Why Willpower Isn't the Answer, The Ayurvedic Roadmap to Healing Perimenopause.

Hello everyone. Good morning. How is everybody doing? I love to welcome you. I hope everybody's having a wonderful morning, evening, afternoon, wherever you are. All right. Yes. Yesterday we uncovered, we laid the baseline. We spoke about the importance of the hormones and we understood how the hormones affects every part of our body. Today we are gonna go into How does the framework help us look through what we are going through? Because what I see online, what I see being shared is that everybody is about popping pills, popping herbs, what can I eat, diet. Whereas Ayurveda is not just about diet. Ayurveda is a full body system, a holistic system. It looks at the mind, body, spirit, and it says, this is the reason why you are sick. If your sickness was caused by all these factors, your healing can also be affected by all these factors. Yesterday, each one of you got to see your own Devi self a little bit. From now on, you are going to embody that divine Embodied, visionary, intuitive energy that is a Devi, a goddess. Let's go into where hope lies for us. How can we move forward in the right direction and get that healing, learn things that is going to bring some ease into our life? Where do our greatest healing opportunities lie? Let's look at how disease manifests in the body. What makes perimenopause really bad for us? What makes this experience challenging for us? Everybody, do you have a mirror around you or a phone? Take your phone, take a picture of your tongue. Turn it around, take a picture of your tongue. Just stick your tongue out, take a picture of your tongue. Now, there is a concept called Agni Mandya. Agni Mandya means Agni, ignition, fire, metabolism, the fire in the belly. That fire, because of certain decisions we make throughout the day, of eating more, eating less, starving, not eating on time, Allowing too long a time to pass before we eat the next meal, or constantly snacking—these are all decisions we make. Impacts the agni, the fire, the ignition in your stomach. When the agni is low, if your tongue looked white and coated and thick, that means your fire. In the belly is low, and you will literally feel low motivation. You can tell that by looking at your tongue. It's called Agni Mandya. It means the fire in your kitchen is not burning as properly as it should. If my stove was not working, if the knob was not okay, and I couldn't cook my food properly, what's going to happen? अब पकवा आहारा। पकवा मीनी कुकिंग, आहारा मीनी फ़ूड। If my food is uncooked, if I eat improperly cooked food, I'm gonna get sick. Similarly, when I eat food and it goes into my belly and my fire in the belly is not working at its optimal that it should. Yesterday we spoke about how food turns into tissue and waste. Ideally, Good food will turn into tissue and waste. If it is not proper, properly cooked, then it will turn into a third subcomponent, a third metabolic product called as ama. Ama sticks. Ama will get into our cells and stick there, and the body will try to bake it into the cells and the tissues to To try and keep it away from the vital organs, because the body is an innocent creature. It is always trying to keep us alive. No matter what we put it through, it is always trying to make sure that we live as long as we can potentially live. Never get upset with your body when it exhibits disease, tiredness. Always say thank you. Thank you for like. Patting me on the shoulders and saying, "Hey, we need to rest." Hey, I have a stomachache. Hey, I have a headache. Never get upset with your body. That ama is sticky. One of the first shlokas of Ayurveda is "Raga di roga." That which sticks will produce disease. Whether it is sticky emotion, it is sticky waste materials in the body. It is friends who stick to you and don't allow you space. It is things that you are just constantly doing out of habit. Is sticky, will create disease. This Ama is going to block the channels. Shrotas, Shrota are the channels of the body. The large channels, the veins and the arteries we see, the cellular spaces we see, the intracellular spaces, the intercellular spaces. When these spaces are blocked, that's when the body's circulation is hampered. That's when Vata is hampered. That's when the imbalance begins to happen. Dosha, dushti, meaning the doshas— Vata, Pitta, and Kapha— the 3 doshas, they will start to go out of whack, go out of balance, and then That is going to cause the व्याधि, व्याधि meaning the disease. Everything starts from the gut. Everything starts because of our eating habits, our diet, and it's affected by all the things that affect us: stress, lifestyle, relationships, emotions, wiring. All of this affects how we eat. The medicine can also be not just the food, but all these other aspects as well. That is the samprapti of disease. This is how all of us get sick. The entire reason we have Ayurveda is to clean this ama. Because we can make the food better, we can help the digestion get better, then when even after doing these, 2, if you come on a consultation with a doctor, an Ayurveda practitioner, they're trying to fix your Agni, your fire. They're trying to make sure that your food is digested properly, but they can't do anything with the Ama. The Ama has to go only through cleansing, and Ayurveda is the only medicinal system in the world that has a protocol Cleanse protocols to cleanse the Ama so that capillaries are not blocked, your Doshas can recirculate in balance, and your disease can go off. Once that Ama leaves our body, we have cleansed some amount of the Ama, you will notice that your brain gets clearer, your skin gets more beautiful, you have more life, you start to embody more of that vital life, That vital spirit, which is your Devi, which is you at your highest potential. How do we all make the biggest mistake of collecting Ama throughout our bodies? There is something called as Pragya Aparadha. I briefly touched this yesterday, that all of us women, we are conditioned to make decisions that are like crimes against Uh-huh. Ourselves. These are decisions we make that hurt our sacred body, sacred spirit, sacred mind. And these decisions can be as simple as you're not feeling like going somewhere today, and you feel obligated, and you show up, and you come back feeling upset and resentful, or You go to the office, your 10th email pops in, your boss wants something, and you just go to the pantry and you're eating a bag full of Cheetos before you know it. Prajya aparadha. Prajya meaning my intelligence, that which will enlighten me, which will take me to enlightenment. Aparadha meaning crime. I commit crimes against my own Common sense. These are crimes of common sense. They lead me to Agni Mandya, lowering of my energies, lowering of my fire, lowering of my potential, and my body becomes open to then this. We get all these issues. Those hundred symptoms we talked about. There's not thirty-four symptoms of perimenopause. It's hundred symptoms. Everything, because estrogen affects every part of our body. Every culture, irrespective of whether you are a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu, Jewish tradition, every culture has cleansing traditions. Every year everybody does fasting, but we modern humans have stopped doing that because we think of it as old-fashioned, but that fasting yearly was something that kept women healthy. We women need fasting during certain times of the year to maintain our health. We've stopped doing that, especially after our periods stop, because our monthly period is a cleanse, is a little panchakarma. When the panchakarma of the body stops, Then we need to do Panchakarma outside through cleansing the body. And that's when we are able to maintain longevity, our vitality. There are 2 quotes I want to give you today. Whatever we are feeling, we heal our emotions by revealing it. Emotions, food choices, who we are, We heal ourselves by reveal it, feel it, heal it. There is no shortcut to this, only through feeling. What doesn't digest, congests. Remember how the food, because of the low Agni, turned into Ama and caused the disease? It became sticky. If an emotion is not digesting, If you are ruminating, if something is running you, then it will congest your mind. You will get brain fog. If an emotion is rising up and you keep pushing it down because you need to show up for work, and you don't feel it because, I can't feel it, it's not the time, I got to keep things together. You will stay stuck in there. This will run just a hundred tabs open in a laptop, and it's running the memory down. I literally had my laptop crash the other day, saying no more memory crash. I had so many tabs open. There are a hundred tabs open in your head. You are constantly thinking. You are going to feel exhausted almost. Everybody here said, I am exhausted. Why? You have not allowed your emotions to be felt. You have not allowed it to move. Emotion, motion. It must move. If it is stuck, it will congest. It will stop your mind from feeling vital. We have done this for decades now, and now it's the time to get messy, to cry, to laugh, to scream, to rage. Let it all out. This is the promise of perimenopause. Let's talk about the 5 Foundation Framework that I keep talking about and how that helps us move forward and make good decisions. We fuel our balance. When we are balanced, then we are not doing Pragya Paratha, the crime against our common sense. When we are balanced, we look at the cookie and say, I'll come back to it, or I'll eat one and I'll make sure I share the other one with my friend. I'll go to my neighbor, I'll give one cookie to her, one cookie I'll eat. The food we eat, the senses, We are on Instagram, we are scrolling, we see somebody who makes us feel bad about ourselves, and we don't look at it like a train wreck. We are like, oh, I gotta keep looking at it because I feel horrible, but I like her. We just say block, delete, outta my life. We cleanse. I don't read any fashion magazines when I need to go dress up for an event. I ask my friends to tell me what to do because I do not want to read a fashion magazine that makes me feel bad, that tells me that something is wrong with me. Why? Because almost every problem women have today are billion-dollar problems marketing created. Your underarms are dirty, you need to dye your hair, you need to wax your legs. All this was created by corporations that has turned into billion-dollar businesses, and they work on our desperation. They catch us because we are in this state of transition, and therefore in a state of lack of confidence in ourselves. We fuel our balance by putting away everything that hurts us. Don't buy it. I had a client who would say, Salila, I cannot help it. I go to the grocery store, there are these pastries right there. I end up buying the pastries and I eat it. I said, change your grocery store. Why are you going to that grocery store? Go to a grocery store where they only have produce, fruit and vegetables. That's how we make the change. We know where we are weak. So we feed our strength. We look at the rhythm of our life, the circadian rhythm. When the sun comes up, our metabolism rises. When the sun goes down, our metabolism goes down. When should we eat our food? When should our heaviest foods be eaten? When the sun is going up. By the time it's 4, the sun is at its Peak. You can have a very early dinner, like a 5:00, 5:30 dinner. You will digest it very well. You can have a brunch. Your body will digest it very well. Between up to 2 o'clock, it's Pitta Kala. It is the time of metabolism. If you take the midpoint of the sun, where the sun is highest in the middle of the day, the 2 hours before and the 2 hours after is when the mind is the most active. And the stomach is the most powerful to digest, which is roughly around 2 in India, where there is a 12-hour day and a 12-hour night. You're all from around the world, so look at the highest point of the sun. Go to the internet, Google this today, which is the highest point of the sun, and around that time is when you eat your biggest meal. Then it will digest, then it won't create Ama. The circadian rhythm says that our body has a certain way of having energy and dipping and requiring rest and rituals. Figure out when you are at your most energetic. Do your most challenging work during that time. For most people, it is in the morning, 10 to 2. Don't schedule things later in the afternoon when your energy is dipping. So that when that 3 o'clock slump comes, that exhaustion comes, and you want to reach for coffee, don't have a tough meeting at that time. Have something easier. Go out for a walk. Wash your face. Eat some fruit. Take a nap. Go to the wellness room. Take a 15-20 minute nap. Put your legs up against the wall. Let all that blood come back into your face. These are all the ways you can manage that 3 PM slump in the afternoon. We cannot heal in the same environment that got us sick, which is why some people need to go away and be in a different place so that they can— Pattern interruption is super critical when we are doing everything and the people around us are like crabs. Drawing us down because they don't want us to ascend a certain way. They get uncomfortable. You're changing. What are you doing these days? Yoga? What is this? Ayurveda? Never even heard of it. Presence, how we connect with others. Sometimes relationships are so deeply wired that you see them and that's exactly how the energy plays out. The energy is so strong. It plays out before we can make a change. So we take ourselves out of the system, out of that place, go somewhere else, become different, and come back. When I did my first Panchakarma, I was no longer the person who went into that Ayurveda ashram and did the retreat. When I came out, I was a different human being. Mindset— these are the commands that we give. Notice, Notice what you are thinking majority of the day. These are like weeds that just grow in our brain. We are happy, we are thinking beautiful thoughts, we are positive, and then stress hits. We are like whacking ourselves with words, calling ourselves bad names. There's a lot of practices where we give that an identity and say, this is not me, this is Samantha who's speaking bad to me. What I've learned in my evolution is, it is better not to make fractals of ourselves. Oh, this is my good part, this is my bad part, this is my nasty part, this is my beautiful Devi part. No, all of it is me, are my children. I'm going to bring them gently in, and I'm going to help them speak differently to me. Integration. Finally, our wiring. We talked about how every decision we make becomes a tendency, a neural pathway in our brain. If I am somebody who is always wearing rings on this finger, I become the person who wears rings on this finger. When I change this ring and try to put it in a different finger, I don't feel like myself. I'm like, no, this is not me. But identity is fluid. None of you were born with the identity you hold today. Ten years ago, you were not the woman you are today. Therefore, identity can be shifted. We women are the most pliable, have the most neuroplasticity. We are wired to shift identity when we step into perimenopause. When we notice things about ourselves, don't blame perimenopause for creating that wound. Perimenopause is simply the flashlight that shined what existed before, the cracks that existed before. Now the cracks are more clear to you because we built those cracks to accommodate a different way of living. To accommodate showing up as a mom, showing up as a spouse, showing up as a daughter, showing up as a friend. And we changed ourselves to accommodate. In perimenopause, now that our estrogen is going away, that people pleasing, the sticking with the others, the being one part of the tribe, just doing anything to just fit into whatever it is that they wanted us to fit into. That inclination is going away. Now we are going to stand by ourselves. The Devi needs nobody. The Devi is full and complete within herself. It feels scary when we think of it as, as a mindset of a woman from a 20-year-old girl. Nobody? I don't need nobody? That's so scary, but I need people! But when you cross your 40s, and when you're balanced, and you're starting to establish in yourself, it's the best feeling! Because you have full control on your destiny, you have full control on the expression of your joy! Hopefully this has helped you, it has lifted the fog off of you, and you can not just see, Where you are lacking, what, what are the areas where you need extra support? You've also seen your strengths, and I'm a huge believer of don't look at the negative, stay focused on the positive. The negatives will work themselves out. Emotions are like these balls that come up over the water surface of our mind, and then we keep pushing them down. Nope, I can't handle this right now. I got to do this other stuff. We need to release emotions so that joy can come up. If sadness, anger, and all is sitting on top, they make a shell and joy cannot come out. Don't just look at where you're lacking, look at your strengths. Take good care, everybody. Bye-bye. Namaste.