On today's episode, Luis discusses how our skin health is affected by our hormones, and by our liver health. Everything from acne, rashes, eczema, and psoriasis can be caused by impurities coming out through your skin when your liver is overtaxed. The focus is usually on sex hormones, but stress hormones can also tax your liver, which then can trigger flare ups. We can work with chronic stress externally, as well as internally by removing foods from our diets that can trigger an adrenal response...
Jul 07, 2025•11 min
On today's episode, Luis discusses the connection between movement and glucose. Movement and modern, industrialized food now lack a reciprocity. Movement is required for gathering and processing food; movement that many of us no longer need to perform in order to access calorically dense food. Refined foods can often cause a glucose spike, which is followed by an insulin response, and then an adrenal response. When muscles are engaged after eating, it helps with your glucose storage, and can min...
Jul 06, 2025•8 min
On today's episode, Luis discusses protein: how it affects mood, the nervous system, and the brain, and why it's so important to understand. Proteins are a combination of amino acids, and dopamine and serotonin rely on them. Refined foods can temporarily fill the dopamine need caused by low amino acid intake, but ensuring you have enough protein is necessary for sustained balance. And sometimes the body's need for protein can change, depending on life circumstances. Luis talks about both plant a...
Jul 03, 2025•11 min
On today's episode, Luis teaches how our processed food cravings can be a compass towards whole food options. Luis gives clear step-by-step conversion choices which can help support our unmet nutrition needs, and discusses how to relate to our unmet relational and emotional needs that may arise when we stop repressing them with food. Register here for the upcoming August 9th webinar, Supporting Boys Through Puberty: Navigating P*rnography, Hormones & Isolation. ---- You can learn more on the...
Jul 01, 2025•10 min
On today's episode, Luis and Camille welcome back Grey Doolin to discuss marginalization and victim mentality. Join them for an open-hearted conversation, with a bit of throwing shade. They explore: · seeking safety from outside · the way counterculture and mainstream culture interact · honoring the knowledge of community elders · separating others' judgements from internal self-worth · building resilience and resources · capacity for disagreement [Ep. 262] Trans People Don't NEED To Belong: The...
Jun 29, 2025•1 hr 5 min
On today's episode, Luis teaches one of his favorite practices, called "Interrupting Your Cravings." Cravings aren't about having impulse issues: they're deep unmet needs in the body that we seek to get met through eating. One of those needs is nutritional, and the other is emotional. Luis guides us through a practice to help put a pause in our cravings to help uncover what information the body has to share with us. Register here for the upcoming August 9th webinar, Supporting Boys Through Puber...
Jun 26, 2025•9 min
On today's episode, Luis explores the way that the body stores fat, rather than the identity that can arise from it. Even though there are negative health impacts from too much fat being stored, the process is a natural, biological, animal instinct for survival, is a healthy response to the ingestion of refined carbs and sugars. Learning which foods affect insulin can help to shift the body from fat storage to fat usage mode. But beyond just food, stress and trauma play a role: both cause adrena...
Jun 24, 2025•9 min
Hello sunshine! How do you enter a new day? Do you slowly stretch into it, or do you immediately plug in to dopamine via technology and screens? Join Camille and Luis as they discuss how living seasonally and cyclically can be supportive and resourcing to our bodies. At one time everyone lived in tandem with the seasons. Caffeine and electricity allowed our ancestors to break their own boundaries and nature's boundaries (of seasons, light, and temperature). This evolved into the dissociative "go...
Jun 22, 2025•50 min
On today's episode Luis teaches 3 simple, free things that can help your body better manage stress and trauma recovery. Watch to learn the suggestions, and how they can support you. You can also watch the video he mentions here: https://youtu.be/7xglDqF52mg Register here for the upcoming August 9th webinar, Supporting Boys Through Puberty: Navigating P*rnography, Hormones & Isolation. ---- You can learn more on the website: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/ Learn more about the self-le...
Jun 19, 2025•9 min
On today's episode Luis takes us through a brief self-inquiry practice to help us get in touch with the ways we use food to modulate our emotions and sensations. He reviews the way he organizes kinds of foods, and the way these food categories affect our nervous system and adrenals. Take moment to notice what foods you consume and crave, and you may find what your underlying state is. Register here for the upcoming August 9th webinar, Supporting Boys Through Puberty: Navigating P*rnography, Horm...
Jun 17, 2025•8 min
On today's podcast, Luis discusses his personal journey with trauma and nutrition, and how the two together have an impeccable ability to help people recover from stress and trauma. Luis shares his full personal story of childhood abuse, and how food was the only thing that could suppress and repress his pain. His personal experiences drew him towards a psychology degree, which he abandoned because of his dislike of the DSM and it's diagnostic rigidity. Simultaneously, he was working at a health...
Jun 15, 2025•49 min
Food helps us tolerate the intolerable. Processed foods can provoke a state change within us (such as joy, comfort, energized, numbed out), which produces an adrenaline response. If we eliminate processed foods, and experience food sobriety, we no longer have food manipulating our body chemistry. We become more awake to life. In our 6 month nutrition group we teach you how to titrate food changes, and we provide somatic practices to help hold the resulting sensations. We teach you not be per...
Jun 12, 2025•12 min
Snack time at Holistic Life Navigation. Drop in for a quick podcast bite full of info and tasty treats. Do you ever experience anxiety or panic attacks? In these moments glucose fluctuates and the blood stream is flooded with adrenaline, resulting in an internal crisis. Once flooded with adrenaline we can experience hyper vigilance, muscle tension, increased heart rate, and anxiety. Balance happens when the body is not dominated by adrenaline. Wild spikes in adrenaline can be avoided with balanc...
Jun 10, 2025•12 min
How does it feel to express yourself in front of others? Are you at ease? Excited? Tense? Frozen? Is stress keeping you from having a voice and expressing yourself because being seen feels dangerous? Luis uncoupled his own performing from a traumatic experience in childhood. This shift allowed him to move from burning out after performing to loving the gooeyness of performing, which he now feels ease around. He shares his two favorite practices for supporting the body through the process. Want m...
Jun 08, 2025•19 min
Do you think of yourself as an empath? Do you feel a flower blooming as deeply as you feel a war-torn country's pain? Empathy itself is a bridge of understanding, non-binary and fluid. This is flexible empathy that can pendulate between embodying others joy and their suffering. Often when someone is referred to as an empath it is someone who reflexively seeks and feels painful stories because that is what feels familiar. Their body and mind are practiced at accessing pain and bypassing joy and b...
Jun 04, 2025•13 min
Remember when toll booths were replaced by EzPass? Did you wonder how you would find your way to the closest restaurant or gas station without the interpersonal connection of the toll booth worker? Likewise are you skeptical about A.I.? Join Luis and Holly as they chat about how A.I. can support your creativity, allowing you to do more of what you love. With the help of A.I. Holly Howard does private consulting and business growth training, as she writes her first book. We may be great at the se...
Jun 01, 2025•58 min
Two fringe misfits walk into a Zoom room and..... Join Grey Doolin and Luis for a joyful, lit up conversation about the spirituality of sex dysphoria. Grey shares how their trans identity is a gift not a destination, and how it's not about shutting parts of yourself off, it's about bringing all of yourself along for the ride. An important part of this realization dawned when their therapist asked if they wanted top surgery because society hates female bodies, or because top surgery was aligned f...
May 25, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Maddie Durbin joins Luis for a tender exploration of her experience becoming Max, and de-transitioning back to Maddie. At 19 Maddie was looking for freedom from the pain of the human condition, she turned to transitioning as an escape. She went by Max for 6 years and took testosterone for 5 of those years, growing a full beard and undergoing a double mastectomy along the way. However, she was still unhappy, depressed and unfulfilled. In 2022 Max decided to begin a healing journey. In that journe...
May 18, 2025•54 min
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, is a farmer, systems developer, agronomist, and business manager who runs an ecosystem. He joins Luis for a fascinating conversation ranging from the Indigenous intellect to hazelnuts. We are a reflection of the earth, all yearning for connection. To understand the earth we need to look within and ask, do we dominate, or relate? Reginaldo tells the story of his chickens and his hazelnuts and the reciprocal ecosystem he has developed and tends. It is a system of econo...
May 11, 2025•1 hr
Our favorite biochemist, Karen Hurd, joins us again to discuss the difference between adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline gives us strength to fight or run, while cortisol reduces inflammation. These hormones are released simultaneously. We are meant to experience short bursts of adrenaline and cortisol in emergency situations, not prolonged baths in them all day every day while we sit at a desk, immobile. Luis and Karen discuss estrogen production after menopause, exercise and chronic pain, hig...
May 04, 2025•41 min
Luis and his friend Steve Rasovsky have an openhearted chat about Steve's recent trip to Ghana. The Ghanaian people shared their dance, joy, community and presence with Steve. In that environment he was able to melt into presence alongside them. Being referred to with familial pronouns, with all the physical contact, and living next door to the people who were part of the towns commerce, all allowed Steve to feel safe enough to access this presence. Feeling his heart expand, his spine loosening,...
Apr 27, 2025•54 min
Luis tucks in for a bedtime conversation about three evening routines that can optimize sleep. Sleep is the body's ritual of repair: these 3 practices will help tend the body to do it's repair work. Think digestion, light, and sensation. Best part is, this podcast comes with a late night snack! Register here for the upcoming August 9th webinar, Supporting Boys Through Puberty: Navigating P*rnography, Hormones & Isolation. ---- You can learn more on the website: https://www.holisticlifenaviga...
Apr 24, 2025•9 min
Chronic stress and PTSD are a hormonal imbalance issue, and if one hormone is out of balance, all hormones are out of balance. These hormones, in or out of balance, control every chemical reaction in the body. Join Luis and Karen Hurd (biochemist, nutritionist and frequent guest), as they explore the science behind what happens in the body with long-term adrenaline output. Elevated adrenaline has a cascade effect on the rest of the hormones, affecting digestion, thyroid health, and melatonin pro...
Apr 20, 2025•48 min
Blood pressure is rising, heart rate is increasing, neurotransmitters are firing, muscles are tense and your nervous system is activated. Is it due to stress, or caffeine? Join Luis as he considers these questions around caffeine: 1) How are you using it? Maybe caffeine is a medicine to energize when in a new time zone, or to help lift one out of a depression or functional freeze. Caffeine could also be adding stress on top of an already stressed out body. 2) What form of caffeine are you consum...
Apr 17, 2025•18 min
Sit in on this juicy conversation between Luis and interior designer Olga Naiman. They discuss creating rituals and spaces that can code our environment for what it is we seek more of in life. If we learn the somatics of what it is we want to feel, we can build it in to our home. First see your home with the eyes of a stranger. Feeling lonely? Look around for what carries a sense of loneliness. Release the items that are antithetical to your desires. Really want a hug instead of loneliness? Mayb...
Apr 13, 2025•41 min
In today's podcast Luis discusses how trauma is stored in the body's posture. When being seen feels dangerous the body goes into a freeze or shame posture of hiding to protect itself. What are the automatic, baseline postures that your body holds itself in based on historic trauma, stress, or abuse? These patterns of tension are the body's way of being prepared for something bad or harmful. Luis gives us a somatic practice to assess our body's capacity for trusting non-threat in our environment....
Apr 10, 2025•13 min
On today's episode, Luis and Camille discuss money, money trauma, and the ways in which we may have inherited or learned about relating to money. They explore: · The relationship we have with money, rather than the money itself · Not finding safety in money, and the reality of needing money · The difference between how much money we have vs. the meaning we assign it · Exploring money solutions that lie outside the binary · Attuning somatically to the present moment ("Feeling The Now") and how th...
Apr 06, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Don't wait until you are feeling anxious to practice this one! Jump right in where you are and practice pendulating. Luis teaches us how to feel where we are now, and where we feel anxiety in our bodies. We are not our anxiety, a part of us feels anxious. What does the rest of us feel? Using this tool Luis is able access the parts of himself that are not anxious and that have capacity, so that he can walk into life more embodied. Register here for the upcoming August 9th webinar, Supporting Boys...
Apr 03, 2025•10 min
Click for story-time with Luis as he reads a favorite chapter that was cut from his soon to be published book, FOOD THERAPY (April 2026). He posits that processed food is disassociated from the land. Often GMO crops are altered to survive glyphosate, wrecking bio-diversity, increasing chemicals, and providing reduced nutrients. Two pounds of GMO altered soy beans contained 9mg of glyphosate. No wonder 81% of the US population has recent glyphosate exposure, an exposure that increases our risk of...
Mar 30, 2025•42 min
On today's episode, Luis shares his favorite herbs, specifically for supporting PMS or menopause. Building on the previous episode about herbs for liver, he explains how the liver is helpful for women's hormones. He teaches how to make the "triple root infusion", as well as when and how much to drink. He also includes two other herbs that can help with alleviating symptoms from a cycle, PMS, or menopause. These herbs help by addressing nervous system health, adrenal health, blood health, digesti...
Mar 27, 2025•10 min
