Incorporating Ayurvedic Principles With Any Diet: 38

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Podcast. I am really excited to share my guest with you today. She is a doctor of Ayurvedic medicine. She's very, um, been into yoga in the past as I have, so I think we'll have a lot in common and a lot to discuss. Welcome, and if you could just start by telling everyone a little bit about yourself, medicine, um, kind of how you, uh, your health journey. I know you mentioned some things you've been working on since you're a child, so just, uh, Give people a brief overview and then we'll go into the details more.

Sure. Well, thanks for having me. It's nice to be here. Of course. Um, where to start? Well, my journey started when I was about 2 years old. I was, the story goes is that I was playing in a field at a park that had been recently sprayed with pesticides and I got very ill from it and nobody really knew what to do. So I got treated very heavily with steroids and antibiotics. And, you know, as we know today, that has consequences on the gut and the immune system and all that jazz. But nobody really knew what to do about that at the time. So most of my childhood I spent chronically ill with a series of seemingly unconnected illnesses that nobody really knew what was going on. Now I can look back at it and say, oh yeah, my gut microbiome was really sacrifice, and my immune system was really low. And we can put all those things together. And then my nervous system was responding to the trauma of both that and my home environment and all that stuff. We can now put those pieces together. At the time, I was just on— I had all these seemingly unconnected health issues. And I basically, by the time I was about 19 years old, I was in college and I didn't think I was going to live to be 30. I was on about 9 different pharmaceutical medications. I was working with the disability service at my school. I was, I had neuropathy and neurological issues down my arms and hands. I had chronic digestive issues. I was in chronic pain. You know, those are just some of them. And I had a moment where I actually, you know, without going into too much detail, I had a kind of an aha moment after I had a gift certificate to a craniosacral session. I don't know if you or your readers know what craniosacral therapy is, but it's a form of very gentle manual therapy on the head and the spine and the sacrum. And I went home and I had this moment of looking down at my medications and this almost like feeling of clarity that I hadn't felt in maybe ever in my life. And I just had this moment of, okay, it's time for me to take responsibility for my own health. And I had no idea what that meant at the time, but time for me to do that. So that's when my health journey really started is I started to change my diet. I started to I started to learn about industrial agriculture and how that influences our food. I started to explore alternative therapies and I started to follow the dots of what worked for me. And it was about a 10-year journey from that point, which ultimately led me to, when I graduated college, instead of going off to get a job, what I went off to do was find a yoga teacher, go off to find a yogi. And a spiritual teacher. I really felt the desire to do that and that, that was what I needed. And so I did. And I spent about 10 years, um, very intimately connected and living very closely with a yogi and who taught me the physical practice of yoga, but also the spiritual, mental, energetic lifestyle properties of yoga, which yoga is because, you know, ultimately that's what yoga is. It's not asana. Asana is just one limb of yoga. And then also to Ayurveda. And Ayurveda helped me to reverse the very— the deep-seated imbalances that I had in the deepest tissues of my body combined with yoga. And I was able to reverse all of my health conditions. It was an incredibly empowering and inspiring experience to go through. And so I decided that that was part of what my offering to the world would be, is help people do the same in their unique environments.

That is such an amazing story and so many things that you had to overcome to even get there. I guess I wanted Just for, in the interest of time, jump forward to what you were saying about having sought out a spiritual teacher or yoga teacher. And I don't know if you had a sense of what that even meant at that time until probably you were into it. Because I don't have a similar background of spending time, you know, living with yoga or in an ashram or anything like that. But I am a yoga instructor. I have over 1,000 hours of training. Part of that was yoga therapy training in which we discussed Ayurveda, which is how one of the reasons that I got a little bit more passionate about it is when I had that deeper learning. So I guess I'm just wondering, um, all that background information to ask the question, what was it like when you first started living with a yogi and what were you looking to learn? Were you really delving deep into the lifestyle at that time? Because I also love that you mentioned about asana just being one limb of yoga. And some people will say, well, don't you do yoga anymore? I'm like, I do yoga every day. You know, now Do I do asana every day anymore? I don't. But I think it's important to talk maybe a little bit about some of those other aspects of yoga and how that was helping you kind of heal and reintegrate yourself with these different practices.

Yeah. Well, the first thing that I noticed was, firstly, I'll say that I had been to several yoga classes. I was a dancer. I was a professional dancer growing up. And I had been to several yoga classes and found them quite boring. You know, I was used to going to dance classes and performing and all that stuff, and so yoga was just kind of like, what is this? This is boring. And, but I took a course in college that was the Theory and Practice of Yoga, and we started reading books on the philosophy of yoga and the spiritual practice of yoga. And that's what I started to fall in love with. And I started to be— have these experiences of being very drawn to that and having this almost knowing that I needed to follow that path in my life. And in these books, they started, you know, they talk sometimes about teachers or gurus or something like that. And that was such a foreign thing to me growing up in the West. Like, how does one even go about finding a spiritual spiritual teacher, or what does that even mean? And nobody I knew in my life had ever gone a path like that. So, you know, how would I? So, I, you know, what I did is I just found myself very sparked by that. And so I listened to that. And eventually I ran into, you know, life led me to a yoga teacher, a real teacher. And And the first thing that I noticed is that I went to a class and it was, you know, I would basically just go to their condo and do yoga and talk. And that was for about a year in the beginning. It was just me going to yoga, doing some yoga and talking. And I cried my life out. For about a year, I just cried. We joked for years afterwards that the couch that we sat on was just like full of my tears because I cried for a year. And I would do yoga and I would do asanas and I do pranayama and we do meditation. And I would have, you know, memories or experiences or whatever that was unblocking in my system. And I would just cry. It sounds like it's kind of embarrassing, but whatever it is, what it is. And we talked a lot.

We—

my teacher taught me the yoga of food. He taught me the yoga of breathing. He taught me the yoga of dance, you know, how to integrate or how to apply yoga to my movement, to my lifestyle, to my work, to my art, to, you know, all of these things that all of that is yoga. Yoga, as you know, yoga The word is to yoke yourself to the divine. And so that relationship to the inner self, the inner teacher is what we're looking for. So, I mean, it's a whole— it would be a whole rabbit hole to get into that whole experience of those 10 years and the evolution of it. But that was really what I was experiencing. And in that, in that opening and in that liberation and in that being felt and heard and seen and acknowledged for my divinity, um, was where then the combination of, you know, physical practice and, you know, Ayurveda and things like that could then come in and support the physical health simultaneously.

Yeah, it's inter— before we move on to the Ayurveda, I do just want to— and thank you so much for like sharing all that. I know that like talking about crying isn't necessarily like one of the most fun things or probably one of the best memories about it. But I do feel personally after, you know, it's, gosh, it's going to be almost 30 years that I've been involved with yoga and practicing yoga. But I had a, you know, I think I have had, and I know students have had similar experiences of, I don't know if it's like connection with the divine or just release on a physiological level from a combination of the postures and the and the effect that breath has on your nervous system. And having studied more on the Ayurveda side of it, before we go into that, but can— is there anything that you learned about the energetics of it that kind of puts that in perspective? Why people kind of just— in my personal experience has been sometimes I don't even know where it's coming from. Like, it doesn't— it's not even a current worry or something that I'm struggling with at the moment. But it's just like an overwhelming sense of like release almost. I don't know. I don't know if any of that's making sense, but I'm hoping that somebody has gone farther into the, like the, you know, the science and the Ayurveda part of it that you might be able to tie that together a little bit for people.

Yeah. There's, um, there's a few different directions we can come from with that. Um, so let's talk first about the nervous system. So in a somewhat simplified definition, Um, we have two main sides of the nervous system, which I'm sure you know, and I'm sure several people know, um, which would be what we call the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system. And they're both parts of the autonomic nervous system. So the parasympathetic is our rest and digest response, and our sympathetic is our fight, flight, or freeze response. So we often call that the stress response. So we have both, we need both, we're constantly going back and forth between these two responses in our nervous system throughout the day. However, trauma, stress, our normal daily modern lifestyles, things like driving, Those are all threatening situations that, in a way, actually, we perceive them to be a threat to our survival. And that puts us in our sympathetic nervous system, our fight, flight, and freeze response, typically more often than we spend in the parasympathetic response. However, health almost always— not 100% of the time, because there's very— once in a while, someone needs to kind of activate their sympathetic nervous system. Most of the time, with most chronic illness, most chronic inflammation, most trauma, what we need is to spend more time in the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest response. That needs to be our home base. And our sympathetic response, we go there once in a while to survive a situation, to, you know, get pumped up to do some activity, things like that, but then we come home to to our rest and digest response. That's all tying back to your question in that when we go to a yoga class, for instance, and we have this deep experience of release, what happens in our nervous system is that we activate the rest and digest response, the parasympathetic response first. In order to be in that state, there's a, there's a nerve called the vagus nerve, which you may, people may have heard of, that extends from the brainstem down through, connects to pretty much all the vital organs, including the heart, and also to the gut. It's the gut-mind superhighway that gives our messages from the gut to the brain and the brain to the gut. So, in order to be in that state, we have to have the feeling of safety. And the feeling of safety both in our environment, in our relationships, and ultimately, in kind of the oneness with all, the oneness with the divine, is where we feel that deepest sense of safety. And so, sometimes you have these like layers of release, right? Sometimes you have a release and it's like, "Whew, that was good. That was a good emotional release," right? A channel opened up. And sometimes you have those deep, like existential feelings of liberation and release where you've got that deepest sense of safety and belonging. Ultimately yoga, you know, the, you're one with the divine. So that's one way of answering your question. From the Ayurvedic perspective, there are 72,000 channels. In the body. We call them nadis. Very similar to what we, you know, a chakra in, in yoga is the intersection of two or more of those channels, the ida and the pingala, and then several other channels at each chakra. And it kind of creates an energy vortex at that place. And there's several other of those points in the body. We call those marma points in Ayurveda, where channels connect to almost like intersections at a highway where the multiple highways intersect. That's what we call a marma point or a chakra. And when there's congestion in those channels, whether that be physical, like congestion of an artery, or it's energetic, emotional, where there's congestion of a, of a subtle channel, like there is traffic on a highway, and then the traffic opens up and you can drive freely. That's what's happening in the body. Those channels open up, and the clearer our channels are, then ultimately the healthier we are and the more free or liberated that we feel.

Yeah, I love that analogy to the highway, and just suddenly the traffic opens up and you feel like you can, like, It's almost like you can breathe again, right? When you start moving. And I think it's interesting for people. So a lot of people hear this type of stuff. And everybody that's ever listened to this podcast already knows I'm very science-minded. I do a ton of research. I, I'm like, show me the science, right? So I think it was interesting when I first got into yoga, like I had no explanation scientifically for why things kind of worked the way they did. But it was my experience that they did actually work. And so a lot of people tend to think of yoga as like very woo-woo, kind of, you know, kind of crazy. But I think that the points of, you know, kind of the chakras, you mentioned that. And if for people that aren't as familiar, you've probably at least seen a photo before where it has all these different colors, it's kind of stacked up somebody's spine, and then there's this purple one at the top of your head, which is your crown chakra. So just people have probably seen that imagery before. And I don't know how much we want to go into chakras because I really want to have you like really talk about Ayurveda, which is your—

this is another one of your passions.

Okay. Yes. Awesome. Yes. And some people, I guess it depends on the way it's taught to you or presented to you. Um, my experience with Ayurveda in the past, very focused on the doshas and the food and kind of correcting imbalances in the body, but really energetic imbalances to your point that you just described are just as important and maybe more important. And it's not the only tradition that has a model like that, right? Like, people are probably more familiar with Chinese medicine and yin-yang, you know, all those energy points that they work with, with acupuncture. Qi— qi is sort of the same thing I think you were describing as those energetic pathways. So yogis aren't the only ones who have thought of things in this way. So maybe if you can, this is a really long-winded way around to figure out what it is I want to ask you exactly, because I think there's so many interesting things that you've said so far. But maybe, is there, is there anything that's been explored on the energetics of the way that yoga and Ayurveda work in relation to some sort of scientific background? And it's been a very long time since I delved into any research. I did some papers when I was doing my yoga therapy thing. But I'm just wondering if there is there anything new that you've heard of or something specifically in relation to the energetics before we move on to sort of the doshas and the food part?

You know, there's, there's a lot going on. I, I didn't prepare myself with any like specific studies to cite or anything like that, but I see one almost every day.

Oh, good.

It's hard. It's an interesting thing because, like, to your point, yoga is an experiential practice that is, that connects and utilizes the system as a whole and is— how do I say this? Here's a better way of saying it. In systems like Ayurveda and yoga, we see the body as a connected whole. Modern medicine is beginning to see the body as a connected whole. And we now— what we didn't know or didn't think we knew or forgot or whatever in the process of scientific understanding of the body 50, 60 years ago was almost more of like a mechanic, like a car, like this part does this and this part does this and this part does this. And now we understand this complex interrelationship between all of these systems of the body. And so for instance, one that's incredible incredibly relevant to yoga, but also to chronic illness and to health, is the pituitary gland, or what people call the pituitary axis, that connects the pituitary, the adrenals, the hypothalamus, the nervous system, and basically the hormones, you know, to put it simply. And that system, the pituitary hypothalamus axis, HPA axis is what people call it, is this complex almost like system that when the, when the switch is turned on in one direction creates health, creates a movement towards the rest and digest response, the healing mechanism. And when it's moving the opposite direction, this is kind of how I think of it, creates the adrenaline rush, the, the creates energy that we need in certain circumstances to survive, but ultimately then leads to chronic stress, chronic fatigue syndrome, inflammation, various different things in in the body. So we now understand those systems in much more detail than we did back in the day, two decades ago. Yoga is working on that axis and has been forever. And so that's why it has a systemic impact on the body. One reason that it has a systemic impact on the body. Another example is the gut, right? The gut-mind connection. For many years, we would think, oh, they have no relationship between the two of them. And now we understand this complex and incredible relationship between the gut and the mind, both the nervous system, the bacteria, the fungi, the viruses, the trauma, the the health conditions that are led to, you know, 30 years from when there's an imbalance in the gut. Things like Parkinson's disease, for instance, is tied directly to the microbiome in the gut. It can be, you know, it can be looked at decades before the onset of symptoms. So these are all examples of how we are now able to use scientific research research to now understand these complex inter-system relationships that sometimes are hard because what happens is we like to think in science in a linear direction. We like to think A equals B and— but C, D, E, and F don't influence A, right? They do. And— but it's hard to wrap the mind around it. Um, And it's hard to write a paper that includes all of it. So what we have to do is we have to use science, our scientific understanding, to help us facilitate the— what we already know is that all of these are connected, and it's much more complex, and it's much more experiential than our mind likes to think it is.

Yeah, absolutely. Totally couldn't agree more. And it's, it's just interesting because you know, I have this need to know. It's just my personal personality. And that's why I kind of prefaced it with being that science-minded person. But at the end of the day, what I always knew is that it was working. And I didn't necessarily need to know all of the reasons why. And I think it's great to want to know all those things, but sometimes you just have to experience it for yourself or try something for yourself. And if it works for you, like at the end of the day, that should be good enough. You know, if it's moving you towards health. So anyway, that, that, but I do like to kind of mention some things about that because I think that again, people think of yoga as being kind of very fluffy. But there is actually quite a lot of research. The yogis have always known before we had functional MRIs and MRIs of people's brains, we knew that it was creating changes in the neurons in the brain. You could feel it, you would experience it. But until MRIs, there wasn't that proof. And there's, you know, some other examples um, like when I did my paper, it was all on yoga for addictions, and it works. And do we know exactly why? No, but it does. And like, to me, that sometimes that should just be enough. So, um, thank you for linking that all together a little better.

Yeah. And you know, I think there's two sides of that, because I think on one hand, the experience— like, the experience should be enough, you know, like, yes, that should show us something. On the other hand, there's also in the yoga community, and I may be criticized for saying this, but, um, there is a lot of jargon. There is.

I would agree.

There's a lot of New Age jargon. I'm just going to be honest about my opinion of it, um, in that you can't just go to any yoga class a couple times and expect everything in your life to be better, or to, you know, people use the term spiritual bypassing. There's a lot of abuse in, you know, spiritual communities and things like that that aren't that dissimilar from religion, religious communities over time and things like that. So I do think that there is a time and a place for bridging the worlds of science and spirituality. And that's a beautiful thing as long as we don't, we don't use that as a limiting factor and we don't use that as an excuse not to do our inner work. Because that's what yoga, to me, that's what yoga really is, is it's a pathway to the inner work that we're all here to do in our lifetime. And sometimes we get caught in the mind and the rational mind saying, oh, you know, blah, blah, blah. That's not a, you know, and then we, we, we don't actually allow ourselves to have an experience that's beyond the mind. And that's what yoga allows us to do. And vice versa, if we find ourselves in a, in a situation of blind, you know, faith being led down, you know, a hill that isn't really full of full wisdom, but is just marketing jargon, then, you know, same thing. It's, it's not going to lead you to that, to the, to the core of your being.

Yeah, you, you made some excellent points there. And I couldn't agree more. And especially, you know, yoga has gotten so popular that a lot of the training programs now are people that have never even really done yoga or been involved in yoga before. And all of a sudden, they want to learn more, which is amazing and a good reason. But you know, then we're doing these 200-hour training programs and putting people out to— and I think that's enough to probably safely lead people through some basic asanas if you are actually watching your class and paying attention, which is not to say that that always happens. But I don't know if just 200 hours of just you starting to learn it yourself and not having practiced it is enough to really say you know, there's always something to teach, there's always something to learn. But I guess I just would caution people that if you are going to take a deep dive into yoga, to seek out good teachers, really experienced teachers, and, and not just, you know, go to yoga class. And this is not to— don't, don't take me wrong, any of my 20-year-olds out there— but not just go to a yoga class with a 20-year-old really bendy person and she's saying whatever fluffy happy love things and think that that's exactly like yoga, or that that's, that's what there is to it. Because I think there's so many different levels and so many different ways to take it. And so I just wouldn't want anybody to be, you know, be turned off from it because of that, because it just, it can take time. It can take time to connect with the right teacher. And, you know, if you're just looking for a good workout, there's a whole lot of people that can do that really well. Um, but if you're looking to learn some more of these deeper things or to work through through some trauma, you might need to explore a little bit more. Has that been your same experience as well, Madison?

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think we've somewhat done a disservice culturally to yoga. On one hand, we've really brought yoga to the forefront of the world in some ways. It's sometimes, you know, my friends in India will sometimes say, yeah, the West has brought yoga back to the world. But on the other hand, like we tend to do with most disciplines, is we have superficialized it and commercialized it. And so we have, in my opinion, done somewhat of a disservice to the practice as a whole in, you know, marketing it as something that, you know, yeah, you need 200 hours for you know, making a business and a commerce-related industry out of it, making it really just about working out and stretching. All of those are okay. There's nothing wrong with business. There's nothing wrong with, you know, working out and stretching and using yoga for that. But that is just the tip of the iceberg of what yoga is. And So yeah, I think to me, you know, a big message that I, I feel inclined to make sure people know is that yoga really is all about the, the inner journey that, you know, sometimes I'll go to a yoga class. My partner will go to yoga class specifically and he'll go to what you just described, you know, somebody that's just like kind of hyper-positive and blah, blah, blah, you know, and he'll walk away being like, well, Ooh, kind of annoyed by it, you know? And not that like being positive is wrong or bad or anything like that, but what our experience of yoga has been over— our experience has been so real, has been getting to the depths of things, turning over each stone, you know, not just like painting the stone gold, you know? And that's what yoga offers us the opportunity for, because when we get into that open, relaxed state is when we hear our intuition. It's when we hear the messages. It's when we feel our body. It's when we recognize what we're doing in our life that doesn't align with our values. It's when we, you know, all of those things that are so important for helping us find our track in life. And not only that, but finding the part of ourselves that is here to serve the world around us, not take from the world around us. And so that to me is like the beauty of yoga, even though you go in and you do asanas and breathing and things like that. Ultimately, the juice underneath it is where like, ah, for me, it's like, that's the stuff that we're looking for. So yeah, you know, it's, it's both, both are true.

Yeah. And I think again, any way people experience it and get into it, I'm happy for for it because you just never know where that goes. But, but it is definitely worth a little conversation. And we actually got a little bit more into yoga than I expected, but I love all the insight that you've shared and your personal experiences. I think has— and tying that into Ayurveda, I think is really a cool introduction to some of that stuff because I don't think I've talked about yoga on the podcast yet. So, but to move— yeah, I know you'd think that'd be one of my top things, but anyway, to move on to the Ayurvedic part. So I think for a lot of people, I feel like this is not something that most people are as familiar with, although several yoga studios, if you've gone to the yoga studio before, they might have an occasional workshop, or they might have somebody that does happen to be into it. So you might learn about it. But for those people where they're here, like they've heard the word Ayurveda, but they don't have a great concept of it, could you kind of give your definition, for lack of a better word, of Ayurveda, and then maybe explain to people the basics about the doshas and how that kind of ties into how we eat and our digestion. And I'll just let you take it from there. Sure.

So I'll start with saying that what we have been talking about is Ayurveda from my perspective. Um, yoga and Ayurveda are considered sister sciences. Um, in yoga is a very important part of Ayurveda. It's— the philosophies are built together, they're interwoven. And Ayurveda focuses on health and disease, and the idea is to set yourself up with a lifestyle that keeps you as close to balance as you can. And when you stay as close to balance, then your immune system is better, you fight off disease, you keep— your digestion stays healthy, things like that. And that basically prevents disease. And that's ideally what we want is to prevent disease. Ultimately, we all die. So ultimately, we're all going to— our bodies are going to start to dry and decay and have, you know, system failures. But in the meantime, that's what we're looking for. Ayurveda breaks down the word Ayurveda means the science of life. Ayurveda. And so it's this beautiful Vedic philosophy of health. The doshas, as you mentioned, if you've never heard the word dosha before, the word dosha I like to describe as the bioenergetic functions that are at play in all of life. So that can be broken down elementally. If you look at a landscape, you see that the elements kind of go in order. In every landscape, they go earth, water, fire, air, ether. So in Ayurveda, we break down the elements in those 5 qualities. Chinese medicine is similar, but their elements are slightly different. It's kind of— I think— kind of think of it like a wheel that's slightly turned. Ultimately, they're describing the same thing. They just have different entry points. So the doshas correspond to those elements. So the kapha dosha is made up ultimately. This is— it's— I'm talking elementally and simplistically here. It's much more complex than this, but this is the, um, Kapha dosha is the earth and water elements. It's the anabolic force in the body. So it's what builds and sustains tissue or builds and sustains structure, anything. You can start to see the doshas at play everywhere in life, not just in the body, and trees, and dogs, and seasons, and life cycles, and all sorts of different things because they— it follows the same doshic clock essentially. So kapha is the structure of things. Pitta is the metabolic force. Elementally, it is fire and water. A good example of pitta in the body is digestive acids, right? Kind of like fiery water. And it metabolizes things. It transforms one thing to another. Vata is the— I like to think of it like the catabolic force. It's what breaks down and moves things through the system. So elementally, that's air and ether. So the doshas are at play together, interacting with each other in every cell of the body. All the time. So ultimately, everybody has all 3 doshas in every cell of their body, but we tend to have a dominance— a dominant function in the body. So that's when you hear somebody say something like, I'm a pitta, or you're a kapha, or I have a vata imbalance, something like that, meaning that those doshas have a dominance and they have an imbalanced tendency. So my dominant dosha is pitta. So I'm a— so my qualities will tend— look, look at what I'm wearing. I'm wearing red and gold, and you know, you see the redness on my cheek, stuff like that. So I have a dominance in pitta. If I'm not careful, I will tend towards a pitta imbalance. So pitta types tend to like fiery things. They tend to like hot yoga and, you know, acidic things and kombucha and, you know, things like that. And so it would— it's easy for me. And then that creates imbalance in the body— hyperacidity, inflammation, heartburn, you know, skin rashes, things like that are all Pitta-type conditions. Vata— people that have a more dominance in vata tend to have more dryness in the body. They tend to have very sensitive nervous systems. So my secondary dosha is vata. Most of my upbringing I was struggling with a chronic vata imbalance, so I constantly have to be aware of, of my own vata. And vata is actually— in Ayurveda is responsible for about 90% of disease. In the body. It's the king of the doshas. It's what moves things through. And if you go back to our previous part of our conversation about the channels in the system, vata is what moves everything through all of those channels. So if things are blocked, then it's very easy for vata to go out of balance. Um, people with a vata dominance, um, tend to be slender, um, in nature, small bones, tend to have more dryness in the system, tend to be very creative and artistic, tend to have a connection to kind of the etheric realm that oftentimes other doshas don't. Um, the kapha constitution is governed more from earth and water, and so kapha constitutions tend to be denser in nature. And I don't mean that as fat. Sometimes people think that kapha means fat. Kapha— the fat tissue in the body is dominantly kapha, but there's lots of other tissues in the body that are too. Kapha constitutions tend to have a little bit bigger bone structure. They tend to have a little bit more mass. They tend to, um, move a little bit slower. They tend to be in incredibly emotionally— how do I say this— emotionally evolved in that they're very sentimental, they're very devotional. They tend to be really good at things like engagement, human-to-human engagement, things like that. Kaphas often love things that increase kapha. Pittas tend to love things that increase pitta. Vatas tend to love things that— so, you know, this is very stereotypical, but, you know, just to get the point across, kapha, good kapha is like ice cream. It's like, you know, earth and water put together, dense and heavy and fat. Pitta is like alcohol. Vata is like a dry cracker. In food. This is food qualities, right? So, um, everything in nature you can actually start seeing through these qualities. Um, you can see trees that have more of a kapha structure to them. You can see dogs that have, you know, a certain doshic balance to them. So that is all to say that we are all essentially born with a recipe, an innate constitution. And in Ayurveda, it says that that is given at birth— I'm sorry, at conception— that doshic element or that doshic combination at conception. And so we're born with it and we have it for our whole life, although we go through different time periods in our life that have a more— like, early age has more kapha. Like, you know, the butterball baby is like— it's a kapha stage of life. Midlife tends to be more pitta in nature. Later life, when all of our bodies start to dry out and decay, is more of a vata stage of life. And our natural constitution is going to interact with those times in our life in different ways. Um, so our, our goal is ultimately to stay as close to that balance point as possible. As we stray from that balance point, the more susceptible we are to disease. And that's where, you know, I will go out of balance, then so my digestion goes out of balance, and then that leads to something else, then something localizes in a weak tissue in my body, and then that, that doshic imbalance eventually leads to some something that we can classify as disease. The idea in Ayurveda, the beauty of Ayurveda, is that we can identify imbalance way before something can be diagnosed as a disease. So very high-trained Ayurvedic doctors can feel diabetes in the pulse 15 years before it can be diagnosed. Because you can feel the pattern at play. You can start to see that pathology play out from the very early onset of the imbalance. So what I just described with the doshas sounds somewhat elementary because it's, it's, we're talking about the elements, but Ayurveda as a system is very sophisticated. It's been around for 5 to 10 to 15,000 years, practiced continuously. We work with very sophisticated herbal remedies, different body therapies, detoxification therapies, the, the integration of yoga and the energetics with it, and all— and food, looking at nutrition not just from the nutrient standpoint, not just from fats, carbohydrates, vitamin B, etc., but from the quality standpoint. How does the quality of that food interact with my innate constitution to either be medicine for me or to be a toxin for me? And any food that we put in our body essentially is one or the other. It's either nourishing for us or it's harming us. And that's gonna be different per, per individual. And that's why I have an issue with the modern rendition of superfoods. We, we like to say something is a superfood, and sure, it could be very nutrient-dense, but is that good for you? Is that good for you? Is that good for that constitution? Does that person have the digestive capability of digesting it well? Those are all questions that Ayurveda can help people with to ultimately come back and stay as close to balance as possible.

Yeah. And I've always thought it's such an elegant system. It has— it's always had such an attraction to me outside of just pure nutrition based on what you just described. Because, you know, whether a food is providing you nutrients or whether it's being toxic, I think can also change it, whether it's times of your life or your emotional state. I mean, you probably already know this from all my, you know, podcast and background and everything, but I eat very low carb and into keto all the time. And but there are times where, say, I was like, I'm missing something from childhood, or I'm whatever, and I don't have— I don't have diabetes, I don't have these things. So I can choose at times, for me, to eat something that might be nourishing more to my soul that might have more sugar or fat or whatever it is that's kind of quote unquote bad. For those either listening, I'm doing the air quotes, but, um, but it's nourishing in a different way and it's feeding some other need. And so anyway, all that aside to say that, you know, I think when people hear this, they might think, oh, well, this is like, that's not even based on nutrition. How can that be anything? It is, it is a very elegant, and we're unfortunately not doing it enough, um, justice today. We just, because of the time that we have involved, uh, and I'm sure that people hearing this, if they've never they're like, oh, this sounds kind of cool. I might want to explore this more. Do you have like an online— and you probably don't because there's so much more to it, I think. But there are some online quizzes where you can take and find out your dosha. So number one, I'm wondering if you have one that you recommend. And then secondly, the way that I was taught Ayurveda was— and what you said, like the qualities are given at conception. And it's the way that I was taught is that it's more based on your physical qualities than anything else. So can you maybe just unpack that a little bit for people? Number one, if you have a favorite place where they can find out their dosha, and number two, if you would agree with that conceptualization, or do you have more to add to that?

The dosha quiz is a hard one for for me because Ayurveda— kind of like we were talking about the superficialization of yoga in the West, um, doshas have kind of become that for Ayurveda. People think of Ayurveda as the doshas. Ayurveda is much more than the doshas. That's one primary pillar of Ayurveda, but there are many, just like the, um, limbs of yoga. I find that Oftentimes people take an online dosha quiz and it brings up their imbalance as opposed to their constitution. Sometimes we're so familiar with the imbalance in our body that we actually don't even know what our innate constitution is or how to even answer the questions. Sometimes it's wishful thinking, sometimes it's just long-term imbalance. Um, So I, I recently published a book and I sat on it for months as to whether or not I even wanted to put a Dosha quiz in my book. I ultimately decided to, and so there is a Dosha quiz at the end of it with an asterisk saying, if you're gonna do this, please talk to a professional. Use this as a guidepost. Not as a Bible because it's much more complex than this and you want to bounce it off of somebody that really understands this and knows the complexities of it. So there are several that are quite good. I don't have one that I love, um, and but they are a good way to self-reflect and self-assess. What I would say is you, when you're answering questions on on the Dosha Quiz, you wanna make sure that you're answering them as a lifetime, as the kind of the sum of your lifetime. Sometimes I ask questions of people like, when you were 18 years old, how would you answer this question? Or when you were 16 years old, how would you answer this question? As far as the physical, the Doshas are not just physical. The doshas are energetic just as much as they are physical. Sometimes people break it down into, you know, I have a mental dosha and a physical dosha. Sometimes we express those somewhat differently, but ultimately they're, they're all connected. So it's more about understanding and learning kind of the dance of the doshas within you. And if you know your dosha and that's as far as you go, you're missing out on a ton of amazing and valuable information in Ayurveda, um, because it's also been simplified. Just like you can go online and say, uh, yoga set for arthritis, and it'll pull up a set. And of course we have way more than that. You wouldn't want to be limited by that. I would say the same thing about Ayurveda. Use that as a touchstone, and if it's of interest to you, if it sparks you to go deeper, then go find somebody that can help you go go deeper with it.

Well, and is that part of what really led you to write your book? And can you share the whole name with everybody, kind of what, why you wanted to write it and what you feel it offers in relation to kind of all this stuff that we just talked about?

Yeah. Um, so my book is called Mind Body Food: Redefining Your Relationship with Food. And, um, the intention of my book is to help people change their relationship with food. So not from a dietary theory point of view, not from this is the way to go, this is the way you should eat, but let's look at the complexities of the relationship with food. And I talk at the preface of my book, actually talks about food very similar to an intimate relationship. So we actually play out the same dynamics with food as we do with intimate relationships. We, we fantasize about it. We create codependent relationships. We play control games with it. We, you know, we base life decisions off of it, right? All of these similar things. Um, and actually food, I describe it as our longest term relationship. We've been seeing food from the moment we are conceived and will to the day we die and we can't break up with it. And so, so This is a deep dive into that and what that means, the ways that food corresponds to, like you were talking about earlier, not just your physical cravings, but also your emotional cravings, how it ties to your family heritage, to your ancestral roots, to your culture, to your experience of pleasure and desire, to your experience of community and connection. All of these play out in your relationship with food and And my goal is to help people explore that. And, you know, very quickly, I struggled with a long-term eating disorder. I was bulimic for several years. And eating disorders, you know, that may seem extreme to some people that have never experienced that. But I came to realize in the healing of my eating disorder that almost everybody that I know and have ever interacted with has experienced some form of disordered eating over their lifetime, men and women alike. And it's different. There's different dots on the spectrum of that and how that's expressed. And ultimately, I actually feel like we have a pretty, um, well-evolved cultural eating disorder. Um, our our cultural relationship with food is very sick at this point. So my goal is to help people heal that. So that's why I wrote it.

Yeah. And I would say, you know, my goal is similar, but I come at it from a different direction. But I think you mentioned you're not coming at it from, you know, this other nutrition perspective. You're kind of coming at it from maybe an emotional or spiritual or even body systems kind of method. And I think it's really important because a lot of people listen to this podcast. And I think you're right, I think everybody's had some kind of disordered relationship with food. I think plenty of people still struggling with that now. The stress that has been brought on over the last 2 years and the lockdowns are changing and exacerbating some of these problems with people's relationship with food. So I think it's important to look at your relationship to food, not only on a day-to-day basis from a very functional perspective, like what are you eating or what is— what you're eating, like, right for you, nutrient-dense, supporting your health. But then also go into more of your side of what you're talking about in the book is changing your relationship with food from all of these other ways outside of what I just described. So I think that, that whenever you go down these roads, finding these different perspectives, whether it's focused just on what you're eating, what you're putting in your body, kind of like what I tend to focus on, versus some of these other methods out there. So, and I love that you connected the mind, body, food altogether because I think for me, for practicing this many years, I kind of naturally do that anyway. And I actually have a similar book title written down in my, my notes of, you know, ideas to pursue at later, later points of time. And I do think that that's missing from the mainstream. So I'm really so excited that you put that out there and are helping people explore, you know, that deeper relationship with food, not just the surface level, what you're putting in your mouth.

Yeah. And, you know, you said something a little bit ago about how what's nourishing for you today changes over time. And that's really important. You know, um, we have this idea that something's good for you and it's gonna be good for you forever, but what's good for you today is probably gonna be very different than it is 10 years from now. And so we have to be very careful about our limiting and rigid perspectives of what nutrition is and what it means and what's good and bad and what's right and wrong and what's, you know, good for me and must be good for you and all of that. It's a, it's a much more nuanced relationship that we can build with food. And then that becomes something that's very beautiful, very joyful, very nourishing, very healing.

Yeah, couldn't agree more. Well, before we go here, can you please share with everybody where are the best places to find you online, any education that you offer, where they can find the book, basically all of your, uh, all of your resources that you can share?

Sure. You can find me at my website, it's livewiseheal.com, and you can find my book at Barnes Noble, or on Amazon. It's called Mind Body Food by Madison Madden.

Awesome. And any, um, any social channels that you're particularly active on or any upcoming courses?

Yeah, you can find me on Instagram, um, at Madison Madden underscore Live Wise. And I have an Ayurvedic body therapy course, um, in May in Southern California. That I'm leading for Ayurvedic professionals, so if, um, as well as massage therapists to come and learn the nuances of, um, the therapeutic qualities of Ayurvedic body therapies.

Oh, neat. Interesting. So I'll definitely put all of that in the show notes so that people can easily find it. Madison, I just wanna thank you so much for taking the time today and for sharing all of your wonderful knowledge. And I hope that everyone will reach out to Madison with any Ayurvedic related questions and go check out her book.

Thank you for having me, Cheryl. I enjoyed our conversation. Yes, you're welcome.