A Beginner's Guide to Ayurveda: Balancing the 3 Doshas and Infertility with Heather Grzych
This week, I’m joined by Heather Grzych, author of The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility*, host of the Wisdom of the Body podcast, and a board-certified Ayurvedic practitioner. She breaks down what exactly Ayurveda is and what the three Ayurvedic Doshas are, how they impact us, and what to do when they’re imbalanced. She helps us understand the wonders of aging, sleep, and facilitating mind content shifts.
Who is Heather Grzych?
Heather Grzych is the author of The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility* and the host of the Wisdom of the Body podcast. A board-certified Ayurvedic practitioner, she bridges the worlds 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 (NAMA) and has consulted with doctors, governments, and insurance companies. She offers virtual consultations and programs worldwide.
Okay, but What is Ayurveda?
Ayurveda is a form of indigenous medicine from India, it's been their practice for many years as well as a few other indigenous medicines. But Ayurveda is definitely the most practiced one with “400,000 something Ayurvedic doctors in India, but here in the United States, we have, say like 1000 because it's newer.” Have you ever seen the trends of people oil pulling or drinking turmeric in the morning? “These are examples of practices that come from Ayurvedic practices. It's kind of permeated its way, alongside yoga, into the wellness culture. But it's also a clinical practice that people study as a form of medicine as well as self-care.”
When we think about disease, we think about what we’ve been taught, disease forms through a “progression of actions and conditions that continue. If you can catch a disease at the beginning, you'll have an easier time getting rid of it. Or if you catch it later, you're going to have a harder time getting rid of it.” But recently, the trend of doing yoga and meditation has allowed us to become more aware of our bodies, so Ayurveda is quickly growing.
Ayurveda literally translates to “the science of life,” and is becoming more prominent “because there are more people now who are aware of what's going on in their bodies early, who can feel things early. Before there's a current medical terminology diagnosis for it, they'll feel something they don't have a word for.” So Ayurveda is understanding how nature, our bodies, disease, health, etc. work and allows you to learn a lot more about yourself.
Within Ayurvedic practices is the concept of the Doshas, “the most literal translation that I've found means that which can go out of balance.” There are three Doshas and the idea is that we have these properties in our bodies that are in “an optimal balance. So you have too not too much or too little of these certain properties in your body.” Some people do have a tendency for certain Doshas to go out of balance more than others, and as we move through different phases of our lives certain Doshas “are more likely to go out of balance. For example, when you're older, when you're, say 50 and above, or even our collagen starts decreasing in our bodies, that we would consider that like Kapha Dosha, it's the thick, dense robustness of the body that makes us young. And as we get older, that sort of starts to thin out.”
the Three Doshas
The three Doshas, Vata, Pitta, and Kapha, all fluctuate based on what’s happening in our environments, our behaviors, and what we choose to take into our bodies, and even what we don’t choose. Vata is the air and space element and the most intangible of all three Doshas. For example, Vata is “when you have a lot of dryness, you're traveling, and your digestion gets off, or you're just feeling dispersed, attention everywhere. It's that sort of lack of cohesion and focus, which can feel quite creative and alive at times. But then when it gets too much, it's sort of haywire.” So when you have too much of those air and space elements, you feel more sensitive energetically, and physically you’ll feel that dryness and roughness.
The second Dosha, Pitta, is the fire and water elements, like lava. We want to be warm being but “sometimes that can get too intense, especially for those of us who are more high achieving. Or also when there's a lot of anger and then for women, certain times of the menstrual cycle where the blood is building and that intensity builds for people.” Pitta is represented by personality trains like intensity and can affect how we perceive the outside world.
The third Dosha is Kapha, the “like slimy mucus, cerebral spinal fluid, you know, limbs different sort of like clear fluids in your bodies, which you need for lubrication.” Kasha is represented by things like your gut lining and protective mucus layers, but when you have too much of it “I remember when my sister was little, my sister has always had a lot of Kapha in her system, she would sneeze in the car and just snot would go all over the windshield because she had so much mucus in her body.” It’s also the reason we all crave different foods or need different foods for energy. Or why we prefer certain weather or temperatures. “Because, you know, not just our life experience is different, but also the way our bodies are kind of tuning into the environment and experiencing the environment is really different.”
Is it too Late to Change, Though?
So, is it ever too late? I’m in my early thirties and already aware of things like collagen loss, so is it possible to start receiving the benefits or even reverse things that are happening after a certain age? Heather says, “aging is interesting because our tissues are always regenerating. Cells have a shelf life, they die and then new ones come. The question is, how are we regenerating? To a certain extent, yes, things can be regenerated. But there are certain things like health conditions, for example, that do get too far down a disease pathway and are very, very difficult to reverse.”
For Heather, what’s important is that you take care of those things that can’t be healed, but when things are caught early, a lot of them can be reversed. “The thing with aging is that if Vata or Pitta, are not not creating high-quality tissues, then yes, something can be done. If I live in the desert, which is a Vata, Pitta environment, it's going to suck all the water out of you, so it's learning how to eat the foods that will create the tissues in that environment that will regenerate more optimally, like eating lots of oils in the diet. And obviously, sleep is like the best medicine, people who have more Vata and Pitta imbalances tend to have a harder time with sleep, especially the Vata imbalances.”
In terms of sleep, there’s the mind and there’s the body. Heather works through changing the body to facilitate the mind content shifts, because “sometimes we actually have things physically blocked in our body and our awareness is actually cut off from something. And that's why, you know, we do a lot of cleansing with people, sometimes they might have a new awareness of something that even happened to them when they were younger.” The cleansing process has to be done with a lot of care and it’s a healing process before it’s that rejuvenation. With sleeping though, “there is a physical component to it. When the body is feeling this sense of lightness, and when we have too much lightness it’s difficult for us to get grounded and settle in. And it's not just our minds that are feeling this it's the cells, it's everything being held by a consciousness.”
There are great herbs out there that help with sleep but one of the best things for sleep struggles is diet. And everyone is different, some people need a ton of sleep and some only need a few hours, some need less sleep to feel motivated and alive, “because there's this thing that happens with the Kapha Dosha where people can actually get too comfortable, so much comfort can actually make us lethargic, unmotivated, unaware, things like that. So it's really all about finding this like beautiful spot to hang out in which is not you know, too high or too low or too warm or too cold.”
Integrating Ayurveda
When it comes to figuring out what your particular Ayurvedic body type is, there are a lot of quizzes online out there, but “I think they're always limited to how we see ourselves. And how we see ourselves is not always accurate. It's like an entry point, I think, to know that you are a certain way.” So Heather practices bringing it back to the physicality, the sensory experience, “and just thinking about how do I use my senses in the world? I have these eyes, I have skin. So the eyes, I see through them, the ears, I hear through them, the skin, I feel when someone touches my skin or when I touch it, or if the wind blows. That's how I feel my environment.”
The point is to get out of your mind, out of your beliefs and memories, and getting into the present moment and that sensory experience. For Heather, she’s most passionate about “helping people reconnect with their primal animal nature. So meditations on the senses, I think are extremely important, and not necessarily something that every Ayurvedic practitioner would do with you. But we do focus a lot on the care of the senses.”
It helps to start understanding how the things in your environment, the things you bring into your senses, are affecting you. And also paying attention to what gives you pleasure, what gives you comfort? “There are certain sounds that will give us pleasure and comfort, there are certain sounds that will make us uncomfortable. And being very curious about that, because the truth is that we all have very different experiences of the world, and all have different needs. And the more we tune into our internal experience, the more we're going to make decisions that are better for our bodies.”
Heather says you can meditate on your senses individually, so sit and concentrate on your sense of smell. Or start with your eyes and what happens when you close them, or “maybe you do a gazing meditation, where you like, gaze at something for a while. And then you could do a meditation for sound, you can play different sounds, sound healing has gotten very big, or even playing with songs that are different pitches.” The sense of taste is worked on largely in Ayurvedic practices, treating people through foods and spices. It’s a big part of Ayurveda to experiment with different tastes and pay attention to what you notice, what it does. The senses are you key to understanding your true body type and what affects you in different ways.
To listen to the full conversation click the links beneath the main photo to listen on your favorite platform!
Affirmation
I listen to my body and tune into every day to live a life that feels more aligned.
Links From the Show
Follow Heather on Instagram here.
Listen to Heather’s podcast Wisdom of the Body.
Get Heather’s book The Ayurvedic Guide To Fertility*.
Sign up for our daily emails here.
Follow us on Instagram here.
*This is an affiliate link. Purchasing through affiliate links helps fund The Good Space at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting us!
