I Had the Answers and Googled Anyway
A few days ago, I caught myself doing something completely ridiculous.
I have a genetic report that’s an actual map of my own DNA, made for me, with clear instructions about what my body tends to be deficient in, that my detox pathways run slow, why my mitochondria need morning sun and red light, what to eat, and what to skip. I paid for it. I was thrilled when I found it. I remember thinking, " This is the game-changer. This is THE thing.”
And there I was, with that report sitting in the files on my desktop, searching on YouTube and looking up someone else’s protocol. Asking how other people fixed the exact thing my own report already had an answer for.
Why on earth would I do that?
Here’s the context, because it matters. I’ve been on a chronic illness journey for almost twenty years. It started with Lyme around the age of 20, and my body just never felt right after that. So I’ve been down path after path after path. Traditional medicine, functional medicine, energy healers, and every fitness and nutrition protocol you can imagine. I’m a certified Rapid Transformational Therapy practitioner, a Reiki practitioner, a 200-hour registered yoga teacher, and a certified coach. Plus, the whole being psychic thing. I have collected the certifications and absorbed the content for two decades. This is how I healed X. This is how I did Y. When you hit this age, the only way to do Z is… I’ve got a lot of X, Y, and Zs going on.
And after all of that, I’m still looking outside myself for the answer.
I think I finally understand why. It’s that, for so much of my life, I’ve been told I’m doing it wrong. Mostly by well-meaning people — people who wanted me to be okay, who were maybe a little afraid I wouldn’t be, given the way I’m built. But the messages landed all the same way. So when I got sick with mold a while back and went on medical leave to detox, I brought a whole team into my world. A functional medicine doctor, a new acupuncturist, and energy workers, and I started taking everyone’s advice as fact.
Some of that is just how I’m wired: from a Human Design perspective, I have an open head, open ajna, and I am taking it all in for better or for worse. But the piece that was missing was the filter. The part that asks:
“Okay, what of this is actually meaningful for me? What’s pointing me in my own direction, and what’s just the way it’s always been done, or the way it works for them?”
The clearest example I have is leftovers.
I’m built to eat fresh, seasonal, simple ingredients, simple meals, cooked that day with my closed taste determination. I’m not built to eat leftovers, and for most of my life, leftovers genuinely disgusted me. Then I moved in with my partner, who is a wonderful waste-not-want-not person, diligent with his leftovers, and that works beautifully for him. Over time, I started thinking, I need to stop being so picky. I need to stop being a diva. Just eat the leftovers. Do the meal prep, it’ll make everything easier. I even found a meal-delivery company I adored that brought me three dinners a week.
But they were three dinners a week that were leftovers. And I’m not supposed to eat leftovers. I started to notice that I felt like I was wilting. Not because the food wasn’t lovingly prepared, but because my disgust was correct.
It was my body telling me something true about myself, and I let myself get swayed by a way of living that was never even pushed on me — it’s just how my partner does things. And the whole time, I was slowly making myself sicker by eating food my body would pull no nourishment from.
Fun.
That’s the part that stops me. Even when I was technically eating, I wasn’t getting nourished, because none of it was aligned with what my body actually needed. I’d handed the decision to a method instead of to myself.
I got a strange gift from an experiment that mostly went badly — I tried some peptides, and my body reacted badly to them. But for a few days, before I stopped, I got to feel my hunger and fullness signals correctly for the first time in I don’t know how long. I could feel what I was actually hungry for and when I was full. It reminded me how simple it can be — a few good ingredients, some herbs, and a little bit of time in the kitchen or at the grill. I don’t need to fast like the fitness influencers say. The first thing my body wants every morning is water and breakfast. To put that off would hurt me.
I learned some of this through my Human Design, specifically looking at the variables. But here’s the part that really got me: I never needed any of it. Not the report, not the protocols, not even the Human Design, necessarily. What I needed was to get still and listen to myself. We just don’t live in a world that’s very interested in letting us sit down, get quiet, and do it our own way. At least not right now.
So this is the thing I keep coming back to, and I think it’s true whether we’re talking about food or your whole life:
Outside voices can be incredibly helpful. But they’re only helpful when you take what works and leave the rest. They’re only good for you when you don’t let them make you feel like you’re wrong.
I still love a day-in-the-life video. I love watching how someone gets through their day, what little thing I hadn’t considered that might feel good for me — oh, I like how she does that, I’ll try it. That’s allowed. The trick is not handing your decisions over to it. Not copying the morning routine step by step, or eating the leftovers because someone you love eats them.
And yes, you’ll get some things wrong. But it won’t be because you failed to follow someone’s instructions. It’ll be because you tried something and it didn’t fit you, which is just information, and you’re always allowed to pivot.
This is actually the whole of what I’m here to do. My sister says she calls me whenever she has a big decision to make, and the truth is the only thing I really do is help someone get clear on what they want and why — and then notice what’s pushing on them from the outside to make them think their own choice is wrong.
Get the wisdom from inside yourself first and then find the people who make that voice stronger, not quieter.
Come back to yourself. I’m doing it in real time over here, leftovers and all.
Be Your Own Oracle
Clear what isn't yours and hear what is with The Daily Meditation. It guides you through your Human Design energy centers — clearing the absorbed energies, shielding your energy field, and getting you quiet enough to hear what your inner voice has to say.
