You're Not Losing Your Mind, You're Being Rewired (Day 1 of 4)

Welcome everybody. Welcome. We're having this chat today to make sure that all of us here who are slowly sliding into their 40s, we are well supported. And we are going to receive some information that probably nobody has spoken to us before. Our parents haven't said that, our friends haven't shared it, and our physicians Most of us, we've not received that support. So we're gathering here to understand what this critical phase of our life is all about, because we are women, we are hormonal, and we are driven by hormones. We will talk about why everything that you are doing is actually making it worse. There's a certain way we were conditioned to live our life and to show up for the challenges in our life. This was great for us in our teens, in our early adulthood, in our 20s, our 30s. However, the way we are conditioned to show up in life is driven by the current setup, which is patriarchal, meaning It is focused on how men function, how men want things to get done, how men feel satisfaction at achievement. But the way our bodies are, our bodies have a very different rhythm. Men have 24-hour cycle, we have a lifetime-long cycle. When we honor our matriarchal way of living, our feminine rhythms, that's when we start to sync in with the way our intelligence activates and the way we are able to show up in the world and do our work. We are moon-dominant people. Our energies are moon-dominant. So we are driven by the 28-day moon cycle, our monthly bleeds, If we look across our lifetime, we will see a pattern of our monthly cyclical hormonal profile across our life as well, from puberty to perimenopause and beyond. Right now, most of us are dealing with this 3 AM wakeups, the rage, the brain fog, the lack of clarity, the confusion we feel. Doctors will tell us labs are looking great. Your labs are absolutely normal. Every time a woman in her 40s starts saying, "I don't feel like myself," she can be pretty sure if a few more of these symptoms are also presenting, then she is in perimenopause. There's brain fog, rage coming out of nowhere. Three a.m. Her eyes are just flinging open. Aches and pains. She's feeling exhausted constantly. Perimenopause is creeping up, and it's not one day you wake up and suddenly it's perimenopause. It's very gradual because it's a very slow phasing out of the hormonal profile. What is shifting? I look at everything through the five foundations, and the five foundations. This is what I call them. In Sanskrit, they are Ahara, which is our fuel, which is our food. Vihara, which is our lifestyle, which is our rhythm. That's how our energy functions. We wake up, we do certain things, practice certain rituals. We go to yoga or Pilates, or we go to office. There's a way we conduct ourselves throughout the day. So we have a certain rhythm based on how we feel our energy. We do certain highly energetic things in the morning or the afternoon, depending on how we feel, and we take rest at certain times. That's our vihara. That's our energy's rhythm. Vichara, our mindset. Everything is driven by our mindset. Now that perimenopause has come, our mindset will naturally shift because The estrogen is what kept everything going in our body. Estrogen is what kept everything positive in our body. Now it is shifting, something else is coming into its place. In that interim, our mindset is going to be affected. We are going to feel all the negative emotions— the Kama, Krodha, Lobha, Moha, delusions, anger, Desire for things we don't really need, a lot of feeling like I don't have it, others have it, feeling lack. All that is going to come up because the oxytocin, the dopamine, all that is affected by how estrogen is shifting in our body. The presence, how we show up in our relationships, how we show up with our loved ones. With the people we know, with our colleagues. All that is going to be shifting because when we were in our puberty, when we were in our fertility years, we were programmed by the hormonal profile to be peaceful, to be people-pleasing, to be with others, to compromise, to adjust. This is no longer going to be. Because we don't need to adjust to make anything happen for anybody anymore. We are now free from that responsibility. Therefore, this is the most powerful time where we are now— biology is telling us, you can absolutely live for yourself going forward. You don't have to compromise for anybody. Your service to society is done. You were a mother, or maybe not. You worked hard. You've given the world what it needed from you. Now, my dear, this is your time for Devi. This is your time for the Goddess to rise in you and for you to live completely for yourself. That is what is going to shift, and that is the identity, the samskaras, the wiring that is going to shift in our mind. Our brain is actively wiring, rewiring itself right now to embody this new reality. And we are feeling the confusion because we don't understand. Because everything looks very, very radical. Everything looks like, oh my God, it's changing so fast. Why am I feeling this way? Why am I not caring so much about this? Because it was not meant to keep you alive. It was draining you. It was taking from you. Now is the time for you to fill yourself and then give from a place of abundance. That extreme drain on our body for creation, for holding fertility, that power is now coming back to us. Now, what is estrogen? Estrogen is the chief hormone estrogen and progesterone that are messengers in the body that started with our puberty. They created this identity that you see in the mirror. They shaped you from a child, from an 8-year-old, a 9-year-old. They shaped you into the woman you are. Everything you are proud of—your hair, your skin, your beauty, your sparkle in your eyes—everything was thanks to estrogen and progesterone. And now, as we are phasing into our 40s and moving forward, the body is scaling back estrogen because estrogen. It takes a lot from our body to maintain on estrogen. Now the body is going to shift its gears and put us on nearly 30% less estrogen. Estrogen was mainly produced by our ovaries. When we went through puberty, we matured our ovaries, and from the ovaries, maximum production of estrogen happened. Now we are moving into ketones and lactates. Ketones are fats, ketones are lipids, and amino acids. The body has an endless supply of ketones and fats. You see our grandparents who are just sitting down and constantly chanting, or constantly doing some work with their hands. They have endless energy at a certain baseline. Obviously, not everybody's running around, but they're sitting and they're quietly praying or doing some little chores or playing with the grandkids. They are going to have that endless supply of energy because of this. They are able to take care of a lot of things, which is greater than the spike of estrogen we used to have. High energy crash during our month, during our day, that's gonna go off. Now we are going to have a steady supply of energy. So this is a good thing. And if you don't believe me, just hang in there and we'll get to the good part. When the estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone— these are the 3 ones that are actually working together. When these shift, naturally our body is going to feel the effect. Because now we don't need to hold on to fertility anymore. We've done all that. You've used that. Now it's time for you to turn that around and come back home to yourself. Estrogen was deeply involved with our sleep, our mood, our brain, our emotions. Now that estrogen is pulling back, you are feeling that deficit in the way you sleep, in the way your moods are affected, the rage. Your brain is getting rewired. So literally the wiring is being broken and it is being rewired into a new kind of organ. It's going from organ that is going to use ketones and lactates. Naturally, your emotional centers are not as supported as before. This is a good time to let our partners, our people know that, look, I'm going through this. I'm feeling really strained. Please forgive me if I do or say something in the moment. Just like toddlers throwing a tantrum and we don't take toddlers seriously, similarly, our families, our partners should be alerted that not to take us So literally, when we have to express something maybe at an intensity of 10 and it expresses at 1,000, once they know that this is not personal, this is not against them, this is just something that is part of our rewiring process right now, we will have a lot more space for grace. Progesterone was the Kapha hormone, which kept us calm, safe, and handled our stress resilience. But progesterone is also dropping right now. And testosterone was the one which gave us the muscle, gave us the libido, gave us that feeling of being intimate. For a lot of us, because we have been depleted by stress, Testosterone is also dropping, whereas in a natural woman growing up in or living in a rural area, estrogen and progesterone are dropping naturally, but their testosterone is kind of steady. Their testosterone is maintaining, their adrenals are supporting, and because they've not been living the life of a corporate girly in the city, They're not receiving those 100 emails a day, client complaints a day, people expecting them to go to the moon and back to get done in a day. It's the work that they have practiced all their life. They're just continuing that. They do not feel a lot of the symptoms that we feel simply by being in the constant go, go, go stress environment. Of the big towns and the cities of the world, the corporate world. If you think back to all your PMS that you've gone through, about 20 into 12, about 150 PMSs that you've gone back, the wealth of information you've had in your PMS. How did you feel in that PMS? Were you rageful? Did you sweat? Did you have diarrheal episodes? Did you have intense pain in your body? Did you feel extreme exhaustion? Just take a second and go through your mind and think of all the times your PMS was hard on you. What happened? Did you lose sleep? Were you wired and tired? Your perimenopause will mimic Some of that. Think of what you did when you had PMS. Did you push yourself? No, you took a break. You said no to work. You told your boss, I'm not feeling well, I'm gonna sleep this off. We had that intelligence. But when we come to perimenopause, we look very normal. There is no period coming, so we don't take that break. We push ourselves when we are exhausted, and every day cumulatively some more exhaustion builds on top to a point where we absolutely cannot function. And then we are like, am I going crazy? Why am I feeling like this? The exhaustion you will feel, the pain you will feel, the tiredness you will feel, the anger you will feel, it's just Many, many, many PMSs over the days, over the weeks, and the months. Isn't that shocking? If we look at all the symptoms of a perimenopausal body, there are more than 100 symptoms. Because we talked about how estrogen is managing our entire system. This whole body is made with estrogen. So when estrogen starts to withdraw, what's going to happen? Every part of the body is going to feel the effect. Every part of the body is going to get hurt. Every part of the body is going to get rewired. Therefore, all of our symptoms are valid. If we are having new food allergies, food sensitivities, painful stomach, severe acid reflux, Nausea, intense food cravings, high blood pressures, cholesterol levels, rapid bone loss. All this is going to be part of perimenopause because everything is shifting. And at this time, the only thing our body needs is for us to give it space to allow it to go through this process. Ayurveda looks at Hormonal profile as a change in our ojas, a change in our vital energies. Ojas is the essence of all the tissues, is the most final essence of all the tissues. Ojas comes directly from the 5 foundations. The ahara, the food, the fuel. The hara, the rhythm, your energy levels, the way you carry yourselves. Vichara, your mindset, what you are thinking, what your predominant thoughts are. Vyavahara, your presence, your connections to other people. And your samskara, your natural tendencies, your wiring, your identity. All of this Works on your rasa dhatu, the first dhatu, the first tissue, the first nutritive extract of your food. From there, it comes to your mamsa, your muscle, your fat tissue, your bone tissue, your nervous tissue, your blood tissue, your fertility tissue, and finally, what is left over. Is your ojas, that which gives you your juiciness, your glowiness, balances your vata element, your pitta element, your kapha element, makes you magnetic and attractive. When your ojas is high, you walk into a room and everybody turns their head around and says. What a gorgeous woman! She has such a light. I want to be with her. I want to talk to her. I want to be her friend. So Ojas is that reason that we are magnetic, luminous. We have an energy field of love and beauty and happiness and life. We emanate life. That is the Ayurvedic view. That when our periods are ending, they are being retired. It is called as Rajomivritti. The Rajas, the flow of blood, is being put a gentle stop to. Ayurveda does not know hormones because hormones were not present. Ayurveda just did not have that kind of a scientific view. Ayurveda saw things. In the shape of ta and kapha, this is made by the balance of your vata element, your fire energy, your wind energy, that which governs your movement, that which governs your circulation. It is governed by your pitta energy, that which affects your metabolism and your digestion, your capacity to Transcend emotion, to heal them in your heart. And it is affected by your Kapha element, your ability to hold your tissues together, your ability to have a certain amount of moistness in your body. When our Pitta element is out of order, Pitta element is out of balance, that's when we feel the rage and the acid reflux and the heat. And the sweating that we feel during perimenopause. There is a Vata imbalance. The air element is imbalanced. Your circulation is in imbalance. Brain fog, anxiety, not able to hold your thought, things dropping as you're speaking. But the thing is, you blame yourself. I blamed myself, like I was losing my edge. I was no longer sharp. I was no longer able to think. I should just retire, do something else. We start saying these things. Not true. It's just a momentary glitch, and once you rest, your brain will be a lot better. Ojas. We spoke about ojas as our vital essence, our radiance, our reserve. When we have balanced vata and pitta in perimenopause, That's when we have more ojas. Now let's look at some of the habits that are hurting us. Intermittent fasting is raising vata. When we are fasting, our vata naturally increases. So fast is a good thing. It will balance our circulation. Fasting is a good thing if you have excess weight. But if you're already vata imbalanced, And you fast. Vata imbalance, meaning you have brain fog, you have anxiety, you have overwhelm, you have exhaustion. You already have vata. Fasting for losing weight is going to deplete your ojas and your vata. It's going to imbalance your vata further. If you have rage, if you have sunburn, if you're seeing a lot of spots on your skin, you're waking up. Drenched in sweat, you already are high in Pitta. You're imbalanced in your fire energy, your Pitta energy. Doing something like high-intensity exercise, lot of saunas, staying out in the heat, not using AC, eating a lot of chilies, even overdoing something like ginger teas is going to aggravate Your pitta further. If you are go, go, go, pushing yourself further, just kicking yourself and showing up more for work because you feel, oh my gosh, I'm lacking, I'm falling behind, imposter syndrome, people are going to find out, I'm having all these weird thoughts in my head. You're pushing yourself, you're going to make it worse for your vata. When vata and pitta deplete. Ojas is naturally going to deplete. You see that pattern. Right now, what you must understand is you are going through the final frontier of you shaping as a woman. You are at a sacred threshold, and I like to use the analogy of an airplane. When you are on an airplane, When you're on the ground, you are perfectly fine. You are safe. But when you are in the air, when you are in flight, you are still safe because you are on a steady air pressure. Your latitude, longitude, your speed is fine. Your fuel consumption is fine. But when you are transitioning, when you're going from Taxiing on the tarmac to airborne. There is a space where you are climbing up and the wings are shaking, the plane is shaking, and the pilot says, put on your seatbelts. If the oxygen masks fall, give it to yourself first. Even if you have a baby, give yourself the oxygen mask first. Don't do anything crazy right now. Don't go to the bathroom. Don't be running up and down the aisles. There won't be any food service. What's going on? Transition. We are respecting the sacredness of transition, and we all behave ourselves. But what do we do? We are transitioning, but we want to act like we are still sitting on the tarmac. We want to play our music, we want to go to the bathroom, we want to chat to Our friends on the backseat, we don't respect the sacredness of the transition. We are all maintaining the sacredness of that transition. We are all protecting the transition. If somebody does not wear a seatbelt, somebody does not have their window shades up, if somebody is walking up and down the aisle, the air hostess is going to be the fear's protector. And say, hey, please go back. This is for your safety. That's what we are going to be doing going forward. And hopefully, this is going to make a change for you. There is going to be terrible rage during that time. So we're not done with that rage part yet. If people stop us, the people who will stop us from living for ourselves, we are not going to feel very happy around them. Maintaining boundaries and having them step out of our lives. As we feel that emotion rising, we warn them, we talk to them about it, and we hold them at distance so we are not forcing ourselves into those rageful episodes. You are going to get massive insomnia in perimenopause. If you do not take care of yourself during the beginning of your perimenopause, if you don't do at least a 2-3 month of a sabbatical, depending on how worse your symptoms are, to really take care of your biological clock. Now let's understand your body. Today I'm gonna run over the body types briefly. There are 3 kinds of body types. You could be a Vata. I call the Vatas skinny minis. They are always skinny no matter what they eat. Pittas are boss babes. They are like go, go, go. They're the ones making things happen. They love to be disciplined and driven. The Kaphas are the goddesses. They are the beautifully shaped earth women. They're nurturing. They are solid. They are grounded. You can lean on them. Vatas celebrated on the ramps of the world. Pittas are celebrated as the CEOs of the world. And Kaphas are celebrated as moms. Kaphas are celebrated as reliable people who are full of love. You can't get rid of a Kapha. Once a Kapha loves you, you are loved for life. So we value them that way. The Vata woman you will know among yourself is the one who is governed by the air element. She's going to think fast, she's going to move fast, she's going to come up with plans fast. She's going to have 5 things lined up over the weekend. Her body is usually running cold, so her hands and feet will be cold. It's that friend of yours at work who is in the sweaters. She's always cold. AC is turned on and she's shivering. She's out, she goes for a walk and she's wearing the thickest sweater. She loves to travel. She's always making her plans so quickly. The Vatas are quick to decide. Vata women are creative. They're inspired. They're electric. But when perimenopause hits. They are going to feel blocked. They are going to feel like their brains are not working anymore. Like they drop their words more. It's that person who goes like chat chat and then loses her thoughts, and she's like, "What's that? What's that? What's that?" That's your Vata woman anxiety. Three a.m. wakeups. Why? Because at three a.m., Vata spikes in the atmosphere. Vata starts flowing in the atmosphere. If you get up early in the morning before sunrise, you can feel that breeze in the air. What is that breeze outside? That is Vata. So for Vata women, 3 AM wake-ups hit them the hardest. Pitta woman— who is a Pitta woman? Boss babes. They are the ones who are setting goals and planning. They've got a plan for everything. You go to them with a problem, they already have solved it. Given you the plan, sent you out and said, go do it. They're very precise. They're measured in their words. When they're balanced, they're radiant. They make a lot of good decisions. They can be constantly be challenged and they'd be fine. They'd be athletic. They will go running out for lunch. Others are sitting down, taking it easy. They're the ones out there running. When they are out of balance, they feel a lot of rage or feel a lot of heat. This sleep gets affected because sleep is essential. Pitta is essential to keep us asleep. If Pitta is in balance, only then our liver is digesting properly, metabolizing properly. We go deep into sleep. Serotonin gets changed into melatonin. If Pitta is out of balance, then we are going to have sleep disturbance. We are going to be wired but tired. We are Alert, feel like we are accomplishing a lot, but sleep is not coming, right? We feel that intense hot flushes because of Pitta. Hair loss is because of Pitta. So if you're just combing your hair and hair is coming out in fistfuls, it is because of Pitta. You may be washing your hair with warm water like you used to before, but now you're in perimenopause, your Pitta is already— Decreasing. Deeply imbalanced, you cannot wash your hair in hot water anymore, warm water anymore. You have to use cold water if you are facing hair loss. You become critical, you become arrogant, you become narcissistic. This is all Pitta imbalance. A Kapha woman is normally vava boom. She has nice hips, she has a bigger body, right? She is steady, she is Earth dominant. She's warm, deeply loyal. She is somebody who is slow to do things, but once she's committed, she is committed. She will go the long haul with you. When she goes through perimenopause, usually she will collect a lot of ama in her body. We will talk about what ama is. The weight will start to grow more and more Faster, and she would start feeling sluggish. Again, brain, brain fog will happen. She will feel unmotivated. She won't feel like getting out of bed. She won't feel like going out and doing the things that she used to do before. She will have more depressive episodes. She will feel left out. The Vata gets anxious. The Pitta gets angry. The Kapha gets depressed. Not that it can't happen to the others, but mostly on a, like, a bigger scale, if you zoom out, this is what the women fall into these categories. And of course, we are mixes. We are more than one. Before we move forward, we need to understand one thing that complicates the journey in perimenopause. What I have seen across the board. Is the presence of ama. Ama is what? When our body digests food, in a perfect scenario, you take a burger, you chomp, chomp, chomp, chew it up, mix it with your saliva, goes into your belly, gets digested, and then you poop out some stuff. A portion of that burger— bad example, burger. But I want you to understand, Amma. So that's why I'm using the example burger. When you chop that burger, ideal scenario, all of that burger should become your tissues. The rasa, the rakta, the muscles, the bones, the marrow, the bone marrow tissue, the fertility tissue. It should become that. And then the remaining should go out of your body as Waste. This is what a perfect body does. A baby's body that is drinking mother's milk, that's what it is doing. It neatly separates the two as tissue and as open pee and sweat. And done. What happens as we start growing up and we start eating fast food, Start getting stressed, start making our Agni, our digestive fire, lower than what it is by our lifestyle, by our Ahara, frequent snacking, not eating adequately, eating too much, eating in distraction. What happens? Our bodies loses the capacity to digest and metabolize. Because of which the food now does not convert directly into the tissues and into waste. Now a third thing is produced. The third thing is what? Ama, toxins. What does not digest congests, will block, will stop. So when we were babies, we did not wake up with bad breath. We did not wake up with plaque on our teeth. We did not wake up with plaque in our muscles and cells and capillaries. But as we started growing older, we started developing plaque on our teeth. Hair started falling. We started getting wrinklier and old, not as beautiful and fresh looking. This is because of Ama. Now there are 30-year-olds who look 50-year-old because of the high presence of Ama, because everybody's ordering food in, nobody's cooking, lifestyle, everybody's tied to their phones and their laptops. Tomorrow we'll go deeper into the 5 foundations and understand where we are going wrong. The 5 foundations that we did, which was the Ahara, Vihara, Vyavahara, Vichara, Sanskara. The fuel, the presence, the rhythm, the mindset, and the identity. Thank you so much, and I'll see you tomorrow. Bye for now. Namaste.