Aliving™ is the point. Health is the infrastructure.
What it means to live well and be well through midlife and beyond
You didn’t think it would be this disruptive, this midlife transition.
The brain fog, poor sleep, irritability, inability to handle routine stressors, and anxiety. What worked before doesn’t work now. What happened? You are frustrated and angry - looking for answers, asking about causes, and trying the latest supplements or exercise strategy - and still cannot make sense of what is happening.
Over the course of my career, I began noticing another shift during this time. I saw a subtle pulling back, a vibe of acquiescence to the demands and expectations of life from women. It had the whisper of settling when there had previously been that go-getter engagement.
Is she choosing this life, or has something occurred that made her less able to engage with the life she actually wants?
We are quick to point to sex hormones as the issue, the one-cause-to-rule-them-all, but is it just that?
Could it be just exhaustion?
How much can we put down to hormonal shifts? Which hormones?
Is it an accumulation of life that never had enough rest, recovery, and recognition intersecting with physiological shifts? What has she let go of and adapted to over time?
How has doing and being so much for so many people, for so long, shaped how she is showing up now?
How might her mindsets and beliefs undermine her well-being and agency?
What about her realization that the unconscious roles she took on no longer feel comfortable, and may even feel constraining?
What happens when all of these changes arrive at once?
I don’t know.
What do I actually want health to be?
Not knowing nagged at me. I didn’t like it. It created an open loop in my head, my brain searching for answers in the background. I felt some of this uncertainty needed to be filled.
And it got me thinking about what I DID want for her. What did I want her health to be for her? If this felt smaller, what was bigger? Maybe not bigger, but to feel engaged and connected to herself and others; to feel physically and emotionally vibrant and soulfully sound; to meet life as it comes with the resilience and coherence of her true self. It is a state of choosing to live well and be well.
It is a state where life flourishes.
The system of you
When I worked in conventional medicine, I wanted this for all my patients, but the structure and system did not support the outcomes I wanted for them. It felt to me like we were always trying to catch up, to manage or reduce the impact of symptoms that were already there.
What I have learned over decades in medicine is that symptoms are inextricably connected but too often viewed in isolation. In conventional medicine, we group symptoms into patterns that become a diagnosis, with an expected treatment to follow, typically treated in isolation from other issues. This ignores the interconnected physiological systems. These systems always have and continue to interact with each other. Categorization has its place and offers value, but it is incomplete. The fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, gut symptoms, and hormone changes are often connected. Those symptoms are part of a system.
That system is you.
When I first connect with someone, they come in feeling tired, foggy-headed, gaining weight, and just not feeling like herself, all of which she wants to go away.
In my head, I need to put that in context and connection
What is happening now? How did her symptoms come about? How long has she had them? What changed, and when? When was the last time she felt well?
What shaped this? What is her history? What events, big or small, have happened that are playing a role? What is her current and past environment? What are her relationships? What does she do day to day? Where did she come from? What was her previous world like? What is her mindset and thinking? How does she learn, and how does she interface with her world?
Where does she want to go? How does she want to live? Does she believe change is possible?
What kind of life does she want her health to support?
Ultimately, my goal is for her to discover her personal context and connections that make up her well-being.
I want people to live well and be well. I want people to tap into flourishing.
Zero symptoms isn't health
If we limit our thinking to eliminate or minimize feeling bad, then we stop at zero. We need to reach beyond zero.
Being healthy is not the absence of symptoms.
Health is not, in and of itself, the ultimate goal.
Life is the point. Health is the infrastructure.
When we feel good, humming along in our lives, we forget how smoothly our well-being supports us.
Aging continues; we will die, and biological limits are inevitable.
The paradox about being human and living well and being well is that we can improve as we age and build capacity, even as we know there will be limits.
Accepting aging and agency in aging are not opposites.
Seeing the whole person
I can't separate how I practice from a person's identity, relationships, purpose, stress, boundaries, meaning, and self-trust.
The body carries information about physiology, behavior, environment, history, and adaptation.
And for many of us, myself included, we need to learn to listen.
How many of us have been taught to think of measures of health as health itself?
a lab value
a checklist
a protocol
a supplement
a medication
a number on a scale or wearable
Get the number right, and you are healthy.
That doesn't translate to our lived experience, does it? Labs may be normal, the body composition may look good, and a wearable may report good sleep, but sometimes we just don't feel very good. We're missing part of the story.
Health is not just biological physiology.
Labs, medications, and body composition matter. They tell us important things about health. By themselves, they can’t tell her how well we are living our lives.
Biology matters, yes, but biology constantly interacts with identity, behavior, relationships, environment, stress, history, and meaning.
Here's what I see with women. They come to me after many years of taking care of others: their families and friends, their careers. Many of the women I work with are high achievers. Many struggle to connect with what their bodies are telling them. They're waiting for the right external intervention that will finally fix things: the right protocol, supplement, exercise routine, or drug.
Many women just treat symptoms, having never been shown or taught how what they feel now emerges from the interplay of physiology, environment, experience, behavior, and adaptation.
The philosophy behind Aliving™
I believe health can always be improved. You can always feel better.
I believe self-trust matters as much as self-discipline.
I believe we can age with intentionality, not passively.
I believe transformation happens when awareness becomes insight, and insight offers a different choice.
I believe stress and how it shows up is underappreciated, unrecognized, and the untapped lever for improvement.
Asking a different question
Perhaps the question can’t stop at “How do I make these symptoms go away?”
Symptom relief matters. It just isn’t enough.
What kind of health do I need to support the life I want to live?
What would it mean to be fully alive within the life I already have?
That is Aliving.
