830: 6 Ancestral Secrets and How to Apply Them to Our Lives With Holistic Hilda

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I’m back today with Holistic Hilda to delve into six ancestral secrets and how to apply them to our lives. And Hilda has traveled all over the world and seen these patterns recur in indigenous tribes all over the world. She’s also developed a course based on these six ancestral secrets and we talk about these in depth today in this episode. She also shares the best of the experts’ experiences and adventures on her podcast, her Holistic Hilda YouTube channel, and in-person at conferences. She’s also the host and producer of the Wise Traditions podcast on behalf of The Weston A. Price Foundation. And I loved this wide-ranging conversation with some direct insight from places I have not yet gotten to go and see and learn. And it’s such a fun conversation. Let’s jump in now. Hilda, welcome back.

Hilda: Thanks for having me, Katie.

Katie: Thank you for being here again. And I will link to our first conversation in the show notes. If you guys haven’t heard it. It was so fun. I got to learn from Hilda’s experience and time with indigenous people around the world and all the beauty and wisdom she gleaned from that. And in this one, I’m excited to get to go even deeper and pretty nuanced in some very specific things you learned. And in the prep for this episode, I came across your writing about the best health hacks in life are free. And I love this. I’ve said this many times on this podcast, that it can be so tempting to want to get sucked into the newest biohack and fancy supplements and therapies. And I think those all have their place, nothing against those. But I really believe that if we don’t have these core foundational things in place, those things aren’t going to be as effective as they could be anyway. And that there are some things that our human bodies need that are almost always either extremely inexpensive or free, but that we don’t necessarily get taught to prioritize in the modern world. So I know from researching you, you have these six ancestral secrets. I love that. And I would love for you to just kind of intro us to that topic and then get to go deep on each of them.

Hilda: Absolutely. So you’re right, Katie, the most amazing health hacks are staring us right in the face and sometimes are literally overhead and we’re missing them because we’re seeking the next best thing. And the problem with that kind of, I would say hacking our health mentality is that we’re kind of overlooking what has served and stood the test of time, what has served people for since the beginning of time. And what’s so beautiful about my travels is I’ve had the privilege of meeting some indigenous people groups and observing how they’re living. So it’s not just something from some history book where we’re assuming this is how we’re ancestors are from the caveman times lived, you know, and we’re just kind of guessing. No, I’ve gotten to see it with my own eyes.

And so I do call these six ancestral secrets to get people’s attention. Because if I said exactly what they were just straight out of the gate, they’d be like, oh, whatever. I’ve heard that before. But listen to me. With each secret I share with you, I’m going to give one practical tip so that every mom or dad listening to the show or single person that hopes to be a mom or dad one day will have something practical to walk away with. Because I think what good is it to have all this head knowledge if it doesn’t transform our life and our health?

And what I want to do is get people who feel like they’re way behind the starting line in life. Like my health is horrible. I wake up exhausted every day. I don’t say good morning, Lord. I say, good Lord, it’s morning, you know. So it’s the opposite of what we want. And I want to just bring people up to the starting line at least they feel like, okay, I’m feeling good. I’m feeling strong. I can tackle some of these maybe deeper conditions that I have. I am a health coach and not a doctor. So I will start with that. But I do have some great ideas that will help people restore their energy and vitality.

And number one, it does start with the sun. It is something that ancient cultures adored and get this. It was recommended by Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine. He recommended sunbathing for patients. He would send them off to the seaside or to the mountains in Florence Nightingale’s time. Patients with tuberculosis, which they thought at that time to be a very contagious disease and very hard to recover from, they would send to the mountains to literally get naked and get that sunshine.

And Florence Nightingale noted in her book, Nursing Notes, she said, when patients are sick, I’ve noticed that if there is a window in their room as they’re recovering, they will turn toward the window as if they were a plant. And she said, even if it means for them to be laying on their wounded side, she noticed that they were doing that. As you noted in the episode we did earlier, children and animals, they go for the sunshine. So we need to do the same. And what I’ve learned in my own research to follow up on what I’ve observed with my own eyes is that the early morning sun is especially important. It gives us kind of a boost of cortisol. I think the reason people drink coffee so much is because they’re not getting the sunshine. They need something to kind of get them going, right? What if we turn to the sun instead?

When I was in Ethiopia last summer and some of the indigenous tribes I met in the Omo Valley, these people had no electricity, Katie. They were literally living in huts by this river. And they told me that their day starts with the sunshine. They get it first thing. And so I recommend that people get out. And I know this might be hard for some people who feel exhausted. Look, we just had a baby. We are not going to get out first thing, Hilda. But I recommend getting out within 30 to 45 minutes of sunrise. So right now where I live, sunrise is at 6:15. I try to get out before 7:00 a.m. And I’m just out there 15 minutes at the least, trying to get that sunlight, making sure it gets in my eyes. Even if I can’t make eye contact with the sun, I still get the benefit, of course. I’m getting a certain spectrum of light that signals to my body what time of day it is. And this is important for better energy, improve metabolism. I do know people who have lost weight simply by changing their sunlight habits and getting that morning sun. So this is a powerful, powerful health hack that I would call an ancestral health hack. Getting that morning sun is critical for well-being.

And then the second one I like to mention is tied to it. It’s sleep. And you were talking to a certified night owl. I used to stay up till all hours because once the kids were in bed and you might be able to relate to this, I was like, let me do the laundry. Let me answer some emails. Let me get things done. For goodness sake, I have a little bit of time here. Let me take advantage of it. But I would push myself and be going till one, two in the morning. And I would get a second wind and I thought, gosh, am I just superhuman? Everyone else is sleeping and I’m going strong. No, the blue light from my screen, unwittingly, I did not know this, but the blue light from my screen was kind of getting to my pineal gland and sending a different signal to my brain and to my body about what time of day it was. So I thought it was midday when it was midnight. And this was really shortchanging my health and making my sleep less profound and all the things.

So when I started getting the morning sunlight and kind of shifting my rhythms, I found I would go to bed earlier, of course, but then I found, oh, I still have time in the morning. I can do the things I used to do at night in the morning. So it was beautiful and very, very restorative, I would say. Plus, I wouldn’t have the dark circles under my eyes and all those things. And this is something, again, I’ve witnessed in culture after culture after culture. In Ethiopia, I did see these families who would sleep together. So for those who are big on co-sleeping, that’s wonderful practice. And I saw it among the tribes in Ethiopia. And they would have the parents sleeping on one side and then the kids sleeping on the other. But trust me, the hut was not bigger than a small closet in some households. I don’t remember hearing anyone tell me they struggled with insomnia or too much noise at night. The sun would go down and they would go and retire in their huts. They would sleep on a little mat of like cow skin or goat skin and they were with each other. But I think part of the secret was they were also grounding, right? They were getting the energy of the earth from that. The sun had gone down, so there was no artificial light. And then they were able to rise more easily in the morning. Amazing. So those are two of the six secrets right there.

Katie: I love that. And just to expound on what you said, someone I know, Peter Thiel, has a book called Zero to One, and it’s sort of based on his teaching at a university. But one of the questions he asks his students and anyone he hires is, what important truth do you believe that few people agree with you on? And this has been one of mine. Thankfully, I think this is shifting, and I would love it if everyone eventually agreed with me on this, and it wasn’t a scarce secret anymore. But I think we need more sunlight, not less. I think that the medical industry got this wrong.

And I’ve actually gotten to delve deep into this data with a couple of the companies I work with. And what they found was astounding, even when it comes to what we’re afraid of when it comes to the sun, which is skin cancer risk, it’s not sun exposure that is correlated with skin cancer risk. It’s the number of extreme sunburns you have. And nobody’s recommending sunburn, but sun exposure is actually very protective against many other types of cancers. It’s protective of our brains. As you said, it influences our hormones and our cortisol, especially that morning sunlight, which again, back to the best things in life are free.

When we’re outside at sunrise or sunset, we are getting red light therapy. Those things that we spend a lot of money buying and putting inside our house, those exact same spectrum of light are available at sunrise and sunset for free. So if it’s not in your budget to have a red light, like you said, just go outside for sunrise and watch the sunrise. And you might be amazed, like you said, how much energy you feel from that far beyond caffeine, or even if you’re going to drink caffeine, because I still love coffee, get the sunlight first. I have this rule of like sunshine before screens or caffeine. And I feel like that makes a huge difference, especially for female hormones. And then I love that you tied that to sleep as well. I think that like that combination is so gold.

Hilda: Yes, yes. And I realized my practical tip for the sleep and what you just shared is great. I love that. I say sunrise before screen rise, which is similar to sunshine before caffeine, which I like too. One thing to enhance sleep is to give ourselves a chance to wind down. And I suggest getting off screens before bed. And it’s funny because some of us use the screens to kind of numb out or space out or relax at the end of the day. I understand why people want to just binge watch things on Netflix because it feels like a mind-numbing break. But the challenge is you’re still getting that blue light as I described it.

So I suggest getting your whole family off screens if possible for one to two hours before bed. If that’s too hard, like I said earlier, more is caught than taught. So simply do it yourself and that will make you more present and available to your family. Or it will actually give you a chance to rest too, because these things can kind of be agitating. I mean, our devices, you know, one more email finds you, you might find yourself breathing shallowly and feeling anxious because there’s something you forgot to take care of. But if you’re reading a book or you’re listening to some music or going for a walk at night, like nobody can take those things away from you. And yeah, so a simple reduction in our screen time at night, I think can help us sleep more profoundly as well.

Katie: I love it. Okay. So we got through the first two. Can you walk us through some more of the other ancestral health secrets?

Hilda: Absolutely. So the third one is shivers. And a friend of mine was like, what does that mean? I said, stick with me because I love the alliteration. So it’s sun, sleep, shivers. It really just means, Katie, exposing ourselves more to the elements. When I was in Mongolia, the Kazakh eagle hunters I was hanging out with did not like whip off their coats so that they could show how strong they were. You know, we see people, and resilient. Now we see people jumping in ice baths all over social media. You know, that’s great. But it doesn’t need to be like that. It can be a challenge of making your shower cold at the end of your shower for 10 seconds, building up to 30 seconds, maybe a minute, you know, and kids love this sort of thing, by the way, notice how they’ll jump in the pool before we do, right? We’re like, I got to get as hot as a lizard here before I’m going to even get into that pool or in the ocean. But they’re just running around and playing. They’re not afraid.

And so I think it’s a stressor that can be a blesser, I would say. And I’ll never forget talking with a friend of mine who’s a homesteader. And he said, you know what, Hilda, he said, aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. He said, so he, it’s my friend from Off Grid with Doug and Stacey. Doug is like, you know what, I am going to challenge myself with that cold shower. He said he, he and Stacey had to do it because they didn’t have like hot water for a time where they were living. So they’re really off grid, right? So we, in our comfortable modern lives, never have to be uncomfortable. But what if like exercise, cold is actually a help. It’s a hormetic stressor that has benefits for our longevity, for the resilience of our mitochondria, and gives us an energy and an endorphin boost, right?

So I’m, I’m big on it. What I do now is I actually do have a plunge in my backyard. And I do that sometimes I’ll just do my face. It depends on my mood. I’m not trying to overstress myself. So I do pay attention to what my body needs, but I do do it regularly because I feel like I want to challenge myself. And then it feels like the rest of my day is a piece of cake.

Katie: I love that. And I think women, especially, it seems like we can shy away from the cold. And like, to your point, you can overdo it. You don’t want to take your body into a state of actual stress, but that hormetic stress can be so beneficial. And so I often, when there’s a conversation about sauna and the benefits of sauna and the benefits of cold, I encourage people to think of them as almost three separate categories, the benefits of sauna on their own, the benefits of cold on their own. And then the two together in contrast therapy is almost its own whole separate host of benefits. And I feel like there’s wisdom in choosing different ones of those at different times, or not just always doing them together, but like getting the benefits individually as well. But I think you’re right, the shivers can be one that women especially like to avoid, or often on average, just more so, but kids run headfirst into and love it.

Hilda: Yes. And so my practical tip for that is just do that little challenge for yourself or your kids. I have some neighbor kids who came over the other day and they were like, is that a hot tub? I was like, no, it’s a cold tub. And so we made a game of like holding our little hand in there. And now with kids, you do have to be careful. So I would say, you know, don’t challenge them to get in a tub for five minutes, for goodness sakes, but watch them play and have fun experiencing the cold a little bit.

So my fourth secret is sustenance. And that just means eating whole real foods. When I was in Australia, I sat on a cliff-side with Suzanne Thompson, who calls herself the Ancestral Whisperer. She’s this beautiful Aboriginal woman who has custodianship of some land that once belonged to the Iningai people in her area in the Northern Territories. Anyway, Suzanne said, Hilda, look. And she just gestured out to this whole land in front of us, Katie. And she said, that’s our grocery store. And I was like, oh, my gosh, like how beautiful from the kangaroo and the smaller mammals they could hunt to the plants and berries they could harvest and forage for to make teas and salads and meals. You know, that was their grocery store.

And then I couldn’t help but contrast it with another town I went to called Maningrida, which is like, for lack of a better way of putting it, an Aboriginal kind of reservation. And the people I met there looked so sad and depressed. And they only had one store in their whole town. And it was right next to the Hasty Tasty, which tells you everything. And it was full of packaged and processed foods. And I thought, these people have been removed from their land and their customs and their ways. It was really heartbreaking. But the saddest thing of all is that they were buying these little juices instead of eating berries and drinking fresh water from a spring in their land. I was just so saddened by that.

So we have options now. And as I said in the earlier podcast, like we need to do the best we can. I’m not saying everyone should go out and forage and hunt for their meal, though, if they can, that’s great. But there are farmers markets, right? And the Weston A. Price Foundation has chapter leaders all around the world, actually, whose only job is to point you to real food resources like farmers markets, farms that are regeneratively doing it right, regenerating the soil and places, stores that might offer some good holistic kind of brands that aren’t full of a lot of preservatives. You know, if things have a long shelf life, Katie, they tend to shorten ours. So I’m big on eating the whole real foods that are single ingredient foods and being an ingredient household, as they say.

Katie: I love that. Okay, so we have sunlight, sleep, shivers, and sustenance. What are the last two?

Hilda: The last two are strength, which I think is really, really critical. We weren’t made to move. We weren’t made to sit. So strength, and that used to be a part of people’s daily lives. When I was with my friends in Mongolia, these Kazakh eagle hunters, it was no joke, Katie. They would train these eagles to go and get prey for them so that they could have their fur for clothing and their flesh for food. And so these eagles, they train from when they’re little eaglets and they would carry them on their arms. And these things weigh like 30, 40 pounds. I would like to start to sink after a little while, but so part and parcel of their lives is movement. Just like community, we were saying before, we have to be intentional about, we also have to be intentional about movement because like language learning, if you don’t use it, you will lose it. And I personally want to be as strong and as hale and as hardy as possible for all my days.

So the women in Ethiopia were carrying their water jugs on their head that they went and got the water like a mile away from the Omo River and brought it back. We don’t have these things. So what do we do? I’m about to buy a weighted vest because I want to have more bone or weight-bearing exercise, right? For my bone density and so forth. I do resistance training. I do walk. That’s the simplest thing we can do. You don’t need a gym membership or a fancy program to get a beach body. I believe everybody is a beach body. The more sun you get the better on it, like we said earlier, but also the more you move, the more you’re going to want to move. And so it’s kind of builds on itself. Taking a morning and evening walk is a way to stack your hacks. You’ll get that sunshine. We talked about the importance of the early morning sun. If you get it at sunset, it’s also protective against burning, actually. So I think it’s really lovely, too. It lifts the spirit. So taking those early morning and evening walks are critical for our mobility, our flexibility, and our longevity.

Katie: Yes. And I feel like in all of these categories, it’s funny that in, at least in the US, it’s like we’ve waited for science to confirm what our biology has always known because studies continually come out that reaffirm all these things that you’re talking about. And if that’s what encourages people to pay attention to them, that’s great. I love that science is confirming these things, but I feel like certainly our ancestors intuitively do these things. Our bodies still intuitively know these things, but the data is strong in all of these areas, especially related to the strength training component that you just mentioned. And there’s an extremely strong correlation between maintaining our lean muscle mass and longevity. And that can be, if you want to evaluate it, it can be through grip strength testing or simply how long can you hang from a bar without letting go. This can be through the mobility piece being really important. We know that falls actually kill as many people as breast cancer. And so maintaining our bone density and our strength and our resilience around those things is very important. But it just is funny to me that we depend on science to tell us what our bodies intuitively know. Okay. So we’ve got through strength. What’s the last one?

Hilda: The last one is spirit. And it is so important because we are more than mind and body. We are soul and spirit, however you want to think of it. We need to incorporate things in our lives that lift us up. If you feel discouraged or unhappy, lonely or depressed, you can’t even digest your food properly, right? So to your point about intuition and science, I think we would do well to tap into our intuition to find out even what our body needs. Why am I feeling a little down today? What could be going on? And this is something I learned from the Aboriginal woman in Australia. She said to me, in our tribe, we have the custom of Dadirri, which is a custom of deep listening. So we remain still and see what our ancestors, you know, what God, what our conscience, what our deep knowing has to tell us. But Katie, we are so busy doing, we’re hardly human beings anymore.

So my call to every listener, my call to everyone I meet really is to take time to be still. I’m working on it myself. I’m a doer. I’m a type A person who loves to check things off. Don’t get me wrong. I get that. But there’s something very precious that helps us tap into our intuition and our really our purpose in life, I would say, that should not be overlooked. And the fact that there is a custom, really, I think it’s a custom in nearly every people group to be still is something we would do well to revisit. It’s valuable beyond words. I’m talking about no audiobook, no podcast you’re listening to, like dare to be quiet and see what you might hear and learn about yourself and your purpose in life.

Katie: Yeah, I think of that quote that all of our problems stem from our inability to sit quietly alone in a room and how we turn to like all these fancy ways to literally learn how to do that, whether it’s meditation or breath work or whatever it is. But I think you’re right. The core of that is simply our ability to be and to nurture that ability to be present and to be still. And often maybe those answers are hiding there if we just take the time to listen to them.

And I love that you distill essentially all of the things necessary as foundational for human health into these six pillars. And to bring it full circle to what we started our first conversation on, I would love to bring it back to community because we talked a little bit about that in our first episode. And I mentioned how my theory, even with the blue zones, is that how much more they do all of these healthy things in community. And I think that this is a perfect way to tie that in because we know that we are missing in-person community a lot in today’s world. And I love the idea of ways that we can nurture community. And ideally integrate these habits that you’re talking about in the community, because I don’t have the data to back this up, but I have a strong suspicion that any of these things that we do, if we do them in community, they’re even more beneficial because we’re stacking on that human connection and that spiritual connection on top of it. So do you have any tangible tips for people in nurturing and cultivating or even creating community in their local area that might even get to include some of these habits in ways that we could spend time together?

Hilda: Oh my gosh, that’s a great question. I feel like so many moms just feel like I’m going crazy right now. I can’t do it all. And I just want to say, you weren’t meant to do it all. You weren’t meant to do it all alone in particular. I went to Alaska and I met this young boy from a particular tribe. I think it was called the Athabascan tribe. And he said, you know, we used to live in community homes up here, like 300 people in a home. Can you imagine, Katie? I mean, it would be a lot. But he said, and then I think it was in the 1950s when the government said, we’ve come to help you. And then they started giving everybody individual homes. And I was like, oh, no, because then you wouldn’t have the grandmother holding the baby or the woman down the street, helping care for the child while you made the dinner. You know, it was all divided up.

And so you’re right, we do need to be intentional. I do know, because I make the Wise Traditions podcast for The Weston A. Price Foundation, that we have chapter groups all around the world, as I mentioned earlier. So people can go to their website, westonaprice.org, and find their local chapter. Sometimes they’ll even have get-togethers. They’ll have field trips to farms and kind of gatherings so that we can remember that we’re not alone and find like-minded friends. I know there’s all kinds of apps and stuff too. And, of course, I’ve developed some things on my website resources where I’m hoping to kind of have a holistic hub so that people can be encouraged to apply these things together. It feels so much better. I think this is why there’s a track team and a soccer team and because you need other people to see them and find out what’s working for them and what’s not and feel a sense of I’m not alone in this world because we were not meant to do this alone for sure.

Katie: Absolutely. And even things as simple as having meals together, inviting people over, creating like dinner parties or backyard potlucks or something. It could be very, very simple or in my own life, like I know the health benefits of sauna and I find it so much easier and more fun to sauna with people than alone. Like if I’m by myself in a sauna after 15 minutes, my brain is like, get out. This is terrible. Whereas, if I’m with people and there’s community, it’s so much easier to stay in there because of the presence of other people and that connection aspect. So I love this. And you mentioned you are building resources around this. Where can people find those? Where can they find you and stay in touch with you?

Hilda: Awesome. Yes. So go to my website, holistichilda.com. I do have a Health for the Long-Haul Course that launched recently. If it’s closed by the time this podcast airs, that’s okay. We’ll launch it again at some point. I’d like to launch it twice a year and I’m building a holistic hub for us to connect in community. So my holistichilda.com website, the Wise Traditions Podcast, and I’m HolisticHilda on Instagram and YouTube.

Katie: Wonderful. Well, I will put all of those links in the show notes as well for all of you guys listening on the go, maybe while you’re in the sunshine or taking a walk. But Hilda, it’s always so fun to get to have a conversation with you. I love that we get to go in so many different directions with this one. And I’m so deeply grateful for all that you’ve shared and for the work that you’re doing.

Hilda: I appreciate you, Katie. Thanks for having me on.

Katie: And thank you as always for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.