Ayurvedic Medicine and Fertility (Episode 357)

Full Transcript: Episode 357

LISA: Welcome to the Fertility Friday podcast, your source for information about the Fertility Awareness Method and all things fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of the fifth vital sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery charting journal. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health, because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys. I know, I know, I’m a busy girl, but I managed to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health. And I’m so excited that you’re here with us today.

Today I am sharing my interview with Heather Grzych. She is the author of “The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility.” She is a board-certified Ayurvedic practitioner. She bridges the world of conventional and alternative medicine to help women and men heal their physical and emotional lives. Heather is on the board of directors for the National Ayurvedic Medical Association. And in today’s episode, we are talking about Ayurvedic Medicine and its implications for fertility. So without further ado, let’s jump into my interview with Heather Grzych.

And so I’m really excited to be here today with Heather Grzych. Heather, thank you so much for joining us.

HEATHER: Thank you for having me, Lisa. Good to see you again.

LISA: Good to see you too. And congratulations on your book, The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility. Just as a great starting place, I’d love for you to tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what really led you, first of all, to be an Ayurvedic practitioner, but what led you to write your book?

HEATHER: Yeah, so I went through my fertility journey at the time of my life where I was thinking about if I was going to become a mother. So when I was in Ayurveda school, so I long story short, I had a previous life as a sort of like corporate person. I was head of product development for health insurance company for many years. And I was involved in Obamacare and stuff like that. And I thought I was doing really good work and it felt like I had a sense of purpose and all these things. But as I, you know, I started teaching yoga when I was in my 30s and then my life slowly started to change after I started teaching yoga and I, let’s see, I felt like I was doing good work, but I was approaching my mid 30s at some point and I’m like, am I going to have a kid? I’ve put this off for a long time. I like had eight million boyfriends. I got married and divorced. What is going on here?

So I basically went on a mission to just be like, I have to figure out if I’m going to become a mother because time’s running out. I’m clearly sucking in the relationship department. There were a lot of things for me going on. And so I just put all of my focus on answering the question, “Will I have a family?” And around that time I started to go to get a master’s degree in Ayurvedic medicine, which is kind of a weird thing to do because there’s not a lot of us in the U.S. There’s only like a thousand of us that practice, and if you compare that to something like, you know, acupuncturists — say there’s like 18,000 of those in the U.S., or naturopaths, there’s 6,000 of those in the U.S. It’s emerging, it’s still not a thing that a lot of people know about. So it’s kind of weird for me to do that, but I had to. My heart was calling me to do it, it made complete sense to me, and all this was going on around the time that I was wondering if I was going to become a mother because the clock was getting sort of compressed. So then it was really easy for me to go on that journey because I started to find out that the longer I knew what I wanted to do in this other direction, the longer I stayed in this other environment where I was sort of okay and happy and making a lot of money but like not really following my heart, the longer I stayed there, the more pissed off I got.

I started to get so frustrated with the industry. I started to get so frustrated with the leadership of the organizations I was working with in the healthcare industry. It was a series of events that finally said, you have to go on this path. So one sort of pathway was really beginning to frustrate me and the other pathway was just looking so beautiful and just clear and my heart was just pulling me down it. And so I went to study Ayurvedic medicine. And again, while I was in school, I was trying to answer this question, am I going to become a mother? I’ve been living my whole life without activating this biology. So I don’t know if it’s biologically possible for me to become a mother. I don’t know if it’s emotionally possible for me to become a mother or mentally possible for me to become a mother. Or if my life, my greater life would support that. So I sought to answer those questions. And so I spent about two years — I had some irregular menstrual cycle stuff too that I was healing, and I spent about two years working with an Ayurvedic doctor who lived in Nepal, and she was my person that I worked with for a long time. And then I started a new relationship and kind of went down this path, and so when it actually came, I was doing tons of fasting, I was doing stuff that was appropriate to my body to sort of prepare it for conception, because my theory was — I tried to take a very spiritual view of whether or not I was going to become a mother. I don’t know if the universe wants me to be a mother, but I want to be as healthy as possible and ready for it if the universe does. That was kind of my game. And so I just focused on my health. That’s all I did was be as healthy as possible, and then if that moment was going to happen, I would just be in the best position for it. So that was my strategy, you could say. And at the end of that — you know, two years, I have this relationship — and then my partner’s finally ready and he makes the decision that he’s ready, and it just happened in an instant. Once he was ready, it was so fascinating, and I was just so mystified by the entire experience. It really was — you know, we all go on a hero’s journey in our life, or the heroine’s journey, whatever you want to call it — and the fertility journey is one for many women because especially now so many of us seem to be struggling with trying to get pregnant, or once we get the idea in our head we want it right now. There’s so many things that get complicated about it. We don’t just go like, have a glass of wine and get pregnant like our grandmas did.

So now I finally got pregnant. I had my kid and I’m home with him, and I was like, it’s time to write this book. So I wrote the book after I had my kid, and there wasn’t another Ayurvedic book on fertility like this. So I went through all the ancient texts, and I can talk a little bit more about what Ayurveda is for any of your listeners who don’t know what it is, because I know it’s not something everybody’s aware of, but it’s an ancient form of medicine from India. It’s a couple thousand years old. It’s an indigenous medicine in India and it’s widely practiced in the same way that you might have something like naturopathy practiced here. There’s also conventional medicine that’s practiced in India — say, the British brought in the sort of allopathic system — but essentially there’s like 450,000 people who practice Ayurvedic medicine in India. It’s a big form of medicine as part of their culture, and here, like I said, there’s a thousand practitioners and things like that. So basically, sorry, I totally got lost on the tangent, right?

LISA: Well, I have a question. So I’ll just jump in there while you’re talking.

HEATHER: I was like, where did I go?

LISA: Because I want to know why Ayurveda? So, for example, there are people who are listening who haven’t heard of it and don’t know what it is. And I had no idea that there were so few practitioners in the States. So I’m just curious how you discovered it and why you chose that. And I also find it, when I do these interviews, interesting — many of us have these completely unrelated careers and then we jump into something like Ayurvedic medicine, right? It’s really interesting.

HEATHER: Yeah, yeah, so, okay. So I woke up one day when I was about 32 and I was married, and I was thinking about having a child. My husband and I were actually trying to have a child when I was in my early 30s. We tried for a few months and nothing happened, and I was peeing on those ovulation strips and all that stuff, and after doing that for a couple of months, something didn’t feel right, like inside of me. I felt like I was gripping every time I would think about getting pregnant or conceiving. It was like something in me was gripping. I could feel myself energetically blocking it. So a couple months later, I woke up one New Year’s Day, hung over with my ex-husband on a couch, and I said, “Okay, I want to be happy and healthy this year,” because I was saying that every New Year’s Day, same kind of thing. But I said, “wait, I said that last year, and the year before,” and it was like I had this epiphany of — every year I keep saying I want to be happy and healthy and yet I don’t feel any happier and healthier, so what’s going on? And it really bothered me. And so later that day I had this idea that I need to leave the country and I need to go become a yoga teacher. I felt like the only time I had ever really felt happy was after a yoga class, like that true bliss. It was the only time I could really let go, I guess. So I went away to Costa Rica, I did a yoga teacher training, and that set me on this path to continue studying yoga. And that’s how I found Ayurveda. So a lot of people who found Ayurveda have found it through yoga, or they’ve found it because they have Indian heritage in their background — either they grew up in India, or their parents or grandparents did. But for me, I learned about it in a yoga teacher training when I was studying yoga therapy. And I said, “What are these things called doshas? Why am I looking at the moon all the time now? Why do I want to go stare at the ocean and stare at the waves?” It just completely connected me back with my primal, intuitive self. It got me out of my head. It made me really get more in touch with my body in a way that yoga did not. Because with yoga, I was doing all kinds of crazy poses, meditating — I meditated every day for six years. So I was really into yoga, really into meditation, but somehow wasn’t able to get the kind of ease I was really looking for in my body until I went a little deeper, and it was Ayurveda that allowed me to go deeper because it really teaches you not just about your will and your effort, which is what yoga teaches you, or how to let go of your will and effort, or observe your mind. Ayurveda makes you look at your viscera, makes you look at your biological functioning — your emotional processing is such a huge part of Ayurveda. So once I went down that pathway — and like I said, I wasn’t really that unhealthy to begin with, to be honest. I had some irregularities in my menstrual cycle, and that is certainly an indicator of there being a health problem in a woman. So it’s not like I was perfectly healthy, and I can’t say I’m perfectly healthy now either, but we always have to work on it. But I was healthier after I found this, and most importantly, I was more emotionally healthy. And it’s really weird because I felt like if I had stayed on that old path, this thought kept coming up in my head: if I keep doing this, I’m going to get really sick, I’m going to get cancer. I don’t know why it just kept popping in my head. And on this other path, everything just — my body works well, I’m happier, I can cry when it’s the appropriate time to cry, I can laugh when it’s the appropriate time to laugh, I can just let my emotions flow through me instead of clenching them up in my throat because it’s not okay to cry, or holding in your sneeze because you don’t want to make a loud noise around everybody.

LISA: Well, so that’s incredible. I think that it’s — I love hearing stories of women who are following their intuition and listening to that voice deep inside, because I’m of the opinion that we all have that little voice inside, we all have that connection to our intuition. And if we don’t listen to it, the voice just gets louder, or things in your life start to fall apart because you’re not listening to it. The road to happiness is not ignoring the inner voices. So for those of us who aren’t that familiar with Ayurveda — I’m a bit familiar with it, but to be honest, I don’t know it in depth — could you share with us what it is? The way you’ve described it, it sounds like it certainly combines some degree of spiritual and emotional dimension. It was very profound for you to discover it. What is it, and what makes it different from some of the other modalities we may be more familiar with, like chiropractic, naturopathy, that type of thing?

HEATHER: Yeah. I would say — you have Chinese medicine from China, and that became known as acupuncture, and people go get little needles stuck in them, but in China that’s a whole system of medicine, with herbal medicine and all kinds of things. Well, Ayurvedic medicine is like that as well — it was an indigenous medicine practiced in India, using the herbs that grew locally, in the same way that you’d have an herbalist anywhere in the world. Herbalism is a big part of Ayurvedic medicine, and yoga is a big part of it in terms of the therapies. People might be familiar with Ayurveda through turmeric — turmeric is one of the spices used in Ayurvedic medicine. It’s a kitchen spice, but it’s also a medicinal herb. So if you’ve used turmeric for medicinal purposes, you’ve used Ayurvedic medicine. If you’ve ever put aloe vera on a sunburn, you’ve used Ayurvedic medicine. If you’ve ever had prunes or psyllium husk because you’re constipated, you’ve used Ayurvedic medicine. So it’s using the natural environment and natural materials around you in order to balance your body. Those are the therapeutic methods, but it’s also got its own philosophy on why and how we get sick. There are stages of disease, with very subtle indicators when a disease is in its beginning process, and then they smack you in the face when they’re later and there are complications. And because it’s thousands of years old, it also uses an elemental system, kind of like Chinese medicine. In Ayurvedic medicine, there’s space, air, fire, water, and earth. In modern medicine we have the periodic table of elements, which has many more elements on it, but everything in Ayurveda is boiled down to essential qualities at a very simple level — if I look at this skin and it’s dry and flaking, it needs something oily to moisturize it. These are common-sense things that somehow we’ve lost. And I think that’s what reconnected me with the ability to see the simple. Now, that’s not to say Ayurvedic medicine is simple — there’s a very elaborate form of cleansing called Panchakarma, which is employed when somebody’s body is really out of balance, using a series of techniques to cleanse the body. It’s pretty intense, and it’s not something you’d do if you were only a little bit out of balance. A lot of people do that in the U.S., and a lot of people prior to the pandemic were flying to India to do that. There’s also oil pulling, where you use oil as a mouthwash and let it swish around your teeth, which helps pull plaque off the teeth. You may have also heard of people giving themselves self-massages with oil, or dry brushing the skin. We deal with the external skin and the internal skin, like the skin of the gut, because they’re all barriers between us and the environment, and we want that skin to be healthy so we can perceive the environment around us clearly. I’d say the last piece that’s important for everybody to know, and one of the most pop-culture things about Ayurveda, is the doshas. Ayurveda looks at people as having imbalances that come up in different ways — categories of imbalance, or a certain body type, but they’re changeable. You may have a tendency toward one or two more than the others — these doshas are Vata, Pitta, and Kapha, which get out of balance, and those are what we’re working to rebalance in a person. It’s not a diagnostic method in the Western conventional sense, but it’s a way that we evaluate the balance in a person’s body.

LISA: Well, when you’re describing the modality, it’s interesting because I’ve interviewed a number of TCM practitioners — traditional Chinese medicine — and they have a similar challenge trying to convert this into the way that we think. I think what’s clear is that these are different modalities that look at the body in a very different, less materialistic way, and I can see the similarity in terms of the challenge of describing it. Western medicine is very definitive, very tangible, very materialistic — it doesn’t really look at the energetic aspects at all, generally speaking.

HEATHER: Yeah, and I think Ayurveda is a spectrum — there’s the subtle on one end and the gross on the other, and certainly modern medicine deals more with the tangible, leaving the subtle to quantum physics. There’s not a lot of conversation between a medical doctor or a chemist and a quantum physicist, but there should be — quantum physics is what explains the energetic components of life that mainstream medicine doesn’t explain. As a little aside, books by Bruce Lipton and Dr. Joe Dispenza are really interesting because they go into quantum physics detail while talking about how to be healthy. And anybody who’s spoken more than one language knows that words form because we have a label for something in our mind, but when you learn a new language, you get a new word, and it can let you see something differently. It’s similar to studying these other forms of medicine — in Ayurvedic medicine, we learn Sanskrit, we learn the diseases, the organs of the body, the channels of the body, in Sanskrit rather than in the Latin names Western medicine uses. Studying something in a different language or culture gives you a different window into the same thing. Everybody who’s trained in a particular way looks for the problem they’re trained to solve — a vascular surgeon and an orthopedic surgeon will look at the same body differently. It’s like that with Ayurveda, where we look at a body but slice and dice the channels and organs differently — we focus less on organs and more on the channels that move through the body, like the digestive tract, or the veins and arteries, or the nerves. Everything is about energy moving through a channel, and there’s a physical structure that surrounds and reinforces that channel. That’s probably how we get at the subtle a little better, and Chinese medicine has a similar concept with meridians. The way that modern medicine is practiced is very tangible and gross — even the disease pathways we use in Ayurveda involve a six-stage disease process, where a disease could start as something subtle and keep getting worse if that pattern doesn’t stop. We think modern medicine is really only dealing with stages four through six of a disease, let alone the preventative measures before it even gets to stage one. It’s funny — I used to work in the health insurance industry, and there were all these medical billing codes considered “preventive,” but most of the preventive stuff you do is at home. What’s actually preventive is eating good food that’s appropriate for your body, your particular metabolism, and the climate and season of life you’re in — not getting attached to things too easily, not grasping so quickly for something when you feel uncomfortable. These are the things we have to learn to be healthy, not how to clean plaque off my teeth. I could do that at home.

LISA: Well, I love the analogy you gave of learning different languages. I don’t know a bunch of different languages myself, but I know from friends who do that when you learn other languages, you’ll find there are times when there’s no equivalent word for something, and you have to describe it. That’s a really great analogy for the different medical approaches to illness — literally, there aren’t words for some concepts in Ayurvedic medicine in traditional Western medicine, because they’re different modalities that look at the body in different ways. And I also really appreciated the analogy of having five different practitioners in a room — an Ayurvedic practitioner, a TCM doctor, a medical doctor, a surgeon, and someone like me who does fertility awareness charting. Everyone would have a different perspective, and this is really important for people to understand — not that one practitioner is better than another, but that each is trained in a specific modality with a specific perspective. In the work that I do, if you have a traditional Western medicine doctor, that modality doesn’t look at the root cause, and it doesn’t necessarily look at prevention — you’re already midway through whatever illness you have by the time they take your symptoms seriously. So it’s not often the best fit for those who want root cause medicine. And instead of being mad at your doctor for not offering you Ayurveda, it’s a good time to think about how to incorporate the modalities that are most appropriate. So getting to the question — one of the things we wanted to talk about today is your book, and about how Ayurvedic medicine relates to fertility. So maybe share with the listeners, how does Ayurvedic medicine fit into this conversation when it comes to maintaining menstrual cycle health and optimizing fertility, particularly for women who are trying to conceive?

HEATHER: Yeah, so fertility is viewed as a byproduct of good health during the years in which it’s beneficial for a woman to have a child — meaning her body is in good condition to tolerate conceiving, growing, gestating, birthing, and breastfeeding a child. I had my kid right before I turned 40, so I was in a somewhat older body. There is a time of life where certain things are more tolerable and easier, and your life circumstances and your biology aren’t always on the same page. Nowadays we have a lot of women freezing their eggs at 28 because they’re worried about their relationship timeline or the quality declining after a certain age. As women wait longer to have children, we run into more biological challenges, even if not financial ones. So in Ayurveda, what we do is make sure the body is as healthy as possible to support that child coming into the world — the health of the mother is the most important thing, and obviously the father too, because he’s contributing as well. I’m talking about heterosexual couples, by the way — my book is geared toward a man and a woman having a baby together, though anyone in a different situation can apply the variation in their head. So making sure the mom is healthy — and I love one of the things that’s so pretty about Ayurveda that I didn’t mention, which is that the medical texts are actually written in poems.

LISA: Wow.

HEATHER: Yeah.

LISA: That’s amazing.

HEATHER: It is amazing.

LISA: Very different compared to the very cold and dry academic tone.

HEATHER: Yeah, and it’s interesting because everyone has different experiences — plenty of women have wonderful experiences at the doctor’s office, but plenty also feel that cold, clinical tone you’d feel in a medical textbook. So when I saw this medical text written in poems, I thought, sign me up please. In the book I wrote about the “four fertility factors” — I pulled the idea from ancient texts written as early as 600 BC, where they use this metaphor for fertility, like a gardening reference. There’s the seed, the season, the field, and the water. You have your seed — that’s the egg and the sperm — and they come together to make the zygote, which implants in the field, the third fertility factor. That all happens at the right time, or season — the word comes from “ritu kala,” which relates to the seasons of the year but also means time or climate. Then there’s the field, whose most literal representation is the uterus, and the health of the uterus depends on the health of the overall body, the partner, the environment, the town, the air, the country, the planet — everything radiates outward from the center of that woman, converging in her uterus. And then there’s the water — you plant your seed, and then you have to water it. Water is related to hormones, though Ayurveda doesn’t talk about hormones directly — it talks about doshas, which are like humoral imbalances. I’ve actually wanted to organize all the hormones in the body by which dosha they would fall under.

But basically, you water something and give it the kind of care that it needs, and we know from raising plants that not every plant needs the same thing — a succulent needs different soil and water than a basil plant. Just like that, all of us are different — some of us are oilier, some more dry, some build our bodies more easily, some break down more easily, some are calm and stable, some flutter around like butterflies, some are really intense and sharp. We each have a certain nature, and each little embryo that’s created also has a nature about it, and needs the environment that’s right for it. It’s really about making sure the woman — because she’s at the center of it — and the man, too, because we actually do a fair amount in Ayurveda for men as well. There’s a whole branch called rasayana therapies, which are rejuvenative therapies for longevity, preservation, and rejuvenation. If a man’s sperm is depleted, or he’s having issues in that department, there’s a whole series of therapies called vajikarana therapies — I wrote about that a bit in the book too. So it’s not all about the woman, though it is more about the woman because she has to grow the child. Once the man provides his material and hopefully sticks around and helps out, her body needs to be in great condition to grow that child. We share a bloodstream, we share cells with the baby — everything the baby gets is from the food we eat, which is why diet and nutrition are such a big thing in Ayurveda. The material that creates that baby is based on how well we’ve metabolized, processed, and assimilated the nutrients we’re eating, and whether those were good nutrients for us and for the baby. So we spend a lot of time in Ayurveda making sure mom is healthy and making sure dad’s contribution is good.

LISA: Well, what’s interesting is that when you talk about it this way it seems really obvious — of course we’d need to take care of mom and dad — but from a practical standpoint in our culture, that’s not exactly what we do. The Western medical paradigm doesn’t really ingrain the idea that we need to focus on the woman being healthy, even after birth, beyond “take your prenatals and folic acid” and “stay on the pill until you’re ready,” because pregnancy is treated as a given we need to actively avoid. So the way you described it, although it seems obvious and self-explanatory, isn’t really the way our culture approaches it. So for women who are listening who are in that preconception stage — maybe trying, maybe not, maybe planning to try in the next six months or a year — from the Ayurvedic medicine perspective of wanting to get mom and dad healthy, what are some of the specific steps she would take to achieve that?

HEATHER: Yeah, so one thing is that Ayurveda is all about learning to see the simple. I really like functional medicine and where it’s going, but it’s not quite embodied enough — what we’re trying to do in Ayurveda is help people feel their bodies more. It’s more about the self-care piece. For example, when your baby is an infant, you don’t know if the baby is okay — they can’t talk to you or tell you if something hurts — so you have to use your powers of observation. What are the very basic things you look at to see if somebody’s healthy? With my first son, he cried a lot in those early months, which was concerning because you want him to be satisfied — or he’d pop off the breast and be upset, and you’d wonder, are you tired, are you hungry? I think what comes to mind initially is your level of comfort — how relaxed and content you are at that basic level. It takes what feels like a lifetime for your baby to smile at you — I think it was about eight weeks for me — and it’s a challenge because you’re looking at this super cute blob of a human who isn’t giving you a lot of feedback. But you can see — did they poop today, did they pee today, are they draining the breast when they eat? These are very basic things — are they eating, are they sleeping, are they pooping, are they able to be comforted, are they not crying constantly? All of us who’ve had a kid remember those moments where the baby is crying and you can’t figure out why. So that’s what I think people have to learn before they have a child — how to look at those basic indicators of the body operating properly, and learn how to do that for themselves first, because it makes it a little easier once the baby arrives. You have to become a master of looking at your poop, studying the color of your pee, studying your period blood and your cycles, and understanding your hunger — because so many of us are patterned toward eating at set times or out of habit or craving, rather than eating because we’re actually hungry. Anybody who’s practiced fasting, which I did a lot before I conceived because of a particular metabolic condition I was dealing with, learns to notice these very simple things — am I hungry, what’s this food going to look like when it comes out, can I predict that based on how I know my body works.

So that’s a lot of what we study in Ayurveda — teaching people how to pay attention to their basic biological functioning. There’s also the idea of not blocking your natural urges — in the ancient Ayurvedic texts these are called “vegas,” and there are about 11 natural urges you should never try to block. One example is sneezing — don’t try to do the “cute sneeze” where you hold it in. The same goes for yawning, urinating, having a bowel movement, or crying — if you try to stop a tear that’s about to come because it’s not the “right time” to cry, you’ll actually feel a lump in your throat. There’s an actual physical thing happening, even if there may not be a word for it in the modern biomedical literature — there’s liquid moving, muscles contracting, energy being held in. Energy is a real thing, even if it’s not a physical thing in the conventional sense, and we all know on some level that holding things in energetically can make you sick, even if that’s a hard concept on a day-to-day basis.

LISA: I think that’s a really interesting way of describing it — taking it back to the simple and the basic. A lot of what I do with my clients is bringing things back to those basic questions, and it’s incredible that in today’s day and age you can go to multiple practitioners and no one asks if you’re pooping regularly, sleeping enough, or feeling stressed. It’s also incredible that, as the person having the experience of your own life, you often need someone else to ask, “is anything going on this month, your cycle’s kind of weird?” before you reflect on the fact that something significant might be going on in your life.

HEATHER: And that’s why I think a lot of people gravitate toward Ayurveda — finally someone’s listening to them and talking about this basic stuff. Even in our current medical model, if your only issue is something minor with your bowels, that’s something many doctors wouldn’t even discuss.

LISA: Yeah, stools are a little loose or something.

HEATHER: Yeah, but in this paradigm it would actually be looked at and addressed.

LISA: Yeah, totally, to a very detailed degree, in fact.

HEATHER: Yeah, for sure. And I think that kind of attention makes some people uncomfortable too, because we don’t like to look at our bodies — we’re so externally focused as a culture, and when you have to focus on your body and your emotions, you have to focus on the things you ran away from by keeping your mind busy. For a lot of people, especially those who’ve had any kind of trauma — and who hasn’t — it’s not always easy to look at those moments and the places in the body where they’re self-protecting. That’s what people who meditate, do yoga, dance, or practice Tai Chi are working on — developing more body awareness. If you’re not willing to look at the parts of yourself that gross you out or scare you, you’re only looking at the parts you want to portray to the world. One of my teachers used to say the mind thinks it’s in charge, but the body really wins — think about everything the body does automatically, like the heart beating, or the nervous system responding to stimuli. Sometimes stress comes not from taking inappropriate action, but from not taking action when a situation called for it. It’s certainly a full medical system — in certain states in India, practitioners even perform surgeries. We’re obviously not doing that here because we already have a medical system with its own language and structure, so we have to figure out how Ayurveda fits into that sphere, because it is its own complete medical system — you could live with just a natural medicine system, though you’d have a different standard, without Fitbits or certain surgeries or the pharmaceuticals we have today. You’d have to look for more pattern-oriented ways to solve problems. When people go to a doctor’s office, they get a limited amount of time, and even a well-intentioned doctor doesn’t have the time to help someone reflect — and most of what’s happened to us are things we’ve done to ourselves, usually out of ignorance rather than bad intention. Looking at those patterns of our own behavior in context takes time.

LISA: Well, it’s certainly challenging in the sense that — I was thinking about this one day — when you go down a more natural path of health, for listeners who’ve recently discovered the podcast and are diving into things like xenoestrogen exposure, cleaning up their diet, and the increase of hormones and pesticides in food, you start on this path where many people do similar things — reducing chemical exposure, filtering water, switching cleaning products, choosing natural menstrual products, getting an air filter. But before you had that knowledge, you didn’t necessarily know there were hormone-disrupting chemicals in nearly everything, and you were still experiencing the consequences, whether hormonal imbalance or something more serious. It’s up to you to fix it, even though you didn’t put it there — the system we live in is kind of set up to work against our ideal health. And even if you address all of these things, you still go outside and breathe the air, and nobody asks your permission about what gets put into it. So I’m pointing out some of the challenges, because we still have to face the consequences of these exposures, and as you mentioned earlier, we’re not all the same — one person can be exposed to chemicals but detox naturally, while another exposed to the same chemicals has real problems because their detoxification pathways aren’t as effective.

HEATHER: Yeah, totally. And I think the dimension Ayurveda adds is that every body is going to have a different reaction to a substance. Take smoke, for example — I’m currently dealing with wildfire smoke here in California — certain bodies that are more dry, with more inflammation or less mucous protection, are going to have less tolerance for that. In fact, in Ayurveda, medicinal smoke is actually used as a therapy — not that trees and houses burning down is a good kind of smoke, but like a knife that can be used for good or bad depending on context, every substance depends on what it’s going to do to that particular body. Bodies that are constantly exposed to toxins, with a liver that’s tired and already hot from imbalances, are what we’d call a pitta imbalance — people who get red skin issues, looser stools, and inflammatory conditions. A diet high in citrus, tomatoes, or salty and heating foods raises that property and makes you less tolerant of things in the environment. Other bodies can seemingly tolerate anything and don’t react much, but they might have a tendency toward tumors, growths, or slow metabolism because they need more of a “punch” to feel something. And then there are very delicate people whose skin is thinner and who are very sensitive, picking up on things before everybody else — almost clairvoyant compared to other people. So depending on your particular pattern of imbalance, and the things in the environment you can or cannot get away from, you have to figure out — can your body tolerate this? We have choices we can make in our diet, cleansing certain pathways, and developing resilience so the body can tolerate more, which in Ayurveda we call “ojas” — there’s really not a perfect word for it, but it’s like a layer of protection, vitality, and strength. Seasons are a factor too — certain seasons are wetter, certain seasons drier, and they affect bodies differently, which is why everybody’s inflammatory conditions tend to go up in summer. The archetypes of the doshas reflect this — the airy, spacey, ethereal people tend toward faster degeneration, memory loss, or thinner skin sooner. The fiery type is like hot lava burning inside them all the time, which one person might love and another might find overwhelming. And the calm, cool type would love being around that fiery energy because they’d find it energizing. So it’s about learning your type.

LISA: I think what’s really interesting about that is that it acknowledges individuality. I feel like we’re starting to get there, but we’re still largely at a point where everyone’s expected to respond the same way to the same treatment, and we don’t take that bio-individuality into account, to our detriment. So, Heather, as we draw to a close today, I’d love for you to talk a little bit about your book, The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility, and share who you wrote it for and who would benefit most from it.

HEATHER: Yeah, I wrote my book for women who are interested in a mindful approach to becoming a mother — you could call it conscious conception. It’s about learning how you can be your healthiest before you have your child, and how your partner can be his healthiest too — I wrote one chapter on the partner’s health. It’s primarily a book about the woman, but also about the environment and how it affects you and how you affect it — lots of focus on this “nesting” piece. Especially in this current strange time, some of my pregnant clients have said it’s been a wonderful distraction from what’s going on in the world. If you consume certain types of media every day, you’re going to develop a worldview that everything is bad, but if you look instead at whether you have clean air, resources, love in your home, a body that’s working well — learning about what’s important now makes the journey easier down the road. This book gives people the tools to understand how their bodies operate, get in touch with their emotions, and orient themselves to the environment around them in a way that keeps them healthy.

LISA: Well, Heather, thank you so much for being here. I’ll make sure to link your book in the show notes. Let the listeners know where they can get your book and find more information about you — and you mentioned you’re starting a podcast, so now I’ve set it on air.

HEATHER: Yes, now it has to happen. You can find me on my website, heathergrzych.com, where you can learn about my consultations and my book — you can read the first six pages for free there. The book itself is also available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop. And I’m starting a podcast called The Wisdom of the Body — it’s not strictly a fertility podcast, but it’s related, since I help people focus on having the good health that supports conception above anything else.

LISA: Well, I’m pretty sure you said fertility is a byproduct of good health, and that used to just be the case before we started introducing so many chemicals into our world. Of course, I hope we get back to a good balance between living naturally and benefiting from technology. Thank you so much for coming on the show — it was really great to have this conversation and take a deep dive into Ayurveda.

HEATHER: Yeah, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed talking with you again.

LISA: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with a friend. You’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at fertilityfriday.com/357. I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Heather, giving us a background and understanding of Ayurvedic medicine and different ways to look at care. One of the things I always talk about is the importance for women to have a team of practitioners. I often use what I call the boardroom analogy, where you can picture yourself seated at the head of the boardroom table, with all of your healthcare practitioners sitting around it. When you’re dealing with health-related issues — menstrual cycle issues, chronic conditions, endocrine or thyroid issues, or persistent cycle disruptions — often what we want is a holistic or functional approach that actually looks for the root cause of the problem, rather than relying on pharmaceutical medications for life. We all need doctors, and it’s important to understand the perspective that allopathic medicine brings, but it’s also important, when looking for a solution more aligned with your goals, to bring in functional medicine, root cause medicine, or a team of practitioners with different methodologies — with you, sitting at the head of the table, ultimately making the final decision. Today’s conversation about Ayurvedic medicine gives us a really interesting window into alternative forms of care, and how it can be incorporated into an overall team when we’re looking to achieve optimal health and fertility. So with that said, I hope you have a wonderful week, and as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.