Good Life Project - Wellness, Women & Wisdom | 4 Leading Voices

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

Is energy medicine real? What about Ayurveda? What about Western/modern medicine, what’s right and not so right about it? Does the gender of a patient make a difference in how they’re treated, or in their health outcomes? What about the role of plants, herbs, and intuition? These are all questions that have come up in conversations over the years as I’ve had the incredible opportunity to sit down with women who are leading voices and often voices of change in various approaches to medicine and wellbeing. And, in today’s episode, we’ve curated key elements from four of those conversations to share and potentially pull back the curtain on so many myths, misunderstandings and confusion and plant some seeds to explore a different lens and maybe even some different modalities when it comes to exploring your own physical, mental, and energetic wellbeing. If you LOVED this episode:You can find Jill at: Website | InstagramYou can find Avanti at: Website | InstagramYou can find Aviva at: Website | InstagramYou can find Latham at: Website | InstagramCheck out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It was more than just the pain or the discomfort I was feeling in my physical body, right? You know, plantar fasciitis, weight gain, back pain, throwing out my back, all of those things. Those were all signals and signs, warning signs for me, right? That I think the biggest thing was, is that I felt so disconnected from all of the people in my life, whether it was my children, my family, my husband, my parents, or more importantly, my patients. I just felt like I was not connecting in any way with other human beings. And that was really, I think, what stopped me in my tracks. And then when I started to think about it, I felt,

I was like, oh my gosh, you're not only disconnected with everyone else outside of you, you're disconnected with yourself, right? You don't even know what is important to you anymore because you're on this like hamster wheel of just doing what you need to do to get through another day. And that was really, I think, what changed everything. So is energy medicine real? What about Ayurveda? What about Western modern medicine? What's right and what's not so right about it? Does the gender of a patient make a difference in how they're treated or in their health outcomes? And what about the role of plants or herbs or intuition? These are all questions that have come up in conversation over the years as I've had the incredible opportunity to sit down with women who are leaving voices and often voices of change and advocacy and activism in various approaches and lenses on medicine and well-being. And in today's

episode, we have curated key elements from four of those conversations to share and potentially pull back the curtain to so many myths, misunderstandings, and confusion, and hopefully plant some seeds to explore a different lens and maybe even some different modalities when it comes to exploring your own physical, mental, and energetic well-being. So excited to share these conversations with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. First up is a conversation we had with Jill Blakeway about energy medicine. Now, when you hear energy medicine, what do you think? Well, for many, it's a blend of curiosity and also caution. You've heard about incredible outcomes after nearly everything else has failed, yet you can't quite wrap your head around how it works, let alone if it works. Is it real? Is there science? I had all these same

questions, and it's what I was excited to explore with Jill Blakeway, a licensed and board-certified acupuncturist and clinical herbalist, to explore applications, research, and the scientific bases for this fast-growing healing modality. She's also the founder of Yenova, a group of alternative health clinics in New York City, and the co-author of Making Babies, a proven three-month program for maximum fertility, Sex Again, Recharging Your Libido, and the book Energy Medicine, The Science and Mystery of Healing. So excited to dive into this conversation. Here's Jill.

I went to acupuncture school in San Diego and I did a master's in traditional Chinese medicine and then subsequently a doctorate. And I found myself and it was the thing that was missing. And then I met a woman called Dr. Ni, who was an MD from China and an acupuncturist. She was a gynecologist and she was extraordinarily brave. She had come to San Diego with her young son and her husband hadn't been able to get out of China. So she was on her own with a child a bit like me. And she was my kind of doctor. She was really smart. She was solving complex problems. Columbia University was studying her

because she was reversing cervical cancer with retained herbal douches and things like that. She was extraordinary. But she would also make soup for the patients and take them to the park to do qigong. And she was just an amazing person. And what I hadn't realized is that Dr. Nee had taught me something extraordinarily valuable, which was she taught me to integrate Western and Eastern medicine when it comes to gynecology and particularly when it comes to fertility. And so I was extremely good at getting people pregnant, couples who were infertile pregnant because of the information she'd given me. And I was really unusual in New York. So within, I don't know, a couple of years, I was seeing 150 patients a week. I was absolutely packed. And it was before there was all that research about how acupuncture can help IVF

be more effective. So I was kind of ahead of the game. And these days, the Inova Center has two centers, we're about to have another, and I have 21 acupuncturists working with me. And it all came from that knowledge base of how to integrate Chinese medicine to make Western medical techniques work better all those years ago. You know, I accidentally studied with Dr. Nee and she was an MD. She was an allopathic doctor as well as an acupuncturist. So she embodied that. So I took on her values and came here. And yes, what I found was that at best we kind of tolerated each other. And I love Western medicine and I find it fascinating. I love science. That's why I wrote this book. And I, what I don't like is dogma. And I think that there is dogma on both sides. The people who

are very anti-Western medicine get very positioned and dogmatic about it. And it's a shame. They throw out an extraordinary system with amazing diagnostics and, you know, some really important solutions. And I've met Western doctors who are, you know, massively dogmatic and just don't see what's right in front of their nose. But I ended up writing a book with a doctor, my first book, the New York Times called me a fertility goddess, which is a very weird thing to be called, to be honest. And something I've never been able to live up to. But I got a book deal and I wrote my first book with a reproductive endocrinologist.

It was called Making Babies. And it was an East and West guide to how to get pregnant and how to get the best of both worlds, which I think is what most of us want, really. We want to get the best of all possible worlds. We don't want to be over-medicated at all, but we do want Western medicine, I think, when we need it. And we want to get the wisdom of traditional medicines and traditional practices and incorporate them. And so I was always doing that for the patients and trying to help them

navigate a line through both systems that was reasonable and that would help them. Yeah. I mean, I think at the end of the day, right, from a patient standpoint, patient doesn't walk in, doesn't say like, I want to go this path or this path. They just want to feel better. Yeah. I think that's true. And I think if we all get our egos out of the way and work together with open hearts and open minds, then the patients benefit from that. And that's been the focus of my career. I've worked with doctors the whole time. I speak doctor, you know, those doctors in the hospice taught me well. I chart well because of doctors, Western MDs. When I first came to New York, I also set up a

program at Lutheran Medical Center, NYU Lutheran in Sunset Park, which is a hospital. And I set up a hospital-based program, particularly in obstetrics. We did a lot of pain relief for women in labor and things like that. So I was always someone who was talking to doctors and learning from doctors and asking questions. And I think that served my patients well. And to this day, you know, and these days, the vast majority of our referrals come at the Unova Center come from doctors. Interesting. That's great to know. At some point along your journey, you're building a practice, building a life, building everything in New York City, succeeding in helping to create outcomes for your patients that are really powerful. Do you start to have experiences

that make you question, is it really the needles? I did. I started to, well, patients would report that they could feel energy, what they thought of as energy coming out of my hands. And I would ask them what they felt, and it would be a sort of warmth and a tingling. And I had all the questions that I think any responsible and scientifically literate practitioner would have, which is, you know, is it placebo effect? Do I have something coming out of my hands that's very impressive, but it does absolutely nothing and people are just impressed and feel better? Is it actual energy? Can it be measured? That kind of thing. And it got stronger. And what I realized was it responded to need. And there was a point where I was still very green in practice. I hadn't been in practice that long. And I had a patient who was very senior in the financial markets. And he used to fly in by helicopter to see me, which was very impressive to me as a young practitioner. And I used to treat him for back pain and And he liked it. And I was able to get his

back out of pain. And then one day he came to me and he looked much more somber than usual. And he told me, I have prostate cancer. And I don't want to do the Western treatment because I don't want to be impotent. And I think there's a real risk of impotency. And he said, I think you can help me. And he had way more confidence in me than I had in myself. And I was scared, actually. And I'm not someone who rejects Western medicine or encourages my patients to. So we talked to his doctors. And it turns out the prostate cancer is quite slow growing. It's not the emergency that, say, pancreatic cancer would be, which grows very quickly. And his doctor said he had three months to do what he wanted to do to see if he could turn it around. And so we decided to work together.

And I noticed that when I treated him, the energy coming out of my hands was way stronger than it had ever been before, which is interesting. But I also noticed that if my ego got involved, if I started to say, please help this man, you know, please get rid of this cancer, even if my ego was wanting something nice for someone else, it would diminish. I needed to distract my mind. And I would look out of the window or I'd chat to him about other things. And it would be very, very strong. And he also responded to the challenge. He is someone who had grown up in poverty and created this extraordinary life for himself. And he was a very determined man.

And so he took it like, you know, a challenge, this prostate cancer, and he changed his relationship with everything in his life, you know, his family, this prostate cancer. And he changed his relationship with everything in his life, you know, his family, food, gods, everything. And at the end of three months, his cancer was gone. And I know him to this day. He's an elderly man now. And I'm seeing him next week, in fact. And he, it has never come back. That was 15, 18 years ago, something like that. And it's actually very hard to tease out what happened there. I certainly wouldn't take credit for it myself. We did Chinese herbs. We did retained enemas, which my teacher had taught me to do, Dr. Ni, to get the herbs really close to the prostate.

We did acupuncture. He changed his relationship with a lot of things. He had a big wake-up call. Who knows what worked? A bit of all of it. So I'm just glad it did. Yeah. When three months later, whenever it was, you, I'm assuming he got scans or tests that showed that this was actually gone. Were you surprised? Yes. No one was more surprised than me. And you know what else surprised me? I thought his doctors would ring me and say, what did you do? And we would collaborate somehow on some great study and we'd move forward with prostate cancer and things like that. And they just dismissed it. They told him he'd had a spontaneous remission and that it occasionally happened. And he was very lucky and which negated his work, actually, his hard work to turn this around and his determination, I think.

And we moved on. So how does that inform you and your understanding of what's actually happening when you're working with this? So you go through this process, you're like, wow, this is actually, we've just had some sort of result where somehow the blend of things that was happening created a profound change in something. And you're also noticing at the same time, there's this something coming out of your hands and it changes based on need and it changes based on your trying to willfully make it happen or not. How does this affect your lens on what this thing is and what the relationship is between the actual needles going into a person's body and making a change because they're stimulating something within the person's body and something else moving potentially through you into the needles into or through another human being. How does this affect your whole sort of understanding of all of these ideas?

I was very inspired by it. I was very inspired by the idea that there are prompts that can prompt the body's intelligence to restore balance and homeostasis, which is what I think that is, that your body can be prompted to heal itself. And it can be prompted by a placebo. It can be prompted by hypnosis. It can be prompted with a physical prompt like an acupuncture needle and an energetic prompt. And so I started to explore the prompts that help people to heal. And I did that for my patients. You know, the thing about being in clinical practice is that you get really fond of your patients and you want to help them to the best of your ability. And so it's a constant searching for answers. It's what I love about my

job. It's always detective work. It's always a collaboration with another human being, in this case, the patient. And it's a constant search for what will spark this body to heal itself, I think. And at about that time, I met a man called Dr. Bill Bengston. And Dr. Bengston was a professor at City University. And he has a sort of extraordinary story. He came across a psychic healing technique from a quite strange psychic healer. And he decided as a scientist to test it in the lab. And so he got mice that were specially bred to have cancer, poor mice, and they are given cancer and they reliably die by day 27. That's how

pharmaceuticals are tested and all sorts of cancer therapies are tested. And he gave the mice cancer and then he was going to test the psychic healer, and he was a little unpredictable and volatile, this man, and he decided not to do it. So Dr. Bengston, having already got the mice, decided to do it himself, the technique. And to his absolute amazement, it worked. The mice got sick. They got noticeable tumors, although they didn't appear to be sick. And then they started to recover. And what's more, when they re-injected the mice with cancer,

they couldn't get it. They had changed their own immune system in response to this technique. And then Dr. Bankston did what any good scientist would do. Good science needs to be replicable. You can't have a special someone somewhere who does something, but nobody can see them. You know, we have to build on each other's knowledge in order to advance science, I think. So he got groups of skeptical students together, and he didn't tell them really what they were doing.

And he taught them the technique, and they too were able to turn around the cancer in these mice almost invariably. They rarely lost a mouse. And I came upon his work and then was connected to him. And his work really inspired me because it's good science in so much as you can't criticize the man's science. The outcome is a sort of astounding thing. But he's doing it in a very scientific way. And I was so impressed by his technique, which actually explained me to me in some ways. How so? was teaching, and I have the exercise in the book so people can try it for themselves. Dr. Fengson very generously let me write about it. But what he was teaching was he was teaching the students to distract their egos. And he was doing it by having them flash in front of themselves in their mind's eye very quickly, all sorts of ego gratifying things that they would like.

These aren't your noble wants like world peace and a better government and things like that. These are our sort of, you know, silly wants in some ways, you know, a bag, a watch. Mine had a beach house on it and things like that. And the flashing before your eyes, in your mind's eye, seems to do two things. It distracts your ego and it projects you into some place into the future. And then energy comes out of people's left hand. It's always the left hand with this technique. It must affect, I think, the right side of the brain in some ways. And it's palpable and it affects change in the mice and actually also in human beings. And I interviewed people who'd been cured of cancer by Bill's technique for this book. And so I realized, oh, he's doing it differently to me, but he's doing the same thing. I look out

the window or chat to the patient about something innocuous, but I'm distracting my mind. And I had already learned that if my ego got involved at all, it all went awry, that I needed to get out of the way. And that's when I began to think that I was making myself into a conduit for something that was coming through me, because I certainly wasn't channeling it with my own mind. So that was the moment where I realized, oh, this is measurable by science. And I am like a little antenna. As I said, when I was small, I'm an antenna. I'm picking something up and I'm passing information through a frequency, I think, to the patients. Yeah. Were you immediately open to that idea? No. No. I mean, I believed Bill's research and I began to dig. And this is the beginning of me

writing this book, Energy Medicine, the Science and Mystery of Healing. I didn't know I was writing this book. I thought I was just at the time trying to work out, explain me to me. But I began to dig and I realized that there are ways we affect each other through frequency. For instance, people interviewing people a bit like you're doing now, often pick up the heart waves of the person they're interviewing in their brain wavesaves, which is very interesting. And they use EEGs and EKGs to measure that. Or at the University of Connecticut, there was some research where they put people in separate MRIs in separate rooms. And when one had healing thoughts about the other, their brainwaves synced up. And I realized, oh, we are in some kind of silent collaboration with each other, that science

is beginning to be able to measure. And it freaks people out, so nobody talks about it. But we're beginning to be able to measure that. And so, as you know from the book, I decided to submit my own body to science at some point. And I had an EKG of my heart and EEG of my brain while I did my thing, which is different to Bill's thing. And what I found is that my heart and my brain go into resonance. They go at the same frequency. And to do that, I have to slow my brain down a lot. And then through something called mirror neurons, the patient's heart goes into the same frequency as mine, which I think is quite beautiful, actually. And I think when that connection through frequency, when we're all

going at the same frequency, I think that's when information gets passed, I think. Yeah, it's sort of like you're aligning all of the blocks so that you just, you know, there's always a channel there, but there, but the, you know, the, the, their kinks in the hose to a certain extent. But, and when you sort of like, it's like process of removing all the kinks or everything kind of flow naturally. So I'm guessing that a lot of our listeners are like, yeah, this all makes sense. And I'm guessing also that, but in the last 10 minutes or so of our conversation, a bunch of people who were listening were saying, well, yeah, this, this, oh, okay. Yes, yes, yes. And now their eyebrow, like an

eyebrow got, you know, increasingly been raised saying, really? Like, are we going there? You know, I, like, I, I love the idea of acupuncture. I love the idea of, of us being able to affect, you know, and I buy into the idea that we can measure energetic electrical fields within bodies and we can manipulate that. But people becoming actual energies, you know, like antennas and beacons of some palpable energy that is measurable externally and can affect other people, that's pretty trippy. It is. Although you can look at it in a very grounded way. And in the book, I did both, as you know, I explored my mystical side, but I love science. And so I would keep coming back to what is provable. And if you look at, say, the hands of Qigong masters, they produce a field from their hands, which is a thousand times stronger than the

electrical field that comes from what is normally the strongest organ in the body, which is the heart, which produces a powerful electrical field. But when Qigong masters are healing people, they have a force that's a thousand times stronger coming from their hands. And that frequency is a very specific frequency. It's very low, interestingly. And science also uses low frequency to heal. Here at Columbia University, and we're not far from Columbia University sitting here, you and I, they did research which showed that running a low-frequency electrical current through bone helps it heal faster. And now at all the best orthopedic hospitals, they routinely run current through bone. Interestingly, it's the same frequency that Qigong masters produce from their hands.

Fascinating. It is. And so science has arrived at this from a different route. But I'm interested in the places where we join up. I mean, it's fascinating, right? Because if you tell somebody that researchers have developed this device that generates a certain frequency that can heal bone faster, a lot of people are like, okay, cool. And then you tell somebody, well, Qigong mask can place their hands around that same area and generate the same result. A lot of people would be like, no, but, but, but it does make sense. I mean, because it's this, it's effectively the same thing.

It's just one is a machine that was created out of the effort of human beings. And the other is a machine that is a human being. And I also, I think it's fascinating the idea of the energy that is transmitted by us. And this is always one of my questions. Is it something that is generated from us or something more that we open ourselves to becoming conduits to allow it to move through us and that it's not actually you are uniquely qualified to generate this it's something which is out there and around us and somehow we can almost allow to move through us harness and direct well i i i don't think i'm remotely special for a start. So I think pretty much

anyone can do this. If I can do this, anyone can do this, I think. And I think it's, to me, I obviously don't know the answer to this question completely and definitively. But to me, it feels like it comes from outside of me. And it may be that I've decided it's good for my mental health to believe that. I have met healers who believe they're generating the energy, and that's a very hard road for them. And their egos often get the better of them, and they become exploitative in some way. And we see this all the time in the spiritual community. And I wrote about this in my book. But, you know, when I looked at what people call charlatans, I was expecting to see people who wave their hands around, we're doing absolutely

nothing and charging a fortune. I didn't see much of that. I saw the occasional one, but I didn't see much of that. What I saw were people with some talent who were using that talent exploitatively. And that actually gave me such a pause for thought that I contacted the head of psychiatry and law at Harvard, who is a man called Dr. Gutheil, who's considered to be one of America's greatest experts on transgressions of the therapeutic relationship. And I asked him, you know, about this. And he said, watch out for people who are a cult of one and have ritual and dogma and watch out for people who are banking on people's confirmation bias and encouraging it in order to encourage people to cherry pick through their experiences and only see what they want to see, which if you have a cult of personality is, you know, is the temptation that people really want to believe in you. So I think for me, it's been an aspect of good mental hygiene to see this as something that comes from outside me and not me and to see myself as just like a convict,

like I always tell my patients, oh, it's not particularly clever. I'm like, just like an aerial or something. I'm just an antenna. And then be able to do it without, you know, putting myself on a pedestal. That's been healthy for me. It also means I can train my team

and I can work collaboratively with people. It's less lonely. There are lots of reasons for that, I think. I mean, I think that's it. To a certain extent, that lens helps democratize both the practice and the effect, right? Yeah. One of the things I wanted to ask you about also, so we've talked about your journey to a certain extent. We've sort of talked about different aspects of this idea of energy and what it can do and how it transmits.

The idea of the breath and breathing and how it relates to the movement of this thing called energy. I had a background in yoga. So pranayama, which was the Sanskrit word for essentially constraining or manipulating energy, was breathing exercises. And it seems like when you cross so many different traditions, at the heart of working with manipulating, changing, moving energy is some focus on breathing? Yes, I think so. And I'm self-taught, as you know. I mean, I was trained in acupuncture, but the energetic aspects of it, I sort of worked out myself. And I had, quite by accident again, everything happens to be by accident, it turns out, but I had taught myself to breathe in a way that created internal resonance. And that is measurable. That's what the biofeedback doctors measure, actually, is the way they teach people to breathe in a certain way so that they create internal resonance between the breath and the heart. And I had taught myself to

breathe in a certain way that creates resonance between my brain and the breath and the heart. And I think that's the triad for healing. And it creates a great deal of calm in me. And that calm in me creates a great deal of calm in the patients. And in my real life outside the clinic or my other life, I'm not necessarily the most calm person. My husband always jokes that I'm the only type A acupuncturist he knows. You know, we have a big clinic and I'm always thinking up new things to do. I'm not a particularly calm person, but in the clinic, I go into this very calm space, which I love for me, selfishly. It's like my little respite from running the business and writing books and being on book tour. And, you know, I just,

just recently I've been on book tour for months now. And I say to my husband, I miss the patients. I miss the clinic. Well, what I really miss, I do miss the patients and I do miss the clinic and my lovely colleagues. But what I really miss is the version of myself I am with the patients, which is calm. And that has to do with breathing. And obviously I could breathe the rest of the, calmly for the rest of my life, that would be, but I'm a work in progress. I'm getting there. But, you know, I taught myself to stay very centered in clinic. And that is, that comes from the breath.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I love all these connections. You and I could talk for a long time, but I think it's a good place for us to come full circle as you sit here at this moment in your life. If I offer up the term to live a good life, what comes up? Love. Love, I think, comes up more and more for me. Community. I have been thinking a lot about how to create community, real community, supportive community in a world that is so virtual and has communities that are so superficial. And I am thinking about kindness and compassion and love in a fearful world, the expansive energy of love. I've stopped being as scared as I was when I was younger. I think you hit your 50s and you start to think, I don't care what anyone thinks of me, actually. Like, why would I care about everybody's projections?

So I don't get scared in the way that I used to. I don't hide my light in the way that I used to because of that. And I want to use the time I'm on Earth to connect. I think we're here to be connected with each other in ways that are tangible and practical and are about community. Thank you. Thank you. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

I love how Jill brings an evidence-based approach to something that seems so esoteric. And next up, we've got Avanti Kumar Singh, an accomplished physician who, after years of practicing emergency medicine, began to struggle with what she saw as an inability for the mainstream approach to medicine to really help patients get well. She turned to Ayurveda, a healing methodology that has been practiced, refined, and sustained for some 5,000 years and made it the focus of her practice for the last 20 years as she stepped away from Western ideas and into this powerful ancient healing practice that centers supporting an individual's capacity to heal rather than an expectation to be fixed by others. Avanti is also the author of a wonderful guidebook, The Health Catalyst, How to Harness the Power of Ayurveda to Self-Heal and Achieve Optimal Wellness. Here's Avanti. What's fascinating to me is you started out your career actually

in traditional Western medicine. So walk me through what actually happened because you're out in the field, you're practicing, it's kind of more survival mode than thrive. What exactly happens that, as you just described, brings you to your knees and kind of turns the light on and says, huh, maybe this isn't the way that I need to be doing this. You know, so I think it was, it was more than just one thing. It was a multitude, right? It was not, it was more than just the pain or the discomfort I was feeling in my physical body, right? You know, plantar fasciitis, weight gain, back pain, throwing out my back, all of those things. Those were all signals and signs, warning signs for me, right? That I think the biggest thing was, is that I felt so disconnected from all of the people

in my life, whether it was my children, my family, my husband, my parents, or more importantly, my patients. I just felt like I was not connecting in any way with other human beings. And that was really, I think, what stopped me in my tracks. And then when I started to think about it, I felt, I was like, oh my gosh, you're not only disconnected with everyone else outside of you, you're disconnected with yourself, right? You don't even know what is important to you anymore

because you're on this like hamster wheel of just doing what you need to do to get through another day. And that was really, I think, what changed everything is that when, and I think because I'm such a feeling person, a very intuitive person, I connect with people. I'm sort of that quiet person, but I'm very observant, always watching what's going on and connecting even energetically with people. I had lost that completely. And that was what I think was quite literally killing me. More than the pain I was feeling in my body, it was that disconnection that was just too much. It was too much for me. And I started thinking about, if I don't change something, then what's the point of this anyway? I really had an existential crisis to tell you the truth.

And so I was in that place of saying, okay, yes, you've spent all this time, all this money, you know, I mean, I was writing loan checks until I was 45 years old, right. Which was only five years ago, turning 50 next year. So, you know, why did I do all of that? But I think I also had this deep understanding that if I continued the way I was going, then I don't know how long I'd actually be practicing. And would it matter anyway that I spent all this money if I couldn't practice too long because I just was exhausted or something happened to me with my health or my mental health or whatever?

I think I really took that really seriously. And then I think I really started thinking about, you know, what was I put on this earth to do? I was put on this earth to be of service to people. And the way that I had showed the feel that I had chosen was medicine and the health professions. Now, I think I just had to sit down and really think about how can I expand that definition of what medicine is. And so that's when sort of my grandfather started coming to me quite literally in my dreams. And he just kept saying to me, you know more, you know more, there's more to this. And so I think that he's probably the reason that I actually kept going in the field of medicine in this health profession of some kind rather than

completely, like you said, going to some other field as the way I would be of service. I think that that was why I had that knowledge and had that lived experience from a child, from the way I was raised, from the way I grew up, that I could go back to. And that's what I did. I realized that I had lost my health in my everyday life, right? While I was pursuing my career, my chosen career path of Western medicine, I didn't lose my health one day and just wake up and suddenly it was gone. You know, I had this realization that it was over time. It was day in, day out of doing the same things that were not supporting my health. And I think that's when I started to listen, to think about, well, this wasn't a problem for the first 20 something years of my life.

You know, what changed? And it was so obvious when I said it that way to myself, I was like, well, of course you grew up differently. And then I really started thinking about the way I live, like you said. And it really quite literally was, it was not a big deal. You know, it wasn't like my mom was when she would cook us meals thinking about, oh, I have to add turmeric or haldi, as we say in Hindi, into the food. That was just the way we did things, right? It wasn't, oh, I have to boost our immunity using haldi, right? And I started thinking about thing after

thing after thing after thing, everything from the moment that we would wake up in the morning till the evening when we'd go to sleep, there were these little things that were just built into the way we lived that were self we're supporting our health. And then I started thinking about, you know, different times of the year and things that would happen. You know, when we went to India, or my grandfather came to visit, and it all started to just come together for me, this understanding that there is all this wisdom in living in a certain way that promotes and supports your health. So it was like the light bulbs went off for me, quite literally. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like there are two light bulbs and tell me if this is right. It sounds like the first light bulb is, oh, this might help me if I return to this.

But then it sounds like the second light bulb is, what if this is actually a path forward for me professionally where I can stay in this being of service, I can stay in this medicine slash healing space, but just do it in a very different way. That's exactly what happened. And I'm convinced to this day, and I think about my grandfather every morning when I, you know, wake up and meditate is that that's quite literally what he was trying to tell me. Go back to your roots. Think about it for yourself, because I was at that point where I was just not doing well, physically, emotionally, spiritually. And then he kept nudging me. There's more, there's more, there's more. And so I think that that's really where I was like, Oh, this is like, right. It's been in front of me the whole time,

right in front of my nose. And I didn't even realize it. And yeah, could this help other people? And quite literally what I started doing was I started applying it to my family and my friends and my children specifically. And I started talking to my mom and she didn't always know the answers of why she was doing what because she wasn't taught it that way. So I started looking things up. I started researching it and reading.

And yeah, at some point, I was having a conversation with my husband and he said, you do realize that this is like what you're supposed to be doing. And I said, yeah, I think I've known that for a while. but I will be honest with you. You know, it's, it goes back to something you mentioned earlier is that it was really hard to make that decision. You know, I remember when I first started down this path, like 15 years ago, I was so worried about people thinking I was completely crazy, right. To leave the field of medicine that I had worked so

hard to get accepted to medical school and get through the training and the time and the money I had spent on it and then to walk away. Yeah, that was in my head. I was like, am I nuts? And I thought, yeah, I am. But if I stay here, I'm going to go nuts. I'm just not going to be able to survive it. So I figured, all right, I'm going to try.. I'm just not going to be able to survive it. So I figured, all right, I'm going to try. What I've really spent a lot of time on is thinking about how does this wisdom that's 5,000 years old, based on lived experience, right? How does that match up with what we know in medicine, in Western medicine, what we've proven scientifically. So how can I start to bridge those and explain the concepts, the whys of what we do in Ayurveda to what actually is happening in the human body without getting too technical?

And I do think that that's probably one of the gifts that I have is being able to do that. I think that that's why people are drawn to the way I teach because of that reason. I'm always very careful and I always say, this is nothing that I've come up with. This is 5,000 years of ancient wisdom. All I've done is I've found a way to explain it to people in a way that's approachable. We've used this word irate a bunch of different times.. Now let's dive into it a bit. And I think probably really the opening question is, what are we talking about when we're talking about Ayurveda? We're talking about a healing tradition that is based on this idea that when you live in harmony with nature, with everything that exists in the universe, you

will have optimal health and a vibrant life. That's really what it comes down to, is that if you can start to do that, if you can become aware of what the cycles are of nature, both on a daily basis and a seasonal basis, and then on top of that, I mean, we can talk about astrology on top of that, then there's, you know, a life stage basis and then an astrological, but let's start with just daily and seasonal. If you can really become aware of that and realize that you are absolutely connected to everything in the universe. And when you live in harmony with the universe, you'll have optimal health. That is really that simple. And I was spending some time reflecting on this past year with this pandemic. And I think if there has ever been a time where

this has been so clearly laid out for us to see is how interconnected we are to everything and everyone on this planet, right? That's been, it's been just mind blowing that the example we've had of that happened in the past nine months, right? And so it's, it's Ayurveda right there. Yeah. There has never been a bigger message around that. If we're, if, but again, you know, there's, there's the data, there's the experience, and then there's awareness and acceptance. And I feel like that's where so many of us stumble. I think when we hear,

yes, fundamentally, it's about us really living in harmony with the world around us and nature and other beings. Well, that makes sense. We kind of nod, right? And we probably know intuitively that in those few moments where we've structured our lives, where we have the opportunity to do that, we feel better. And yet on a day-to-day basis, I think so many of us walk around and say, but I can't. I can't do that. I live in a big city. I work in a job. This year, I'm sitting in front of a screen for eight, 10 hours a day. And this is the way I'm relating to people and my body is not moving at all. And I'm freaked out about contact with anybody else and I don't want to. So it's interesting to me, we can look at this year and it just becomes glaringly apparent how disharmonic we are with the environment around us. But I almost wonder if doing that does a

disservice to what we're talking about, because the truth is we haven't been that much better before this year. No, it's true. I think what I'm getting at is that it's trying to help people become aware that, yes, on a macro level, right, this pandemic has shown us that. But then if we can just take it back to ourselves on a micro level and look at ourselves in our lives and how are we connecting to the other people in our lives? How are we connecting to our space? How are we connecting to nature? You know, what are our rhythms on a daily basis, just becoming aware that in our own little worlds, right, you know, because that's quite literally how we are living this year, especially,

how can we sync up with everything in the universe? It doesn't have to be this huge, massive way that you make and suddenly everything will be OK or better. You know, a little of something is good. If that's good, then let's do a lot of it and it'll be even better. And that's just not the way it works. So I really focus in on how can you make these small changes? How can you become aware and just start doing one small thing? Because it really does have a profound effect on your health, your mental, emotional, spiritual, physical wellbeing by doing small things and becoming aware. So I think that awareness of just first realizing that you are connected to everything and then bringing it back to what can I do to enhance that connection?

Yeah, I love that. And it takes a lot of the scariness out of it too. It makes it more doable. The word toxic or toxic load has kind of become a big thing in Western medicine, but also I think in Ayurveda. But I think when we think about toxic load, the toxic load that we're taking on in Western medicine, our mind just goes to chemicals. What's the exposure? But toxic load in the context of Ayurveda has a much broader context. Yeah, it does. I mean, it's really about, again, becoming aware of everything that is coming into your life and into you, right? Through your five senses. And so, you know,

in Ayurveda, we talk about the fact that everything in your life affects you, affects your health. It either supports your health or it weakens your health. And so, you know, we're talking about our relationships. We're talking about our career and our work, our passions. We're talking about our environment, our physical environment and space and the diet, right? That's one aspect of it too. But I think we get so focused, like you said, on the chemicals that we forget that so many of these other things are so important. You know, I can't tell you how many, pretty much every lecture workshop that I do, I will have people coming up to me saying after the talk, you know, Dr. Kumar saying, I have changed this, this and this in my diet, and I still

don't feel well. And it's, it proves exactly the point we're talking about, because all they've thought about is their diet. They haven't considered the fact that the toxins that are coming into them, into their being, is actually coming from their relationships or from their space or from their work. And that if they start to become aware of that and make some small changes there, it will profoundly shift how they feel, right? So the toxins aren't actually coming from the food. The toxins are coming from something else. And so I think that's the awareness of, you know, when you're connected to nature and you're connected to what's going on

outside of you, and you can then bring that inside of you and think about, okay, how is this affecting me? What signs and symptoms are showing up to tell me that something is not connecting correctly? What are the changes I can start to make? So it's sort of that making that connection to what's outside of you to what's inside of you. It's something that really struck me as I started practicing Ayurveda for myself again and reading and researching. And what I came to is this idea of changing your relationship to the symptoms, not just becoming aware of like, oh, where are they coming from? Oh, it's my health.

It's my relationships. It's my career. That's important too, right? To figure out where the toxin's coming from. But then the truth of the matter is, is that there are going to be some of us who are going to have headaches all the time because that's how an imbalance shows up. But when you can change your relationship to the headache per se, right, and look at it as it's here to tell me something, you can change how you view that headache, right?

It becomes a gift almost. I know that's going to be controversial to say that, but it does become a gift because it's an indication. Change something. Take a look at what's going on in your life. What are you eating? You know, how are your relationships going? Are you getting outside?

Are you breathing prana? Are you getting fresh prana? How's your career going? What's going on in your work, right? It's like an indicator. It's a signal to stop and go inside and think about what's happening, become aware, right? And so then the headaches will dissipate and then they'll come back again. But I think that you can really change the relationship that

you have with these symptoms. It changes everything. Rather than being in this place in Western medicine that so many of us get caught up in of trying to eliminate the symptom, just like, let's get rid of it. Let's cure everything. I don't know that that's the point. I know that that's the goal in Western medicine. It may even be the goal for some practitioners of these other traditional healing methods. But for me, I think I've let go of that being the goal. I think what I've sort of more focused on is how do I help people reclaim the healing power that they have within them, the awareness, that sort of ability to take control again and say, I'm going to change how I'm looking at things. And hopefully it adds to like a more vibrant life and how they're living. So they're not sort of

chained by the headaches or the GI pain. You know, those are still going to be there and uncomfortable, but if they change how they look at them, maybe it changes how they live their lives, right? Because I think with chronic conditions, if you become so attached to the symptoms and that's all you can see, how can anything change for you, right? I don't know if you can ever get out of that cycle of feeling so bad and feeling so sad. And not to say again, that that pain isn't real. It's very real, but how can you change how you look at it so that you can still live as vibrantly as you can? Yeah. I mean, it's a pretty major change in lens and context and mindset that I have to imagine is not an easy one for people to welcome because you

show up and you're like, I have headaches every day. Give me something to stop that. And then if you turn around and say, well, I get it. I acknowledge it. There's real pain here. Let's talk about what the pain is telling you. I have to imagine people will be like, yeah, that sounds nice, but I'm in pain now and I just want it to stop. So there's a lot of tension there in sort of like what you want in the moment and somebody suffering in the moment versus a willingness to zoom the lens out and say, well, maybe if we look at this from a bigger picture, what is this telling us? And if we make changes based on what it's telling us, maybe we can actually get rid of this. Right. And I agree 100% with you. So I think that that's why I really do emphasize the fact that this is

integrative. I really do believe that both have so much merit and so much, you need both, right? So you need the medication to help you decrease your suffering in the moment. But how are we going to decrease the suffering on an ongoing basis, right? Because to say that the only way you can control your pain, your headaches is with medication. That's, I think, where people lose hope, right? That's where they feel like the control is outside of them, right? But if you can equip people with this understanding that they're, let's zoom out and let's look at what is the pain trying to tell you? Can you correlate it with anything? Maybe the pain won't be as severe. You still might need the medication,

but maybe it's not going to be debilitating. You know, I always say that the measure of something working is not whether or not it takes it away, but can it decrease the amount of time that you're in that suffering, right? So you might still get the headache, time that you're in that suffering? Right? So you might still get the headache, but can you bounce back in a day rather than five days? Right? Can you decrease the length of the suffering? It could be, right?

Rather than just always focusing on trying to get rid of everything. And again, that may be controversial to think about and to say, but I feel like that's the truth. And I feel like that's where we're sort of missing the boat in Western medicine, presenting it that this is the way things are done and take it or leave it sort of thing, rather than coming and saying, let's look at all of the different modalities that we have that can help you heal and help you feel better. Yeah. It's such an interesting frame. Again, this is a lifestyle. This is about living a certain way. And so I think my whole approach is that if I can teach you how to think about this, you can take it or leave it

and take what works for you and what doesn't work. But at least I'm teaching you sort of the philosophy behind it. And it's activating that self-awareness within you. Again, activating that knowledge and wisdom you have within you. Because what's interesting is that every time I speak, by the end of me talking, people will say, this just makes sense. I have no idea why, but it just makes sense, right? Because they're not focused on the doshas and focused on a list and all that, which is more sort of cerebral of like, oh, I have to figure out how to follow that. Now, how am I going to make sure I can cook this, this, and this today so that I make sure I stay in my list and all that other stuff? Instead, when you understand that this is based

on lived experience and human experience, you have that intelligence and that knowledge within you. So you're reconnecting to that and it's like, oh, I just get it. It just makes sense. And that I think is so incredibly powerful. And I think that's what the power is of Ayurveda specifically, is that people can connect to it so instantly once they understand how to think about it. And that's really sort of my aim. If we can just take a step back and balance what we're learning from data and science with what we also know inside of ourselves, that I think is where the magic happens. That's really where it comes together. Yeah. No, I love that. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So sitting here in this container of good life project, if I offer out the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I would say to live a good life is to live with a sense of ease. It's a term that I really focused in on when I was doing my yoga therapy training, this idea of ease of even if it's something challenging, it's creating this

sense of expansion within me because I know I'm connecting with something that's inside of me, that this challenge is something that I want to do. So I would say that it's really connecting in with this idea of what is, what feels nourishing and ease? What, what, what creates ease within me, whether it's what I'm eating or how I'm moving or what projects I'm working on or how I'm being creative or how I'm relating to other people. Does it create ease in me? Thank you. Thank you. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

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or treating the whole body rather than just the symptoms. But even that felt limiting. So over the years, Aviva began to integrate a more nuanced, expansive, well-rounded approach that integrated all parts of her education, traditions, and experience with a focus on women's well-being and remains an avid environmental health advocate, researching and publishing on the impact of toxins on fertility, pregnancy, women's hormones, and chronic illness in women and children. Aviva is a leader in botanical medicine, is the author of seven books on natural medicine, including the textbook Botanical Medicine for Women's Health, The Adrenal Thyroid Revolution, and her latest, Hormone Intelligence. She's the author of the

Integrated Medicine Curriculum for the Yale Internal Medicine and Pediatric Residencies, and is on numerous scientific advisory and editorial boards. So excited to share this conversation with you. Here's Aviva. You started out, I guess, in the world of fiercely devoted to women and women's healthcare and women's wellbeing in the early days, really focusing on mid-wivery and herbalism, and then eventually end up at Yale doing your MD. And then launching into this world of, you know, it's interesting, actually, I'm curious what you call it, because in the early days, it was sort of like, well, if you weren't doing the traditional thing, but you were traditionally trained, you know, there was this functional medicine term, which came out into the universe and feels so heavy and clunky compared to

the way that I know you have really developed a lens on wellbeing. I am calling it the new medicine for women because it's not just the wellness space. It's not all the entrapments of functional medicine that we could talk about, but it is clunky. And it's not just conventional medicine. And nobody just really goes to their doctor anymore, but not many people just go to their acupuncturist either. Most people are doing this new thing, right? They have a fever and a cold, and they go to their doctor to make sure there's nothing big going on and maybe get something there. Then they go to their massage therapist for that. Then they go to their naturopath for the nutrients and supplements. And then maybe they get a little acupuncture tune up and hit up the sauna. And so to me, it's this new medicine that is evolving, that is an amalgamation

of all of it. The other thing is I'm playing with a term, and I don't like to make up medical terms because I feel like there's not a lot of validity in that to me, but there is this concept called exposome science. And it's all about how our external and internal ecosystems influence our wellbeing. So I am playing with this term and concept more internally with my team and my writing and my audience of ecosystems medicine, which is looking at these different internal ecosystems, whether it's our microbiome or our stress or our diet or the external ecosystems that we live in. And, you know, I think of a Venn diagram. I'm very visual, but these Venn diagrams, like, you diagrams, when you have a circle and then another circle and they cross over

and then there's that area in the middle, it's usually like me or where you are or something like that. And I feel like that represents it so well. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting also because I think on the one hand, you could hear this conversation and think, well, does it really matter what you call it? But on the other hand, I feel like language really matters because it creates a perception and it also creates sort of like an openness to engaging in certain practices with certain practitioners or just a knee-jerk

reaction against it based on a lot of the way that things are communicated. It's interesting. We see, zooming the lens out, we're having this conversation in 2021, the last five years or so have seen this groundswell of change in society on so many different level. And especially in women, women identifying people, changes in politics, changes in culture, changes in representation, changes in work and business. And you've written about this. And you've also written about this really interesting phenomenon where you see all this stuff happening, but you're not necessarily seeing the same thing in medicine.

No. In fact, I was thinking about it this morning that we really need a Me Too medicine movement, really, not just in the fact of women going to the doctors and feeling not seen and not heard, but there are actual levels of documented abuses that happen to women physically, emotionally, and actually sexual abuse too, in an environment where you should be able to go and get care and be able to trust that provider. There are changes happening a little bit. I think particularly the Black Lives Matter shift in the movement, because I don't want to say the Black Lives Matter movement. It's been going on for a long time. But the real sea change that we started seeing last year in 2020 with Breonna Taylor and other just very egregious abuses of the system that we saw leading to deaths and all

kinds of situations, I think has led to a new recognition of the need to identify bias in medicine, if only to be politically correct and not end up getting sued and having a backlash against you. It's not always the best intentions that lead to these changes, but sometimes the changes happen necessarily and then it leads to that seed change you're talking about. So there's an opening right now to look at biases in a lot of systems, but it still hasn't really been focused

on women and women's health. Yeah, and I mean, it's interesting that you said, the intention behind it isn't necessarily what you'd like to see the intention, but because almost like for financial and legal reasons and PR reasons, you're seeing some energy put behind it, but it doesn't seem like you'll ever really get the level of intentionality and funding and devotion and groundswell and mass change until there's something else that's really motivating it. Yeah. You know, Buckminster Fuller, you know, Bucky Fuller, right?

His work, of course. And he has a quote, which I can't cite exactly, but basically says, we kind of have to wait for the old guard to die out and then actually just create a new system. And what's tricky with medicine is it's a really old system with a lot of entrenched biases against women, racial biases, other biases. Like there's a lot of fat shaming in medicine, particularly against women. And what's happening now, half of all physicians in primary care are women, but we're still training in the same philosophical system.

So we're still internalizing these same biases because they're so, so implicit and so tacit. Sometimes they're overt, but we're so used to ignoring them. Like one study came out this past year showing a video of women being spoken with by physicians and physicians saying just completely inappropriate things, like things that you should just not say to another human being or a woman in the context of an appointment, whether being dismissive or just inappropriate. And most of the men who watched that video who were physicians didn't even identify that there was a problem. More of the women did. But the problem is, is that way of speaking and communicating is what is typical in medicine. So we may recognize it, but we may still be doing it also. We bring to anything that we teach what we believe or

what our culture teaches us. And that's part of the problem. Like you said, it's a lot of these problems, they show up in everyday life and the treatment of patients and the interactions and the most fundamental point of service. But it sounds like the real bigger solutions, they need to happen multiple steps upstream from that. They do. And also bringing in more people who represent more diverse populations in and of itself could bring significant change. So for example, we know that black babies, newborns, taken care of by black medical providers are far more likely to survive against

what are already uphill statistics for Black babies in this country than if they're taken care of by a white provider. And that can only be a matter of attention to detail, prioritization, super complex systemic racism factors that are influencing how providers treat people. We know that women who are treated by other women, but people who are treated by women are much more likely to have successful hospitalizations, successful discharges, and live longer than treated by men. So just the diversification itself may, diversification, but also listening to the voices and paying attention to what are those people doing differently than people with different outcomes. Yeah. So I know a lot of your focus has really become focusing on women on, you know, both within the profession, but also in patients, inpatient

experiences and patient outcomes. And, you know, you were describing how bias shows up in the system. How does that actually show up in the experience of women in medicine when they're seeking help? Oh my gosh. It's, let me just give you one example. That's really astonishing. So a study was done looking at women who experience pain. That pain could be due to chronic pain. It could be due to endometriosis, something like that. And this study found that women who go, well, we know across the board that women's pain is treated differently than men's pain. So if a woman is reporting that she has shortness of breath and chest pain and goes to the hospital, she's more likely to get an anti-anxiety medication than a workup for a heart attack than a man going and reporting the

same symptoms. And she's just as likely, if not more likely, to be having a heart attack. So that is one example. We know that women wait far longer in the emergency room when they have pain upwards of over an hour longer, which is actually serious if you have something significant going on. But this one particular study was fascinating to me. So women who go to the primary care doctor for pain, if they look too put together, right? If they're dressed nicely, they've done their hair, and they've done their makeup, they can't possibly be experiencing pain because if they did, they can't possibly be experiencing pain because if they did, they wouldn't have time to put themselves together like that. So dismissed,

nope, you don't get your pain treated. Conversely, women who show up appearing quote unquote more disheveled per this article, meaning you show up in your sweatpants pre-COVID, but you show up and maybe now it's okay, but you show up in your sweatpants, your hair is not done, you haven't put on makeup, and you're asking for pain treatment. Now you're perceived as drug seeking. So there are these biases. If you look too good, you couldn't possibly be uncomfortable. And if you don't take care of yourself, you must be a drug addict. So we can't take care of your pain either way. Women are, women, let's just use endometriosis as an example. It's a gynecologic and immunologic problem. Takes nine years on average and many doctors to actually get a proper diagnosis.

Women with autoimmune conditions, five years and four doctors on average to get a diagnosis. I've had women had things, you know, I've had one patient, she had Hashimoto's. She had gained a lot of weight in a short period of time, like 30 pounds. She went to her doctor who basically said, you know, what are you eating? And she said, I haven't changed my diet. This is what's happening. I haven't changed my exercise. This is what's happening. And he told her, if you would control your fork to mouth problem, you'd probably lose the weight. And so she came and found her way to me. and she had florid Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which makes you gain weight and have difficulty losing it. So these situations are on and on. Then at a deeper level, when we look at the top

surgeries that are done in the United States, two of the top ones that are most frequently done are hysterectomy and cesarean section. We know that at least half of all cesarean sections done in the United States are medically unnecessary, are overdone. There are economic and time incentives on the part of the physicians, but we know that a cesarean section increases a woman's mortality 28 times over a vaginal birth. We know that most women who are offered a hysterectomy do not need them. And a large number of women over 50 in the United States will have a hysterectomy. Probably 35% or more are completely unnecessary. But interestingly, this multi-center study done

in Michigan some years back found that it wasn't just women in their 50s and 60s who were being told they needed a hysterectomy and not given any, not just like alternative medicine alternatives, but like conventional alternatives. Like you could take this medication for six months and have that uterine fibroid shrink and you won't need the surgery. And so women were being funneled into these surgeries, but even in their 30s. So women who hadn't had children yet might want to have their uterus in, not given alternatives. Then as women, we're so programmed from our earliest ages to not question authority, not make waves, not push back, not be difficult. And at the same time,

physicians who have women who come in and question, those women are often labeled as difficult patients. I mean, doctors talk to each other with an eye in and question, those women are often labeled as difficult patients. I mean, doctors talk to each other with an eye roll and say, oh, it's that kind of patient. You know, she read about that on Dr. Google. So there's a complexity of women keeping ourselves quiet and not pushing back. But when we do push back, we get labeled as difficult. And so let's say that woman who does have chronic pelvic pain, and she goes from one doctor to another, and it takes her years to get a diagnosis of endometriosis, and maybe she ultimately does get it. Half of all women who were told, at least half, up to 70% of all women that

were told all along the lines that everything was fine did actually have endometriosis. But for every subsequent doctor she goes to, it's statistically well documented now that each subsequent doctor is going to think that she's an increasingly more difficult patient because she didn't believe what the first doctor said. She didn't believe what the next. So now she gets labeled as having a psychiatric problem. Which just compounds everything. And then you take that, right? And at a certain point, I have to imagine that then as a patient, you start questioning yourself. So many women do. So many women have come to me and said, I don't even know anymore if I'm actually feeling this symptom or if I'm making it up. I'm so confused. And even

more so if they do look really well or they are really highly functional in their lives. They're like, maybe I am just crazy. I've had women say that. Maybe I am just depressed. Maybe I am just anxious. Maybe I do just need to work less or whatever the things are rather than somebody going deeper and saying, yeah, there's something going on here. And when they find out there is, you just watch their shoulders drop. It's like, or the tears start rolling. The thank goodness someone is finally listening to me. Because that's the other thing.

We know that the average physician has about 14 minutes to see a patient and the average physician interrupts their patient within 90 seconds to three minutes of asking questions. So you barely even get your words out. And then, you know, if you're a woman and you go in and you're fatigued, if you're any patient and you go in and you're fatigued and you have these symptoms that you don't know what they are, and now you talk to your doctor and your doctor's trained to think we know everything, but we don't know what's going on with you and we're burnt out and we're exhausted and we have 14 minutes for you. It's not a recipe for the best relationship for people hearing and understanding each other. You know, there's another layer of problems too, a couple of things with women specifically. One is that a lot of what

women experience, whether it's menstrual pain or heavy bleeding or these kind of things that are woman part things, a lot of that historically has been just chalked up to normal. So, oh, well, it's normal to have period pain. So just take some ibuprofen. It's normal to have heavy bleeding. Just take some ibuprofen for that too, because it helps lighten your bleeding and wear a maxi pad. So there's a lot of misinformation about what actually is and

isn't normal. And then historically, and this continues to be a problem, there has been significant lack of study of most phenomena in women's bodies. So most medical research on pharmaceuticals and interventions has actually been done on men. And in my book, I say women are not just small men. We have different physiology. We are different size. We have different amounts of fat on our bodies. We have boobs and hips and butts. And those parts of our bodies actually accumulate and store medication. We break down things and eliminate them differently. And we do that not just differently at one time in our life.

We do it differently when we're in our puberty years to our menopausal years. We do it differently in pregnancy. So there's just been this real dearth of study that there are people who are taking action about that. I mean, there are people who are being activists for more medical research to happen in really important women's health areas and in pharmaceuticals. So there have been a lot of layers of challenge to peel back. It seems like part of the master regulatory piece of this also is you've used the word endocrine disruption, endocrine system a number of different times. I think I phrase it as your chemistry. But the notion that we've got all these symptoms that show up on the surface,

we have all these potential contributors, but underneath it, there's a dynamically changing soup of chemistry that's happening in our body that is sort of like provides this regulatory role for everything. And if we're sort of like always looking at the stuff that's happening outside and always looking at, you know, just the symptoms, and we're never actually looking at this, this constantly changing chemistry system within our body, we never really get to what's going on. And it seems like that is really, that's where so much of your focus is right now, is what's actually happening on that level. It's really interesting. Around 2007 and then again in 2013, two major medical organizations, first the American Academy of Pediatrics, then the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, identified the menstrual cycle as women's sixth vital sign. So we have blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature, then pain is actually considered the fifth vital sign and menstrual cycles as the sixth vital sign. So when our menstrual cycles are awry, too much pain, irregular periods, heavy periods, light periods, whatever it is that's going on, and not just menstrual cycles, but what we're going through gynecologically,

which is a reflection of what's going on hormonally. But what they identified is that what's going on hormonally is a reflection of yet underlying causes that if we can pay attention to early on, we may offset some of the downstream problems. So if you know that you're having heavy periods every month and they're really painful, we know that there's a very good chance you have excess estrogen. Well, where is that coming from? Often from these endocrine disruptors or the body's lack of nutrition or microbiome to break those down and eliminate them well. So you're overwhelmed by them. But we know that too much estrogen is a long-term risk factor for developing uterine fibroids,

breast cancer, endometrial cancer. So we actually have an opportunity to identify things early that may actually help us prevent some of those bigger chronic problems. And it's interesting, men don't actually have that. We have a monthly opportunity to kind of have almost like a scorecard that we can look at and go, check, check, check, that's going pretty well, or huh, this actually seems to be a little off or a lot off. Let me realign what I can do to bring myself back into some harmony here. And then you see it. You see the improvements or you see the changes. I just want to be careful to say that

because of endocrine disruptors and a lot of other factors, sometimes these things are set in motion before a woman is even born, before she's even hits puberty. And then puberty is like the switch that sets everything off. But we now know that things like polycystic ovary syndrome and endometriosis may actually be happening a couple of generations back. So it may be that our mother was chronically exposed to something or our mother had a medical problem that caused a lot of intrauterine inflammation that nobody identified. And now you're in your mother being gestated, you have all your ovaries that are forming while you're still in your mom. Hers formed while she was in her mother. So we literally have situations that can be intergenerational, like the tracks are laid down. But then when you hit

puberty, it's like the train could go this way, or the train can go this way. And now I'm doing hand gestures for those of you guys who can't see me because I talk with my hands. So you can go left or you can go right. And it's like your nature wants you to go right, but all the tracks got laid down to the left. And then you add to it standard American diet, the number of antibiotic doses kids get by the time they're in their teens that alter their microbiome, the fact that teens are using a gazillion cosmetics that contain these endocrine disruptors. And it's almost like somebody pulls the switch and it goes down that track. So as we're talking about healing or transforming and

taking back our health, I also feel, and this is something that I feel so strongly about because I think the wellness movement and even maybe a little of the functional medicine movement gives you this sense if you just do everything right. You do the diet right. You do the yoga right. You sleep the right amount. You do your meditation app. You get out in nature. You're somehow going to have guaranteed perfect glowing health. And it can lead to people feeling like, what am I doing wrong? What am I not doing enough of? Or am I just broken? And it's so important for us to take a step back and say a healthy dose of self-compassion and self-love, but also perspective

that this is not anyone's fault. And yes, doing all these things is really healthful, but it doesn't mean 100% or 80%. We have no measure of like, that doesn't mean you're going to need the medication or the surgery either. And I really want there to be like a no fault, no blame approach to healing. I think that's so, so important. And whether that's fat shaming in medicine or fat shaming in the wellness space, that's got to stop for us to live more comfortably in our bodies and minds. And what I really love about this new medicine, if you will, is it's not new at all. If we go to every indigenous traditional culture around the world, they already know it's all connected, right? It's just all connected. So we can't tease out what we put in our bodies from how we feel, but we also can't tease out how we're treating the environment from how we feel. And I feel like as women, our bodies are,

not to sound biologically reductive or romantic, I really do believe that our bodies are such a powerful mirror of what is happening to the planet. And in a sense, we're a little bit like the canaries in the coal mine. All of these symptoms that are showing up now in women's bodies are just telling us that there is a life out of balance. And how can we restore hormonal balance, if you will, without restoring a life in balance? And that's really more, I find, what I'm working with women around. Even if they are going to use a pharmaceutical to feel better or have the surgery, it's still about how do we reclaim this knowing that everything is connected, that our relationships affect how our hormones show up.

Our beliefs about our bodies affect how our hormones show up. They also affect how we advocate for ourselves when the doctor isn't listening, for example. So I love that part of this new way of thinking. One of the things I've been thinking about is when women are called hormonal or when we call ourselves hormonal, there's almost like this, not almost, we're kind of being told that we're irrational and unpredictable and unstable. But one of the things that really came through for me as I was crafting this book is that it's actually exactly the opposite. There's this biological blueprint that has existed hormonally in women since the time immemorial. It hasn't changed. So why is it that suddenly it's entirely predictable? Certain things happen when you

get into puberty. Certain things happen when you've been in puberty for about three or five years. Certain things happen when you get pregnant. Certain things happen when you've been in puberty for about three or five years. Certain things happen when you get pregnant. Certain things happen when you go into menopause. It's the same. It shows up a little differently for each of us, depending on our history, our medical stuff and all of that. But it's the most predictable human biological thread. So the idea that we're unpredictable is really fascinating to me. It's, I think I'm trying to reframe that for ourselves as women.

It's like, oh, actually, no, I'm pretty predictable here. Yeah. I know what's happening. There's a certain sense-making element to it. We could go a lot of different rabbit holes here, but I think this is actually a really nice place for us to come full circle. I have asked you this question in the past, but it was a number of years ago now. So I'm going to ask you again, because we are evolving human beings. So sitting here in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? You know, I remember when you asked me this the first time, and I remember saying presence, that being present was really so powerful and so important. And in some ways, Jonathan, I don't, I know, I mean, I've evolved and changed so much,

but I really feel like if I would add to that presence, meaning that I am so here right now in this moment, giving that time and experiencing that time and connection from you. I would say that if I would shift anything, I might just say authentic connection. Because I think when I was talking about presence many years ago, it was really about making time for that authentic connection. I think time and space for authentic connection in life to me is living a good life. Thank you. Thank you. I love learning about the intersection

between medicine and advocacy and activism and how equality weaves into the field of medicine. And finally, we're bringing it home with Latham Thomas. Latham is a wellness and birth coach, doula, and founder of maternity brand Mama Glow, as well as the author of Mama Glow, A Hip Guide to Your Fabulous Abundant Pregnancy, and Own Your Glow, A Soulful Guide to Luminous Living and Crowning the Queen Within. She has been on a mission to transform maternal wellness. Latham's practice provides support to pre- and postnatal women, along with their journey to motherhood, offering culinary and nutritional services, yoga and birth coaching.

Latham also serves as the maternity wellness expert on the advisory board of Yahoo Health and has been featured all over the place and has deeply studied on natural and plant-based medicine. Here's Latham. When I was young, my aunt, my mom, and my great aunt were all pregnant at the same time, all of them at the same time. And they had babies March, April, May, like back to back. And so I was surrounded by these women who are just like larger than life. I'm like four years old and I'm just seeing big bellies and hearing conversation. And I just remember them saying really positive things. I remember my mom having a baby sister and she's going to come out of my mom's vagina and she's in my mom's uterus. And people were like, okay. She just talked about it in such a normal way.

It wasn't like this weird thing. And storks weren't carrying the babies. It was like, this is what it is. This is what my body does. This is what our bodies do. And so my cousin and I, who was, she was, I mean, 19 months older. So she was like five, five and a half. And we were watching this. So our dramatic play outside of being out, you know, out with, you know, in the foothills and stuff, our dramatic play was now sort of governed by this experience of everyone being pregnant. So we'd put our Cabbage Patch dolls and we would roll them up under our shirts. And then we would take turns delivering each other's babies. And so I remember that. And I reminded her a few months ago, I was like,

do you remember when we used to do that? She's like, oh my God, yeah, I remember that. But my mom was the one who reminded me too. She was like, you know, you used to always be like this. You used to always be into the plants and then the babies. I was like, oh my God, you're right. So that was like really the rudiments I think of Mama Glow. I think it was like ignited at a very early age. And so the baby thing was one thing. I think the plant systems and like life cycles, all of it just folded into one. And for me, it was not, none of it was different than the other, like the life cycles I was studying of plants and plant systems. I just like overlaid that onto the human body. And I was like, okay, well, it's just going to unfold. Like I don't have to do anything. It's just going to, it's just going to unfold on its own don't have to do anything. It's just going to unfold on its own. And so I kind of applied the principles from what I noticed plants do.

They just sort of yield and there's grace and there's no like fighting. There's no like I'm not going to bloom. You know, I'm not going to – it's like I'm not going to shed my leaves. Like there's not this – it's just like, okay, it's time. And every phase has its time and there's no resistance in time, in the timing and in the timeline or this sense of like not getting enough of something, or I don't have my shine or there's no ego. It's just like, I'm a flower and this is what I do. Now it's time to fruit. And this is what I do, right? Now it's time to eat, you know, and then be processed through someone's body. So I don't know, I think I just was

very attuned to that. A lot of what I talk about with moms now is like, you know, to help them map it before if they have the privilege of planning it. But if it's not that you just find out and it's like, okay, great. Like then there's all kinds of ways that we can approach this in a mindful way and in a holistic way, or just even in a way that like, it's not happening to us, but it's happening through us. You know what I mean? That we're like more in control by like surrendering and like letting it be what it's supposed to be. And I think that we have the opposite way of like moving through life and pregnancy really, it's like forces you to be a different way. And so you have to kind of almost like part of you dissolves because you're becoming

something that you weren't before. And then you emerge from that experience on the other side, you cross this threshold and you have something that you didn't have when you started and you're somebody completely new. And there's this like total dissolve of the ego and you become, you have to either struggle with that or you just right away, it's like, oh, cool, here I am. But sometimes you have to find your feet. And I think that which we don't talk about in our culture, like that, like reemergence of like, who am I now? And like this? And where am I? And how do I like now find my way back? And where is back? Like, where am I trying to find my way back to? I think that that's really not discussed in our culture as much as it should be with like helping people find their way like families, but particularly moms like finding their way once the baby arrives. And so I felt really fortunate in that we had planned towards me having space and not feeling pressure to go

back to work, not feeling pressure to birth a certain way. Like I had a natural birth and it was in the place that I wanted in this birth center. And it was seven blocks from where we lived. And I birthed with the midwife that I wanted. And it was amazing, but it was like, it was so like, everything was really on my terms, right? Like the, it was very calm and, um, it was great to have my mom come to town and help. And just like those things, like you talked about before, like having people step in and like, like swaddle you with that love that you need right after you do something that's like terrifying or that's like exhilarating and then just like holding you close, you know, and you're like, okay, yeah, cool. Like, okay. Everywhere I look, I'm like safe. Right. Um,

I think we need those things. Um, we need to create spaces like that for people, whether it's having a baby, whether it's like you are going to write a book or a screenplay or launch a new business. Like people feel like they're in these silos. They're like by themselves, like doing these things that are really like terrifying they're like, putting so much of their soul into something, and they don't have anybody to lean upon. And I think it goes back to what you said about just, what are we losing when we don't have community, whether it's like family or family that you've created nearby, I think that in life transition, we really need that. And that's why I hope that like for our children, that one of the things that we can instill in them is like that relationships, healthy

relationships, and this sense of like emotional intelligence is really like well-rooted in them when they go out and start their own families. The thing that really resonates with me is this idea. And I so agree with you that we all have these moments of intense transition and birthing. And it may be a child. It may be the next season of your life. It may be just change which drops into your life which is not really wanted. There may be disease. It may be, you know, these profound changes and, and it's sort of like culturally,

you know, the, the, we're kind of taught to buck up, you know, like soldier on and keep doing everything that you're doing, you know, and because distract yourself as much as possible from this and whether it's good or whether, you know, whether this thing holds positive potential or negative potential, or very often it's always a blend. You know, we're kind of, we never create the space to actually just say, okay, I'm in a season. You know, it may last a week. It may last 40 weeks.

It may last a couple of years. This may be a season of my life that takes a while. What would it look like to just be with that, to make that the center of everything and allow other things to take second or third or fourth and then really just kind of be, let that define whatever amount of your day in your life it needs to define for the moment that it needs to find it. Like,

what would it, what would it be like? And I don't think we asked the question that say, if I allow that to happen, how might I reconstruct the way that I approach each day right now, the way that I live my life, um, in order to,

to support that, um, I approach each day right now, the way that I live my life in order to support that, to bring people and experiences into my life that would allow me sort of like to support that. And I wonder, because this is so much of what you now do professionally, like you support. I wonder how much of that is just that we don't believe it's possible. So I guess maybe that's my question for you because you are the person who's like you've built your life around helping women do this largely and be there for them and help them navigate these questions. What's your sense of that, like of a willingness to go there and to the extent that we don't allow ourselves to go there? Like, what do you think is stopping us? That's such a beautiful question. And I love the way you just pulled all of that together. I think the approach that I take, and I feel like we are very similar in this, like for parenting and life and is that um it's sort of like a watch and see and so most people are going to show up to situations like okay and they have like planned

how it's going to go and this is what they're going to do and this is what they're going to say and and then there's like the actual you know practice the reality on the ground right like when you get there it's like holy you know what's going on. Then there's this whole like, okay, so then how do we approach what's actually happening here in this moment? And so I think it's like, you know, we have everything we need. Like there's like the skill set is there, but there's like an unwillingness, I feel like, to participate in listening. And it's not just like hearing what's going on, but like hearing what's going on in your, like your heart becomes like your ear really. And so it's like this generous listening that's required, like all of you has to show up for that, so you cannot be divided on your cell phone or doing, you have to just be there and immerse yourself know, a lot of people, one of my clients say, oh, she's like a producer for your birth. I think a producer anticipates what's next. Like, oh, they can see this is coming. That got messed up. Let me fix that. Like, they can do all these

things, right, to make sure that the entirety of the experience is one that people remember in a certain way. And so I really want to make sure that I don't construct something, but that I hold space for something that'll be remembered in the way that this person would like. But also that when I show up, that I'm not putting what I want to happen into play, but more like ask, well, what does this situation call for? And what's the best outcome for all that are here? And in this exact moment, what do we need? And responding like that. And so I think that that takes like sensitivity. It takes, you know, you have to be constantly sort of thinking about what's next, but not necessarily in a way where you're distracted, but being able to like have right at your fingertips, like the solution to something and be or delivering, I feel like, you know, the mother gives birth, but we deliver. Like we bring safely the outcome to unfold.

We as the child, you know, the doctor or midwife, the child provider of nurses, the doulas, whoever, like we actually deliver an experience. And so, so I think that for me, like, that's my sort of vantage point to come from this space of like generous listening and just like dropping into presence as soon as I get there. So coming without all this stuff going on, it's in my life, stripping that off, like cleansing, whether that's like having a meditative moment in the taxi or however, or like in the hall before I come in, like making that, that I come like without all this stuff going on. To answer the question around like this possibility, I also do that because I think that I have to then build up in people sometimes this belief in themselves. I have to almost construct for somebody what that looks like because they might be coming from a past that was riddled with miscarriage or with abuse or with, you know, maybe other birth outcomes that weren't as positive as the one that they're hoping for, or maybe having had so many things in their immediate sort of social

network that these stories have tainted what they think is possible, or just like living in the world and seeing how birth is projected and how women's bodies are perceived, right? So it's like, well, how is this even possible that I can do this, right? So I have to start like with all of that, like sort of against, right. And then go back to like the science and then go back to the, you know, spiritual and then go back to the sacred and like views all of that and speak to people in a way that they recall, they have this sort of recollection of really what they're capable of on like a cellular level like not just like oh you can do it rah rah rah but like really

reminding them and teaching too but it's like really a remembrance because these are things that we know like ancestral wisdom really kicks in when you're in birth. And I think one of the things that's like not really talked about, which I love to educate people in that work with me, but also people in this space, that to move into a place where you can where you have like labor sort of progressing. We actually move out of like a beta brainwave state into alpha. So we get out of like where you and I are having this conversation and people who are listening, you're listening to us, which you're also thinking about your dry cleaning and you're sitting in traffic and it's like, oh my God, there's all this stuff going on. But at the same time, you're fully listening. We have your full attention, right? Then all of a

sudden the brainwaves at that point are like really erratic and, you know, and hard to sort of chart. But then you sort of ascend to like a flickering state of consciousness, which is alpha waves. And they're more organized and there's a pattern and they're slower moving. And in that state, when you're in there, it's like you could be doodling or daydreaming. You could be, you know, sort of almost sleep and then you kind of wake up and realize where you are. Or you could be in a moment of intimacy or arousal. You could also be giving birth. And that's the state you have to be in for your body to go into a trance-like state to be able to do what this primal process and primal template has

been unfolded for us, which is every mammal has this capability, but like there's all these impediments to being able to like access this in a hospital setting sometimes or in, you know, just like with our own, you know, our own crazy thoughts that like, you know, we hold on to that keep us from being able to like enter a state of like elevated consciousness. And that's what's required for us to give birth. So I'm constantly trying to protect the space that a woman is in so that she can get into her inner animal and be able to do what she doesn't actually have to know what to do because it'll turn on for her and she'll be able to do it if she can like get out of this like, okay, trying to control, but the control is really in the surrender. Like you actually have a full control of a process. If you think about it in this way, where it will unfold almost like textbook style. If you just sit in the back seat and let your brain, your body do all the work together. And if you can do that, and if you can stay in like an awareness state, spiritually, like that, I trust that this is all unfolding in the way it's meant. And each wave of contractions or sensations, I'm closer to meeting my baby. And this sensation is good. Like this is for the better, you know, and then move your body in the

way that feels, you know, good for you, then it will unfold in the way it's meant to, because guess what? Like, you're not going to be the first human to mess it up because this has been happening for millennia. So you're not like that special that you can mess up a process that's been, you know, unfolding for forever. Like we're all like, that's what makes us all the same. Right. So I think that if we can get back to just like the basics of honoring how people are born, like their birthdays are sacred and it's two birthdays because the mother is born, the woman is born into motherhood and the baby is born into this world. And the way that we're doing it now, some of the births are like traumatic for both the mother and child.

And so I think that the care that we put and the attention that we put into palliative care and into end of life care is so important, but there's also an importance that needs to be in a protection that needs to be placed for mothers and babies, because this is the crux of community. This is how we're like entering into the world. And a baby knows within like the first couple of hours of life, whether or not the world is a safe place. And I don't think we're doing a good job. If we look at what's happening today of making sure that babies grow into sensitive people that then, you know, treat the plants, animals and other people around them with love. We're failing on a lot of aspects of that. We do see that there's a lot of work to be done in that place, I think. Yeah.

Also, I love what you explained. explained is there, it's actually two births happening at once. And I wonder if we don't acknowledge that enough that yet we all see the birth of the child. Yet that second birth of motherhood, you know, and as you sort of described it, you evolve, it's a different, it's the same person, but at the same time, you're sort of birthing a new you. And yeah, I think we probably create the space to nurture the baby to a certain extent. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but very rarely create the space for that second birth to actually really take root and emerge and develop in a way that's really nourished.

And it sounds like that's so much of what you've now built your life around is helping, supporting women in that and acknowledging that that is important. That is, there's, you know, creating space for ritual and for care and just for space to allow that to happen. So I want to come full circle with you. So the name of this is Good Life Project. and for care and just for space to allow that to happen. So I want to come full circle with you. So the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer the term out to you, the phrase, to live a good life,

what comes up? What does it mean? You know, Jonathan, even just saying that, good life, living the good life, you know, even saying those words make you feel lighter, like give a sense of levity. But I think living a good life, I think, is really just being attuned to your surroundings to the point where you see the beauty in all things, having freedom. And what I mean by that is not an illusion, right, that you're free, but really like walking and feeling levity in the choices that you make, in the people that you surround yourself with, not feeling like tethered to the ground,

unless you want to be on the ground. And I think it's just loving. I think it's about really diving deep with your passions. I know people talk about this a lot and it's a big, like passions are a big buzzword or whatever, but it's like, we're all sent here, as we know, with our children and stuff, they come here, they're born on mission. And we often take them off course, and then they have to spend their whole lives finding their way back either through therapy or whatever ways they find their way back. But we're all here on mission. And so it's like, well, am I staying with that? Or am I like veering off and like getting lost again? I think like, living the good life is if you're attuned to that mission,

then like God keeps like folding things in that are that just make it better. It's like keeps putting layers of pancakes, you know what I mean? And syrup. It's like, it's awesome, I think. So I think it's about that. I think it's just, you know, enjoying the journey, but making a journey that's one of your choice. And how you do that, I think is really just by, it goes back to, again, another cliche that we say all the time of like living your truth. And if you're constantly filtering, like what belongs and what doesn't belong, so that you can keep steadfast and feel when something comes into your force field, like that isn't, that's not it, then it just keeps that pathway clear. And it's very, you know, you can see really clearly where you're headed if you do that. And so I think it's like showing up every day to weed. And so you have to

know, like, and be able to forecast, right. And anticipate for yourself, like what doesn't belong. And so I think we do that when we start practicing that active listening that I was talking about. And to me, it's that like, not vigilance, but diligence of how we live that provides us freedom. And that really allows us to live this good life. There's almost these energetic boundaries in place from like these actions that we've been making that keep us on track. So part of that good life is tapping into like your own medicine, too. Like, what is that for you? What is it that you need daily?

What's your dose? But you do everything else and you make time for everything else that you fold that into your life. Because if you know listening to this podcast helps you feel fulfilled and it gets you through your day, then you need to turn that on when you get up in the morning. Or if it's prayer or if it's meditation or your yoga class, you need to make time for that. I know that for me, I feel most fulfilled and like I'm living my good life when I do all of those things, when I fold in my medicine, when I spend time with my son, when I do all the things that I've actually been working hard to create space for, then I feel like I'm living the good life. Thank you. Thank you. I love learning so much from these incredible women. Well, I hope you've enjoyed this exploration of wellness and wisdom and medicine from the

perspective of four deeply studied and wise and experienced women in the field who are not just practicing and changing lives, but changing the face of how we look at wellness in general. If you love this episode, be sure to share it around and listen to the full length conversations with all of our guests today. All of the episodes are linked in the show notes below. And of course, if you haven't already done so, go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you appreciate the work that we've been doing here on Good Life Project, go check out my new book, Sparked.

It'll reveal some incredibly eye-opening things about maybe one of your favorite subjects, you, and then show you how to tap these insights to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller now. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields,

signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.