Holistic Life Navigation

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At the age of nine Luis was diagnosed with ADHD. He never medicated with pharmaceuticals: instead his drugs of choice were coffee, cigarettes, and a stimulating diet. Over the years Luis has learned how to reduce the stimulants needed to keep him engaged. 

ADD/ADHD is when there is not enough dopamine getting to the brain, usually because of low levels o...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book

In this replay episode, we explore ADHD or RITC -- a Radical Inability To Conform.

Luis shares with us his own childhood experiences with ADHD, Tourette's syndrome, and nervous ticks. Often people are prescribed medications to suppress these conditions but Luis questions what would it mean to allow ourselves to relate to them as expression...

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Our favorite biochemist, Karen Hurd, joins us again to discuss how stress fuels disease. Chronic levels of stress, be it from food, relationships, physical exertion, thought patterns, or the environment, all tax the adrenal glands. Karen tells us how and why this happens. With taxed adrenals we are left feeling burnt out and reach for coffee and stimula...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book

Kymber Maulden joins us on the podcast today. Fertility isn't just for women who want to be mothers, it is a sign of health in menstruating females. Trauma stresses and rapidly oxidizes the body, causing it to need even more nutrients and therefore be in metabolic debt. This draws on resources contributing to low progesterone and elevated testoster...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book

The new Food Pyramid is released in the United States, turning the old one on its point. Regardless of how you feel about the administration it is released under, the focus has shifted from carbs and demonizing fats to centering protein, vegetables, nuts, beans and healthy fats. Camille reminds us that it is a guideline, not a hard and fast rule, becaus...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book

Luis and Camille banter as they dive into the concept of the Self in somatics. Along the way Luis offers 3 practices to work with finding the Self as witness. This witnessing allows us to be with a sensation or state and feel it rather than avoid it. It also helps us dis-identify from the state. From there we can experience something unpleasant and be w...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book

Luis and Tasha talk about beauty standards, eating disorders and their role in Tasha's life. She used food as a way to control her appearance and fit into beauty standards. Her hormones tanked. Out of desperation she began the complicated journey of taking control of her own health. In 2020-2021 she found herself within the nuance of liminal space....

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book

Meet Linda Erman, Luis' Somatic Godmother, Art Therapist and Somatic Experiencing practitioner. About a decade ago Luis decided to go back to school for psychology. Instead of school his own body's resurgence of symptoms led him to Linda and her Somatic work. Linda herself found SE in her 50s. SE carefully tended her body, titrating into the t...

Curious about how Luis teaches? Here is your window into a nutritional teaching about stored trauma, visceral fat, and inflammation. 

Stored trauma in the body sets off a chain reaction resulting in elevated insulin, putting the body into fat storage mode. Visceral fat becomes an endocrine organ producing protein molecules called cytokines that create an inflammatory response. This process primes the body for carb consumption. Often...

3 Oreos and 1/2 an Avocado join Luis on the podcast today. Their calories are the same, but how each affects our glucose levels is very different. Refined carbs spike glucose, which increases insulin, and puts us into fat storage mode.

Another factor to weight is stress and trauma, especially when in functional freeze, where we produce adrenaline, but do not burn it off with movement. 

Join us live on January 13th 2026 at 10am EST as...

Today's episode is a replay of the recent free Food Therapy session.

Recovery is different from abstinence, though both are important as you heal from addiction. Abstinence is the avoiding of an addictive substance, while recovery is the balancing of your body from years of addiction. For example, some people go from cocaine to coffee so the same activating patterns of addiction are playing out with a new substance. This free s...

Quick and dirty, Luis outlines the science between insulin and fat storage. It's not the least amount of calories that is the golden ticket, instead, it's the least amount of glucose spike. He teaches us which foods, and the ideal combination of those foods, that results in the least amount of glucose release, so that the body goes into fat burning mode instead of fat storage mode. 

An important factor in the equation is a...

Colin is our fourth and final small group facilitator for the Embodied Masculinity program starting January 6th 2026. His journey to somatics, and Luis, started with a nail gun, and the pain resulting from repetitive use. He realized he was holding tension around accuracy in physical labor, and relationally around important topics. Somatics helped show him how to hold his body through work and relationships in a way that was easefu...

2025 and it's still fringe as f*ck for men to do somatic work. Why? Because men are conditioned to suppress the parts of themselves that are tender and vulnerable with dissociation and porn. Join Luis and his friend Steven as they discuss masculinity and the upcoming 6 month Embodied Masculinity Slow group, starting January sixth. 

Steven reminisces about singing with a friend when he was 11 years old, when a parent c...

Our boys, too often, grow up using porn as a formulaic way to self soothe. They experience the dopamine rush, stimulation and sexual gratification in isolation. There is no touch or feedback in return, no boundaries to navigate, just dissociative pleasure.This stress loop, repeated chronically in a young body becomes a developmental trauma. The pattern spills into future relationships, where they find themselves numbed out and disc...

Atarah Valentine joins Luis on the podcast today. They warm up talking about how we can practice self hatred, and we can practice gratitude. It's all a practice. What choices and practices have adapted you to be the person you are? 

Men, Atarah saw, hurt women. He did not want to hurt women. As a result he practiced hating masculinity.  He evoked feminine energy emulating his grandmother who wanted to fix everything for everyon...

On today's episode, Luis is joined by Annette Knopp - meditation teacher, somatic educator, nature mystic, and author - to discuss her newly released book Mystic Nomad: A Woman's Wild Journey to True Connection.

In her book, Annette shares the personal experiences that shaped who she is as a person, and then how these events developed her way of teaching and showing up in the world. Part memoir, part modality teaching, she...

Meet Zach Kalatsky, a mentor for the Embodied Masculinity 6 months slow group, as well as a member of the HLN retreat team. He joins Luis today for a chat about their experience as friends, and as part of a team that holds the all male slow group members. 

So many men identify as being fatherless sons, sons of men who could not connect and support their boys the ways they needed. The result is a lingering and deep sense of never bei...

Somatics is naturally an inward focused practice involving the noticing of internal feelings and sensations, something that sociatally, in America at least, only women are "allowed" to notice. Men often feel like they need to be loud and dominant, focusing their energy outward lest they seem weak, whereas women can be fluid, sensuous and internally focused. However, it's when men learn to relate to their own feminine...