Make Your Path to Hormonal Health Effortless

Introduction and Summit Welcome 0:00

Mona Sharma I just want to start off by saying thank you for joining me. In every way possible, but thank you for coming to this amazing summit that we're putting on. I'm so happy to have you. My pleasure. I'm so excited. This is the best part of my day to be with you always. You know. Thank you so. Much. And you know what I want everybody listening to know is like you and I have been in some extreme situations before, but knowing each other through Jesse Adler's group. But when we're hiking, when we're cold, plunging, when we're saunaing.

This is what this is what we're talking about, like people who are about to hear. What Mona and I talk about, even when we're it's just our personal time, so. I just can't wait. So exciting. Same. Let's go deep. I love it Yeah, let's go deep. Exactly. So, yeah, for starters, just so people kind of have an understanding of the context of your mind in your heart, talk a little bit about how you came to your work today, because I know it continues to morph and there's so much to for us all to learn from it.

Yeah. Gosh, I still feel like I'm morphing into something completely different, which is exciting. Yeah. So in my previous life, so about 12 years ago, I used to work as a national artistry and sales trainer for a bunch of different luxury cosmetic companies. And at the time it seemed really great coming from a family with an Indian dad. I didn't pursue becoming a doctor or a lawyer like my brother, so I just found an industry that I loved. I got to the top of my game really, really fast and sure enough, it ended up being just that typical corporate sales job.

I was really busy being busy. I was I was out of alignment with my purpose. I was waking up in different hotel rooms, not knowing what city I was in. I was living in that kind of high fashion, lifestyle, eating, drinking, smoking, doing all the things. There was a point. I don't know if I told you this. We were actually taking laxatives to kind of counteract the foods that

Mona's Health Crisis and Career Shift 2:00

we were eating because we thought like, it was just it got toxic and onset, you know, debilitating anxiety onset or regular periods. I brutal PCOS. I was told that I was never going to be able to have children and these heart palpitations that were onsite, you know, I would just bend down to pick up a pair of socks, but they got so bad if I went for a run or something, I thought that I was going to black out. So at that time I wasn't really interested in doing the personal work or the growth. So like so many of us, this was around 24 years old at the time of Yeah, yeah.

And then later on towards my thirties, what ended up happening, I was on Beta blockers and ended up going in for my second heart surgery for gosh was like my fifth ablation for this tachycardia that just wouldn't go away. But you know, I wanted a quick fix so I went on the beta blocker, gained a ton of weight. I was probably about 20lb heavier and it was in the second heart surgery where I was looking at this monitor because you're awake for the whole thing. They're injecting you with like adrenaline and all these other things to boost your heart rate.

I could see my heart with wires going everywhere and they said, All right, we found it. But here's the thing, Mona. If we go through with this ablation, you might have to wear a pacemaker for the rest of your life. Oh, my God. Yeah. So talk about like that was my moment. That's when I was like, what is happening? This is not my life. I'm not going to have a pacemaker. I am sick of identifying as somebody with a heart condition, and I'm sick of feeling this way. And the irony of all of this is that I grew up with a very different conception of health.

My father is Indian. Like I said, my mom is Danish. She's from Denmark. But I've only ever known my mom to have debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. So autoimmune disease completely deformed. I've never had my mom without a disease. It as a result, with my father's insight on Ira Veda and this ancient Indian practice of healing the body, you know the motto in my house, growing up was Eat it, it's good for you. My mom would try anything and everything to take down this inflammation in her body. The idea of food as medicine was like in our house in the eighties, and my dad would take us to live at an ashram, the spiritual center, where they practice yoga and meditation, connection with nature, eating whole foods, lots of time in community, and just healing your nervous system.

And so here I was with all this insight because I was the girl, you know, my dad would tap me on the shoulder at 5:00 to go meditate. Yoga kind of felt like torture to me, right? Looking back, it was a gift. So in that moment, in the heart surgery, I'm like, Oh, my God, I know that there's a better way. I've got to go back to the ashram. And so I did. I quit the corporate world altogether. I went back to the ashram. I became a yoga teacher, a meditation teacher, then a holistic nutritionist at this time, not pursuing it professionally at all.

This is only my personal healing journey. You're yourself. Here, myself, and I started working with CEOs and a lot of hockey players at the time. And what I realized quickly is I started incorporating the rituals from the ashram in their healing protocols. So, you know, it wasn't about the diet, you know, and I'm sure one of your questions is going to be like in this healing at the ashram, I stopped writing, I started eating more carbs. And I had probably eaten in over a decade. Right. I was exercising less.

I wasn't on a crazy, you know, Atkins diet or 2 hours at the gym. Instead, I was just there to to heal. So I knew that there was something more than just diet and exercise to rebalance and gain health. Yeah. You know, you. Know, what strikes me in that story is there's the similarity for me in the sense that I was given really strong, foundational roots about what health was as a child. And for me, it was my mom was like really adamant about the quality of food. So we had to actually go into the grocery store and if we wanted something other than what Mom wanted for us, we had to show the ingredient label and read it to her.

And if sugar was in the first four ingredients, we weren't allowed to have it wild. This is in the seventies. The one thing I wanted to have was a fruit roll up and the fruit roll up had the number four ingredient was sugar. And all I wanted to be was. Like one of those other kids with the fruit roll up and when. I got sick in my twenties, I came back to what I had been taught, which is very similar to what you're saying. So I think for parents out there, it's super important to realize that you may feel like you're not being heard, but when when a crisis hits, they're going to come back to their roots.

And I actually see it with both my kids now at 23 and 20. Oh, my gosh. Same with me, too. It's like just the imprinting that's happening right on. Is my kids doing something or, you know, offering to help in the kitchen. And they'll say, Get a veggie, get a veggie. It's like, Oh, they're listening. It's working. It's amazing. Yeah. So do you. Think in in your story, do you think we've overcomplicated health completely? I think that, you know, what we really have to recognize right now is that we're living in this era of hyper wellness.

There has never been more access to health information, food, diet than ever before in history. And yet diseases are on the rise, right? Diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, mental health issues are all on the rise among adults and children. So something is not working here. Right. And with my approach with my clients, very much like you, you know, you really have to honor your personal constitution in order for you to heal. So how could it be that one diet or one style of eating was perfect for all of us?

In order to feel the same benefits like you and I, with our health journeys, we have to consider what was the environment when we grow up? What is our mental state? What is our self dialog to our self every day? What is the environment that we're living in? They all contribute to how we're feeling today. So the sooner that we can break out with this cookie cutter idea of what to do and instead kind of tune in to our bodies intuition a little bit more, we're on a much faster tracked healing. Do you think we have?

We struggled to believe that the simple can help. Like we, the medical system has taught us that it's so sophisticated, you can't understand it. You have to be the intellectual elite to be able to even understand it. And then I'm going to deliver it to you. We don't even know. Like when we walk into our doctor's office, we have no idea how much they're going to even charged for that appointment. It's like this big mystery that has been, like, wrapped into this. It's too sophisticated for the individual world to understand.

And then here we come along with, hey, you might want to look at eating more vegetables. You might want to fast, you might want to meditate. And the human mind is like, that's too simple. It's this mysterious, complicated thing that's going to save me.

Returning to the Ashram and Healing Foundations 9:00

Do you feel like. It's our perception of where where the greatest health benefit comes from? And if it's too simple, we dismiss it. I think that we used to have a lot more support, right? We used to live in larger family units. We used to live in villages where there was more people kind of delegated to help. We're busier than ever. So yeah, the simple act of preparing a healthy dinner is complicated all of a sudden, right? And I'm a perfect example of that. When I went to the doctor, you're put into a position of being inferior.

They have all the control. You're naturally a little bit scared because you're the one that's suffering right. Then all of a sudden and God bless doctors, you do this like they're trying to take away your pain. So when doctors prescribe debate a blocker, I was like, oh, my God, okay, I need I need to do this. This is this is easy. It didn't occur to me that they weren't asking about my emotional health at the time, my spiritual health at that time, the fact that I was taking laxatives, the fact that I was out of alignment in my life, the fact that I was partying and not sleeping, they just wanted to know that I wasn't drinking too much alcohol or eating too much McDonald's.

Right. And then they ask that. They ask. That. They ask. And then the same thing with surgeries like, you know, I'll never forget, I ended up doing this just shortly after my second heart surgery, my brother, he's ten years older. He's always been the triathlon, the runner, the marathoner and everything. And he said, I want to do this adventure with us. And it's like, no, I can't. My heart and he looked at me and he's like, What's that working out for you? How's the story going for you? Oh, that is so good.

And it really was just like the wake up call. Like, Oh, yeah, like, the story isn't working for me at all anymore, right? I'm doing these things that doctors have told me to do, but I know that there's a better way. So yeah, I think that my biggest challenge with a lot of the clients that I work with is just like taking the the pressure off their shoulders. I'm like, this doesn't have to be so heavy and complicated. We can come up with something that is so personalized to your lifestyle to make it seem easy.

But with any change in life, it's going to seem a little bit hard in the beginning, right? So I think that we do need a reframe and maybe a decision deciding that, hey, if I'm going to focus on my, you know, that the buzzword is lifespan. Now, if I want to feel great into my eighties and nineties and behind every decision that I make today is going to matter. So what are those decisions going to be? And then having some really hard boundaries around what those and what those choices are. Right. It's not that some things are good in good or bad, it's just deciding when and how they can fit in, if it's going to be in a state of health or a state of imbalance.

Yeah. You know, I was thinking as you were as you were talking one of the gifts, one thing that you and I share as well as we've both worked with a lot of celebrities. And one of the gifts of working with a celebrity that I've that's that I had or I've been able to realize is that these people's lives are so complicated, they are so busy that the tools I need to bring them have to be very simple. And they have to work quickly. Because the other thing is that they're very you know, a lot of these people have all the money they they they want to spend on anything they want.

I call it shiny object syndrome, where they're like, Oh, how about I get that? How do they get this? But what I've learned has been the most effective and the most in the of most chaotic lifestyles or life patterns is the simple approaches to food fasting, exercise like mindset. The more simple I can make something for a celebrity, the easier it is to follow, and the better it works in their crazy lifestyle, which should be everybody who has a busy lifestyle. Have you seen that as well? Yeah, I would say, you know, the biggest I'll never forget it was a racecar driver that I was working with.

And gosh, he had everything. He had the personal chef, he had the massage therapist, the physiotherapist, the psychotherapist there, that everything like a full support system. And he still wasn't working out feeling great or feeling his best, right. So, you know, when working with him, we just had to address first his state of being, you know, once we understood his state of being and what he was really lacking wasn't it was in conversation about he had this green smoothie to start your day and this is going to be the solution or take this, you know, bowl of supplements every day.

It's like no, you you need to go and have some alone time away from all screens where you can just sit and be and read and look up at the sky. Right. It's in a sense this like nervous system regulation that had to happen for him, for other people. Yeah. To your point, because of this excessively busy lifestyle, their health has gone so often to the other direction. They're so nutrient deprived and accustomed and I would say like undernourished. They're not eating enough food and they're eating all the wrong foods, but they don't know anything else. Right? They're eating for fuel.

They're eating for the rush of energy that they need to go and present and be on. So, yeah, it really depends on the individual, but I can certainly guarantee that money is not the factor that's that's making you healthier. Unhealthy. That's right. It's an agreed. Oh, my God, that's such a good statement, because it's how complicated we have made every aspect of our life. And another unifier, I think, for you and I, is our approach to health is let's come back to the basics. Let's come back. Let's stop looking for the magic thing that's going to cure you.

Let's just redo your lifestyle so that it's more effortless and it's working for you, not against you. Totally. Mindy, I can't tell you more than 95% of the calls that I do, the initial assessment, everybody wants no monitors to tell me what to eat, what's the perfect diet? I will start it tomorrow and I'll say, okay, we'll get there. Right. I want to understand your biology and what's happening. And, you know, the first question that typically comes up is like, tell me aware, how are you feeling in your body?

And when they say gotcha, I'm feeling frustrated, I'm feeling angry, I feel like I don't have time. And how does that make you feel? Makes me feel really sad and makes me feel like I don't have any control over my body. And then I'll ask, well, when did these start to happen? When did these emotions start to come out? When's the last time that you felt good or safe or happy in your body? And for a lot of people, like, they can't even remember a memory in the distant past. And for a lot of people, I have to do some timeline therapy and go back into like a time of childhood and all of a sudden it's like it opens the floodgate of tears and tears and tears of just not even remembering what it feels like to feel good in your body without focusing on dieting, without focusing on a number, on a scale, not feeling good enough of pretty enough, like you're the right size or whatever it is, right? So it's true.

It is such a bigger picture. And I think that we can call when we can cultivate more of that, remembering of who we are and how we came into this world. Making the healthier decisions becomes so much easier. You're not looking for the red pill anymore because you're like, you know, that would make my body feel really good. If I eat that, that's not going to make my body feel really good. So like your intuition really takes over. So yeah, the going back to basics is key. And I think that it's also going back to basics, getting to a time when stress and overwhelm and anxiety and busyness wasn't the most prevalent thing.

Yeah. And wasn't. Wasn't highlighted as the sign of success. That's why I think we have to do is we have to get out of this idea that oh I'm busy means I'm important or I'm worthy, or when I look a certain way, it means I'm lovable. Like all of those patterns is where we have to start to unwind, which also leads me to the question that you and I really connect on, which is women. I think that this modern world is hurting women more than it's hurting men.

Why Health Feels Too Complicated 17:00

So talk a little bit about what you're seeing in your sphere with women, because one thing I want the listeners to to realize is that does it matter if you're a celebrity or not, who all women are suffering in a very similar way? And that suffering can stop if we get education out on what women can do. So talk a little bit about that. Yeah, my gosh, I don't know about you, but I've always hated the title Mom Preneur. It's like, you know, you're wearing all these hats and supposed to be proud of it.

You're drinking wine at the end of the day as a coping mechanism to get up and do it all over again. You're not sleeping, you're constantly busy. You've got hundreds of tabs. Open your mind so that for mothers is just like one thing. And to your point, it's like, if we're not busy, we all of a sudden feel like there's a lack of self-worth or like. We're not. Says, Yeah, yeah, it's wild. So yeah, when I, when I address this and when I can really hold space for a lot of women in my practice, it is going back to the fact that within their nervous system they're constantly wired and tired and spooked through their searching of what to do and what to eat.

They're they're overstimulate it like they're looking for more Band-Aids. And the Band-Aids are stacking on top of the Band-Aids over and over again. What cleanse, what colonic detox right next. To. Me in an next. Yeah. Give me the. Next magic thing. Yeah. Without and work with snacks right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what would you do. If you had a like I mean, I think so many of the women listening to this podcast will fall into this category. You had this woman who has been this rushing, rushing lifestyle, doing too many things, putting everybody ahead of her, and she's physically, mentally struggling.

We want to give her some basics. And I think one of the things I love about your teachings is they all come back to ancient healing strategies, which is my passion. This is why I love fasting. When I found fasting, I was like, Oh my God, everybody can do this. This is free. This is healing. How do we teach the world? So how do we teach that woman? Probably in her early forties? She is usually when we start to realize that that our pattern of health isn't working for us. How does she come back to the basics?

What are some of the tried and true that she absolutely has to incorporate? First and foremost, address your symptoms, right? We are living in a society where we all are suffering with these symptoms that we've become masters at ignoring, or we just call them normal, right? Bloating, irritability, fatigue, low sex, drive, cellulite, lack of motivation or concentration like these things aren't normal. Constipation, diarrhea, like they're not normal. You might have been experiencing for a long time.

So they might be normal to you now, but start paying attention to what those symptoms are first and foremost. Next address your your state of your emotional being. So there's this magic time in the morning when when you first wake up, how do you feel, you know, is your thought instantly to jump out of bed and get busy? Is your thoughts like, oh my God, it's already the morning, it's time to get going again? Or Is there a sense of ease that you can feel? So I teach my clients how to tune into their might, their body, how to tune into their mind, to address their state of being.

This impacts your hormones, too, right? If you're running out of bed, if your cortisol is spiking first thing in the morning like crazy, you're going to be on this roller coaster throughout the day. If you can kind of set the stage, have that magic morning practice that works for you, not my morning practice, your perfect morning practice. Set the stage for you to go out into the world with some sort of grounding and regulation where your body can feel like it's not in that fight or flight. Right.

Just overdrive its back into this parasympathetic kind of orchestra where things tend to flow a little bit more smoothly. Start with that for first before any diet. How do you break that though? Like, you know, that's it's you're asking for a four you're asking two huge things in that you're asking to understand your symptoms. And I think, like, most people don't know what to do with that. So I want you to talk a little bit about what some of those symptoms might mean or how you would navigate some of the symptoms that you talked about.

And then you're asking women to slow down when they've got a pack of kids, they've got a job, they've got it. There's too much to do. What tools do we have to help that woman change the way that the rushing happens in the day? Yeah. So first foremost, you know, I did this with a client yesterday, asked her to write down her fire list. So what are the things in your life that when you think about them, they evoke some sort of emotion that doesn't make you feel good. Irritability, anger, sadness, grief, resentment.

Get it out of your mind and your body and put them onto paper. Okay? Yeah. And look, is it going to cause healing to to happen right away? No. But we need to have the awareness. Why? Because we know that if you have a powerful Y for your healing journey, that's the instigator. To commit to your healing journey, you need to have a powerful way and then I can support people, you know, seeking the right practitioners to help with that. The second thing is, yes, starting out in that peaceful state of mind.

So instead of the diet, the first thing that I'm working with my clients on is their morning routine. And this has gotten a lot of attention, right. And a lot of it sounds woo woo. But it's now backed by science. And at the ashram, I've talked to you about this a thousand times, like it wasn't the ideas that we had there that helped me lose weight. It was the structure of the day that allowed, you know, all the running and open tabs in my mind to shut down so that I could be so focused in that moment.

And if you're creating this like Steven Cutler, for example, he has written so much on flow state training. When we're in flow, we feel a sense of ease and grace and life happens a lot more smoothly. We're we're more productive. So for that busy mind, the thing that we can do to thrive on is creating a schedule. Could it mean that you might have to wake up five, ten, 15, 20 minutes early? Yeah, I have one client who now wakes up an hour early, so she has a full 60 minutes to herself in the morning before her three kids get up. Right.

Is it comfortable in the beginning? Not at all. Is it highly advantageous and soul filling and like life loving for her afterwards? 1,000%. So in that morning routine it could look like a few things. Some people, they can easily go into a guided meditation routine where they're listening to, you know, something guided that's going to help them set the tone for the day. It could be on affirmations, it could be on gratitude for other clients. What we're doing is creating a movie reel for them. So I teach them how to visualize.

Like, if you could go out into your day and you decide or remember, your thoughts become a reality. What's your take on it? Go like are going to feel a sense of calm. Are you going to be racing around? Do you want to reach for that third, fourth or fifth coffee? Or would you rather nurse yourself instead and. Decide ahead of time. Decide it is having a plan. Women thrive on planning and thinking ahead. Right? So let's use that to our benefit for other people. Is going out for a walk, right? Depending on where you are, just like that grounding aspect getting into nature and that connectedness also backed by science to help cool and calm or nervous system.

So I think that just by honoring what your perfect morning should be and taking action on that, it's going to take a few days to get it right. I'm old school. I use like an old agenda, but I literally map out hour by hour what my day is going to look like so that I don't feel like I'm not showing up as the best version of myself at any point or that I'm giving my kids my leftovers or my clients my leftovers. Right at the time is said, you can just be so hyper focused and present to that moment, which automatically releases stress from the body.

Women, Stress, and Nervous System Overload 25:00

Do you schedule downtime? Do you put like literally put down like unscheduled time into your daily calendar? I do, yeah. It's a big thing for me and it took me a long time to do that. My kids are five and eight now. Right. And don't get me wrong, like some parents are listening, they might have more children or younger children. Some of this goes out the window some days. But I'm just at a point where I give myself grace, this is life. It's not falling off the wagon. It's just life. Tomorrow is a new day.

I start again. But yeah, scheduling that time for me. I just noticed like through my ordering, if I read before bed, my deep sleep goes up. Oh yeah. Fascinated. I'm going to have to check that out. That is so it doesn't matter what you read doesn't. Yeah. And obviously it's the books that you and I are always into. All right? I can't read, so I can't. Read nonfiction before I go to bed or my brain gets too stimulated. So I have I have to read fiction. I have to. Because otherwise my brain is like, oh, my God, what about this?

And what about that? That's a good point. Most of my books are probably on mindfulness, so that's probably why another great hack for me. So at the ashram, we're up early and we walk. So we walk outside. The sun isn't always up, but when it is, we now know that the sun naturally boosts serotonin in your gut. Microbiome right? You carry that happiness with you. So imagine when your kids wake up, you're no longer in that fight or flight scrambling. Stay. You're like, Oh, hey, good morning. How are you? Right. Such a shift.

And that is just something that you can do by planning master schedule. The you know, I don't know if I ever told you the story that when my kids were I want to say they were like in fifth, fifth grade, maybe in seventh grade, too. We had a situation where two of our closest friends moved out of our area and it was really devastating for me. I was like, they were like my best friends. We were family friends. And I noticed something really interesting when they moved to these new locations. A lot of the grievances they had in their life, everything from their children to their husbands to the rat race of their life, changed.

And in this new life they were in and I was trying to figure out what was it that allowed them to have this massive shift in their perspective of their life. And I realized what they did is it was a pattern interrupt. Something had happened that interrupted a pattern that was not working for them. So I said to myself, How could I do a pattern interrupt in the life that I'm living right now? And so I decided I had to get up early in the morning. So I started getting up at five and I knew my kids would be up by seven.

And so I just said 5 to 7 is going to be the time for me. I'm going to make sure that I do something for me before anything else. And so I would get up. I would read, I would meditate, I would work out like. And then by the time everybody else woke up, I was like, Haley. I was so excited. To see everybody. I felt like I had already given to myself. And that negative thought pattern that I walked around with is like, Nobody cares about me. Nobody knows how hard I'm working this life is, you know, I don't not loving the life I'm living in.

All of that shifted because I gave to myself first. And I think that's what I hear in your morning time. You know, that you're saying. Yeah, you know, you and I know both our bodies are miracles. Like you are your own self healer. And what we want we're talking about before constantly looking for these external programs validators, pills, diets, gurus write. What happens when you work with a therapist? They pull the answers out of you so that you become your own healer. Right? You and I, when we work with our clients, we help them decipher what they need most.

It's like the answers are within you. You just have to trust and take the action that you need to do that. And the pattern disruptor, it's so funny you brought that up. So, you know, I think for many of us, we can all agree that life isn't going to become less busy. It's going to remain hectic. Right. And gosh, this world of like technology for me doesn't make things easier. It makes things a lot more complicated. So there's that. So a really great and easy pattern disrupter. So one that I used to do is just get up and go for a walk.

Whenever you're spinning in your mind or in your head, get up, go for a walk, break the pattern, take a breath. The other thing is a rebounder. So yeah. Okay, tell me more. Why is that word other than lymphatics? Yeah. So I ended up getting a rebounder because I separate from all your ego, which I was on this crazy mold protocol and I was doing everything to support my lymphatic system to remove any blockages. And then I realized that whenever I was on the rebound or as I got skills relegated so I would go on to it in a state of stress or worry.

But I'll come off of it feeling like, okay, this feels great, let's go. Like a boost of energy or like a nice dose of coffee without the jitters. So you can get a mini rebounder. And they're easy. You can easily get them in your house. They're like small and they're inexpensive. So totally falls under your couch or your your bed or whatever it is. So yeah. Pattern industries. So change starting your day differently. I'm going to put that as like in the category of like major thing you need to do if you're a woman who's trying to get your health back on track, what, what else?

So when we look specifically at hormones, you know, you and I have talked about, I'm just shocked. I'm shocked at how illiterate the world is about hormones. And yet they completely drive us. They completely drive us. So they drive our food habits. They drive our sleep habits. They drive how we interact with other humans. So I would agree if somebody said to me, where's the first door in to better hormonal health? I would agree with everything you just said it. Slow your life down and re pattern it and make it work for you instead of making it work for other people.

What would you say the second step of lifestyle would be that that a woman would need to do to change her hormonal. Profile. And again, not food, but sleep, optimize your sleep, make sure that you're getting into that deep restorative sleep every single night, but it's with consistency. So at the ashram, you know, we go to bed at the same time every night. We rise at the same time every day. And you and I know the body thrives on routines and rituals. Consistency is everything your body wants to know when it's going to get food, when it's going to get nourishment or not.

And we can train our bodies. And I think especially after children, we don't talk about this, but adults need to sleep, train after having. Kids get so. Good so that you like after your kids are like five. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like if you. Have three kids that's like 50, you know, that's 15 years of poor sleep. Like, yeah, that's a lot. Yeah. But out with it. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a big. But think about that though, right. So you know for me, my greatest indicator of my stress when I had mold exposure was through my aura.

My deep sleep was plummeting. What is that? Higher levels of stress and inflammation in the body. If you're not getting into deep restorative sleep consistently, if you're a bad sleeper, a poor sleeper, your body is not going to be able to function the same way that it would. This means that your body is under a state of stress every day. Creating the perfect symphony of hormones is not going to be your body's priority. Surviving is going to be your body's priority. Seeking caffeine and carbs and sugars in your diet is going to be priority to keep the ship running throughout the day.

So optimize your sleep, you know, like, so what do we talk about? We talk about no, no screens. At least an hour before bed in our home, we dim all the lights after dinner and blue light blocking glasses are really great. No screens in the bedroom. All the weird stuff I do. Yeah. Like, what did they like? What do they think I'm saying? You said no screens in the bedroom, but I want to make sure that gets put out. But what do they want? That's got to be, like, fun to be your child. Like, okay, after dinner, we're going to turn all the lights down.

Is that what happens? Totally. I've got to make a video and all the things that we do. Like I have these blue light blocking glasses for my kids if we're doing a movie night and stuff like that. Yeah, I've got some like red light therapy for them that we do once in a while. So I do other. Things because here's the thing, like once you start trying these different modalities, the point is that you feel a difference, right? It's not about you know, I'm looking at the science behind it and you and I, we have to try everything before we can recommend them.

So everything I talk about the things that I do and I can preach because I feel them working right when my sleep is all over the place. When you and I travel, when we're doing a lot of crazy things, our sleep is a mess and we really feel it right. Exactly the most for two people that prioritize sleep. The activities that we seem to do with Jesse are the worst sleep habits ever. Like it's crazy. It's crazy, actually. That brings up a point. Do you think that men can get away with poor, more poor sleep than women can?

Yeah. Biologically, their bodies deal with stress differently than women's bodies do. Period. Right. And as having fluctuating hormones throughout the month

Morning Routines, Sleep, and Pattern Interrupts 34:00

that just need different cues to activate. That can't happen if there's constantly this like cortisol pumping at the wrong times of the day of it spiking at the wrong times of the day or at night. Right. So for a lot of my clients, you know, if they're telling me that they're constantly waking up between one and 3:00 in the morning, that to me is like cortisol is getting them up at the wrong time. We got to fix this, right. So I might help with that with some sleep aids or doing some of the recommendations we've not just mentioned.

Do you think that women are more vulnerable to stress than men do? I do. 1,000%. You know, one because of our hormones. One, I think we are just these empathetic creatures. A lot of us will take on a lot of what's happening in our immediate environment, within our families, within our society, within the world. Right. I can't even watch the news anymore because I feel like the images stay in my mind and we practice. And I have to also it's like you not only digest what you what you eat, you digest what you watch, what you smell, what you eat, what you listen to, and what you feel.

So ask yourself, what are you digesting? Are you digesting the things that are going to optimize your body and help it function at its the things that are going to nourish you? Or are you digesting the things that are going to cause inflammation, that are going to fuel more stress and anxiety? They're going to fuel your worries and your anxiety and your pain, right? What are you digesting? And so I'll often work with my clients and creating their ashram at home. You know, when you've got that really messy closet or, you know, that drawer with all the mess in it, right?

My dad would always say cluttered house is a cluttered mind, which makes sense, but a cluttered mind causes a congested body. Yeah. You know. You just you just have me thinking that one of the chronic statements that I've heard recently is when we eat, we have to remember that what we're eating is building our cellular health. So looking at food, not from the tastebuds perspective, but looking at it from what kind of cellular health do I want to build? But you just made me think a little bit deeper on that because who you're talking to, who you're allowing to go into your brain, it's not just changing your your neuronal pathways in your perception of life.

It is literally. Leaving an imprint on the 72 trillion cells in your body. So I know for me, if the news gets turned on in my house, which my husband's a political junkie, and so often the news will get turned on, I have to walk out of the room because I have a visceral reaction to it. Or if I'm in a conversation where somebody is just complaining, complaining, complaining, and I got to get away from it, it's my body feels like it wants to throw up. And I think it's because I've trained myself over so many years to be very protective of who I hang around, what I allow into my brain because cellular I feel better.

But when you look at what most women are doing, they're not doing that. They're they're being pulled by. So much external information that that perhaps is only creating more cellular trauma. So how do you know if you're in an environment that's not working for you? How do you know if you're around people that are not supporting your physiological and mental health? I love this. Again, women, I think like we are built to to be a soundboard, right? When our girlfriends talk about things like we we take it all on.

We'll listen to them. We want to be there for them, be present for them, but we can't literally take it on. Right. So I would say there's a couple of things. One, ask yourself one question is doing this going to nourish me or deplete me? And you can ask that question with everything. Yes. The food that you eat, but also the conversations that you have, the parties that you choose to go to, the people that you're choosing to engage with, like just stop in the moment. Like, how is this making me feel?

If you notice yourself getting more anxious or like you want to, you know, indulge in the gossip or the bad talk and stuff like that, like that's negative energy, right? We know about this word vibration. And now we can measure it. We can measure your vibration when you're in a state of happiness and peace and and joy and feeling calm, you have a higher vibration. Those are the people that walk into a room. You want to spend more time with them. You want to be in their presence. Right. And when you're around people who tend to be in that lower vibrational state of stress and worry and anxiety and fear mostly or even shame, right?

That vibrational tendency tends to just be and it will suck and drag you down with it. So you have to mind your energy. Go to my practice like I'm so interested in this world of cranial sacral health and somatic therapy. Mm. So easy. Yeah. Easy examples. Yeah. Why are you. Why are you attracted to it? So my son was born through emergency C-section, and I just knew, like, there. That must have been stressful, right? It was stressful for me. Must be stressful for him and a dear friend of mine. Just give me the inside of cranial sacral work for babies, for newborns and a newborn baby on a cranial sacral table with a session with a therapist.

You can just see like you can hear gurgles in the stomach, you can yawns and burps or gas. And then this is a practice that I've done with my kids, my daughter. Just last week had a really bad fall at the monkey bars, so I took her for cranial sacral and suit through this simple, energetic practice. As somebody who's trained to just like tune into the body, I yawn after yawn, or my daughter would just like sit up and then have to move down or have to get up and walk around or start to laugh or ask question.

And then she go really quiet and it's just like, wow, you see this like miracle of your nervous system just unfolding on the table. So the way that we can interpret that as adults not really having this information as part of our healing is just thinking like if the body truly does keep score, what is it holding onto from the time you were a little kid? From the traumas, the falls, the accidents, the teacher that said the wrong thing, the abuse, the neglect, like whatever it was, where is that being held in your body?

And how could that energy be contributing to how you're feeling now? And, you know, we talked a bit about this, but when I bring this up with my clients, I can't it's constantly just like releasing these ideas. How on earth, if that amount of emotion is living within the body and I say it's alive. It's alive. Meaning if you remember something from your past and it evokes a strong emotion for you to feel angry or sad or cry, it's still living. How can your body step into optimal health through diet and exercise and all those things that we talked about?

How could you truly feel healthy and at its best when there's still all of this suffering that's still available? So, oh, my God. Okay. You just gave me a whole nother level of thought here. This is great. This is why I love these moments. So I call them triggers. And the one thing I can say at 53 is that I feel so confident that I own my own happiness. And when I go into a place, into an environment where I am not happy, I instead of go instead of thinking, oh, these are the wrong people, or this environment is wrong, which I think is also good to think about.

But my first go to is what is this triggering in me? What is it that I need to resolve in me? And what I just realized that I think I want everybody to hear is that if you have a trauma that you haven't healed, it's in your cells. It's not necessarily in your mind, it is in your cells and it is being activated and that is a gift. So if somebody comes into your environment and instead of villainizing that person, could you actually thank them in your own mind and say, oh, my God, I didn't realize that I have some healing left to do because it's alive the way you said that it's alive in me.

And that is like a trauma that you had at 13 that is showing up at 50 and is still activating. It is still alive in you, even though 40 years later, you know, the event was 40 years ago. If you don't resolve those traumas, they stay alive. Is that what you're saying? That's exactly what I'm saying. Okay. Brilliant. Yeah. So, you know, just think about how often this could happen, even with your partner, you become so triggered that you just want to blame the other person. Right? But just if you can adopt the practice or the mindfulness, mindfulness doesn't mean that you're making a change in the moment.

It simply means the act of being mindful every time that it comes up so that you can just stop and ask the question, Where did this start? Why is this happening? What is the first time that I felt this emotion right?

Trauma, Triggers, and Emotional Healing 43:00

Yeah. For me, I even learned, my gosh, there was a can tell you this quick story. Yeah, please. I was in grade one and I was in French Immersion and I had to read this thing in front of class. So public speaking, terrify reading in another language I'll never forget that my paper was shaking like this. I was so scared that I couldn't even do it. So instead of this teacher saying, Oh my gosh, you did a great job, don't worry, take a deep breath. Everything's fine. She pulled me out of the class. She said, What is wrong with you?

Oh, my God, I hate teachers like this. I have so many teacher stories like this. How old? How old were you? I was in grade one. Oh, God. Okay, so do. I say this because this has recently come up with this therapist that I've been working with. And so what we uncovered is that in that moment and every single moment in my life, when I had to go and perform or be on or speak publicly, which already is fearful enough, we know that's number one fear for most people. For me, it always felt like I wasn't good enough or like there was shame or like I couldn't even show up.

I had no place being there. So through doing what you are talking about and just asking like, where does this come from? Where does this come from? I was able to uncover that moment that happened when I was in grade one. Wow. Hey, do you know. That that I have a very similar story with an English teacher who looked at my essay and said, You're not your sister, are you? And my sister was really brilliant and her name is and that teacher's name is Betsy Glass and it was in seventh grade. And so when fast, like a girl came out, I was in therapy because I'm like, oh my God, it's like another, you know, a re aggravation of this trauma where I showed my work to Annette to somebody and it was ridiculed.

And here I am putting this book out in this biggest way possible and what is going to happen? What kind of ridicule would I get? But at least I had enough foresight to go, Hey, I better do some therapy first. Yes. So I unwound that. But we are dealing with humans that don't think like that. And so instead we start we kill ourselves by trying to control everybody around us, not knowing that it's all the situations and everybody around, us that's just triggering these alive traumas that we never resolved.

And control comes when we can resolve those traumas. Just like with our health, when we can address our own symptoms. And I love that we're talking about this because this is like the instigator of like the first stages of what inflammation would have been like in the body. Right? So it's a learned behavior that happens over and over and over again. So, you know, in that style, judgment of it still feels alive. And there's the work that has to be done. And I promise you, the clients that I work with who deal with those traumas and, you know, like that aspect of themselves where they feel some freedom from the past, it's like cutting that the ball and chain that's been there for so long.

Right? What happens? You feel a sense of liberation and peace and ease. There's that high vibration. And when you're in high vibration, you're not going to go to a drive thru. You're not going to want to have a bottle of wine. At the end of the day, you want to honor your body and how you feel. I feel so good right now. What I'm going to do to keep this up, right? So we need to be talking more about this. And, you know, especially with women in our conversations when we tend to gossip sometimes like instead, how do they make you feel?

What are you going to do about it now? Right. When did this start for you? Right. I was going to say that one of the my predictors, if I'm hanging around the right people or in the right situations is I ask myself when I leave the situation, do I feel better than I before I went? And if the answer is no, then I'm like, that might be a situation or a person. I don't want to be around as much, but that's my litmus test, is how do I feel after I leave and if I'm elevated, great. If I feel lower or I have a lot of self-doubt or a triggered negative thought patterns, of course I go and go, okay, well, this is what I need to work on, but it just reminds me not to keep putting myself in that situation.

Absolutely. Yeah. And you'll really know when you can go out into the world and make that person or that friend the way that you want to feel. And it's reciprocated. Yeah. Then you're. Those are your people. Those are your people. Last question I have to ask you, because. This one is a hormonal question that came up on my interview with Tom Bill. You interviewed me on chat on Tuesday on Impact Theory, and I always think it's really interesting when men interview me because they're often interviewing about fasting and hormones.

And so when we get into the topic of hormones, there tends to be an incredible fascination, a much more of a misunderstanding than even women have. So the questions are fascinating. So here's what showed up. And I want to I'm curious, your opinion is that I'm always thinking about biologically what our hormones were designed to do. So let's use estrogen as example. We know that estrogen is designed to release an egg. That is her number. One thing that she does is it's she's got a rise. I get I call all my hormones like they're my friends.

That like she's got. To ride this to a certain point so an egg can be released. But what biology also did is it raised testosterone when estrogen was at her peak, when it when an egg was being released and biology decided to raise just a little bit of progesterone. So during ovulation estrogen ends at her peak, releasing the egg, testosterone is there to make sure that we work our libidos up and we're motivated to procreate. And progesterone is there to calm us down. So when I say we're like in our super powers, it obviously it is.

I can't think of a more accurate statement, but this is what Tom and I got saying is I said, I think what tests what estrogen does is estrogen is the hormone that makes us want to connect. And so we need that connection in order to be able to reproduce humanity, we have to feel an emotional connection to the person we're about to procreate with. Now, I know that that's maybe not the same for every woman, but I would say in general estrogens job during ovulation is to make sure that there's a bonding that goes on with the person that we are are just decided to have sex with so that we can continue the species on what it was like.

He was like, I've never heard that. I don't I've never thought about that. And I said, Well, yeah, because your hormones come in in 24 hours, you have one hormone, we have three. But yeah, that's me thinking. What do you think of that theory as as our need to for estrogen is providing our need for a human connection. I think you're a genius again. Absolutely a genius. Why? Because men, you know, they don't have to go through such massive hormonal fluctuations, even into their forties, fifties, sixties and beyond, like they can continue to procreate with women.

My gosh, this goes back into that, like really honoring the feminine spirit and like this wisdom that is within us, looking for the right life partner and father and every companion, best friend, whatever it is, it only makes sense for us to have this note within us that causes us to go out and want to have that drive. I think you're an absolute genius. I think you should be very confused. And I just thought as I. Left, I was. But here's here's where I really go one step further. So what happens to the menopausal woman as she loses estrogen?

And I will be very, very frank that one of the surprising parts of this menopausal journey for me is that as my kids have gotten older, I have felt less maternal draw, draw to them. I don't look at them in the same way, like, I need to nurture you. I need to protect you as I did. Even when they were teenagers and their attitudes were horrible, there still felt like there was this primal maternal instinct that was there. And now that I'm moving into to more of my post-menopausal years, I actually feel a little more selfish.

I feel a little bit like I already. I already served you. Now I just need to take care of myself. And I'm wondering if that's the loss of estrogen that has me thinking that way. So is this the body's incredible wisdom that's supporting us as women for our children to then go off out into the world so that we're not left? You know, you know, we talked about empty nester syndrome, right? So if our hormones are actually supporting us through that transition, eventually to help us kind of cope with that, that's it.

That is. And here's that. That's it.

Hormones, Motherhood, and the Wisdom of Aging 52:00

It has to be biological. And here's what you like. Here's what we're losing. You know, when we used to live with our mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers and just understanding that wisdom like learning it, seeing it, feeling it, experiencing it, that is gone. So if us women aren't taking responsibility in sharing these things because, here's the thing. You know, I'm sure you remember when people will talk about, oh, when you're in your thirties, this is going to happen. When you're in your forties, this is going to happen.

Well, here we are moving into those ages like, oh, shit. Like it's actually it's happening, right? God, I wish I had someone to talk to about this and understand why and what are the physiological things that are happening? What are the emotional responses are happening to all of this? So I think it's brilliant that you bring that up. Maybe this is the topic for your next book. Well, that ties into the next book because. The next book is about what happens to the female brain after 40. And one of the things that I'm just observing at 53 with my own brain is just how it it just cares about things very differently.

And I know I could easily say, oh, it's time of life. You know, as you age, you do sort of get a little bit like, I don't care about the things that I used to care about ten years ago that would keep me up at night. Now I'm like, Hallelujah. Yeah, you're like kind of right. Also think there's a hormonal piece, and I've noticed that as estrogen has gone down, that my maternal instincts gone down. And it's like one of those things that you just don't say out loud because you sound like a horrible mother.

I'm still a mother. I have a 23 and 20 year old. But I think you have a really good point. Maybe it's a protection so that I can move out of that intense need to be there for my kids. And maybe this is hormonally the moment in which I am supposed to care for myself and my hormones shifted in order for me to be able to do that. So imagine this. So imagine women had that knowledge. Okay? It's like, okay, my body is this miracle. It's, you know, adjusting and modifying it as needed to help me cope with this next stage of life.

Then compounded with having, you know, just other people to confide in, other women to like understand and go through this, which like even for me in my forties, no one ever talked to me at the fact that there might be a sense of mourning over not having children anymore. Right? Like, Oh, my God, I'm not having. Any more kids like that. Makes me a little sad. Well, what happens then? You know, in your fifties, then, like what you're talking about and then in your 60's. Like, what if we talked about this a little bit more so that we understood it was a natural progression of life, but hey, these incredible bodies are of ours, are actually doing everything that they can to help us through the process.

Brilliant In the in the new book, by the way, I just got done writing one of the chapters yesterday, call it I call it the cultural hush that there's so many things around women's hormones, but specifically perimenopause and menopause that as a culture we're scared to talk about. And I feel like the conversation you and I just had needs to be talked about because I know there are women out there that are feeling that, but they would never say that out loud because somebody would think they're a bad mother or they've maybe they're a bad mother.

And I love this idea of like, where are the elders? You know, one of my new things is I love talking to women that are ten years older than me. I learned so much from them. And we I actually recently here's another really interesting story. I was on a call with read Traci and Patti Gift of Hay House and we were just talking about Fast Like a girl and the next book that's coming and Reed asked me if there was anything I needed to support from them. And I said, Here's what I need. I want to start a conversation across all the decades.

I want the 60 year olds to mentor the 20 year olds. Yes, I want the 40 year olds. I want the people, the post-menopausal women, the 50 and 60 year olds to shepherd the women through their forties. Why are we not creating books and conversations that is allowing all these decades to start to share the wisdom of what it is to be a woman and at? Why aren't we get allowing women as they age? Why aren't we putting the spotlight on it. On a stable? Because there is so much. Wisdom to be able to go down and support the young ones.

And so then I went on and I said, Where are your 20 year old authors? And they're like, Oh, they don't really write books right now. I'm like, Where are the 30 year olds? How do how do we unify all these decades? And we kind of left the conversation with with no answer. But I think that's what I'm pulling out of the end of this conversation. And what I would really task everybody listening to is who are you mentoring as a woman? It doesn't have to be your mother. It doesn't have to be your grandmother.

But who in your life are you turning around to and helping guide them through the hormonal chaos that so many of us are living in right now? So lately, because what is that going to do? It's going to change your belief system, right? If your belief system is change even around healing like every the whole game changes. If your belief system is in the understanding that you are this miracle, right? This body is like a self-healing machine. That's your belief, you know that what you're doing, all of the effort and the work that you're doing is going to pay off.

And I think that having the guidance by people who've lived it, experience it and done it before, there is so much wisdom that's there that we're losing. So I agree with you. Let's make this a reality. Yeah, I know, I know. I'm coming. We're not stopping this conversation. You and I are going to carry this off offline. But, you know, and then I just want to say, this is a perfect example. I just it was 3:00 when we got on. Definitely not the highlight to energy time of my day. And a. Very busy morning.

But here I am an hour later, more energized than I started an hour ago. So that was awesome. My creative brain is going like, Well, let's keep it going. I can talk to you forever in hours. Yeah. What? Agree? I agree. How do people find you? You're doing some really cool things. You have your amazing Xicama water out there. Like how do people find you? Thank you. Yeah, Instagram's probably, like, the biggest platform right now. So at Mona Sharma, you can find me there. I've got a lot of exciting things in the pipework, but community is just so important to me.

Xicama is my beverage. It's spelt with an Xicama We just launched into Sprouts. As a retailer, we're available online, but it's a prebiotic to fuel your gut microbiome biome without sacrificing flavor and stuff like that. So yeah. And I do. I do want to point out for the women that are fasting, I have had that in the fasting window and it did not spike my blood sugar. And because it's a prebiotic, it actually fuels your microbes, which kills hunger in a fasting window. It is one of the greatest drinks to have in the fasting window.

So thank you for creating. Yeah. My pleasure. Thank you. Where to. Come? Yeah. You're amazing Mona. Thank you to. I adore you. You too. You so much for having. You to thank you.