The 3 Patterns That Change Everything

Welcome back to The Atelier. I'm Cicely Everson, your host and the founder of Tao Holistics, suite of holistic brands. I'm excited for you to check out my work, what I do, what I offer, who I serve. You can find out more about me at cicelyeverson.com. Alright.

So today, we're gonna get into something that is really important to me. Actually, it is a part of my foundational process when I'm working with clients. We're gonna talk about patterns. Now patterns show up in our lives in every aspect and in so many different ways. And even as it pertains to health, there are so many different ways we can look at, identify, and even assess patterns.

If you look at traditional Chinese medicine, for example, there are thousands and thousands of years of empirical evidence and anecdotal evidence and the stories and the usage of herbs and how the Chinese identified imbalances in the body. And a lot of this began with patterns. Noticing patterns, whether they were exterior patterns, you know, impacting our internal body or whether they were whether it was something internally happening that was impacting our physical body, but also our our outer world. And so patterns are essential for identifying where things go wrong. If you think about a simple pattern of shapes on a piece of paper, pick a pattern, it doesn't matter.

Whenever you notice a break in the pattern, that would create imbalance. And if there's a break in the pattern in something in our bodies, that break in the pattern could represent imbalance, but that break in the pattern could also represent the healing process at work. And so the lens that I wanna talk through today is going to be about pattern interruption, disrupting the patterns that we see, that we feel, that we notice, and perhaps maybe have just never had the language to actually name or identify. This is where we begin. The three core patterns that changed everything for me and my practice and in turn changed everything for my clients.

It didn't begin with symptoms, not with diagnoses, not with the endless list of things that your body is supposedly doing wrong or acting in ways that you might feel like it's even betraying you. We begin with patterns, that's where we're going to start. After years of clinical practice, hundreds of patient encounters, and the kind of pattern recognition that really only comes from looking and searching, I've managed to distill the complexity of chronic illness into three core constitutional patterns. The first is deep depletion, the second is inflammatory heat, and the third is metabolic stagnation. Now these aren't diagnoses.

One could have a dominant pattern, two of the three or all three. They're the underlying terrain beneath your symptoms and the why behind the what. So the reason that two people with the same condition could possibly need completely different approaches and treatments that all boils down to their own individual patterns. Alright. So in today's episode, let's walk through each pattern.

I'm gonna give you guys a sneak peek. I also wanna let you know I have a free guide that explains these patterns. It's called the burnout pattern. And if you visit eeyasumed.com, which is my holistic medicine practice, you'll see in the footer that there is a space where you can enter your email in exchange for the burnout pattern guide. It's a great read.

It's easy to understand, but will get you thinking about what your potential dominant patterns are. K. I'm also gonna give you a way that you can discover your own pattern at the end of this episode. So this will be pretty brief. Alright.

So let's walk through what these patterns look like. Now, we talked about this being a part of my foundational approach. This is a part of the framework that informs everything that I do. Not just my clinical practice within EASU, but also my botanical formulations with Tauen Saloma, my line of herbal medicines and skincare and all of that stuff like my teaching in my academy, it's all through the lens which I see healing, not as symptom suppression, but as pattern interruption In restoration, we wanna actually restore the body to an optimal functioning state. And for some of us, we don't even know what that feels like.

So if you've been treating your symptoms for years without lasting relief, maybe independently, perhaps with your medical team, with your doctor, but still not really finding that anything works even after having tried everything. If you sense that there's a deeper story that your body's trying to tell, then I'm hoping that this episode and this this framework will change how you understand yourself. Because once you see your pattern, you can finally address the root. So again, welcome to the atelier. This is where we combine modern science and clinical herbalism, functional medicine with the art of healing, with the devotional practices, the personal practices, and rituals that we can incorporate into our day to day lifestyle to really increase our well-being and our health.

So let's jump into the very first pattern, deep depletion. Deep depletion is the pattern of emptiness, not just fatigue, but a fundamental deficit in your body's reserves. You feel like you're running on fumes. It feels like no amount of willpower or caffeine can override what's missing. And that's because this is a part of your foundation.

Deep depletion typically shows up as chronic exhaustion that rest or even a night's sleep does not seem to fix. It's anxiety that feels like you're wired but weak. It could also be hair loss, brittle nails, poor sex drive, low stress tolerance, like the least little thing sets you off, feeling cold all of the time, despite possibly even having a euthyroid state. Euthyroid just means that your thyroid is in a balanced state. It's not hyper or hypo.

And typically the having cold hands and feet or cold extremities is associated with hypothyroidism, but there can be other reasons at play if you are someone who tends to feel cold all the time. This could also show up for you as difficulty building or maintaining muscle, feeling overwhelmed at small tasks that goes back to that poor stress tolerance, and that specific kind of tired where even thinking feels hard. If that's you, you're not alone. This is deep depletion. It's not laziness.

It doesn't have to be depression, although it can look like it and can coexist. This is primarily your body telling you that the well has run dry. So what causes it? Well, just like anything else, months but more than likely years of stress without adequate recovery, crashing and burning, short term fixes to try to get back up and just jump in there. Chronic illness can cause it.

Postpartum depletion can also cause it. For my ladies out there who have recently given birth or you can think back to a time when you did give birth and you just felt super depleted, of course your body's out of whack, your hormones are out of whack, but on top of that, now you have this added responsibility of caring for a newborn with or without support at home. And if you already have other children, this adds another layer of complexity to it. If you're working a nine to five or running a business, this adds yet another layer of complexity. And there are just so many obligations all around that it makes it really challenging to function optimally because you're pouring all of your love and energy into this new little human.

Well, that can create depletion. Overtraining can also deplete. Okay? And remember, for those of you who are like heavy cardio people, you're at the gym almost every day of the week, you can have overtraining syndrome, but also you can send your cortisol into a heightened state by doing the opposite of what you're trying to do. A lot of times when people work out, obviously, for the physical benefits, but they also they want those endorphins.

Right? You wanna get your biggest bang for the buck. You wanna feel good in addition to looking good. But if you overtrain and you do specifically more cardio than your body needs, you can be increasing your cortisol, which is the stress hormone, one of the stress hormones. And as this happens, your adrenal glands will start to pump the cortisol into your bloodstream because it thinks that you need to fight off a danger when really you're just like hitting the the track too hard or hitting the treadmill or just doing too much cardio more than your body needs.

Restrictive diets can also create depletion. Now when I say restrictive diets, this really there's a spectrum, so this could cover a lot of ground. I don't mean like a gluten free diet or something where for health reasons you need to restrict a certain type of food. Okay? That's a little different.

Actually, it's a lot different because you can feel depleted by eating foods that the next person might restrict. Okay? So it really depends on the individual. Grief can trigger depletion. Trauma can trigger depletion.

Living in sympathetic overdrive for so long that your adrenals, your thyroid, and your sex hormones have all down regulated to protect you from complete collapse, essentially is what's happening. When your body starts to shut down those processes, it is because it needs for you to survive. And it's time for us to move into a state of thriving and not just crashing and burning and putting band aids on the issues that we're dealing with and pretending like they're not there. Now I'll tell you what does not work for depletion. Pushing harder, adding more stimulants to your routine, having aggressive detox protocols or doing anything that's aggressive.

High intensity exercise like we talked about just a moment ago. Anything that demands energy that you know you don't have will create depletion. That's like swiping your credit card when you know you don't have the money to pay for that item that you're purchasing. That creates depletion. What does work?

Well, nourishing your body. Deep, slow replenishment. We've really gotta get out of this instant fix, instant dopamine hit sort of culture because it is killing our health slowly and it is really reshaping the way that our brains are wired. Now there is a such thing as neuroplasticity, which means our brains can grow and learn more and change and evolve and they can do that but we've got to put it in the right environment for that to happen in the first place. What else works?

Taking adaptogens, those herbs that are adaptogenic in nature that help your body become resilient to stressors. They help you emotionally and physiologically adapt to stress. This does not mean continue piling on the stressors and just take your adaptogens. No, no, no. For all my type A folks that is not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that when you consume adaptogens they help your body on a physiological, biological level adapt to the stressors that you are facing. Now the goal is always going to be to remove the stressors that you can. Remove and then limit the ones that you cannot necessarily eliminate, but find a way to mitigate that stress. Herbal adaptogens also come in to support you by helping to build rather than stimulate. So adaptogens will build and support your adrenal glands rather than stimulating them with something like caffeine or sugar just to get through.

Mineral repletion also works because as the body gets depleted, we lose nutrients, vitamins, minerals. So taking amino acids, taking minerals, even something as simple as magnesium can yield such great benefits. You can use magnesium, take it orally, you can apply it topically to the skin, you can add the magnesium salts or Epsom salts to your bathwater. Find a way to get magnesium into your system each and every day. Magnesium actually is like the first domino.

If you picture a table full of three to 400 dominoes, you consuming magnesium would be the very first domino, and everything that happens once you begin consuming magnesium are three to 400 enzymatic processes that happen in your body and only happen when you have enough magnesium to trigger that domino effect. Alright. What else works? Nervous system regulation. I know this is a buzzword.

I know this is trendy, but nervous system regulation is important. It is vital. It is vital. It is life or death. When you don't feel safe in your body, you would rather fall into a pool of struggle just because that might feel safer or more familiar than doing something new.

So nervous system regulation can impact us on so many different levels in different aspects of our lives, but as it pertains to our health, that is the very core. Regulating, calming the nervous system, knowing what your triggers are, knowing how to mitigate those triggers. And so that's something that we will continue to come back to. And be sure that you check out my episode called nervous system sovereignty that will also give you a little more information and more tools to help you learn how to regulate and downshift. What else works?

Rest. Rest that is actually restorative. If you're someone who has trouble sleeping, this could be for many reasons. It could be hormonal. It could be because you are deficient in nutrients like magnesium.

It could be that you have a very poor sleep routine. Maybe you're on your device too late. Like, there are tons of reasons. But you know, I'm sure, what it feels like to have a good restorative night's sleep. Well, that is important for healing your adrenal glands.

It's important for downshifting your nervous system. It's important for allowing your brain to detoxify. We do have something called a glymphatic system that actually helps our brain detox while we are sleeping. But if the body is not resting in a resting state, it's gonna be more challenging for that to happen. Alright.

We talked about adaptogenic herbs just a moment ago. Let me give you some examples. There are so many, but I'm just gonna limit it to a few. And these herbs are also tonifying, so they really help to tone the adrenal glands, the tissues, and allow you to be more resilient. These are herbs like ashwagandha root, chativari root, ramenya root, and nettle.

Stinging nettle, we use different parts of the plant. We can use the leaves, we can use the roots, we can use the seeds. In this case, nettle leaf is typically the most common that's used because it is so mineral rich. So not only is it going to allow your body to sort of de stress, it is nourishing you with its deep reserves of minerals, and that really helps to restore what is depleted. Also, things like bone broth.

Bone broth is very nourishing. Whether you are, you know, cooking a chicken and cooking the carcass to to create a broth or purchasing it over the counter, a good organic high quality bone broth will be very restorative, very nourishing. Okay? And just think, sleep over hustle. Like, hustle mode, I hope that it is starting to phase out because so many of us entrepreneurs have been burnt out trying to follow the latest and greatest or the next big thing or what we think will be the answer to a problem.

And for you and your health it may be the same. Maybe you have watched this webinar on weight loss or that webinar on reducing your blood pressure naturally like one thing after another listening to all these different people and at some point you have to quiet the noise. You have to find the resource that resonates with you in that moment and quiet everything else because everything else after that will be noise. At some point, you need to make a decision. What is going to work?

What are you going to put to use? Because, honestly, there's a ton of great information. But if you don't stick with something long enough to make it work for you, it won't, period, no matter how awesome it is. Slowing down long enough to let your body remember what fullness feels like. Slowing down to let your body remember what peace feels like.

Slowing down enough to let your body remember what silence feels like. All of these things are within our reach. They might feel a little weird or wacky or just foreign because we aren't in the practice of doing this every day, but the beautiful thing is you can be in the practice of doing these every day. Deep depletion requires you to stop treating your body like a machine and instead treat it like soil that needs care. It's essentially like soil that's been over farmed, if you will.

Like, your body needs time, it needs care, and it needs patience. The kind of patience that our culture doesn't necessarily reward, but your biology demands. So it's time to start going inward and to start to identify what we need to feel like we can thrive. And it is absolutely nourishing the body so that we can start to correct those signs of deep depletion and start to feel more balanced and more vital again. All right.

The second core pattern that I see all the time is heat or inflammatory heat. For short, you could just say inflammation. This is what I call the pattern of excess, not in the indulgent sense, but in the sense that your body is like on fire and cannot cool itself down. This does not always come across as feeling hot in your body or feeling heat like in your skin. It can.

It definitely can, and it does for a lot of people depending on your phase of life, but it's more of a reactive phase. Everything is reactive, inflamed, hypersensitive, and overactive. And inflammatory heat shows up as skin issues much of the time. This could be eczema, rosacea, rashes, acne, anything that you can't even put a name to but it's a skin issue it may be temporary and it might go away. But when that happens I want you to think about what's happening in your life.

What's happening in my life right now? I'm noticing this itchy patch like have I eaten something different? If not okay, let me move on. What's happening in my life energetically? Am I feeling irritated or experiencing some sort of trauma or grief or like what's happening?

Because typically we can connect our internal world with our physical health and the way that we show up. Also other things that will indicate inflammatory heat, joint pain, that one's pretty obvious. With inflammation typically comes pain at some point, at some level. Joint pain and stiffness, digestive inflammation, IBS, Crohn's, colitis, autoimmune flares, migraines, heavy or painful periods. Let me just chat about this for a second.

If you are a woman with a cycle and you have a heavy or painful period, that is very common, but it is not normal. You should not be just accepting that this is the way your body functions. It means something is out of balance and you might not feel that something is out of balance, but you having a heavy or painful period, period, no pun intended, is an indication that something is out of balance. Now sometimes we can have heavier painful periods depending on our diet. If you eat a diet that consumes if you include a lot of dairy in your diet or maybe you don't and then, you have a stretch where maybe you were eating more cheese or more milk or just consuming more foods with dairy that absolutely can change not only your period but it can also change your vaginal discharge, the consistency, the amount, all of that.

Also, if you were previously sick, let's say you just got over a viral infection, that can also create changes in your menstrual cycle. But generally speaking, heavy and painful periods are a sign of something being out of balance in your body. Other signs that indicate inflammatory heat, night sweats. Yes, this is also associated with low estrogen and perimenopause and menopause and post menopause because as we get older our hormones decline. If you're not repleting, which means to put back, if you're not putting back those hormones then they continue to decline until they tank and your symptoms can worsen.

Okay? Or at the very least, your symptoms can just remain. And then that just becomes like your normal way of life. It does not have to be. K?

Night sweats, acid reflux, sensitivity to heat, irritability, and anger that feels disproportionate, meaning you wanna absolutely take somebody's head off and they might have just said one word to you, that definitely is a sign that there is some inflammation brewing. And we're gonna talk in just a second about how it's not just the physiological inflammation, but also your mood, your reactivity, the energetic inflammation. Brain fog and that feeling of constantly being overstimulated, those are signs of inflammatory heat. Oh my goodness, if you're a parent, you have felt overstimulated at some point and there may be days where you just can't hear another theme song to your kid's favorite cartoon. You want them to put their headphones on because you cannot take hearing another coin being gotten on a video game or whatever.

Like the level of overstimulation simply from being a parent can be a lot. And that's not even including feeling overstimulated by the outside world, your work or career, the people who you have to be around, especially if you're around people at work that you can't necessarily control, you know, that environment. So many areas where you can feel overstimulated. You might feel overstimulated by a parent. You might feel overstimulated by your mate or your partner or your spouse.

There are so many different ways in which one can feel overstimulated and that's an opportunity for you to ask yourself, what's really happening? What's happening in my life right now? What can I control? What can I not control? Whose baggage have I decided to pick up and carry?

Like those are the questions that we want to ask when we find ourselves in these states that feel very consistent and very constant. So all of this, this is not just inflammation. This is your immune system in a perpetual state of alarm basically. Your nervous system is unable to downregulate, and your body is perceiving threat everywhere. I'll show you how this can show up in just a minute.

Let's talk about what causes it though. I've talked a little bit about this, but I hint hinted around. But let's talk a little bit more about what can cause this inflammation. Chronic infections. This could be viral, bacterial, parasitic.

So this does not have to be, you know, something that you're hospitalized for, this could be the seasonal flu. This could be, you know, any kind of communicable infection that can create inflammation in the body because your white blood cells are increasing, they're rushing to the site of infection to try to heal your body. That's what happens on the inside. And so this in turn can create inflammation. Inflammation itself is not bad, it is the body's response to beginning to heal.

However, when it's chronic and it's constant, that is an issue. Food sensitivities and leaky gut, this can create inflammation, but if you did not already have those or you didn't have any symptoms of those prior to and another cause created your inflammatory heat, that inflammatory heat can then, create food sensitivities and a leaky gut environment. Okay? Environmental toxins, prolonged stress and unprocessed anger. Listen, I don't know what your outlets are for processing your anger, but if you don't have one, you need to find one and fast.

And the quickest thing that you can do when you're feeling that you have anger or resentment building up inside of you is to let it out. That may look like for some people just verbalizing the problem out loud. You can verbalize this to yourself. Go somewhere where you're alone. You can be in your car, anywhere, but where you're by yourself and safe where you can verbally just say all the things that are just on like, they've gotten on your last nerve.

Like, I have no room left for x y and z. Get it all out. You can verbalize it through simply talking and stating it because that is the first step, acknowledging, recognizing it. You can let it out by singing. You can let it out by shouting, screaming, chanting.

Sometimes these things can be in anger. Sometimes they can come from a place of love, but verbalizing it and getting it out, that is essential. Okay? Because the energy's gotta go somewhere. And if that stuck stagnant stank energy is not being released, it's staying in your body and that continues to fuel this cascade of inflammation and reactivity.

Blood sugar dysregulation can also create inflammation. If you're not careful or not even thoughtful about what you eat, if you don't really pay attention to how your body feels after you eat, that's something that you wanna start thinking about and looking into. And by the way, let me just back up a second. When I talked about processing anger and resentment like getting that stuff out. Of course, we want to also remember the very simple tools like journaling, brain dumping, automatic writing, which is literally just writing what's coming to your mind does not have to be coherent or cohesive makes sense at all.

It's you getting it out. It's just another form of getting that stuck stagnant energy out of your body. Poor sleep also causes inflammation and a nervous system that is stuck in fight or flight. This one's pretty straightforward. By now, I think almost every human on the planet understands or at least has heard of the nervous system and fight or flight.

And of course we also have like the fight, flight, freeze, spawn, like there's several different phases that one's nervous system can be in but when you feel stuck in fight or flight that means you don't feel like you have the ground beneath your feet metaphorically and that is a very unsettling place to be. When your body responds to real threats or even perceived threats that creates inflammation. A real threat could be like an infection. It could be mold, Epstein Barr virus, Lyme disease, or a perceived threat could be autoimmunity. Now autoimmunity does not necessarily mean that you have a heightened immune system.

You could have a deficient immune state, but autoimmunity tends to fluctuate and that is a perceived threat because your body thinks that it is attacking foreign objects when it's really attacking its own tissue. Okay? And autoimmunity, the only tool it has inflammation, which is why autoimmunity is on the rise because it creates so many inflammatory cycles in the body. And depending on when you notice things in your body, if you notice something at a time when you feel pretty good, you might brush it off and think, oh, it's not that big of a deal because I feel good at the end of the day. But depending on the state or the fluctuation, the phase that your immunity may be in or your inflammation may be in, that can actually create dangerous cycles where our body is really fighting itself.

And when in a heightened state, you're going to create more inflammation, reactivity, more overstimulation, more sensitivities, more nervous system dysregulation. Okay? So a lot as you as you can see a lot that can create inflammation. Here's what does not work. Ignoring it and hoping that it calms down, period.

Does not work. Anti inflammatory diets are beneficial, but they need to address the root cause. So, you know, you can start by looking at meal plans that are like autoimmune paleo. That's a really good one for eliminating the inflammatory foods and giving you a place to start. It's about starting somewhere.

Also suppressing symptoms with pharmaceuticals is not necessarily the answer because that can give you a false sense of security. If you still have the root cause players, inflammation, the fire still burning underneath, but you're suppressing it with pharmaceuticals, that's really just putting a Band Aid on it. Okay? And then adding more heat would also not be advisable. This could be a lot of spicy foods.

This could be alcohol, adding on additional stressors, maybe obligating yourself to things more, intense workouts. I think I might have already said that. I'm not sure. Working out intensely and stimulating things. Anything that stimulates more than it calms is not going to be beneficial for an inflammatory heat pattern.

Now, what does work? Well, anything that's cooling, clearing, calming, identifying and removing those inflammatory triggers that you know of like infections, allergens, toxins, foods, you know, focusing on healing your gut. About 80% of your immune system lives in your gut. And so when you focus on healing the gut, by default, you're going to be supporting your immunity. Binders and drainage support, something like my blood and lymph wash formula is very supportive for reducing inflammation as well as my Quell.

Quell, which was formerly called shakimic acid booster, that's my anti inflammatory tincture. That formula is excellent at helping to stop inflammatory cycles. So and also nervous system practices. Nervous system practices that teach your body that it's safe to stand down. Anything that teaches your body that it's safe to stand down is going to be complementary to helping to reduce an inflammatory heat pattern.

So in a nutshell, inflammation, inflammatory heat, it requires you to stop fighting your body's alarm system and start listening first to see what it's trying to protect you from. The inflammation itself isn't the enemy. It's the messenger. Your job is to address the threat, not to just silence the alarm. Okay?

Think about that. If someone is breaking into a house, the alarm may be annoying, but the biggest threat would be the person or people who are breaking into the house. So your job here is not to just silence the inflammation. It's to address the actual threat so that that alarm will not continue to be activated. All right, we're coming down the home stretch.

All right, metabolic stagnation is the third and final core pattern that I'm going to talk about today. This is the pattern of slowness and not in a good way, not in like slow morning, slow living. No. This is the pattern of stuckness, not a peaceful stillness, but feeling stuck, sluggish, congested. Everything in your body is moving slowly, your digestion, your detoxification, your circulation, your metabolism, even your thoughts, your mind feels slow like it can't keep up.

If this is you, this metabolic stagnation might be showing up as weight gain especially around the middle that doesn't seem to budge no matter what you do. You feel plateaued, which I hear from so many women. Sluggish digestion and chronic constipation. So maybe your body's reacting differently to foods that you've eaten before. You're chronically constipated, meaning that you might go a day, two days, three days without having a really good bowel movement.

Brain fog, also stagnation can show up that way, difficulty concentrating, low motivation, and even mild depression. So if you're someone who has a tendency to mood disorders or depressive states or anxious states, this certainly could help you feel worse, feeling metabolically stagnant. So that's something to keep in mind. Cold hands and feet, fluid retention and puffiness. So if you have puffiness anywhere on the body, under the eyes or anywhere else in your body where you're retaining water, definitely a sign that this could be metabolic stagnation.

Hormonal imbalances, which most of us are dealing with, high cholesterol, and blood sugar even creeping up, feeling heavy or stuck emotionally. I wanna point that out. Metabolic stagnation is not just about the way your physical body is presenting, but also on an emotional energetic level. If you feel stuck emotionally, if you feel heavy emotionally, it's gonna be hard for you to find the drive to do the things that matter to you, that intellectually matter. You know that you need to do them, but it can be a lot harder to get those things done when you're feeling stagnant.

And that sense that just nothing is moving. Your body, your life, like, just feeling stuck. This is not necessarily laziness, it's not necessarily age or genetics, it's basically your body's metabolic machinery coming to a halt, grinding to a halt because something's blocking the flow. So we wanna first start with energy. What is your energy like?

Only you can assess that. What are your stressors? External, internal. What is your mind's what is your mind like? What are you thinking about day in and day out?

What do you have control over that maybe you're not controlling properly? What do you have control over that you're doing a good job at controlling, but perhaps you are also trying to control other things that are not yours to be concerned about? So just do a little bit of soul searching there to find out what your potential triggers or causes could be because here's what's here's typically what causes metabolic stagnation. On a physiological level, insulin resistance and blood sugar dysregulation. So I have a formula called fat flush.

It's actually gonna be renamed to probably metabolic tonic or something like that. But this particular formula is great at improving insulin sensitivity. When we have insulin resistance, it makes it a lot easier to have dysregulated blood sugar obviously, but also other issues like weight management issues, poor liver detoxification, and even thyroid dysfunction. Okay? And even subclinical thyroid dysfunction.

A lot of people have subclinical issues which means that their levels on a lab report go unnoticed because they fall into the normal category but they walk away still feeling shitty. Right? These are things that may not be picked up by a traditional provider. So when you work with a functional medicine practitioner like myself or an herbalist or someone who understands and can help you decode your labs, they will be looking at other markers, not just the thyroid markers, but they'll be looking at things that will create optimal thyroid function for you or whatever it is that they're, you know, studying from your labs. We'll be looking at what's going to create optimal performance here, not just keep you in the normal range.

K? Other things that can create metabolic stagnation, lymphatic congestion. Keep your lymphatic system clear. Our lymphatic system does not it's like our internal garbage can, but there's no pump for it. You have to actually move, perspire, sweat in order to start draining the lymph unless you are doing something to actually drain the lymphatic waste.

So I mentioned my blood and lymph wash earlier. That helps to clean the bloodstream, remove lymphatic waste from the lymphatic and cardiovascular system. Your lymphatic system is basically part of your cardiovascular system. And as you focus on cleaner, healthier blood, that's gonna improve the blood flow and improve the blood viscosity, which is the thickness of your blood and also helps with lymphatic release and getting rid of waste. Sedentary lifestyle, something else that causes metabolic stagnation.

This is pretty common sense when you think about it, just very straightforward. The less you move, the more your body's going to be used to you not moving as much. Your body changes. So that's why we've got to stay active. We've got to find ways to move that are safe for us, but still very important.

And then chronic stress that has shifted you from feeling wired to tired. If you're also having hormonal imbalances and you feel like you might be estrogen dominant, meaning that you're making or producing too much estrogen or having poor elimination or exposure to environmental toxins or nervous system that stuck like in freeze mode, like you just don't know what to do, this can create and be caused by, but this can create metabolic stagnation. And I don't necessarily mean the nervous system fight or flight in this instant, I'm talking about a nervous system stuck and freeze. Like, you know, you have so many different things to do, but they're also overwhelming. You don't know where to start, so you do nothing.

Okay? What does not work for metabolic stagnation is restricting your calories in an extreme way. This actually can make it worse. Overexercising can make it worse. You're adding more stress onto an already taxed system and ignoring the thyroid and the insulin piece.

Those things will make it worse. That's not going to work for metabolic stagnation, just ignoring and acting like, you know, that's that's probably not my issue. And, also, if you're treating weight as the problem instead of the symptom, that's not going to work. Try to not be as focused on the number on the scale and be more focused about what could this weight issue be a symptom of. Okay?

What does work however, get things moving again gently. You can start stabilizing your blood sugar through eating at timed like eating timed meals, meaning, you know, eating just as an example, every four to four and a half hours, having a solid high protein meal with protein, fiber, and healthy fats at every meal. If you're going to snack, limiting those but making sure that they are not empty or junk snacks that they are actually providing fuel. Liver support, supporting your detox pathways, very essential, very, very critical to metabolic stagnation so that it can start to clear out what does not belong there anymore. Lymphatic drainage, talked a little bit about that.

You can also do self lymphatic release or self lymphatic massage. Tons of videos on YouTube about that. I've also done co led workshops with one of my colleagues and friends, Stephanie, who teaches lymphatic self massage. It is very, very beneficial, something that I feel like everyone should know. Lots of tools and resources on this.

Lymphatic drainage could also include dry brushing, dry brushing your skin before you bathe, rebounding. So if you have like a rebounder, small trampoline, castor oil packs, movement, like anything that gets your body moving internally and outwardly, those would be supportive. Thyroid support if indicated depending on your needs and anything that's warming and circulatory. When you think of warming herbs, think of the ones in your kitchen. Like, you might not be a pro on herbs and that's okay, but I know that you can identify the ones in your pantry that are warming.

Let's go for it. Cinnamon, warming in nature. Ginger, definitely warming in nature. A little spice there. Cayenne, definitely spice but warming.

We treat cayenne as an effector herb in herbalism where we use it. I use it in a way that it helps to activate the other herbs in a formula. It definitely would not be a primary or secondary or even tertiary herb. It is one of those low lying kind of flies under the radar herbs to help support the rest of the formula. Rosemary, another common culinary herb that can help increase circulation, also great for your brain.

Bitter herbs to help stimulate digestion are going to get things moving. So anything to help stimulate digestion. This could be digestive bitters. This could be digestive enzymes, this could be cleaning your colon, keeping your lower bowel clean, like so many ways that you can stimulate movement. Also strength training and walking, not cardio, but strength training and walking are both great.

Addressing any hormonal issues. If estrogen dominance is what could be affecting you, then you want to look at ways to reduce that and we can do that through food and through supplementation. So at the end, metabolic stagnation requires you to stop pushing. You don't want to push, push and force but you do want to make sure that you're incorporating things to allow for that gentle movement to start. And as you get started then you will be able to have a capacity to do more.

But it also requires you to stop punishing your body for being slow and just start asking why it slowed down in the first place. What are the things that could have contributed to it? This is a great space to keep track on a piece of paper to write down these things as they come up or even use the voice recorder app on your phone. This stagnation, your body treats it as protection. So even though you feel like your body might be feeling you, the stagnation really is protection.

Your body's conserving energy because it does not necessarily feel safe to burn it. So your job is to restore safety, which goes back to your nervous system, to optimize your bodily functions, and to let the flow return naturally. Okay? These patterns typically do not exist in isolation. Most people are a combination, depleted and inflamed or stagnant and depleted.

And the art of clinical herbalism and holistic medicine is recognizing for me, pattern is primary in a client, which is secondary, and how to address both or all three without overwhelming the system. Now, if you visit eeyasumed.com, I do have a free pattern assessment where you can take a quiz to discover your dominant pattern. If you need deeper help and you want one on one support, I offer that through one on one private sessions, which are very limited, but I do offer two different types, a seventy five minute full functional medicine workup session, and I also offer a quicker rapid remedy session that is thirty minutes. So you can view those on the website. There are also other offerings that you can see there.

But definitely begin to think about how this all fits for you. Like, where do the puzzle pieces merge? You know, we want to address what's happening in the body. We wanna address the root. Now the branches matter.

The branches would be your symptoms, how your body is physically manifesting. That all matters. It's all a part of your story and a part of your journey and all a part of your holistic treatment. But it for us, for me as a clinician, it's about getting to the root. Right?

Understanding those underlying factors. So that's what we do. That's what I do here at Iyasu. And even when I'm formulating the botanical medicines, you know, Tao and Saloma, they're all built around these these principles. And it's also how I teach my students in my academy.

So if you're someone who is looking for support as a client for your own body, for your health and well-being, or perhaps if you're an aspiring practitioner, an existing practitioner, someone who loves holistic natural health and herbs, then you can visit our academy. Check out what we have going on there. You can find it all at Cicely Everson dot com. It'll take you wherever you need to be inside my ecosystem. But at the end of the day, here's what I want you to do.

I want you to see your pattern. I want you to start addressing the terrain. That's your earth. That is the foundation, and then watch everything change. Thank you for hanging in there with me during this episode of the atelier.

So excited about this one where we uncover the three core patterns that I see all the time in clients and what you can do about it. Don't forget, you can grab my free burnout pattern guide as well as that free discover your pattern quiz at iyasumed.com. Thanks, guys. I'll see you in the next episode.