64 Times Around the Sun

64 Times Around the Sun

And in my most happiest of places. The garden I grow.

At 64 the body keeps revealing more of who I actually am. That is not something I expected to love as much as I do. What I did not expect was for it to keep revealing the mysteries. That is the crone. She does not slow down. She activates.

I was birthed into beauty. My father owned a salon. I have spent my entire life inside this world, in every register it offers. I have scrubbed the feet of the celebrated and the completely unknown and I will tell you there is no difference in that moment between a toe and a toe. I have dug crud from under the nails of people whose names fill marquees. I have sat at the feet of beautiful humans no one will ever know. That is where I learned what beauty actually is.

At this moment I live on a small piece of land large enough to grow over thirty medicinal and beauty botanicals. Crafted by hands, grown by humans. We may be tiny but we are mighty.

And at 64 I am releasing my first book.

I have lived many lives in this one. I feel another beginning.

At the finish line, if there is one of the second Saturn return the body does what it does. I have leaned into the crone, not fought her. I have made peace with the belly that arrives at this threshold because I understand what it is holding. It is anchoring the heart so the heart can stay open through the heartbreaks that come with a human life. That is not a flaw. That is architecture.

I may not have a snatched jaw. My eyes carry those hoods everyone is apparently at war with. But I am whole. Fully human. Not altered to fit someone else's standard. I am living my life in the sovereignty of soul and that is the only standard I answer to.

People ask me about my skincare routine. I have one. And I break it regularly. On purpose.

The routine is a foundation, not a law. It gives me something to deviate from intelligently. What I have learned across the decades of working with plant medicine on skin is that the skin speaks and most people are not listening to it. They are following a five-step protocol from a brand that does not know them. The skin is not a static organ with a fixed set of needs. It is a living report of everything happening underneath. Season, stress, sleep, grief, joy, the quality of the water you are drinking. A routine that does not bend to that information is not a routine. It is a cage.

Some mornings I skip everything. I rinse with a hydrosol and go outside and let the morning air do what it does. Some weeks the skin is asking for more oil. Some weeks it wants to be left alone. And sometimes I do a bit of Damage Control. I have learned to tell the difference by getting quiet enough to hear it. That is the whole practice. The listening.

Any brand with a one size fits all approach is not schooled enough in the skin to know what it actually needs. They threw something in a bottle and called it skincare. Your skin is a communication between your entire biology and you. It is always speaking. It is the outermost layer of your energy body, a living oracle, translating everything you have ever felt, feared, loved, and survived into the surface the world sees. It knows things your mind has not caught up to yet.

I make thirteen different serums because that is closer to the actual range of what skin needs across a life, a season, a body in motion maiden, mother & crone. You do not need all thirteen. You need the right one for where you are right now. That is a very different thing.

When I began formulating Narayan Beauty I set out to move mind, body, and spirit via the skin. Every face serum and face oil is built with the mind in full attention, with essential oils and aromatherapy chosen not for fragrance but for function. These are precious compounds. On contact they enter the bloodstream. That is not a metaphor. That is biology. Which means when you apply one of these serums you are not treating a surface. You are delivering intelligence directly into your system. Your skin receives it. Your nervous system receives it. Your emotional body receives it.

Think about that for a moment. You are sitting with yourself. You have warmed the serum between your palms. You are pressing it into your face with intention. That is not vanity. That is ceremony. You are communing with plant intelligence that has been on this earth far longer than any of us. It knows the body. It has always known the body. You are simply remembering together.

Each serum has a purpose that goes well beyond what you can see in a mirror. That was the intention from the first drop. It still is.

Someone asked me recently what supplements I take daily. The answer is none. I do not take a stack. And if you know me you know I am not injecting peptides either. I will save that conversation for its own story because it deserves one. I take what I need when I need it and when I do, it comes from mother nature. Then I step off once the work is done. A true herbal remedy will work the mind, the body, and the spirit simultaneously. That is how I know it is real.

That remembering is not small. It is in fact the whole work. Because what was done to the human body was not merely a matter of belief. We were not simply convinced we were inadequate. We were altered. The original human template was interfered with. Capacities were dimmed. Frequencies were suppressed. And then a framework was built around that diminished version and called it god's design, called it human nature, called it the seven deadly sins, called it the fall. A cage was constructed and then consecrated so that the inhabitants would never think to question the bars.

The work I do, for myself and for every client who comes to me for session, is dismantling that architecture. Not to heal what is broken. To restore what was switched off. To return to the original signal. Underneath everything that was installed is a being of extraordinary intelligence and luminosity who has been waiting, patient as a seed in winter, for exactly this moment of retrieval.

That is the pursuit underneath all the other pursuits. The serums, the botanicals, the plant medicine, these are mother nature's helpers, allies on the path, not the destination. The destination is the full restoration of the human to what it actually is.

Sixty-four years. I am just getting started.......Narayan

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