[00:00:00] Katie: And what this tradition says is that you are divine. You are holy. You are loved. You are the love of bull. You are the endless flow of beauty and bliss and goodness. It can get tears in my eyes because that is really what we say, Ayurveda, which means the science of life.
What we're saying is the science of learning how to live a life more and more that allows you to feel and embody for real, not like from the intellect, but from this knowingness, of who you are.
[00:00:31] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath depth and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma and join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of shifting their mindset, taking courageous action, and designing the life they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to the Live The Width Of Your Life podcast. My guest this week is Katie Silcox, a New York Times bestselling author of the book, Healthy, Happy, Sexy, Ayurveda Wisdom For Modern Women. And she has a new book called Glow Worthy. She is the founder of the Shakti School, a premier online certification school for women-centered holistic wellness.
She holds a master's degree in Ayurvedic medicine and is a member of the national Ayurvedic medicine association. She's currently pursuing her deep studies, in Jungian Psychology and her platform focuses on the convergence of ancient holistic medicine, functional medicine, science, and heart-centered spirituality.
This was such an awesome conversation. We talked about the Shakti School, which is a unique space for women-centered holistic wellness. We talked about programs that she has. We talked about the basics of Ayurveda and I love how Katie explained it in the most simplistic ways, talking about the five elements and then the doshas.
And we had a conversation also about Ayurveda and how it brings us into harmony. And especially for women that are in midlife and maybe are experiencing some changes in their body, changes in the motions. And it's just was an awesome conversation. She's generously also offering a discount. So you want to listen to that if you're interested in the Ayurvedic school program. I love this conversation. Take a listen.
Welcome, Katie. It's so nice to meet you.
[00:02:34] Katie: Thank you. Super happy to be here.
[00:02:37] Aneta: I'm so excited to talk about the Shakti School and to talk about the things that you do. But would love for you to just share your background and share what you think would be relevant for the audience.
[00:02:50] Katie: Yeah. So, I'm a regular woman. I was raised in the American South in the 1980s. Southern Baptist upbringing. Grew up like I'm sure a lot of your listeners with Cosmo magazine and eating junk food and yeah, around my teens, I began to struggle. I think I'd struggled my whole life, but in my teens, I just realized, wow, it seems like I struggle with my emotions and my mind, maybe a little bit more than I saw in other people.
Now that I'm an older, wiser woman, I realize that everyone at that age feels like they're weird and alone. We all go through family traumas, but back then it felt like a lonely thing. Long story short I started to question a lot of the religious upbringing that I had I began to work for an artificial intelligence firm in the South of Spain when I was in my twenties, which was exciting intellectually stimulating, and financially very lucrative.
And I was offered a big job and I went home and cried. And I turned it down and moved to India where I studied yoga and Ayurveda full-time, very much looking for a solution to what I felt was a broken self. And I saw in these wealthy very smart, studied mostly guys that they also, while they had money and success and status, they didn't have what I was looking for, which was peace and love.
And so that sent me on a wild journey of studying Ayurveda and yoga deeply and leading eventually to creating a whole school for women in what I call feminine form, Ayurveda, and spirituality, and that's where we are now.
[00:04:46] Aneta: I love everything about the story. So tell me for you to leave the States and to go to Spain and to find a job. Was that the beginning of your search? Did you think that you would find yourself or find what you were looking for by moving abroad?
[00:05:00] Katie: I think like a lot of people listening, I always have been in the search. Going abroad was just one more way that I was living out a pattern in me, which I celebrate and don't demonize, but it has its limitations, which were, I needed to run and go and I needed to go very far so that I can solve this inner problem. And right now you're talking to me from Virginia, which is where I'm from.
I've come full circle and now I'm back here living in the middle of Virginia in central Virginia. But yeah, I think, going abroad, it's so wonderful because it enables us young people to see so much, but the shadow side of that is exactly what I just said, which is running away.
And so now hopefully, more and more, I'm beginning to find that home inside myself. And I think that's really what I think you and I will talk about, which is Ayurveda, which is finding a home. That's the meaning of it.
[00:06:07] Aneta: So when you left for India, you turned this job down and you said you cried about it. Why India? And were you already a practitioner of yoga to some degree or how did you come to move to India?
[00:06:22] Katie: Yes, thank you. So in that story was another story that is that this company that I can barely call a company. It was like a wild mind laboratory that involved a lot of alcohol prostitutes and drugs and FBI agents and government officials from all over the world. Like I literally could write a whole book about that one experience, they called me. I had a nickname. This is a Hollywood movie. I'm not making any of
[00:06:51] Aneta: This is the company in Spain that you worked for that AI company. Okay. Okay. So now I know why you said quit the job.
[00:06:59] Katie: Yeah, it was a company in the south of Spain, but the CEO was a German and the COO was a Mexican. It was like an international cabal of artificial intelligence. It was a cult in a way. And I say that with affection. Like I love all the people I worked with and they were freaking crazy, but like wonderful souls as well.
But that experience. And it was like so much intellectual stimulation. It was super fun. And it was back when no one even knew about AI.
[00:07:28] Aneta: Yeah. It was a while ago.
[00:07:31] Katie: They called me the sacrificial virgin. It's like something out of Oceans 11. And here I was this 20-something-year-old. I met the CEO in a bar in Spain and he was like, you're super smart. Leave your world and come and live with me. And I moved into his house. Hashtag no boundaries, right? Like I had no sense of boundaries.
I'm like, so this is like a juicy story, but the conclusion and the answer to your question are that while I was suddenly making what felt like a lot of money, looking back, it was nothing, but I felt like I was making a lot of money and I was being super intellectually stimulated and I was being surrounded by like wealthy sort of famous people, which later got repeated for me in the yoga world.
I didn't see that they were happy and we could talk about Zen Buddhism, but no one was doing Zen Buddhism. And so I started to do a yoga class in the South of Spain and did it obsessively. Like a good fire type. And I met an author who was writing a book on Indian holy men and miracles and magic and like charlatans.
And he invited me to go on this journey to the weirdest parts of India to do the weirdest things, to look at the weirdest stuff. And I was like, sure, I'm going to quit my job and do that. And so I'm just telling you, the karma I have in me of like big and dramatic, it's real. And, now, if you saw my life it's pretty mundane and boring in a way.
But that trip to India, I was there for six months, just really formed who I am today and created this whole new path for me. And so I feel super indebted to India and the culture and the tradition, while at the same time, the very culture. And 5000-year-old tradition, if you read the old books and I studied tantric yoga, which is even more obscure urges the practitioner to never be caught in these traditions and these books and these rules and laws.
And so I very much feel called to be someone who's translating this mysticism, which is perennial and universal and goes far beyond India and any given tradition. It's called Sanatana Dharma, which means the universal way or the Tao, the way, the law, so now I have a pretty strong relationship back to my Christian roots that are more mystical.
So there's a whole story of coming sort of full circle. And then what we help women do at our school is called the Shakti school, which means feminine power. What we help them do is realize you don't have to, sometimes it's necessary, but you don't have to leave your home. You don't have to leave your lineage.
You don't have to leave your tradition. You can do whatever you want, but that true light and guru and guide is your energy.
[00:10:32] Aneta: Juicy. I want to hear the full story at some other point.
[00:10:36] Katie: You got a pretty good version of that.
[00:10:39] Aneta: I love that. So when you were in India, was that your first exposure to learning and then studying Ayurveda?
[00:10:45] Katie: Yeah I doubled it in a little bit but I feel the teachings say that one of the best karmas you can have is to have a good teacher. There are so many not great teachers and mediocre teachers, but to have a good one. And I've had that karma. I've had some challenging karmas too.
I don't mean to paint a rosy picture, but one of the things I'm most grateful for is I met a man named A. G. Mohan and his wife, Indra, who were Krishnamacharya students. And Krishnamacharya is like the godfather of modern yoga. And I got to like be in their home and that's where I learned Ayurveda first.
And then of course went on to study. And now I have a teacher who is a surfer, she lives in Hawaii, she drinks coffee, and she doesn't follow Ayurveda at all. That's like a very sort of tantric story that I'm telling you. We learn the rules so that we can then freestyle.
[00:11:37] Aneta: Yeah. The discernment I think after a while is so key. So for folks that maybe are listening and then don't know about Ayurveda how can you explain it simply?
[00:11:48] Katie: Sure. On one hand, Ayurveda is the indigenous folk medicine tradition from India. It's been around for thousands and thousands of years. It's been passed on as an oral tradition amongst women and grandmothers, and it's also been codified and studied in whole universities and hospitals.
It's the health care system of India. So that's 1 definition, but a more spiritual definition that I think Ayurveda would approve of as well is that it's a path home. It's a path to what they call Svastha, which means to be seated and situated in the truth of who you are. And so all this stuff that we do to make the body and mind healthy is just supporting this main purpose of a human life, which is to know who you are.
And what this tradition says is that you are divine. You are holy. You are loved. You are a love of bull. You are the endless flow of beauty and bliss and goodness. It can get tears in my eyes because that is really what we say, Ayurveda, which means the science of life.
What we're saying is the science of learning how to live a life more and more that allows you to feel and embody for real, not like from the intellect, but from this knowingness, who you are
And like who we are, isn't our patterns and our limiting beliefs and our diseases, even though that's a part of life, right?
We can honor them as a part of the path, but who we are is this other thing. And so I hesitated to find that because of that experience that we have around it.
[00:13:22] Aneta: No, it's beautiful. And so if someone is interested in learning more about Ayurveda, what are some of the basic steps just to start to identify maybe more for each person personally?
[00:13:35] Katie: Yeah. So I think the way I learned Ayurveda made it feel really overwhelming and too complex. And I didn't want to study it. And then I started studying it and I started loving it and I realized the way it had been taught to me, it was way too complicated for me. And so what I would recommend is, that I wrote a book called Healthy, Happy, Ssexy, that breaks it down.
It's not like I'm trying to sell my books, but find a good book about it that meets you where you are. And there are certainly many great books about it. But also understanding the basic elements of Ayurveda, I think is the most important place to start. People often want to go straight to the famous Ayurveda mind-body types, which I'm happy to talk about.
But mind-body types are constructed of the five elements and the five elements seem, so esoteric, but they are metaphors of physiological, psychological, and spiritual, down from the atomic to the quantum level their processes, their experiences of all of nature, not just being a human.
And so learn about the five elements. And then when you learn about the five elements, you realize, okay, Katie over here and you over there out in podcast land. We're all the same because we're all made of these five principles of nature. And yet, if it were like a stew pot, I might have way more carrots and you might have way more potatoes.
And so what we're attempting to understand is, what is the natural elemental makeup that I was born with? What percentage, if we want to be mathematical, was I born with, of each of one of these elements, because that's forming my personality. It's forming my tendencies. It's going to show me what I need to eat, and what I need to avoid.
And like, all of that is a better place to start, I think, than going straight to the mind, body types. Because when you learn your elemental nature. Now, you can understand this next layer up, which is, of course, the famous Ayurvedic doshas, which is, yeah, probably something they might be interested in.
[00:15:51] Aneta: Yeah. So what are the five elements then?
[00:15:54] Katie: Yeah, so earth is the 1st and you can think of it as the principle of stability. Water is the 2nd, you can think of it as the principle of fluidity and adaptability. Fire is a third, and the principle of transformation and metabolism air is the fourth. And it's the principle of that, which moves things the changing, shifting wind. And then the last is a joke because it's not a joke.
It's the most important one, but it's also not an element. And that's the element of space or ether, which is the absence of all elements. And so space is the container, the emptiness. With which all the other four elements move, play, squish into each other, repel one another, and so on.
And so like, when you combine earth and water, you get mud. If you just imagine dirt plus water equals mud, and that's the first dosha, which is kapha.
And it's I don't want to be muddy, but yes, you do. Because if you have a body, you have kapha. It's the principle of that, which is stable. So like bone, muscle, fat, and in the mind, it's mental stability,
Super important, right? And then if you combine fire with a little bit of oil, you get Pitta, which is this fire type. And if you have a mind, you have Pitta because that's that neuron-firing action. If you have a digestive system, you have the fire. It's the 98. 6 degrees thing, but like on a practical level, it's our metabolic fire ability to digest things stuff, but on a spiritual level, we can digest our past.
The last one, of course, is the air combining with the space. And that makes something called Vata, which is essentially the principle of degeneration and death. And that might sound sad, but it's the dying off that makes the capacity to rebuild and be born again.
You and I were talking a little bit before the call and so what's so beautiful about Ayurveda is you have a certain amount of these elements when you were born and you can't change it. And so it allows people to love their bodies and to love their minds and to love it because that perfect combination of how you were born, what is the destiny that you have?
And so you have the elemental levels that are going to be good for fulfilling your particular purpose in the world. And so we just annihilate this whole idea of looking a certain way, mentally or psychologically being a certain way, like we're all not neurotypical basically. And then lastly, you get different dosha and this is gonna freak people out, but it's just the way it goes.
Like you have the one that you're born, but then that can get out of whack. Because life happens and maybe you were more in this particular makeup, but then you had a heartbreak or you had a trauma or you had a super stressful childhood, or you had a really bad period in your thirties, et cetera, and that can alter the makeup.
And so you've got this superficial you living on top of the real elemental you. And so why we have a whole year program is as you can see, this is like complicated, we call it lady life school, because it's essentially, we're not adding anything in we're deconstructing.
We're looking at what's built up. That's not me getting rid of that with love and affection and allowing the real you to emerge. And I can't tell you how many times, like hundreds of people I've seen who come into our school and they're like, I'm this. I'm a fire type. I'm a water type. And you're like, okay, cool, maybe.
But then as they start to meditate and love themselves and eat healthy and get out of bad relationships and quit their job and get a better one, as things start to shift and meditation and prayer and like this community come online, they realize, I'm not anxious.
I'm angry. And then they're like, like I'm not angry. I'm heartbroken. I'm sad. And so it's all along I thought I was this super airy anxious person, but I'm not and that's like just one example of how deep this is and also how simple it is.
[00:20:06] Aneta: Yeah. So interesting as you were saying it, because I was smiling to myself saying, I think I've taken those quizzes so many times but I've never had, actually somebody work with me to help me figure out what my doshas are. And so once someone identifies what the doshas are. You do the work about the elements and you start practicing.
What are some of the other really important things? Because I know nutrition is a piece of that can also be very helpful in balancing if things are a little bit off of where maybe, I don't even know, is it balance or what is the right term even what would you say?
[00:20:42] Katie: Yeah so we want balance and we want harmony. I just learned that the word hormones comes from the same root as harmony. So yeah, it's important, but also balance doesn't exist. Harmony and symmetry don't exist. And even physiologically, our bodies are asynchronous and they're like the left and the right aren't the same.
And what's interesting is just for your listeners, I think they'll find this funny. The body is only mostly symmetrical or asymmetrical when it goes into rigor mortis for death. Yeah. Like imbalance. Is a sign that you're alive in chaos. Yes, we want to honor that chaos. So that's the feminine. And then and the masculine is always got your shit together, lady, get calm and get balanced.
And so we have both of those chaos and silence emerging. And so what we can do just to make it simple is like Ayurveda has these three pillars of health and one of them is food. Food is the first spiritual yoga. If your food is right, you don't need herbs or medicines as much.
This is in the old days, right? But now, because we have so much chemical sensitivity because we have so many toxins in our environment, we all have to watch for food and do supplementation and herbs because our food sources are depleted. So food is the number one thing and people get super concerned.
What should I eat? And yes, there are certain foods that your body may be more suited to, and we should explore that. But more importantly, it's just what I find with the thousands of women that I've worked with they don't make food for themselves. So what we start with is the basics.
Are you chopping vegetables and cooking them every day? Do you have a crock pot? Do you have an Insta pot? Do you have a Vitamix? What are the ways we can get fruits and vegetables and whole grains and grass-fed meats and healthy fats into our diet every single day in these really good amounts?
So food, number one the second one is sleep and so that's a whole rabbit net or hornet nest or rabbit hole that we could go down. But sleep is everything. And then the third so it's like a stool and you're sitting on these 3 legs and the 3rd in Ayurveda is sex. And it doesn't mean intercourse.
The word is Brahmacharya, which is often translated as abstinence, but what it Brahmacharya, the one who walks with divinity and with her energy? And so what it means, I think the best translation is the wise use of our life force, like the wise use of our energy. And it could be a relationship.
It is relational. Whether it's the person you're having sex with, or a partner, or your friendships, or your work relationships, like all of that life on the horizontal plane is a relational experience. And so what Ayurveda says is, this is Katie Solcox's translation of the ancient, so it's do you wake up in the morning and hear your alarm clock if you have to use one and get excited about what you get to do with your energy, or are you living a life that feels intolerable?
Are you doing things that we all have to do things we don't like, but is the way that I'm giving and receiving energy intolerable to the soul, and that is going to affect your health just as much as eating a hamburger and French fries?
And I often tell women especially we have a whole like month where we talk about sexual energy and we get so caught in the minutia of should I eat pumpkin seeds or sesame seeds for my dosha when it's like these bigger things like, are you living in a chronic state of intolerable stress because of a job, that is so much more important than getting the perfect food list for your mind, body type, but to conclude sleep, food, and relational management, energy management are the three pillars of health and Ayurvedic medicine.
[00:24:38] Aneta: It's so interesting as you're talking, I'm thinking about how those are the basics, the things that we as humans need, and we should be honoring and doing for ourselves. And yet, those are the things that typically are last. We know one-third of the population doesn't sleep enough and that's like a huge problem.
We know that our food supply, as you said, even if you think you're making wise choices, we're already not in a great place. And it's hard to account for everything environmental and what's hidden. And then also the energy, with so many people burned out and really in a state of chronic stress even just focusing in on those three things it seems overwhelming, could be overwhelming.
So how do your school and your approach, how do you help women in a way that feels manageable? I assume that you probably get women from all walks of life and everyone's got something going on.
[00:25:36] Katie: Yeah. 100 percent you nailed it. And just to go back to go forward, sleep, food, and are you laughing? That could be like a sticky note on our wall. If you're sleeping well and you're eating well and you're laughing and you're enjoying. You're probably healthy. And then if you add in some sunlight, you're golden, right?
And if you add in some moonlight, now you're the goddess. It's that simple, but I get off track too. It's so hard to be, poor me. I'm not trying to say poor me, but like sometimes when you're the founder of a health school, it's like the massage therapist who never gets a massage.
I understand the women who come to my school because I'm a busy woman with a lot of responsibilities on her shoulders. And I think women and men, but especially women, we just try to do everything. And so one of the things that we start the year off in, with Shakti School as I have this, it's called a mudra or a hand gesture that came through me.
And it's been with us for probably five or six years now. And right here is do all this stuff to be better and feel better and be healthy. And then people freak out because it's like a lot of stuff. And then there's this thing over here. That's the yin and the yang. It's like equally as important.
And this is over here is like the experience that we give people in our courses because this is the actual embodiment of experiencing your nervous system drop into parasympathetic. When we work with our body and its energy in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, or 90 seconds, we can shift out of these chronically held states of tension in the mind and the body.
And so what happens and Einstein understood this just as these ancient Yogis did when we give our body and mind 5, 10, 20, 30 minutes of the experience of release, openness, calm, silence, freedom, and energy. When we give our body, and mind that lo and behold, we have access to more of our energy, but also the energies around us, which are infinite.
And I know that sounds a little woo, but it's not, you and I are both able to access the gravitational pull below and the cosmic pool above. This is just science. And when our physiology and our mind is a part of that is held in constricted states of tension, those earth energies can't move through tension.
And so by opening up those channels, which is the bulk of what we do in our meditative approach now, as Einstein told us, I have more energy to go about my day, I have more bandwidth and most importantly, my brain is out of those fight flight freeze patterns, that doesn't allow it to take in any new information.
It doesn't allow it to change. And so if I don't do these things, I don't want to say 100 percent predictable, but I feel like it is, it's pretty predictable that your life will look very similar as it did last year to this year unless you create those pockets of openness and emptiness, and trust me, I get that it's hard, especially ladies that have kids or very high stressful jobs.
It is challenging but what I've seen over and over is when you give women that place in that time, women are so good at being their inner healer. And so then the answers come. And so that's really what we're trying to help people do.
[00:29:09] Aneta: I love it. So in terms of the program that you offer, what are some of the details, like how long is the program and what are some of the things that folks could expect if they're interested?
[00:29:19] Katie: Yeah. Thank you for letting me talk about it. It's a year-long school. It's called Ayurveda school within the greater umbrella of something called the Shakti School, and yeah, it's a year together. We have 20 different teachers. I'm one of the main teachers. We meet every week for three hours.
We also meet for office hours but people do it live, but they also do it on their own. It can be a self-guided thing or kind of a deep community thing. And yeah, we start every January. So we have one coming up in January and we'd love to have any of your listeners and I think we're giving them a discount if they want to come.
And if they want to talk to a real person that's done the school, we have amazing coaches and, it's a time commitment and investment, but what we hear is that it's pretty freaking life-changing. It's changed my life and a lot of people's lives to be a part of it.
[00:30:09] Aneta: Thank you for being so generous and offering the discount. I think we'll include all the details in the show notes, but it is pod 100 at the checkout and you get a hundred dollars off, which is amazing. So that's fantastic. So tell me a little about the book. If someone is still on the fence and they just want to dip their toe in. Books are such wonderful ways to start. Let's talk a little bit about your book. It's called Healthy, Happy, Sexy Ayurvedic Wisdom for Modern Women. And then you have a new one coming up,
[00:30:37] Katie: Yeah, thank you so much. Read Healthy, Happy, Sexy. If you're interested in Ayurveda, often describe it as Ayurvedic medicine, crashing into Cosmo magazine. I try to make it real, I'm a Southern bell. I wear high heels. I like rap music. I still eat hamburgers. I can't take that away from me.
It's my culture. So I feel like it's a good intro for people and then I have a new book out called Glow Worthy that is the subtle body practices, which is how you can work with your energy and so that's another one they can check out as well.
[00:31:09] Aneta: That's fantastic. I love books. So I'm so excited to dive into that. Is there anything else that I didn't ask you about Ayurveda that you think is important or any misconceptions that people might have? Because I do know that there's so much information out there and it could be very overwhelming for folks.
[00:31:27] Katie: Yeah, I mean take these online quizzes with a grain of salt and secondly this goes for Ayurveda it goes for astrology it goes for Chinese medicine. Any system of understanding and categorization. Humans tend to like to categorize themselves and I am one of them and it's fun and it can be a wonderful way of understanding and learning.
But at the end of the day, the feminine form of Ayurveda is less concerned about your imbalances and more concerned about your heart. The feminine form understands that while we want to be as healthy happy and sexy as possible, our greater mission on this planet is not to be perfectly happy or healthy.
It's to know who we are. It's the university of the soul. And so from a feminine form perspective, you aren't broken, you aren't messed up, you aren't imbalanced. You are whole and complete unto yourself. And from that place of acceptance and openness of everything, including all the wacky stuff and the bad stuff and the horrible stuff, we can set a scene or a field in which real healing can happen.
Real healing can't happen when we're in self-judgment, self-condemnation, and more insidiously. And this is what I have to watch for myself and others, or I share it with others when we come into these systems, there's this real longing to fix what feels broken. And make it go away. And it's normal to want pain to stop, but it's often the very thing that's our pain or our suffering, that is the portal to the superpower. We're sitting behind it. So I think take Ayurveda itself with a grain of salt. And this is coming from someone who's dedicated her life to studying it.
[00:33:23] Aneta: It's such a great reminder for all of us. And I do love taking all those quizzes too. And we associate with it. And then, like you said, sometimes we don't rely on our discernment just to see if something makes sense. And I do have a final question, which is for women in midlife who may be experiencing hot flashes, or they're noticing that their body is changing and suddenly. Things just don't make sense anymore. Can Ayurveda help with that as well?
[00:33:50] Katie: Yeah, hugely. We do a whole module on perimenopause, menopause, and women's hormones. Like I said before, this word harmony, right? And so when we're young, we're riding on our estrogen. Estrogen is a yen or we call Brahmana in Ayurveda. it's a hormone that brings about wetness, juiciness, and heaviness, and that wet heavy is good because all of the fire and wind underneath, in other words, it's all the inflammation, all the irritation, all of the degeneration gets coated in this layer of estrogen.
And as we age, our estrogen goes down. And so it's not that suddenly you're having hot flashes, it's that all of the heat that you've built up throughout your life, estrogen isn't covering it up anymore. You're just feeling the inflammation or the irritation or the anger that was already there.
And so we have a whole system and cleansing methodology that helps women cleanse. And so cleansing is big, and it doesn't mean doing a fast or anything, but, taking maybe a week to eat, fruits, vegetables, and some legumes and getting your digestive system clean is a good idea for anyone going through perimenopause or menopause because a lot of that buildup in the body is just been through years of life.
And then once the woman has cleansed herself, now she can begin to add in back some of these things that are heavier and denser and hormonally synergistic. And so we have a whole realm of Ayurvedic herbs like Shatavari, Maca, and Vidari Kand these are all estrogen mimickers, but from a healthy perspective not like plastics that do that.
And so what they do these estrogen-building herbs, they are adaptogens. And so what that means is that these plants go inside the body and essentially adapt to the scenario they're finding themselves in. So you may be interested in looking at some of those herbs, but also diet. And so things like avocado, dates, coconut oil, ghee.
Heavy dense, those are going to help to build healthy fats in the body. The other thing I would say is to look at things that are cooling. So cucumbers, aloe vera, coconut oil, coconut water, but also there's breathwork that's cooling. That's going to be helpful for people. Another thing that we talk a lot about in the Shakti school is yes, we want to do those things.
And I'm not adverse or I think bioidentical hormones can also play a role in women as well. I think, our ancient foremothers would have been very interested in some of these more Western or medical approaches to dealing, I'm not saying that it has to be 100%, from an herb.
By all means, like research bioidentical hormones, but if the underlying imbalance isn't corrected. Which is perhaps your system is full of toxins, and then that added load is just going to increase toxicity. So number one, address toxicity, do some kind of cleanse seasonally or twice a year, and number two, address emotional toxins.
So built-up emotional experiences from your teenage years or your twenties or your thirties, et cetera, that just haven't been grokked that can be super helpful. And so there's this whole protocol, which I can talk for hours about though. We have teachers in our school who are much smarter than me that I've hired to come talk about this, that everyone should join Shakti school, but that's great.
But then there's the spiritual answer. And that is in ancient times, when you were going through this period, we call perimenopause, you were entering into the crown phase, which means crowned one, the queen. During the queen phase, the heat of the serpent, AKA Kundalini, we call energy. That energy that we've been pushing down because we're young.
Now we're ready to release it. And so you can also think about the hot flash as one of my teachers used to say, the hot flash is Kundalini awakening. And if we can approach our heat, hello, the heat that is going to burn away the dross of my misunderstanding. Now it's a different perspective, right?
So, I'm not saying lay in bed and sweat and suffer, but because I have had many experiences with that as well, what I am saying is there is also a perspective around this that can be so advantageous for women when we're only told, you're in an imbalance. It's no man, you are entering into the queendom.
[00:38:43] Aneta: Oh, I love that. I'm going to start by saying that I am entering the queendom. This is not a hot flash. It's a kundalini awakening.
[00:38:51] Katie: Exactly. And this heat, bring it on and burn away. And what you will find is as you're laying in bed, drenching the sheets, it's yeah, tomorrow I need to eat more cooling foods and explore some cooling estrogen, building Ayurvedic herbs. And sometimes you don't need that, but yeah, I'm going to do that.
But while I'm in the fire, burn baby, burn like, and what you'll find is old memories, old feelings. You may have clarity about the way you're living your life now that works for you in your thirties and forties. It just doesn't work for the queen. So it's a deep spiritual question you just asked me.
[00:39:31] Aneta: I am fascinated by this and thank you for putting this magic into the world. We need it so desperately. We'll include all the links in the show notes and Katie, I ask everyone a final question, which is what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:39:46] Katie: First I want to say before we close how much I've enjoyed meeting you and being on your podcast and thank you for being such a generous interviewer. And I do lots of these, and this was just so lovely. And I can just feel like a kindred sistership. And in that light, that's what it means to me.
It's like you are a stranger to me, but you're not. And everyday life is giving us this opportunity to interface with the absolute mystery. Whether it's you or the little spider that was climbing up my chair before the podcast started, we have been given this diamond opportunity called this human life. And not waste it, it's always available and in endless supply. It just really requires that we be in this moment right now. So that's my hope for myself.
[00:40:42] Aneta: I feel the same way. Kindred Spirits. It's the gift of podcasting is being able to meet so many amazing people like you in the world and in a world where we seek news, from turning on our TV or scrolling through our phone and finding very curated. Stories that are not there to provide enlightenment to make us feel good or to share what's really good things are happening. I love when we can have these conversations and highlight someone who is making a difference. So thank you.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones, or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.
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