KIANA, DIRECTOR of EDUCATION, FORIA

My background started in birth work. In college, I had a really amazing self-made bachelors degree at UC Santa Cruz called women agriculture and spirituality. My interests in health, wellness, and the female body lead me into birth work so I became a practicing Doula for a number of years. When I had my kids, I really understood it’s not just about birth, there are all of these moments within the lifetime of being a woman or someone who identifies as a woman where we cycle with the moon, we have our menstruation, and we also have these larger life cycles if we do have children.

FIRST THING IN THE MORNING

I press snooze on my alarm. It’s really important to be motivated in the morning but I usually hit snooze twice, at least and probably have one if not both of my kids climb into bed with me. I try to get a really sweet moment with them before we get to the hustle of the day. I’ve also been recently into the practice of setting powerful intentions and having prayers on my wall that I focus on. I also do hot lemon water and add a little bit of sea salt to it.

CAREER

When I met Mathew at Foria, I was studying to become a sex educator & also studying to do intervaginal pelvic work. All the things kind of merged together because with the background I was coming from I could really speak to a lot of our products and how they work and have the foresight to go, you know maybe no ones talking about this problem but our products may be applicable to this specific thing. We’re not just talking about pleasure. We have a lot of conversations about pain and all of these different life changes. It’s really been quite fulfilling to pair these two worlds together.

ELEMENTAL MEDICINE

Sundays are spent in the sun and at the beach with all the elemental medicine around us. It’s a holy day of rest & I use it to reset. I end up doing a lot of housekeeping things & try to re-organize everything. My kids and I love going garage shopping together. I have a hat obsession right now. I love making a really big breakfast and since the sun is back out I’m in this really interesting spot in Topanga where the trees are very tall and their right in the same plane as the sun so when it’s winter the suns behind the trees and when its summer I get full sun in my house. I feel like I go through the seasons so much more intensely because of the light.

CONSISTENT RITUALS

I use all of our Foria products pretty religiously, particularly our Basics Tonic. CBD makes me a better mom. It helps my stress levels and it actually makes me feel like it works. The CBD Tonic is 100% foundational to my wellness routine. I like to kickstart my mornings with an adaptogenic drink. I make a hot tea with MCT oil, two egg yokes, some Raw Cacao, Basic Tonic, a few Sun Potion Adaptogens and blend it up. If I can’t make it to one of the brilliantly fabulous Korean spas in LA I take a super dense Epsom salt bath. I’ll put in four pounds of Epsom salt into the bath and soak for two hours and that’s just a really detoxifying way to get magnesium in your system and the next best thing to getting into the ocean and swimming.

RELATIONSHIP WITH LA TRAFFIC

I commute to Venice three days a week from Topanga but it’s next to the ocean so one thing I always do is get in the lane closest to the ocean and if we’re in a dead stop I roll down my window so I can hear the waves. I have an ever-evolving playlist and when I get super obsessive about a song, I’ll listen to it a thousand times until I’ve gotten a full dopamine response from it.

LIFE-CHANGING RECOMMENDATIONS

(#1) Not the amount of sleep time that you're getting but the quality of your sleep. If you can support the quality of your sleep to be denser and more nourishing then you will have so much more energy and more capacity. Every night I take really high-quality magnesium and CBD and I sleep like a baby. (#2) In my early twenties, I had hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, and all sorts of hormonal imbalances. The one thing that supported me through that was getting very clear about what food works for me. I don’t think there’s a specific diet that works for anyone. I think you really have to listen to your body, what it’s responding to, what it needs are. And that doesn’t necessarily mean cravings it means like really deeply listen to what kind of nutrition you need and that totally changed my hormones. I balanced my hormones essentially through nutrition. (#3) This one’s coming from my background as a pleasure advocate and somebody who knows what happens as you experience pleasure and orgasm and how they’re beneficial to your wellbeing. To really start looking at pleasure and self-pleasuring as a self-care practice and the more that you know your body the more you can explore it the more you're gonna be able to do that with your partner as well.

ADVICE TO HERSELF AT 25

When I was 25 I was living on an island by myself about to have a baby and become a single parent. It was the most challenging thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. The idea of coming into that amount of responsibility with no financial or career stability. If I could give myself any advice at that moment, it would be to lean in and savor all the beauty of those moments. Everything continues to unfold in beauty even when something’s very frightening and unknown. It was a piece of my journey that has made me who I am today and made what I’m doing today possible. So to slow down and be like I really need time and it’s okay to take your time and it’s okay to be slow. To keep your emotions in great company and to be there for them. If I didn’t take the time to live with my mom and tune myself in and land that plane of motherhood and take care of myself, I wouldn’t have had any of the resources to really come back into my life. I would’ve been super traumatized basically so yea, if you can, slow down and savor every minute, your freedom, your relationships, your breakups, savor your losses and your failures and you’ll really learn how to savor those big moments as well cause it’s all part of the same thing.