A love note to those tired of being told their bodies are broken
Holistic health is not a brand, not a luxury, and not a pseudoscience playground. It’s the integration of biology, ancestry, and lived experience — practiced at the pace of Earth, not the market. This piece dismantles both wellness-industry gimmicks and biomedical reductionism, argues for symptoms as intelligence rather than inconvenience, and sketches a grounded, feminist, intersectional approach to living in relationship with our bodies.
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Why we need a new conversation about health — The noise we're navigating, and what's at stake.
What is holistic health, really? — Definitions through a feminist, decolonial, and ecological lens.
Symptoms are not the problem — Moving beyond battlefield medicine's reflex to suppress.
Healing at earth pace — Reclaiming cyclical time and the intelligence of seasons.
Integration in practice — Keeping the work accessible, rigorous, and real.
On misinformation, medical gaslighting, reproductive control, and reclaiming our bodies at Earth pace.
I'll start where it burns. Snake oil sellers dress like caregivers online. They hawk detox pearls, vaginal “cleanses,” endocrine‑wrecking powders, performative hormone hacks, a thousand‑dollar path to purity. Algorithms reward spectacle, not rigor. Meanwhile, a clinical voice tells us pain is ordinary, flooding is normal, anxiety is the personality we were assigned. Western psychology names a disorder and forgets to name the disordering forces of racism, misogyny, poverty, displacement, and war. Reproductive care still comes through gates shaped by white supremacy and control.
This is the noise field many of us navigate while trying to heal. I'm not here for purges or purity tests. I'm here for coherence. For practices that return us to relationship—with body, land, lineage, and one another. Holistic health, as I carry it, puts science, ancestral knowledge, and lived experience in the same room without asking any of them to disappear. Sovereignty looks like body literacy paired with accountability.
If you’ve been dismissed in the exam room and exploited by the “wellness” scroll, you're not imagining the contradiction. There is a way of working that honors rigor and ritual, data and dignity, survival and transformation. That's the conversation I'm here to have.
A radical, feminist definition rooted in body literacy, trauma awareness, and Earth-paced care.
Holistic health is not just an “alternative” to conventional medicine. Instead, it's the meeting ground. A crossroads where evidence-based science and ancestral, land-rooted wisdoms stand shoulder to shoulder. It sees the body as both a biochemical marvel and an archive of story, lineage, and relationship.
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality reminds us that systems overlap and interlock — and our bodies are no different. Physical health is braided with mental, emotional, social, and ecological health. Trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem speaks of how racialized and ancestral trauma live in the body's tissues, shaping both our physiology and our choices. Herbalist Karen Rose writes that healing is a return to right relationship with the Earth, not just an individual project.
This lens refuses to compartmentalize. A migraine is never just a migraine. Chronic fatigue is never just “low energy.” These experiences live inside political realities, environmental conditions, family systems, and cultural narratives. Holistic health names and works with those intersections instead of pretending they don't exist.
Why Western medicine’s obsession with fixing misses the wisdom of the body.
Modern biomedicine learned plenty on battlefields. Triage, anesthesia, antisepsis—the protocols that keep a body alive under catastrophic stress. This lineage saves lives every day. Keep it. Respect it. And name its limits. Triage is doctrine for emergencies; it cannot govern the long arcs of endocrine repair, grief integration, menstrual dysregulation, or nervous‑system recalibration.
A symptom is information. Heat, ache, flooding, fog, sleeplessness —signals from a system negotiating conditions seen and unseen. Suppression has its place; analgesia matters; antibiotics matter. The work doesn't end with silence. The work begins when we ask what the body is responding to, adapting around, resisting on our behalf.
Intersectional health scholar Lisa Bowleg warns that skipping context causes epistemic harm. The same is true in the clinic. Turn attention toward pattern rather than panic. Track cycles and the weather of your life: food, labor, housing, intimacy, history, exposure, rest. Many presentations labeled “dysfunction” are functional attempts at equilibrium under duress. Naming that function opens choices beyond eradication—choices that include medicine, herbs, movement, boundaries, redistribution, and repair.
Reorienting our language, our expectations, and our relationship with discomfort.
Our bodies keep time with the planet, not the clock. The Earth moves in seasons, phases, pulses — expansion and contraction, dormancy and bloom. So do we.
This is not linear, industrial time (Chronos), where healing is measured in efficiency and deadlines. This is Kairos — the ripened moment, the fertile pause, the cycle that cannot be rushed without consequence. Think of the menstrual cycle, the way bone knits after a fracture, the slow integration of grief. Each moves in its own spiral rhythm.
Somatic practitioners like Prentis Hemphill remind us that “boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously” — and healing requires boundaries with time itself. It requires letting the body dictate the pace, rather than forcing it to sprint through recovery because capitalism demands productivity.
At Earth pace, thirteen moon cycles might be what it takes to truly restore a nervous system. The work is in listening for the moment when the body says “now,” and trusting it — even when the world demands “faster.”
A gentle guide for how to begin—even when the system isn’t made for you.
Theory without practice is just another abstraction. Holistic health becomes real when it shapes our daily choices and the ways we relate to ourselves and others.
Track your patterns.
Whether through menstrual cycle charting, symptom logs, or energy mapping, patterns reveal truths that one-off observations can't.Integrate care modalities.
Let herbal infusions sit beside lab work results. Let therapy sessions exist alongside ritual. Neither cancels the other.Center relationship.
To community, to the more-than-human world, to your own body. Healing is a collective act, even when it feels solitary.Stay politically awake.
Bodily autonomy is not just personal. It's under active threat — in reproductive rights, in access to trans-affirming care, in environmental policy. Your health choices are part of a larger struggle.
This is the ethos we've built into the Baba Yaga Cycle Coach app. It's not here to flatten you into data points or sell you another “perfect cycle” ideal. It's a tool for literacy — body literacy, cycle literacy, self-literacy.
You'll find both science-backed menstrual tracking and the kinds of pattern recognition your grandmother's grandmother might have practiced — reading the body like you'd read the land. We don't pretend the world isn't burning. We build resilience in spite of it, alongside it.
Holistic health, in this frame, is not a lifestyle trend. It's a remembering. A return to the knowing that you are not separate from the Earth, and that your healing is bound up with hers.
