A theme that Indy Holistic Hub has governing and guiding us this year is relationships. If you think about it, we are in relationship to everything within and around us. That’s powerful!
I am honored every time I get to know and form a relationship with a new holistic professional, or aspiring one - those on a path to lend a helping hand, support another’s wellness journey, provide healthful products and so much more. I love watching them meet one another, finding synergies in their efforts, and building friendships that buoy them with inspiration and fortitude.
When I first stepped towards this journey that became Indy Holistic Hub, thankFULLY so, I would hear of people moving away from here due to a lack of “like-minded community,” and along the way I began to hear the opposite. I will always remember when I heard from someone on the west coast saying they were drawn here due to our holistic community! There are amazing beings and works being done here in Hoosier land.
At our recent quarterly Holistic Care and Fellowship gathering, we offered the holistic professionals a loving space that included a sound bath, meditation, business reflections, card making for Make-A-Wish kids, as well as connection time with each other. Thanks to The Playful Soul for being our host location, and Angela Miller (Enlighten The Soul) and Colette Pellissier (Illuminated Leadership) who facilitated the self-care experience.
Holistic providers are so often tending to others, and it’s important they are tended to as well! We heard them say it felt good to “not feel alone,” to “be the receiver
rather than the facilitator,” and that they had an appreciation for natural, genuine connections.
Are you looking for some of that? I encourage you to use our Community Calendar to dip your toe into a workshop or class, get to know a practitioner, make friends, learn and grow.
Our next Holistic Care and Fellowship gathering is Sunday, June 2 at Greenwood Family Chiropractic, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
In Holistic Care, Jenn Seffrin
Regenerative farming is practiced in harmony with nature and the natural order of things. Unlike industrial agricultural farming, which is more focused on yields and individual crops like corn or soybeans, regenerative farming focuses on soil health and biodiversity of ecosystems. Regenerative farming is about putting more back in than what you take away. It’s taking care of the land instead of just taking away from the land. It’s not so much a specific practice, but rather implementing a variety of sustainable techniques such as doing more no-till
farming to decrease soil erosion, and not covering everything with chemicals and killing everything off to grow the next crop.
“It’s recycling, in general,” says Amy McKamey, a registered veterinary tech who owns Heritage Meadows Farm in Clayton, Indiana. “For instance, we plant things to promote the use of beneficial insects for the natural way, instead of spraying chemicals to get rid of bugs.”
Regenerative farming is nothing new; it’s just a new term.
“It’s how my family has always done farming,” says McKamey. Farming in her family dates back to 1340!
The primary mission on McKamey’s farm is to raise and protect the rare and endangered genetics of heritage livestock and poultry breeds that are on the verge of extinction. They raise large black hogs, Katahdin sheep, and lots of poultry, including ducks, geese and chickens.
“We do all our own breeding and sell breeding stock, including shipping and
hatching eggs,” says McKamey, who notes that they never lock up their birds. “Our birds free-range all over the farm to the point where chickens sleep in trees.”
They also harvest and sell the seed. Her most recent passion involves training livestock guardian dogs.
“We pull dogs from shelters, retrain them and place them in new homes to protect the animals,” she says. “Taking a dog someone has thrown away and changing the life for that animal makes my heart feel good. Saving rare genetics - both animals and plants - goes along with that too.”
Andy and Tammy Orem both come from a farming and education background. Located on a farm just outside of Shelbyville, Indiana, Tammy teaches fourth grade and Andy is a guidance counselor. They also raise cattle, pigs and chickens. Tammy’s parents both came from small farms, and Andy’s father was a first-generation farmer.
“Regenerative farming is all about rebirth, the cycle of life and helping life along,” says Andy, who became intrigued by regenerative farming when he visited Polyface Farm in Virginia, a farm that embraced environmentally friendly farming practices. As for Tammy, she was eager to learn more about the healing nature of food.
The pair doesn’t use any herbicides or pesticides on Orem Family Farm. As a result, they’ve seen many monarch butterflies, frogs and snakes on the property, as well as flourishing grasses.
“It’s fun seeing things come to life,” says Tammy, who notes that a lot of the grassfed products in America are imported from other countries. The Orems’ cattle are fed purely grass, so they get the rich Omega-3 fatty acids that are healthy and important for our diet. In addition, did you know that pasture-raised birds have three times the amount of Omega-3s, 50% more vitamin A, D and E, and 21% less saturated fat?
Duane Freed is the owner of The Freed Farm, a pasture-raised, 50-acre poultry farm
outside of Greensburg, Indiana. Although he’s a first-generation farmer, he’s been interested in the industry since his youth when he was asked by a dairy farmer in Pennsylvania to help him milk cows in the afternoon.
“I made $7 a day, but would have done it for free because I love being close to nature, working with the animals and working with my hands,” says Freed. As a teenager he read “Pastured Poultry Profits” by Joel Salatin, a guidebook on how to profit by raising chickens on pasture. In his 30s Freed was CEO of Moyer’s Chicks, a hatchery that ships commercial-quality, day-old chicks throughout the U.S. and eastern Canada. The job gave him an inside look at the poultry industry, and it reinvigorated his love for the backyard pasture poultry model. Around this same time, he and his wife started raising 50 to 100 chickens on his acre-and-a-half farm in Pennsylvania. In April 2023 they moved to Greensburg, eager to live a slower-paced life and connect daily with nature.
“Something feels simple, right and human about being close to the land,” he says. “This year it felt like forever for winter to turn into spring, and I think it’s because I’m so much more aware of what’s happening with the earth. It used to be more of a glance as I’m rushing off to work, and now I’m in sync with the rhythms of nature.”
McKamey feels that these days, more people are showing an interest in growing their own food and having a few animals like chickens in their backyard.
“Even though there are a lot of advances in the field, regenerative farming is also about people who are coming back around and doing it the old way,” she says.
Freed notes that there are small steps everyone can take to make a difference, whether it’s buying products from a local farmer, planting a small garden on your property or putting a tomato plant in a pot on your deck.
“There’s value in working in harmony with nature,” Freed says. “In doing so, we help ourselves, the environment and the world that we live in.”
The best place to start is right where we are.
It’s easy to be spiritual when everything’s going the way we want. We love ourselves and our lives. We love the people we share our lives with. We feel supported and vibrant within ourselves, and compassionate with others. It’s easy in those times to feel like life is happening for us and that we are on the right track. Our light shines brightly without much conscious effort on our part.
When things go sideways, though, the light within us can move to a place within us that is harder for us to access, obscured by a film of gunk. We can become frustrated and impatient with ourselves and others. Our sensibilities can get hijacked by troubling news, sending us into a negative spiral of critical thinking and judgement. We sleep poorly, and we might abandon our supportive self-care practices (not making time to exercise, eating more on-the-go meals), further depleting our energy stores and disrupting our capacity for selfleadership.
Personality science tells us that if challenging times go on long enough, our sense of resourcefulness gets taxed, and we will recruit our thoughts and actions from our oldest and least-developed capabilities. Under persistent duress, our problemsolving acumen declines, we get foggy, and we can’t find our way out of a paper bag. We certainly can’t be considerate or muster up any self-mastery for our own inner state, much less our interactions with other sacred, stressed beings who cross our path. I’ll invite you to pause for a moment and notice what your default responses might be when you are energetically taxed, whether that be mentally, emotionally, physically or spiritually. What are your patterns of thought and action when you are under protracted periods of challenge? Repressive defaults cause us to withdraw, cloister and retreat so that we can rebuild our energy stores. Reactive patterns cause us to lash out in order to cast off our discomfort. These patterns can be both an Achilles heel and a tremendous area of opportunity.
“The rest of creation is waiting, breathless, for you to take your place.”
- David Whyte, poet
We are surrounded by it. We ARE it. It’s moving fast, and it’s a long game. It’s everywhere, all around us, all over the world, likely even throughout the cosmos. It’s coursing through our individual and collective veins. In our politics, health care, education, financial markets and our environment. Transformation is afoot.
Transformation can be defined as a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance, a metamorphosis during a life cycle, and the spontaneous change of one element into another.
Think about the caterpillar changing form into a butterfly. Hallmarks of transformation include disruption, friction and change. Let’s be clear - it’s not meant to feel comfortable.
While resistance to transformation is essentially futile, it is a natural and even purposeful element in the process given our human condition. The discomfort of the current situation has to be greater than our fear of the unknown before we’ll let down our guard long enough for transformation to take form.
The very nature of transformation asks us to level-up our default responses. Transformation is always asking us to go to the edge: the edge of our comfort zone, the edge of our patterns, the line between what is familiar and what is new and never done before. Isn’t this a hallmark of innovation? It takes us, by its nature, to the other side of what we already know, in service of discovering something new. We’re then able to see what we simply cannot see in our comfort zone: something different. Something novel and more…possible.
Even in any discomfort we may feel, there are more elevated ways of responding that will better support the direction that transformation wants to point us toward.
Can you see how our default patterns keep us stuck in the same old cycle? Imagine a world that stays stalled where we are right now. That’s motivation enough for me dig deep and discover new, more elevated response patterns in service to moving forward in a brighter world.
Changes at scale start with changes within each of us individually. It’s a brilliant design, don’t you think? Through this lens we each have an essential contribution to make, cultivating habits of thought and action that allow our light to shine - not just when everything is going the way we want, but during times of challenge or duress, because that’s when they are needed most.
How can we elevate our self-leadership, then, when our habits and the force of entropy are seemingly working against us? Our superpower lies in our ability to consciously choose new habits of thought and action, versus being perpetually driven by old, primal habits. It doesn’t have to be pretty or perfect. We just need to begin. And when we realize that we’ve regressed (because we will regress), we simply choose to begin again. We get endless second chances to begin again.
The more you practice noticing your habits of thought and action, without judgment, the more leverage you’ll have. Practice paying attention to the energy that your thoughts and actions ride on. Just notice.
Once you build your compassionate noticing muscles, practice choosing the highest-frequency thought you can hold that still feels authentic for you. For example…
• Are you against injustice or are you a compassionate advocate for fairness? Let’s attend to fairness! Fairness is a more elevated focus than injustice, even if your eventual actions are identical.
• Are you making someone else wrong, or offering an alternate perspective to expand and enrich the breadth of a conversation that matters to you? Let’s enrich the conversations that matter! The greatest outcomes will happen when we can include each other’s perspectives and expand our own, without taking differences personally or needing to agree. Different perspectives are a good thing.
• Are you encouraging someone else’s courage in trying something they’ve never done before, perhaps doing it imperfectly, or are you judging their action as imperfect and criticizing them? In the elevated approach, we focus on what we want, which is to be helpful. Let’s catch each other doing something right, and rebuild our individual and collective self-belief!
Feel the difference between these? It’s subtle yet powerful.
We get to choose, thought by thought and action by action, whether we are going to contribute to the sum total of funky gunky energy in ourselves and on the planet, or the sum total of loving and compassionate energy. These small, ordinary acts of selfleadership ladder into a palpable force for good that ripples out into the world.
And that seems like good news worth sharing.
Colette Pellissier is a Lightworker in corporate America offering Executive & Team Coaching and Organization Development services. She founded Illuminated Leadership as a doorway to develop conscious leaders and guide growth-oriented professionals through the changes caused by evolutionary pull— in their lives & relationships, in their careers and in their businesses. www. illuminatedleadership.com
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We are in a time of improved understanding on how emotional and mental stress impact our own well-being. Many of us are being very intentional about caring for our emotional health, which makes it a great time to think about how we can help our pets do the same. Reducing stress for pets is an important aspect of their overall well-being and quality of life.
In my recent interview on "The Cat Conversation" podcast, I welcomed Dr. Natalie Olden-Stahl, a leading integrative veterinarian, to discuss some key factors that contribute to stress in pets and how you can help them. When I asked Olden-Stahl what is the most common stressor for pets, the answer was surprising.
“It is just when we leave the home every day,” Olden-Stahl says. “I don't think we think about that. Sometimes I think we think we have kitties that are maybe a little bit more like a house plant - that we can go for the weekend, we can leave out some dry food - but for the kitties, that could be a huge change for them.”
Now, we can’t just stay home all of the time to lower our pet’s stress, although that might lower our stress too. So how do we think holistically about our pets when it comes to stress?
Here are some proactive steps we discussed, to create a calming and supportive environment for your pets:
1. Get routine checkups. If your pet seems stressed, it’s important to address or rule out medical causes. We know pain and discomfort are stressful for us. They are stressful for your pet too, but they can’t say “Hey, please help me. I'm hurting.” They will show this through their behavior.
So why is the routine checkup so important? “One of the things about going to the vet regularly is that they have a baseline,” Olden-Stahl says. “They have baseline weight and they have maybe baseline blood work and urinalysis - something that can give you a good indicator of when they were fine.”
Knowing what your pet’s results are when they are healthy allows your vet to help you more accurately identify when something is off. Keeping our pets physically healthy is key to reducing stress.
Cats in particular are misunderstood when it comes to their stress indicators. Going outside of the box is actually as stressful for you as it is for your cat. I can’t stress enough - no pun intended - the importance of having your cat checked for medical issues if there are litter-box problems. This is your cat’s way of communicating to you, their trusted caretaker, that something is wrong and they need your help.
2. Use stress-relieving pheromones. Simply plug in and let the calm begin. There are stress-relieving pheromones for both cats and dogs that simply plug into your outlet. You don’t smell anything but your pet receives a dose of the calming pheromones to help them feel safe in their environment.
3. Use enrichment toys and food puzzles. Your pets NEED to play! Often, unwanted behaviors come from the natural energy your pet would need in the wild but still has as your domesticated family member. Food puzzles help stimulate your pet and slow down those fast eaters, helping them digest. Technology has come a long way with motion-activated, interactive toys to keep your pets playing and active even when you’re not around. And of course, there is no better way to bond and help your pet feel safe than to have a good play session with them. Helping them meet this natural need together will reduce stress on both you and your pet.
4. Provide enough resources. Many pet owners don’t realize that pets get stressed over their food and water bowls - and for cats, the number and location of litter boxes. Provide adequate access for your pet to all of these resources. It’s an easy way to ensure that if there is any subtle resource guarding going on, or if there is simply an area of the house that doesn’t feel safe, your pet has other options.
5. Implement sound therapy. Sound therapy can be especially beneficial for pets who are prone to anxiety from loud noises such as thunderstorms. Sound therapy can help new pets feel safe and secure in their new surroundings.
“Because [pets] are individual creatures just like we are, definitely test any of these things with the safety of your presence,” Olden-Stahl says.
I discovered the magic of singing bowls for cats through YouTube, and it’s now part of our daily routine. I actually did a “Pet Pals TV” story on one of the leading experts in cat sound baths.
The great thing about these suggestions? They are simple and affordable. “If we have a diffuser running and we've determined that one of those sound therapies is something that they like, those are things that I would say are not expensive, and we didn't have to rearrange our house,” OldenStahl says.
By incorporating calming resources and creating stress-free environments for your pets, you can significantly reduce stress levels, ultimately enhancing their overall well-being and quality of life - and reducing stress for the whole family!
Dr. Natalie Olden-Stahl is an integrative veterinarian who's been practicing for over a decade. She is acupuncture certified and nutrition certified. She began at a rural practice and then went into emergency medicine, which then led to an interest in integrative medicine, where she now practices a variety of modalities. One of her primary goals is to help educate her clients and the veterinary community on integrative medicine to enrich the lives of pets and reduce stress on those working in the veterinary medicine.
KJ can be seen on Pet Pals TV reaching over 41 million households nationwide each week as well as being the host of the award winning KJ TODAY Show, your place for the positive vibes of pop culture, people to know and pets! She is also the author of the Amazon #1 new release, Raised by Cats: Behind the Mic and the Meows. She lives in Indianapolis with her husband and seven rescue cats. Her experience includes 12 years working in a cats only clinic, she is a Reiki Master and dedicates time to helping multiple animal welfare organizations. Follow KJ on social media here: kjonsocial.com
Ayurveda is a natural holistic medical science from India. A comprehensive science of medicine, Ayurveda offers treatment towards all disease conditions including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, weight gain, digestive issues, sleep issues, mental/emotional conditions, and musculoskeletal conditions.
According to Ayurveda, you have a unique mind-body constitution. Because all bodies are different, what is healthy for one person may or may not be healthy for another. The medical practice of Ayurveda is founded upon the recognition of your individual baseline bodily constitution.
Just as certain foods may be healthy for
one person and disease-promoting for another, the same is true with medicines and treatments. In Ayurveda there is no “cure for arthritis.” Not only do people have different mind-body constitutions, but the causes for their conditions also vary. Thus in Ayurveda we treat each person according to their current unique biological condition. If 100 people come to us with the same “arthritis diagnosis,” we will create 100 different treatment protocols suited to each individual.
Benjamin Franklin wrote that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This wisdom underpins the rapidly expanding cultural shift towards the holistic wellness paradigm.
Today conventional medicine is often a
disease-reactive, symptom-based approach, where the goal is to destroy the disease.
In Ayurveda we elevate your quality of life today, rather than wait for you to have a disease. Our focus is to invigorate, cultivate and bolster your natural health and vitality. It’s a preventative lifestyle medicine approach, illuminating proactive health preservation as the shield against future diseases.
Not yet recognized in the United States, Ayurveda is a registered medical discipline in over 16 countries including India, Switzerland and Brazil. Ayurveda is practiced all over the world, and its popularity is increasing rapidly as more and more people experience its profound impact.
It’s easy. You start with an initial consultation where you’ll gain insight and understanding of your current health condition. You’ll learn the causes for your imbalances, what’s creating them and how to reverse them. You’ll learn the most effective changes you can make to elevate your health, and walk away with a complete written protocol addressing diet, lifestyle, exercise, breathing, herbs, treatments and formulations.
Have other questions about Ayurveda?
Email us at info@indyholistichub.com.
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