There’s No Quick-Fix Supplement For Being Human

I recently attended a “lunch with strangers” event hosted by a wonderfully community-building-oriented friend here in San Francisco. She provided the lunch and the space, and each of us was invited to bring a friend. 

Community and connection were the only intentions. (Hooray!!)

The group was lovely, and it took nothing more than a casual “What allowed you to come to a leisurely Thursday lunch like this?” question posed by one guest to another to ripple into rich, thoughtful sharing and genuine, open receiving around the table.

But one theme I had an intense internal response to kept popping up: Which nutritional supplements the women were feeling compelled to take these days.

I've been hearing (almost always male) “longevity hackers” and “peptide stackers” seeping increasingly into the zeitgeist.

More and more people are feeling like they need to get expensive full body scans to be told what they need nutritionally or feeling driven to pack in protein supplements because they heard someone – who's almost never an actual nutritionist – wax on about the virtues of protein maxxing on a podcast.

Some of these supplements and procedures likely make perfectly sane sense for certain individuals' particular needs, and there are some genuinely exciting, groundbreaking technological advances coming through that will no doubt support health in powerful ways. 

But seeing people put more trust in what some perceived expert “out there” says than they put in their own sense of what feels right for them from the inside out breaks my heart a bit.

It absolutely makes sense that we humans have the impulse to seek outwardly for things that might help us feel more in control of the inherently uncontrollable experience of being human.

But the truth is, there is no amount of peptides or supplements we can take that will alleviate our existential anxiety as humans. 

No external supplement can give us what we're actually seeking –

a sense of internal safety, wholeness and peace.

What will increase that sense of safety and positive, actually useful control is expanding our bandwidth of tolerance to be with our internal experience.

To increase our capacity to hold discomfort, uncertainty and nuance within our inner landscape.

To get more comfortable with the uncomfortablility of two or more things being able to be simultaneously true, rather than there being some one and done, black and white fix to the things that make us uncomfortable.

To practice tuning into our internal cues, vibrations, rhythms and needs and learning to tend to those things first from the inside out rather than the outside in. 

You are capable of cultivating the capacity to attune to yourself with the type of curious attention and warm care that lets you feel and trust what's uniquely right for you from the inside out.

You can become the #1 authority of and expert in what best nourishes your own wellbeing. Not through what your mind thinks about it or what anyone out there tells you, but through what your body and being sense.

Tune into micro sensations of what your organism is telling you throughout your days this week. Wise external action and resourcing, when appropriate, will flow naturally from there.

With Love,

Melissa

PS - If you’re curious about exploring these themes in a personalized way, be in touch about 1:1 coaching possibilities.