. Standard salad dressings rely on industrial seed oils and questionable ingredients to make them shelf stable. Commercial sauces are loaded with sodium and exhaustive ingredient lists that turn a perfectly good meal into a toxic burden. Create variety from dry spices instead. If food doesn’t taste good without burying it under bottled sauces, it’s probably time to do a Reset.

• Apply the 3pm coffee boundary. If you choose to have coffee, sit and sip it ideally with a pinch of warming cardamom after you’ve fully cleaned up from lunch. This gives your digestion a little time to settle. Cardamom acts as a natural neutralizer: it alters the harsh acids to protect your stomach lining, while smoothing out the caffeine spike so you get steady mental clarity instead of an anxious adrenaline rush. Regardless, if you already had your morning coffee, then matcha, herbal tea, or CCF tea (1 tsp each of whole cumin, coriander, and fennel seeds simmered in hot water) is the call. Absolutely no coffee after 3pm if you intend to protect tonight’s sleep and tomorrow morning’s energy.

• Honor the leftovers. You can always take leftovers home for tomorrow’s lunch. Just add a generous amount of fresh spinach or kale to your meal when reheating. Eat slow, eat until satisfied, never stuffed.

Three foundational lunches

These are not quick pulls from the fridge inhaled standing up. Nor are they complicated gourmet performances.

They’re intentional, repeating routines.

Grilled mackerel, Korean style

Mackerel is a wonderfully rich, oily, and robust fish.

This classic Korean technique uses a light dusting of curry powder as an aromatic tool — not to make the fish taste like a curry dish, but to cut through the intense oiliness, balance the flavor profile, and stoke your digestive fire.

Ingredients

• Fresh mackerel, 1 whole (or pre-cut and pre-cleaned)

• Rice water if you’re starting with whole mackerel. This is the starchy water captured from rinsing white rice before cooking it. You’ll need enough to submerge the fish

• Chickpea (besan) flour, 1 tablespoon

• Curry powder, 1 tablespoon (alternatively use 1tsp garlic powder + 1 tsp cracked black pepper, pinch of sea salt)

• Avocado oil

• Fresh lemon, optional

Instructions

If you buy a whole fish, clean it and remove its innards. Soak the cleaned mackerel in rice water for 10 to 15 minutes to draw out excess fishy odor and surface blood. Rinse under cold water, pat dry with paper towels, and cut into halves. Or buy prepped halves, which is what I do — it takes minutes to prep.

Mix the chickpea flour and curry powder together.

Lightly dust the fish, patting off any excess. You want to see the flesh peeking through the spices, not buried in a thick paste.

Put the frying pan on medium-high heat with a tiny wipe of avocado oil.

Once hot, place the pieces in skin-side down first to get a spectacular, crispy crunch. Let it grill for 1 to 2 minutes, until the skin turns crispy.

Flip it over, reduce heat to low, and let gently cook through for 3 to 5 minutes without burning the spices.

Finish with fresh lemon and serve with hot basmati rice cooked with a tablespoon of wakame, alongside kimchi or seasoned perilla leaves.

Note:

Standard white flour creates a sticky, damp paste on fish that bogs down your system. Chickpea flour is naturally lekhana (scraping); it absorbs surface moisture beautifully, delivers a light crispiness, and keeps the meal entirely starch-fee and gluten-free. It tastes amazing.

Baechu doenjang guk (napa cabbage soybean paste soup)

This is an absolute masterpiece of minimalist, therapeutic cooking. Unlike its heavier cousin, doenjang jjigae (stew), a traditional guk (soup) is light, highly fluid, and designed to cleanse and comfort.

From a clearing perspective, it doesn’t get better than this. Napa cabbage becomes beautifully tender, sweet, and cooling, while the deeply fermented paste provides a rich, grounding umami that fuels your digestive fire without adding a single drop of heavy fat.

Prep time: 10 minutes. Cook time: 20 minutes. Servings: 2.

Ingredients

• 1/2 head Napa cabbage (approximately 1/2 pound), cut into 2-inch chunks

• 4 to 5 cups clean bone broth (or filtered water)

• 2 tablespoons doenjang (Korean fermented soybean paste)

• 1 teaspoon gochujang (Korean red chili paste, optional but highly recommended for a tiny spark of heat to slice through stagnation)

• 1 teaspoon garlic, minced

• 2 scallions, cut into 2-inch lengths

• Optional depth: 4 to 5 fresh shiitake mushrooms, sliced

• Optional: tamari or fish sauce

Instructions

Bring your bone broth to a gentle boil in a medium pot, then reduce heat to medium-low.

Place your doenjang and gochujang directly into a small fine-mesh strainer, lowering the bottom of the strainer into the warm broth. Use the back of a spoon to press and dissolve the paste directly through the mesh into the liquid. This ensures a perfectly smooth broth and catches any large, unground whole soybeans. Discard any leftover sediment in the strainer.

Add in your cabbage and shiitakes.

Cover and simmer gently on medium-low for 12 to 15 minutes until the white cabbage stems lose their opacity and become translucent and tender.

Uncover and stir in the minced garlic and scallions, and simmer for 3-5 more minutes to let the fresh aromatics infuse the soup without overcooking.

Taste the broth. If it needs more depth, stir in a tiny splash of tamari or fish sauce.

Ladle it piping hot into a deep bowl.

Savory oatmeal in bone broth

This is the fastest complete lunch in the rotation. It takes the concept of comfort food and makes it actively scraping and drying, which is exactly what you want at midday when your digestive fire is strong but your afternoon requires absolute clarity.

Ingredients

1/2 cup rolled oats (not instant)

1 cup clean chicken bone broth (I love the Bonafide brand)

1 large handful dark leafy greens (baby spinach or kale)

Sliced fresh garlic

Fresh black pepper and sea salt

Optional: 1 soft-boiled egg or 3 oz leftover flaked fish

Instructions

Bring the bone broth to a gentle boil in a small pot. Stir in the oats. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the sliced garlic and greens. Cook for another 2 to 3 minutes until the greens have wilted completely. You want a loose, porridge-like consistency, not a dry, dense lump.

Remove from heat. Season with black pepper and sea salt.

Optional: top with your leftover fish or a halved soft-boiled egg.

Note:

Do not substitute water here. The clean chicken bone broth is what transforms this grain into a deeply sustaining, savory lunch. The collagen and minerals keep you full without the post-carb crash.

The pantry

To clear your midday decision fatigue once and for all, you need a resilient environment.

My Korean lineage informs this pantry setup, not as a sentimental preference, but because traditional East Asian ingredients are the ultimate toolkit for busy people.

They are deeply shelf-stable ingredients that act as therapeutic scraping (lekhana) agents to slice through metabolic sluggishness and clear your internal pathways without requiring you to track fragile, fresh grocery every single day.

We stock the non-perishables ‘once’ so that your weekly shopping decision shrinks to which fresh fish or greens look good?

Non-negotiable staples

Keep these stocked. On impossible days, you’ll make complete, nourishing meals out of them.

• White basmati rice: the easiest grain for your system to break down; runs entirely clean without taxing your digestive fire.

• Rolled oats: a fast-cooking, high-fiber option that absorbs savory broths beautifully to keep your energy steady.

• Dried shiitake mushrooms: a shelf-stable ingredient that actively breaks down lipid accumulations and supports clear blood vessels.

• Dried wakame: a mineral-rich sea vegetable that clears lymphatic stagnation and helps accelerate natural elimination.

• Dried kombu: the ultimate metabolic catalyst; a deep-sea seaweed that breaks down heavy starches, ignites your digestive fire, and prevents bloating.

• Bonito flakes: an instant, clean umami (savory) base that infuses stocks with amino acids to support tissue repair without adding heavy fat.

• Split yellow mung beans: the ultimate Ayurvedic cleaning foundation; gently scrapes toxins from the intestinal walls while grounding the nervous system.

• Canned white beans (cannellini or great northern): a fast, shelf-stable protein that sweeps the digestive tract clean when fresh options are unavailable.

• Canned tuna & mackerel (in water): immediate, clean, anti-inflammatory fats that optimize brain health and protect your vascular system.

• Miso paste: a live fermented paste that supports gut health and keeps your brain steady.

• Doenjang (Korean fermented soybean paste): a dense, deeply grounding fermented paste that cuts through internal sluggishness and soothes scattered energy.

• Nori sheets: a crisp, mineral-dense seaweed that provides thyroid support and cleanses low-grade debris from the digestive tract.

• Extra virgin olive oil: a clean fat that reduces inflammation; best used for drizzling at the end, never for high-heat cooking.

• Avocado oil or ghee: high-heat transporters that carry nutrients deep into body tissues without burning or oxidizing.

• Sesame oil: a deeply warming, heavy oil used in teeny amounts to ground the nervous system and soothe internal dryness.

• Chickpea flour: a drying, gluten-free coating agent that absorbs surface moisture and sweeps away internal congestion.

• Tahini: a rich, bitter sesame paste that provides grounded stability to quick meals without triggering heaviness.

• Bragg liquid aminos & tamari: clean, wheat-free liquid salinity that delivers immediate savory depth without the artificial additives of commercial sauces.

• Gochugaru (Korean chili flakes): a sun-dried pepper flake that cuts through heavy mucus layers and internal sluggishness. Note: unlike sharp cayenne, raw jalapeños, or vinegary hot sauces, sun-dried gochugaru sparks circulation without overheating the liver or triggering acidity.

• Gochujang (Korean chili paste): a functional spice complex that stimulates sluggish circulation and kindles digestive heat. Crucial note: avoid standard supermarket brands which are flooded with corn syrup. Look for clean brands like Mother-in-Law’s that stick to traditional, unadulterated ingredients.

• Whole & powdered spices (cumin, coriander, fennel, black mustard, cardamom, curry powder): a natural toolkit that kindles your digestive fire, balances the qualities of your food, and prevents gas or fermentation in the gut.

• Sea salt & black pepper: foundational minerals and flavor-enhancers that spark stomach acid production and clear out cellular stagnation.

• Raw walnuts & whole almonds: concentrated brain fats used as minor, functional additions to anchor energy without creating heaviness. Use sparingly.

• Raisins or currants: small, iron-rich dried fruits used in tiny amounts to sweep stagnation from the colon.

(more simple recipes to come using these ingredients)

The fresh rotation

Go with what looks fresh and matches your budget. Organic whenever possible. If time is your biggest concern, choose the pre-washed, pre-cut options. Be the hero in your work and relationships and come back to this when you have more bandwidth to reduce plastics use.

• Dark leafy greens (kale, spinach, broccoli rabe, dandelion, arugula, etc): these are natural brooms for the body; raw nourishment that filters out toxins.

• Fresh shiitakes, garlic, ginger, scallions, napa cabbage, celery, lemon: a powerful network of fresh aromatics that clear out congestion and brighten the palate.

• Kimchi: a live, sour, and pungent kinetic engine that instantly dissolves slow-moving food mass and clears internal sluggishness. And, bonus, microplastics. Just make sure you’re getting the local, perishable kimchi.

• Fresh fish & firm tofu: clean, lightweight proteins that build lean muscle tissue without generating metabolic sludge or heavy fats.

Functional Condiments

Pick up these low-intervention additions, if you like them, to create variety without reliance on bottles.

• Pickles, sauerkraut, olives, capers, and fresh ginger slices. Note on Honey: it’s great for a touch of sweetness, but absolutely do not cook with it; when heated, honey becomes completely indigestible and turns into ama (metabolic waste).

What my week looks like

• 4:15am: wake up. I drink only hot water, sometimes with lemon, until 7:30 or 8.

• 7:30am: I heat up a warm liquid blend of Mud/Wtr plus ground flax seed to act as my morning broom. Mud/Wtr is a mushroom, cacao, chai blend. I switch back to sipping hot water afterward until lunchtime. (Note: if you decide to try this out and purchase through my link, I get a small something something for it).

• 11:15am (the Master Anchor): Lunch. Fish (fresh or canned) + fresh greens seasoned with garlic, salt, and pepper, and finished with a teeny drizzle of olive oil + sometimes basmati rice. Or kitchari with greens cooked directly in, seasoned with Bragg liquid aminos. Or beans or tofu with greens. Or savory oatmeal cooked in chicken bone broth with handfuls of baby spinach. On a sweeter afternoon, oatmeal with fresh berries, a small amount of chopped walnuts, and half a banana or a chopped date cooked through.

• 4:30-5pm: Dinner is served and wrapped up by 6pm (with the exception of going out with friends). The menu mirrors lunch, choosing the more quickly digestible options to leave the liver unburdened overnight.

My sister doesn’t need an intense cleanse. Nor does she need a hyper-restrictive protocol. She needs one repeatable lunch that she can make on autopilot, sit down to, and eat while it’s still warm. The point isn’t the mackerel. It’s that she stops outsourcing the decision.

One warm, on-time, seated lunch is the minimum viable act of self-referral. It rewires the nervous system. It rebuilds self-trust. It becomes the entry point to reclaiming an entire life.

The repeats are good. The repeats with variety, assuming the choices are aligned with your body, allow for maximum creativity where it counts and ample slack when you’re out with friends.

The body keeps a meticulous ledger. Every override is a withdrawal. Every anchor honored is a deposit. It doesn’t moralize, it just tallies. And at some point, it sends the invoice, or the receipt.

Eat warm, breathe slow, keep a rhythm.

— Savitree

I needed change. A way to get out of my own head.

I didn’t like affirmations and gratitude lists, they felt disingenuous to me. I was baked skeptical, irritable, and a little bit sarcastic.

While my life from the outside looking in was nice, inside, I was unamazed, bored more than overwhelmed, and chronically low-level stressed. My job was the right kind of challenging, and I enjoyed it. I was good at it, but it wasn’t mine.

Becoming a new mom, things didn’t look the same anymore. Like going to the gym, I remember feeling like I was on a hamster wheel.

Why did I decide this was a good idea? What world am I showing my children? What lens will they look through?

Willing new thoughts didn’t work. Willing happiness didn’t work. Willing equanimity didn’t work.

I’m going to tell you what did work, what changed my life, and why I believe you need to do what I’m about to share with others, not alone.

I found a teacher who led a practice at 4:30am. It sounded insane… especially because I was a night owl. So of course I tried it. It had more meditation than asana. The yoga was weird, it didn’t flow like vinyasa. During savasana, my upper right lip twitched. But the drive home was different. I felt elevated in a way I had never felt before. My curiosity pulled me deeper, and a year later, I became a certified teacher.

But before that, my mind was already changed.

I still didn’t make gratitude lists, but I became a grateful skeptic through honest presence and cleaner boundaries. My life was turned right side up. And it only took 3 months of daily meditation to get me there.

Daily meditation doesn’t solve your problems. It’s not a firehose. It’s not to get your heart rate down when you’re feeling the fight-or-flight. Nor is it a hiding place.

Daily meditation is the most important date in your life, with your highest self. A daily opportunity to earn self-trust. By learning to stop re-negotiating with yourself and showing up when you need yourself the most. By learning to anchor when life gets slow and when it gets too fast. When the best things happen, and when crises happen.

It begins to show you the effects of every choice you make in your day. You gain courage to see yourself behind closed doors, not performing, not socializing, not distracted by screens or even books. It starts to show you who you are when you’re not afraid. And what you do when you are.

For that to happen, the sadhana itself cannot be entertainment. It’s repetitive. Arguably boring. Your mind drifts to your to-do list. And it’s up to you to decide what you’ll do – or not do – next.

This isn’t about enlightenment. It’s about becoming self-referred: living through your deepest priorities, values, and sense of personal integrity. Doing what you would do if you had sustained capacity and could harness courage.

Enter the Huddle

This is the fourth anchor. The one that makes the other three actually stick.

It’s important to be able to practice on your own. Remember when you tried working out with a friend as a motivator? The problem was, when she bailed, you did too. It’s important to be able to hold the rhythm yourself. It makes it portable, more flexible, and consistent.

Practicing alone, however, comes with the danger of using it as a hiding place. Which is not what meditation is for.

So it’s important to practice in a group. Because the benefits of group meditation scale exponentially rather than additively. When a group sits down together, the steady rhythm of one person stabilizes the person next to them, whether local or remote. The collective drops its baseline cortisol and settles into a shared parasympathetic safety zone at a rate an individual simply can’t achieve on its own. And when you miss for too long, the group reminds you to come back.

This is why one Huddle member repeatedly tells me, “I can’t explain why, but my days are different when I show up to sadhana.”

Bonus: you automatically gain a teacher on the other end who can answer questions and support you through the tantrums that come up through asynchronous chat.

I started the Sadhana Huddle shortly after moving my work online, because I know how important group meditation is. And, selfishly, I wanted it for myself.

Here’s what happens in the Huddle:

You get on Zoom. We tune in together with Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo. 3x. This calls on your wisdom, the Infinite Intelligence that lives within you. We do meditation sets + light body movement. The sets I choose often include breathwork and mantra. Breathwork to bring in vitality and move the energy through the system with the most efficiency. Mantra to code over the negative self-talk that won’t let you still. We take a short savasana to integrate the work. We close with one long Sat Nam – to call up and acknowledge your Truth.

It’s deep, connective tissue without the use of words, socialization, or performance. You just show up and follow the practice. You leave. Your baseline, your standards, go up without thinking about it. Without having to will it.

I know what you’re thinking: I don’t know if I can do this every day.

I started sadhana once a week. Then 3 times. Then 5. Then 7. I’ve been practicing sadhana daily now since 2005, with only a handful of misses. It strengthened my gut-brain connection, my nervous system. It slowed down the ball flying at me so I have time to decide how I want to meet it. No, the world doesn’t slow down. The mind slows it down. It’s cool. Yes, mistakes keep happening, but I no longer beat myself up. Instead, I genuinely see the gifts in them.

You don’t become a nice person who’s “neutral.” You become the You that you’ve been yearning to become, emotions intact. And as you keep going, you step into your next higher version. Your operating system keeps upgrading, and the world keeps shifting with you. It just can’t be helped.

But for today, showing up daily increases your capacity to show up and sit with others despite what’s going on inside. And to feel safe.

Show up. Rearrange. So the world can do the same.

The Sadhana Huddle.

M-F, 6 to 6:30am central (Chicago) time.

Morning for some, afternoon for others, evening for a few. The anchor is the same. Show up. Practice. Leave. Try it on your own on the weekends. Chat asynchronously on your terms.

This is for annual subscribers.

→ Join me.

– Savitree

Two messages from my doctor, seven weeks apart.

April 8: “I reviewed your results. There is enough here that I think we need to talk about it.”

May 29: “I reviewed your results and they are normal.”

The first was about my cholesterol. The second was about my heart.

When I refused the statin in April, my doctor offered an alternative: a CT cardiac calcium score. It’s a scan that looks for calcified plaque in your coronary arteries. The buildup that leads to heart attacks. Your score is a number. Zero means no detectable plaque. Higher means more.

I said yes.

Let me be clear: I am not playing chicken with my health, and I am not anti-medicine. Western medicine is brilliant when the crisis is acute. But when a condition is chronic, we have options, and we have time. I choose to take absolute responsibility for my choices.

Life got in the way of scheduling it immediately. I was leaving for Korea and Japan at the end of April. I took the scan on May 27, seven weeks into the experiment.

Here are my results:

Left main: 0
Left anterior descending: 0
Left circumflex: 0
Right coronary: 0

Total Agatston coronary calcium score: 0

All four arteries. Zero across the board.

I sat with that for a while.

My cholesterol is high. My LDL is elevated. By the standard playbook, those numbers point toward risk: plaque, narrowing, the slow accumulation that leads to intervention.

But my arteries are clean.

The numbers said one thing. The body said something else.

Here’s the question that kept coming up for me, and I want to be honest about it because when I first saw those zeros, I didn’t have the answer:

Was there plaque seven weeks ago that the scraper foods cleared?

For seven weeks I ate scraper foods: bitter greens, oats, garlic, flax, the full protocol from “What Heart-Healthy Gets Wrong.“ I wasn’t rigid about it. I ate my way through Korea and Japan. I had matcha ice cream at Kyoto’s Golden Temple. I had every banchan dish my family put on the table. And then I came home and returned to my anchors.

But then I went looking for the hard science, and the physiology told me something clearer and much more grounding: No.

Calcified plaque takes decades to harden. Seven weeks of an imperfect protocol cannot dissolve a structural fortress. If my score was zero on May 27, it was zero in April when my doctor first panicked.

A calcium scan only reads the hardened past, the old scars of long-standing damage. It does not see the soft, uncalcified lipid tracking of the present, the circulating debris floating through the bloodstream right now.

And that’s exactly where I realized what 21 years of practice actually built. It didn’t make me immune; my circulating numbers still rose. But two decades of a settled nervous system, internal alignment, and functional agni prevented the systemic inflammation that acts like glue.

Total cholesterol isn’t the sole author of a heart attack. Inflammation is.

Inflammation is the sandpaper that irritates the vascular walls, creating the wounds where circulating lipids get trapped, oxidize, and build dangerous, soft, volcanic blisters. If your blood vessels aren’t inflamed, the cargo doesn’t park. It just floats through the transit lanes.

The slack held the infrastructure clean while the numbers rose. My practice didn’t give me a get-out-of-jail-free card; it just gave me a clean job site to do the real work.

What that looks like in the data:
Most people with my cholesterol numbers would have an HDL around 40. Mine is 60. Same blood test. Same results that triggered the statin conversation. My body’s clearing system didn’t degrade even while the cholesterol climbed. The cleaning crew is strong. Twenty-one years of practice built that crew. The protocol I’m on now is just giving them more to work with.

While that’s not a free pass, it’s a head start.
And it’s why I’m doing this experiment instead of taking the statin: the foundation is still there. The body is still responsive. I’m giving an intact system the right materials: scraper foods, rhythm, and timing.

And btw, when I talk about “scraper” foods, I don’t mean they act like a literal steel-wool brush inside your blood vessels to erase plaque. They work upstream, intercepting the load before it ever reaches your arteries. Spices like garlic and turmeric ignite the digestive fire (agni), preventing food from turning into metabolic waste. Soluble fiber in flax acts like a sponge in the gut, binding to cholesterol-heavy bile and escorting it out of the body entirely.

Two weeks ago, in “The Signal Ozempic Silences,” I wrote about the gap between what a lab report flags and what your tissue actually looks like. My cholesterol put me at a structural risk by the Western framework. But the ancestral map tells a different story: the lipids are circulating, but because systemic inflammation is low, they haven’t been able to park. My arterial tissue is untouched. The invoice is screaming. The ledger is quiet.

That gap — between the circulating data feed and the actual state of the tissue — is the whole argument for why signal literacy matters more than a static lab result. The lab result tells you where the system flagged something. It doesn’t tell you what’s actually happening in your body. Only your body tells you that.

My doctor looked at the scan and wrote “normal.” She’s right.
But “normal” doesn’t capture what I actually learned. What I learned is that the ledger is more patient than the invoice. That the body gives you more time than the medical system suggests. If you’ve been making deposits.

I want to tell you what the last seven weeks actually looked like. Because I know some of you are reading this thinking I must have been monk-mode strict since April.

I wasn’t.

Here’s what I did: I ate warm, on-time lunches on most days. While in Asia, my anchor meal was breakfast. I made scraper foods the backbone of my meals: kitchari, bitter greens sautéed lightly in avocado or olive oil, garlic in almost everything. I protected my dinner timing: earlier, lighter, giving my body the overnight window it needs to do its clearing work.

Here’s what I also did: I ate out in Seoul with family. Bibimbap and japchae and every side dish on the table. I ate soba with herring in Kyoto. Wagyu in my hot pot at a cooking class in Tokyo. The bento box on the flight home.

I came back to Chicago, missed my kitchen, and made spinach kitchari with bone broth my first day back.

The return rate was the practice, not the streak.
Instead of punishing the misses, I shortened the distance between the miss and the return. Some weeks, 90/10 was more like 80/20. But the anchor was always there. The warm lunch. The dinner timing. The morning practice.

And the arteries held.

The experiment isn’t over. July 22 is the follow-up blood test. That’s the original finish line, the day my doctor and I agreed we would look at the data and determine whether the statin conversation reopens.

Before I left for Asia, my Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner handed me a bottle of red yeast rice, a whole-herb source of the compound from which prescription statins were originally derived. He told me to take it and just enjoy the trip.

The bottle sat in my suitcase, untouched, the entire time I was in Korea and Japan.

I wanted to see what my baseline architecture could do first.
If I ever need a secondary intervention to help manage this lipid load, that supplement is where I’ll turn. It’s a sovereign choice, not a fearful reaction.

But for now, I have seven more weeks.

The question I walked into this experiment asking was: Can I force this external number down using only food?

Essentially, I was treating the lab report like an aggressive bill collector.

The question I’m sitting with now is different: How do I partner with a biological system that has been this patient with me?

I’m still eating the scraper foods. Still protecting dinner timing. Still returning to my anchors after every miss. But I am no longer doing it out of a defensive contraction to satisfy an invoice. I’m doing it to support the cleaning crew already on the floor.

The blood test in July will give us a fresh data feed. It will show whether the circulating lipids have responded to the timing and the bitter greens. I will share those results with you, even if they are messy.

Because the experiment was never about achieving a perfect chart to prove I’m bulletproof. It was about learning to read the ledger.

Four arteries. All zeros. A home base that waited for me to return.

That’s the ledger.

— Savitree

P.S. The standard playbook treats high cholesterol numbers as an isolated billing error: the number is wrong, here’s a pill that corrects it. But the physiology doesn’t work that way. Circulating lipids only become a crisis when they meet inflamed arterial walls. Inflammation is the glue. And the primary driver of systemic inflammation is not saturated fat. It’s a nervous system that never downshifts, a cortisol rhythm that never completes, an operating system that mistakes chronic urgency for drive. Your numbers won’t park if your infrastructure is settled. That’s not an argument against medication. It’s an argument for asking a better question than “what’s my number?” Namely, “what’s keeping the match wet?”

The shift from externally-referred grind to an internally anchored architecture doesn’t happen by reading essays. It happens by changing the daily hardware protocols. We reset the nervous and glandular systems inside the Sadhana Huddle, M-F, 6:00 to 6:30 AM Central (Chicago) time. Go annual to join.

I’ve spent nearly two decades telling people to trust their bodies. As a kundalini yoga and meditation teacher since 2006, and an Ayurvedic practitioner for almost as long, “listen to your body” has been one of my core teachings.

And it’s true. Your body has immense wisdom. It’s equipped with systems designed not just to help you survive, but to help you thrive. It knows how to find equilibrium after stress, how to signal rest, how to nudge you toward action when you’ve been still too long.

But here’s what I’ve learned: “listen to your body” only works when your body is speaking a language you can trust.

If your instrument is out of tune, listening to it will lead you in circles.

Let me show you what I mean.

When listening fails

Consider three common scenarios.

“My body wants a salad. And some sliced fruit. I know because it feels good to have them.”

This can be true. But if you suffer from chronic health issues, anxiety, or are on medications, raw cold foods may be making things worse, not better.

Cold salads feel light and “balancing” against feelings of heaviness or stuckness. But raw food requires immense agni — digestive fire — for your body to cook and process it.

When the nervous system is unstable, that digestive fire is weak or erratic. Raw, cold foods increase the very qualities that aggravate an already frayed nervous system.

Cooked foods with warming spices are pre-digested by heat. They ground you. That’s what anxiety, attention deficits, dizziness, emotional sensitivity, dryness, and disrupted sleep actually need.

“My pregnant body is craving a Wendy’s cheeseburger. So I guess it’s telling me I need one.”

Whether it’s a pregnancy craving or a deep behavioral addiction, we often crave most what we need to let go of.

This isn’t the body asking for more sugar, saturated fats, or caffeine. It’s the body saying it’s dysregulated — nutritionally, energetically, or emotionally.

The craving is real. The interpretation is the problem.

“I have a headache. It’s not dehydration — I’ve been drinking tons of water. So I need ibuprofen.”

This one is the most deceptive because it sounds reasonable. But what if the headache isn’t a hydration issue at all? What if it’s your liver struggling under the load of last night’s late meal, or unprocessed emotion lodged in the shoulders and neck, or a circadian rhythm that’s been ignored for weeks?

The ibuprofen silences the signal without ever asking what the signal meant. You “listened” to your body and gave it exactly the wrong thing: a mute button.

The three voices your body speaks in

You cannot listen to your body if your body is speaking the language of its imbalances.

Until the instrument is tuned, you don’t listen to it. You follow the protocol to tune it.

Depending on its state of health, your body speaks in one of three voices:

The voice of the Conditioned Whim. This is the distorted body. When your system is carrying a heavy toxic load — what Ayurveda calls ama — or dealing with addiction, behavioral loops, or deep nervous system dysregulation, your signaling system is off. Cravings masquerade as intuition. Impulses feel like truth. You reach for the cold salad, the cheeseburger, the ibuprofen, and you call it “listening to your body.” You’re listening to static.

The voice of the Rules. This is the Scaffold. When a person is sick, addicted, or deeply out of balance, they cannot trust their immediate desires. They lack the clarity to decode the signal. So they need an external structure: a protocol, a framework, a set of practices to follow while the instrument retunes. This is where Ayurveda and the Four Anchors come in. You don’t ask a broken compass for directions. You look at a trusted map until the signal recalibrates.

The voice of True Resonance. This is the clean body. This is the goal. When the baseline is clean, grounded, and healthy, you can truly listen. The body speaks clearly. You hear it. You trust it. And the loop between signal and response becomes fluid, almost effortless.

What the Scaffold asks of you

I’m just the guide. The ultimate teacher is within you. I’m here to point you to her by sharing the Scaffold, and asking you to sit through the tantrums that come with this work — don’t quit, don’t react, don’t turn back — until your ultimate teacher emerges.

You’ll know when she does. Not because you’re doing it perfectly, but because you’ll feel the stillness within the pressure cooker, the chaos that is life, and you’ll start meeting it with constancy, equanimity, and an underlying sense of trust and joy.

How do you get from the distorted body to the clean one?

You start with the Scaffold that feels most accessible to you right now. For most people, that gateway is one warm, on-time, sit-down lunch. Not a smoothie. Not a salad. Not whatever you can grab between meetings. One cooked meal, eaten seated, at roughly the same time each day. Spiced. Warm. Grounding.

This single practice begins to quiet the baseline static. It stabilizes blood sugar, which stabilizes mood. It sends a signal to the nervous system: you are safe, you are fed, you can come down now. Over days and weeks, the instrument starts to tune itself. The static fades. The real signals become audible.

That’s when you can finally listen.

If you’re ready to start

Until your instrument is finely tuned, “listening to your body” is an empty phrase. You don’t ask a broken compass for directions. You need the rules before you can trust the resonance.

So start with the rules. The 5-Day Digestion & Energy Reset is the Scaffold in its simplest form: five days of warm, spiced, pre-digested food — kitchari — doing one job, which is to quiet the baseline static. Nothing to decode. No cravings to interpret. No asking an out-of-tune body what it wants. Just the protocol, followed, while the instrument retunes. By the fifth day, most people feel the noise drop — and for the first time in a while, the signal coming through is actually theirs.

It’s free. Subscribe and it’s yours.

That’s where listening begins.

— Savitree

Twice in the last month, someone has asked me what I think about Ozempic.

Here’s what I think.

They work. They’re not evil. For someone whose body has passed the point where food and rhythm can reach it — where the damage is structural and the crisis is acute — these drugs can be necessary intervention.

But for most people reaching for them, the question isn’t “does it work?”

It’s “what are you silencing when you bypass the signal?”

There’s a framework, thousands of years old, that maps six stages between “something’s off” and “you’re in a crisis.” It comes from Ayurveda, one of the oldest medical systems in the world.

Here’s the short version:

At stage 1, you feel it. Something’s off. Nothing dramatic, just persistent. You’re tired in a way rest doesn’t fix. Your digestion is sluggish. You’re foggy at 3pm. Your doctor says you’re fine.

At stage 2, it overflows. The imbalance exceeds its container. You’re reaching for coffee earlier, crashing harder, sleeping worse.

At stage 3, it spreads. The symptoms move: sinuses, skin, joints, mood, energy. You feel it everywhere and nowhere. Your bloodwork still looks normal. You take Benadryl for the sinus. Ibuprofen for the headache. Melatonin for the sleep. Each one silences the alarm without addressing the source.

At stage 4, it parks. The imbalance finds a weak spot, created by genetics, old injuries, emotional patterns, and settles in. Tissue damage begins.

At stage 5, your doctor finally sees it. High blood pressure. High LDL. A scan that comes back positive. Western medicine meets you here. And prescribes a pill to manage the numbers.

At stage 6, the damage is structural. Acute crisis. Intervention is no longer optional.

Here’s what most people don’t realize:

Stages 1 through 3 are all food, rhythm, and listening. That’s not alternative medicine. That’s just paying attention earlier.

If you’re exercising regularly, getting enough sleep and water, and eating what you think is healthy, and still something feels off, that’s not aging. Nor is it “just life.” That’s your body at stage 1, tapping you on the shoulder.

Distract from it and it speaks louder.

I've written the full six stages in detail here, including what each stage looks like in your body and where the conventional approach breaks down.

GLP1s aren’t the problem. They’re the most visible example of a much larger pattern: external referral as the default operating system.

We’re groomed to look outside ourselves the moment something feels off. Another pill, another app, another expert. The signal gets silenced rather than interpreted.

Here’s what no one tells you about silencing a signal:

Force the body away from one, and it finds another. Suppress the weight gain, and the imbalance redirects. Suppress that, and it redirects again.

This is why the external referral method ends with a tray of pills on the kitchen table.

Not because anything’s wrong with your body but because it keeps trying to talk to someone who stopped listening.

Your body’s intelligence is remarkable. It speaks to you, protects you, and does whatever it needs to reach equilibrium. It doesn’t ask you to take the easy, most comfortable way. It asks you to do what will keep you fully alive and thriving. Safe, not from discomfort, but from self-abandon.

That’s the dis-ease most people feel. Not disease. Dis-ease. The low hum of living out of alignment with your own signals.

How do you start listening?

You practice. Three times a day, you eat. Three times a day, you get a chance to practice the opposite of what GLP1 culture represents.

One warm, on-time, sit-down lunch without a screen is a stage 1 intervention. It’s the daily practice of catching the signal before it becomes a crisis.

It’s claiming time and space to sit down, chew slowly, and listen in.

It sounds simple because it is.

But simple isn’t easy. Because the first thing your nervous system does when you slow down is throw a tantrum. That restlessness, that urge to check your phone, that voice saying “this is a waste of time” — those are withdrawal symptoms from external referral. From years of living on borrowed values and borrowed urgency.

Get through that, and you begin to access something else entirely.

There’s an image I keep coming back to:

Break open a seed and it looks hollow. Empty. Nothing there.

But encoded in that emptiness is everything. The intelligence to become exactly what it’s meant to be. It already is. It just hasn’t been given the chance to realize it yet.

Self-referral is what gives it the chance. You’ll know you’re there because you’ll feel safe enough in your own skin to follow through on your yes and your no.

Dis-ease becomes ease. Stage 1 stays stage 1. You claim back your vitality. Your clarity. Your courage.

That’s the difference between managing a disease and never arriving at one.

New here? Start here: the four essays that explain everything.

Already reading? The Sadhana Huddle and the tools behind the method are inside paid membership.

→ Start Here

→ Join paid membership

— Savitree

I just got back from Korea and Japan. It had a profound impact on me in a way that going to other places in the world hadn’t.

These two countries have something we in the U.S. are missing: service and respect deeper than anything I’ve ever experienced. And a sense of responsibility to protect safety and harmony in their communities.

What they don’t seem to have is self-referral. It’s all about duty. They’ve collectively decided to rise up together to become “better countries” … at the expense of their own Joy. I saw the extreme pros and cons in this.

We in the West have the capacity to bridge that gap. Because while we may not be great at it, we do care a lot about personal sovereignty. And we are simply, almost genetically, more “rebellious”.

Our frustrations lie in this battle between two forces: self-referral — what we actually want for ourselves, and external-referral — how we think we’re supposed to look doing it. Yes, they can conflict.

When we are self-referred, we access a higher level of service, respect, and ownership. We deliver safety and harmony within ourselves, and thereby in others. And. We experience Joy.

Which can only be accessed when our digestive and nervous systems are strong. Meaning we can process life in real time. We can relax when we need to (not when we think we need to, but when we actually need to). And we can take action when we need to (rather than out of performative urgency or optics).

My publication is called Food as Medicine because food is something we need daily. It’s the gateway to steady energy, clarity of consciousness, and deep sense of safety — what we need in order to do right for ourselves and others.

Coming home, we cannot instantly change a chaotic culture, but we can command our own biology. To build the infrastructure for self-referral right here, the first move is a Reset. Three to five days of simplified eating, not as a diet but as a proof of concept. To show you what’s possible. Three days is enough to see that focus and sustained energy aren’t things you have to chase. They’re what happens when digestion isn’t working overtime.

From there, you leverage this by establishing Rhythm. The Four Anchors set throughout the day give you access to yourself, no matter how busy, no matter where in the world you are. This is where the paid subscription lives. And for women who want witnessing and accountability, the Anchor Circle is there.

The reason this order matters is that people come to me in crisis, in fight-or flight, wanting the practice to save them. It can’t — not from that state. And the moment things feel “good enough,” the practice stops. Until the next crisis.

The anchors aren’t for emergencies. They’re what make emergencies less likely.

These simple daily protocols give you access to your internal powers. Yes, powers. And they are built on over time. To deliver sovereignty. Through self-referral.

True freedom isn’t just doing whatever you want, whenever you want. True freedom is having a nervous system steady enough, and a digestive fire clean enough, to choose your responses rather than react to your environment. It’s the transition from external alignment to internal authority.

Here’s what I want to know from you. Aside from the Four Anchors, what would you like to know more about to become self-referred? To activate your natural healing abilities? To soothe your frayed nervous system?

Cast your vote below, and let's begin building the infrastructure together.

Eat warm. Move well. Come home to yourself.

—Savitree

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My travel to Korea and Japan has had a profound impact on me that I’ve yet to unpack.

Partially because Korea was my birthplace, so I have a special connection to it.
But mostly because of the way the people live. And while I’ve always loved Korean and Japanese food, I had no idea just how connected food was to the way they live.

Korea has a culture that has a name: pali-pali.

It means hurry, hurry. It doesn’t mean to rush everywhere. It means to advance in no time.

When I was born (1968), Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world with per capita GDP at less then $200, putting it below much of sub-Saharan Africa. Now, it sits among the world’s top 15 economies, a global tech giant built in less than a single lifetime.

After freedom from Japan’s occupation, Korea saw what was happening in the West, and they adopted this pali-pali culture to meet it — and beyond. They made it. Not just economically. The world now loves their food, movies, and music.

But the cost was high.
You can’t tell because they’re so well put together, but they’re tired.
They have one of the highest suicide rates in the world. The burden to achieve is so high, they’ve stopped bringing children into the world, driving the fertility rate down to 0.72, the lowest in human history and well below the 2.1 needed to sustain a society.

Both Korea and Japan drink a lot of coffee, like the U.S.
But neither Korea or Japan walk around their streets with lattes in hand.
Nor do they eat walking or driving around.
They sit in cafes, and they eat warm.

In Japan, they have a word for walking while eating or drinking: Aruki-kui. And it’s considered bad manners.
Korea looks at it as a lack of self-regulation or dignity, a sign that your time is completely managing you rather than the other way around.

As densely populated their cities are — Seoul, Busan, Osaka, Tokyo — people aren’t raging. Amid the density, there’s efficiency.

No one is raging over where the frickin line begins and ends — the lines are incredibly clear.

People stand on one side of the escalator so those that want to walk can move through on the other side.

They move through spaces like they’re of one mind.
When one accidentally bumps into another, there’s no raging. They just move on.

They respect space. For meals. And for each others’ stuff.
When I go to other parts of the world, including the U.S., I’m reminded to keep my phone in my zipped-up pocket. Watch for pick-pocketers.

In Korea and Japan, to save a seat at a cafe, I can literally place my purse down on the table and walk away. Stand in line. Go to the bathroom. Even if the table is outside on the corner of busy.

Growing up in Chicago, I was made to believe that the denser the population, the more violent people become. Yet Tokyo, a metropolis of 37 million people, consistently ranks as one of the safest cities on earth, turning the myth of urban chaos completely on its head.

Back home, there’s something else happening. A lack of respect — for space and property. And for each other.

Yes, suicide may be a problem in Korea. But mass shootings aren’t. Pick-pocketing isn’t. There’s no fear of personal attack.

Safety in Japan and Korea is rooted in Wa (harmony) and a deep-seated aversion to Meiwaku (inflicting trouble/shame on others).

Stealing a phone isn’t seen just as a crime against the owner but as a rupture in the safety of the entire space. The social cost of breaking the collective trust is devastating.

Voltaire said, the health of the nation depends on the digestion of the Prime Minister.

I can’t help but make this correlation.

Breakfast begins with the country’s version of miso, rice, fish, and pickled vegetables. Warm. People aren’t shoveling food down and treating their bodies like trash compacters. The rest of the day’s meals is also warm. Soups, more pickled or fermented veggies, nori, fish, meat, rice, green tea.

They make the most incredible sweets. Their ice cream, sweet yams, Monte Blancs, and red bean desserts are to die for. Just sweet enough to be incredibly delicious without feeling like you’re going to sugar crash.

Helped by their infrastructure, which fully supports walking and taking public transportation. You can’t help but get 10-20,000 steps in every day. Even as a local.

The sounds in Japan’s intersections, elevators, and train stations are chosen specifically to calm the nervous system. They’re intentional that way.

Having said all that, I feel lucky to live where I do (because of something we have that I’ll cover in a bit).

And to be able to travel and see other parts of the world. It lets me see what they have right. What we can adopt here. What we can bridge…

1. Neither Korea nor Japan have garbage cans or alleyways with garbage dumpsters. This makes you mindful of the garbage you make. When you make garbage, it’s your personal responsibility, and you carry it with you. — I feel like I’ve been Marie Kondo’d while there. Already leaning minimal, I’ll be working on creating less garbage and minimizing my belongings to keep only what I absolutely love and move the rest on for others to enjoy.

2. Korea and Japan are masters of “scraper” foods: foods that not only nourish the body and are “heart-healthy” but scrape the ama (toxins) that are floating or getting stuck along our arterial walls and flush them through. They sit and eat warm, scraping foods made delicious. — Spurred on by my high cholesterol reading and trip to Korea & Japan, I’m now more obsessed with scraper foods than ever. I hope to share these with you in future posts.

3. They sit to consume. — I know that I’m much less likely to walk around with drink in hand now. Even Ayurveda recommends sitting down to drink; drinking while standing or walking increases Vata, which can increase joint pain and anxiety.

In the U.S. our pali-pali looks different.
It’s a kind of urgency that doesn’t let us sit. Or respect each others space, including our own: we don’t tidy up after ourselves as much as they do (again, think Marie Kondo). We have innovation but lack the respect that translates into kindness (greetings in Korea & Japan is met with a bow).

They say freedom comes with responsibility.
We claim freedom but forget the responsibility.

There’s so much here in Western culture to be proud of: we are more relaxed in general.

Let’s live into that and sit down. Eat warm. Chew. Stop running around like we can’t manage our time. Get more respectful of our own space. And see how that translates into our connection with each other.

One thing I didn’t like seeing in both Korea and Japan is that they are on their phones. Like all the time. Yes, we have that issue in the West too. But not to their extent.

While their trains are impeccably clean, high tech, efficient, on time — and silent (everyone is on their phones so as not to disrupt), ours is trashy. But the first thing I noticed taking the train back home from O’Hare airport (to avoid the horrendous 4pm traffic)? The train cars were full and people were talking to each other, smiling, and making eye contact.

We have an incredible, relaxed capacity for joy and connection in the West that doesn’t exist in the rigid structures of Tokyo or Seoul. But right now we are shouting for our freedom while forgetting the responsibility that keeps that freedom safe. We’ve mastered innovation, but we’ve dropped the micro-protocols of respect that translate into everyday kindness.

Sit down. Make space. Eat warm. Drink coffee sitting down. Respect your time. Claim that space. Stop making garbage. Calm your nervous system amid chaos.

And see how that rolls out into respect for everything else.

—Savitree

Every morning around 9am, we meet our guide for the day in the hotel lobby.

Lunch time has become a huge variable because it can take time to walk through an historic village or Buddhist Temple, and seldom do we want to eat or snack there.

So our food anchor has become breakfast. Something we can count on that’s included with our accommodations.

With this breakfast anchor, desperate decisions aren’t made during the day surrounded by food galore as we walk through food markets and temples villages.

And when I do deviate from my 90-day plan, it’s not out of desperation because I’m “starving.” It’s because it was the right moment for celebration.

Because enjoying matcha ice cream with Larry at the Golden Temple was right.

Not because I couldn’t say no. It wasn’t a failed attempt at staying “clean.” It was a pause. An intentional yes.

And, I had the “scouring” Japanese breakfast following my morning wake-up stack: meditation, arm swinging, and hot water sips to afford me this slack.

But it took me a few days to get there, mentally.

I was so “good” leading up to the trip, it took some self-coaching to remind myself that there were other ways to clog up my arteries: cortisol.

Negotiation is cortisol. The internal can I, should I creates friction. And cortisol acts like biological glue. It cancels out whatever scraping the breakfast did.

Joy is the opposite. The awe of a moment, the ease of connection — these literally open the vessels. The sovereign choice isn’t always the cleanest meal. It’s the one eaten without static.

Can this become a slippery slope? Absolutely. The trick is to know when you’re tricking or being honest with yourself. And paying attention to your body’s feedback loops: the 3pm audit, 9pm scan, and how you wake up.

I do plan on enjoying some ramen while in Japan. And a wagyu cooking class in Tokyo had already been lined up before I got my blood test results.

This doesn’t mean all is lost. It means I won’t be having Wagyu (or meat other than fish) on any other night. Fortunately I love fish, soba noodles, and matcha tea just as much if not more.

But when it’s time for Wagyu, ramen, and matcha ice cream, it will be enjoyed. Unapologetically.

—Savitree

Dispatch from the field: traveling Korea and Japan while navigating my 90-day health experiment.

This is that dispatch.

Left for the airport on Thursday, 8:45am. Connection flight in Tokyo. Checked in at our hotel in Seoul around midnight local time (or ~10am Friday Chicago time).

Total travel time from home to hotel: ~25 hrs

What I ate:

Breakfast before taking off: a mug of Mud/Wtr (a mushroom adaptogen drink) + oatmeal.

Took my hot water thermos, packets of matcha, and walnuts.

Our 12:45pm flight to Tokyo included 3 meals. I pre-ordered the Japanese meal; it was better for my 90-day protocol. Thank god I did — my neighbor across the aisle tried to get the same thing and they had run out, so she had the Western Dining option. She said it wasn’t great.

2pm: Appetizer & entree was served (lunch).

2:45pm: Dessert option of cheese & crackers or ice cream sundae. I asked for just the vanilla ice cream and enjoyed two delicious scoops. It was surprisingly amazing.

The idea was to enjoy my meals and get responsibly satiated so I don’t reach for snacks or feel austere.

I had them top off my thermos with hot water three times during this trip. Twice, I put in matcha.

I meditated for an hour, then slept three hours on this flight.

The “Before Arrival” meal came around 11:40pm (Chicago time).

We’d be landing 2 hrs after this meal, at 3:30pm Tokyo time.

With a 4.5 hr connection to Seoul + 2.5 hr connection flight, we’d get to our hotel close to midnight local time.

I said yes to this meal.

Had the rice, pickled side, miso, and a quarter of the salmon.

We landed at 3:30pm — perfect timing for my 3pm audit: I felt only slightly tired. Relaxed-tired instead of wired-tired. Instead of sitting at the airport waiting for our connection to Seoul, I walked around, moved my body, and stretched. I refrained from staring at my phone the entire time. Then slept a solid hour on the last leg of our flight.

Unexpectedly, they served us a full meal. Didn’t know they did that on a two-hour flight!

It was 9pm Tokyo time. I felt I should have said no to it, but couldn’t refuse the bibimbop. Skipped the egg, bun, and dessert.

On that first night in Seoul, I did my bedtime stack and slept 5 solid hours.

Up at 5:30am. Wake-up stack: Bathroom ritual, hot water sips, stretch, and meditation.

Then walked the neighborhood before breakfast.

First meal at our hotel, 9am: mackerel, soft tofu, rice, ginseng tea, and (not pictured) “scraper” banchan: dark greens, kimchi

It was divine.

Skipped lunch altogether — intentionally. We both needed this intermittent fast.

The next meal would be at 5:30pm with family I hadn’t seen in lifetimes (12-52 years, depending on the member) — three aunts, one uncle, and one cousin.

One aunt ordered for everyone while the rest of us were distracted trying to communicate excitement to each other — they didn’t speak English and my Korean was kindergarten level.

6pm: Everyone was served this tray for dinner. In the pot: rice. On the right: two beef patties that tasted like bulgogi (I had one, it was amazing). Not pictured: mackerel — had the whole thing.

Old photos and gifts were passed around.

Below: I’m the 5-year old held by my aunt at the airport on the day I left Seoul to move to the States. Everyone in this pic were at the dinner.

Afterwards, Larry and I thought we’d partake in the 8pm nightlife…

…but we were wiped out in the best of ways.

My 9pm scan happened at 8:30 — and we both passed out.

My natural wake-up time this morning was at 4:30am. The 14 hour time transition happened without a hitch: my circadian rhythm adapted. And hopefully, meals over time zones proves to be the most challenging part .

— Savitree

You’ve done the research. You know what to do.

And then you face the family.

The kids don’t want the bitter greens.
And you barely want to cook for yourself let alone a different plate for everyone else.

Or, your partner makes the meals, and he’s focusing on heart-healthy foods for you, to be ready at 7:30pm…
when you’re trying to eat scouring foods three hours earlier.

In either of these cases, the negotiation isn’t with your discipline.
It’s with their feelings.
And, your desire to keep the peace.

Food isn’t just something we consume to stay alive.
What, how, and when we eat defines who we are, and we’re attached to our identity.
When one person in the friend or family solar system makes a change, it holds up this very mirror.

Ever tried skipping that glass of wine at a social gathering?
It will make someone uncomfortable. And that makes you uncomfortable.
So you get something that looks like alcohol, or you cradle a glass of the real thing.
For appearances.
Because you don’t want the questions.

The same happens at dinner: Why aren’t you having this?

It’s not just about the food. It’s about the joint vibe.

So feelings bubble up when you break it.
And how we work through them determines follow-through.

They seem to get it. But then “amnesia.”

When you decide to change your diet for health reasons, people do get it.

Intellectually.

And they’re completely supportive about it. Until dinnertime — when the change feels like an affront to the way of life.

If you’re the person who had to explain the change in order to get your health back on track, this can feel like amnesia by the people you’re counting on to support your change.

Questions ensue. Why this? Why not that?
They’ll offer up alternative options that feel more convenient to their vibe.
It can be frustrating. And you don’t want to keep repeating yourself.

Truth?
It’s not amnesia.
It’s more a subconscious protest against the change in the relationship’s gravity.
This isn’t a fault. It’s all simply human.
Change is hard, and it’s met with resistance.

Here’s what solved it —

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