We know there’s more to being healthy than what western medicine would have us believe. A lot more. Particularly for women. We are far more complex physically, mentally and emotionally.

The fact is that health isn’t the absence of disease just like pain doesn’t always equal injury or illness. And the natural aging process is not a disease.

Our modern culture has stripped women of the sacredness of our bodies. Cut us off (sometimes literally) from our intuition. We are hyper sexualized from a young age and then shamed for our sexuality. Modern feminism has masculinized womanhood in the workplace and stripped all honor and reverence away from motherhood at home.

Is it any wonder that women feel exhausted trying to please everyone and have forgotten how to please themselves?

If there’s one thing that every woman I know complains about, it's sleep deprivation. There’s a reason they use it for torture, oops I mean enhanced interrogation. Sleep disturbance every once in a while, a night or 2 here and there, is not a problem. More than 3 nights a week might be. Now I thought it was just me but apparently waking between 2 and 4 AM every night like clock work is pretty common for women in perimenopause and menopause. So today we’re going to take a look at why that happens and what you do about it.

Ideally we would all get everything our body needs to function optimally from real, whole food. Theoretically if we did that then we wouldn’t need to count calories. Or even watch portion sizes because the body has built in on and off switches for our appetite and is brilliantly designed to find the perfect energy balance. Sadly I think we can all agree that the standard American diet is deficient on many levels.

Our modern life of convenient hyper palatable food consumption has disrupted that delicate balance and led to food addiction, gut dysfunction and metabolic disease. Today, the lack of nutrition awareness and just basic general activity in modern life and you see most people deficient in many micro nutrients, using food as therapy on some level and desperate for a quick fix to fill in the gaps. That’s where supplements come in.

Today kicks off a 4 part series on reclaiming your health. Movement, nutrition, sleep and connection, each of these are levers, access points and communication pathways into the nervous system and each of them can and will affect your nervous system whether you know it or not in both positive and negative ways. Today, I want to kick off our series by looking at sleep. I like to think of sleep as the canary in the coal mine. Often (not always) it’s the first thing we notice when we’re stressed. It’s an easy thing to gauge. How well do you sleep on a regular, consistent basis?

Melanie is a certified EFT therapist with a multi modal approach and years of practice in health care. Melanie takes her knowledge, experience love and light and successfully mentors others. She has coached hundreds into a world of self fulfillment and freedom. She helps clients who feel stuck, find ways out of darkness and bondage by incorporating simple but effective practices that create neural pathways to positivity and happiness. She specializes in difficult challenges, including PTSD, addiction, depression and anxiety. Melanie is a best selling author of the book happy, joyous and free, as well as a sought after inspirational speaker. 

part two of our sleep factor 101. Today, we are going to be talking about the stages of sleep. And what is happening in those stages of sleep, and which ones are more important. We just want to get a real good picture of what a good night's sleep looks like what is normal. What is abnormal. And how can we use this information to really find our way back, and support our health With a healthy night's sleep.