The Secret to Longevity: Heal Your Cells, Change Your Life | Jenn Payeur
20 Nov 2025 · 37 min
Podcast episode in which host Jennifer Payeur interviews Dr. Monisha Bo (five-times board certified physician) about cellular health and longevity. Dr. Bo describes patterns she observed over millions of pathology slides—chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, and disrupted cellular communication—and explains how lifestyle (epigenetics) overwhelmingly influences disease risk versus inherited genetics. Key practical topics: gut microbiome diversity (aiming for ~30 plants/week), inflammation and antioxidant status, circadian rhythm, nature/forest-bathing effects on immune cells, the role of trauma and stress, and adopting rituals (versus habits/routines) to support cell care. The episode closes with discussion of Dr. Bo’s book (Anatomy of Well-Being) and contact info.
Questions this episode answers
Anatomic pathology; clinical pathology; cytopathology; integrative medicine; culinary medicine.
She states that 90–95% of cancers are not genetics-driven.
She cites that one in seven to one in eight women will develop breast cancer in a lifetime.
drbonote.com (social handles: @DrBenot across platforms).
Chapters
Welcome to the Wellness Sherpa Podcast, where we engage with passionate leaders, holistic thinkers, and disruptors who courageously share their personal journey, mission, and wisdom with you. Together, we create a safe space to empower you to live your best, most vital life. Thanks for being here. Well, it is such an honor and privilege to be here with dear friend, Dr. Monisha Bo, who is, by the way, five times board certified. And I want to know more about that. I didn't even know that was a possibility. I thought triple board certified sounded really amazing. So we want to talk more about your certifications and what you focus on. And she's been featured on NBC, the Huffington Post, Women's World. She is a force to be reckoned with, and she focuses on many things, but some that are near and dear to my heart cell care. So focusing on cellular health and just getting out of the burnout, self care and why it's so important in the nervous system as well. And I know you have a practice. We'll get all this in the show notes, but if you can share a little bit more about your background, that would be amazing.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Jen, for having me on the Wellness Sherpa Podcast. I'm looking forward to talking to your community and sharing what I've learned over these decades. So imagine this. Like, just picture this. I'm sitting at a microscope for the thousandth time, okay. Diagnosing disease after disease, you know, inflammatory cells, cellular dysfunction, cancer cells, all of this slide after slide, like literally thousands and thousands and millions of slides. After diagnosing these millions of diseases and tissues, under the microscope, I began to see a pattern. And that pattern really kind of changed my trajectory to why did I not stop at three board certifications? To why do I have five board certifications? What I saw was that every single disease set cell was telling the same story. It was a story of inflammation. It was a story of, you know, from a scientific term, oxidative stress. It was a story of cellular communication mishaps. And so, just to give you a little bit of background, I have those five board certifications. Anatomic pathology, clinical pathology, cytopathology, integrative medicine, and culinary medicine. Where do we start?
But they're all connected.
They are all absolutely connected. Yeah. In a way, I've made them connect.
Yeah. So share. Okay. So you're looking under the microscope. You're seeing these patterns.
Yeah.
So let me ask a question. How are these patterns emerging and have they changed at all? So I'm assuming that was at the beginning of your career when you were first in the medical world, you're looking at these slides. What was, you know, what was the story telling you? And what has changed in the last 20, 30 years?
Yeah, absolutely. So I started out as a physician who is like your general, like, internist that most people know, you know, you get sick, they treat, you know, this many chronic diseases, you get your medications. And I was doing that my first year out of med school, and I was like, oh, wait a minute. Why isn't anybody getting better? This is not cool. Like, everybody's still got the same problems. I'm still prescribing the same medications. I'm seeing them in the clinic. I'm seeing them in the emergency room. And, gosh, this. Like, I'm not fixing anything. I'm not helping anybody, even though I'm doing the. What was the right thing? So I then proceeded to go into pathology. And for those of you guys who might not know, pathology is really the diagnosis of disease. It's. Pathologists are doctors. Doctors. So we are looking at tissues in the body. So whether you've had a colonoscopy and you had a biopsy removed from there, or you had a mammogram and they found something, and you had a breast core needle biopsy from there, or your blood that's taken out of you goes to a pathologist, or say you have a thyroid nodule, and they stick a little needle in there, do a fine needle aspiration, and they take out cells. I'm the person who's literally looking at these, like, millions of cells under the microscope, and I'm like, huh, okay, normal, not normal. You know, this, that. But the patterns that I'm seeing is like, why are some people developing diseases and others not? You know, like, what. What's all this connection in this and that? How does disease actually progress? So when I'm thinking of it, I'm not just looking at the slide and going, okay, here's the diagnosis. I'm thinking about, what is this person's story? What is this person's, like, tissue telling me about the life that they've lived? Right? Yeah. And would they have changed the way they live their life if they knew that every single thing they did was communication to these 37 trillion cells in the body? And now, you know, I always like to pull up, like, my cell model. We have, like, 37 trillion of these guys. No, humans, they are not this big, okay? They are microscopic. Okay? So microscopic that I need, like a 40x or 100x to look at. Them under the microscope. But what's really happening is that there's these subtle changes from the size of the nucleus, the nucleus which holds our DNA, to the functionality of our mitochondria, which generally produce energy for ourselves. But as we age or get exposures to different lifestyle factors and become dysfunctional and contribute to diseases of aging, there's all these things going on, and we ignore all of them because we don't think of our body in, like, these trillions of cells that, that make us up. And so we don't know how to take care of them. So that's where I said, all right, well, if no other pathologist is going to get out of their office, because I will tell you, being a pathologist is a great job. It, it's different every day. We're solving puzzles, we're solving mysteries, or like, what is this diagnosis? But I felt like I learned so much that if I kind of kept this little secret to myself as a pathologist, that there would be a lot of people missing out on how to heal without knowing this. And that's where, you know, I, I, I went and verified whether or not my initial thoughts and connections were, you know, correct. I trained in integrative medicine from the Andrew Wheel center for Integr. Then I did further training in culinary medicine. How do we really take food and plants and all these things to, to use them to fuel our cells? And then that's kind of what brings me to, you know, maybe the, the last decade or so of my life of where I've been working at this, to really educate people in the, in my Wellkula Institute to how does your body work?
Yeah. And so talk a little bit about, so you're talking about lifestyle and how it affects these, you know, trillions of cel and genetics. Because, you know, I look at my own knowledge base and what I've learned over the last 20 years in the health and wellness space. And originally, you know, you know, I had a very serious diagnosis. The, the feedback is often, well, you have, sorry, you have bad genetics. And, you know, I think we've been taught that. We've been given a lot of programming and stories to believe about our health that simply aren't true. And so, you know, people, you, that have the data and the structure to be able to tell the accurate story. So talk a little bit about DNA and genetics and the lifestyle or the epigenetics and how you saw that under the microscope. Yeah, Great importance of it.
Absolutely. So key thing for people to understand because this, this Is a conversation I have often is, oh, my parents had it, I'm gonna have it, or my family member had it, I'm gonna have it. It's in my genes. It's just in my genes. I can't do anything about it. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've heard this conversation. And for somebody who does the diagnosis and actually tests the genes in the laboratory, I'm like, okay, let's rewind the conversation. And especially when it comes to one of the heaviest diagnosis, which is cancer. Okay, So I have a breast cancer fellowship training a bone and soft tissue cancer fellowship. So I've seen literally over a hundred thousand breast cancer cases. And breast cancer is very, very common in women. One in seven and one in eight women will develop it in a lifetime. So when we're having this conversation, I want people to know that 90 to 95% of cancers is not genetics. Let me repeat that. 90 to 95% of cancers is not genetics. And then the question will be, well, then why are they checking my genetics? No, what they are checking is the mutations that you have developed over time so they can give you a targeted medication for them. Because that's how as scientists, we go, all right, this is what's happening. Let's target that and stop that pathway. Right. That does not mean that it's a genetics cancer.
Right. So.
And we have power over these mutations, and that power lies in our lifestyle.
Yes. So what are some things that affect those, the. The, you know, the genetics? Because, you know, we were just talking beforehand. I, when I got my, my cancer diagnosis, I'm like, wait a minute. I exercise every day, I eat healthy. You know, I had two of the pillars that I would consider part of that lifestyle impact. So what goes wrong? What else is in the mix that is impacting our cellular health?
Yeah, absolutely. So let's just call this the hashtag cell care revolution. In my book, I talk about hashtag cell care. So most people are familiar with self care and how to take care of themselves. I want you to elevate that and think of things, of how can I take care of myself? So cell care, right? And this is where conventional medicine doesn't tell you. Like, it doesn't tell you that every single cell in your body, right? Remember these guys? Every single cell in your body, it's constantly listening to the signals you send it. So it's listening to the thoughts that you send it. It's listening to the breath that you take, it's listening to your food choices. It's listening to even the places you go travel, it's listening to the people that you communicate with. It's basically listening to everything. And so when we think of cell care, we think about how are we having our outer world communicate with our inner world, which is our cells. Right. And one of the key aspects that I have found over this time that influences that is our gut health. And, you know, in Ayurveda, we believe that, you know, all disease starts in the gut, so we can be healed from the gut. And everybody has kind of a different mechanism of how they do that because everybody's biology is different. But modern science is now catching up to this and seeing that, oh, the microbiome, which actually has even more organisms in our body than our cells, is going to influence each and every disease that somebody will experience over a lifetime. So I always tell people, let's start with the gut if we can optimize your gut health. And I know, like you said, like, oh, you were eating all the right things, but I begin to question, you might have been eating the right things, but were you slowing down enough to take the nutrients from the food you were eating, allowing it to break down? So. So then those nutrients would become vitamins, neurotransmitters, hormones, and all that stuff.
Absolutely not. No. I mean, I was eating at my desk, if I was lucky, and I, you know, I was in the race to go get it and eat quickly before the next meeting. And, yeah, no connection to the food at all, even though I was eating organic and eating some really great things, and I didn't have a lot of diversity. And I have a feeling that has something to do with it, too, because we need diversity in our microbiome.
Yes, yes. So I do do stool testing, gut testing on individuals in my clinic. And, you know, even before we get to the, the testing, I, I do an entire nutrition call with them, and I have them fill out a food diary. And I'm like, let's see what you're eating. Right. And. And they become very aware that they eat basically the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner over the week and that then we sit down and we go, all right, well, let's look at how many different plants you're eating. Okay. So ideally, we want to get 30 plants in a week to have that biodiversity because our gut microbiome loves biodiversity. Most people are getting two, maybe three, maybe four. And a lucky. Lucky, Right. Maybe because we think, oh, spinach is good for me. Let me just eat spinach every day, or avocados. Are good for me. Let me just eat avocados every day. And so what we find is that biodiversity decreases, and that influences the gut bacteria that is there. And we need a certain commensal or natural gut microbiome to do all the things in the body. So when I do test their microbiomes, I'm like, wow, you have no detectable levels of half of this stuff. And I'm like, when was the last time you ate this kind of food? They're like, never. And I'm like, oh, my God. You've taken an entire food category out. Like lentils and beans. Very common. People just take them out because they're like, well, they bloat me. And I'm like, well, yeah, but let's introduce some smaller. So you can actually have the microbiome that can help break them down. The reason they bloat you is because you don't have the right gut bacteria in there to break them down. So there's ways to kind of repair the microbiome. And so we don't say, all right, you go from your current diet to, like, all of a sudden eating all this because, yeah, you won't feel good, and then you'll be mad at me because you don't feel good. And that's not the way we do it. Right. We have addition. So for those people who are very much a. Like, 0 to 180. No, it's. It's a slow process. So.
So how do you work with people? Because there's the mindset. Because of the allopathic world of, I have a headache, I take a pill, it's gone in 20 minutes. So we also are very attached to instant gratification. I want to fix things now. So how do you. How do you manage that process with your patients? Because that's. I think that's a big, huge mindset hurdle to shift.
Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I think it comes from a place of, like, when I get a patient who, you know, like, say something like, right now, like, weight loss, right? Like, oh, I want to lose 30 pounds. I'm like, okay, let's talk about it. What's your feel good body weight? Oh, I feel good at 140 pounds. I'm like, okay, when was the last time you were at £140? First year of college. And I'm like, okay, so you actually, like, let's just think the body cannot, like, lose. Like, if you're at 225 now and you want to get back to 140, the body will not in a good way lose that weight like in six months or a year. And I know there's a number of people who are on medications to lose the weight and we are seeing all the long term side effects come from these medications. So think about like if you're trying to reverse or prevent diseases, it's really about peeling back all these layers of why are you doing the things that you do and do they make sense for you in this stage of life. And I like to tell people to think of their lives more intentionally like come, come from a place of, we have a very short amount of time on this planet that let's just wake up every day and go, what does my body need today? What does my mind need today? What does my soul need today? Instead of competing with all the external factors that, that exist and the these external things that in the long term don't bring gratification. So coming back to your question, how, how do I address it? We really kind of have an open, honest conversation about what is it that, that you want, you know, out of your life? Like what's, what's going to make you happy? Because if you're, you want a quick fix, I'm definitely not your doctor.
So what else besides the microbiome? So that's a really like foundational piece. What else do you look at in helping to f. Cellular imbalances or dysfunction?
Yeah. So another thing that we look at is inflammation and inflammation from a perspective of it being basically a silent accelerator for aging and chronic disease. And the type of inflammation I like to look at is, you know, imagine your cells. Every day we are being exposed to the air we breathe, the pesticides in our food, the toxins, the food additives, all this kind of stuff. And our cells fight back because they're like, oh, how am I going to survive? And they create something we call reactive oxygen species or free radicals. But that's how they're fighting back. But these free radicals go and they damage more of these cells. So when these cells are damaged, they can't function. And how do we fight that? With antioxidants. What's another thing I test in people is their level of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants. And most people are so depleted that they're missing these ingredients. So if you think about it like chronic inflammation can accelerate your age by two to three years. So that means a 50 year old person who has inflammation all the time can actually have the age of a 65 year old person. But the key part is that it's totally reversible. I don't know, Jen, if you've ever done your. Your aging test. Have you done your aging test yet? I have, yeah. Yeah. I did mine at the beginning of this year. And I'm like, I want to repeat it to see, but I don't think I've been as good as I was this year. So.
But.
But my biologic age is. Or my cellular age is 11 years younger than my chronologic. And that's because of the lifestyle, you know, so whether that's the food I eat, the way I manage my mind, the sleep optimization I do to the movement, all of that. So it's not one thing when it comes to repairing ourselves.
Yeah. And I think we're a nation. Another big piece is we're so disconnected from nature. I found myself sitting under fluorescent lights at a desk for 10, 12 hours a day. And the only time I got up was either grab food or I'd skip food and run to the bathroom because I'd been holding it for hours on end. And I know I'm not alone. I see a lot of people, especially when they're working for a corporation that's kind of the go to is just maximize your time in the office, and then you come home and you take care of your family or whatever, and then you're back sitting down on your laptop at night. And this was. This was my lifestyle for, you know, 20, 29 years.
Yeah. And this is a cultural thing that we work so hard and. And I love that you brought up nature because I definitely think, like, healing goes beyond a doctor's office. Like, I don't want people to rely on your doctor's appointment and like, oh, you get your medication now all of a sudden you're going to be healed. Right. We do know that being in nature can change your epigenetics, can change the way your body responds. In fact, there was a study done, and I believe it was in Japan where they found that people who spent time in nature being in, like, the fore, like it's called forest bathing or shinriku, like that they could actually increase their natural killer cells by, I think, enough for like the next 30 days. Like, if they. If they just spent about 15 minutes in nature, and like you said, we're under fluorescent lights, we're doing the complete opposite of that. So I definitely recommend people to get out in nature. And, you know, even if you don't need to go to exotic location, although I favor exotic locations, but you can even go to a park Right. And go for a walk and like hug a tree. I mean, it's good for you because what you're doing is the more natural killer cells, which is a subtype of cell that we have in the body that can actually help you prevent getting colds and flus and all this kind of stuff that people, you know, as like we see people getting sick every season. So I definitely think that nature plays a key part in how we repair our cellular health.
And what else? Name a couple more that you focus on and then I want to talk about your book.
Okay, all right. A couple more that we focus on is circadian rhythm. That's another one. And why I feel that is important is because once it goes along with nature as well, right. We want to rise with the sun and we want to go to bed when it's like dark. But I'm seeing individuals that I'm talking to and they're like, oh, I stay up till 1 o' clock at night and then I'm getting up at 11 o' clock and I'm like, well, you're missing half the day. And that circadian rhythm actually disrupts your gut microbiome, which it then circulates.
That's the first time I've heard that. That is an amazing connection. So can you repeat that?
Yes. Your circadian rhythm disrupts your gut microbiome. So if your gut microbiome is one of the keys to healing, you also need to fix your circadian rhythm. So for the people who are doing like late nighters and, and staying up late working, or even for individuals who might go to bed at a decent time, but before they went to bed, they're looking at blue light. And their, their biology inside isn't making the correct hormones. Like it's not making melatonin at night, it's still making cortisol because it's getting all this like electrical signals that's going to influence how the body repairs at night. And I think that that is also key that I see often is we live in a society where it's a very much go, go, go autopilot. And then like I, I just can't even get the reasoning behind this anymore. Like, oh, let's work until we hit retirement. And then after you go from retirement, so instead of going to your office, you're spending all your time at doctor's appointments. That's what I'm seeing. That's not necessary.
Not making it or not being or not making it. Yeah, yeah, that happens a lot. That happened to my father. He retired in his early 60s and he, he passed away at 63. You know, so he died very young. And I think that's common is so much, you know, we could unpack this for weeks of a conversation. But so much of individuals identities are tied to their jobs. Right. And they have unhealed trauma. I'm sure trauma is another big piece. Right. Of the puzzle.
That is a huge piece. I am glad you brought that up because that was another interesting thing that I was seeing with the cases that I was diagnosing in the hospital. Because I'm always so curious. I'm like, what's this person's story? Like I can see their diagnosis, but like, let's see all the other stuff. And you know, sitting in tumor board rooms, the room is generally the pathologist that presents like the actual diagnosis, the radiologist that presents the imaging for the case, the, the surgeon who's going to cut out the bigger tissue. Then we have the oncologist who's going to prescribe the NCCN guideline medications and. And then we have now the radiation oncologist in the last like two decades or so. So in that space, there's no. The human is not there. Like the person, the story, what, what's going on with this person. Instead we're like, okay, I'm gonna cut this out or I cut this out. And now we need to go back because there's this many margin, this positive margin. But no, we can't go back. So why don't you radiate like these conversations that I was seeing and I'm like, wait a minute, let's see the person's story. Let's see if we really want to help them. Yes, maybe they need surgery. Yes, maybe they need the chemo. That's fine. But how do we help them not get this back? What was going on before? This situation of developing this. And that's where the immune system comes in and that's where that trauma comes in. Because what I was finding is that 90 to 95% of people that were diagnosed with cancer, and this is even now in my clinic, I talk to them, I'm like, so tell me what was going on in life last year? What did it look like? Right? And there's always something big and traumatic. And it doesn't need to be big and traumatic, but it's enough that it was emotionally overwhelming that they didn't have the tools to manage it. Right?
Because everybody, right? Then it gets stored in this, in the cells and in the tissues.
It absolutely does and this is one of the things that, honestly, because I know this freaks me out because I did have my own personal trauma, like four and a half years, almost five years ago now. And I'm like, damn it, now I'm going to develop Alzheimer's, I'm going to develop cancer, I'm going to develop this. And I'm like, all right, I got to make sure I stop this in the work because it was an extremely traumatic event that, that I'm still healing over. But I remind myself that I have to, like, heal from that. Otherwise I know that cellular cascade that happens.
Right? So where is the line? You know, you said something earlier about, you know, people taking responsibility for their health and also, you know, the doctor part where, where is that line for people from your perspective of where you lean into your doctor as an educator to help guide you? And where should individuals be taking responsibility for their health on their own? Because we just talked about simple things like getting outside in nature, diversifying the food that you're eating. So help unpack that a little bit.
For people, I think they go in parallel. And it's not like this or that you need both, right? So first thing is, whatever doctor you pick, really have a conversation with them so they understand where you're coming from. And I don't want people to blindly be like, oh, okay, my doctor told me to go do that. Like, I want you to question it. I really want you to question it and be like, okay, is there something else I can do before you put me on a statin? Do I. Can you give me six months to do something else? And what would that. That something else be? Right? And if they don't know what that something else would be, ask them, can you send me to somebody who might know what it'll be?
Right.
Because you know, doctors, we don't like to say we don't know anything, right?
So.
But, so, so I would always ask, what is it that you can do before you are on medication for a lifetime? First of all, right? Because it is very easy in our 10 minute appointments to just give you a medication. And for the people who want it, like, they want that quick fix, you're not gonna be able to change them. You're not gonna be able to change them. I mean, I, I know a current person is not a patient, but is a. My friend's husband and he just had heart surgery, okay. And he had like two stents put in, put in him. And he, and he's young, he's only like 60. And I I know the lifestyle he lives. He lives the lifestyle on the road. He's always eating, like, steak and barbecue and. And alcohol, like, literally, like, if not every day, definitely, like quite a few times, you know, So I know the lifestyle he's living. And so she was asking me, she's like, what. What can he do after now that he's had his surgery? And I'm like, well, what. What did his surgeon say? And she's like, he didn't say anything. He's got to be on these medications now and. And whatnot. And I'm like, okay, well, here's some lifestyle recommendations. And she's like, yeah, he's not gonna do that. And I'm like, well, that is what the guidance is, right? So that's his choice if he doesn't want to do that, and he doesn't want to see his daughter get married and, you know, have grandkids and all that kind of stuff. So that I think that's an individual's choice. But for the people who do want to take some control over their health, definitely look at your lifestyle. And I think one of the most important things to look at is your first 30 to 60 minutes of your day, right? So when you wake up in the day, like, are you right on your cell phone? Are you creating that stress response right away as soon as you wake up, or are you doing something for yourself? Like, I call them rituals. Right. So what's your morning ritual? What's your practice? To really put your. Your body in a state where it's able to heal and receive versus a state that's just like, literally on fire. Right.
Morning. Amazing. So as we wrap up here, your book was one of my favorite books, the Anatomy of well Being. So what inspired you? Yeah. Show your book one of the best books ever. Packed full of amazing information.
I don't just have this book. I have this one. Yay.
We both have a love affair of plants, for sure.
Yes, we do. We both love our plants.
So tell. Tell me what inspired you to write the book and what is your favorite thing? Because your book is, like I said, it should be on the New York Times bestseller Forever and Ever and Ever.
Thank you. Thank you. What inspired me to write this book was, you know, I really wanted people to understand how their body worked and how they can take these simple rituals and practices so health doesn't have to feel like another job. I wanted to put them through their. Their medical school on their body in, like, a book. And it was funny because my. My editor told me Stop writing. Stop writing. You got 95, 000 words in here. Just stop writing. You can write another book. And I'm like, no, that would be me giving them, like basically leading them to water and then just not giving them like the tools. Right. So this book literally is the book you read before other health books so you can understand why you would want to make these decisions and why you would want to use these other tools. So yeah, and I really wrote it for the person who feels overwhelmed and confused with all the misinformation out there and. And how can we simplify it? And I feel like from what I've been told, like, this book is so easy to read. And I mean, I've had people like, send me pictures like my husband highlighted in this color, and then I went back and highlighted in this color for me. And they put these things into practice and they're like, yeah, it's that simple. And I think we over complicate health because there's so much information out there. And I really wanted people to have that foundation of how. How to repair their body and their cells.
Well, two things that you said that I think are brilliant and worth calling forward is one is, you know, we often wait till we get sick before we decide to change. Hello. I was one of those people. And you don't have to. And when you do, it does feel like another thing on the to do list. And that's. That was a big piece of something I had to overcome is I had to literally step away from my life so that it didn't become another thing on my Check the box. Right. And I actually started forming a relationship to my healing process versus outsourcing it. So I think that's so important to know that it's not just another thing that you incorporate it. And then the other big piece, which I love is the word ritual is then it becomes part of who you are, part of how you're feeding yourselves, your soul, every aspect of you. And it's not something separate from you.
Yeah. And. And if you allow me a minute to explain why I use rituals. So we mo. Many people live in this space of habits and routines. And for me, a habit is, you know, it's a cue. You see, you come down the stairs, you see the coffee maker, you're like, oh, I need to have my coffee. Or you go into work and somebody brought in pastries. Oh, I need to have this. Right. So it is done with very little self awareness and very little intentionality for your life. Then we move on to you know, the X and Y access to routines. So think of routines like, oh, I brush my teeth because I know it's good for me, or I go to the gym because I know it's good for me, or I flop, I do this stuff. But you kind of stop doing some of these things, like you're not flossing every day because it's like, you know, you don't have that connection with it or the gym routine, forget about it. People just, you know, change like, because it's a forced kind of thing as opposed to where I see rituals have the highest degree of self awareness, the highest degree of intentionality. So when you wake up in the morning, you're going, like I said earlier, what does my mind need today? What does my body need today? What does my soul need today? And you're living from that place. And the best part is, is if you don't do something, you don't feel bad about it. Whereas, you know, with routines, if we miss the gym, we're like, we're like just angry at ourselves because we did something wrong. So rituals are really meant to be flexible. They're meant to be placed in times and different things so they just make you feel good. And my book has, you know, so many rituals in it based off of what you might want to be focused on, whether that's sleep or nutrition or all that kind of stuff. So just easy things that don't feel like another to do list.
Yeah, I love that and I think it's so true. And, and I teach this when I work with the plants that, you know, protocols often allow people to be unconscious. Right. We lose that connection. And if you have a relationship with a plant or you have a relationship with yourself, or if you have a relationship with a ritual, then it's feeding you, it's not depleting you. And you know, I just think that like that self awareness is such an important part of the healing journey too and for thriving. So.
Absolutely.
Oh my gosh. I could talk to you for like the next five weeks and not take a breath. You are so insightful and just incredible. So thank you so much for joining me here and we will share in the notes how folks can find you. Will you just say your website real?
Yeah, absolutely. So My website is drbonote.com and all my social media handles, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook are all at Dr. Benot, so really easy to find me. And my book is available at all book retailers and is now, after a long awaited time available on audiobook Ah, yay. All right.
All right. Well, thank you so much.
Thank you, Jen.
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