Spring Reset ✨ Gentlest release, cleansing + renewal ✨
From what we drink to how we think... it's time to shake off Winter's cloak ☘️
Welcome to MOTHER NOURISH – the home of wholistic + realistic nourishment.
I’m Emine – an award-winning health editor + wellbeing author, as well as being a qualified yoga therapist, Ayurvedic consultant + holistic skin therapist (I no longer practice, but pour my experience into my writing, instead).
Here at MOTHER NOURISH, I write about our growing need for nourishment, collectively & personally – as a mid-40s mother of two beauteous, neurodivergent kids, who’s also beginning to experience perimenopause.
Week after week, I explore the ways in which we can stop relegating our own core needs, and move into a place where we feel truly resourced, cared-for, resilient, and yes, deeply, wholistically nourished.
No more burnt crusts + crumbs at the end of each day… we deserve the whole slice of Hot Buttered Toast!
I send out two letters every week – YIN + TONIC on a Wednesday evening (a simple, single-shot of midweek goodness; often a video/audio practice to try at home), and HOT BUTTERED TOAST on a Sunday morning, which deep-dives into Heart, Home, Food & Body/Skin, combining my 20+ years in health + wellness, with my ever-evolving path towards sustained + sustainable choices rooted in self-respect, love + care.
I will always balance my background in various alternative health modalities with robust research – and I will NEVER demonise or assign moral value to choices that relate to food, body, or health. One of my biggest pet peeves, as a former health journalist who has always been interested in holistic health data, is the ease with which so many self-appointed health experts make blanket statements about health + wellbeing.
Just this week, I was listening to a podcast about spiritual health, and the host said ‘you may have cut out all gluten and all dairy which is a healthy choice, and means you’re on the right path,’ and in another sentence, ‘you may be wondering why you just can’t lose that last five pounds,’ and my jaw dropped. I literally paused the podcast, there and then, and sat for several minutes, trying to process what I’d just heard.
Millions of receptive young women listen to this woman talk about health, every week, and for her to make such empty, blanket statements shocked me. ‘That last five pounds’ is one of those arbitrary notions that drives me insane! Five pounds? What’s five pounds? Can we please get some perspective? How is weight still a metric by which we measure our WHOLISTIC 360 health & wellbeing? How is this rhetoric around being ‘light & enlightened’ still playing out in 2025?
Forgive my digression… but as someone who writes about health & wellbeing every week, through a 360 lens of mind-body-spirit-home-relationships-environment, and so much more, I am immensely cautious of generic statements, recommendations + individualised experiences being passed off as universal ones.
I am also not an ‘expert’ – mostly because ‘health’ is subjective, and data is always shifting, research evolving, and one year’s holy grail may be problematic a year or so later; I’m not a doctor or a healthcare professional, and I will not dole out medical advice. I am a health journalist, who has qualified in three different alternative health modalities due to my own personal interests in them. I write about what I know, have experienced with clients, and what is also being backed up by the passage of time + robust, independent research. I do not discount anecdotal evidence either… anecdotal evidence, particularly in the area of women’s health, is immensely valuable, not least of all because funding for women’s health research is massively lacking.
When woman after woman expresses her experience – and when patterns arise from these women, at certain ages, in certain environments, in particular scenarios – much can be learned. Indigenous wisdom – such as the Ayurvedic medicine of India – was denigrated and almost destroyed by the English, who devalued the millennia of passed-down, observed, intuitively understood knowledge of the Indian sages & doctors. Just because Ayurveda was not born of laboratories, under microscopes, does not mean it is not to be trusted. All indigenous forms of medicine + alternative medicine, including acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine – come from longest lineages of practice + study + learning, and all were honed though anecdotal evidence: simply, witnessing inputs + outcomes, over + over, until patterns of truth were found, and remedies + solutions made possible.
Indigenous health protocols are born of centuries of ‘seeing’. Of paying attention. Of listening. Of understanding the relationship between a plant, a place, a person. Health is born of knowing, of seeing, of listening, of responding.
When we go to see a GP (and thank heavens for the NHS and our brilliant GPs!) we sit across from someone who, for the most part, tends to know nothing of us – our relationships, where we live, what we had for breakfast, what’s keeping us awake at night – and simply sees a SYMPTOM, without ever having the time or resource to dig all the way down to its root cause – we are experiencing a system of healthcare that is trusted + widely used, but which may or may not have failed you or someone you know at some point, too.
At MOTHER NOURISH I try to bring balance to the often extreme ‘health’ picture. I value the NHS enormously, and both my children were born in NHS water birthing centres (the midwives were out-of-this-world brilliant). I think emergency medicine is a miracle. I do not swear off over-the-counter medications. I eat sugar. I have processed food pretty much every week. I do not think that someone who no longer eats gluten or dairy is ‘on the right path’… I do not think there is a right path other than the one you yourself are on, which has nothing to do with me, and is wholly personal to you.
I am not trying to be my ‘best self’ (even though it sells). I will never encourage anyone to do anything in order to lose weight (even though it sells). I will not share ‘stay young’ skincare secrets (even though it sells).
Instead… I will write about nourishing yourself as well + true + deeply as you can, with what you have + who you are.
I will celebrate this body I am in, and that body you are in, for all it does to keep us safe + alive (miracle).
I will celebrate this skin I inhabit – this envelope to my soul – and care for it, unconditionally, and expect + accept its ageing.
I do not have all the answers. I have no secrets or ‘codes’ to share. All I have are my stories… my lived experiences… and the stories + lived experiences of the women in my orbit, my life, my therapy room + in this community, here, at MOTHER NOURISH.
I don’t have a strategy of ‘game plan’ for Substack either… if you follow me here, whether you pay to subscribe, or have a free subscription, you’ll know that I write about many things that relate to nourishment: food, family, body, skin, home, heart.
But part of my ‘spring cleaning’ is to refine what I write about here, and why, and to use the chat function on Substack to gauge interest + take questions from members – to prevent writing from a vacuum, or in ways that feel siloed or overly self-referential.
That refinement is simple: WHOLISTIC + REALISTIC NOURISHMENT FOR MUMS WHO WANT MORE THAN THE CRUMBS
Once a week, I will pop a Q in the chat – asking you to choose from 2-3 topics which I will then write about in upcoming letters.
Thank you for being here & I hope you leave feeling a little more nourished,
Emine
In today’s letter:
To end, I share a 33 minute video on Spring Potential + Gentle Cleansing, which explores simple ‘recipes’ + supportive rituals for Spring (part one was shared in Wednesday’s letter, here).
What’s going on in my body-mind… feelings coming up + trying to be curious about them + 5 helpful enquiries that might support us to cross the threshold of a new season
Write about the move from winter into spring… and how we need to pace ourselves!
psssst… I have also recorded a 60 minute Holistic Skincare Class, which will arrive with next Sunday’s Hot Buttered Toast – which covers everything from cleansing, hydrating, moisturising + masking, to gua sha, massage, natural choices + the holistic health of the skin in general…
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