The Rich Roll Podcast - Heal Thyself

Episode Date: December 9, 2016

Welcome to a special mid-week episode of the podcast. During our most recent Plantpower Italia retreat, we hosted a panel discussion on the subject of holistic health and alternative healing modalities. I'm glad we decided to record it, and I'm excited to share it with you today. The three-person panel is comprised of: * Angela Bäuml-Nicolas – Osteopath & physiotherapist practicing in southern Germany; * Jennifer Ayres – Ayurvedic Health Practitioner and teacher certified by the internationally known Ayurvedic doctor, writer, and teacher Dr. Vasant Lad; and * Colin Hudon – Physician of Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine and founder of Living Tea, which imports some of the finest living teas in the world from Taiwan and China. In addition to covering the panelists' various areas of practice, this is a super engaging round table conversation designed to get you thinking pro-actively about long-term health, disease prevention and the power we all hold and exert over the quality of our well-being. Enjoy! Rich

I think all systems of medicine have incredible strengths and all have limitations, and that when we recognize what our own limitations are, it would be so much easier to work together. And I really pray that that's the way that we're moving. It seems that we are. Things are changing a lot, and I look forward to the day when it's all working together in that in the US you'll find Chinese practitioners with a Western doctor surgeon next door

in the same building and an Ayurvedic practitioner and an osteopath all of us The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome or welcome back to the show where usually, traditionally, typically, I go deep and heady and long form with some of the most intriguing thought leaders and positive paradigm

breaking change makers all across the globe. Today, it's going to be a little bit different, and I'm going to explain the hows and whys of it in a second, but first. All right, so as I inferred earlier, this is a special midweek episode of the podcast. It's a panel discussion that we hosted during our most recent retreat in Italy, Plant Power Italia. We decided to record it, and I thought it would make for a really interesting podcast episode because it's just a fascinating discussion. So it's a little bit different than what I usually do here on the podcast, but I think you guys are going to be

intrigued by it, and I think there is a lot to mine here and certainly a lot of information from which to learn and expand. So essentially, it's a three-person panel that includes our longtime friend, Angela Baumel Nicholas, who is a highly skilled physiotherapist and osteopath practicing in Southern Germany. and osteopath practicing in southern Germany. Secondly, our friend Jennifer Ayers, who is an extremely talented and incredibly empathetic Ayurvedic health practitioner and teacher. She has been certified by the internationally known Ayurvedic doctor, writer, and teacher, Dr. Vasant Lad. They collaborate and work together. In the world of Ayurveda, Dr. Lod is like the dude. He's like the guy. And thirdly, our friend Colin Hudon, who is another longtime friend, as well as a physician of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, as well as the founder and owner of Living Tea, livingtea.net, which is a company you probably heard me mention on the podcast many times.

livingtea.net, which is a company you probably heard me mention on the podcast many times. Essentially, Colin imports some of the finest living teas from Taiwan and China and brings them to the United States. It's just phenomenal tea. So Colin is a wealth of information. If you recall my podcast with tea master Wuda, then you likely recall Colin's name being mentioned as they are collaborators. It's through Colin that we were able to meet Wuda. And so that's a little bit of the history there. Anyway, this is a super interesting roundtable discussion. We cover topics like Ayurveda and Chinese medicine and acupuncture and osteopathy, various additional healing modalities, and essentially the power that we all have to exert more control over our health and our well-being. So that's all I'm going to say. I

don't want to say too much more about this episode. I'll just let you guys tap into it. I'll leave it at that. And I hope you guys find it informative and enjoyable. As a final note, enjoyable. As a final note, the audio on this is a little rough, at times very rough. So I apologize for that in advance. We didn't exactly have the best equipment and mics with us when we were in Italy. We weren't sure we were going to record it. It was kind of a last minute decision and we were jerry-rigging it the best that we could. So you're just going to have to bear with it and understand that, you know, not always perfect with the audio. But that being said, I thought there was enough here on the positive end of things to make it worth sharing with you. So that being said,

and without any further ado, please enjoy this panel discussion on holistic health and healing. discussion on holistic health and healing. Welcome to our, what day is it today, Wednesday? Wednesday. How many people feel like you've been here a month? That's good. Isn't it strange? It does. It feels like time is so stretched. I feel like I've known all of you guys for my whole life. time is so stretched. I feel like I've known all of you guys for my whole life. We've known each other three days. It's pretty cool. So anyway, many of you guys know these incredible people that are up here on the couch, on the therapist couch. Jennifer, Colin, and Angela, they are all extremely developed beings they are all gifted immensely and of everyone on the planet that we know they were the very very best people that we could think of to get to come on the trip so we're really really honored and grateful that you guys said yes and that you came. So thank you so much. You add so much to our experience here. And we really wanted to honor them

and take time to kind of feature the work that each of them do because it's a very, very important part, I think, of being on this wellness journey of transformation. We can't always do it on our own. There's not everything that you can solve with eating a plant based diet it's a lot more complicated than that and we all need

to be familiar with different healing modalities and practitioners and people that can help us as we go through different periods of our life so anyway thanks for coming you guys and you're on

check check check before I talk about the distractions and evils of modern technology I just got to send a text here so once so we discussed a little bit about what we wanted to talk about as a group because while all three of us have experience and background

in different types of holistic medicine, there are different systems, there are different approaches to medicine, but they all have underlying principles that are similar. And one way that we thought would be helpful or beneficial to all of you is to give a broad context or paint a broad stroke picture of some ideas about health and ideas of what disease is or may or may not be, and to talk about the idea of what it means to be healthy in a general schema, and then to get more granular and actually bring that down to the point of what it means to practice medicine

as practitioners of holistic medicine and what that actually looks like. So bear with us. We're going to kind of cover a lot of ground from a very broad context down to a more focused context. So I spent the last six years of, seven years of education unlearning linear learning, which was a lifetime of learning. So, and I'm talking about the very broad general context of health. So if you leave what I have to say when I pass the mic on to Jennifer, more confused than I've achieved my aim. And I kind of, I'm saying that jokingly, but I also mean it quite seriously because we

in Western culture especially have this idea that clarity, you know, you always, I've got clarity on the matter, or I'm clear, that once you've arrived at clarity, now you've got your life figured out. You have your aim and your goals, and there's this movement of hacking your life, making things more efficient, more simplified, and an emphasis on this linear, data-driven efficiency. The problem with clarity is that oftentimes that's just a concept we have in our heads. And some traditions, I'll say spiritual traditions, we'll say traditions that wish to live with skill and wisdom,

they see clarity actually as an obstacle in one's growth. Because as soon as one arrives at this belief, oh, I understand this thing, or I have knowledge, I'm clear about it, you've cut yourself off from the question of it. So if you follow me for a moment on that, as soon as I believe I understand something, I'm no longer in a wide, receptive way of relating to it. I've sort of relegated it to that part of my life that, oh yeah, I got that. I understand that. And we tend to do that so often, you know, even at the simplest level with our partner, with loved ones. Oh, I know this person. often, you know, even at the simplest level with our partner, with loved ones, oh, I know this person. And, you know, I've caught myself at times in the last year even where I make

eye contact with somebody or I stop for a minute and I see them and I realize I haven't actually looked at them or taken them in as a living being, as a growing, evolving human being, as a living being, as a growing, evolving human being, because I'm familiar with them. I know them. I get them. And we go through so much of life in this sort of mechanical way that this idea of clarity can actually be a real obstacle. And that's very relevant to health in ways that will come up, I think, throughout this talk.

So again, if you are more confused by what I've said and haven't been able to follow me by the end of whatever I'd like to share, then I've achieved something good, I think. So that brings me to my first point, which is that I know I found myself throughout some of the talks in the first couple days of this week with this thought of, oh, when this is done, I can't wait to X. Or when I start, once we leave here and we arrive at this next place we're going, oh, I can't wait to incorporate that thing or to start doing this thing or to make this change or this shift in my life. And it's not to say that goals aren't a good thing, but the problem with it is that this, what you're living right now in this room, in this moment is your life. This is not a dress rehearsal. We are here living our lives in this moment. And we spend so much of our time, humanity, lost in thought. We spend so much of our lives living in the future or the past. And carrying the past around with us as a burden or projecting out into the future our

desires or aversions or anticipating what may or may not happen in the future. And we spend very little time really actually living our lives. And that's a practice that takes a lifetime, I think, of commitment to really develop. You know, we hear these terms mindfulness or presence. I would say those are synonymous with consciousness and love. All of those are the same thing. And that's a very important and central aspect of this idea of health. Because if you ask yourself the question, well, what is health? Or what does it mean to live a healthy life?

A more fundamental question that has to be asked first is, what is it to live a life? And it is definitely not a life to spend your entire time thinking about something that has nothing to do with this present moment, with the living reality of where we are here now. But we often spend a lot of our life doing that. are here now. But we often spend a lot of our life doing that. And if you don't believe me, then you can try and give yourself some task or something you want to remember to do throughout the course of the day. Like maybe when you walk in and out of doorways to remember yourself, to feel your feet on the ground or feel the handle in your hand and make that commitment or something like that, like an alarm clock, and then notice that throughout the course of the day, maybe multiple days will pass and you don't do it one time. And what that shows you is that we aren't really here

for most of our lives. We're not really living our lives. We're not present to it, which that will open up a whole lot of questions like, well, then who is, or what am I doing with all this time and this space? So some of the broad spectrum things that I just want to touch on, and then I'll pass the mic. One of them is that there's a fundamental misunderstanding that humans have that we exist independent of life itself. That we think that we are separate, that we have our own agency

and that we're existing separate from life itself, which is a real fundamental misunderstanding of right relationship. And I think if you look at the reality that we find ourselves in, you know, we have nature over here as one camp, and then we have society over here as another camp, and we have economy in another place and culture in another place, and we treat those all as independent things.

another place. And we treat those all as independent things. And in modern life, I think we've created a religion out of money, out of economy. And if economy is a religion, then ultimately bankers are the priests who are telling people what to worship and what's important to them. And things get disproportionately disconnected. So a lot of people live and fundamentally prioritize material reality and their relationship to stuff and their identification with stuff as what's most important. And that is the beginning of ill health. and that is the beginning of ill health. And the reason being that a right orientation or a right system puts nature with a capital N as the largest, we'll say, ecosystem

within which society exists. And within society we have culture, and within culture we have economy. And that nested system, the smaller aspects of the system should feed the larger aspects of the system, or exist in right relationship to it, because that would be a healthy society. But,

unfortunately, we have this disproportionately misaligned relationship to these things. And I say that, I share that because I think that, and this is part of practicing holistic medicine, we can't understand our own health or what it means to be healthy without understanding the context of their lives. And that's a lot of what biomedical science and modern Western medicine does.

A person comes in, they have a list of symptoms, and you look at their labs and their blood work and their radiological reports, and then treat some symptoms and send them on their way. You know, and the average doctor, I think, spends 15 seconds or 20 seconds with a patient and read some things off a piece of paper, generally speaking, and prescribe some drugs, and it's either drug therapy or surgery. Those are your options. And then sends them on their way. And I don't know about most of you, but my experience going to a hospital is usually not one where I feel seen as a human being, much less taken in the context of the entirety of my life. I feel more like some symptoms on a piece of paper and not really, my health as a whole does not feel addressed or considered. And I don't think we can understand a person outside of the context of their lives. So if you see a person comes to you

and they have some health problems and you don't take into consideration, are you happy with your work? Are you happy in your relationships? Do you feel fulfilled in your sense of purpose? Are you content in the life you're living? Are you moving in a direction that you feel inspired by? And they say no to all those questions. And then they say, but I've got these digestive issues. And that definitely has nothing to do with any of those other things. Even though I'm profoundly unhappy, I'm worried a lot, I haven't had sex in five years, and I eat a poor diet. If a person comes to you with all those issues, but then says my digestive issues have nothing to do with any of that, then in all likelihood, they're probably misunderstanding what's actually going on. the mind and the body and the emotions and the spirit, is that anybody who's had a cold or a flu or some minor illness, did you sit in like perfect equanimity and say, no, it's just this body that's

not feeling well. I feel great otherwise. You know, there's a profound interrelationship, interconnectedness between these things. And that's in the context of an individual. As a species, as a society, you know, if you take a breath right now, where did that breath come from? You know, it came from the trees. Where did the trees come from from you can't understand the trees independent of an extraordinarily complex root system with microbes and fungi and mycelium

and sunshine bird song the stars the cosmos the wind the seasons all of this is feeding a living system and all of that has to work in a profound harmony just for you to take that one breath. And, you know, we also talk about a plant-powered diet or something or eating a whole foods diet. Every thought that every person's having in this room is being fueled by plant energy. This is something that one of my teachers talks a lot about.

Even if somebody's eating meat, that's still running on plant energy because those animals are plant-driven. You know, the clothes that we are wearing, the wood that's on this floor, all the material to make the lights and the walls, everything that society is producing, everything that we're surrounded by, everything that supports us fundamentally is coming out of nature. And that's what I mean by it being a nested system. But most people have lost a feeling of connection to that. And without a feeling connection of our fundamental need for and relationship to nature, we're living in a state of disharmony. And that is at the root and the core, I think, of ill health and of disharmony for individuals and for people as a whole. And

I'll say the last thing I will say is that I think it's less important to relate to maybe the food we're eating or the things we're doing as, or to food we'll say, as these bioavailable fuel packets that we need to run our next marathon or, you know, to stay healthy or stay fit. Because by reducing food to stuff that fuels these machines that we're inside of, it is not allowing us to take this fundamental and necessary step of the feeling of connection and relationship to nature, which is what should come with the consumption of food, is an awareness of the connection to nature and that's one of the reasons that tea is such an important vehicle and something that I work with

because you're literally drinking teas or you're literally drinking trees and you're also not distracted by with food there's a lot of other things that happen like craving and delicious flavors titillating flavors and things that it's easy to get distracted in the act of eating whereas with tea it's about clearing a lot of that out of the way and it's hard to dismiss the fact that you're literally just sitting there drinking trees and so that connection of feeling the feeling connection to nature is experienced. You know, if you ask somebody to describe how they connect, we'll say connect to nature, they wouldn't say, well, I think intensely about it. Or, you know, if you were to walk into a forest and think intensely about it, it would turn into a report about birds.

Or if you look at a mountain and you think about it, it becomes something to mine or to conquer or to climb. But this process of incessant thinking and analyzing and critically observing does not allow you to connect. The way we connect with things is through an embodied feeling relationship to it. And modern society doesn't really put much emphasis or appreciation on this feeling connection of things. Can we sense one another? Can we feel our connection to life itself and recognize that we're immersed in it? We're part of something much bigger than us. Thinking is very good at breaking things down into their component parts, but it certainly doesn't help us connect with something much larger than us. And so with that,

you can probably imagine what I would suggest we all spend more time doing. I'm going to pass the mic for now, otherwise I'll keep talking for another 20 minutes. Wow. Thanks, Colin. Good morning, everybody. I think I'm going to feel for a sec. So I thought part of our giving a little context for who we are and our practices, maybe Colin can go back and say a little bit about his background. But I started my journey early on and started practicing Ayurveda before I knew the word

for it. I was an environmental major and had this, I felt like, I'm a spiritual environmentalist. I'm a spiritual environmentalist. I just love everything. So what do I do with that? And I started in education, and then I also was doing healing work, massage therapy, energy work. And I was really discouraged that I had two career paths

when to me it was one thing. So it's following in line with what Colin was just saying about how much we compartmentalize our lives and there's these separations that are really false, that are really uncomfortable if we're feeling. So for me, this connection, my relationship to the natural world, which is my body body which is every moment which is everything where everything comes from and my relationship to other people and my relationship to my culture and my relationship to god all add up to am i healthy or not and if i'm healthy and really

aligned then all the decisions i make are benefiting those around me, including the environment. So why two career paths? That makes no sense. And I had my own health struggles where I was like, my digestion's not working well. What's going on? So I started researching and I found a book on Ayurveda. And it was by Dr. Vasant Ladd, who ended up being my teacher and now my boss. And I thought, oh, I found it! Oh, and early on in my life, people say, like, what are you going to do with your life? I'm like, I don't know, but I think,

I don't know the name of what I'm going to be doing. And when I read that book, I'm like, I found the name! It's called Ayurveda! And I've been practicing it all along. And the great thing about Ayurveda is that it was never created, and it will always exist, and always has existed. It is only these rhythms that can be described, and if you take time, if you take a breath, if you feel your body, you have access to this information. It's not some esoteric, really hard to understand thing. But when you try to articulate how does everything work,

it becomes really heady really fast. It gets complicated. And so learning Ayurveda, there can be lots and lots of rules and this and that, but the baseline is forget the rules. If you feel what's true to you, There can be lots and lots of rules and this and that, but the baseline is forget the rules. If you feel what's true to you and it brings you closer to balance, it brings you closer to who you really are and there are no side effects, that's called Ayurveda. But that's also called Chinese medicine.

That's also called osteopathy. That's also, this is the pathway to health. So, yeah, I did a bunch of studies and became a practitioner and also a teacher. And I worked for a swami and learned how to cook for him. And that was a great honor because food is so important, as everyone in this room knows, for well-being. Food actually creates the quality of our mind.

The quality of our food creates the quality of our minds. So mind actually is coming from two directions in our philosophy. One is that in the beginning we're just energy. That we could call a soul. And that soul had this desire to have an experience, to know self. So it started to crystallize, to become a little more dense, and that became a mind.

And that mind became a little more dense and crystallized into a physical body. So the body is crystallized mind. So if we're going to have a beautiful, well-operating body, we need to start with the mind. Sometimes that seems a little out there. Like, no, the mind is contained inside the body. But we're saying, no, the body is created. It's crystallized

mind. And that soul still wants to have an experience. That experience is flow. I see all of us as a river. Unique. Our banks are completely unique. Maybe have a few landmarks that you'll see throughout your life. But the flow is always flowing and it's always a different river. But yours is unique. But it's flowing and eventually joining with the ocean and eventually evaporating and you become a cloud. And it's all one thing. We are one flow, which is nature. So anyway, sorry, I wasn't supposed to get out there philosophically.

So let's bring it down more into physical being. What do we do? Some practical things. What do we need to talk about with food, with the physical body in this context of there is just one big flow. The concept in Ayurveda that's most central to food is digestion, and we call it agni. Agni is the fire of digestion. It is all about transformation. Any part of the process in the body that is changing one thing from to another, like food into energy, or thought into understanding, is governed by this thing called agni. So there's agni everywhere, but the biggest fire, let's say it looks like a little campfire, is in the belly, is in the stomach and the small intestines. And we even say that taste doesn't come from food.

It comes from the quality of your agni. What? But if you're not feeling well and you don't have an appetite, food doesn't taste good. It's really coming from your ability to transform one thing into another that allows you to taste it and allows you to then take it in in other ways to utilize it the most, to have energy, to have nutrition, to have building blocks for the physical body.

So this quality of agni is the most important thing in terms of digesting food, in terms of eating food. So we have the quality of the food that we have done a lot of focus on, but before we decide what we're going to eat, we want to make sure that this digestive fire is working properly. And how do we do that? How do we care for our Agni first of all

it knows what to do right this formation this crystallization of mind wanted to have a body you wanted to have an experience of life so it knows what to do the most important thing we need to do is make sure our minds don't get in the way. The flow will happen without us if we could just stop from getting in the way. And what I mean by getting in the way is that we tend to override our bodies a lot. We override the body by saying, oh, you're tired? Hold on a second. I just want to finish this thing.

We override the fact that our body needs rest the body has its own intelligence and that intelligence is coming from Agni so Agni is a is a very big term that's all about transforming anything to anything much more than just digesting food but the digesting of food is only possible if we're taking care of Agni in all ways. Okay so some ways that we can misuse our Agni is by overeating, eating too many complicated things, eating the wrong types of food for our body type or for the season. So let's say it's cold and rainy out and we're feeling a little under the weather. Eating ice cream is probably not the best idea. It's cold, it's hot, it's heavy, and it's wet,

and we'll put out that fire.'s like putting a big damp blanket on top of a fire puts it out once it's out it's not gonna do its job and anything else that we put on top of it will turn into a residue called ama toxins like putrefaction fermentation and can cause all kinds of symptoms. So right then it's like, oh wait, then I need to know all the rules. Tell me all the rules. And I'm like, okay, hold on. There's no way that I'm going to teach you Ayurveda in one 10 minute session. But if you follow what feels right to you, you probably already know. Erase probably.

You already know. Erase probably. You already know. Everyone that comes to me, well, usually one or maybe many things, will say, I know I shouldn't, but... So luckily my job is really easy. All I need to do is, like, remember that thing you know isn't good for you? What do you want to do about that?

I'm a mirror. But just to give your mind a little more of that, you know, food to chew on about the rules, okay. So we don't want to do the overeating, the complex foods, the wrong foods for the season, for our body type. Also, the quality of our attention, our emotional state when we're eating, completely affects our acne.

And we can look at science for this. Like, there's the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. One is for rest and digest. The other is for fight and flight. So when you're running from a bear that's chasing you, it's probably not the time to be digesting. The body knows the difference. It shunts all the blood to the limbs and to the brain in order to get out of a situation.

Right? That means there's none left over for the stomach and those systems and the hydrochloric acid and the enzymes are just not available at that time. But that means our body doesn't know the difference between being chased by a bear and having a deadline. And that's when we're ramped all the time and we don't know how to shut that down. We don't have the ability to digest. And it doesn't matter what quality of food we're putting in it.

We're creating toxins. So coming to the table to be like, I'm sitting. I'm not going to be eating in my car or while I'm on the run or standing in the kitchen because I have 10 seconds. It's important to have a seated, relax, take a breath, and be present with the food for your digestion, for the nervous system to know that it's time and that it'd be even able to. So the quality of your state of emotions and your quality of attention, equally important.

So we can overwhelm and misuse our agni in so many different ways. But let's say there's also another possibility of your agni just coming in with it not being as strong. It's a genetic thing. There are ways that you can strengthen that by right practice. But in general, your Agni knows what to do. And if we just get out of the way of doing the wrong things, it's going to work.

So in terms of quality of food, we're really, I know all of us have done a lot of work, a lot of intention, a lot of, so I don't even feel like I need to go into that so much, but of course in Ayurveda we talk about organic, local, seasonal foods. Whole as much as possible. The more whole, the more nutrition, the more connection to this flow, which is everything, which is nature, is available to us. We call it prana, the energy of the food. We want the food to be as alive as possible. In Ayurveda, we also talk about raw versus cooked, and it totally depends on who you are. There's no one thing that's good for all people because we're completely unique.

And if you have a lot of fire in your digestion, then raw is totally an availability for you because it takes a lot to break down a raw substance in order to unlock the nutrition that's inside of it. If you don't have really strong digestion, a lot of fire, then it's going to take some pre-cooking in order to unlock the availability of those nutrients. So for a person with a lot of wind in their system, meaning that they're dry, they're thin, they're really active, they might have a more delicate digestion, they're going to need more cooked foods. So all these rules I'm not going to go into right now about who for what. But you know.

You know what works for you. So it's like, don't listen to any trend. Don't listen to anyone telling you what to do. Feel your body. And if you're not sure, experiment. For most people, you know, about 30% raw can work for them. But it also depends on the season. In the summer, there's so much more fire outside in our natural environment, that means that there's more fire available inside of us.

Another foundation of Ayurveda is that we talk about the attributes, the qualities. That all of these, we have 20 that we talk about, hot and cold and light and rough and slimy and dense. They all exist in nature. This is all the things that make up a being and all of our physical reality. Whatever qualities like this are on our outside, we will imbibe and it will become our inside. So when it's hot out, we start to get more inflammation, which is a type of heat in our body. When it's cold out, we'll start to imbibe cold quality in us and that will cause symptoms like constipation and gas. It's an interesting, we are actually

imbibing the qualities of our external environment and making them internal. The internal ones become external. We are all one thing. There's no way to separate it out. But we really see that combination, that influence with the seasons. And that in the hot season, we don't want to have hot, spicy foods because we already have too much hot in us. So it was a good time to have cooling foods

like coconut, cucumber, those types of things, leafy greens. It's also, since there's so much heat available, it's a better time to eat raw. In the winter, heavy, cold, dark, we want some lightness, some heat, some spiciness. So having spicier food in the winter is a good thing to keep your immunity up. In the fall, fall right now, we're having some transition from heat to cold. Anytime there's transition, it can disturb the movements in the body and vata, which is the wind part of us, gets disturbed and we need to make

sure that we have stability. We need some regular schedule. We need to go to bed at a good time, get up at a right time, have our daily schedule of timing is important for our digestion to be working properly. It's a good time to go into root vegetables because it's a time that's easy to feel ungrounded especially when it's windy outside we can feel unsettled inside. So that's a way that wind will show up in our overactive mind, insomnia. So that's a good time to do warm soupy soups and stews and root vegetables for grounding.

I'm trying to gauge like, okay, details and not details, and like, it's probably about time for me anyway. Quickly, the qualities of our mind are created by the quality of the food that we're eating. And that's why fresh, whole foods are going to give us the most clarity and the most close alignment with our true nature. When we have processed foods, they get further away from what's real. We get confused, we get disturbed, we get toxins that lead to heaviness, depression, or overly active mind, restlessness. We have words for that. Tamas is heavy, rajasic is overactive, restless, and sattvic means clear, pure mind. And completely those qualities are created by what we're What's the term for that? I'm not sure.

So the preparation of our food is the last thing that I'll be touching on is that just as important as the quality of the food and the quality of our ag is the last thing that I'll be touching on is that just as important as the quality of the food and the quality of our agnes the preparation of our food because the love that we put into it changes everything and how it's creating our minds so I don't know about you but I can totally tell if I'm in a restaurant if somebody prepared this and they're angry and like somebody does not like their job back there and I can't eat it. I get an upset stomach. I feel agitated later if I eat that food.

And even if you're not feeling those things, not as sensitive, it's happening. And the more that you're in touch with the whole process of where does your food come from, how is it being prepared, how much transportation was involved, all of these things add up to how it will create your mind. So highly recommend have a garden. Know where your food comes from.

Cook it yourself. And think about who's going to be eating this food and how much you love them while you're cooking it. It changes everything. Okay. food and how much you love them while you're cooking it. It changes everything. OK. So any suffering that's in our body or mind is not punishment. Sometimes it's confusing. When we're suffering and feeling victimized

by this body of ours, it's like, why aren't you behaving? It's not a punishment. It's communication. It's feedback. And it's saying, hold up. You're not in the flow of your river. That's all it's saying. And so how do we get back in that flow when we're not?

Presence, presence, presence. We say it over and over. And follow your desire. If you have any little upwelling of like, it would be nice, feed that. any little upwelling of like, it would be nice, feed that. Desire is the way into the soul's manifesting its purpose. Follow desire. So I hope you all know what I'm talking about, not the compulsive, needy, but the true feeling

of like, I just really want this thing. Now I'm like, oh no, there are all those pitta minds that are like, but progress. No it's the quiet one, the quiet one that's not attached to ego that I'm talking about, that desire. You're with me, you know. Thanks, I'm going to hand it over to Angela. Do you have a needle to bring down my heart rate? It's going to take about five minutes, so I'm going to calm down.

It's difficult for me to speak with a lot of people. I'm kind of a one-to-one person. This is where I work best. But it takes about five minutes, and then when I'm into it I'm going to calm down. So it's kind of more easy for me now to talk a little about my work. There's a lot of things in osteopathy that are not in osteopathy but in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine so there is nothing about food

for me to talk or something like that. I do really just work in my hands. It's certainly the most touchy kind of holistic medicine and I really would love to dialogue with you just to answer questions because this is what I'm certainly best at I've got kind of difficulties to to give answers for question that hadn't been asked. You know what I mean? Because I don't know where to start, where to begin, how to explain. But there were already, in the last days,

a lot of questions from you about what am I doing, what is this special kind of osteopathy. So it gives me a kind of red line to follow because I hope to answer these kind of question questions and so how did I come to osteopathy I was a physiotherapist for it first and I worked for yes 30 years ago I started and I had my clinic with people working for me and I totally always was was into body work working with people I I really appreciate it and had a really really good time but

immediately or really fast I came to point of dissatisfaction of my work because came to point of dissatisfaction of my work because certainly I don't know, maybe I was born like that. It wasn't that for me it was always or always out of question that there is a division possible between body, mind, spirit, soul, whatever. It was totally clear for me that that when somebody said okay I'm stressed out or I don't know my relationship is not good or I hurt myself I had a trauma I had an operation or whatever that this comes to him to point to say yeah yeah this is all you and this is all about you so why am I just

treating this muscle or why am I just treating this articulation because it hurts I treat this back because I hurts but what if this bag is hurting because it's not hurting because there is a blockade or some but because you are carrying something or whatever so So it came to this point and seeing people coming back always happy when leaving the the treatment but coming back always having the same problems, always having the same issues. And then I had the chance to meet, I just have to take a sip of water. I just have to take a sip of water.

I'm just going to pass. So then at this time with my clinic, I was attached to a studio, so I had a lot of, I had to give lessons, yoga lessons and spinning lessons, and I did a lot of things. And then there was a woman, she was working at the reception, and I was asking what she was doing. She said, yeah, she's earning to to make her osteopathy studies and she just and I asked her so what is this and what is the difference and then she came up with this holistic picture of yeah that they're not just treating the skeletal system but they're

also looking at the organs they're looking at their central nervous system, and there are different techniques and ways to go. So the treatment of the central nervous system is what maybe some of you know as the cranial sacral treatment. This is the part of osteopathy that treats the central nervous system. And then there is the treatment of the organic system and the skeletal system like you know there's part of chiropractic or assessment or facial treatment or whatever the what you do with the black roll for example you do it with your hands in osteopathy and I said okay this is my thing I have to go into it so I started this five five years studies all the time working in my clinic besides so this was a kind of real tough time and this was beautiful and I had the chance to to get in touch with the professor who teaches the cranial sacral

treatments she kind of I my partner when we were training she she had a question and so the teacher came and she tried to and she said yep please could you a look? I'm not sure if this is the problem. And she took my hair and I was lying there and she said, yeah, why doesn't she really touches me? You know, really getting contact, you know, with the structure. And I was kind of, you know, reaching out, so why won't you touch me? And, but then I said, okay, now she doesn't want to touch me. And then I started to really relax into the situation and was completely forgetting about her because anyway I didn't really feel her hands. And then I had the experience of what we call an automatic shifting.

It's a kind of, you know, there's a kind of thing going on and it was, yeah, okay, I you know like you do it sometimes This and this just came up with me lying on the table and said what what was that? I turned around say what are you doing? This is nothing Okay, so she said it's you you just adjusted yourself and I say so this is Osteopathic she said yes,, but she said that she started the biodynamic series, what do you call it? And it's a seven-year postgraduate thing.

Now I'm in my sixth year now, and now they're just making it a nine-year thing. I'm really happy about that because I really don't know what I'm going to do the day I'm not mentored or lectured anymore so I hope when I'm at my ninth year they're going to say oh we're doing this for another 20 years this would be really great and so and then I said, when I finished my studies, I immediately applied for a spot in this biodynamic series that I'm doing with Dr. Tom Shaver. And he's teaching all over the world, and I do it in Austria. Because, yeah, so I have to go to Austria all the time to go there. And so this is what I'm doing right now.

I'm totally, I don't do any chiropractic anymore. It never ever was my thing because it's manipulation. And this was never in my system. I don't want to manipulate. I don't want to be manipulated. So it was just not in my system. I don't want to manipulate. I don't want to be manipulated. So it was just not in my being. It's totally good that this exists and that the possibility exists that when you kind of are there

and say, OK, please help me. But if somebody calls in my office and said, oh, I have to come to see you to make an adjustment, I say, don't. Please go and see somebody else. It's not that I don't want to see you to make an adjustment and say don't. Please go and see somebody else. It's not that I don't want to help you, but it's just not my thing to go into this situation. So I started the biodynamic studies and there, yeah, I maybe quote what Dr. James Chalice said,

quote what Dr. James Chalice said, biodynamic begins with awareness of wholeness and so this totally brings everything together and back again and just to be aware that you can't split anything in nature into pieces

if you watch it and I mean you would never think about it and if you go and want to help somebody, you just, I think you're just not allowed to split him up. And so what it means is to perceive really in treatment, to perceive the whole and let what we call the breath of life so what maybe it's called prana what i don't know andrew taylor still the the father of osteopathy he said 1807 five he just said it's breath of god

i mean he really had no problem with saying things like that you can't say that today to people so um so it's a kind of a compromise to say it's the breath of life. And it's just our completely total connection to everything. of this totally perfect system and to help the whole to come back to balance and without compromising the wholeness of this person. So yeah this sounds really good I know so how do you do that? And it's, you know, when you come to touch a buddy, it's just to be the listener. I touch somebody and I immediately start to listen.

And just to be transparent, to not compromise anything. And maybe to make up a picture, I also, in parallel, I started a specialization for pediatric treatment. So I'm treating a lot of babies and this is, I mean, this is certainly the best way to really learn what biodynamics or holistic treatment is all about. Because when you, I made, I kind of made up this picture, you know, when I treat somebody, it's like if you have a pot a pot of hot soup and there is carrots and everything and when you touch an adult person you go and go near the pot and then you just try to sense and try to get as transparent as to really get into the soup in touch with the soup yeah so that you say okay this is the liquid these are the hard pieces, so okay, just watch

this. If you touch a baby, you never, never, ever could touch a baby like you touch an adult. You always could treat an adult as a baby, and this is certainly the best kind of treatment, this is biodynamics because this is in respect of the embryo, of the real blueprint of you, of your real shape and this is always and your whole life accessible. It's in you, this embryo and this is perfection and if you touch a baby you're directly first you take the mixer and there are no pieces anymore there is this whole total homogeneous thing and then you really go into it with your hands into the soup this is touching a baby when you touch a baby you're

in the soup and this is why you have to be really really careful when you touch a baby, you're in the soup. And this is why you have to be really, really careful when you touch babies or when you treat babies, because there isn't this safety pot around with an adult, with his mind, his ego, and everything. This is a protection for an adult in treatment. Adult has the possibility to say no, you just don't go there, I just don't talk to you, I just don't show. A baby doesn't have the possibility. A baby always shows everything and so this is why you have really have to have this picture to get into the soup and just stay there and then feel outside your head, inside your hand, and just this kind of pot at one moment just totally disappears. And then you're totally working kind of, yeah, to the horizon.

So this is mostly what it is about. And in biodynamics, it's really, really important, this connection to embryology. There is a real well-known embryologist, Blechschmid. He was German. And a long time ago, he did a lot of research about the question, what is this power behind the growth and the development of an embryo? I mean, if the embryo develops and it takes,

you know, all these layers get formed into a liver and into a stomach, this is genetics. They know what to do and they know I'm going to be a liver and I don't know what I have to do. This is totally genetics. This we have, this we get. But what is the energy that makes it happen? That says, yeah, now it's the 21st day,

now this has to happen. It's the 36th day, now this has to happen. Nobody ever found out what it is. And just kind of the classical science, I don't know if they kind of ignore it, but we still don't know. And they say, no, no, no, no, breath of life and things like that.

Yeah, but just why don't give it a name? It's just a name. For something we can't explain. And so this searcher, which is really, I mean, it's real tough stuff, but it's really, really, really interesting to get into this or to read about this. And he was doing the same research as Sutherland, one of the big fathers of osteopathy. He was doing the same research at the same, and they didn't know of

each other. It was just after that osteopath discovered that more or less at the same time, they were looking for answers in the same kind of field. And so this is why the embryology is really, really important to know and to kind of respect that as a fact that this shape, this perfect shape is still in you and it's accessible. That just we're very often so divided and parted and apart and what you said about before to be disconnected from nature is that we are not just disconnected from nature but also disconnected from our our embryo from our perfect shape and so this is what we really want to look about and this is why the treatment is just about to get you in this neutral

resting state where there is totally melting, where this soup is going to lose structure, hard pieces and everything, where there is a kind of homogeneity, of all forces so that your potency, capital P, could do all the work for you. And I know certainly this brings up a lot of questions so this, maybe I just stop here, but I wanted to, because this is really, really important. I think it really helps to think it through, this embryo idea. And I just wanted to quote like Dr. Chalice.

He put it, because I surely can't put it as well in English words as he did he said an embryo function as a whole its integrity is universal within itself this display of unity and individual function remains at the core of each of us our cultural senses are aware of it but are complete are not aware of, but are completely conscious of our whole pre-genetic, pre-gender role in recognizing the press of life as the most dominant feature of our sensory landscape. We are tracking our own divinity as we begin to sense health. I couldn't have said it better.

So, yeah, this is a little about what I do. What I try to do. Thank you. Thank you. Can you say a little bit about, you have Chinese medicine? Did you all hear the question? She asked, can you say a little bit about Chinese medicine and what that's all about? So the first Chinese medical text is called the Yellow Emperor's Classic.

And it was written by a guy named Huangdi Neijing, and it was written in 2737 BC. So Chinese medicines, and when that was written, it's incredibly detailed and is evidence of a fully developed, extraordinarily complex complete comprehensive medical system which means that there was some precedence to that system so we're talking about a form of medicine that's been around for a minute and it's been refined and developed over those thousands of years.

And I find that always kind of amusing because we talk about it as complementary medicine or alternative medicine. And I go, well, modern medicine, Western medicine, has only been practiced in the form that it's currently practiced for 250 years. So which is the alternative medicine, right? I don't know. Something seems to be off about that picture that's a whole other conversation but in general what I can say about Chinese medicine is it developed out of Taoist thought and so so Taoism, right, it's another ism like Buddhism, Hinduism, you know, Sufism. And any ism is a wasm. So as soon as something turns into an ism, it stopped being part of the living reality that we're in right now.

So Taoism is also another ism. It's something that existed in the past. It's a conceptual framework for reality, which is not reality as it is. That being said, the idea of early Taoism was that the earth is a living being, something that the modern scientists call a Gaia theory, or there's one scientist in particular who's a NASA, he's an astronaut, James Lovelock, who coined this term Gaia theory. And this is the idea that the earth is a living conscious intelligent being. And there's a saying in Taoism which is, man

follows the earth, the earth follows the cosmos, the cosmos follows the Tao, and the Tao follows itself. You could insert for the word Tao reality, life itself. So this idea that man follows the earth means that we must observe, we have to observe the earth. So the early Taoists became unbelievable, incredibly meticulous observers of the natural world. And that means the movement of the four seasons, the movement of the cosmos, what we call the 28 constellations,

the movement of animals, the movement of the seasons, the movement of weather patterns, areas of dryness, wind, heat, cold, moisture, etc. And they observe the animals. And so, for example, the intelligence of an animal, like if an animal gets sick, we'll say, you know, a wild cat or something. The wild cat, how does it know to go and eat that one herb and to eat until it's full and then to go into a shaded protected place and basically do yoga or some version of it

and bend its body like she was talking about the wholeness, the natural intelligence of the body to get its body into some strange position and breathe in some way while this herb is working through its body and then to heal. Nobody taught that wild cat. They didn't say in a textbook, this is urolensis glyceris and you need to cook it for seven minutes. Or better yet,

in modern chemical science, we need to isolate this one amino acid and then compound it into a powder and then, you know, put it in a pill. This idea of Gaia theory is that the earth is intelligent. And if we observe it, we can derive principles by observing the function of the earth, the function of the animals, the movements of the seasons and the weather, day and night, and also the larger cycles of human life, you know, seven years for men and eight years for women. You know, most of us have heard that every seven years we have a completely new body because all the cells have regenerated. So by observing these transformations and these movements, we develop a very robust picture of what harmony is.

So the last thing I'll say about Chinese medicine is these principles from nature were derived from observing nature. And the basic idea, and I know this is true in Ayurveda as well, is if you look at any human being or any being or any situation, there are aspects of it where there's deficiency

and there's aspects of it where there's excess. So in the summertime, there's an excess of heat and a deficiency of cold. This is a very general explanation. And then there's on one spectrum, cold and hot. And then in the human body, there's the very deep interior, like the viscera and the organs. And then the exterior of the body, which is dealing more with the skin,

the cutaneous layer, and the organs and structures that are more exposed to the outside world. So there's the interior and exterior. And when you combine these things, heat and cold, deficiency, excess, interior, exterior, you have a picture of yin and yang. Now, everybody's seen this symbol that's sadly been so overused and misunderstood. I mean, somebody in this room has probably got a tattoo of it,

understood. I mean, somebody in this room's probably got a tattoo of it, which is the Tai Chi symbol. It's the circle with the swerve in the middle and the two dots, which is that within yang, there is a little bit of yin. It couldn't be otherwise. And within yin, there's a little bit of yang. And this wavy line represents change or transformation so as something reaches utmost yang uh it transforms into yin in the way that if you look at a a wheel spinning on a bike or something at a certain speed it looks like it stopped moving you know um the same thing could be said of the chakras or anything that's spinning really. So we take these principles and we apply them to the functions in the human being and the organs are associated with yin and

yang and different movements and there's a system of meridians which is an energetic pathways throughout the body that relates to the nervous system and the vascular system. And we have stagnation that develops in the body. Stagnation can also be in the emotions. It can be in a thought that just is on repeat. What's that? Or a song that's stuck in your head, yeah. Which is actually a lot.

If you meditate, you know, if you meditate, you observe that if you really go deep into meditation, you observe that we're basically thinking about the same thing in different variations. You know, the same six themes are just on repeat up there. And we think we're having original thoughts, but really we're just, you know, it's like a needle's been dropped on a record and it's just kind of spinning.

Meditation's a really good recipe for realizing how completely insane we all are. So in short, or actually that was in long, but all this observation out of it, there developed a very robust system of treating the stagnation. And so we use these needles, very fine needles, and we manipulate points in the body to break that stagnation so that the flow can be restored,

the flow of energy throughout the body, also the flow of blood and body fluids. And we work with herbs that go to different organs in the body, again, if something's deficient, to maybe bring heat or movement, and if something's in excess, to calm it down. And we also use gua sha, which is a way of scraping the skin to bring blood to the surface. And we use cupping, which some of you probably have bruises on your

back to prove that over the last couple of days. And cupping is used to break up the myofascia in the body or to stimulate the myofascia. And again, to bring fresh blood and energy to an area of trauma. And we use massage, of course, for the same purposes. And we use herbs and diet. And different foods have different natures, like Jen was saying. And actually, that's, and I'll end on that note, which is that for a lot of people eating a plant-based diet, over time, I, of course, am an advocate of a plant-based diet. I myself eat a plant-based diet over time. I, of course, am an advocate of a plant-based diet.

I myself eat a plant-based diet. But I found, especially with type O blood types, but also other people who for a long period of time eat a vegan or vegetarian diet, that in Chinese medicine there's something, a condition called blood deficiency or liver blood deficiency, where because you're not consuming blood

the body can stop producing it in enough quantity and i think it's easily treated or it's easily avoided if we eat foods that nourish and support and build the blood and so i'm going to tell you some of those foods now, and then I'm going to stop talking. Okay, so some of the grains that are really good for blood building are barley, corn, oats, rice, and whole wheat. Some of the vegetables that are very good, especially are dark, dark leafy greens, which I think most people in here eat quite a bit. Uh, shiitake mushrooms are very good. Dandelion, celery is very good. Uh, beets are a big one. I eat beets every week. Um, artichoke, alfalfa sprouts, and then watercress, spinach, wheatgrass,

but I sort of clump those in with dark leafy greens. Some of the fruits that are very good for blood building are apple, apricot, avocado, avocado especially for women. If you look at an avocado, it's shaped like a uterus. That's not, there's a reason for that. Most foods, you know, like walnuts, for example, look like the brain. They're incredibly good for brain development and for rebuilding neural pathways that have been damaged.

Carrots look like an eye if you cut them, and they are full of beta carotene and vitamin a they're very good for the eyes so a lot of foods it's called the doctrine of signatures a lot of foods if they resemble a body part they're really good for that body part again nature is intelligent it is a living organism and the earth also produces in a local area foods in that season that are good for your body for that season. That's why it's good to eat seasonal foods. Okay, to finish the list of fruits, there's dates, figs, longan, and mulberry. Cherries are also very good, especially for women when they're going through their menses, menstrual cycle.

when they're going through their menses, menstrual cycle. And then we also have aduki beans and kidney beans are very good for building blood. For nuts and seeds, almonds and black sesame, especially black sesame in the autumn. Right now is a very good time to eat a lot of black sesame. And last but not least, some of the herbs that are very good for building blood are nettle and parsley.

That's all I have to say. Are there differences in foods that you should be eating depending on where you come from? Yeah. Obviously the foods are different. Does that make a difference or is it just we're all, you know, we're all the same? But it's just that in general, these are the ones that are great in one place and we need something else. We don't have a lot of, you know, we don't have fresh fruits. There's not tons of fresh fruit in Montreal? Well, it's all important. For people who come from a warm place, my husband's Greek and I'm Lebanese,

and we live in a place that is not at all like the climate. It's completely different from where we're originally from, back when our parents, grandparents came. Does that affect? Can you repeat the question on the mic too? Sure. So the question was, does it matter where you come from, which foods you should be eating? And the answer is yes and no. I have a couple of things to say, and I'm sure there's a lot. I'd love for you to jump in.

But one is that we have a genetic lineage. And that I almost see it like there's a karmic flow and responsibility. Like there's a trajectory that's happening from this lineage of our family we call genetics. And part of that will determine what is good for us personally. But that's only part of the story. And that a big part of the story is what environment are you living in right now? And that you are imbibing those gunas, those attributes from your outside environment and making them your inside. And that we need to recognize and harmonize those things. So if you're in a cold climate, you're going to really thrive on those foods that are thriving in a cold climate. But

you have this genetic history too, and you need to respect both. And how do you know? You know what feels good and to follow that. So that's an oversimplified answer. What do you think? No, totally. But I had a patient. She came from India. And she grew up vegan,

and she married a German doctor, and she came to Germany, she came to my office, and she expressed a lot of, since it's about 20 years now that she's in Germany, but she is not good, and she has got a lot of issues. Germany, but she is not good and she has got a lot of issues. And while talking, we came to this point and now she is not vegan anymore because her husband isn't. And then I say, yeah, but what happens when you go back to visit your family? And she said, yeah, yeah, I'm always better. And I said, yes, so you could but she all since 20 years she is in Germany but she still hasn't really adapted to and she said yeah because there is a lot of spices you don't get what apparently her

buddy needs you know so there yeah so this is the part of um but maybe with another genetics she could totally be fine, but she really had a lot of health problems. Not respecting her was good for her. Yes to all that. I also think that maybe the most universal characteristic that humans share is our capacity for adaptation. And we are such extraordinarily resilient and adaptable beings. And so our ability to even, you know, we all have a constitutional makeup, right? But our ability to change even at the level of constitution, I think is fundamental to what it means to be human. Again, I'm less sort of concerned with individual constitutional needs.

individual constitutional needs, I think it's important. But I think equally important is being in harmony with nature in the environment that you're in, right? So, and one of the ways to do that is through diet, definitely. And even the types of exercises that you're doing in different seasons and different types of movement. even the types of exercises that you're doing in different seasons and different types of movement. You know, so for example, right now we're in the autumn, right? We're just at the beginning of the autumn and all of the heat from the summer is transforming, you know, what does heat do? If it's hot out and the sidewalk's very hot and you drop some water on it, it evaporates, right?

Heat is a drying agent. So all the heat from the summer has created dryness in the autumn. And when things are dry, like if you go out to, I've never been there, but like South Dakota? I don't even know what I'm talking about. If you go to South Dakota, where I believe it's very flat, from what I've been told, because I talk about South Dakota so often, there's a lot of wind, right? Or you go to deserts or places that are very flat,

there's a lot of heat and there's a lot of wind. And so when you have this dryness and heat in the autumn, you also have a lot of wind. And so those atmospheric qualities influence our health quite a bit. So there are foods that you can eat to address those two things and keep you in balance with nature. For example, foods that nourish the body fluids, like Asian pears or any kind of pears, daikon radish, cucumbers, things like that, but also herbs that bring heat to the body to keep you warm as you go into the wintertime like ginger, garlic, chili peppers, onions, the pungent vegetables. They keep that agni,

that fire alive. So this idea of nourishing the fluids because it's dry, but also bringing heat to the body so that you can transition into winter, cooking food for longer periods of times, eating hearty stews and seasonal vegetables. If you were to eat that way for the autumn and then eat foods appropriate to the wintertime in the spring and the summer while observing the unique characteristics of the place, so in Quebec, for example, then you're staying in harmony with nature, and the extent to which we're in harmony with nature,

in a lot of ways, is the extent to which we're healthy. So that's my personal opinion. There are other people, like i think weston price and others who he did the china study and um i know maybe that wasn't western price i'm not sure who was but who've gone around and studied uh the teeth of different people and different cultures and found that different dietary needs are based partially on the environment and the genetic makeup of a person. So, you know, if you took an Inuit Eskimo who live on, like, whale blubber,

and I'm just making this up, but they live on a predominantly meat and fat diet, and you drop them in Los Angeles and said, you're going vegan, raw vegan, they would have some significant health problems. But over time, they'd be able to adjust to it, is the idea. And so I think we can all adjust to different diets, but we have to also consider where we're at personally. Any other questions? Any other questions? How is, with the changing of the seasons, and this, how is it back,

or do we know how our ancestors, like when we were still hunters, they must have had periods, especially in between seasons, when they pretty much were fasting. I mean, apart from what they had, you know, stored up on, there must have, is that something that benefits our bodies? Like you were saying, how we're affected by sort of the change of the season, is that

something that, is something to actually take into consideration and maybe like not be scared of, that will help our systems to sort of in between seasons do a bit of fasting? Is that anything that is ever... You repeat the question now. So there was a question about, is fasting beneficial? Yeah, with the changing of the season, you said that we could easily get, if I understood it before, our systems could react a bit to the change of the seasons? Yeah, because our body is changing with the change of the season, would it be helpful in mitigating that transition

with some fasting? And in Ayurveda, we have a tradition of having our cleansing time be the transition time. So fall and spring are the main times that we do our cleansing. And that does include some fasting, but that there's no one thing that's good for all people. So it really depends on, do you have excess? And yeah, and sometimes in the Vedic tradition, fasting is a very loose term, which can mean I'm only eating after sundown, which in my mind, that's not fasting. You're eating, but it's only the time of day, or it's only with one type of food, like only fruits, or it's only this, or it's only that. So there's many different types

of fasting and that cleansing during those times is recommended. And fasting is really dependent on what's happening with you right now so i wouldn't say everyone should go out and do it every fall but to look at is there excess do you have toxins one way to know if you have toxins in your gi tract is the coating on your tongue so if you look at your tongue on a regular, especially if you're having some digestive issues. If you have a white, yellow, brown, black, it's amazing how many colors you can get on your tongue. And it's not something that's because of what you just ate, but it's there in the morning, first thing in the morning when you wake up.

Then it means that you're not fully digesting your food. You're not as optimal. Your acne is not at its optimal point. That would be a time to consider doing a cleanse. And those in-between seasons, fall and spring, are the recommended times. But then there's several different cleanses, depending on if you're a Vata or a Vata. Yes, many different ways to do cleansing.

So I do recommend that you get some guidance on how for you. Yeah, definitely the best cleanses are customized to your own constitution and health conditions and that kind of thing. Because for one person, a juice cleanse for a week could really wipe out their digestive system and be incredibly enervating and leave them really weak and depleted. Whereas for another person, it could be extremely supportive, right? So that I think cleansing in particular is a good thing to work with somebody on. Uh, and also I remember reading about something about in India,

they're for early encounters with Europeans, the white barbarians, and how a lot of, I mean, I imagine when they arrived on ships, they probably looked like a pretty motley crew, but that because the white Europeans did not do any form of cleansing and their eating was more determined by preference and taste than it was necessarily by what's healthy or more supportive, that they were considered really kind of uncouth and unclean in some ways, I think, which is amusing in a sense

because I'm sure a lot of the Europeans looked at maybe Indian cities and thought that they were unclean or unkempt people or something. And it says something about the cleanliness. Really, our internal environment is maybe more important, if you want to talk in those terms of clean versus unclean than our external environment. So we've got a question over here. Thank you, guys. This is fantastic.

You touched on what you can learn from taking a look at somebody's tongue and extrapolating from what you observed there to make predictions about how people should make adjustments to their diet and lifestyle, et cetera. In Chinese medicine, there's also this tradition of ulcerating. So I'm interested in, I'm wondering if you could explain what that tradition is about, what it entails, and what that practice allows you to inform about somebody's health and then provide recommendation.

That also exists in Ayurvedic. Maybe we can both touch on it and then see which one is better. Yeah, let's compete. So the question was, yeah, the question was, in the history of Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, there is a diagnostic method of taking one's pulse. And what can we determine by that? And can we say a little bit about why we do that? And what the difference is between the way that you guys read a pulse versus just going to the doctor and they take your pulse and tell you a number. Wow.

Yeah. So there's a big difference between how a Western practitioner will read pulse. They will look for quite a number of things, but the main thing that they're looking for is the beats per minute. So you're looking at the rate of the heart through the pulse that's the main thing they can also look at a few other things but i don't know that they use it as a diagnostic tool except for that one in ayurveda there are countless number of things that can be looked for in a pulse. We have so many, there's probably infinite numbers of systems. It's recommended that when you find a teacher who's teaching pulse and you trust them, you should stay with them until you master the pulse

and not learn from anyone else, because there are so many different varieties of ways of learning pulse. So I can only talk about my teacher's way, where there's seven different levels. Base level is looking at the baseline constitution at birth, so we can feel that embryo imprint that you were at the moment of birth, and that ratio of energies, vata, pitta, kapha, that you were. And then the top most superficial level is what imbalance is happening right now, and that if those two are different then there's some work to be done to gain more perfect balance but that's only

scratching the surface we can feel the strength the depletion the overactivity stagnation of every organ in the body. We can feel emotional states. We can feel the movement of the values, which is vata, the type of energy in the body. We can feel... In addition, we feel the 20 gunas, or the attributes that I was talking about that are in the outside environment

that we imbibe and are in, making up our inner environment. We can feel all those in the outside environment that we imbibe and are in making up our inner environment, we can feel all those in the pulse as well. So I can feel, oh, you feel a little dry. You feel a little slimy. You feel a little dense. And these things all we add up to a lot of different conclusions. But it's an interesting art and science.

You don't have to believe in it to learn it. You can actually feel, okay, this finger is mostly Vata, this one Pitta, this one Kapha. You put it on the pulse. Which one is strongest? Great, I'm feeling mostly Pitta. It can be very straightforward like that. But as you get deeper into the artistry of it, it's like I'm describing everyone as a river and I feel like I jump into the river when I'm feeling the pulse and I can go and actually get lost in that river and we can feel things like astrology we can feel things like really anything that we look for we can eventually find and what my job is to flip follow your river to show

me where there are Eddie's where the things aren't flowing as well as they could so that's where we can work and that really it's revealing to me I don't need to go searching and invading in order to get this information I rest as a listener and what's really important comes forward to me. And from that, I've had all kinds of experiences like, I'm just going to need to say this. I have apple trees, applesauce. I keep getting applesauce.

Your pulse feels like applesauce. Does that mean anything to you? And she's like, oh my gosh, I grew up on an apple farm, and we had applesauce at every meal. And it's like, I am made of applesauce. I'm like, yeah, that's kind of how you feel. So it's a profound science and art that really anything you look for you could find. And that's one of the most important diagnostic tools that we have. Whoa. So there's, I hear a lot of similarities and definitely some differences as well between the Ayurvedic approach to pulse and the Chinese. Again, I think both of them are looking to understand what's going on in the organs and the general scheme of a person's health.

So in Chinese medicine, you're reading the patency and movement of blood in the radial artery. And on the left hand, we look at the blood organs, so liver, gallbladder, the heart and small intestines, and the left kidney. And on the right hand, you're looking at what we call the Qi organs, which they're the organs that are overseeing the production of, well, biomedically speaking, we'll say ATP, but that's really not, that correlation falls apart in some places. But the organs of the spleen and stomach and the lungs and large intestine and the right kidney. And there's three levels of depth from the very superficial right at the skin level, and then a mid-depth, and then

much deeper into the body. And that's going from the surface of the body deeper into the body. And at all three levels, you're looking for different qualities in the pulse. So there are 28 base pulses, we'll say. For example, one would be called wiry. Wiry is described like on a guitar string. If you took your finger and you pressed down on a guitar string, that kind of sensation of it being complete across the finger and also kind of snapping, the way that if a wire snapped up and hit your finger, that's a wiry pulse, and that tells us something about

what we call stagnation in the body and the state of the liver in particular. Another pulse would be described as, say, wiry, or I just said that as as rolling and that's described in the classic texts as like a pearl that's inside a tube and is moving slowly through the tube so the so the blood is rising and then it's it's like it's rolling through a small tube and you'll feel your feet you're feeling that texture to arrive at distinguishing these 28 pulses and actually there's upwards of 100 pulses at these different levels in this incredible

level of detail there's no substitute for taking thousands and thousands and thousands of pulses until you find one and go okay that's that's what a tight rolling pulse looks like. And then you ask your teacher who's been doing it for 30 years, and they go, you're just so far off the mark, it's incredible. And then you just keep doing it over and over and over again, and it builds over time. But it's a real art. And some of the real masters I've seen, you know, they'll

say things like she was talking about applesauce, but that also, you know, I've seen master pulse takers say things like your grandmother on your dad's side had diabetes. And the person's like, what are you doing right now? And they're picking up on things in subtle levels of the pulse. Or you broke your leg. You had a bad traumatic break to your leg when you were young, didn't you? There's things that are coming to them that they're finding in the pulse that have to do with an incredible level of listening and subtlety. And I think it's a practice that takes many, many years to become very proficient in. But when done well, it can be a very helpful diagnostic tool.

Because the body doesn't lie. You can ask a person all sorts of... Every patient that's come to me is like, yes, I'm vegetarian. I've actually never drank or smoked a cigarette. And I run five miles a day and drink exactly three gallons of water. And I'm like, I don't know if that's true. My relationships are in perfect harmony. I've never lied. I have no addictions and I'm really happy. And I'm like,

I don't want to hear that. I'd rather hear, you know, so we, uh, we can bullshit a lot, but the body doesn't. And so getting proficient in reading tongue and pulse and cues like observing the skin color in the eyes and all these things can oftentimes tell us more than the person will actually tell us. I'd like to add a story. My teacher, Dr. Vasant Ladd, is master at Pulse, and he's not that great at teaching the

advanced part. Whenever we asked, how'd you get that? He's like, it is so. Which is true and beautiful, just not that helpful when you're like, but how do I get there? There was a patient that was willing to be seen in front of our class. And after taking their pulse, well, the reason that they came in, they had an injury to their leg that just wasn't healing after years. So had a knee injury, and then five years later was still recovering from it when physically it didn't seem there was anything wrong with it. So they had come to do panchakarma, which is our main cleansing technique,

and took the pulse in front of the class and said, Do you have swords in your home? And they said, Yeah, I actually collect swords. How did you know? And do you have two swords in particular pointed downward? Yes. Over your stairs? What?

Yes. That's exactly where I fell down the stairs and received my injury. He said, you remove those swords, your knee will heal. Like, that's not the pulse. They don't teach that stuff in school, though. But time after time, we're blown away by what he's experiencing, the level of listening that he's achieving through taking the pulse.

Yeah. What else? Just supplementation, vitamins, minerals. What's your take on that if you are following plant-based, vegan, you know, that sort of path? For both, depending on geographically where you're living. If you're in a country where you don't see much sunlight versus a sunny country, and also age,

and maybe even gender. If you're a five-year-old or if you're a 40-year-old, what's your take? Do we need it, or can we survive with just the food we're eating? Sorry. So the question is, what is our take on supplementation in regards to age and gender? And can we really get what we need from our diet or do we need supplementation?

And I think in an ideal world, I would love to get everything that I need through my diet. And the reality is that our topsoil is depleted and our farming practices are imperfect and there's a lot of stress in our environment. And we have some separation from our nature and where we're getting our food. And all those things combined leads to not getting the optimal nutrition that we would if we were eating fully wild crafted plants. So I think because of that, there are times when supplementation is extremely helpful. One of those times in my practice that I recommend it when I don't generally use supplements is around pregnancy. Iron, calcium, magnesium, omegas, like a lot of different things that the body needs.

It's a stressful time for building another body out of a body. It's a stressful time for building another body out of a body. Also, as we get older, our agni becomes less efficient. And no matter how optimally we've treated it and how healthy we are, our ability to transform one thing to another starts to diminish. And in those times, it might be helpful. I found that simplifying is usually easier for a an impaired agni rather than adding more things so simplifying it's like taking away anything that's getting in the way of proper assimilation and absorption is the first thing before i would

give extra things because that actually taxes it's like putting more wet logs on the fire if you put too many things in so for older then it's a balance between these factors there's one other thing I was going to say she has to geography

oh right there's something going on around the D vitamins and that every person that I know that it's been to a doctor comes to me and says I'm D deficient even though we're in California like how is that possible I don't know what's going on if there's a problem with the testing devices or it's a conspiracy to sell more D vitamins but um oh right so I experiments, if you feel better with it, it's good for you. I really feel like trust your body, trust your being, navigating these things. I would prefer not to use supplements if I could get it in my food. But if I can't, if I feel like I'm lacking, I'll experiment and let

my body tell me what's working, what's not. The quality of those supplements is also really important. Is it easily digestible? Is it something that your body recognizes as food or is it completely synthetic? I wouldn't recommend anything like that. Do you have any good brands to recommend that aren't natural? For the Deez example, I don't. I don't. Rainbow Light is a prenatal vitamin company that I do recommend. Floridex is an iron supplement that I like to use with my pregnant clients. And B12 is something that a lot of people that have changed to plant-based diet are not getting enough of. And I would say first start with brewer's yeast and leafy greens

and do as much as you can. And if really you feel like energy is lacking, experiment. I actually love getting B12 injections. I feel so much better. And I think if you have a high stress level in your world, in your life, that that's going to use up your bees faster. So it's even harder to keep on top of that. And supplementation can be really helpful. It's personal. Can I respond to that quickly? I also think less is more. There's one school of thought that says

that supplements are macromolecules, and so we're not really absorbing much of what we're taking to begin with. I tend to think that's true. I mean, I know when I've been on supplement protocols in this experimentary lab I call Human Body, and I'm peeing like radioactive yellow, I'm like, I'm pretty sure my body's not absorbing anything that I'm actually taking.

And I think if somebody's digestion is already taxed, taking these very condensed isolates is maybe not so helpful. The vitamin D thing seems to also be coming up a lot, but I think that I'd rather tell somebody to eat a lot of shiitake mushrooms, you know, like, especially people as they get older and they have, like, osteoporosis, osteomalacia, bone-related issues. Mushrooms are very good. Instead of taking supplementation, I prefer to get it from food if possible i think another really big and obvious one is the quality of the water you're drinking you know probably the

most significant contributor to um to senescence you know to aging is uh dehydration and and there's a great website called findaspring.com and you can find natural spring water in a lot of parts of the world where a lot of those vital coenzymes and cofactors are still intact. I'd rather get my minerals from the water I'm drinking than from supplements or something. I do think B12 is important if you're a vegetarian for a long time. You know, or like people take like, there's a good side and maybe a downside of supplements, right?

Like so somebody takes extra calcium because they think they need it for bone health, but the body can pretty quickly develop excess calcium, which then forms calcium-phosphate bonds, and then you have chronic inflammation. So my tendency is if you feel pretty good, take a little B12, eat an incredibly healthy diet without being crazy and dogmatic because that's illness up here in the

the old noggin and uh and if you find that you really have a health condition or you're you know you can feel things are out of whack then maybe see see a practitioner and that pretty much goes for any age you would say i think so yeah i think so i think so again and the last thing i'll say um i also feel you know i'm obviously an advocate of drinking tea over other forms of caffeine or stimulants or things um good old growth tea not like not like bagged tea that you buy commercial plantation tea has the roots grow grow proportionate to the size of the canopy. So a full-sized tree can have roots that go down 150 meters, and so they're drying up

trace minerals that we're not getting in our diet. So I think drinking tea is a good way to do it with fresh mineral water, or fresh spring water. We had one question back there first. I was just curious what your thoughts are on the role of Western and Eastern medicine, and if there's a balance, or if the ideal space is that they work together, or that one is sort of.

What do you mean with Western medicine? Do you see a role for Western medicine also in your practice at all, or is there a real separation between Eastern and Western medicine practice? You can repeat the question first. of medicine practice? You can repeat the question first. Yeah, so the question was if the role of the Western medicine, like classical, academical, school medicine, this is what you're talking about, yes, if it's of importance in our work or in the practice.

So for my work, not, it's not. But I mean, the Western medicine and everything, what comes with it, you know, the surgeon possibilities, the medication, the urchins medications we have, they're totally necessary. I mean, because if you have an accident, you really need somebody who is fixing this for you. So for me, I'm talking for me, I do have a lot, a lot of respect also of the diagnostic possibility of the Western medicine. So this is something we really, really could use, you know, just to get quickly a picture if there is something happening and what is happening.

And in any case of urgency, it's totally you need it. And if you, if, and I mean, we just't be happy that we have antibiotics. Because nobody wants to die of something, you know. You don't have to right now. So this is totally the place and the importance for Western medicine. What I think. Because I'm sure with my treatment, I can't help somebody, you know. After a car accident and broken legs. So this is totally important and necessary.

But, and I work, you know, in my practice, I got a lot of patients sent from Western medicine, dentists, pediatrics, you know, and they're totally starting in a part, not everybody, to cooperate, you know, to get to say, okay, we can do the diagnostic. We can see. We can fix whatever. Or, you know, and they're already started to work with a lot of homeopathy also, especially in the pediatrics. in the pediatrics and if there is something going further they they send people to have a look at you know when you have to get this kind of holistic view on it so I don't know if this is kind of the answer you yeah it's thoughts on, I mean, how do you navigate that as a prospective patient to decide if you're... It's difficult. For example,

with the mothers. This is what maybe it's... I really think it's important to say that we have really to trust ourselves and our good, just human sense and our intuition to know

what to do. Because the problem of the Western medicine is that they took totally away the ability, the responsibility from us. They really depossessed us from the capacity of doing what he told animals are doing. I mean, you would never have the idea to go to a dog to tell him how to get his babies or how to treat them. We do that. We are telling the mothers yeah you have to feed it all the three hours and yeah and don't take him to your bed and you know all these things. This is crazy. We really have to trust you know to keep our good senses you know to see yeah this is this is here I mean a medication here I need a surgery that's good sense or here yeah

there is a baby I really have to respect a kind of rhythm because but you know it's it's really really important for this is what I tell the patients because they come to see me with their babies and say yeah but the pediatric said I have to do like that and have to do like that and you know and this is what I tell the patients because they come to see me with their babies and say yeah but the pediatric said I have to do like that and have to do like that and you know and this is always the kind of difficult part you know but then I always bring back it what is your what are your guts telling you to leave this baby there and to let it cry instead of taking it to your bed afraid of you're not getting free again until he's 18 yeah so what I mean we're we're all the time the whole life after we try to get these babies in their bed and to sleep alone in a room and after we are taking a

lifetime to find somebody else to share our bed with us it It's totally absurd. This is what I, yeah, this is what I tell the mothers, you know, I say, no, there is no, take it, take it. It's still you. It's still in a hole. I think we have to end here in just a moment,

but I just wanted to say something about that because my brother is a Western doctor, and so this dialogue is very alive and present in our house or in our family. And things are starting to change slowly. In China, if you go to Shanghai, Beijing, some of the big cities, when you go into the hospital, the initial diagnostic intake, they'll determine can this be treated with herbs and acupuncture and needles and cupping and all that?

Or does it require drug therapy or surgery? But they're both wings in the same hospital. does a surgical operation. Afterwards, the patient will then go to get liniments with Chinese herbs and take herbs internally to help the bones heal properly so that there's minimal scarification. And so they're working in synergy, and there's a syncretic dynamic relationship there that's really profound because the doctor the western doctors are also extremely respectful of the chinese doctors you know it's not those those california complementary care providers who are you know just working on the astral planes or something like they really profoundly respect chinese doctors and they realize that the education's as robust and long-winded. But they also, it goes both ways. The Chinese doctors

also respect the incredible, I mean, technologically speaking, we've developed things that are so far beyond what we could have imagined 100 years ago. The level of detail that we can look at you know with cat scans and x-rays and or and mris and things what we can see about what's happening in the human body is unbelievable you know ultrasounds and things like this so and those diagnostic tools if related to properly not dependent on alone can profoundly aid somebody else practicing. If a patient comes in and they've got a physical injury or something, if I can look at radiological reports, that can just help me inform my treatment. And so part of the dialogue between my brother and I is a lot how how can we address the larger

context which is a societal issue of polarization you know and I think that's happening right now because it's getting to an extreme that systems are going to start to collapse you know that is reflected so obviously in the current presidential race where we're only giving you only have two choices folks all right if you're thinking outside of one of these boxes you've lost your mind um and you know i was joking around with somebody last night saying like there's part of me that's kind of like i really hope trump gets elected causes like total meltdown of all systems so that we can start from scratch, which that's the anarchist in me.

But I obviously would not promote any form of collapse that would cause that level of human suffering. But the point is that a polarized view of reality is not a way forward. And developing a philosophy that's both and instead of either or i think it can apply to all areas all disciplines and especially benefit medicine and the way forward with medicine so and luckily now that we have you know quantum physicists who are starting to sound a whole lot like ancient Vedic mystics and magicians.

So you're saying we can exist at two places at once? That doesn't make any sense. I think science is starting to open up, and we're starting to pop the top off the limitations of purely reductionist thinking. of purely reductionist thinking. I'd just like to add quickly that I think all systems of medicine have incredible strengths and all have limitations.

And that when we recognize what our own limitations are, it would be so much easier to work together. And I really pray that that's the way that we're moving. It seems that we are. Things are changing a lot. And I look pray that that's the way that we're moving. It seems that we are. Things are changing a lot. And I look forward to the day when it's all working together

and that in the U.S. you'll find Chinese practitioners with a Western doctor, surgeon next door in the same building. And Ayurvedic practitioners. And Ayurvedic. And osteopaths. All of us. Can I say something in regards to that? Because I'm an orthopedic surgeon, for those that don't know, but I have the other side, if you want. And there is no doubt that I'm totally at the same place you are. There's one little detail, and I don't know if I'll be able to explain it,

but in order to become a doctor and stay a doctor as a physician you have to prove prove yourself all the time okay you have to there's like people checking that what we're doing is accurate and what we're doing is in sync with what we should be doing okay I don't know if that's clear to everybody but if I if I'm a surgeon and I cut people up and I do it all wrong someone's gonna pick it up and say she's not doing a job you know and she shouldn't be doing surgery so we'll do something about that so in French the college de me playing so I don't know if someone can help me but there's this organism there's people checking

that we're doing our job properly in that sense for us anyway I don't know you can tell Annetta what your point of view is there's no doubt there's a role for everything that you are doing and people have different needs

and the western medicine doesn't answer to all of that for sure. There's no doubt. But then with time, I've seen different people and some people pretending they're something they're not and there doesn't seem to be people checking that all these different doctors of all sorts are doing what they're supposed to be doing. I have no doubt you are competent in what you're doing, and I'm here to consult with you, so I trust. But how am I to know the next one or the next one?

Do you see what I'm getting at? Yeah, I think that's a really good point. That may have been an obstacle. Yeah, that's definitely an obstacle. And I would say that a mediocre practitioner of, say, Chinese medicine or Ayurveda can be really mediocre meaning irresponsible and a mediocre or we'll say lesser developed uh western doctor who's been through the western medical system and the incredible rigor that's required of that um is still going to have a certain degree of proficiency and knowledge and foundation

just to have that title, really, that is worthy, that deems respect, I think. And because the system of checks and balances in Western medicine is so well-developed, the standardization of the medicine is so well-developed, we've talked a lot about that being a limiting factor, but this is the other side of it, which is that it creates a baseline for the practice of Western medicine that you can rely on it in a lot of ways. Um, and, uh, you know, with Chinese medicine, luckily with the reason it's been able to spread around the world is they're there's, they've been able to standardize the medicine quite a bit. Uh, but that doesn't mean that there's the same degree of checks and balances

you know i get out of school and i can just start practicing i don't need a mentor or years and years of residency after my clinical hours are complete of somebody looking over my shoulder making sure what i'm doing is good the other side of that is that the modalities of chinese medicine generally don't run the same risks of potential side effects you know my using acupuncture needles does not present this pose the same risks as doing heavy surgery or a kidney transplant or something so um so again this is where the dialogue is very dynamic and there are lots of areas where hopefully we'll continue to have a robust conversation about it

and develop a more synthesized medicine. Are we out of time? Thank you. Thank you. But, you know, it is what it is. But that being said, I thought it was full of all kinds do. So if you haven't done so already, please click that subscribe button on iTunes or on whatever app you use to consume podcast content. And I greatly appreciate it. I also appreciate everybody who has shared the show with your friends and on social media. I appreciate everybody who has left a review on iTunes. And also with the holidays upon us, you're probably going to be buying gifts on Amazon. If that's the case, it would mean a lot to us. If you click through the

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