What Does Your Body Need Now? Minerals, Patterns + Ecology

Minerals are having a moment. And in many ways, I love that.

But I'm also watching them get pulled into the same fragmented model so many of us were trying to escape — how much magnesium do I need, should I take copper, which cell salt is right for me — until something that's inherently relational becomes fourteen bottles on the counter and another complicated protocol to manage.

In this episode, I want to zoom back out.

Because no mineral works alone. And once you really understand that, it changes everything about how you approach mineral balancing, HTMA, and what your body has actually been doing all along.

This episode is also personal. I just got my 48th hair test back after almost twelve years of running HTMA on myself — and every retest gives me another opportunity to ask the question that has become far more interesting to me than chasing perfect numbers:

What does this version of me need now?

In this episode I cover:

— What mineral ecology actually means and why it gives you permission to stop micromanaging every mineral
 — Why having minerals coming in isn't the same as being able to build with them
 — The full supply → absorption → transport → cellular use → storage → losses → demand framework and why it matters
 — Why potassium is never really just a potassium question
 — How your biography becomes your biology — and why that's actually hopeful, not discouraging
 — The difference between adaptation and compensation, and what that looks like on an HTMA
 — Why the goal isn't a perfect test — it's greater capacity
 — What working with mineral ecology actually looks like in practice

I also share a personal update: beginning in September I'm adding an eight-month Minerals & Microbes container alongside my existing four-month program — because bio-individuality applies to the timeline too.

Related episodes + resources:

• Terrain Work: Why Your Body’s Story Matters More Than Your Symptoms
• 10 Years of HTMA: Insights for Deep + Lasting Health Recovery

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:12

Well, hello, hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Rewilded Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Lydia Joy. Guys, we are officially in the final week of Leo season and getting ready to head into Virgo season, which happens to be my favorite season of the year. Uh, in large part because it is my birth month, of course, but I really do love the energy of this time of year. Um, well, first we have the light shifting, which maybe we don't love, but the light is shifting. We're in the descent, right? There's a lot of change there and transition there. And we're at this point where if you're a gardener, um, or maybe you're part of a CSA, you know, we're we're heading into this massive, plentiful harvest time, which is so awesome. And to me, Virgo season always less like this baton passing off of like the transition from summer into fall. And, you know, September has always felt a little bit more like the beginning of a new year than January does. Um, for me, it's my solar return, right? It's a natural point of reflection where I tend to look back and think, okay, where was I a year ago? What has changed? What have I learned? What's gotten stronger or, you know, better, excuse me? And what, you know, and then also what wants my attention now. And one of the things that I've done around this time of year for a very long time is run a new hair tissue mineral analysis on myself. Um, I actually do this every quarter, every season. Um, and I just got my latest results back, which happens to be my 48th hair test after 12 years of doing this work. And every time that I do a hair test, retest, um, it just really gives me another opportunity to look at my life, my physiology from just a slightly different place, right? I'm I'm not over here like trying to perfect the test result per se. Like, um, I'm really trying to deepen my understanding of myself by looking at the patterns that I've gone through and seeing what has shifted, what hasn't shifted, like how is my body currently responding to my life, right? What I've been doing, how I've been supporting myself, but also like what I've been living through in that particular season. And then it becomes about like, okay, well, what wants my attention now, this next season? And that question has become much more interesting to me over the years because, you know, 12 years and 48 hair tests later, I think one of the biggest things that I've learned is that you can't understand your physiology or this whole mineral pattern you might be in without understanding yourself, right? Without understanding the life you've been living and what your body has been adapting to and compensating along the way, right? And I see this in the work that I do with my clients all the time, right? So obviously most people aren't coming in to work with me because, like, one Tuesday morning, they suddenly decided, I want to optimize my minerals. Like, almost no one does that, right? Usually it's because they've lived through quite a lot, right? Um, they've had a lot go on in their life. Um, maybe it was one major event or season that just like knocked them totally sideways. Um, but often it's usually an accumulation of many variables. It could be a difficult living environment, um, for whatever reason, right? Like it could be uh, as we know, many people have experienced challenges from living in water damaged housing, uh, toxic job environments, family environments that are not healthy, right? It could go on and on. Maybe they've had that plus years of not sleeping well, or maybe they've had extreme seasons of caregiving that required such demand on them. Maybe it's raising children, um, and parent and like helping aging parents at the same time. Maybe it's going through a period of grief, of loss of someone in your life, whether it's death or you know, relationship loss, um, or major relational stress, uh, financial stress, right? Like overworking, not having enough time to recover and recoup. Uh, it could be an undernourishment. Like there's I have that story come up all the time. A lot of people are very undernourished and they finally realize it, right? Um, or having gone through like a period of some kind of illness, even hormonal transitions, right? That's a big one, especially for women. Um, and then of course, all these environmental exposures we all might have. Or just like if I could deduce it down, like simply it's just like years of having more demanded of them than they had the resources to continually meet. Boom. And then eventually stuff changes, right? Their body no longer responds to life quite the way either it used to, or they think it should, or they would like, right? Um, and then maybe even like things that people could have previously bounced back from at one point in their life literally take a lot longer now, or they it's just they constantly feel thrown off and they can't bounce back from things easily at all. Um, and then they notice like things in their body changing that just did not used to be a problem. That they're like, what on earth? It's just so many things. Maybe it's noticeably like wonky digestion that they can't explain, or just like their energy overall. Um, or maybe the sleep, you know, pattern gets crazy. Um, or maybe they used to work out and now they just literally can't for some reason, right? Like, or they could go hiking and feel fine and now they can't even walk up the stairs without like feeling exhausted, right? Or maybe it's like, you know, foods that seem to used to be benign to them are now like causing problems. Or every supplement they try, it's like, holy shit, my body feels like it wants to blow up or something. You know what I mean? I'm just being a little extreme. But or maybe it's just people are reaching this point of saying, like, I don't feel like myself anymore. And what I've been doing isn't getting me where I want to go, right? That's often when people start looking deeper, when they want to get help, when they want to get into functional work, right? And this is where something like the hair tissue mineral analysis, the HTMA, becomes incredibly useful to me. Um, it's not gonna hand us this like list of like everything that's wrong with you and tell you exactly how to fix it, right? Right. So you have like this shopping list, so to speak, of what to do. It really is giving us your current pattern and this snapshot of how your particular body has been adapting and then therefore also likely compensating, right? And then over time, how that reshapes you, right? And it's all in response to the life you've been asked to live. Okay, so then that's where we get to start to work with your pattern. Does that make sense? And I've talked about this a lot in over the last few years in many different ways over the podcast. So if you want to check it out, like two years ago, around my 10-year anniversary of using HTMA, I recorded an episode talking about like what a decade of testing had taught me about deep and lasting health recovery. Uh, and then last year I went deeper into the concept of terrain, like why your body's story matters more than simply just like chasing your symptoms. Okay. So you can look for those in the show notes if you want to check them out. Now, this year, there's another layer that I want to add into that conversation. And it's just ecology. We're gonna, we're gonna start using a term mineral ecology in this episode, okay? Now, I think minerals are still having quite a bit of a moment in the health and wellness world. Like more and more people are like finding this body of work and understanding, okay, minerals are a big deal, right? They're foundational. They're involved in an extraordinary number of processes that allow our human bodies to function, okay? But still watching the minerals get pulled into the same fragmented model so many of us were trying to get away from in the first place, right? We pick a mineral or we pick a thing and we and we hyperfixate, and we're like, okay, I'm gonna fix this by taking this exact mineral and this exact mount, right, or whatever it is. And we can do like magnesium. Like magnesium's had its heyday for a while now. Now people are like, okay, copper, right? Uh now even everyone's getting into cell salts and trace mineral drops, and like, you know, they're becoming aware, right? There's like people coming in the door to me are like more aware of like two, three, four, five years ago where it was like, holy crap, we have to talk about these things that nobody knows about. Now it's like you can find all this stuff and go and like become a mineral groupie. I mean, you know what I'm saying? Um, and then people are even coming to me and they're like, oh, well, I see my hair tests and I heard that, you know, like this antagonizes this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, you can read up on all this stuff, but like that doesn't mean um you can understand it because like what's happening, I'm noticing, is like when people look at it in this fragmented way, you know, suddenly something that's inherently relational is like now becoming complete overwhelm, or like 72 bottles sitting on the counter and another 15 compliment, complicated like protocols. I'm being extreme here. You get the point. Um, the amount of information that we can consume and think we can understand is crazy these days. So I I want to zoom back out. All right. No mineral works alone ever, right? You understand this, guys. Um, and once once we do, it can chuse me, it can change the way we look at this work. Whether you want to call it mineral balancing, whether you want to focus on looking at the heritage and mineral analysis. Um, ultimately, it's about like using this piece of the puzzle and helping your body heal, right? Um, but really to me, using this specific tool is helping each of us understand kind of like what our body has been doing all along. So, what do I mean by mineral ecology? I want to start there because I don't want it to become this like new fancy wellness term or whatever. Um, I just want to use it to give us a much simpler way of understanding what we're looking at. Because ecology is really kind of the study of relationships, right? So let's be really simple about this. Like, if you were gonna study the ecology or look at the ecology of a forest, for example, you're not gonna just like see one tree that looks bad, or you're not gonna pick one tree and just try to determine the health of the entire forest from that tree alone. You're gonna be looking at okay, what's growing around it? Like, what's going on with the soil and the water, the light, how much light it gets, how much light reaches different parts, different places, like the microorganisms that are there, the weather that's been coming? Um, like what has actually happened over time? Has there been drought? Significant drought? Like, has there been any flooding? Have there been fires? Has there been like disease? Like what, like what maybe could have massively disturbed the soil here? And then, like, maybe most importantly, like, how well is that ecosystem adapting to the conditions it's currently living within? Okay, I know the human body isn't a forest, obviously, but I think this gives us a much better way to think about minerals because no mineral in your body is operating independently, right? Like magnesium doesn't just do a list of magnesium things, right? You can go read about that. Like entire books have been written about magnesium and what magnesium does. You see what I'm saying? Same thing with potassium, same thing with copper. It's good to know these things, but the thing is, they interact with each other and they depend on each other. And sometimes they can sort of like be in a little bit of a competent competition. Um, and then the way that they each move and get used in the body are influenced by so many things. So many things. But we can always start with your digestion, right? And the kidney function, um, even how your hormones affect minerals and minerals affect your hormones, your cellular energy, uh, the movement in your body. Um, what is your food intake? Like, are you having a period of life loss of around these minerals? Maybe it's something as basic as like, okay, we're in summer right now. I've been sweating my butt off in the garden like every day. So it's like, oh, hold on. I probably should account for that, right? Um, so basically what I'm getting at is like the demands being placed on our bodies at a particular time during a particular season. So when I'm using this term mineral ecology, I'm really talking about this entire relational landscape. And this is where I think mineral balancing, which is like a model of how we approach this work with hair testing, right? It can get confusing really quickly. And I think what people do is they tend to see, like, let's say they get a hair test or blood work from regular blood testing, right? Like, because that's where I first learned this concept was back when I was like 19. I got my first blood work, and they're like, oh, your iron's low. Boom, here, take a bunch of iron. That actually wasn't the answer, right? So, because we still do that. We still tend to see a mineral that's low and immediately think, okay, go take a bunch more of that. And sometimes you might need to do that to some degree, okay? Because I'm not gonna say supply doesn't matter. It absolutely matters. Supply of minerals coming in to you matters, but that still doesn't tell us why a marker is low, right? Because we don't know whether you're absorbing it. We don't know if you're consuming enough in right relationship to other things. If you're actually holding on to it well, if there's some reason why you can't, um, like your what are your current demands? Like, have they increased because of multiple variables? Um, is there another nutrient you're overdoing that's affecting its use? Because people do that, like because we're told, you know, in the health and wellness movement, like you got to take X amount of this to be healthy, right? Like you can go anywhere and see that all over the place. You have to eat this much of this, right? You see what I'm saying? Um, so we and then, of course, like why does the pattern you're currently in develop in the first place? And this is something that my own hair testing has taught me over and over again. There are things that I can deliberately work on each season that move beautifully. And there are things that barely move. And so there's gonna be minerals that change and completely alter their relationship to another mineral. Um, and then there's gonna be ones that didn't. Or maybe they went the opposite direction that I wanted them to, right? And every time that happens, instead of thinking, well, shit, right? Especially if it's a low mineral, I guess I need to take more. Uh, and maybe you do, but maybe that's not the full thing. It's like the the question that I'm asking is, okay, well, what is influencing this specifically? And this is where the ecology gets interesting because now we're no longer looking at, you know, minerals as like individual elements to replace per se. We're looking at how your whole entire system is currently handling the mineral terrain, so to speak, like your mineral story and what and what might be shaping that. And this is where I came up with that term. Maybe you've heard me say it, maybe you haven't, is like your biography becomes your biology. I think I have a podcast episode on it somewhere. Right? Because your mineral needs and the way your body handles those minerals don't exist separately from the life you're living, right? Whatever you might be getting now can shift because you're pregnant, or you're a woman in the season of life of menstruation, or you're now a woman who's no longer menstruating and you're you've you're postmenopausal, or maybe you're in the transition. You know, you're you're you're getting ready to be at menopause, like me. I have a few more months and I'm there, baby. Maybe your season of life, you're exercising, you're an athlete. You've been an athlete for six years, and it's a very intense athletic, it's a big demand. Maybe you went and did CrossFit for a long time, and now you can't even like go for a walk without getting winded. Maybe life happened and you didn't you didn't have any chance to build muscle mass or your muscle mass changed because of so much life stress. So that's playing a role, you know. Um, I could go on and on. Maybe you've had a period of extreme environmental exposures that have like put such an intense demand on you that it's been hard to fully deeply recover since then. Okay. Adaptation itself isn't a problem at all. We want to be adaptable, right? We're always going to be adapting to all those things I just listed. A resilient body should be able to change its physiology in response to any changing conditions. However, sometimes the demands are intense enough or they continue for long enough that our body now has to start compensating just to keep us alive, right? Keep everything moving as best as it possibly can. And then those compensations be become why people come to me, basically. Like it's part of the landscape that we're looking at, right? This is where if there's compensations, you're not feeling your best. You're like, I don't feel like myself anymore, right? And that's why I find HTMA so valuable. It's, you know, we're never looking at a piece of paper and like trying to fix the numbers only or make them perfect only. Um, we're really asking, like, okay, what is this pattern we're looking at right now revealing? What might have contributed to it? Like, where has this person actually like adapted well? Like they're maybe too strong. Um, and then therefore, where now is there a compensation, right? Like you can be strong in one way and weak in another, right? Like we all have this to some degree. Um, but really most importantly, is like what actually makes sense to work on now? Because you can't work on every layer at once. You can't rebuild everything at once. And I think this is where the work I'm doing with people through this tool as one piece, but really the the greater lens of like the approach to it, call it mineral balancing, um, whatever you want to call it, it can become incredibly useful if we use it right, or it can become incredibly overwhelming. Because once you understand that all these relationships exist, the temptation is to think you now have to manage all of them. You certainly don't, I certainly don't. Um After 48 hair tests, I can still get a new test back and look at something that hasn't moved the way I expected to and think, okay, what's going on here? And then I start asking questions. I'm not like there is a knee-jerk, like, oh, I want to correct this, but like it's really not about that. It's it's like, okay, this version of the pattern now is giving me an opportunity to just look at my body and what it's doing now. What did it do? What did it change? What did it do well? What does it need to keep doing? What does it need improvement in? Right. And I think this is one of the biggest things that has changed for me over the 12 years of doing this work. I'm much less interested in chasing numbers. And I'm way more interested in like what wants my attention next, right? Because again, like I said, rebuilding your health happens in layers. There are going to be times when something is very loud for you in your health, in your body, and you may need to deal with what is right in front of you first. It might not even be in your body, it maybe just be in your life. Right? Like what's going on in your life and how's your body responding to it? You could have a season where out of nowhere your digestion just is like cray cray. It's like turned on a dime, and now all of a sudden you've got like all this weird stuff going on you've never had before. Or somewhere seemingly out of nowhere, you you you stop sleeping for whatever reason, or you know, your cycles start to get real crazy, or whatever it is, right? And you could possibly be living in an environment that is continually working against you, right? There's a lot of ways the modern environments that we live in do. And so what's really happening is your body just may simply not have enough resources coming in to meet what's going out. And those things matter. Now, as some of the bigger fires people have can quiet down, right? Then something else often becomes visible. Right. So, like if I'm looking at my hair test quarterly, I'm like, oh, look, that changed. Great, awesome. But then something else shows up, and I'm like, huh. And it doesn't necessarily mean you're getting worse if it looks not so great. It just means you have the capacity to work on the next layer that's showing up. Right. And I think about this constantly in my garden. Okay. When I first started building it, there was a tremendous amount of infrastructure that had to happen, right? Like I had to create the beds. Okay, well, what do you have to do to get that ready? Okay, let's do that. What am I gonna do with the soil? Like, do I add soil? Do I amend the soil? Do I like that's a piece, right? Where do I put the beds in the first place? I should have said that. Like, gotta make sure they get what they need, right? Like, how do I create support and borders and so that these beds are stable and protected? Like, I had to understand all this stuff. Like, where's the sun hitting? What's gonna grow well, where, all this stuff, right? And, you know, it's not like you can do all of it perfectly all at once, right? But once I built something that worked in some way, it wasn't like, okay, I'm gonna tear it apart, start over. It's more about like maintaining what's working, protecting what has been established and built. And then now, okay, you don't you have like the capacity to build something else. Do you see what I'm saying? So, like basically eventually in the beginning, things may require a tremendous amount of conscious effort simply to like establish, right? To learn what do I have to do? Like, and then actually do it and then see how it turns out, right? So that's like how you operate, right? That's how the garden was even able to operate. I had to like pour into this beginnings. Do you see what I'm saying? And our health works the same way, right? Like you build some infrastructure into your life around your health, you create more stability. Then you you want to protect what you've built, right? Now you're not becoming afraid to live your life. Like you're, it's not like a protection of like freeze or you know, freaking out of, ah, I can't ever do these things. It's really just like allowing the supportive practices to just become part of how you live. And then you keep going. And over time, what once felt like a protocol starts becoming an embodied way of being. That distinction matters to me because I don't think any of us want to spend the rest of our lives like working on our health like it's a chore, like you know, and and like we have to keep starting from scratch. You know what I'm saying? Like, I want the work I've already done to give me greater capacity to live my life. And that's also why I continue to retest. I'm not the same woman who took my first hair test, like my hair sample in 2014, September 2014. And my life is absolutely not the same, and I am not the same person. My environment has changed, uh, my digestion isn't the same, my resources aren't the same, right? Like now I'm moving through one of the biggest physiological transitions of my life as I head into menopause. And I talked about that in the last episode, by the way, if you want to go check that out. So it's like there's always these variables, right? So my body is reorganizing. And I and I think we underestimate that sometimes, you know, like a hormonal transition isn't happening off in some little hormonal department of the body, right? You, your whole self, our whole person are moving through it. And anytime anything like that happens, your mineral needs can shift. The way you use and retain them can change. Um, like right now, my muscle and connective tissue are responding to a completely different hormonal environment, right? My metabolism's even shifting a little bit. Like, there's a lot of things, right? So whenever I look at a new hair test, mine in particular, right now, since that's what I'm talking about, I'm not asking, like, okay, how do I, I don't know, how do I get a perfect result or how do I even get back to what it was five years ago? Like, you know what I'm saying? It's really like, what does this version of me need now? And that to me is like seasonal, right? It's bioindividuality in practice. Okay, so now I want to say, like, all right, having the minerals isn't the same as being able to build with them. This is where I want to bring in a little bit of the physiology because one of the threads um I started pulling after getting my latest test back reminded me just how quickly a question about one mineral becomes a question about the entire human system. So let's pick potassium for an example. I uh this is an awesome one. It's so important. Um, a lot of people have low tissue potassium these days. And not everyone, of course, so don't please assume that that's to you if you've never seen this before. But you could look at that one marker on this hair test and think, okay, my potassium is low. So I probably need to eat more potassium. I probably need to take the pot the supplement, problem solved. Except not necessarily. Obviously, you need the mineral coming in, right? Because we can't build without the raw materials that we don't have. So great. Established. Intake is only the beginning, though, right? We have to kind of like look at like, what are you eating, right? A lot of times people, you know, forget what they're eating. They think they're eating well, and and they may be, but they maybe have deviated from how they should be eating. Like it's always worth like taking like a quick little check-in, right? Now, okay, great. Let's let's shore up how we're eating, make sure we're doing a good job. Now, can you digest it? What are what can we see here in this information that tells me there's an inefficiency there? Or there's an improvement there, right? Um, and then how does that lead to what you can actually absorb, right? The nutrients that you're eating, do you have what you need to absorb them properly? Then hold on to them. Right. And then, like if we're going to be talking about potassium, for example, we want to maybe look at, okay, well, what's happening with magnesium? Because it's intimately involved in cellular potassium handling. So are what your kidneys are doing, what they're able to retain and excrete. And then how your hormones like insulin and aldosterone are affecting where potassium moves. I brought up sweating a minute ago. Like, how much are you sweating? You can lose minerals in your sweat. If did you replete before you depleted? Do you see what I'm saying? So, like, kind of re-establishing like, well, what are your current fluid and electrolyte demands in this season of life you are currently in? And how much metabolically active muscle tissue do you have available to take up and store potassium? What's happening with your cellular energy, like, which helps maintain the gradients, like keep the potassium primarily where it belongs inside ourselves? I could go on and on. So suddenly, do I need more potassium? Isn't one question. It's a doorway into your whole ecology. And of course, that's just one example. I you, you know, I could have done that with magnesium, copper, zinc, calcium, sodium. I have whole episodes in the past, way many years ago, about these things. Um, but this is why, like the supply, digestion and absorption, transport, cellular use, storage and retention, losses, demand, this whole like framework I just tried to paint for you is helpful to me. I don't expect anyone listening to what I just said to even memorize the sequence. I'm just like, hear me out. It's it's nourishment is a process. You can eat incredibly well, and please, please, please do. It's it's it's crucial and important, but you can eat incredibly well and still wonder why your body doesn't feel deeply nourished. Because what goes into your body and what your body can actually build with aren't always the same thing, right? It's not just like nutrients in, I'm awesome. Do you see what I'm saying? Um, we're not like, you know, cars, put the gas in, I can run, right? You're gonna use it up and you have to replace it. Anyways, I'll pause there. This is where your biography becomes your biology, is important because then this word ecology becomes even more useful because we can't talk about nourishment only from the perspective of what's coming in. We also have to talk about what your particular life has asked your body to do with the resources it has. Okay, so like two people can have a very similar diet, take the exact same magnesium supplement in the exact same amount, and have different needs and use it differently, right? Or you could have one person who's like in a stable phase of their life, maybe. Maybe they're sleeping, maybe life is is kind of just la-di-da-ish, right? But then you could have another person who just had four kids, had a water damage basement. Now they also have to take care of an aging parent and work and recover from all the stuff that the water is like, do you see what I'm saying? That there's a difficult environment or they're moving through a major transition in their life of some sort, and several things are happening all at once. Right? Those are not the same physiological landscapes. And our body is gonna adapt to whatever we're going through because it's part of being alive. But sometimes demands stack up or continue long enough that maintaining those adaptations begins to require compensation, right? Your body prioritizes and resources get allocated differently. So a pattern develops that may have worked incredibly well to get you through one particular season, but it isn't necessarily where you want to remain forever, right? And then your body has to adapt to that. This is what I mean when I say your biography becomes your biology. It's it's not like, oh, your history becomes your destiny. It's quite the opposite. Like understanding how your body has adapted gives us somewhere to begin working with. And this is why people can become so frustrated when they're doing so many like things to improve their health. Right? I like, okay, I'm I'm doing all the things. I'm I'm eating clean. I have my sleep hygiene nailed down, I left a stressful situation, I got out of the moldy house, I'm taking all the supplements. I have Lydia air quotes up, by the way. Right. Why haven't I completely bounced back, right? Like that's the that's the frustration talking, right? Um, you know, but sometimes our circumstances change before our entire physiology that had to adapt to the previous circumstances has had the time and resources to reorganize enough. Do you see what I'm saying? So that's where like rebuilding comes in, right? This has changed what I'm looking for after 48 hair tests. Okay. It's never about, oh, I want to create perfect test results. So I'm much more interested in like what can I or up the person before me handle now that they couldn't handle before? How well do I recover as compared to a year ago? Like, can I digest my food better? Right? Can I sleep better? Can I actually think clearly, make good decisions, like have good executive function? Can I move my body and actually recover from it? Right. Like I was talking about the exercise intolerance people can have, right? Um, or can you tolerate more foods now better than you could before? Or even the supplements, maybe. I mean, I definitely couldn't tolerate supplements 12 years ago very well at all. Um, can you move through a difficult week, month, season without completely losing your footing? That's capacity. And when I look back over 12 years, that's where I see some of the biggest changes. There have been seasons where my body had to do an enormous amount of compensating, let me tell you. And there have been seasons where I've had enough stability and resources to begin rebuilding what those years required of me. Excuse me. So when something new shows up on a hair test or something stubborn still hasn't moved, this could relate to people who aren't even doing hair to show mental analysis, but they're on health journey doing functional work, right? I don't automatically interpret that as failure. Sometimes it's simply, okay, this is what's asking for my attention now. And that's a very different relationship with health than perpetually trying to like fix yourself, right? I did a whole episode on that, like fixing too. If you want to go back in the archives, there's some good stuff in there. So, what does working with your mineral ecology actually look like? It starts with stepping back, right? We always got to get that bird's eye view. Instead of immediately asking, okay, well, which mineral should I take? Maybe you don't even have a hair test, but you're like reading all the things on the interwebs. Um, for me, I want to know, okay, like, well, what is this person actually supplying? Right? In their current like food and supplements and whatnot? Like, what are they actually bringing in? Then, like, okay, well, where are they at on the digestion and absorption end of the spectrum? Like, are they, is there some inefficiency here that we can shore up, right? Um, what relationships are showing up between different minerals that are exposing areas of your body that are, you know, working harder or not working as hard? Like, what has your body been adapting to these last few months, but even these last few years? And what compensations have had to become a part of that story because of it? Do you see what I'm saying? Maybe you're using up more than you're putting in. Maybe you're losing more minerals than you realize by not understanding. Do you see what I'm saying? Like I was just talking about the sweat for as an example. Like, what are your current demands? What phase of life are you in? What's actually asking for attention now? That's where bioindividuality stops being a buzzword and becomes very, very practical because I don't need to work on every single thing that could theoretically improve your health. Neither do you. We need to understand where you are and then prioritize, right? Sometimes you have to put out a fire first so that there's energy to repair something else and then be able to build something else. You see what I'm saying? And sometimes we need to stop adding so many variables into the story because our body has already more than enough to manage. And sometimes the most useful thing we can do is create greater consistency around something incredibly basic that's already working and maybe needs even more time to like work more. Do you see what I'm saying? And once we've established something useful, we protect it, right? And that's something the garden has taught me over and over again, right? Create the infrastructure, get something established, protect it. Um, and then eventually you don't have to spend all of your energy thinking about it as much, right? It's simply a part of how things are functioning and you have, you know, a whole routine around how to take care of it. And I think this is what we miss when health becomes one endless series of like protocols, maybe. Like the goal isn't to spend the rest of your life, I don't know, like staring at your supplements and managing yourself. I don't know if that's something people do. But the goal is embodiment. You build rhythms that support you, you learn what your body needs, you establish enough stability that those things become part of how you live rather than another project you're constantly like trying to complete. And then life changes because it will, and you reassess. And that's exactly where I am right now. I'm heading into another year of my life. I'm moving through a significant hormonal transition. My movement needs are changing. My body is showing me some things that I want to strengthen and rebuild. So my 48th hair test isn't giving me like a list of things I need to go fix per se. It's just giving me another opportunity to deepen, to listen. What's changed? What's improved? What hasn't moved? What does that make me curious about? And what makes sense for me to work on in this particular season? And that to me is mineral ecology in practice. So if you've recently discovered my podcast, Rewild Abundance, or my work, or you've somebody who's been on a health journey and you learned about the mineral piece of the puzzle, or maybe you found out about mineral balancing, um, or like you've been in this world for a while and you found yourself getting increasingly overwhelmed by all like the individual supplements or nutrients or all these things. Like you could go out on the interwebs and read so many things today, and you're like, oh my God, how on earth do I keep all this straight? I kind of want to like leave us with something much simpler because we don't have to know every pathway, everything, and we don't have to micromanage every single one of them to be healthy. Like, you don't have to memorize every biochemical relationship before you can begin to support yourself. Well, you all don't need a PhD in all the things. None of us do. We can zoom out. Minerals are a part of our ecology. They're one piece of the puzzle, they're a big piece. We need to make sure they're being supplied efficiently, absorbed, transported, used, retained, exchanged, even sometimes lost, right? Um, because uh we are living humans inside constantly changing variables, and we all have a history. We all have a current environment, a particular phase of life. We have different resources, different demands. Yada, yada, yada. Your biography becomes your biology, but your biology can still be incredibly responsive. And that is why we do this work. It's not to create like perfect numbers, to control every freaking variable, but it's just to keep creating the conditions that allow us to build greater capacity so we can adapt well, so we can recover well and actually inhabit our lives. And this is exactly how I've been approaching the work that I do with clients. And I do this inside my core container, minerals and microbes. That's the core way you can work with me. And of course, I'm using heritage mineral analysis as just one like window into the pattern that you currently have, right? That kind of gives me this better picture of your terrain. Same thing with the microbiome test that I do. Um, and it's not neither of those things are isolated. It's really like looking at those alongside of you, your history, your symptoms, your your life, like everything that's going on, um, where you're at, like what what's what is that showing us now? And then we work through it in layers and phases. Um, and this past year, like so a year ago, I kind of like recalibrated the way that I work with clients. And this is the way that I do it now. Um, and it has reinforced so much of what I'm talking about today. And it's like a four-month process that I work with clients. You know, it can be incredibly productive for people, but like sometimes people need more time, more space to really work through these layers without rushing the process. Um, so in September, I'm adding an eight-month version of minerals and microbes alongside my existing four months. So I'll have two now instead of just the one. It's not because I think everyone needs eight months right out of the gate. I'm I'm not saying that, but you know, um, bioindividuality applies to the timeline too. So it's like sometimes people need just a shorter period to like get things rolling. But a lot of people are coming in with years of accumulated patterns and overwhelm of information. I'm not gonna lie. And they just want more space to really work through things, to repair, to rebuild, have some retesting put in there to like kind of see what is our body revealing now that we've worked through certain layers, right? So, of course, you can always learn about how I work with clients in the show notes below. So just check that out if you want to learn more. And if this episode gave you a different way of thinking about your health and how to approach your health, and even just about minerals, too, by the way. Um, really, this can apply to any like element or piece of our health that's super important. I would love to hear what came up for you. Um, so there is a link, the very first link in the show notes, where you can just click it and text me. You can text me whatever came up for you. Like if you have a takeaway, an aha, like, oh my goodness, thank you so much. This is this really made sense, or maybe you have more questions. Um, or you know, you can even just share what you'd love for me to pull apart in a future episode. Um, and I have a feeling that mineral ecology is a conversation that I'm gonna keep building around here because I think it's just a helpful lens to come from. So, with that shared, I so appreciate you for being here. Thank you for tuning in. And until next time, stay wild and stay well.