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

Related essays

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, my thoughts.

My personality wasn’t made for affirmations and gratitude lists. They felt disingenuous to me; I was baked skeptical, irritable, and a little bit sarcastic.

My life from the outside looking in was quite nice. But inside myself, 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 felt like I was on a hamster wheel.

Why did I decide this was a good idea again? 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

Share

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 —

Read more

Continuation from last week’s essay: The Slack Ran Out

The numbers

As promised, my blood test results: the lipid panel.

Cholesterol: 288

The V trend here is my “tax bill.”
But looking at the current number alone omits important context, which is why I share the three-year trend.

• November 2024 reading: 261
  is the result of my 2.5 year experimentation with keto, an attempt to reverse the unwanted effects of my 2.5 year plant-based experiment. Which coincided with the onset of perimenopause.
  
  What I did: reduced meal portions. Took a Red Yeast Rice (RYR) supplement* to carry me through Thanksgiving and upcoming trips to Bogota/Medellín, San Miguel de Allende, Puerto Vallarta/Zihuatanejo, and then Los Angeles over those 5 months. And, I wasn’t feeling the alarm yet to do much more about it (nor did my doctor sound any alarm).

• April 2025 reading: Less than 5 months later, my total cholesterol dropped from 261 to 207.
  
  What I did: I took RYR for a few more months, then stopped. In November of that year, I decided to experiment with the trending “high protein-nutrient dense” diet to see how it’d support muscle mass and bone density: two things we begin to worry about with age. Increased workout + increased protein (fatty because I dislike the taste of lean protein) = feels great (as with all beginnings). The fact that this diet is socially well supported doesn’t hurt. I didn’t think about dinner timing for this reason.
  It felt good. Until it didn’t.

• My April 2026 numbers reflected this. What I’m doing is below under My 90-Day Protocol.

Triglyceride: 170

This represents how much liquid fat (unused fuel) is in my blood that my HDL couldn’t clean up due to overload (despite increased exercise).

High triglyceride levels (anything over 150) indicate insulin resistance. This is the number most affected by late dinner timing (e.g. being done by 7 to 8pm) along with the keto/high protein experiments.

HDL: 60

This number has been in the 60s (optimal) throughout and represents my “slack”.

While my LDL (194, not shown), is the ‘“trash” currently piled up from my most recent activities, my HDL is the size and efficiency of the “garbage truck fleet”.
At 60, my fleet is large, well-maintained, and ready to work. Meaning, my body has a high capacity for cleanup.
It’s the reason I’m not feeling sick despite the numbers: my system is still actively moving the sludge, even if the volume of sludge (LDL) has temporarily overwhelmed the trucks.

How I got my slack: 21-years of meditation + the four anchors practice. I’ve spent over two decades practicing what scientists call Nervous System Regulation. Chronic stress and high cortisol are HDL killers. By meditating, chanting, and eating a proper lunch (the afternoon mindfulness practice), I’ve protected my liver from the corrosive effects of the stress response. This gave me high baseline resilience.
In my classes, I’ve talked about depositing “money” in your bank account each time you show up for these practices. The HDL is the bank account.

I’m an “Average Risk”: 4.8 thanks to my HDL (buffer). You get this number by dividing total cholesterol by HDL. “High risk” begins once over 5 or 6.

As mentioned in my previous essay, my body was already telling me these numbers were high – in fact screaming at me two months prior, on the flight back from our Mexico indulgence trip: sinuses acting up for the first time in 20 years, constipation, and my natural morning wake-up time slipping from 3:30am to 4:15/4:30.

These body signals weren’t separate complaints. They were the same signal (as the blood tests) – just read through different instruments.

Here’s what these trends tell me: my body responds to change.

*Red Yeast Rice supplement is the TCM version of statin. While still not ideal, it acts more like a “scraper” than a “sledgehammer” (more on this below) working in harmony with the liver’s cleaning “night shift” rather than overriding it entirely.

Why not statin

The liver is responsible for over 500 functions, including hormone synthesis and toxin filtration. Statins shut down the biological factory in the liver that produces cholesterol, a fundamental building block of our structure.

Every single one of our cells has a membrane made largely of cholesterol, keeping the cell walls flexible yet strong. It’s the mother molecule for our hormones, without which we can’t produce estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, or cortisol. And, it insulates our nerves, allowing for the cognitive capacity and decision confidence we so deeply value.

Statins function as an “HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor,” blocking this molecule’s ability to convert into cholesterol. Since produced in the same “factory”, statins also shut down the production of CoQ10, a critical coenzyme for mitochondrial energy production necessary for cell growth & maintenance. Domino effect ensues.

The takeaway: Statins don’t just ask the liver to behave. They occupy the factory. Effectively becoming a “sledgehammer” on the liver.

This is the Viking approach: conquest and intervention.
It works for acute situations. But for someone whose body is sending stage 3–4 signals, the question isn’t whether to silence the signal. It’s whether to answer it.

By relying on statins to manage the numbers, the liver stops maintaining its own metabolic efficiency. It shifts the authority from “internal referral” to an “external” pharmaceutical authority, creating a lifelong co-dependency problem.

I’m not anti-statin. I’m pro-response. There’s a difference, and that difference is sovereignty. Consider the domino effect of the closed factory and, down the line, a kitchen table filled with prescription bottles to take care of each disabled domino.

The missing piece: building vs. scraping foods

Many of you have responded to last Saturday’s essay saying you’ve tried negotiating with your doctors to avoid statin, then surrendered to it because the numbers didn’t move.

There are two reasons why this happens:

1. You eat “heart-healthy.”

2. You’re eating at the same time(s) as usual.

Let’s start with point #1: heart-healthy.

Most people who try to avoid statin follow the building playbook:

• Eat “clean”.

• The numbers don’t move.

• The doctor concludes the body isn’t working the way it should.

Truth? Your body is working the way it should. It just isn’t being scoured.

Here’s what you need to know:

Heart-healthy foods are Building Foods.

They’re clean fuel. The bricks and mortar of the body. Excellent for maintaining health. They include lean poultry, broccoli, carrots, brown rice, lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini, celery, potatoes. But they’re stationary:

• Lean Poultry (Chicken/Turkey): “Neutral Carrier.” It provides protein without the Saturated Fat Tax, BUT lacks the Omega-3 lubrication of salmon.

• Broccoli & Carrots: “Foundational Fiber.” Great for general digestion, BUT lacks the bitter “liver signal” of dandelion or the beta-glucan gel of oats.

• Brown Rice: “Stable Fuel.” A better choice than white flour, BUT it’s a “building” starch rather than a “scouring” one.

• Lettuce, Tomatoes, Zucchini, Celery: “Hydrating Fillers.” Excellent for volume and hydration, BUT they are too “light” to act as a mechanical broom.

• Potatoes (Baked): “Grounding Starch.” A clean fuel source, BUT they provide “bulk” rather than “scour.”

If you have high cholesterol, you don’t need more bricks.
You need a cleaning crew. Foods that scour out the existing debris floating around in your blood vessels. Think kitchen pipes: When there are fats floating around in them, coagulating, it takes scouring.

And with high cholesterol levels, building foods become Accumulators.
Because my 194 LDL and 170 Triglycerides indicate an oversupply, eating building foods (even heart-healthy ones) is like trying to organize a cluttered room by bringing in more high-quality furniture. It doesn’t clean the floor; it just adds to the total density of the room. This isn’t maintenance. It’s further accumulation. The building foods begin to clump with the existing sludge, which led to the sinus venting I experienced on my way back from Mexico.

This is why people get frustrated when they eat “clean” but their numbers don’t move. They’re eating to maintain a body they’re actually trying to scour.

To actively fix the problem, focus on SCRAPING foods.
Dark leafy greens, oatmeal, matcha, radish, miso, kimchi, garlic, ginger, walnuts.

These act as biological detergents that actively scour the pipes.
In Ayurveda, this action is referred to as Lekhana (scraping, thinning, liquefying).

We’ve now moved from basic healthy eating to using Food as Medicine.

Below my signature, you'll find the full scraping reference: the foods, the oils, and why red wine isn't what you think it is.

Next up: point #2

The Arsonist: why timing outweighs exercise

The Viking approach to high cholesterol: work out harder, burn more calories.

While this can help, here’s the downside of this approach: the temptation to overtrain in response to these numbers produces more of the same.

When you overtrain to “outrun” your numbers, those longer, more intense workouts create undue stress on the body causing chronic inflammation and cortisol elevation, which then stimulates the liver to produce more cholesterol.

This “work out harder” approach also doesn’t address when the body is manufacturing cholesterol and why.

The Sage approach: and why timing matters—

Your liver has two shifts (in order of priority):

1. Processing (digestion): a high-energy metabolically “noisy” event that can take hours to complete

2. Cleaning (autophagy): requires a quiet, low-insulin environment to perform cellular “scouring.”

When you eat, Insulin (the factory manager) enters the blood to tell the body to stop scouring and start storing. As long as the manager is there, the night shift cleaning crew can’t start their work.

• If you eat at 7pm, your liver is occupied with breaking down food until well past midnight.
  By the time it finishes, the hormonal window for deep repair (governed by circadian rhythm) is already closing.

• Which means the cleaning shift never starts. Because as long as there’s elevated glucose in the blood from the meal, the pancreas continues to pump out insulin.

• Baseline is reached and the manager goes home when all the fuel from the meal has been successfully moved into the cells or the liver for storage.

Insulin is the switch that tells the liver to manufacture cholesterol, and eating late keeps that switch on all night.

For Building Foods, this can take 5-7 hours.
You can run five miles in the morning and it won’t undo a late dinner.
Because while running vacuum-cleans the glucose from your blood, it doesn’t scour the metabolic sludge that’s already settled in the tissues overnight.

Exercise manages today’s fuel, but only the night shift cleaning crew has the detergent (autophagy) required to clear the existing debt.

Bottom line: the problem isn’t calories. It’s timing.

For Scraping Foods: 2-3 hours.

True story on the power of timing:

Emily (not her real name) shared that she didn’t know she had high cholesterol. It wasn’t high enough for her doctor to tell her. So she went on with her life changing “nothing.”

But she did change something: she decided to start finishing her last meal by 3:30pm. That’s it. Her next meal would be breakfast at 7am.

Her next blood test showed a total cholesterol drop of over 100 points.
Her doctor, of course, asked what changed.

The answer wasn’t food. It was the clock.

My 90-day protocol

1. Reclaim the early dinner: Finish eating by 5pm.
   For dinner, I’m choosing foods that process easily before bedtime: scraping veggies, oatmeal, beans, kitchari.
   Exception: dinners out with friends. Schedule dinner as early as possible. Choose scraping veggies when available + grilled or baked fish.

2. Reintroduce Scraping Foods as my daily go-to.
   In my monk mode era, I had them every single day, and all my numbers were in optimal range. I slowly moved away from them in my Integration era because Building Foods are what’s usually provided when hosts and restaurants are cooking. Lunch is where I’ll add chicken or fish, and where I may add building vegetables to my scraping veggies. But I have the Scrapers first to ensure I don’t fill up on the rest beforehand.

3. Drink wisely:
   - Hot water sips, especially in the morning, to flush everything through my system. As hot as my mouth can take it without burning it.
   - Matcha tea in the afternoon. With hot water, not milk or milk alternative.
   - Warm to hot water (with or without lemon) throughout the day.

4. Maintain the four anchors as instruments:
   - My lunch remains at 11:15 am: warm, on-time, sit-down, and well-chewed for optimal processing.
   - 3pm audit: through my energy and clarity levels, this tells me if my system is working effectively (if I’m making the right choices for my body).
   - 9pm scan: tells me if I’m going to bed still processing or ready to restore.
   - My morning wake-up, the ultimate feedback loop: am I waking up with ease or resistance? Self-referred or externally referred? Just 10 days into my plan, I’m already naturally waking up again at 3:30am, rested and light.

5. Continue to exercise and move my body: Not harder. Just keeping it consistent. Exercise stimulates the muscles to vacuum up glucose from the blood. Overtraining can increase cortisol that leads to higher cholesterol levels.
   My exercise routine:
   - MWF mornings: 30 min treadmill (incline to 9, speed to 3). 10 min stretching.
   - TTh: 22 min full-body workouts with dumbbells. 15 min stretching.
   - Daily: 10 min arm swings after lunch (for the lymphatics), then 20 min walk outdoors (weather permitting).
   - After dinner: naturally moving activities e.g. going up and down the stairs, folding laundry, putting things away, cleaning up. Movement to allow my muscles to take some of the glucose from my blood.

What I’m tracking:

• My energy and general resistance levels as markers for stagnation and flow. Doing this through the four anchors, which sets the rhythm the body needs to deliver the clear signals needed for self-referral.

• My weight. Same time, every day. Weight loss can be an indicator for lower triglyceride levels. It can also tell you what foods process well for you.

• My numbers: taking another blood test in July. And making my primary doctor my partner. In addition to my TCM. Feels good to have a team by my side.

Portable Sovereignty: What’s Coming

Larry and I leave for Korea and Japan at the end of this month. This isn’t an interruption in my plans — it’s the test.

Lucky for me, Japan and Korea happen to be two of the best classrooms in the world for scraping foods. Miso, natto, radish, kimchi, seaweed — the instruments are everywhere.

The question isn’t whether the protocol survives travel. It’s whether sovereignty is portable. I already know the answer, and I’m excited to live it out in the field.

Here’s what to expect from me:

Instead of full essays, I’ll be sending you shorter dispatches, still using the same Saturday + every-other-Wednesday rhythm. I’ll share things, including how I’m navigating the travel itself and how I’m navigating my plan, holiday style — given that I’m a believer of do as the Romans do, and honoring hospitality (seeing family in Korea).

A word of caution:

Do not try this at home. And by that, I mean, if you’re on medication, don’t go off of it to do what I do. Start with the Four Anchors. Establish Rhythm. Read through the 6 stages of disease from my essay: The Body Keeps a Ledger. Remember: I have over two decades of monk-mode practice, food-as-medicine training, and body literacy behind me — deep reserves that gave me a long leash before the body came to collect. What I’ve been building with you here — the warm lunch, the four anchors, rhythm before protocol — that’s the prerequisite. Without literacy of your own body, even the best protocol becomes just another form of external referral.

If this essay resonated, there are a few ways to go deeper.

Start with The Exhaustion Experiment: a three-day proof of concept to see what one protected lunch changes.

Explore the Library, where the frameworks and tools behind the work live.

When you’re ready for the full system and the witnessing that makes it stick, paid membership opens the door.

— Savitree

FOOD AS MEDICINE:

The Scouring Greens

• Dark Leafy Greens (kale, collards, arugula, spinach): High-fiber “brushes” that physically sweep cholesterol out of the digestive tract.

• The “Super-Scourers” (dandelion & rapini): Potent bitters that signal the liver to release stagnant bile and flush the system.

• Parsley: Not just a garnish! It’s a “vascular rinse” that flushes excess sodium and supports the kidneys in filtering the blood.

The Metabolic Detergents

• Radish: A biological “plumber” that breaks up metabolic congestion and clears the pipes.

• Miso: Fermented enzymes that support “Agni” (digestive fire) and help process heavy fats.

• Kimchi: Probiotic “detergents” that break down sugar and support the gut-artery connection.

The Mechanical Scrapers

• Flax Seeds: A mucilaginous broom that binds to waste and ensures a clean, daily elimination.

• Beans & Lentils: Slow-burning fiber anchors that prevent insulin spikes and lipid storage.

• Seaweed: Mineral-rich sponges that bind to toxins and help remove them from the body.

The Vascular Lubricants

• Garlic: A natural vasodilator that prevents “stickiness” on the arterial walls.

• Ginger: A metabolic heater that thins the blood and keeps the “cleaning shift” moving.

• Matcha: A concentrated antioxidant flush that protects heart health and clears mental fog. (use ceremonial grade, not culinary)

• Walnuts: Omega-3 lubricants that “oil” the arterial pipes and lower blood viscosity.

The Arterial Sponge

• Oatmeal (Steel-cut or Rolled): Contains “Beta-Glucan,” a specialized gel that mops up excess lipids and keeps the blood light and clear.
  Oatmeal works if it isn’t buried under large amounts of brown sugar or cream.
  Instead of throwing cold berries on top, cook them in for optimal digestion. If you need more sweet profile, add a tsp of ghee or cook in half a banana. Or drizzle a little bit of honey (but don’t cook). OR, try a savory version: ¾ cup oats, 2 cups chicken bone broth, a handful of dark leafy greens (I like collards), a pinch of salt, black pepper to taste.

I’ve organized this a different way for you:

The “red wine” myth: the resveratrol illusion

• The Reality: to get enough resveratrol to actually “scour” an artery, you would have to drink about 1,000 bottles of wine in one sitting.

• The Triglyceride Tax: for someone with a 170 triglyceride count, red wine is actually “arson.” Alcohol is a refined sugar that the liver immediately converts into triglycerides.

• The Verdict: it doesn’t counteract the meat. It adds a second layer of “dampness” for the liver to process during the night shift.

The oils:

Supporting Bibliography & References

1. The Red Wine “Resveratrol Illusion”

The “1,000 bottles” figure is a clinical benchmark used to illustrate the massive gap between the concentration of resveratrol in wine and the doses used in successful heart-health studies.

• Reference: Baur, J. A., & Sinclair, D. A. (2006). Therapeutic potential of resveratrol: the in vivo evidence. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

• The Data: Clinical studies showing metabolic benefits typically use 500mg to 2,000mg of resveratrol. A 5oz glass of red wine contains only about 0.2mg to 1.0mg. To achieve a therapeutic dose of 1 gram, a person would need to consume roughly 1,000 liters (or approximately 1,300 bottles) of wine.

2. Oatmeal and the “Beta-Glucan Sponge”

• Reference: Whitehead, A., et al. (2014). Cholesterol-lowering effects of oat β-glucan: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

• The Data: This meta-analysis of 28 trials confirmed that a daily intake of 3 grams of oat beta-glucan (the amount in one large bowl of oatmeal) significantly reduces LDL cholesterol by interfering with the reabsorption of bile acids in the gut.

3. The 4:30 PM Window (Circadian Metabolism)

• Reference: Manoogian, E. N. C., & Panda, S. (2017). Circadian rhythms, time-restricted feeding, and healthy aging. Ageing Research Reviews.

• The Data: Dr. Satchin Panda’s research demonstrates that late-night eating disrupts the liver’s “cleaning shift” (autophagy) and leads to higher triglyceride production. Ending the eating window early allows the liver to switch from “storage” mode to “scouring” mode.

4. Garlic and Vascular Stickiness

• Reference: Ried, K. (2016). Garlic Lowers Blood Pressure in Hypertensive Individuals, Regulates Serum Cholesterol, and Stimulates Immunity. The Journal of Nutrition.

• The Data: This review confirms that aged garlic extract can reduce total cholesterol by 7–29 mg/dL and acts as a “vascular detergent” by increasing nitric oxide production, which prevents plaque from sticking to the arterial walls.

5. Honey as a “Lekhana” (Scraper)

• Reference: Noori, S. Al-Waili. (2004). Natural honey lowers plasma glucose, C-reactive protein, homocysteine, and blood lipids in healthy, diabetic, and hyperlipidemic subjects. Journal of Medicinal Food.

The Data: Clinical trials show that raw honey—unlike refined sugar—can actually reduce total cholesterol and LDL while slightly raising HDL, supporting the Ayurvedic classification of honey as a “scraping” agent for metabolic waste.

The exam room

Last week, my doctor called for a follow-up on my annual bloodwork. She said my numbers were worth a discussion.

I had Larry come with me so that he can hear what’s said first-hand and ask his own questions as a concerned stakeholder. The nurse took my oxygen reading and blood pressure. Larry says he would give anything to have my BP. Then we wait.

My doctor enters, sits in her chair, and says: Your cholesterol and LDL levels are high.

Knowing who she’s taking to, she sits and waits.
Larry and I both anticipate she’ll try to put me on statin.
Many of his friends are on it, so for him, it was a question of which one.
My mom had been on it, and I don’t remember exactly why she stopped taking it, but we know this is the protocol.

Me: How are my estrogen levels? (Because we decided to test this too). I know it can affect cholesterol levels.

Larry: It can??

Doctor: Yes. They’re low.

Larry: They are??

Doctor: Yes. But to be expected post-menopause. Nothing concerning.

Me: What I found more telling than my current numbers are the trends over the last three years. And the trend isn’t a steady incline. It’s a V (albeit the right arm of the V is higher than the left, hence today’s conversation). I know exactly what changed leading up to each of those three points. Which means I can fix this with food and dinner timing. I’d like to test this over the next 90 days and then take another blood test.

Doctor: What do you think about also taking a statin during those 90 days? I’ll order the tests for three months from today, and you can stop taking them if your numbers are down.

Me: No.

Larry: Savitree’s stubborn. And. I have no doubt her numbers will be down in three months.

She agreed and ordered advanced lipid testing to check my LDL type (A is large, buoyant, and generally harmless. B is small, dense, inflammatory, and contributes to plaque buildup) – what I want to see. And, to see if it’s hereditary – what she’s interested in.

I’ve spent months teaching the Four Anchors as the framework for body literacy on Substack. Twenty years teaching body literacy face to face. And here I am today with high cholesterol.

Let me tell you how this happened, and why I’ve decided to share this with you in real time.

The curse of the high baseline

I had a long rope.

21 years of meditation practice, on most days, I was going 60-90 minutes deep.
6 years of cooking sadhana: a daily one-hour morning practice in mindful cooking before the children woke up.

I built deep reserves.

My digestion became strong and forgiving.
My clarity and my energy was my ally.
My Western-trained Ayurvedic doctor said all of my tissues were strong.

As I began to integrate back into a more conventional social life of enjoying dinners out and wine and coffee dates with friends, I noticed that nothing bothered me the way they used to many moons ago. Meat didn’t make me tired. A glass of wine didn’t change my mood. Pizza didn’t bother my sinuses. Walking through the fragrance department didn’t trigger my allergies. And my clarity stayed intact.

I had built an immense buffer. Convenient for people like me who enjoy the sustainability of Sanctuary lifestyle inside a Viking (versus monastic) world filled with Viking friends. This sort of resilience is a gift of instant forgiveness.

It’s also the reason you may not hear the signal until it’s already a number on a chart 17 years after integration. That’s a lot of slack.

But the truth is: I did hear it.

I just didn’t listen. I continued on like a 20-something who doesn’t understand that mortality applies to them yet. The slack made me do it.

The gift in this is something I can offer my future self as well as you:

They say that high cholesterol is a “silent killer” because they present no symptoms while they build up as plaque along the arterial walls. I’m here to say, this is not true.

Nothing is really silent. When you’re listening to your body. Which is why signal literacy is so important.

Alas, we’re quite good at (enthusiastically) shutting that voice down so we can “go on living” the way we’ve always been.

Here were my signs at the tipping point: our annual family trip to Mexico’s best all-inclusive (less than 2 months before the time of this writing).

Every dessert on the menu made it on the table every night we were there. It was a nice resort, and the food was excellent. This was an annual family celebration, and that’s what we were there to do. Who was thinking of restraint? Not a one.

Even in Mexico, my high baseline allowed me to naturally wake up early, poop first thing in the morning, and lead my morning group meditation online before heading off to walk the beach.

While I was enjoying my 10% in Mexico, I realized later that my 90% standard had slowly degraded. I kept feeling fine.

Until the plane ride home.

My sinuses acted up on that flight for the first time in 20 years.
Back home, my bowels got irregular.
My natural 3:30am wake-up slipped to 4:15/4:30. This one’s super easy for most of us to shrug off as a more civilized time to wake up anyway.

In hindsight, I realized something: I didn’t used to worry about being around people who are sick because I was that person who didn’t get sick when everyone else did. But over the last year or two, that worry slowly crept in, and I’d pick up probiotics and supplements to ward them off. So I already knew. My body was already telling me.

The timeline

How I earned my long slack, and how I depleted it:

1. The Lost State (teens to 1997). Foggy, depressed, panic attacks, allergies, sinus issues, throat issues. Despite getting off The Pill in early 1997, missing my period just two months later, and being super tired, I didn’t know I was pregnant for almost the entire first trimester. I had zero body literacy. I was a calorie-counting, gym-loving, disciplined party girl obsessed with body image. A Viking.

2. The Transition (1997 to 2003): I became a mom, and I found yoga. When the teacher instructed us to turn our thighs slightly outward, I had no idea what he was talking about. I had no idea when my shoulders were shrugged. I was falling over trying to hold trikonasana. I was shallow and reverse breathing. After being a gym enthusiast for an entire decade, I was shocked to see how little connection and control I had over my body at a deeper, subtler level. My daughter got sick, and I found a natural foods chef to teach me to cook without wheat, sugar, and dairy. I also realized how little connection and control I had over other things, like people, current events, and my finances. The family ship hit a huge iceberg and sank.

3. Monk Mode (2003–2009). Opened with divorce and complete financial loss, but already introduced to yoga, meditation, and cooking, I entered the Sattvic life: daily morning mindfulness cooking. No TV, no news. I traded in my Mercedes for a $2000 Toyota Camry stick and raised two young children alone through this. At the dismay of my parents (Vikings), I took this opportunity to stress-test the wisdom of the sages (Sanctuaries), and found it held. In fact, it held not just a little bit but remarkably well. This is where I developed strong digestive health, self-trust and authority, and a deep well of reserves, aka a lot of slack.

4. The Integration (2009–2026). Re-entered the world. Dated. Moved into a committed relationship. Traveled. Experimented with how far I could go into the Viking world while protecting my core values. I was willing to accept consequences, trusting I could bounce back if needed. In 2018, I started experimenting with plant-based, keto, and then high-protein/nutrient dense diets. I was curious to know how they would impact my body as I entered perimenopause. I was ready for the good and the bad. I added annual physicals to my wellness checks, including bloodwork.
   The result — two tax bills came due: LEEP in 2020, cholesterol in 2026. That’s 11 and 17 years, respectively, into the integration. Shifting my publication to Food-as-Medicine was to prepare me to get back the sovereignty I had lost in this experiment. I just didn’t know it yet.

5. Sovereign Integration (now). Monk mode tools, Viking-world life. The experiment I’m now sharing with you.

Why the tax bills are gifts

The LEEP (2020) and the cholesterol (2026) weren’t failures of the method I teach. They were the method working. The body kept the ledger. The invoice arrived. The body didn’t get louder than it needed to because the buffer absorbed it.

Nor were they errors.
They were proof. That nothing’s silent when you listen. Akin to being shocked when a relationship “abruptly” ends.
Wisdom through experimentation: this was no longer intellectual knowledge for me. It was cellular.

The tax bills? They were gifts. Knocks on the door to let us know they aren’t in fact silent killers.

Admittedly, the Korean eldest daughter part of me that cared about optics wanted to elicit shame around the numbers and not talk about it. But that’s borrowed. From an outdated, obedient culture.

Here’s the thing about the slack that I had: it wasn’t all gone. I hadn’t lost my self-trust. Just a little bit of timing that said, let’s try it but then forgot to stop until the numbers came in.

I’m about to explore Korea and Japan with Larry at the end of this month. I can’t tell you how many past clients in similar situations would have said to me: I’ll start when I get back.

Which is why doctors hand out statin as the first line of defense.

Not only do I understand the importance of the return rate, I also understand when food is called to become medicine. And I have monk mode muscle memory.

This time, instead of going back to the Monk Mode era, I’m stepping forward into Sovereign Integration. My life looks different now: my children are grown up. I’m in a committed relationship. Together, we enjoy time with our Viking friends. And the act of writing to the world has mostly replaced journaling to myself. So I get to put myself out there this time. Do that kind of scary. And share this 90-day experiment with you.

This upcoming trip to Asia isn’t an interruption. It’s an important part of my sharing. Because we need to see that sovereignty is portable. Otherwise it’s a cage, not a refuge.

And in sharing my numbers with you (soon), I’ll also show you how sovereignty is measurable and logical as well as portable.

The Experiment (what I’m doing and why I’m sharing it)

I’ve written for months as the teacher. Laying down the foundation to upgrade your hardware. Now I’m the subject.

I’m not doing this because the method needs proving.
I’m doing it because you need to see what the method looks like from the inside: in a real life, in a real partnership, and inside a real schedule. Not in a monastery.

I’ll share my numbers next week. Tell you what I’m doing instead of statin over the next 90 days. This includes what I’m already doing that gave me slack and information in the first place, what I’m doing for “medicine,” and why they work. I’ll mention exercise and how I’m learning to bridge the communication gap between Sanctuaries and Vikings. And share my trip to Asia with you.

My hardware is not “broken”. I have my anchors, which gives me slack, intuition, and self-trust. Which means I can run my software to use food as medicine to transform instead of drugs to intervene.

The Anchors

Cholesterol (or any other “silent killers”) isn’t a silent killer when you have the instruments.

This is where the Four Anchors come in.
The warm, sit-down lunch, the 3pm audit, the 9pm scan, and the wake-up stack all work together to give you rhythm, which gives you muscle memory you can access on command, internal points of reference for insanely good information, and a calm nervous system to be able to listen in and trust what you’re experiencing. You’ll cut out the external reference points that, quite literally, gaslight you into a more co-dependent state of mind.

I “ignored” my signals due to the immense amount of slack I earned. The numbers had to tell me what my body was already signaling. But the anchors I held have gifted me access to everything I will ever need in order to ask the right questions, look for the right feedback, and take back my response-ability. And sovereignty.

Quick note here in case you haven’t yet read Wednesday’s essay: I’m not anti-drug or Western medicine. There are specific places where those are amazing gifts, and we need them. But not as much as we use them. Not to take away our response-ability.

A word of caution:

Do not try this at home. And by that, I mean, if you’re on medication, don’t go off of it to do what I do. Start with the Four Anchors. Establish Rhythm. Read through the 6 stages of disease from Wednesday’s essay: The body keeps a ledger. I have over two decades of monk-mode practice, food-as-medicine training, and body literacy behind me. Deep reserves that gave me a long leash before the body came to collect. What I’ve been building with you here — the warm lunch, the four anchors, rhythm before protocol — that’s the prerequisite. Without literacy of your own body, even the best protocol becomes just another form of external referral.

—Savitree

You’re led into the exam room where the nurse takes your vitals and asks a few basic questions. Later, the doctor comes in and gives you not-so-great news. No, you’re not dying yet. But the numbers don’t look good, and to avoid a more invasive action (or premature death), she tells you to take this medicine.

The doctor assures you this happens to the best of us, especially as we get older, offers you some basic cliche diet, exercise, and lifestyle advice, you nod, and ten minutes later, you’re on your way to the pharmacy.

Here’s what she never asks:

What changed in your life that produced this?

Why they don’t ask

My daughter struggled with foot fungus for a good decade, first caught in high school diving, not helped by barefoot practice in the circus arts. She “tried everything.” Desperate, she got her liver tested in her late 20s to make sure she could take this 6-month drug protocol that’s so invasive that they first test for liver health before you can take it, and then continue testing for liver health throughout. After just a couple of weeks, she felt horrible enough to stop. They decided to try a topical cream that her doctors honestly didn’t know if it worked (though they didn’t tell her that just yet).

She had to apply it daily. And it worked.

Her doctors were thrilled, they asked permission to take pictures of her feet for evidence. They admitted they didn’t know if it actually worked because no one had followed their instructions to a tee the way she had. (She said she was desperate)

Doctors care a whole lot. And for that, here’s what they assume: most people won’t change their behaviors.

If we can’t apply cream as per instructions, or remember to take a supplement daily, then how can we be expected to stop gulping down our food and chasing it with ice water or stop compromising sleep for “me time”?

This isn’t cynicism, it’s architecture. And this architecture: medical training, insurance incentives, and appointment windows – are all built around intervention, not transformation. Some people may think this is “evil.” Others will argue you have to meet people where they are.

Which means conventional medicine is built around not denying you your desire to indulge in whatever you want. At least until it’s life or death.

Let the drug do the work, not you.

But here’s what you must know: the prescription is the external referral. Someone else reading your body’s data and handing you the answer.
And it comes with a heavy tax.

The ledger

Intervention – letting the drugs and surgeries do the work – is one answer.

An excellent one for acute situations like heart attacks, severe depression, can’t breathe, broken bones, ER situations where the one single goal is to stabilize the body (and mind when appropriate).

Most chronic issues are warning signs, and for these, we have more options than we are ever given. Options that could give you your life back instead of spiraling into accumulative side effect hell that adds more medications to your kitchen counter.

Chronic issues are signs that tell us that we’ve been cashing our “once in a while it’s okay to do this” at the bank a little too frequently. The level of chronic matters of course, in the spectrum of low-grade early signs of “getting old” to nearing the acute zone.

Here’s what you need to know:

The body doesn’t operate on willpower or intention. It operates on cumulative input: food, timing, sleep, stress, rhythm.

Every override (skipped lunch, late dinner, pushed-through exhaustion) is a withdrawal.

Every anchor honored is a deposit.

The body doesn’t moralize. It just tallies. And at some point, it sends the invoice.

The tax

When the invoice arrives — the abnormal result, the inflammation marker, the number that wasn’t there last year — most people experience it as a verdict: bad genetics and aging finally catching up.

But it’s actually a call to action. The heavier the tax, the louder the call.

The question is: who answers the call?

The system says the doctor does.
Self-referral says you do.

This doesn’t mean firing your doctor. It means equalizing them as partner, not authority.

The fork

This is where external referral gets institutionalized at its most consequential.

• Accept the prescription* → the body’s signal gets managed, not answered.

• Accept the CTA → you have to change the architecture that produced the number.

One is easier. The other is yours.
*This decision depends on where you sit on the spectrum of early chronic to acute. This is where your signal literacy will serve you better than external authority.

The body’s ledger is not a punishment system. It’s a feedback loop.
And the first act of sovereignty is deciding to read it yourself.

Before I show you my own ledger on Saturday, you need the map. Because without it, you won’t know where you’re standing:

How Ayurveda looks at the stages of disease.

There are 6 stages.

In contrast, Western medicine often doesn’t recognize a disease until the 5th or 6th stage when it’s visible on a scan or blood test.

Source: The “Shat Kriya Kala,” or the Six Stages of Disease from the Sushruta Samhita (a thousands of years old foundational text). I put this chart together with the help of AI.

Stage 1: Accumulation (Sanchaya)

• What’s happening: Subclinical imbalance (early warning system). Toxins or imbalances begin to collect in their home sites (where depends on the elemental nature of the Dosha).

  • Vata (Air/Ether): Its home is the Colon. It’s hollow, dry, and responsible for movement.

  • Pitta (Fire/Water): Its home is the Small Intestine and Stomach. It’s the site of heat and chemical transformation.

  • Kapha (Earth/Water): Its home is the Stomach, Chest, and Lungs. It’s the site of lubrication and structure.

• Opportunity for change: Maximum: Easiest to reverse. Subtle signs only an intuitive person notices.

• Message: Empty the trash purely through food and lifestyle.

Stage 2: Aggravation (Prakopa)

• What’s happening: The imbalance “overflows” its container.

• Opportunity for change: Maximum: Still highly manageable with simple diet/lifestyle shifts.

• Message: Take the trash out, it’s overflowing.

Stage 3: Spread (Prasara)

• What’s happening: The imbalance enters the general circulation, and it’s moving through the “highways” (the circulatory and lymphatic systems). It’s why symptoms can feel vague or move around.
  
  How this shows up:

  • Bowels: the root alarm. Stage 1 and 2 signal. Trash is full. The processing plant has slowed down. This is the earliest possible warning that the foundation is shifting.

  • Sinuses: This is the overflow vent. Stage 3 signal. The secondary exhaust. When the primary system (the gut) can’t process the load, the body looks for a “vent” to release the pressure; the excess moisture and metabolic waste that’s entered the general circulation. (kapha overflow)

  • Skin: rashes, hives, sudden acne (pitta spreading)

  • Head: tension headaches or migraines (vata or pitta spreading)

  • Joints: transient “wandering” aches that don’t stay in one spot (vata spreading)

  • Mood: sudden irritability, brain fog, or unexplained anxiety

  • Energy: general malaise or “heavy” limbs that feel like lead (kapha spreading)

  • Tongue: a thick white or yellow coating in the morning (this is ama or metabolic waste circulating)

This stage is still subclinical: in 90% of cases, your blood work will look perfectly normal. You feel the headache, but your MRI is clear. You feel the bowel irregularity, but your colonoscopy is unremarkable. You feel the fatigue, but your thyroid markers are in the “standard range.”

This is why we look at these signs as nuisances. We’ve been conditioned to believe that if a machine can’t measure it, it’s not real. So we take Benadryl for the sinus or Ibuprofen for the headache.

Danger of the OTC approach: by “shutting up” the system, you aren’t stopping the overflow. You’re just cutting the wire to the alarm bell. The trash can at the home site is still overflowing, but now the body has no way to tell you. It’s forced to move to Stage 4 and find a place to “park” the mess.

• Opportunity for change: Still maximum: Signals are louder now. The body is asking for help.

• This can be looked at as traffic on the highway (compare to Stage 4).

Stage 4: Localization (Sthana Samshraya)

• What’s happening: The imbalance finds and “parks” in a weak spot (e.g. the arteries or joints). This weak space is created by genetics, past trauma, old injuries, or emotional patterns. The moving imbalance parks there and begins to infiltrate the actual tissue.

• Opportunity for change: High: This is the tipping point. Tissue damage begins here. Intensive lifestyle and herbal intervention.

• This can be looked at as a car crash.

Stage 5: Manifestation (Vyaki)

• What’s happening: Clear, clinical symptoms appear (e.g. high BP, high LDL). Tests come back “positive.”

• Opportunity for change: Moderate: Western medicine finally recognizes the “disease.” Management/ Reversal via lifestyle + meds

• You have some urgent choices to make. Keep self-referral intact; maintain authority.

Stage 6: Diversification/ Complication (Bheda)

• What’s happening: Structural damage or acute crisis

• Opportunity for change: Low: Western intervention is required for stability

• Get stable. Then add back the previous protocols to build back signal literacy and activate self-authority and your own body’s natural healing abilities.

Compare and contrasting when disease is acknowledged:
Western medicine treats the Crash (stage 6) while body literacy manages the Traffic (stage 3).

Western medicine treats Stage 5 Manifestation as the final destination, prescribing a pill to keep the numbers in check. And creating a false stability where the patient “feels fine”. But the underlying “spread” (stage 3) continues.

Holistically, the goal is to use the stability provided by Western medicine (when necessary) as a window of opportunity to do the deep work of stages 1 & 2: fixing the lifestyle and choices that fueled the fire in the first place.

As I begin sharing my own experiment on Saturday, I want to be clear:

Do not try what I did at home. I have over two decades of monk-mode practice, food-as-medicine training, and body literacy behind me — deep reserves that gave me a long leash before the body came to collect. What I’ve been building with you here — the warm lunch, the four anchors, rhythm before protocol — that’s the prerequisite. Without literacy of your own body, even the best protocol becomes just another form of external referral.

– Savitree

I know what it feels like to be exhausted.

Not tired from a wedding that goes until 11pm, a hospital emergency, the flu, or working through the loss of someone you love.

I mean exhausted. Stressed. Burned out. Nothing really happened other than normal life.

Over the last two decades, I’ve learned to peel off the layers of borrowed urgency.

Now, I start my day with non-negotiables.

Meditation, movement, deep work — all before lunch at 11:15.

My mornings are optimized. Which means I have a strong reference point. Which means any change in quality gives me real data.

So when I’m exhausted, I know where to look.

The symptoms

I’m fighting my mornings. My mind is agitated. My meditations aren’t as deep. My deep work, also not as deep.

The checklist

I’m practicing my four anchors. I’ve protected my non-negotiables. I’m staying hydrated. Everything I do in my day is a conscious yes for me.

I see my TCM monthly for acupuncture and cupping. He asks questions, looks at my tongue, confirms that I’m good. I get my annual bloodwork done. All this since 2020 when I had a cancer scare. I get my spine adjusted monthly to keep potential back and neck problems from inconveniencing my life.

Hardware: check. Healthcare: check. Anchors: check.

So where is it?

The variable

After cooking three meals a day for 24 years, Larry now does more of the cooking for us. He’s gifted me space to write before lunch. His cooking is amazing. I’m very lucky.

Except that I enjoy cooking, and that time has been replaced by writing, which I also enjoy. Equally.

Writing won so I can make this my work.

Here’s the real variable:

I’ve been writing with urgency in mind rather than writing to fully realize my potential. Intention: fast. Consequence: slow. Experience: exhaustion.

Here’s what that looks like:

My 3pm tells on me. I’m exhausted.
But the data isn’t even that slow — it comes right after lunch. By 1pm, instead of walking, I want to nap.

Not from lack of sleep, but from grind.
And I don’t have a to-do list. Nor is my calendar maxed out.

Performance is grind. Urgency (vs promptness) is grind. It’s the slow cut. It looks like efficiency but it’s not. It’s at the expense of your best work, and it grinds down your connective tissue and your connection to others.

The tell

When this happens, I start feeling like I need to get you to believe what I do. So that you’ll give it a try. So your life can become yours. Because I know it can. Because I know what I’m talking about. I just need you to understand it.

Do you see the grind in that paragraph?

This is external referral. It doesn’t always look like a to-do list. Sometimes it’s just the mind, grinding.

So then I think about quitting. Because exhaustion makes us think that way. Why not just enjoy the life I already have? Cook more. Travel more. Exercise more.

Why not? Because I’m called to do this. And I love getting to know people from all over the world. I love collaborating with others whose work matters. I love to write. And I change lives. Including my own.

The fix

I don’t need more sleep. I don’t need a better diet.

I get to do this work for me.

To stop listening to bestsellers that tell me to write with tension, get the hook right, align the funnel, and take my time — they did it “slowly” in three to six months, from zero to 10k.

These things matter. But not so I can get to you. So I can get to me.

Otherwise it’s exhausting.

This is self-referral. The energy that doesn’t burn out but sustains.

Truth?
When I think about taking you all with me, I feel like no one’s paying attention. Nothing’s enough.

When I make my own life amazing, and when I turn work into play, people want to know what I’m doing.

Analytics and funnels? Likes and comments? Sure. But not at the expense of my voice.

Make important things. For you first. Because this is where your gem, your deepest contribution, lives. This is the legacy.

I’ve identified my variable. Easier because my anchors are in place, and I have strong reference points.

I’m writing for myself. And my family (whether or not they read it while I’m alive). And from there, anyone else who cares to have a conversation with me.

If you want to do this together, join me in the Anchor Circle. I’d be honored to witness what you’re working on.

— Savitree

I see you.

You have plans. Real ones.

A book you want to write. A business you’re building.
A creative project that keeps whispering your name.

But when do you work on it?

After everyone’s asleep.
During school pickup while sitting in the car.
On Sunday mornings before the house wakes up.
In the margins of someone else’s schedule.

You’re stealing time.

And by the time you sit down to do the work, the work you actually care about,
you’re already depleted. And you’re thinking of other things that need to get done.

Your body’s been running all day.
Your mind’s been negotiating all day.
By the time you claim 45 minutes for yourself, you’re operating on fumes.

So you open the laptop. You stare at the blank page.
And instead of creating, you’re reorganizing folders. Watching tutorials.
Checking Slack.
Making another cup of coffee.

The dream doesn’t need more time.

It needs you to show up with capacity.

The hardware problem

We join communities, enroll in courses,
hire coaches to help us write the book,
build the business, learn the skill.

These are software upgrades. And they’re good.
They teach you what to do.

But if your hardware is crashing,
if your nervous system is fried, your digestion’s a mess, your afternoons are fog,
and your sleep is wired-tired,
the software can’t run.

You can have the best book-writing framework in the world.
But if you’re working from depletion, you’ll stall.

You can have the clearest business strategy.
But if your body doesn’t trust you to stop, rest, and nourish, you’ll grind.

Truth?

Before you can do meaningful work sustainably, you need an operating system that doesn’t crash under pressure.

That’s the hardware.

And the way you upgrade your hardware isn’t through another course.

It’s through rhythm.

Specifically: the four daily anchors that regulate your nervous system so your body stops fighting you and starts supporting you.

What crashes look like

You have your coffee, maybe you meditate, and maybe you’re present with your kids at breakfast.

Then the day starts.

Meetings run long. Lunch gets pushed.
By 2pm you’re starving but you have another call, so you grab whatever’s fast:
a protein bar, leftover pizza, a handful of almonds standing at the counter.

By 3pm, you’re foggy. Decision fatigue sets in.
The creative work you were going to do after the kids go down now feels impossible.

So you scroll instead. Or you batch emails.
Or you start another organizational project that feels productive but isn’t actually the thing.

By 9pm, you’re wired-tired. Your body’s exhausted but your mind won’t stop.
You tell yourself you’ll go to bed early, but instead you stay up and rally: this is your me time...

and you wake up the next day already behind.

This is what happens when your nervous system never gets the signal that it’s safe to stop.

And when you never stop, you never digest.
Not just food.
Everything else: ideas, emotions, decisions, the day itself.

You’re running on borrowed energy. Adrenaline. Urgency. Caffeine.
And the emotional push of I have to get this done.

That borrowed energy works. For a while.

But this is why you can’t access the deeper work.
The creative work.
The work that requires you to be present, not just productive.

The anchors are the signal

These are four moments in your day where you practice stopping:

1. Wake-up: The first 15 minutes set the tone.

2. Lunch: Warm, on-time, seated, no screen. It’s the hinge of the day.

3. 3pm audit: Read the data your body’s giving you. This is valuable feedback.

4. 9pm scan: Close the loop so you can actually sleep.

Treat these as real data points instead of wellness rituals, and your body will learn:

I can stop. It’s safe to digest. I don’t have to keep scanning for the next emergency.

When your body learns that,
when your nervous system shifts from reactive to regulated,
your capacity comes back.

The fog lifts. Your 3pm steadies.
The creative work that felt impossible starts to feel accessible again.

That’s your hardware upgrade.

Why small circles

Here’s the thing about building new rhythms:

It’s hard to do it alone.

This has very little to do with willpower and more to do with the fact that
the grind is so familiar.
It’s comfortable.
It’s how you’ve known who you are.

The moment you try to slow down,
to protect lunch, to sit instead of scroll, to close your laptop by 9pm
every part of you will fight it.

Your calendar will scream. Your inbox will pulse. Your identity will whisper:

If you’re not grinding, who are you?

This is where most people abandon the practice.

Even though it’s working, they’re doing it alone, and alone feels dangerous.

We need witnesses.

Instead of cheerleaders or coaches telling us what to do.

Witnesses who see you practicing,
who are practicing alongside you,
who hold the space when your nervous system throws a tantrum because it didn’t get its adrenaline hit.

Small circles make the unfamiliar feel less dangerous.

When you see another woman protecting her lunch window,
imperfectly but consistently,
you start to believe you can too.

When you share that you skipped lunch three days in a row and someone asks,

“What was happening earlier? What made it feel impossible to stop?”

…instead of feeling judged, you’ll see patterns.

When you witness someone else’s breakthrough,
when they say “I had energy at 3pm for the first time in months,”
not only are you happy for them, you’re seeing proof that this works.

Small circles create the conditions for change that big communities can’t.

The Anchor Circle

I’ve been running the Anchor Circle quietly since December with three women.

We had our first live Zoom call two weeks ago.
The second is scheduled for two weeks from now.

The Anchor Circle isn’t a course. It’s a practice space.

How it works:

The four anchors are the practice.
Lunch is the entry point: warm, on-time, seated, no screen.
But the real work is learning to read your body’s signals.
To notice when you’re reactive vs. regulated.
To see what you’re protecting and what you’re giving away.

Everyone in the circle is working on something non-negotiable.
A book. A business. A creative project that matters.
Something with a healthy dose of urgency. Born from an inner calling.
Something not borrowed.

The anchors aren’t separate from that work.
They’re what make that work sustainable.

When you protect lunch, you’re not just feeding your body.
You’re practicing self-referral.
You’re building the capacity to claim space in the middle of the day.
Which is the same capacity you need to claim time for:
your work, boundaries in your relationships, and authority in your decisions.

The circle holds the container:

• Asynchronous check-ins

• Witnessing each other’s patterns and shifts

• Frameworks I share from 20+ years of teaching internal authority

• Honest feedback when you’re stuck

• Monthly live calls where we work through what’s actually happening

What becomes possible:

• Grounded energy at 3pm instead of fog and crash

• Waking up clear instead of with dread

• Showing up for your work from capacity instead of borrowed energy

• Cleaner boundaries

• Being present because you’re already full

This is what one Circle member said after her craniosacral therapist confirmed her stress levels had dropped:

“I’m grounded. Rooted into the earth.”

And another:

“This space is entirely judgment-free... it really does feel like an anchor in my life.”

The Anchor Circle is capped at 12 women…

…because I need to know your patterns. I need to remember what you said last week. I need to see you. I seriously can’t do that with a larger group. I’ve been adding slowly so I can get to know you one by one.

Currently there are 4 strong, amazing women.
I feel blessed to be witness to their journey.
8 spots remain.

The alternative is to continue trying it on your own.

Here’s how to know if the Circle is right for you:

• You have a specific goal with non-negotiable, self-directed urgency (writing a book, building a business, creating something that matters).

• You don’t want to “burn the candle at both ends”.

• You’re willing to practice the four anchors daily (not perfectly, but consistently).

• You want witnessing, not hand-holding.

• You’re ready to be seen and to see others .

The Anchor Circle is part of the founding membership.
But it’s not automatic. There’s a short (Tally) form + the Day in the Life Assessment you’ll need to take. The form lets me know you’re interested. The assessment is a diagnostic that maps your current rhythm and shows us where you’re operating from depletion instead of capacity.

When there’s space, I reach out to you.
When it’s full, you’re added to the waitlist.

I’m not in a hurry to fill the Circle.
While I’d love to fill this group, I’d rather have 6 women who are all in than 12 who are half-present.

If you’re ready for something small, real, and built for depth…

1. Take the assessment

2. Fill out this short form: https://tally.so/r/vGDQzX

Your work is waiting.
But it needs you to show up with capacity, not fumes.

— Savitree

The morning dread didn’t start that morning.

And the wired-tired feeling most of us carry into bed isn’t a sleep problem.

It’s about what we never put down.

I know this because I lived the loop for years. I told myself I was a night owl. It felt true: I came alive after everyone else went quiet, the house finally mine, the demands finally paused. I stayed up late and called it freedom.

What I didn’t see was what I was carrying into those hours. The day’s unfinished business. The urgency I’d absorbed and never metabolized. The decisions that didn’t get made, the edges that didn’t get closed, the sense that I hadn’t quite had my turn yet.

I wasn’t unwinding. I was still running. Just without an audience.

And then I wondered why I couldn’t stop grinding. Why the mornings felt heavy before they’d even begun. Why the dread arrived before the alarm did.

The loop wasn’t random. It was architectural.

The carry-over nobody names

Here’s what the Four Anchors taught me. Not as a framework first, but as lived experience:

Every anchor either closes or compounds.

A protected lunch closes the morning’s accumulated urgency.
A steady 3pm closes the afternoon’s drift.
And the 9pm scan closes the day — or it doesn’t.
And if it doesn’t, everything unresolved gets carried forward. Into sleep. Into the body’s overnight repair window. Into the first moments of waking.

Your morning dread isn’t a morning problem. It’s the previous day’s carry-over, compounded by a night that never fully closed.

Most approaches to sleep hygiene focus on the hour before bed: the blue light, the magnesium, the wind-down routine. These things matter. But they’re treating the symptom and missing the source.

The real question is: what are you bringing to bed with you?

Read more

You finished the reset.

By Day 3, something shifted. The fog lifted. Your afternoon stayed steady. You sat down for lunch and actually tasted the food.

By Day 5, you had data — not someone else’s data, but yours. Evidence that your body can feel different when you give it the right conditions.

And then the reset ended.

Maybe you kept the hot water sips for a few days.
Maybe you sat down for lunch twice the following week.
Maybe you told yourself you’d keep going.

But the meetings came back. The mornings got faster.
The phone found its way back to the table.

And somewhere around week two, you noticed the fog again.

Not dramatically. Just persistently.

This is the part no one talks about.

The reset paradox

Every reset — every cleanse, every detox, every “new protocol” — creates the same arc:

Clarity → motivation → slow fade → return to baseline.

Not because the reset didn’t work. It did.

Not because you lack discipline. You don’t.

Because a reset changes your state.
It does not change your architecture.

State is temporary.
It’s how you feel on Day 5 of kitchari when the noise has cleared and your digestion is running clean.

Architecture is what happens on a random Tuesday when the morning runs long, lunch gets pushed to 2pm, and by 3pm you’re making decisions from depletion instead of capacity.

The reset can’t help you on that Tuesday. It already happened three weeks ago.

What actually fades (and why)

When you did the reset, several things were true at once:

You ate warm food at consistent times. You sat down without screens. You chewed slowly. You gave your nervous system a predictable rhythm it could trust.

The clarity you felt wasn’t just about the kitchari. It was about the conditions around the eating — the timing, the warmth, the stillness, the consistency.

Those conditions told your nervous system something it rarely hears during a normal workday:

You can stop. It’s safe to digest. Nothing is chasing you right now.

When the reset ends and the conditions disappear, the nervous system goes back to its default:

stay alert, stay reactive, keep scanning.

The fog returns because the signal changed.

Not because you failed. Because the architecture that was sending the signal was temporary.

The difference between a reset and a rhythm

A reset is a controlled environment. You cleared the calendar, simplified the meals, removed the noise. It’s a greenhouse.

A rhythm is what grows in open air.

It’s the practice of maintaining enough of those conditions — not all of them, not perfectly — inside a real life with real demands.

One warm lunch, sat down, on time. Not every day. But most days.

A 3pm check-in that takes thirty seconds: Am I running on capacity or borrowed energy right now?

A morning that starts with something other than your inbox.

These aren’t dramatic changes. They’re architectural ones. They change the default your nervous system falls back on when the day gets hard.

The reset proved your body can feel different.
The rhythm is what makes “different” the new normal.

Why most people skip this part

Because the reset felt like progress. It was tangible.
Five days, clear results, a beginning and an end.

Rhythm doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like repetition.

Eating the same warm lunch on a Tuesday doesn’t give you the dopamine hit of starting a new protocol. There’s no Day 1 excitement. No dramatic shift by Day 3.

There’s just Tuesday. And then Wednesday. And then a month later, you realize your 3pm hasn’t crashed in weeks and you can’t pinpoint when it changed.

That’s how architecture works. It compounds invisibly.

The reset is the proof of concept. The rhythm is the investment.

What this looks like in practice

You don’t need to eat kitchari forever. You don’t need to recreate the reset conditions permanently.

You need four anchor points in your day — moments where you deliberately practice regulation instead of reactivity.

How you start the morning. How you eat lunch. What you do at 3pm. How you close the day.

Those four moments, protected consistently, create the architecture that the reset only simulated temporarily.

The reset showed you what’s possible. The rhythm makes it yours.

If the reset gave you something you don’t want to lose, the next step is building the system that keeps it.

That’s what the paid membership is built around — the Day in the Life Assessment, the four anchor points, the meal framework, and the ongoing support to make rhythm stick inside a real life.

→ Join the membership

Or if you want a smaller next step first, The Exhaustion Experiment is a three-day proof of concept — one protected lunch, tracked results, your own data.

— Savitree

What happens when you slow down enough to actually hear yourself?

Not just your voice. Your signals.

We didn’t know exactly what the answer would be. We were our own experiment.

What surprised us

What surprised Jane: The screen.

Not the phone during a meeting, not the laptop during a call — but the screen when eating alone. The moment no one is watching, no one is waiting, no one needs anything. The moment that should be the easiest to protect.

That’s when the pull is strongest.

What surprised Savitree: The communication.

The expectation was that this challenge would be about food. About chewing slowly, eating warm, protecting the lunch window. And it was. But what wasn’t anticipated was how much the listening would change. The prompts didn’t need to be followed day to day. Reading them created awareness. And that awareness — that slight pause before speaking, that willingness to stay in the question a little longer — changed how we showed up in every conversation.

There are receipts. Watch the first live, then this one. You’ll see it.

Something Jane wrote in Chat midway through the challenge stopped us:

“My stomach already closed the door.”

We laughed. But the question underneath it wasn’t funny: Do we keep speaking after the door is closed?

What was hardest

The same thing. For almost everyone.

Putting down the screen. Sitting with the meal. Not reading, not scrolling, not listening to something. Just eating.

Savitree: Twenty years ago, my teacher found out I was eating while driving. He was horrified. He gave me an assignment: sit and eat. Chew your food. Don’t read. Don’t listen to music. Just eat.

What he was teaching me — though I didn’t have the language for it then — was that presence is the flavor enhancer. Extra spices become unnecessary when you’re actually tasting what’s in front of you.

One participant wrote in Chat: “Definitely chewing — and I wanted to swallow so badly. I did a few times almost without even thinking about it.”

Another shared that the challenge made her aware of how much she used to eat under stress. A warm midday meal, she said, not only nourishes her body — it lets her breathe.

Someone in Notes mentioned she makes it a point to eat lunch outside as much as possible. For those who can’t get outside: make your plate the nature. Take it in through your senses. That’s enough.

Jane: The urge to run the moment eating was finished. To get up, move on, answer the next thing.

We recognized this immediately: that’s normal, right? We’re always asking what’s next. We’re trained to move through moments, not stay in them. We seldom sit for a second and take in what just happened.

Anna wrote in the live: “It’s interesting to notice when you’re feeling fidgety — to not reach for a screen. Just noticing the nerves.”

Jane: “Yes, it is.”

In yoga, when you start to feel the shakes — that’s when you know it’s working. Don’t abandon the position.

What changed when we slowed down

Posture. Presence. The space we claim.

We talked about how the way you hold your body affects the space you occupy — and how that space affects your mind.

Savitree: I’ve been teaching meditation for a long time. I always remind people: you are royal. Sit like one. Royalty doesn’t rush.

Jane: Lunch as your meditation in the middle of the day. That’s exactly it.

Claiming your lunch — being present to it, protecting it — is a more honest act of gratitude than any rote list. How you feed yourself now is how you feed yourself after.

We also talked about claiming space in conversation.

Savitree: In group settings, I’m more prone to listening. I find it interesting to see where things go. But it takes me out of the equation a little. And I noticed I don’t like that.

Jane: [laughs]

It’s about claiming the proper space. For someone wired to listen, even claiming a little space can feel like hijacking. The challenge — in eating and in speaking — is learning the difference between taking up space and taking over.

What remains

For Jane: The pause.

“Even in my working rush hour — to pause, take time, to know it’s not necessary to rush. My biggest learning: take lunch, take a little pause, and then we can run faster. There’s more power.”

The slow cut is the fast cut.

For Savitree: Claiming space. The on-time lunch is where it starts. A protected meal in the middle of the day is a rehearsal for claiming space in everything that follows — in conversations, in decisions, in the work that actually matters.

And the pause itself.

Without pause, jokes aren’t funny. Music without the pause wouldn’t become symphonies. Sound without pause would be noise.

And our day without pause becomes an exhausting grind.

What we asked at the beginning — and what we know now

We asked: what happens when you slow down enough to actually hear yourself?

Here’s what we found:

The screen gets harder to put down when no one’s watching. The chewing feels impossible until it doesn’t. The fidgeting is the nervous system downshifting — don’t abandon the position. The urge to run after eating is the same urge that makes you speak before you’re ready. Posture is not aesthetic. It’s the space you give yourself permission to occupy. Presence at lunch is practice for presence everywhere.

And the most surprising thing: you don’t have to change what you say. You change how you listen. And everything else follows.

The practice is yours now

The 21 days are over. The prompts will always be in the Chat — you can start at Day 1 any time. The recordings will be there.

But the practice doesn’t live in the challenge. It lives in your lunch. And in the pause before you speak.

Whatever you choose next:

Jane’s Rehearsal Room opens next week — a real room to practice speaking before it matters. If you’re not ready for the hot seat, witnessing is its own form of learning. Find it at Captain Rhetoric.

Savitree’s Exhaustion Experiment is three days of your own trackable data — one protected lunch, one shift in your afternoon. Find it in the nav bar at Food as Medicine.

Whatever you choose — keep the lunch. Keep the pause.

The practice is yours. You built it.

— Savitree & Jane