Full Capacity Living…
I have a few openings this fall for one-on-one work that blends functional medicine with microdosing integration. If anything in this story sounds familiar, reply to this email or book a free conversation with the link below… Let’s see if it’s a fit.
The Water She Was Swimming In
When people start paying attention to the core pillars of functional medicine (nutrition, sleep, movement), something shifts beyond the labs. They start to connect with their bodies. They notice how habits they’ve repeated for years, often without a second thought, are tied to the symptoms they came in with.
That awareness is the foundation. And it’s exactly what makes the next layer of work possible.
In my practice, I sit at the intersection of functional medicine and microdosing integration. Every person is different. For some, we lean heavily into the functional medicine side. For others, the integration work takes the lead. But the functional medicine piece lays the groundwork for the body to notice, and metabolize, what comes up with microdosing. That intersection is the sweet spot.
Let me show you what I mean.
A client’s story
A woman in her early 50s came to me for help with metabolic health and hormones through lifestyle. High achieving, driven, successful, and genuinely happy with her life. But she was gaining weight and struggling with hormonal shifts.
She already ate well, so we didn’t eliminate anything. We focused on shifting the balance. She wore a continuous glucose monitor for a while, just to see how small tweaks could support steadier blood sugar. We pulled back on intense cardio and added more strength training.
Intense exercise had always been her stress relief. It wasn’t working anymore. When she tested her cortisol, her levels were off the chart. Wired and tired, but she’d pushed through it so long it had simply become normal. The writer David Foster Wallace once told a story in a commencement speech about two young fish swimming along. An older fish passes by and asks, “How’s the water?” The young fish keep swimming until one finally turns to the other and asks, “What is water?” The things we’re surrounded by every day are often the hardest to see. That was her. A hypervigilant nervous system was the water she was swimming in.
We touched on the nervous system gently, since it wasn’t her comfort zone. But as she began to slow down, she started to feel the tension she carried. That was shocking to her. In the moments she thought she was relaxed, her body was clenched. That holding was causing daily headaches.
Here’s the part that stays with me: she never mentioned those headaches in our first three months together. She had accepted them.
As she began releasing that tension, something else changed. When I asked her about it, she realized her clothes were fitting differently. Pants she couldn’t wear a few months earlier now fit.
What microdosing adds
So many women come to me exactly like this. Deeply focused on their body from a weight perspective, yet out of touch with how it actually feels and what it’s holding.
This is where microdosing becomes so powerful. The effect is sub-perceptual, subtle, but it helps women drop into their bodies in a way that’s hard to reach otherwise. They begin to feel the holding, the carrying, that has gone on so long that it felt normal. And then they get to feel what it’s like to set it down.
Much of it was never theirs to carry in the first place.
Men experience this too, but women, by a wide margin, grow up learning to hold things tightly. We hold fear as a form of self-protection. And the ways it shows up in daily life are usually disguised and unconscious, out of our normal reach.
The missing piece
The piece most often missing in functional medicine is the nervous system, or more fully, the psychosocial and spiritual side of our health. We touch on it. But until we can truly get into our bodies and feel the connection, it eludes us. That’s often why people feel stuck, like nothing is working.
So many of us check the box on breathwork and meditation. We do the practice, and that matters. But when we look honestly at whether it changes how we come into our day, how we respond when life gets hard, it often doesn’t. We’re still reacting the same way, holding the same tension, running the same patterns.
And it’s not just about taking a microdose either. The real transformation happens in the integration work we do right alongside it: connecting the dots, putting words to the insights that emerge, and building tools you can actually use in your daily life. A microdose can open the door.
Integration is how you walk through it and make the change last.
Functional medicine builds the awareness. Microdosing integration helps you notice what’s been hidden, bring it forward, and release it. Together, they reach places neither can reach alone.
With a decade in functional medicine, training at Duke and the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, and the past five years focused on nervous system work and microdosing integration, this is the work I’m here to do.
If you’re ready to stop swimming in the water and start feeling what your body has been carrying, let’s talk. Reply here or book a free conversation
Warmly,
Karen
