Rise. Renew, reconnect.
Welcome to from the Ashes, a podcast where every episode ignites hope and healing.
I'm your host, Valerie Hwang Beck, and I'm on a mission to help you embrace your unique potential and become the vibrant visionary you knew you were meant to be.
I'm going to start straight away with the main takeaway for tonight's podcast, and that is don't wait until it's too late to start taking care of yourself.
This is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot and that I care about deeply. Because the more that I am out there in the world inviting people to my coaching business,
to getting help,
offering my services,
the more I come across people who. Who absolutely wait until it's too late to get help for their health,
whether that's physical, mental, or both.
And by the time that it's too late,
the.
The consequences on your health are really devastating.
And so I hope that anyone out there who feels at all like they're on the brink of exhaustion, anyone who feels like they've been pushing the envelope dangerously close to burnout,
I want you to listen to this episode. Because not taking care of yourself and waiting until the absolute latest to do something about it can seriously affect your livelihood.
Not only your ability to make money, but your ability to just be an able person, to be able to go out in the world, to be able to support yourself financially also just energetically,
and to make sure that you continue to be taken care of in having enough food, having enough. Having enough shelter,
having a roof over your head. Right?
It can get that bad.
And so I really am going to talk deeply on this topic tonight, give you some anecdotes, but also pull in some ancient wisdom so that I hope this drives the message home.
And the thing is,
so many of us only slow down when we're forced to slow down.
Either we get a cold or we get the flu or,
or we break our leg or something happens where it's like, okay, the universe told us to slow down,
you know, and most people see, like, oh, they kind of laugh it off, like, ahaha, the, you know, the universe is finally telling me to stop,
as if they couldn't stop it themselves beforehand.
Of course the universe is going to give you a sign to stop when you've pushed it too hard. But that's because you weren't listening.
You weren't listening to the warning signs that took away your ability to focus on the road, your ability to eat correctly, your ability to get good sleep,
and then your ability to take care of yourself is compromised because your senses are compromised, your energy is compromised.
So it's not surprising then that you get into an accident or you,
you find yourself sick,
or you,
you know, you, you pass out or something like that.
And there are so many warning signs that we don't even have to wait until those extreme ones to start to tell that we're heading towards energy depletion.
In Ayurveda, the ancient system of holistic medicine from India,
they talk all about this concept of pathogenesis. Where does disease come from?
And it doesn't start when you start to feel sick. There are actually signs before that in your body and mind that are telling you that you are going to get sick later.
So we need to start to focus on those now, every single day.
Now.
If you know already that you've been pushing at your job too hard, if you've been focusing too much on your work, on your business,
you might already be towards the brink of burnout.
So I'll start with those first. I'll break down how to locate symptoms and signs we can start to identify even before these start to happen.
But if you have constant fatigue, that sleep doesn't fix,
right? If you're waking up and you're still not rested,
that's a sign that your nervous system is out of whack.
Something needs to happen where you really need deeper restoration.
If you have mood swings, emotional volatility, like one day you're super sad and crying, and one day you're really irritated.
That's also a sign that you don't have the resilience right now that you need.
And action needs to be taken now in order to restore yourself to a place of relative evenness where you don't become so reactive all the time.
You have trouble sleeping or waking up when unrefreshed.
If you're waking up in the morning and you're like you feel heavy as a rock because you feel like you haven't slept,
you. It's telling you that your body hasn't actually restored.
If you have resentment towards people that you care about or responsibilities, responsibilities you have, or things that you love to do, even you feel like you're being. You're obligated to show up to something you used to actually love showing up to without any question.
That's also a sign that your energy reserves are depleted and nothing is being done. To restore that so that you continue to enjoy the things that you like and the people that you love,
it's not them, it's not the activity.
It's the fact that there's no proactive actions being taken in order for you to show up your best self.
And it can be easy then to blame our outward circumstances. Be like, oh, they expect me to show up all the time.
But it all starts with us making sure that we are taking care of ourselves, even if that means we're disappointing someone else.
If you feel lack of motivation or lack of joy, pleasure in life, if you feel flatlined, that's also a sign that something is really out of whack.
It's not that we should always be happy, go lucky.
But if we feel like nothing is really sparking our joy, if nothing is really motivating us and we're feeling like, well, what's the point of anything?
It really is a sign that we are very, very depleted.
And then pushing through as a way of life, not a temporary strategy, I see this way too much.
I'm a strong person.
I. I have to do this.
Pushing through is my way to show that I can.
And then pushing, pushing, pushing,
having that becoming your,
your way of being all the time. And then it's no wonder that all of a sudden one day you're breakout in rashes and you could barely stand because you're dizzy.
Yes, I know people like this.
And yet you insist on keeping on the push.
So these are signs of burnout, early warning signs of burnout that you really, really need to pay attention to. If you have any of these,
just know that you have already probably pushed a little too hard.
Now,
what about the signs before that?
So this is where I start to draw in on the Ayurveda. Because Ayurveda talks about paying attention to your gut health, your digestion as the first sign of anything slightly askew.
And in modern medicine, now in modern science, they talk about the enteric nervous system, how our gut and our brain are very much intertwined mind and so. And our nervous system, right, being the in between,
that if we are experiencing any kind of emotional or psychological distress, our gut is also immediately affected.
So it's no wonder that digestive issues are what Ayurveda point to as being some of the earliest signs of disease in the body and signs of disease symptoms that are very, very manageable according to Ayurveda.
So if you catch digestive issues early,
you can prevent many more serious issues down the line.
So let's Talk a little bit about pathogenesis and how this relates to being able to catch the signs and also prevent disease in the long run and how to know when perhaps it's not necessarily too late, but when things become really, really difficult to reverse.
So Ayurveda calls pathogenesis samprapti. It's the.
The stages of disease formation.
And I like to describe these stages as a tree, starting from the roots.
The roots are where the imbalances start. And those imbalances start, as I said, in the digestion.
And in the first stage of pathogenesis,
we have mild symptoms that increase in various areas of the digestion depending on their nature.
So you might find that it's either going to be in, like, your upper stomach area or your lower stomach and intestines or in your colon.
So depending on site, the symptoms often differ.
So it could be something like a acid reflux type of thing or burning sensation in your stomach. It could be accumulation of mucus in the upper gut, and that also carries through to your lungs.
It can also be constipation and gas in your colon.
Anytime that we have a disturbance in our emotions or our nervous system and our psychology,
it changes the way that we eat and it also changes the way that we feel.
So if you ever noticed that you lose your appetite when you feel down,
and then all of a sudden you're feeling either bloated or gassy and stuff, that's something that happens naturally.
Now,
knowing the symptoms and the nature of the symptoms in Ayurveda, you can just start to reverse those by introduc.
The opposite qualities of whatever. Whatever it is. I'm not going to be talking about that today.
If you have questions about how to identify those specific symptoms, you can message me and we can talk about it. Or you can take one of my dosha quizzes and it will give you a pretty thorough outline of what's going on in your digestive system and what you should do to.
To alleviate the symptoms.
But for now, know that those mild symptoms show up in your digestion and they are easily reversed if you catch them early enough.
Now what if you notice them and you ignore those signs?
Then the imbalance starts to intensify.
Your body gives more signals because it's trying to catch your attention so that acid reflux may become ibs, or it can become like loose stool, or it can become like a burning sensation in your gut that doesn't go away.
You actually start to notice it. Now, we call that aggravation.
At this stage,
it's still okay. If you notice and you do something about it, it's still easily reversible because it's still in the gut.
But the thing is, with aggravation, it's at the edge of something, right? And so once it crosses over that edge, it goes into a stage called overflow.
Now, we're still at the root here. It's still very much manageable.
But when it goes into overflow,
we go from gut to circulation.
Circulation in the body.
Imagine like you're. You're digesting food.
Those foods get broken down in the stomach, Then they are absorbed by the small intestine and the large intestine. To some extent,
those nutrients are absorbed and they are distributed in the body. Well, it's not the only thing that's being distributed.
Whatever we are taking in in the gut is also being distributed.
And that could be liquids, it could be.
It could be toxins. Anything else that we intake towards the gut also gets distributed.
So imagine there's an imbalance being distributed in the body because it overflowed from aggravation,
and literally that starts to show up in your circulatory system.
So circulatory system being like in your blood, it could also be in your lymph fluid or in your skin. So you get random skin issues,
or you might feel like an intense heat,
you might get a rash, or you might get dry skin, depending on the nature of things.
I all along also experiencing emotional patterns.
So once it overflows into circulation,
it's a lot more difficult to target that.
And then when it starts to circulate in the body, this imbalance will start to search for places in the body that are weaker.
So if you have naturally sensitive skin, a mate lodges,
may lodge in the skin.
If you have issues with the joints,
those imbalances might lodge in the joints.
Let's say you have had nervous system issues for your entire life,
it might relocate to your nervous system and affect you there.
Some people get like shakes on their tongue. That's what I've seen in patients. Like, they get shakes in their tongue, and that means that their nervous system is depleted.
They feel very, very sensitive.
So once these imbalances relocate towards vulnerable tissues in the body,
then we have something called manifestation. It becomes a disease that is diagnosable, that has a label, right? Western medicine doesn't really call it a disease until manifestation.
So manifestation could be diabetes, it could be anxiety disorder, it can be inflammatory bowel syndrome.
Any variety of things that have a label and that have a set number of symptoms that determine its diagnoses.
And then on the final stage we have what we call complications or diversifications.
So then multiple systems in the body are affected.
So like, let's say autoimmune disorders, chronic depression, heart disease, and things where multiple diseases seem to show up.
Right? So maybe it is you have eczema at the same time that you have adrenal fatigue, that the same time you're experiencing hair loss at the same time that you are having heart palpitations and you don't really know what's going on.
But there's just a lot that's happening because we've waited until this last stage to even notice the disease or acknowledge its presence.
Diseases is really your body is trying to tell you something is off and that it needs to be repaired.
So if we are constantly pushing through the first, let's say four stages even of disease and waiting until it manifests, waiting until it diversifies in order to do anything about it,
you're probably wearing your system down so thin that it's going to take a lot more intense measures to get it back into a state of balance.
So like I said, most people don't seek support until stage four or five. We're basically conditioned, I think, in our society to believe that we have to wait until it's too late.
We have to wait until something is really, really wrong to do anything about it.
And I don't know if it is because we feel like we should have the right to eat whatever we want and like, just, just abuse our bodies however we want, or if it's because we feel a pressure to put ourselves last.
But either way,
we're ignoring a very universal truth that the longer you wait, the harder it is to reverse the disease.
And maybe you don't have a diagnosis for anything, but if you are getting dizzy, if you can't show up to work because of exhaustion, if your skin is breaking out all the time and it's causing you pain,
does it matter if you have a diagnosis or not?
So I really think that most of us are living life not at all paying attention to diseases in the root stage. Meaning that anytime there, there are digestive upsets, anytime there are slight emotional upse or like maybe slight signs in the skin,
we don't really think of those as internal problems. Like we, we, we see acne showing up on the skin, we're like, oh, we just gotta slop some, you know, cream on it,
rather than being, hmm, I wonder what it is that I'm ingesting or the way my Digestion is, is working. That might be affecting my skin or maybe the way that my mental health is affecting my skin.
It is great to start paying attention earlier because your habits, your behaviors,
your cravings even are going to signal when you're maybe pushing it a little too hard.
Perhaps you're skipping meals or you don't have an appetite.
I was just talking to someone who was like, oh, I don't really have an appetite these days, even though,
you know, I'm working out a lot.
So looking at the digestion of why that might be using caffeine and sugar to stay upright.
If you can't function without coffee,
that's not because coffee is your savior.
It's because you don't have a structure to keep your body actually fueled with the energy that it needs.
Knowing something feels off all the time, but actually brushing it aside or putting off till later,
like, no matter who you are, if you are like a CEO at the top of the food chain, or if you're someone who's. Who's working for themselves,
yes, life is busy,
but what's going to happen when you can't get up in the morning and you can't actually do your job?
We all have a responsibility to take care of our own bodies.
It might seem like, yes, there are a lot of people around us, and yes, they should, they should notice when we're tired. But no,
if you mask the fact that you're tired,
no one is going to notice. It is actually your responsibility to. To voice your needs.
Even if you feel like they're not going to be heard.
You don't know if they're going to be heard or not until you actually say it.
And only when you know that will you know what to do next.
Because I hear a lot of people who are afraid to tell their bosses that they are too tired because they're afraid that there are going to reprimand or consequences for doing so.
And I get that corporate culture can be really, really brutal.
But if you're working yourself to the brink of death, which some people are,
and if it's that or talk to your scary boss,
would you really actually rather collapse?
It's funny that I'm. It's not so funny, actually, but it's kind of.
It's astounding to me that I actually have to ask those questions.
But in a lot of people that I've talked to, when I ask them,
what do you think is going to happen if you don't take care of yourself now? And they say death,
I I also have to question, well then, what is your next step?
Are you willing to take an action or take a stand for yourself?
As I said, I have witnessed friends and clients wait until a brink and I,
I really don't know how much longer I can wait for them to choose themselves because I have had, I've had actually multiple people say that next step is maybe death.
And that doesn't make any sense to me.
So I do have a close friend that will basically stop communication and disappear for a couple of months or maybe even close to a year sometimes because they're working so hard that they don't have any bandwidth for anything else.
They work in a very, very demanding corporate environment and they are deathly afraid of their boss,
but they're also unwilling to leave the situation because there's,
you know, they want to climb that ladder.
And I've seen this person come to me in literal rashes,
hip pain,
back pain, dehydration,
pallor, dizziness,
just a lot of symptoms of extreme depletion.
And regardless of what advice I give,
there's this unwillingness to leave a very toxic situation.
The allure I think of climbing that ladder, of doing the thing that feels impactful is very drawing.
Even if there is self sacrifice involved and even when they know that like they can't take it anymore, if their body can't take it anymore.
And it's incredibly difficult to witness somebody that you care about really deplete themselves that way because you're saying stuff and it's not landing anyone out there who relates to this person, anyone out there who is like,
I, I know that I should be taking care of myself more.
I know that I am exhausted, I know that I need rest, I know that I need to do all these, you know, self care practices, but I can't.
I want you to think about the people that you care about and present yourself to the life that you want to live and really question if it's worth that goal.
So then it comes to this question that I want to ask as well, is to myself actually, what is it that I think is underneath the refusal to slow down even when the body's clearly, clearly asking us to slow down?
And is it fear, guilt, conditioning?
This is why beliefs are so,
they're so significant because a lot of our behaviors come from internalized beliefs that weren't even ours. They were just ones that society taught us or our families taught us or whatnot.
And we just accepted them by default, whether or not they serve us or not.
And so there's internalized systems,
internalized sense of self worth that's tied to productivity. A lot of the time there are expectations of being strong,
of being the provider sometimes.
And there's that guilt and shame for needing rest,
especially when other people are depending on us.
You know, if a society reveres working really, really hard,
then slowing down is of course going to feel like a failure.
But these are beliefs, they're not mandates. You don't have to choose to believe this if it's not serving you.
You don't have to buy into every system that you were raised in,
especially if it's killing you.
But you have to be the one to make that decision.
So in Japanese culture, there's this concept of karoshi, karoshi, which is death by overwork.
So there are literally people that work so hard, work so long that they neglect themselves completely and basically drop dead.
And in the United States, actually we, we also have a very hard hustle culture and a glamorization of burnout. Perhaps not to the extent of having karoshi,
but there is still a. A sense of revering the martyr, caregiver, martyrdom.
There is a sense of revering the activist,
the person who's like, I'm going to take it on.
I'm gonna take it all on.
There's pride and over functioning of being like, look at how much I can handle.
And we have a lack of community,
we have a lack of cooperation.
So it's expected that rather than pooling all of our resources together, we all have to handle this all on our own. And I'm. I'm guilty of being in the system too, believing that I have to have it all together and I am even still working on it.
But I really want to take this conversation to an extreme because it's not so far away from reality because who of us out there that are listening have also been to this brink.
And it's more people than you might realize.
So what I would like to invite all of us to do is to reframe.
Reframe our relationship with our wellness and our health,
reframe our beliefs and the way that we look at self sacrifice.
Going from thinking it's just a busy season, I have to push through to being like, I am really overworked right now. I'm going to take the time that it needs to bounce back before I can take on more.
And rather than saying, I'll rest when I'm done because there is really no done,
it's telling yourself that sustainability matters more than your speed.
And to also really see that the people around you that care about you don't want to see you collapse.
They don't want to see you sacrifice yourself.
They want your presence more than they want whatever it is that you're trying to help them with.
If they would rather see you self sacrifice and don't give a **** about your well being,
I would question your choice to work with these people or to be around them or to give them your energy.
All right,
so if you're one of these people out there who feels like you really, really have to pull it together and start taking care of yourself, but you just don't know where to start.
Remember that the mind and the gut are connected.
Your digestion is really important and you can even start with that.
So start treating your gut health as important as your mental health, as your, the rest of your physical health.
So drinking hot water,
eating regular meals.
We can also start to set boundaries with our phones, with our devices,
making sure we have a little bit more space to rest,
to give ourselves time without any of those distractions each day.
And to really check in with your body, check in with your digestion, like even monitor your elimination.
That's what we do in Ayurveda. We look at how we're pooping and just start to pay attention.
Because even that act of paying attention starts to signal to your self that, yeah, I care a little bit about,
about my well being and start to really voice your needs to other people. Don't worry about if you're going to be such a burden because we are tribal people. We're not meant to survive by ourselves.
And I don't want you to lose hope. The body's incredibly adaptive if we listen early enough. And even when it feels like you can't handle it,
you can always slow down that deterioration by giving yourself the rest you need, by giving yourself the nourishment you need,
by giving yourself a little of that self love. And remember, it's not about going backwards or you know, regressing or needing to,
to put your life on hold. It's about evolving your relationship with yourself.
And every one of those small changes to like, pay attention to what's going on in your body, to like get a little bit more of your me time in the morning helps you reclaim your energy and your trust in yourself.
In another podcast episode, I'd love to talk about the relationship between trusting yourself and autoimmune. So stay tuned for that. But just know today that choosing yourself,
especially when you are already pushing the envelope in terms of your energy, your health is not a selfish thing.
It's essential and it's strategic and it's necessary. If you're waiting until you're at the brink of.
Of collapse,
really catch yourself to see if that is the life that you're committed to living,
or if you would rather live a life where you are vibrant,
where you have vitality and you can actually show up with joy and give yourself from a full cup rather than one that's already really, really depleted. And I know that this is going to take courage.
Choosing yourself is the bravest thing you can do in a culture that rewards depletion,
in a culture that rewards hustle.
But that makes it all the more essential because you are pushing against the tide.
Now I'm going to leave you with one activity that I want you to do to start taking back your sovereignty,
and that is to write down three deal breakers when it comes to managing energy that you're not going to let anybody cross these boundaries.
You're going to prioritize self care and getting rest if these things happen.
For example,
if I wake up and I feel like a ton of bricks, I am going to do a week of meditation and you know, just be, be creative. But make these decisions for yourself right now so that you know that you are taking care of yourself.
And when you're doing that, you build the courage to start to stand up for yourself no matter who is pushing back at you.
Okay? I hope you enjoyed this episode.
If you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it and I'm always here for you if you need someone to listen to your struggles.
Thank you for listening and see you next time.
Thanks for tuning in to from the Ashes. If this episode sparks something in you, I want you to know your evolution matters and we're rooting for you all the way.
For coaching, community and resources to help you rise into your full potential,
visit intrepidwellness Life and check out what we have to offer.
If you love the episode, please leave a comment, share it with a friend, or tag me on Instagram ntrepidwellness Val,
because I'd love to hear what resonated for you. Until next time, keep rising.