Wellness With Julie Civiello Polier: Face Reading, Seasonal Living, and the Wisdom of Slowing Down
Julie Civiello Polier has built her work around a simple but powerful idea: the body is always communicating with us, if we’re willing to pay attention. A holistic facialist, face reader, author, and lifelong student of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Julie explores the connection between our skin, emotions, environment, and overall wellbeing. Her approach to beauty goes far beyond the surface, blending facial reflexology, massage, ancient wisdom, and intuitive observation to help people better understand what their bodies may be asking for.
For Julie, wellness is less about doing more and more about learning how to listen. It means honoring the seasons, making space for rest, caring for digestion, moving through emotion, and finding joy in the rituals that bring us back to ourselves.
We sat down with Julie to talk about what our faces can teach us, the beauty of seasonal living, why slowing down can unlock creativity, and the simple practices she returns to every day.
Q: You're known for holistic face reading and facial reflexology — can you share one thing your face has "told" you about your health that changed the way you approached your wellness?
A: Oh yes, I’m in daily conversation with myself… mostly listening and lovingly observing my subtle shifts. One thing I really watch are my eyes, and when my right eye retreats a bit into my skull, or the brow above gets heavier, that’s usually my que to rest more. I love my work and I could really always be thinking about it, creating something new, writing a new Substack, etc. Yet what I’m finding, and this recent summer has really been washing over me to teach me yet another layer of this, that when I am relaxed in nature, and “off-duty” this is when I am most harmonized and this is a magical time when I receive my epiphanies, downloads, and divine creation ideas to implement into my life, relationships, and offerings.
One other thing I’ve been noticing is vertical lines in my upper lip, only on my left side. These lines or wrinkles in the upper lip represent “tiny, little hurts” in TCM Face Reading. I used to see these a lot in my clients when I gave facials, and I’d massage them out by wearing a glove and working inside my clients’ mouths and I’d teach them to curl their upper lip over their teeth to stretch out the tension and rewrite the fascia. Because these “little hurts” are only showing up on my Left Side, this tells me these hurts are in relationship to a prominent male in my life. My cousin passed away last year, and he was very much like a father figure to me, as my father and I do not have a relationship. I miss my cousin dearly and these little lines show me I have some feelings of ache and grief I need to feel all the way through by letting them up and out onto my exhales, within daily movement, and by honoring his memory with joyful action in my own life.
Q: A morning (or nightly) ritual you swear by?
A: Prayer + Gratitude!
Q: You teach that skin and physical symptoms are often messengers of stored emotion. How has that lens shifted the way you support your own body — and what role does what you put IN your body play in that healing?
A: By really adopting this philosophy, I’ve developed so much compassion for myself, my experiences, and my feelings. When I struggled with cystic acne for many years, I felt my body was against me, attacking me no matter what I tried. The acne was a message for me to release deep judgments I held against myself, to detox my liver (the source of most acne), and tend to my digestion with probiotics and enzymes. During those years, I put intense pressure on myself to be skinny to get roles as an actress (my career path at the time), and I burned myself out working many jobs and saying yes to everyone who needed something.
It’s a wonderful shift in my body to honor myself first in every way.
Q: What's your favorite Juna product and how do you incorporate it into your everyday routine?
A: I absolutely love Juna’s digestive enzymes. I always have them on me, or in a little container in my pocket book for when I’m dining out and about or on a trip! My belly is sooo much happier with them and my forehead lines are lighter or erased when I am super consistent with taking the enzymes.
Q: When was the last time you felt inspired?
A: In the redwoods in northern California! Placing my hands and forehead on those trees, feeling the deep wisdom they hold, listening to them and the over 2,000 years of experience they hold – it all makes my imagination sparkle and come alive.
Q: Your Substack is a space for ancient beauty wisdom and slower living. What's one old or forgotten practice — whether it's lymphatic work, reflexology, medical astrology, or something else — that you think every woman should know about?
A: Seasonal living is really the core of what I am learning and re-learning and it is what TCM shows us is the secret key to longevity, wellbeing, and harmony inside your being and outside.
Observing the elements and the seasons reminds us how to eat, how to rest, how to be social, how to thrive. And when we are out of whack, we can easily right ourselves by returning to what is in season (with produce grown locally, with sleep patterns, with keeping our feet, necks, lower backs warm in Autumn, Winter, and Spring).
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