When It "Feels" Like Nothing Is Working

Healing Is Stewardship: Why Conditions Matter More Than Protocols

What if healing is happening... and you're just looking in the wrong place?

As we move toward the summer solstice, I've been thinking a lot about seasons, stewardship, and what it really means to support the body. Summer is often the time of year when people start feeling better. We have more sunlight, more movement, more fresh food, and more opportunities to reconnect with nature. But instead of seeing summer as the finish line, I see it as one of the best opportunities all year to build capacity, restore resilience, and strengthen the foundations that support long-term health.

In this episode, I share a story from my garden, a dream about carrots, and a pivotal moment from my own healing journey when I realized my body was finally becoming less reactive after years of digestive issues, food sensitivities, bloating, constipation, and chronic stress.

I talk about:

• Why healing often happens long before there's visible evidence
• How gut health and the microbiome influence resilience and reactivity
• The mistake many people make when evaluating their progress
• Why symptoms are not always the best measure of healing
• The relationship between capacity, nervous system regulation, and recovery
• How mineral balance, digestion, and daily habits create the conditions for change
• What gardening has taught me about stewardship, patience, and healing

One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that the symptom that brought you into a healing journey isn't always the first thing to change. Sometimes the evidence shows up somewhere else first—in your sleep, your digestion, your energy, your mood, your recovery, or your ability to handle stress.

Healing is rarely about finding the perfect protocol.

More often, it's about creating the right conditions and stewarding your internal terrain over time.

If you've ever felt like you're "doing all the right things" and "nothing is working", this episode is for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Well, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Rewilded Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Lydia Joy. And I'm not sure how it happened, but somehow half of June has already disappeared since my last episode. And here we are, we're moving towards the summer solstice coming up on June 21st. And there's something about this stretch of the season, especially leading up to the solstice, that I always feel. And even my clients are saying things about it, right? We came out of the winter, we entered the spring, the light started building in terms of like how much access to the daylight we've had, right? The sun's climbing higher and higher in the sky, and it's staying longer and longer every day, right? And our bodies uh respond to all of that light, literally, because we are light-dependent creatures. Sun is our number one nutrient. And so when the sun returns to its fullest, the way that it does right around the solstice, I think a lot of people really start to feel it. They start to feel better, their energy shifts, moods are starting to shift. Um, you know, and something that many people felt quietly contracted through the darker winter months starts to really open back up, right? Um, you know, these really long days we're in, the garden's starting to prove to us that things are growing and flourishing again. To me, I want to say this is one of the best times of the year to more deeply support your health. Right. I see the same pattern every year. I've been tracking it for myself. Um, I've been tracking it with clients, right? People spend their winters, especially if you're in the north. I'm in the northeast, um, in southeast Pennsylvania, zone 7B. Um, it's not as bad as more north of me, but you know, it's it's it's not, it's it's significant enough to really feel it. And you get to the point in the winter where, you know, it's like you're just trying to get through, right? Um maybe more tired or feeling more drained or dealing with like seasonal illnesses or lower energy, right? Because, you know, we're inside more, we're not moving as much usually. Uh there's a little more stress on the body. Like the conditions of the winter environment can be harder on a body that is trying to deeply recover from whatever it's trying to recover from, right? And then once we really settle into late spring and make that transition into summer, something really shifts for people, you know, um, and people start reporting things to me like, oh man, I'm I'm sleeping better, or that I'm moving more, or uh, suddenly I like want to eat more fresh food, right? Like, you know, feeling better mood, feeling like a little more hopeful, right? Um, and one of the things that's very tempting for many people, and I've seen this, is that, you know, okay, I feel great compared to what I felt, you know, even in the winter. And, you know, life changes, we start to travel more, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then one of the things people may do is stop paying attention to the things that were supporting them. And I get it. There's a real sense of relief that comes with summer. You made it through another winter, your body knows it. But I've come to see this season a little differently. I don't see summer as like, okay, I made it. It's like a finish line, right? It's more of an opportunity. I see summer as a season where many of us finally have like enough reserve that it feels like the wind is at our back, so to speak, you know. We have more uh resources from nature available. You know, the light really helps our circadian biology massively, massively, massively. So then naturally we want to move more. Uh, we want to spend more time in nature, we're ready for the fresh food, right? And so there's more opportunity to restore what feels like winter depleted, right? Um, really, it's just maybe the winter just exposed what was there. But, you know, when the conditions are favorable, growth becomes easier if you just look at the the land, right? Like if you have a garden or if you're just observing nature. It's not effortless, though. It's just easier because it's the season that things grow. And that's what the garden reminds me of constantly. So this week I harvested my real handful of first real handful of carrots, which was really exciting. Because I'll tell you what, I've been watching and waiting and like, are they gonna do it? Are they gonna grow? And I knew they would. It's just like, you know, sometimes you wonder. And it's interesting because a year sometime last year, I had this dream where I saw myself in my carrot patch, and I started to see carrots just like bursting out of the earth like endlessly, like just like almost like the earth was heaving all these carrots forward. And I was just like, wow, there's so many carrots. It was just this endless, endless thing. And um it was exciting. But the the thing about it is that if you think about any harvest of anything you intentionally seed and plant that you created the conditions for, it doesn't happen instantly, right? For me, it just became tangible in my hands this week, right? And the carrots didn't just appear because of anything I did in the last few days or the last two weeks or even the last month. It began way before there was anything to see. It began when the bed was built, when I improved the soil, when the seeds were planted in the colder ground back, you know, in March, um when there was no evidence yet that anything would come out of it. Um, and it was really just when the conditions were created, quietly, really, for something to grow. And healing is often exactly the same. And one of the things that I've noticed over the years, both in my own healing and in the people that I work with, is that we don't always recognize that something is happening, like under the underneath, so to speak, right? Like if you think about a carrot, it grows in the darkness, right? Um, is that people don't always recognize progress when it is happening. You know, we live in a world that wants immediate feedback, immediate results, immediate proof, right? You take something, you do some specific thing, you change a thing, right? And you want to know right away whether it's working. Um, instant gratification culture, right? Especially if you've been tracking your own symptoms for a really long time and they've been hanging out with you, right? But that's not how gardens grow, and it's not how our bodies heal either. Because what actually happens is here we are, we're we're looking for evidence, kind of in the wrong place. We're we're focused on the symptom that hasn't changed yet. And that's the thing that's still frustrating us. But the thing that brings us into the healing journey in the first place is the symptom, right? Um, but if we keep staring at that one thing, we miss all the other signs that our inner ecosystem or terrain is already shifting when we actually take the time to begin, you know, supporting ourselves more deeply, right? Like sometimes it's very subtle. Maybe our sleep is a little better. Maybe we woke up four times a night. Now we're only waking up two times a night. Maybe we have some improvement in digestion to the degree that it was when we came in and started doing the work on ourselves, right? And it shows that there is more capacity in the body, but we're not done yet. So what do we think? We think, well, shoot, I still feel this, this, and this, right? However, if we're honest, we can see that, you know, we're able to handle life a little differently than we previously were. Um, and so a lot of times what happens is, you know, the original symptom isn't entirely gone. And so maybe we assume literally nothing has happened. Now, I know this full well because I personally have lived it. Um, I still get in my head, right? Even with the garden. I'm like, I know this is gonna happen, but here I am waiting and watching and calculating. Come on, hurry up and show me that you're gonna do what you're supposed to do, right? Um, but the reality is, is like, you know, the carrot was growing well before the harvest appears, right? And so here's the thing that I want to get it to is like the season that we are all in right now of late spring, almost summer, is one of the best times to really begin to plant seeds, meaning, you know, take more concerted uh effort and intentionality and care and planning to really support uh your body through the summer. It's a great, great time. There was a period in my life where I reacted to everything on and off for quite some time. Everything, like literally everything. I don't know if I need to tell you all the stories, but I went through the rigmarole of chasing every food, every supplement I tried. Um, anytime life got a little more stressful, right? Anytime I ate anywhere other than my own home, anytime I traveled outside of my home, when I didn't have tight control or hypervigilance to know what was gonna come at me or go into my body, you know, I could easily react badly. Um, even when I tried gentle things that were supposed to help me, a lot of times it felt like they created another problem. And I got to the point where my body just was so reactive that I felt like I was constantly managing symptoms and trying to avoid the next thing that might set me off. And at the time, I'm gonna go back in time many years ago. I want to say it was like 10 years ago, um, I was dealing with really significant digestive issues. I was bloated all the time. On and off constipation was a pretty regular part of my life. Um, I definitely was avoiding foods, gluten, you know, back then was a big one. Um I now can eat it with no issues. Um, but I just like I was avoiding so many things because I I just literally felt like a reaction to so much. So going out to eat was enormously stressful. I couldn't even enjoy it. Um, even going to someone's house and letting someone prepare me food felt really stressful. And it's like one of those, oh, it's bad because you can't tell someone else, like, here's my laundry list of all the shit that I can't do that I need you to be. It's like, no, you can't do that, right? You guys probably feel me, like going on vacation with the family, and you're like, ugh, everyone's trying to collaborate, and you're just like, I can't do what anyone else is doing. I have to just be over here and do my own thing, right? I know some of you listening understand exactly what I'm talking about. And it's like, it's almost like you you even stop trusting your body uh and food and anything new, and just like everything feels like a potential threat. And then the world just gets really small and tight and contracted because of it, right? Now, what I didn't fully understand at the time was what was actually happening underneath all of that reactivity, because it wasn't random, right? Um, there was definitely gut barrier permeability, which I have talked to you guys about in multiple podcast episodes, uh, explaining the physiology a little bit better, even the leaky gut episode, so on and so forth. So we know that when our gut lining is compromised, that barrier that is supposed to selectively filter what gets through is, I'm gonna say the word damaged or, you know, not optimal, whatever you want to call it, right? What happens is our immune system starts seeing things it should not be seeing. Partially digested food particles, bacterial byproducts, right? Things that would normally not make it past that barrier. And so then what happens? Our immune system does actually what it is designed to do. It reacts over and over again because something's there that should not be there. But the problem is that reactivity can continue and then increase and sort of just become like the baseline state of your body. Okay, so this is not about a character flaw because a lot of people are like, oh, I'm so sensitive. It's not that you are some weak human, it's really your insides and a terrain problem. And when you have a barrier that is breached, right, this is a terrain problem. It requires a solution um to do the repair. So around then, I was introduced to a product called Megasporbiotic. I've talked about it, it's still by far one of my favorite probiotics, does so many great things. Now, here's the thing. Of course, I was like, I believe in all the research. I believe, you know, the people who have used it successfully, I believe them. I'm not disagreeing. However, I am aware that my body has always not always, let's let's let's back up back up the truck for a second, because it feels like always, but it's really if I look, it was a short window of time, you know, where my body was reacting way more to everything. So I believed it was a good product. I wasn't resistant to it, but what I knew for certain was that my body had lost its tolerance for change and it had been demonstrating that to me for enough time. Even a simple recommendation, like try this probiotic, you write, like it just felt scary, right? A lot of people are just like, yeah, here it is, here's the probiotic, take the dose, carry on, right? Standard advice. Now, what I needed at the time was permission, which I gave myself, but nobody really talked about what to do when the body is so reactive that even support doesn't land smoothly. So then, of course, you get these slew of people who are like, that probiotic's bad, right? Because it didn't feel good in their body. I myself had to figure out the pace that worked for me when I got started with that probiotic specifically. And I realized that I had to take the tiniest amount imaginable. And every single time I tried to increase too quickly, my body let me know, and things would get uncomfortable and I would get constipated and I would have all these things. I would feel off. So I would back up and go slower. I didn't stop though. I kept going. It took me about four months to reach the full dose. Four months. I was still living in a water damaged house. I was still a single mom, stressed out the wazoo. I was trying to run a business, right? Like I still had a lot of life stress going on. Um, but it took me four months to tolerate the full dose. And here's why I think that makes sense for someone whose, you know, body is in a chronic uh immune-like threat mode. Um, megaspore is a spore-based probiotic, right? It works very differently than a lot of the probiotics that we all are familiar with, right? They actually survive the stomach acid. And a lot of conventional probiotics don't do that, right? So they end up like kind of germinating in the small test intestine, if you will. And then they just kind of go to work reshaping the microbial environment, crowding out opportunistic bacteria. They help to uh produce compounds that actually can help repair the gut lining and start to support conditions for a more diverse and stable community to grow, right? So that process is slow and cumulative. You're not just like adding bacteria, right? You're actually trying to shift an entire ecosystem. So the thing is, is they that doesn't happen like the overnight, right? You don't transform a reactive system overnight. So I kept going slowly, consistently. And then it took another four or five months after reaching that full dose before I could honestly say that something fundamental felt different. Right. So it was like somewhere around eight or nine months of consistency before I remember a really big moment of proof. Um, so I'm what I'm trying to get is the healing wasn't happening the day that I noticed the change. It was happening during all those months when it felt like almost nothing was happening, just like me watching my carrots before I could actually pull them out and they were big enough to eat, right? The roots were gonna grow way longer before I pulled it out of the ground, right? So one day I was out to eat and I ordered fish tacos. I think I was a little nervous to go out to eat, but I was also a little more lighthearted about it than I had been. Um and I didn't realize until halfway I was through those tacos that it was a regular old flour tortilla. I thought it was gonna be a corn tortilla. And when I went out to eat, you know, corn was less of an issue for me, if at all, than wheat. So to give you an example, um, years earlier, accidental gluten would put me out for like five days in a coma of fatigue. I had a specific experience where that happened. And, you know, so when you hang on to those memories, you know, it's it's what makes you hyper-vigilant, right? It's what makes the world feel dangerous. And it's what makes you scan every menu and like interrogate every waiter and never fully relax around a meal that someone else prepared. So when I realized what I had eaten, which was wheat, which I had previously had bad reactions to, I just decided, you know what? You know what? Um uh it's gonna be fine. I'm just gonna eat the food. I'm gonna trust that my body is improving, and I'm gonna see what happens because it's happened before. I know what the worst is, right? Like, you know what I'm saying? And nothing actually happened. I literally did not have any brain fog, any fatigue, zero reaction, nothing. And I remember just sitting there with that for a bit, like, you know, obviously, like a flower tortilla from a restaurant isn't like technically a health food, right? Um, and maybe that's not like an ideal food that's optimal for everyone, right? But what was the most profound was that my body was different. Right? That same input, which previously caused me problems and fear was producing a completely different response, which tells me my terrain had changed. And that's when I started understanding something that would shape everything about the way that I work with people. See, I feel like the goal is we don't want to spend our life avoiding everything. You know, there's so many things in the health space that people tell you are bad for you. Avoid it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Really, that's a terrible way to live. I mean, yes, it's true. There's a lot of things that are created uh in the food system that are terrible. Um, but you know, the goal is to help our bodies become less reactive. To all of life itself, right? Um, we can't live in a bubble, right? So we want to have uh a body, a system that's less reactive to these foods that we eat on occasion, less reactive to the stresses that we once were, right? Um, less reactive to any input that we take that is intended to help us make change within ourselves, right? And even less reactive to all the normal things that we encounter every single day, because like we cannot control it all, right? So when our terrain, um, our body, our ecosystem becomes more resilient, the world becomes like bigger again. And we can stop spending all of our energy managing outcomes and symptoms and how are we going to navigate the world? Like, right, right. We can stop organizing our entire life around what might happen and start trusting our body a little bit more. And that's exactly what I've had the privilege of watching happen with the clients that I work with, right? It's not like this overnight perfection, it's more gradual. Where people come in to me, they tell me their whole story. Uh to them, there are some certain things that are very frustrating and hard and challenging and shaping their life differently, right? But when I see someone sleep through the night for the first time in an entire year, or, you know, someone who can finally have an appetite in the morning again after years of literally zero appetite, um, or a client who used to literally have six weeks every spring where allergy season was terrible and they brace for it every year, right? Literally go through that season with zero problems. Um, you know, uh, as well as like trying foods that they couldn't have eaten previously without some big flare-up. Um, or even, you know, people start starting to notice that they're they're just not afraid of every symptom that shows up anymore. Right. Every single one of those examples and changes begins in the same way that the carrots do, right? Long before there's visible proof with small things done consistently to reorganize the state and conditions that you're in, right? Like there's definitely has to be patience. There definitely has to be support, stewardship, um, you know, bringing in more of the conditions that let the body do what it's actually designed to do. Now we just had a really big storm come through last night. Huge. Um, it was a torrential downpour. We got flash flood warnings, we got many inches of rain. Power went out, you know. Um, and so first thing I wanted to do was go check the garden this morning, be like, okay, what is going on? How did my garden fare in this storm? Right. And, you know, some plants definitely did get knocked over. Um, there wasn't like a really a lot of damage per se. I definitely could see a few weaknesses get exposed. I was like, okay, I need to come in here and trim, trim some plants back, you know, stake some things up a little better. Yada, yada, yada. Because here's what I learned about storms. They they don't just erase the growth that came before them. They can show you where the infrastructure needs strengthening, right? Where additional support is needed, like where metaphorically, the roots haven't gone quite deep enough yet, if you will, right? And I think our life works exactly the same way, especially when we're in a healing phase and on a journey to, you know, heal our bodies. We can have very stressful seasons. Sometimes that's what leads us to the deeper symptomology that we struggle with, right? We can have difficult winters, we can have health setbacks, we can have a busy month that like throws things off. And those things don't mean we're back at the beginning. Sometimes they're simply revealing where the next layer of support is needed, where our roots need to be more established, go a little deeper. You get the point, right? And that's just information. And I think a lot of people, what they don't realize is you're living your life and you got to go through the storms, right? Like you, it's not just gonna be easy peasy, light and breezy. You're gonna have times where things pick up, right? Life changes, and your body has to go through that change with you. And if it can do so better than it previously did in the past, that's information, right? And one of the things that I've noticed over the years, both in myself and in the people that I work with, is that we tend to like hyperfixate and become even like maybe I'll say the word obsessed, with a thing that still isn't working, right? Like we're watching for like a very specific symptom to disappear, like I don't know what it is, constipation, sleep, allergies, fatigue, some version of anxiety, maybe bloating, whatever it is. Um, whatever brought us into that healing journey in the first place, that we sought out help and really wanted to find a way forward, right? And because we're so focused on that one thing, we often miss all the evidence that our bodies are already shifting in a good direction. I know that I did. When I look back on that season of my life that I just told you about, I can see now that my body was improving long before I fully appreciated it. And it was also summer into fall, by the way. Just a little side note there. I know that I started sleeping better. I know that overall I was less reactive. Uh, I was recovering from certain things more quickly. I definitely realized I started to have a little more freedom around food, even though I was avoiding things still, right? Truth be told, I started having more capacity for life, even though I was still scared and still tracking the pattern, right? Um, but because I was still watching the things that weren't yet perfect, I wasn't seeing the progress that was already there as easily. And the reality is our body rarely heals in a straight line, according to our mind, right? It heals, it heals kind of in layers, and often the evidence shows up in places we may not be looking, right? So this is why I do the work that I do. It's why I built the minerals and microbes program, the way that I built it to support one-on-one clients. Um, because I don't think we need protocols per se anymore or a specific list of supplements for the thing that we are trying to heal. Um, we certainly don't need to be told, oh, we have this label or we're broken. There's a place for labels, right? Like diagnoses. But what I think we really truly need is to be able to kind of see the bigger picture, right? Like see what's going on in our system, the systems of our body. Like our terrain is the word I use, right? So, like if you're gonna grow a garden, you kind of have to survey the land, right? You gotta survey the land, you gotta know where what gets sun where, you gotta know the type of soil you have, you gotta, you gotta know kind of like what's going on, right? And then you kind of need some guidance to know how to even start and grow a garden, right? So the same is true for clients. Like they need someone who can help understand what the body is actually communicating and figure out like what season are you even in? Like what phase of the healing process are you even in? Like, how do we even need to approach this? What kind of support actually makes sense right now if we really tune into your body? And that's what minerals and microbes was built for. You know, um, through my terrain assessment is through your whole health history, the hair test, the biome test, and then tracking and watching your body in real time. And I was the woman who, man, you guys, I could probably write a whole series of all the terrible things that I went through. How reactive I was, right? I was afraid to eat, you know, I couldn't see the healing already happening beneath the surface, you know. I I couldn't trust. Um, and you know, it took me a really long time. I didn't have anyone guiding me through that could help me trust in my body again. Um, and I don't want people to spend as many years in in that same place that I did. Uh, because, you know, it takes a lot, it takes a lot from you uh to tread water constantly, so to speak. I'm full of metaphors, if you haven't noticed, you guys. I'm a big picture person. So, anyways, that is what I wanted to share today. It's just what came through for me to express to you. If you've been listening to this episode and recognize yourself in any of what I've shared, this is actually one of my favorite times of the year to begin. Um, I don't think summer like fixes everything per se, but the conditions are much more in our favor, thanks to nature giving us far more light uh to help like rebuild our capacity, our voltage, our, you know, our cellular reserve, if you will, right? So um I definitely think I wanted to point that out because I think a lot of people let summer just be fun, which is great. We should. Um, and it will help, but sometimes it's nice to get in there and and stay focused on stewarding and targeting your current terrain and what's going on in there to set you up better for, you know, the next season and the next season and the next season, right? Like we just keep building and um deepening the stability within ourselves to really deepen our health. So if you would like support learning how to steward your own terrain, I'd love to walk alongside you. You can learn more about minerals and microbes in the show notes. Um, and that is it for today. I'm I appreciate you if you made it this far. Until next time, keep tending your roots and stay wild, stay well, and we'll talk real soon.