I have a note on my phone that I look at every day and update every day.

I start each day with this, and then I list the reasons my day will be great. Walking my dog somewhere new, sending a newsletter, a call with a friend. Even the bad things, like having to call T-Mobile, get listed as if they are great things I am making happen.

I started it because I needed a reason to want to wake up. I needed a reason to believe in myself again, and to hold onto something, perhaps for a semblance of control, but more for the feeling of being aligned. It has since turned into my new company (yay!), which I will come back to.

First I want to talk about why it was necessary, for me and arguably for anyone, to want a great day badly enough to design for it.

You have taken care of yourself your entire life. You eat well, you work hard, you live cleanly, and then suddenly none of it adds up the way it used to. Those ten pounds will not budge. Your body feels like it is operating on a secret frequency nobody warned you about. Every time you look for answers you get patronizing, generic advice, or someone telling you to just accept getting older. You do not want to be put out to pasture and you do not want a fifteen-step biohacking protocol. You want to wake up, do one clear thing for your body, your mind, and your plate, and feel alive inside your own skin again.

Under the Tuscan Sun

Almost every woman I know loves that book and the movie. Everything falls apart for Diane Lane’s character, and then in the wreckage she builds something better. (And who thought there was any way she could replicate that beautiful San Francisco home, or her ex, and of course she did.) If not this, something better.

We love stories of the underdog, the rebuild, the incredible thing that comes out of the rubble. Though I notice we only love the underdog once she is no longer the underdog. While she is still down there it feels a little contagious, a stark reminder of how quickly any of us could fall.

I love that book and that movie, and I have noticed there are not many protagonists in their fifties. I suppose it makes sense.

How are you supposed to be uplifted when your cycle is all over the place, and you have brain fog, and you are gaining weight, and your hair is falling out, and your doctor is telling you all of this is normal? When you have been in shape and eating well and doing all of the right things, and nothing is working, and there is a tire around your belly despite two hundred crunches a night. When you are running around for your kids, your husband, your boss, your parents, your business, your dog, and everyone except yourself, and have been for decades.

Then everything goes wrong at once and you are laid off by the job you thought was your retirement plan, and you apply to hundreds of others, and the screeners kick you out, and recruiters tell you to remove your degrees and cut ten years of experience off your résumé.

The glamorous older woman in Under the Tuscan Sun, the one whose beauty is fading, feels a bit sad. Because at her age she is not supposed to want more, be more, be seen.

Silenced, just when you have a lot to say

You hit midlife and you are not to be seen or heard from again. Once your fertility is gone you are no longer a useful part of society.

Everything from movies to pop culture is arranged to make aging feel like the worst thing on earth, to make gray hair and wrinkles and wisdom and experience read as negatives. Speaking about your experience is taboo. And if you try the reverse, if you look after yourself and dress well and keep your hair long and go to the gym, you are trying too hard. Mutton dressed as lamb. Or fake.

There is no scenario in which you win, because the situation is designed to remove you from the conversation.

The interesting part is the timing. You are pushed out precisely when you have the wisdom and the experience and a voice that could change how the next generation sees the world, and sees women, and sees our value.

We Were Hunted Down As Witches

For most of human history women were botanists, midwives, and healers. We were celebrated for our mystical ways and deep understanding of nature. Our knowledge was practical and inherited, passed from one woman to the next without a single institution involved.

Then our wisdom was made illegal. Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries the European witch trials targeted women who practiced any kind of healing arts, and curing a neighbor with willow bark could be reclassified as heresy. At the same time the care of the body moved out of villages and into universities that did not admit women, so a practice that had worked for centuries became a crime overnight.

In 1322 a healer named Jacqueline Felicie was tried in Paris for practicing medicine illegally. Her patients testified that she cured them when the university physicians could not. She was banned anyway, because she lacked the credential.

By the nineteenth century the same thing happened to birth. American midwives were publicly described as relics of barbarism, and licensing laws dismantled the traditions of Black midwives in the South, immigrant lay healers, and Indigenous practitioners. Women were not removed from medicine so much as demoted inside it, into low-wage roles under a male hierarchy.

What was left of the knowing got renamed. Intuition, somatic sense, and experience became old wives’ tales. And a system built on linear output has a problem with a woman who has accumulated fifty years of pattern recognition, because the thing she has is not measurable and cannot be credentialed. ‘= Under this system, an older woman with wisdom has to be considered past her time. The crone is the most dangerous figure in that arrangement, and calling her old is the cheapest way to minimize her.

I saw this play out in my own company. At Rêve Health we interpreted biomarker labs through Traditional Chinese Medicine, where health is viewed holistically and includes your environment and your relationships, and our members resolved years-long chronic illnesses. Some of them had spent six figures on concierge doctors without answers before they came to us.

But the ancient wisdom was too woo-woo for many investors, and we struggled to find money. The second anyone mentions meridian lines or healing energy, credibility is gone (despite the efficacy).

Nobody questions why WiFi works. Nobody questions that we are living on a ball of rock hurtling around a fireball, or that there are planets light years away. But suggest we might be susceptible to energy and rhythm and we are…well, eccentric at best.

Chronobiology

The interesting part is that intuition is largely instrumentation, and there is a formal science of it. Turns out science and soul dance together.

Chronobiology studies how living things run on internal clocks, and the finding that matters is that there is not one clock. There are three, layered on top of each other, all running whether you pay attention or not.

Ultradian Rhythm runs about ninety minutes. Your brain moves through sleep in ninety-minute waves at night and it does the same thing during the day, so you get roughly ninety minutes of real focus followed by twenty minutes where you turn foggy and restless and want a snack. That dip is a recovery phase. We are not meant to power through days without breaks.

Circadian Rhythm is the twenty-four-hour cycle following natural light cycles. Temperature, cortisol, alertness, digestion are ruled by this clock. The science of how those molecular clocks work won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 2017, Christian Cajochen’s lab went further and found that under controlled conditions, with no view of the sky at all, people still slept measurably worse around the full moon. I wrote more about that in Exhausted Before a Full Moon.

Infradian Rhythm cycles are longer. Some examples include our menstrual cycle, hair shedding cycle, seasonal cycles. This one rules things like migratory cycles in birds and hibernation in bears. It’s pretty cool and most of us have ever heard of it,

So we are rhythmic beings made of layered clocks, ruled by the moon and seasons just as animals and nature are.

The only question is whether you work with the rhythm or against it.

Listening to Intuition

On January 13 my startup dissolved and the last 9 months have involved pretty much every door I opened closing.

The great thing about getting older is that you come to understand the universe shuts out anything that is not supposed to be yours. If something is meant to be yours, it will be. A relationship, a job, a house, a city.

You stop trying to break down locked doors.

What happens when things get quiet is you start listening to yourself. I realized I can build for myself, and for other women in the middle of a transition. Something to help all of us tap into our natural wisdom.

Alignment

I decided I needed to be balanced, and started with one line on my phone eahc day: today is a great day, and I make things happen.

Then I started expanding. I would look to the sky to figure out the energy of the day, after I noticed I was impacted by full moons, lunar eclipses, seasonal shifts (in other words, noticing the natural rhythms of the 3 clocks).

I tracked my sleep and my mood and write down what my circadian rhythms were doing. As I got certified in nutrition, and then again for personal training, I started asking whether the energy of each day impacted movement, and how to balance hypertrophy with rest and recovery based on these cycles (turns out, they hugely impact your training).

I started eating with the seasons. Being able to get frozen blueberries in December does not mean I am supposed to. Farmers markets, tomatoes and basil from the garden, a meal made from the ground I stood on, or the ground somebody near me stood on.

Seasonal eating aligns your diet with your body’s changing biological clocks, gut microbiome, and metabolic needs, providing peak nutrients that match environmental demands throughout the year.

I started grounding, purposely touching grass.

Basically, I started doing all sorts of witchy things which really were based in science.

Illumination

I created an app for myself to track all these things and started calling it Lumine, from the Latin lumen, meaning light, brightness, or radiance, and later used in Middle English to mean illuminate.

If you know me, you know I like cards, whether Tarot or the Deck of Character. So I started building a daily card from where the moon and the season actually sit, with one movement, one mindset, and one meal attuned to it.

Each day was a way to illuminate the energy of that day by predictable cycles, because God only knows my own cycle is not predictable anymore.

I started feeling absolutely aligned. It helped me get crystal clear about what I want, who I am, and where I am headed.

There are endless people telling you to find your purpose. For me, alignment comes first, because the question does not even make sense until you are balanced.

Then it arrives, and broken down to the core it is usually something like this. I want to feel awesome every single day. More alive. More attuned. Not drifting.

Which is why I started seeing Lumine as more than a tool for me. As a service.

I was always going to make something to help other people get in tune with themselves, to find their voice and listen to their body. To feel the most alive, and content with the knowledge that you are the path. You just might need a light to guide the way.

Stay tuned for the launch. Subscribers to my newsletter, the Illuminator, will receive complimentary access to our core methodology and priority access to more tailored experiences.