I am sending this to you while in the Austrian Alps with my family. I wrote it back in May for Truly Crunchy Magazine. When I’m home from this trip, I’ll share how I practiced what I call ‘wellness minimalism’ this time, with three kids in Europe. Enjoy!
This illustration is a custom piece by Emily Karamihas exclusively for the Body Luxury book.
I’m writing this while flying home to Australia after two months travelling with my husband and three young kids.
We spent two weeks in Japan, two weeks in Florida, two weeks in Tennessee, and two weeks in Lake Tahoe. We stopped in LA for a few days as usual but that was just so we could get maximum sun to adjust our circadian rhythms. Oh and also, so I could bomb $700 on a Erewhon delivery including my favourite Ophora Water.
Being able to load up on the boujee wellness-girl- goodies was a welcome treat after two weeks in Japan where we fully embraced the deliciousness that is Japanese food. We didn’t scour the streets for health food stores, ask the waiters whether the meat was grass fed, grass finished beef, make sure the vegetables were organically grown vegetables, or desperately try to avoid plastics.
The most important nutrient for us was enjoyment, connection and the aliveness of new experience.
For me, not much brings me alive as much as walking into a new cafe or bookstore. This is an energy boost that not even an hour in a hyperbaric chamber can mimic.
Travel has a way of simplifying wellness, doesn’t it? We might have a supreme set up at home— sauna, red light, vibration plate, whole house water filter— but we don’t take it with us. We could but do we want to?
As someone who is for sure a creature of comfort and with a very impressive wellness set up at home, I love how travel strips us of our dependencies and makes us see wellness through a simplified lens.
It shows us that wellness is actually much simpler than we thought. It shows us where we have made an idol of our perfected wellness regime. It shows us whether we truly have faith in our body, our vitality, our resilience or we if we believe we will only feel good after an very expensive 11 step morning routine.
A few years ago, I wrote this:
Wellness minimalism is the real flex.
The flex used to be ‘look at all my fancy supplements and modalities and how knowledgeable I am to use them’… but as you mature out of that false reliance, you learn that your vitality isn’t mostly because of your high maintenance regime-- it’s how you’re using your mind and your words, how you resolve conflicts, how you’re using your God given gifts, how you narrow in on the work and people in front of you to love. You can be dropped in a country town with no boujee natural store or organic farmers market and know that you’ll be good. The more vital and free you become, the less reliant you become too. It all becomes simpler. It becomes about faith, not anxiety dressed up as wellness.
(Disclaimer: Now let be clear, I’m talking here about people who are relatively well, not people who are moving through physical conflicts who in fact do need a very delicate environment in order to heal).
Travel gives us a masterclass in wellness minimalism.
On this trip, I packed a small red light and a warm plug in light so that I could dim the lights for my kids in the many locations we travelled to. It didn’t always work out. But it was a small little thing that I felt made a big difference.
I packed a small amount of supplements, but for most of the trip I didn’t use them.
I packed those emergency crunchy gal things like Activated Charcoal and a full homeopathic first aid kit.
Instead of using any lymph device, I jumped up and down and did ‘the big 6’ lymph points whenever I remembered.
We did our best with their water situation, buying in glass bottles where we could but not freaking out where we couldn’t. There was no worrying about the quality of the full cream milk when ordering a coffee.
At certain airbnbs, I bought stainless steel cookware for our time there because we were in each one for two weeks so it felt like an appropriate investment when cooking for three kids.
I bought epsom salts, bicarb and bentonite clay for restorative baths for us all.
We got sunlight, we enjoyed lots of different food, I worked out a little differently to my normal routine but let that be ok.
I went and took a couple of ‘hot’ classes so I could get a smaller dose of the sauna I’d usually get at home but I didn’t plan our trip around it, especially with kids.
We got adjusted by a chiro towards the end of our trip because Lake Tahoe is like a second home for us and we have family members who are chiropractors.
None of this felt like a big wellness effort, but a natural and effortless adjustment to the standards I already embody— no stress. No paranoia. Simple standards to support our systems without being neurotic.
I know now which things move the needle, and which are superfluous, wellness consumerism add-ons because oh boy have I fallen for too many of those!
Needle movers:
Sunlight.
Honesty.
Lymph.
Warmth/sweat.
Movement.
Good food.
Good times.
Joy and creative expression.
The most important thing was there was no worry, no neurotic avoidance of fun and joy because of fear of a little plastic or seed oils or where the bed sheets were bought.
I know after years of being a wellness fanatic, that stress + paranoia is the worst toxin of all and that relaxing and enjoying can go further than obsessing over every thing.
I believe many millennial wellness girlies swing the pendulum so far one way and then are brought back to a more life giving balance.
Time abroad has been one of the most balancing, life giving gifts for my wellness philosophy.
I have travelled extensively with my young family. We’ve lived in four countries. Five years ago, we bought and renovated a 60 acre organic farm in Northern Italy (never been sprayed, ever!). We restored it based on building biology principles so it became a gorgeous classic Piedmontese X Non toxic haven.
On our many trips and time spent in Italy, it slowly changed me. It softened the very pedantic wellness girlie in me and helped me mature into a women who could enjoy life, beauty, and understand wellness through the lens of older Italian women.
I lived how the Italian women lived. They didn’t know what infrared was. They sill had overhead lights and didn’t have special warm lightbulbs to turn on after the sun went down.
Their approach to wellness was simple— cook real food with local ingredients, eat with family daily, walk a lot, maintain long term friendships and meet each morning at the Gelateria for a croissant and cappuccino, maintain traditions, eat slowly, ensure aesthetic beauty is part of your diet too and most importantly? Enjoy. They weren’t flipping the labels of the Nutella in their Crai Supermarkets checking for seed oils because it didn’t matter. Their foundations were so solid, unchanging, life giving— they didn’t have to be neurotic about ‘wellness’.
I love optimising. I love vitality maxing. If there’s a crunchy convo happening, I’m right in there.
I love living as close to nature as possible.
But over the years through much personal experimentation, study and life experience— I started asking myself the question— is excessive wellness consumerism really us living close to nature?
If I had so much faith in nature, in God’s good design for the human body, but was this reflecting in my life?
Did I really believe that I could be vital and vibrant and resilient without a neurotically perfect wellness set up?
Was the wellness world making people as dependent as Big Pharma did?
My gosh, had we all ditched Big Pharma, only to replace it with Big Wellness?
Over the last few years though, I started to realise that my devotion to the perfect wellness regime wasn’t always just me having high standards. Some of it was my hypervigilance and eldest daughter perfectionism finding a convenient place to hide. I wanted everything to be just right.
A wellness journey that was meant to give more freedom, was actually making me more rigid. Maintaining it was creating a whole other poison— stress.
What has happened to the modern wellness minded woman? We have become mass wellness consumers. Wellness companies only make money if we are always wanting the next best thing. And we do. We learn so much about what red light, or astaxanthin does for us, and so little about how God truly designed out bodies…about how our minds are the most importent wellness instrument we have… about sunlight and how insanely powerful it is for all of our bodily systems… about how our symptoms are all linked to a conflict in our psyche, and how important faith is for vitality.
When we are wellness consumers, living as if our vitality depends on always having the next popular thing, we are not as free as we think.
We forget that the whole point of health is life— to be more free to live and give to the people and things we love.
Many of us get stuck in the part where we are relentless optimising and we forget to live.
To the reader, I want to say this:
Sometimes, wellness obsession doesn’t make you more free, it puts you on high alert. You are always scanning to ensure your environment is one in which you can thrive, that you have the last gadgets and know about the newest threats… having more knowledge does not always mean more freedom.
Millennial wellness girlies proudly ditched Big Pharma but traded it for Big Wellness. You believe you need every new gadget and supplement that comes out. Having the perfect conditions has become your idol. You worship the wellness industry as if it gave you the remarkable, self healing body. You forget about the love and intelligence that sustained you while you were in the womb and that wakes you up every single day.
You forgot that you loved dancing to EDM.
You forgot that you loved reading fiction and not just endless guides to more perfection.
You forgot that your mind will do more for you than your unhinged routine ever will.
You forgot that you are safe to actually live.
You forgot that the whole point of the wellness journey is to live life more fully.
Vitality means being able to give yourself fully to who and what you love.
The health journey wasn’t meant to be another way you prove yourself to be a good girl— always proving, never living.
Do what brings you alive. Put on a playlist from your glory rave days and watch it give you more energy than a PEMF mat ever could.
The point of the wellness industry is meant to be ALIVENESS, not dependency.
Over the yeas I taught and wrote about may evolving wellness philosophy and I called it Body Luxury— a new way of being, where wellness girlies finally mature and relax, where woman meets vitality meets God.
When we mature out of wellness consumerism, we don’t throw away all of our beloved practices and products, we just don’t become mindless consumers of everything that’s on offer. We don’t buy things out of fear, or because we think we’ll crumble without them.
Find your own sweet spot, where wellness minimalism meets the joy of experiencing all of the new, cool discoveries in the wellness world.
Don’t forget that the point of our wellness journey is more life, not less.
If you want more Body Luxury in your life, and you want it in gorgeous, luxury print form….. you can buy the most beautiful coffee table book in the world titled Body Luxury here.
Pk XXX
Pictured below is me and the most beautiful book ever at Hanks, Franklin Tennessee earlier this year.
