Malnourished

I think I’m malnourished as a person. I read it in my palms. I’m sure it’s something I knew intuitively but ignored when not actively burnt out.

The thing about palms is that they change, but they don’t change so rapidly that you can blame what you see on Mercury retrograde or a bad flu. Palms reflect patterns and personality traits, then show us where those things lead. If you have a hot temper and you’re quick to make decisions, you might see a lot of setbacks in relationships (flaws on the heart line, lots of short lines of influence, etc.)… If you’re like me, and you’ve been in a long period of self abandonment, you might share a few markers of that on your palms.

The first thing that concerns me is my life line. It is the line most prone to change. Ideally it runs from the inside of the hand between the thumb and pointer finger all the way down to the wrist. It’s the orange line in the image. This line doesn’t tell you how long your life will be. It tells you how long you will experience vitality in your life. On my left hand it goes to my wrist! This is my recessive hand. On my dominant hand, which shows the path I am currently on, it stops about halfway there. This shows vitality being all used up when I still have life left to live.

Although I came into this world with potential for vitality through all my days, I’m not on that path now. Some people have the opposite markings on their palms. They may have been sick as children (short life line on the recessive hand) but they’ve done a lot of work as adults to improve their health and overall wellbeing (long life line on dominant hand). If I stopped reading my palms here, I might think that this is predominantly a health issue. I need to eat more nourishing foods, sleep more, take my vitamins… I DO need to do those things, but vitality is more than just what we experience in our bodies.

The muscular area under the thumb that the life line wraps around is your mount of Venus. Venus is love, beauty, connection, femininity, and affection.

Take a quick look at this space on both of your hands. Notice the color, size, and resilience of the skin bouncing back after you poke it with your finger.

Just like with the life line your dominant hand is reflective of your current state and your active self, while your recessive hand reflects more of how you entered the world and what you were given. It’s not quite as simple with the mount of Venus, though.

The recessive hand also shows us how we RECEIVE love. This is the hand where lines of influence appear representing people that have impacted us significantly. The dominant hand is how we send that love out- people that we impact significantly can show up as lines of influence here.

My dominant hand has a healthy pink color, full size, and is very resilient when poked. The left side is not gaunt, but it’s slightly smaller, paler, and less resilient. This tells me that my capacity to receive love (and other Venusian qualities) is diminished in comparison to my capacity to express it.

The problem is me. I am fortunate in that I have been loved by many people my entire life. I was born into a big family and I have close friends as an adult that I can trust and rely on. Love is all around me and I’m not letting it in as much as I could be. I’m not good at asking for help, and my inner dialogue is not always kind.

I do think that I love myself and feel deserving of love, but I don’t know how far it extends. As I took in my own reading of my hands, I wondered if I have ever nourished myself without a goal. I don’t think I have, not consistently anyway. I’ve tried to be prettier, heal from illness, get pregnant, lose weight, gain weight, etc. But I’ve never prioritized nourishment- mind, body, and spirit- as the default way to live.

I want to break down my resistance to caring for myself, so I decided to spend 77 days (11 weeks) being really intentional about nourishing myself daily. I don’t have to do the same thing every day (ok, I am going to try to actually take my vitamins/supplements) but I do need to think about it every day. I don’t expect anything on my palms to change after 11 weeks. That’s not the goal, though I do hope that nourishment eventually becomes so natural to me that my trajectory changes. If I totally missed the mark reading my palms, the only risk is that I took better care of myself. I’m willing to take that risk!