You Cannot Pour From an Empty Vessel: The Spiritual Layer of Midlife

From the video captions, as spoken.

We can't generate steady prana, life force out of a depleted body. You know, prana is your life force. Some actually equate prana with the divine. Some equate it with God. Some may have no word for it at all, but you still kind of know what I mean. When the light goes out of a day, you know, whatever words you would use, your spiritual nature is your own very personal, unique, direct experience. It doesn't, our spiritual nature doesn't live in our thinking.

It's your direct embodied experience and I do assert that we are here to embody the transcendent and the transcendent friends, it needs somewhere to land. And if your ferritin is 17, which many conventional doctors are going to call acceptable, you're going to feel like you're dragging. It's going to feel like you're slowly dying. When your cortisol goes flat and your gut is inflamed, everything you give costs you energetically way more than it should. It's your family, your work, and your practice. And friends, we can't pour from an empty vessel, and the vessel is your body. Now, I say this as someone who has and continues to teach spiritual practices for a living.

When your body is depleted, it stops being an environment that can hold spirit consistently, long enough for you to actually experience it. And then your relationship with spirit will slowly move to theoretical. You still know the teachings, you can say the words, but that felt experience, that felt relationship with spirit, the thing that made you take up a practice that you loved in the first place will get further and further away. All right, and this is where then those small compensations start, spending more time online, maybe reaching for a glass of wine, reaching for sugar, carbs, caffeine. This is what running on empty looks like from the inside, all right? And there just comes a point where there isn't enough energy left to live really engaged in your own life. Like literally, there isn't the energy to allow you to do that.

You know, I watch Women take that personally, like treating their physiological problems as spiritual failings and adding shame on top of that. So, you know, it's just, it's really important that you get. Friends, sound baths are wonderful. They will never raise your ferritin. Yin yoga? Love it. But it's not going to resolve anxiety driven by low progesterone.

Breathwork cannot steady blood sugar if cortisol is pouring glucose in from the inside. Right? We can't yoga nidra our ferritin levels up. Now I love every one of those practices. I teach them. They're beautiful. But for a lot of Women in Midlife, these are treading water practices until the body gets resourced.

You see these practices will hold you at the surface, but they have a hard time deepening while the body underneath has nothing to give. What raises the floor is ferritin, thyroid hormones, progesterone, sleep, protein, and a gut that has healed so it can absorb what you feed it. When your body is resourced, something shifts, right? This is what astounded me. I took years to re-resource my body. And guess what happened?

My Nervous System completely settled all on its own. Okay? I didn't need to do any more practices to regulate my Nervous System. There are Women that are that flocked Nervous System practices and the yoga world and Qigong and spiritual practices because what's really going on is is something missing in their physiology. And yes these practices do help temporarily, but then when you go home, they fade away. The results fade away. Okay?

When you resource your body, the Nervous System settles on its own. You don't need to do practices to regulate your Nervous System. These practices will then start giving back to you differently than helping you to tread water. Okay? And I want you to hear this. A stable Nervous System through resourced physiology is the doorway to your soul. So that is the whole arc of this conversation from cell to soul to spirit.

And it goes in that order for a reason. And all that is 5 layers, physical, mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual. They move together. They suffer together. They recover together. And the fastest way into all 5 of them is through the one that answers to numbers.