The slack ran out

How 21 years of meditation gave me a long rope — and what happened when it ran out.

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