Latest / Homestead And Heal Podcast / Ep 20: The Missing Pieces of Women’s Health: Ayurveda, Digestion, Pelvic Health + Herbs with Adena Rose Bright

Transcript

Ep 20: The Missing Pieces of Women’s Health: Ayurveda, Digestion, Pelvic Health + Herbs with Adena Rose Bright · Homestead And Heal Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Homestead and Hill.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Scott.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm Lindsay, and we live with our three children on a farm in Vermont.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: Our lives revolve around growing food and medicine, working with the body, and trying every day to live in deeper relationship with the earth.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: And now we're welcoming guests to our farm for intimate retreats where they can slow down and feel deeply into this earth-body connection.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast is about remembering something many of us have forgotten: that we're not separate from the natural world.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Our bodies are part of it.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Our healing comes through it.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And when we reconnect to both, our purpose often begins to reveal itself.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: Through conversations with herbalists, farmers, body workers, and people walking unconventional paths, we explore what it looks like to step outside the modern paradigm and build lives rooted in connection, healing, and reciprocity with the earth.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, welcome back to Homestead and Heal.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: I am so excited to have our friend Adina on today.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I am not exactly sure how I even met you, Adina, but we connected maybe online first, and then have been blessed to have an Ayurvedic consultation with you, specifically around postpartum.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: And you've helped me with various ailments over the years.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_03: I've also gotten to learn a little bit from you, some of the bodies that you do, and been able to be a teacher for you in my fascia alchemy bodywork training.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: And really excited to talk with you today about all of the things and would love to have you just introduce yourself because I know you have such a wide wealth of knowledge and expertise.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so tell us, tell our audience a little bit about you.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, thanks, Lindsay.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: As I mentioned before we started to record, I'm just honored to be a part of what you two are creating and yes, sharing it far and wide, but also I feel really connected to you as Vermonters being here in the same place.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm so lucky to have been able to exchange with you in person in lots of different ways.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, yes, I'll say my name is Dina Rose Bright, and I'm an Ayurveda practitioner.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I also put so much under that label.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm yes, I am focused on supporting women to bring hands-on tools into their daily life.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I love to land it in the framework of Ayurveda because I am and I'm so lucky that I've been able to practice Ayurveda clinically and at the Ayurvedic Center of Vermont, up here in Wilson, Vermont, since I started studying Ayurveda, so almost 20 years ago, I suppose.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: So having a lot of that, like I said, in-person clinical experience.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so what I have done there is I've been a Punch of Karma therapist, which again, we could talk more about what that means, if that makes sense.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: Having my hands on people's bodies as they're moving through this deep cleanse and rejuvenation process.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then I have applied so much of the Ayurvedic principles to my own body, moving through healing from painful periods and moving towards conscious conception, pregnancy, postpartum.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: And now I'm in my mid-40s.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: So seeing how that this framework of Ayurveda feels really empowering to move through another stage of life.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so as I'm at the center, I'm also moving into more of a teaching role in the training programs and certification programs that we're running there.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, reaching people still in person as I have time for it, because I do think that's really important.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: And also further and wider through my online programs and offerings.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_03: Amazing.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for being here.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's so exciting.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_03: And we always usually like to also start after that introduction of yourself, just with an introduction of your land or your place, just where you are right now.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to orient our listeners to what is happening seasonally, and I know we're in similar places in here in Vermont, but tell us a little bit about where you are.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yay.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: I'm in more northern Vermont where you two are southern.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: So we are slightly different, I'm sure.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'm homeschooling my kids right now.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's our second full year.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's a lot, it's great and a lot.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: But part of our morning routine is to write a nature observation journal.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm trying to support them in seeing all the little tiny changes day to day.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was so lucky to be able to take them after a short bookwork morning out to Green River Reservoir yesterday.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've ever heard of it.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: It was so beautiful.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I love it there.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: It was my first time there, so gorgeous.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: And just watching the colors really just start to change in the trees.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: And it's so subtle this year.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: I usually notice there's one tree that starts it, and it's always the same every year.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: This year I see all of them very more subtly changing all at once.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you're noticing that, but seeing that.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: And we're just at this threshold of the green and the grass is so lush and abundant, yet it's at the end, right?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's like it's so soon going to be drying out and losing that watery resiliency.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: Things are starting to the tips of the goldenrod are starting to be brown now.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: We're really just at this real subtle slow shifts that's so special right now.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: I love this time of year.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's my favorite time of year.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Just for all those reasons.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is still so alive and so beautiful, but it is starting to finish.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you guys, but where we are, we're in that cold spot, and we're pretty likely to get a frost tonight.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: Oh gosh.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna be out scrambling, getting stuff.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: I got stuff covered a few nights ago because I thought it might frost.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Typically, when we see a forecast of 40 degrees or less, we can expect in our cold little pocket right here that we're likely to get at least some spotty frost, sometimes more than that.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I love just like the gardens are full, the colors are so vibrant and abundant.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also that bittersweet piece of knowing that all of that is quickly coming to an end.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'm glad you put that on my radar because it's really like at any moment that sort of anxiety comes in of the deniability of not summer anymore.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's really needing to, like you said, cover things in the garden or take some plants in.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and I want to just, for whatever reason, what's popping into my mind is yes, this witnessing of the meadow behind our house with all the goldenrod and the Joe Pyrie.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: They were so vibrant in their colors not that long ago.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: And now things are starting to just, yeah, you can see this end coming.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: And there is something really special about living in a place with seasons like Vermont where we get this really clear harvest season, that we get the lush summer, the harvest season, and then this slow and sometimes fast snap into deaths and compost and the slowness of the year.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I think you were speaking to that, Adina, just how moving into this time where so many people struggle with winter or the idea of winter, but I've found that I do sometimes still struggle with it, but I'm also so excited for the slowing down and the stillness of winter, which we have so intensely here in Vermont.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: What I actually wanted to say was that we have this beautiful Chinese mother wart growing in front of our house.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: And it's so gigantic and so beautiful.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_03: And I didn't harvest the other mother wart this year.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: Scott was like, I was like, I want to do it.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_03: Tell me when you notice it's ready because it's in a place that I'm not walking by as often.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I didn't harvest it, but I wanted to just acknowledge that your mother wart that you harvested and made medicine from really nourished me in my postpartum time and was just such a beautiful.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the mother wort skull cap blend.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_03: It was just such important medicine for me.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm thinking of your place and how I've had the medicine of your place and how powerful it was for me.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah, I'm glad to hear that.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: I actually have my little secret stash right with me.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'm holding it up for folks who can't see the video of Skullcap and Mother Wort.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I drive around with it in my car.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: And it's funny, I actually didn't make fresh mother wort medicine this year either.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I have for 10 years.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: I'm always writing about how Mother Wort saved my life, and I feel like real honesty in saying that it did.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: So I have a deep relationship with this plant, and I haven't been selling it as much.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really just using it a lot for myself.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: I did make my rose medicine this year.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: Oftentimes I do blend it with rose too.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: But I guess what I wanted to say too is I find myself leaning on it now, like this seasonal transition, rather than earlier in the summer or when it's becoming ripe.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: It really feels like this transition.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I could talk about it from the Ayurvedic energetics as well.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: But is when we have this heightened intensity of everything happening in the summer, like this, like what you were leading towards of there's sort of a natural downturn for those of us who live in New England to begin to turn our energy inward because that's what the nature is doing around us.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: But also what's happening in the summer, it's like we're just like maybe we're not in our work so much, like outputting so much, but there's a lot of action and movement and travel, a lot of family time.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think we take in the summer.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: And then we slide into the quote school year, which for some of us that's very literally relevant.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_02: And other times we're still programmed, I think, culturally to hit the ground running with work and productivity right now.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: And there's no pause in between that.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like there's this overwhelm that happens right now.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: And then I really always find myself coming back to, oh, these are the herbs I need right now that sort of remind me or allow me to turn that energy downward and inward a little bit because there's yeah, it's still a really busy time right now.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: And naturally the harvest time, which is built in ancestrally for probably all humans, it doesn't mean it's this time of year, depending on our climate, but harvest time for anyone with an agricultural ancestral background, right?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's like you can harvest and there's this feast, but also harvesting means preparing or processing, or in order to keep things going so you can survive through this long winter ahead, which is no joke up here in New England.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: Whether it's literally needing to feed ourselves, which it's not so much anymore.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of us are choosing that because we for lots of good reasons.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: But it's also that mental and emotional piece of like, holy shit, there's six months of darkness and winter ahead of us.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: Getting through it mentally and emotionally as well.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and having those gifts from the summery, like lively time of year, such uh for me, it's so helpful.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: I both appreciate living in a place that we have that that slowdown that you can't get around.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like my whole life, I've like all of my work is gardening and working on the farm.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And there's just like most of that is shut down during the wintertime.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: I just can't be out there doing anything.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's this like very built-in, like rest reflect sort of period.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I do appreciate that.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I guess what I really appreciate about that is one, that bittersweet feeling in the fall of knowing that it's fleeting, and then the reward of spring.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: One of my kids was recently talking about, I think it was Ella was talking about how it would be so nice if we just got snow for the couple weeks around Christmas, and then all the snow is gone.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Yeah, but like deep cold winter with no snow is not very good either.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: She's like, No, like spring would just come.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Or I was like, Wow, yes, that sounds fantastic.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because for me, I really do miss out on being out there like interacting with the living plants.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: I still I find like the form of the bare trees really beautiful, and I love pruning and I love working with them in that way, but I definitely am so ready for spring every year in that sort of like rebirth.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I had a point to make there that as well.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: No, I'm hearing you, and I'm also feeling like those of us who stick around New England and stay in New England, I'm a New Englander my whole life.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: I grew up in Maine, southern Maine, and I've traveled extensively.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't really lived for a longer period of time in other places, and I'm just like a sucker for it's almost like a masochistic tendency.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: So we've got to stay here.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: And like it's like survival tendencies.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know what it is, but I'm not necessarily built constitutionally to thrive necessarily here.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: But there's something I kind of say it's like, I don't know, my Scorpio nature or something where like to go dive really deep into the dark for a while where you almost get lost there, and then it's oh my gosh, the spring, like the gratitude, and you'll never take advantage of it, you know.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely again.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_03: I would love for you to tell us a little bit about your childhood.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I know you did grow up in Maine, but just seeing the makings of who you are today and what you remember about your connection to Earth as a child or your connection to the body.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_03: And I also just wanted to say, too, that I know you are quite connected to the rhythms of the earth.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_03: And it makes sense to me that you love these seasons and the wheel of the year and the turning points.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_03: So, any bit that you want to speak on that journey as well.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm glad Maine came into it.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: My parents are still there, they're not in the same place, they're not together, but I still get to go back regularly, and that's something that I do in the summer.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: I feel so blessed that I had this idyllic childhood.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: I remember being in Ayurveda school.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: There were like 80 of us at the time in our in beginning foundations program, and I don't know who asked it or why, but it was like, who feels like they had an idyllic childhood?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like me and this one other woman who became my friend who grew up in Maine, and I was like, sorry, I did feel really blessed that I did.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: My parents, we didn't, we grew up pretty poor, other than my dad built our house.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: That is really rich in skill set.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I was able to have a horse when I was a a kid and rode horses, which again, I did competitions, I was on the main equestrian team, but it was like me on my little backwoods pony and everyone else on their thoroughbred jumper, whatever whoever they are.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: But it was still a very important experience for me, of course.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: But very blessed too that my parents instilled some really important values, I think, of real food comes from the earth, growing a lot of our food.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: We even raised chickens, chickens for meat and for eggs, and pigs sometimes for meat.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: Just seeing that, I just feel like is invaluable and really instilled again.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: My value systems, and not that we're that super far away from that, but we're living that in a different way now.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: We don't have agricultural animals, we have our gardens.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: We're so lucky here in Vermont to be able to get amazing quality food from local farms and instilling those values in my kids.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's what brought me to Ayurveda too.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know about Ayurveda as a kid.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: I had friends who were doing alternative things like some herbal medicines, and I have one of my lifelong friends that lived near us in a place that was pretty rural.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: So we were neighbors of two miles, but that felt like close neighbors.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: And she homeschooled her three kids and she had the home births.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: And it was, even though my mom didn't do that and we didn't do that, I really was exposed to alternative ways of doing things.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: So that's definitely informed how I live my life and ask questions of kind of the normal things that I am seeing out there, and made me really interested in yeah, herbal medicine, knowing that this innate connection and trusting our innate like ability to thrive and survive without a lot of intervention, and led me to want to study not I study more local herbal medicine because it's and quote Western herbal medicine, because it's what around what's around me, and that feels relevant.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: And Ayurveda just happens to be I found this complete framework to fit it all in, even though it's from a different ultimately out of a different culture.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: The framework is really the laws of nature, understanding the laws of nature and finding a language to describe that.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: And you wanted me to too, you asked a little bit about like connection to the earth and seasonal rhythms.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think as I came into really again just feeling connected with my body, I feel really blessed to have had that quote, idyllic childhood where I had a real deep connection with with food and nourishment and never had a lot of deep questioning or challenges around that as a woman, because I think it's pretty pretty common and really never had to deal with those those challenges.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: And then also again, trusting my body, trusting the things that happen in my body, say menstruation and really being like, hey, this is like trusting this is a natural process and if there's discomfort or imbalance here, like it's something.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to say, I don't know if I'm saying it right, like say, oh, it's all my fault if there's some imbalance.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know what I mean?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to put it all on my shoulders or someone's shoulders, and also that there's an inquiry that can happen of I trust that things are supposed to be operating really well.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: This is like a system that's created by the divine or the creator or earth or the goddess or whatever you want to call it.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: So if there's something going wrong, how can we get closer to what the design is supposed to be?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so when it comes to being in a cyclical body, going through different stages of life, it's like these are natural fluctuations.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's okay that there are some discomforts and what's the line of like, when do we need intervention and what sort of intervention and what level?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: And what's going to feel that I can be an active participation in in that?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: So I think, yeah, my perspective and how I work clinically and work with women.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: I love that you brought it back to my childhood because I do feel like it's something that I was blessed to be instilled with these values of connection with the earth.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think it it seems clear that's really guided you.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: Did you have something you wanted to say, Scott?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, I was just gonna say that's all really beautiful, and they can just, I don't know.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: I a couple of things come to mind.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: One, I love Maine.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's such a dear place.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: I know it's a really special place for you guys.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's where Lindsay and I met, and it's where I went on vacation always as a kid.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we have some friends that live there.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I grew up going to the coast in southern Maine, which I loved and still love, but also a a dear friend of mine who lives out in isn't Hiram now or near Cornish.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know some of those like western, southern Maine towns that are so beautiful?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I know of them.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's funny.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like I grew up there also in southern Maine, but it's like Vermont.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: There's like these little hidden community places.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: What town did you grow up, just out of curiosity?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: I grew up in South Berwick, which is literally right next to it.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then so very southern Maine and like York beaches, we were like not far from there.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then my mom now is off of Portland.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: My her side of the family was all from like Portland, Falmouth, Cumberland area.
• 21:24
  unknown: Yeah.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things I've told people for a long time, I love living in Vermont.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: If I have the choice, this is where I'm going to be, and this is why we landed here.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: But if there was a second choice, Maine is a very obvious second choice for places I'd like to live.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think part of it, like they have Maine and Vermont have really distinct and different characters from one another, but they also have this sort of what they have in common is when you're describing early on when you're talking about your childhood, uh you said something about like Less need for intervention or like recognizing that basically this idea that we can take care of ourselves.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like that's such a strong ethic that exists in Maine and in Prophet.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: Common New England are a do it yourselfer, which is there's pros and cons to that.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: But yes, I think it's like it's in there.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think I can see where there could be negative sides to that, but I do think that it's such a critically important, if that's what's shaping the culture.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: I feel blessed to have grown up in a culture that wants to at least attempt to take care of yourself or have the idea that you're like empowered to take care of yourself and your family.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that's definitely a threat that I see in Maine and the people that used to live there and in Vermont.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I and then the other thought that came to mind was just I've studied herbal medicine quite a bit, and I don't know that much about Ayurveda, but what I have learned is exactly like how you described it.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like it is a system that really takes into account the nature of life on earth, like using that as the lens, like having, and I guess a lot of the traditional systems really do go back to that.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I think Ayurveda does it in a really beautiful way that is provides a framework that allows it to be easy to check in with.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like you said, like being in a like a cyclical body, I think you said something like that.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like, where is yes, some amount of discomfort is probably normal, or whatever this is, but having this, having the earth to check back in with has the the great teacher.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Nature has the sort of like place that of course that's where we should be checking into.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we are of.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: We are a manifestation of life on earth.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why would we look elsewhere for answers to our health concerns?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: I was wondering, Adina, you mentioned your ancestors, or at least your maybe some of your ancestors coming from sort of northern Maine.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: I was wondering if you feel like sharing anything about your ancestors, either ones you knew or ones you didn't know, or just where you felt connection and maybe felt like you're even carrying what has come down your line.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure if you're meaning to speak to like really specific ancestors, or maybe it's more sort of a broad question.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Anything, anything you want.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: What comes to me is I have done 23andMe, which is fun.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I am basically 100% European and a lot of English and a lot of Italian.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: There's some Finnish ancestry in there, French, French German, but I really do feel connected to both that English and Italian ancestry.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: One, the Italian is in there, it's mostly on my mother's side, and that's why I think I struggle in New England because I just really need more suns.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like, yeah.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: And also the English ancestry, and it's funny I say specifically English because I I don't know how I feel about 23andMe.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: I just thought it was interesting.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: But somehow when I first did it, it was like a lot of Irish was showing up, and I was like, I don't think I I've never heard about my Irish ancestry, etc.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: But the history of those aisles is it's just it's so interwoven and complex there.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: But I say this only because in the past five or six years, I've studied Ayurveda deeply, I practice it clinically, and also I'm using this.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm studying druidry.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: I consider myself a practicing druid, whatever you think that might mean.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: But we're so lucky again here in Vermont to have amazing things.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: There's a Green Mountain Druid School and the Order of Druids, and I've been able to study some of that lineage there, which feels connected to my ancestry from Europe and from those regions.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: And bringing in the languages and the understanding of the wheel of the year and those holy days or holidays that come at certain seasonal junctions also to just have signposts or landing posts of reflection of what's happening this time of year, what may have been talked about historically, but also it's really so relevant to just what's happening in your environment.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: More points to just celebrate.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: So when I'm teaching Ayurveda and talking about the seasons, Ayurveda talks about six seasons.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: If we think about the wheel of the year and there's eight points, it's broken up into these several week-long chunks of time that is a season.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: And then these junctions of the seasons are really important check-in moments in Ayurveda as well, health-wise, of like what was happening the season before.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: What are we preparing for?
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: How is our physiology making shifts right now?
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: And how can we support that?
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: We don't even really need to know all the details of what's happening, but Ayurveda supports people to acknowledge that there's a shift happening and how we might be able to care for our metabolism, et cetera, in order to not get sick.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then thinking about my New England ancestors, it's like to stay healthy was literally so important for survival through this long winter time, too, right?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: The more times that we may have gotten sick, it was sometimes that could be scary.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm so speaking of your ancestral question, there's a lot of layers there, I think.
• 27:42
  unknown: Yeah.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_03: Are is there anything?
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_03: I know that with Ayurveda, it's it's not a broad sweeping, like everyone has their own kind of individual constitution and things like that.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_03: But are there any little tips you would give for people that are in this season, kind of living in New England, coming up to the end of summer?
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_03: What are the things you're doing in your body that you feel like you're doing as a preemptive sort of way to support your immune system or things like that?
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: So you're writing to say that Ayurveda takes into account individual constitution and your innate kind of resiliency and strengths and baseline when it comes to maybe choosing specific herbs or specific bodywork practices and or self-care practices and things like that.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: If we're talking about yeah, like some in specific imbalance, but everyone is affected by what's going on in the environment in similar ways.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, you probably I know that you've heard in Ayurveda about the doshas.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: So it's certain seasonal influences, certain doshas.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: There's external dosha and there's internal dosha.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: So the external doshas are going to be affecting all of us.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: And in autumn time, you we are going from this might sound a little bit when I say different from maybe what you have heard, because I think Ayurveda often gets oversimplified into four seasons, but there are really six seasons talked about in Ayurveda, and we just went from May to June is Grishma or high summer, and then July to beginning of September, mid-September, it's called Varsha, which is monsoon season.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of like wind and rain.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: And then now we are actually going into what could be called fall, like sharad.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that makes sense.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: But it's when actually the like sharpness of pitta and the heat and the light start to get really intense.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: So we do start to see things like migraines come up this time of year.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of people have allergies, but allergies that are connected to sort of inflammation, pitta, heat, flushing, hives, hot, hot itchy eyes, things like that.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: But either way, there's some dosha influence.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: What everyone can do is always care for our ugni, we call it, our metabolism, but also what's seated in like the stomach and actually how we're just digesting things so that we don't leave metabolic waste behind that can be the underlying cause of like inflammation or the seat of where bacteria and viruses can sit.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: And then we start to get those colds.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: And baseline for taking care of agni is always to we're talking about food mainly, but to eat warm cooked foods, I think it becomes very more obvious this time of year when it starts to get a little cooler in New England.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: People want to start eating soups and stews and things.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a really great natural inclination.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_02: And along with that, we have so much fresh produce, and people might find themselves, though, eating a lot more raw, cold foods and salads.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: But those are actually really hard for us to digest and can create inflammation, can slow blood flow down to the GI, can slow down our bowel movements.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_02: Then that metabolic waste builds up and then, like I said, causes inflammation.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: We might see allergy signs and symptoms, or it is a home for bacteria and viruses, we get more congested, things like that.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: So warm cooked foods, warm teas, ginger tea, coriander, cuban fennel tea, no matter our constitution, these can help us through these times where there's a lot of fluctuation, a lot of fluctuation in temperatures.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like Scott mentioned, it might freeze tonight, but it's also 80 degrees right now.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah during the day.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: Such big shifts, which you know, Lindsay, too, change your tissues so much.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: Your tissues go from open and more flaccid to rigid and tight.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: And this is just changing how everything's moving in our body.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: So I hope that wasn't too much information.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: Thinking about warm cooked foods and those sorts of teas are something that we can all do.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: Getting really good sleep, right?
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: Going to bed early and not compromising our sleep with alcohol, caffeine, which might have been habits that are helping us cope from our wild summer that we had, right?
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: Making those shifts, which all will help us too healthy.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: No, that's I think that will definitely be helpful for listeners to just orient to the simple, the simplicity of just eating warm foods.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_03: I'm thinking of our daughter Ella, who's she's had like a sore throat.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_03: She had a little fever yesterday.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_03: She's she seems particularly sensitive to when we first have these big shifts in temperature.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I made some soup, and it's and definitely like I could tell, even though she was a little resid, not resistant, but like the thing she was wanting to eat, I find it interesting mothering children.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_03: And as they get older, like she's almost 11.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_03: I'm letting her make some of the choices of what she eats when she's not feeling well, but also trying to help her connect the dots of, is this the most nourish?
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think this is the best choice?
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_03: And like when I offered to make soup, she was like, Yes, that sounds good.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_03: But also, it wasn't coming to her on her own.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_03: What would you like to eat?
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't like, I want soup.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_03: But then as soon as I was like, How about some soup?
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_03: She's like, Yes.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: And then she ate it.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's interesting to me to always see the way, just the way things pop up in my children's body.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_03: They're whatever you want to call it, their illness, their healing, whatever it is, just the patterns that I see.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's great for you to bring that up just because we are in such a, we have so much fresh produce right now.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: And sometimes it is just the easy thing to do to grab a cucumber and whatever.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_03: But at the same time, it that's one of the complicated things I feel like with Vermont is that like the things that we're more likely to eat raw are often coming later in the season when we're already starting to have some of these colder temperatures.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a funny kind of juxtaposition of like what feels maybe more easy and natural with like what is actually going on in the environment.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if that makes sense.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I want to say I my son is 11 and we struggle with the same things.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: What I try to do for my kids every morning, and we can all do too along these lines, is to start your morning with a warm cup of water and maybe with a little bit of lemon or apple cider vinegar sprinkled in it, something.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: And that can start to move the GI and just bring some of the warmth and good blood flow there.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: But believe me, there's no perfection over here.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_02: There isn't.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: But navigating parenting sometimes with this knowledge is I don't want to be giving them a complex or making them overthink or fear their food.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: I want them to be excited about how they're nourishing themselves and think about, which is I think different from our parents' generation.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: We, our generation, knows you are what you eat.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like more of a truth and helping to bring that in for them.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: And it's the little things.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's like I had I sometimes crave raw food.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: I just know with my constitution, and one reason that I fell in love with Ayurveda and felt like it was so aligned with the truth that I already had in my body was actually some of those basic principles of oh, drinking ice water at a restaurant.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_02: Then I would get gas and bloating and painful gas.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd be like, oh, there's a reason behind this.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: The pattern makes sense.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just me.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I am that weirdo in my family that always asks for my water without ice because I just can't handle it.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_02: No, I do too.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then I'm even extra weird now when it's really winter.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, can I have a hot cup of water?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: But even so yesterday we went on this beautiful adventure, and I actually packed my kids' warm soup in a thermos to bring with them.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: But for myself, I made myself this delicious cold tofu peanut sauce wrap.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: This is I don't mind getting TMI.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_02: But so today, after eating that, I actually felt okay.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't have any gas or bloating.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: But this morning I didn't poop right away.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody can it's I'm like clockwork, I wake up immediately, evacuation.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: And to me, I'm like, that's what it is.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: The the pattern is more cold, raw, it's like aggravating vata, vata is dry, affects the colon, slows down bowel movements.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you for sharing that with us because it is, it's I think this is what I've always really appreciated about talking with you about Ayurveda, is when we have the awareness of what our choices are, we can look for those clues of, oh, this might be from this, and we can choose differently in the future, or we can choose the same, but we know maybe a little bit more what to expect.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I absolutely agree.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_03: No one's perfect.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_03: We're all just doing this human journey and it's all a big experiment.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_03: So I appreciate you sharing that with us.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm curious, you spoke about Mother Wort saving your life.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like I don't know that story, and I you don't have to share that, but I'm wondering if there have been times when you felt less connected.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I know you mentioned you felt like this framework that Ayurveda gave you just really helped you make sense of things.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm wondering, were there times when you either felt less connected with the earth, less connected with your body, or what brought you onto that path into the practice that you have today?
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I will come to that.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_02: I just wanted to finish up of this speaking of slower bowel movements and wrong food and pelvic health, because I know that you're deeply in in this work as well.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I've, like you said, cited with you doing my some myofascial release training.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm coming from also my abdominal therapy background, working with the pelvis.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: But I was thinking about okay, one missed bowel movement and/or one bowel movement that might have been not moving out as easefully, right?
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_02: And how that could be connected to oh, there's some discomfort in the pelvic floor, or there's discomfort down the right hip in the right leg.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, this is one morning, and just thinking about how those patterns build up over time and how, yep, we can work with the pelvic floor, we can work with the hip, but if we're not also connected to what we're eating and our digestion, how we're digesting it, how much it's all connected.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_02: And we had a client last night who is pretty sure that she might have a rectacyal.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_02: And she's very frustrated with her doctors, like medical doctors at this time, partly because she knows a lot about Ayurveda, but she also knows that her gynecologist or reproductive specialist and the person who's working with supporting her colon, they're not talking to each other.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: They're not they're specializing in different things, but those organs are so close together and like affecting each other because she might have she has some uterine prolapse too, but she's so frustrated because there's not this, it's just compartmentalized where it's like it really is this complex picture.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_03: I I feel like I need to just speak to that as well because just this week I had a client who had a recto seal and she had surgery to repair it.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_03: And she's someone who's in the medical system herself, and she's just had such a terrible time after that fact.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_03: And this is the kind of thing that is promoted by depending on who you go to, we all have our own bias and our own kind of view of what might be going on.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: And it and I was just before this conversation with you having another conversation with a client about the disconnect.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: And she's someone who's approaching menopause, she's having this bleeding, she's really trying to avoid a hysterectomy, but she's like, they've never even brought up this or this.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_03: And how are these people not talking to each other?
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_03: And it is just such a frustrating experience.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_03: But that's always a question that I ask and would encourage anyone who's having any pelvic health challenges to really notice these sorts of things.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_03: Of does the dysfunction or the pain that you're feeling change when your bowels are full?
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_03: Even just something as simple as that, because it's like our or when you're approaching your bleed, because as those, as our rectum is full, as our uterus is filling up with blood, that's gonna affect how much space there is for the tissues to move, the motility, the mobility, all of it.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_03: And it's just unfortunately so missing from not to mainstream medicine.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_03: I'm so grateful for many reasons, but this is where I think Ayurveda can come in and body work and really all of the things to look at all of the pieces of the puzzle together and remember this connection that we're not separate parts.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_03: We are entirely connected.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think like these older traditions of medicine, like often, of course, you're considering like what do you what have you been eating this week?
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: What has your sleep been like?
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: What like all of these practical things that like a system like I have made up?
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's all these stories in herbalism of people like going into the doctor with GI distress, like something like really severe, like severe pain or something.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: And they go in and the doctor looks at them and says, Oh, like you need to get your gallbladder removed, or something like that.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you're looking at all of those practical things.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what did you eat today?
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's this one story that comes to mind where this person went in with severe GI distress, and their doctor recommended this, and then they had unsatisfactory sort of results, and they went and saw this herbalist who was like asking the questions, what was your sleep like?
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: What did you eat that day?
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: And they had been at uh like some sports, they were like at a sports watching party of some sort.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what they're they're watching a football game or something, and they ate an absurd amount of something that was barely food.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: I forget what it is, it was like candy or something.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: They ate three bags of whatever it was, and then had this intense pain, and the doctor never asked them.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so then they're like, it sounds like I have to get my call bladder out, and then the herbalist was like, but what about like all of that junk that you ate?
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, but just I think I see with like Ayurveda, what I know is that there's such a big focus on digestion, which only makes sense because it is the primary source of how we maintain wellness.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: Just if we know anything about maintaining health, if our digestion is not working properly, of course, that is going to manifest as all sorts of cascading problems.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I love that you brought that up too, because it makes me think about another.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think I had started studying Ayurveda just around this time.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_02: But this is actually what brought me to be more interested in women's health, even though Lindsay, I'll come back to your question.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: I want to talk.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: About mother ward, and I do share that story a lot in my work.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: That my nephew was born, and he was born by C-section, which I watched that happen.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_02: I watched, oh, it's the first baby.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's right, he's due on Christmas.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, the pressure to give birth before the holiday.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, the oh my gosh, I'm blanking.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: What do you call it?
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_02: The induction.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: And oh, how that came into C-section.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: So, okay, that was my first time because I was only probably 24 or 25.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_02: I hadn't been thinking about that world so much, but watching that happen, okay.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_02: But then also right after he was born, seeing my sister-in-law had complications because okay, she had just had major surgery surgery.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_02: We know in Ayurveda that postpartum is a really delicate time for our digestion, but also so much has changed.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's the most, it's the biggest powerful force of downward and outward moving vata energy.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: I teach about postpartum care in Ayurveda because there's so much to offer there that also our our over culture doesn't have.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: But I knew about what was going on with her agni, her digestion.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: And she was very hungry after giving birth, of course.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_02: So much as having, I don't know how long it's been since she's eaten, right?
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_02: She's been in dues, so they might not have been letting her eat in the hospital, your X, Y, Z.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: But she was she wanted a burger or something or a sub sandwich.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_02: And eating that shut down her digestive system to the point where it was an emergency.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_02: They were very concerned about her health.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: And for me, just starting studying Ayurveda, I was like, whoa, it's not a joke, this concept of our digestive capacity and ability.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_02: And like again, I don't know how they were managing her or treating her or what they were doing.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_02: They might have been like, I don't know if the focus had gone to you need your gallbladder out, probably not.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_02: But just how how much the GI and our digestive itself truly actually is at the root of these things.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_02: And thinking about the the gallbladder piece, it's like I just, or not the gallbladder piece, but that sort of invasive medicine piece where it's like I'm very conservative, even with myself and my kids.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_02: Of I realize the power and the potency of these medicines, these modern medicines that we have.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes they are literally life-saving and important, but we are overusing them, right?
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a cascade of complication that inherently happens if you cut the body open, like Lindsay with scar tissue, or just you're changing major operation of the natural function of how things are supposed to function.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_02: Big deal to be taking an organ out, right?
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_03: Such a big deal.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_03: And then also, this woman this morning was saying she was telling me she's wanting to avoid a hysterectomy, and she's my friend just had a hysterectomy.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_03: Now she's having all these problems, she's having all this prolapse, she's got all this pain.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: Now they're gonna go in and put in a sling.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, oh my gosh.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_03: It just it's the cascade.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_03: Like you said, that even with an induction, that's so common for there to be a cascade of interventions that lead to a cesarean or some other challenges.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: And it leads me back to too, my my kind of belief system that we could be and should be active participants in our healing.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_02: And the body's not always going to just be easy and perfect.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: It really might be like managing her prolapse.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like maybe it won't ever be like perfect or back to exactly how it was.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: Would you rather manage that set of symptoms or a potential more complicated set of symptoms?
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_02: And there's also the mystery of some people have hysterectomy, it might be perfect, it might be like the exact thing that they need.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that's totally fine.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_02: But these are the this is the discernment that we have to make, have to make.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_02: And if we have more tools, we have more opportunity for choice, like empowered choice, which is totally what I'm about with teaching women these hands-on skills, whether it's from Ayurveda or my abdominal therapy, or helping them navigate more of the popular self-care trendy things like yoni steaming and et cetera, but from the Ayurveda lens.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I'll talk about Mother Ward.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I came to this work speaking of times of disconnection, where when I went to college, this was my first time really living away from home, and that's what brought me to Vermont, though.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_02: I went on birth control, I think mainly just to prevent unwanted pregnancy, unplanned pregnancy.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_02: But I had also known that my periods were getting more and more painful.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_02: But then in in college, it was like ignoring that fact and feeling probably more disconnected from the natural cycles of things than before.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_02: And then after or near the end of my undergrad, I found yoga and started practicing yoga.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_02: And that really brought me back into my body again.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_02: And it also really brought me into oh, okay, I've been managing my painful cycles with birth control.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I understood right away, I'm not ovulating.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_02: This isn't a natural cycle, this is fake.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I was really like, okay, I'm ready to uncover this and to look deeper into this now.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_02: So then going off of birth control, it really was like insanely painful periods.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_02: Not as bad as I hear some people have that I work with, but just like on first day unable to work or function, even if it was just for several hours.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_02: So that was like my deep dive into like all of this work.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: Not just Ayurveda.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_02: I felt like I needed more than the initial Ayurveda training, but so I started meeting women that did my abdominal therapy, like the more manual hands-on work here in Vermont and then dove into studying through that.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what was my firewalk into initiating into a lot of these healing practices.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_02: But Mother Ward came to me more about a year postpartum, really, with my son.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_02: So he's 11.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_02: So say nothing about birth and the initial postpartum period, but for me, it hit me a year later where it was like, oh, this is actually never gonna end.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's still going.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm still never getting that rest time that I needed.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_02: My body is so incredibly depleted.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_02: I ended up breastfeeding both of my kids for two and a half years, but you're like giving it all.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I was yeah, I have a I have a Vata Pitta, like a lighter constitution.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like, I normally my healthy weight is between 115, 120.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, my high school weight, I was like 107, 108 pounds.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_02: That might not sound like a lot to people, but for my body, it is.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, so I was feeling it also mentally, like super anxious, heart palpitations, chest pain, and I felt like I was just not functioning in my life.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I never would consider this before, but I might need to ask for help, like medical help with this.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so I but I wanted to turn to herbs more, and I don't even remember how I came across mother word, but I started using mother word.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_02: It could have been from Deb Sewell at Vena Botanicals.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, I'm sure you guys know her.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_02: I love her stuff, but I started taking motherwort and it just really hit on all of those things for me.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then, of course, I just dedicated myself too, oh yeah, come back to the tools that you know that you can do every day, turn your awareness inward, focus on walking your talk and really using these tools that I'm always talking and teaching about herbs, oil, and breath.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_02: Not just mother wart, but like nourishing herbal infusions and doing prani gentle breathing practices every day and doing my self-massage abyanga and Ayurveda is like one of the core nervous system practices.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_02: But Mother Wart really was that more quick, immediate supporter, support person that was there for me.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was a turning point for sure in my life to find Mother Wart.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm like you said, Let's see, I make the medicine from it growing in my garden here now.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's such important medicine and it has been for me, especially with my third baby, and trying to move houses at, I don't know, eight weeks postpartum, which I was not doing any lifting.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_03: Scott was taking on so much for us, but just that anxiety and that feeling of just ungroundedness that I think a lot of people have postpartum.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_03: I remember one specific time of just everything had been moved to the other house on our land.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_03: And I walked up the road crying and was like, I just need to find my mother more.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_03: And it just brought me back to my body and to home in the earth.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_03: And it's an herb that I recommend so often, especially for new moms, because yeah, it's just one of those things that it's like, I think the older I get, the more I feel such wealth with knowing about health.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_03: It really feels like my body and our family's bodies and our health is our wealth.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_03: And so knowing how to care for my body through nourishing food, through herbs, through body work, through all the ways, and even just to have a network of people I can call on.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_03: When I'm curious about what the Ayurvedic approach is, that's not something that I'm going to study in depth, but to know the basics and to know I can call on someone like you, it just feels like I can't help but feel like people that aren't doing this are entirely missing out on life.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_03: Like, what are you doing not knowing about this stuff?
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_03: It's just so critical.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's also sorry, Scott.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_02: I just I'm so passionate about this too.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes I forget that it's not innate in people, but it's it's not like the total do-it-yourselfer perspective.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's a little more, it sounds like it's like I need to do this all myself.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's actually though, more like we are going to navigate uncomfortable and really challenging things health-wise in our bodies.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_02: We just are like that.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_02: Why would we not?
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_02: I don't why would we want not want to participate in that on any level?
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's like otherwise, we're gonna be thrown into the wilds of Western medicine, maybe, and just be like flailing or feel frustrated, or feel fearful.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_02: But when we have some baseline for self-care or again, participation on in and around these things, yeah, obviously, this is what we're passionate about.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_02: So it's logical.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like the reason that people don't like why that's not accessible to so many people is because the system that we're so steeped in is is so fear-based, and is like if you don't have an expert looking after you, you're probably gonna do it wrong and you're probably gonna create more problems.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so then it leaves you this is deliberate to leave you feeling like you can't trust your knowing of what you're experiencing in your body or what you're seeing in your children's bodies, or your family, or people that are close to you.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, I feel like what Lindsay was just describing, I feel this way so strongly about plants and herbalism, like how much people are missing out, not by not knowing all of these plant friends and the magical things they can do to support our bodies.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like even people that I would expect to maybe know better, like so many people are still have friends who'll be like, I had this thing, I a story comes to mind, a friend who was like, I had these warts that I couldn't get rid of, and I tried all the things, and I went to the doctor, and I used the medication, it didn't work, and then somebody gave me like selendine or something, and like I couldn't believe it worked.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: Can you believe that?
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's so weird that this worked.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, no, I don't find that weird.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_00: Human history is based on like we are here today because we had a relationship with the plant world and learned and got to know these plant allies well enough to support our health.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that's not shocking to me.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I just even if it weren't, even if you weren't using plants for health benefits, just they're so beautiful and pleasant and wonderful to experience, even if it's just enjoying a beverage that's really delicious or beautiful or whatever it is, not to mention all of the ways that they support the critical processes of our bodies.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I do feel that way.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_00: I can't imagine getting through life without all of the gifts bestowed upon us by like when I look out the window, when I see I don't see people when I look out my window.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: I see millions and millions of plants surrounding our life.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like it's such a I don't know, just like an invitation for people to recognize that you're always surrounded with these amazing plant allies and friends.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_03: And also just how simple it can sometimes be.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_03: Like sometimes we're dealing with really complex things, but when we bring it back to our diet, our digestion, our rest, just like basic nourishment, so much can change.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_03: And it's just unfortunately, these questions aren't even being asked sometimes by mainstream doctors.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_03: So, like the least we can do is explore that within ourselves.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: Even with complex conditions, like using supportive things like bod and good food and supportive herbs are still often going to be like even if they're just offering some relief of just like feeling a little bit more at ease or whatever it is.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like we can people with complex problems, like it's not that there's always going to be a but like a botanical solution, that's gonna be a silver bullet.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's like very seldom the case.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_00: But there's certainly so many things that we can be utilizing that are going to just move us in the direction of maybe feeling a little bit better or maybe being a little bit better supported underneath.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll just say I'm sure Lindsay experiences this as well.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_02: But a lot of women that I'm working with, whether they're navigating painful periods or something more complex like endometriosis or fertility or fibroids, a lot of times I'm working with them through Ayurveda around also Western medicine.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what we're missing and what Ayurveda can offer, whether it's even for maybe more natural medicine and or of course like more modern Western medicine for lack of a better word, it's the piece about like our digestive system and the importance of that.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_02: How are we digesting and assimilating our food and not causing or maintaining or this like metabolic waste or ama to build up, which causes inflammation and is the root cause of a lot of imbalances because we don't in our a lot of our ancestral medicine, whether we are orphans, like we're separated from those traditional cultures, or they've been, even for Europeans, systematically destroyed over thousands of years.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_02: We've lost some of these subtle nuances that are still there, thank God, even though India has gone through a lot of colonization as well, but is still there in Ayurveda.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like the fact that there's like some kitchen witch medicine which has stayed through, like when we're sick, let's eat light, warm soups and such.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_02: But there's this idea of three meals a day and like digesting our meals before we eat the next meals, food combinations in Ayurveda, which sometimes looks overwhelming.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_02: But like when we are managing some complex system or some complex imbalance, and we start to observe those changes, which are a little bit countercultural to our norm, they can make such an enormous difference that Ayurveda just can offer these things that can make such a big difference no matter what else, what other healing path pathways we're choosing.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, love that.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for bringing that to this show.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_03: And just final questions.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_03: One is just I've asked everyone, what is advice you wish you would have gotten earlier on, or best advice you could give to someone who's just starting out on their journey with all of these topics.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know why this is coming to me, but because it's advice that I got when I was preparing for birth, the birth of my first son, and it was from a friend where it was just like let the animal body take over.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_02: Love that.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not forgetting again that innate intelligence that our body is trying to heal, it knows how to heal.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_02: We are just supporting the best environment for it to do that.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_02: It knows how to give birth, your body knows how to give birth, and we can support the best environment using our intellect to know how to do that.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's perfect.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_03: That's such good advice.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_03: And then just let everyone know where they can find you online or best ways to connect with you.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yay.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_02: Website adina roseaiurveda.com, Instagram Adina Rose Aurveda.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_02: I was mentioning that there's a few different ways to find me.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_02: I am more recently leaning towards supporting other Ayurveda professionals or people with a really solid Ayurveda background to be better clinicians when it comes to women's health, like supporting them to learn these hands-on healing tools, mainly for women's health, but through the Ayurvedic framework, so you know when to use them, how to use them clinically for them, not again to create fear, but so they'll be the most effective.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_02: They're not just, oh yeah, I know how to do this, but I don't exactly know if it's appropriate for me at this time for what I'm going through, et cetera.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_02: So that's in a year-long apprenticeship, which starts in January.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_02: But if folks are interested in learning Ayurveda language for the female physiology, that's more approachable and learning these skill sets, not at the practitioner level.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_02: I have my membership, The Feminine Path, which is a growing course library, but I offer curated pathways through it based on where people are coming from.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm also doing the once-monthly community call.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_02: That's really an integration call.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_02: So people can help to integrate that into their lives.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_02: I mentioned that I'm doing this Ayurveda, online Ayurveda conference called the Women's Health Revolution.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's a second annual in November.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_02: It is also focused on Ayurveda professionals, but there's so much info in there that isn't only for people that are studying at that level, but all based on restoring this traditional wisdom into women's hands.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_03: Amazing.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's lovely to talk with you and connect with you.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I know this is gonna be really loved by all the people who listen.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, great questions.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'm glad to spend time with you too, and hopefully sometime in real life, like real person time.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, it's gotta happen.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_01: Come visit the province and farm.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I'd love to.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for listening to this episode of Homestead and Heal.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_03: If you loved it, please help us spread the word by subscribing to this podcast and leaving us a review.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_03: For more information about our work, visit homesteadandheal.net.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're wishing you the life of your dreams, one that feels deeply rooted, fully alive, and connected to the earth beneath your feet.