Letter from the Editor
November/December 2024
Time and energy…two undervalued commodities until we run short of them.
Healing restores your energy.
But healing takes time and commitment.
I write this in the autumn of my 44th year of life, a time when I’m both a new mom and a woman beginning to glimpse a new horizon as my own hormone balance takes a still-gentle downturn.
I’m also a woman whose life has caught up to her a bit: I find myself needing more rest, more steady attention to my own self-care. I find myself dealing with hormone shifts, excessive toxin exposure, immune dysfunction and the faulty brain wiring that comes from that. I look in the mirror and see new lines, new contours, and wonder how they appeared overnight.
The cup of unlimited energy is no longer self-filling. I must be more conscious of its contents.
So even to myself I say, “healing takes time and commitment.”
It’s saying yes to yourself every day, over and over. It’s learning to anticipate the challenges and prepare for them before they arrive.
But healing is even more than that, really.
Healing is about transforming your relationship with yourself, putting yourself first.
That’s because we women tend to overvalue everything and everyone around us, and undervalue ourselves. We don’t grace ourselves with the time and energy we deserve for self-care.
And usually we can keep going, for a while. But in time, if we don’t pause to restore ourselves, to refill our own cup, we run low.
Autumn is a season of change: energy moves inward, recedes from the surface to dive deep. Autumn energy invites us back inside.
This is the best time of year to take a breath, pour some tea, maybe take a nap or tuck ourselves into bed early.
This, I remind myself now:
As a human I’m constantly restoring, which self-care promotes;
As a perimenopausal woman I’m recognizing the importance of self-care on a whole new level;
And as a new mom recovering from a frighteningly low postpartum experience, I’ve been waiting for my own permission for self-care for a long time.
Now, as a naturopathic doctor I’ve always recognized the importance of self-care, but it is the human and woman in me that makes the commitment to it. Again. Like new.
And to be clear: healing doesn’t have to mean recovering from some big illness like turning around a massive, massive ship to face its port of origination. Instead, it can mean the journey from recognizing that we don’t feel well and that we want to feel better.
It means beginning to make a map of all of the conscious steps you will take toward feeling better, whatever that looks like for you.
I’d been surviving for so long that I’d forgotten where I wanted to head. So that was my first step.
I’m a big lover of journaling and meditation.
These self-reflection tools helped me see a bigger picture, a life on the other side of the moment I became a mom and my tough road back to myself, a life where I’m navigating the sometimes rough, sometimes scary or sad, (and increasingly joyful!) and often profound waters of perimenopause.
You’ll see how, in this inaugural edition of The EDIT, my newest baby, the tool of meditation has soothed my mental and physical healing journey.
The EDIT is my way of helping other women navigate the times in their lives that can feel big or overwhelming and showing them simple steps to help them get back to feeling better, whether their struggle is with periods, pregnancy, postpartum, or perimenopause.
This is my gift to you, so you can live better, longer, and with so much love.
Happy turning inwards,
