Meena Puri ON: Ayurveda Myths & Facts | Eat, Live, Feel BETTER Podcast

Balance is a misleading word. We think balance is 50-50. It's not a quantitative measure. We don't need equal amounts of every element. I mean, you know what I mean? When you talk about our liver, our liver needs more of the heat element than the water element. Our nervous system needs more of the air and the space element than the heat element. Imagine the nervous system being inflamed. We keep talking about achieving balance for centuries. Haven't we gotten it yet? Obviously not, because we keep talking about it. Your body has a built-in mechanism to achieve homeostasis if you don't come in the way. Hi there. In today's episode of the Eat Live Feel Better podcast, I sat down with Meena Puri, an Ayurveda practitioner, spiritual counselor, and author whom I deeply admire. Meena's way of being is so refreshing in the world today. She doesn't sugarcoat things, and she says things exactly as they are. Her candor comes from her fierce compassion and from wanting others to hear and take in her unwavering belief in the human potential to heal from anything. Meena has discovered what is often hidden from others on their healing journeys, and she's laser-focused on it. You'll hear an example in today's episode. Here's the hint. If your shoulder hurts, it's not about your shoulder. What is it about? You'll have to watch the podcast to find out. Hi Meena. Welcome to the Eat Live Feel Better podcast. I love the name. Thank you. What more would you want to do? Eat, live, and feel better. Exactly. Actually, the name comes from one of my students who made it her goal to do better. Her measurement of improvement in her journey and her health journey was just to do better. I thought that was a brilliant idea. It is. We're all striving to do better, right? I can't wait to dive into our conversation today and allow the listeners to really understand, like I do, what a precious gift you are. Thank you. Thank you so much. So are you. Thank you. I thought it would be wonderful if you could share a little bit about yourself and maybe even your journey into Ayurveda. And what is it about Ayurveda that you connected with and how it changed your life? I think my journey in Ayurveda or my connection to Ayurveda comes from my lineage, my heritage. I grew up in India. My father was an Ayurveda doctor, healer. So was my grandfather. My father was also a medical doctor, eye surgeon and all that. But in India, I didn't look at it like, oh, this is Ayurveda and this is not. Because that's all there was. People were not continuously struggling with options of the medical world, you know, because it was all Eastern. My father was a medical doctor as well. So, you know, it was just like a one thing, one thing to do, because things that Ayurveda could not do. He did surgeries and whatnot. So he was like the whole package. And same thing with yoga. I've always messed around with my body in a sense that I've seen my brother do it. But it never was like, oh, this is yoga. Oh, this is meditation. It was in a way inbred, part of the living. When I came to Canada, I never consciously forgot about it or tried to connect with it because it was in me. But I went on to my journey of I wanted to become a doctor. So I went to school for biochemistry. I visited medical schools and whatnot. It was very machine heavily equipment related. And I thought that's not what I want to do. I want people. I don't want to learn how to operate machinery. But I'm sure there was more to that. But that's what I saw. So I had zero interest in it. Then I kind of detoured into becoming a chartered accountant because I needed a way to make a living. So I'm kind of both right brain, left brain. I don't know. So I did that for a while. And it served its purpose. And having my child necessitated that I work out of home. And it was just a chance yoga class that I took that I thought, oh, this is something you go to learn. Like there's a class for it. And I thought I was like, I was kind of dumbfounded. And I go, oh, wow. I talked to the teacher. And with me, we started like a teacher training program. Wow. And without doing the teacher training, I went and taught the class. And it was a big class. So my friend, Johnny, he called me. He said, the phone has been ringing off the hook. People loved your class. For me, it was so common sense ago. So anyways, then the teacher training happened. I attended the teacher training. And it just opened up a whole world to me in a way that I hadn't realized. And it served me well in some of the difficult times in my life, the journey into yoga. It found me. And I could not help what to teach. So yoga, when I was teaching classes, it wasn't just yoga posture. I think people are like, what posture do you do? I'm like, what are you talking about? Who cares? Everything is a posture. This is a posture. I never bought into the whole kind of a fixed mentality about yoga and what it is. I have my own ideas. I don't know where from, but that's just how I thought. So my teachings were, although in a yoga class, they were much deeper. So people would come to me. I started doing counseling as a yoga teacher. Yeah, that's very different, I think. Because I could. Because I knew. Because I shared that kind of wisdom in the classes. And then I did a fundraiser. I did cooking classes. And people are like, you should teach cooking classes. I'm like, no, I'm not going to. And I ended up writing a cooking book. But it's kind of a small cooking book. But you know, my first book, Healing Your Relationship with Food. And I wanted to do more. I love studying. I'm an academia, and I love learning new things. So I thought, what can I learn that can go together with yoga, that it's more medical? It's a word that came to my mind. I see. I almost looked into Caroline Meese's course and this. And nothing really. Then a friend mentioned, have you looked into Ayurveda? I'm like, what? And I said, Ayurveda? Is that here? You can study Ayurveda here? I'm like, oh, my God. So I started searching all the different schools. And I went in with, I just dived right in. And the teacher was like, he interviewed me. And you know, it's a big commitment. And I'm like, are you teaching or what? Hurry up. So I got the books, and I was like a little kid going to kindergarten. So when I took my first class, I was literally squealing with joy, because I felt finally someone understood my language, that I wasn't crazy. I thought about all of this stuff. I knew all of this stuff. I thought I was making it up, because I taught like that. Wow. I used to do guided meditations about, you know, consciousness, not even knowing what the heck I was teaching. This is how I found it, or it found me. So finally, I could breathe easy. There was something out there that spoke my language, that understood my language. What is that language? And people are probably thinking, what language? I felt understood by Ayurveda. And I understood it. It was like coming home. You know, when we used to have, you know, our homework was doing all these case studies. I would go over the board. I would analyze the heck out of everything. And my teacher's like, you really went to town, because I wanted to, I wanted, I couldn't help it. And my son, who was in middle school, he goes, I've never seen someone being so excited about doing homework. You're weird. Because it spoke about, it told me about the person. Everything was connected, their story, the way they thought, what they felt, what they've been, and how they're eating. So the person was a whole one integrated unit. And that was a breath of fresh air for me. And that was it. So it found me. And, you know, I remember prior to finding it, when I got sick in my challenging times, they had no clue what was going on with me. I had no clue what was going on with me. And the doctors never asked. So they, you know, like all kinds of things they were doing, and they never asked about the stresses in my life. I literally could not breathe in the environment that I was in, which is manifesting, but they never asked. They're putting me through MRI and whatnot. It's just such a naive way of treating people, of looking at what's going on with them. How can you possibly figure out if you don't go inside a person? And then when I found Ayurveda, it was like coming home. You know, I taught my class. And anytime when I asked questions, the teacher would get everybody else to quiet down, because in my questions were the answers. So it's like, listen to Meena's question. Because I asked the most questions because I wanted to get in. Yeah, I couldn't get enough of it. So I actually ended up teaching with my teacher when there were intensives and internships, and I was meant to do it. It sounds like Ayurveda fits you like a glove. It was something from like the past, you know, maybe from past lives. I think it's that, and it's like my father's karma. I wanted to become a doctor. My dad said, what's the point? You're going to end up being in the kitchen. Oh, I was too young to say anything about that. But I'm like, okay, dad, here I am. So you had those cultural obstacles as well. Yeah, well, I was young. And I mean, that was a comment that was made. But you know, what I have come to believe, when there's a little fire in your heart lit, it's not possible to put it out. Doesn't matter the obstacle, because you'll find it. You cannot not find it. My nature is like a little bit of a rebel. Rebel just because it's fun to be a rebel. I'm a rebel because I question things. And I'm not a follower because I'm a leader. I know what I'm talking about, that kind of a sense. And if you follow me, great. If you don't follow me, great. I kind of, you know, lead my own path. I heard that from when you were speaking, like nothing is going to hold you back and you're just doing what you're doing. I'm just kind of wondering because Ayurveda means the knowledge of life, right? And I love that, you know, in the way I view it is understanding how to find your balance, both internally and externally. So how you're interacting with yourself and how you're interacting with the world, right? That's the balance is there's this constant motion that's happening kind of in all things, right? Even the Agni at the cellular level is transforming energy to supply nutrition and what's needed for our tissues and our organs and our systems to work. Everything is constantly in motion and we're constantly needing to find our balance point as we move through the world. So the knowledge of life is how I understand Ayurveda. And that was knowledge passed down, you know, in antiquity, thousands of years ago to the rishis who were responsible for the health of the people at that time. And they received this knowledge after praying to the gods for answers to help to keep the population healthy. And what I find particularly interesting about the version of the story that I tell anyways is that this need arose at a time when people were moving in larger numbers from their lives in the forest in the Vedic times in India into cities or communities. And that it was at this point where they were separating from nature that more of the problems arose. And so if we think about just this knowledge of life that comes from the gods to assist humanity, how do you understand that? Because it's like, that's what you're kind of trying to say. We have that ability. We have that ability even now. So I tell you many times, like in my meditations, I have clients coming in and sometimes like odd things pop into my mind, odd things in the meditation. And I'm like, hmm, I wonder what that is. And I forget about it. It's the client who was coming in. I picked that up. It seems like magic, but actually it isn't. Because if you think about the universe as being both physical and non-physical, just like we are physical and non-physical, the non-physical has the energetic signatures of knowledge, the wisdom, if we take time to tune into it enough. So when you actually tune into things, it's like your intuition. Your intuition in high gear. It's when we get the download, when we get that hunch, that feeling. When all of a sudden you begin to see the human imprint and the nature's imprint and how they're connected and how when they're doing this, you can see the future. You can perceive a problem. That's many times what Ayurveda's pulse diagnosis does. So it's a preventative measure because a pulse will tell you about the imbalances that are energetically starting to take place in the body. I didn't realize that you were experiencing at an energetic level in the pulse. Absolutely. It's in the pulse. So that's why you prevent it. Like this is out of balance. This is not in sync. So let's work on that. And another point I want to make is balance is a misleading word. We in the Western culture are forever trying to reach a balance. Balance between family and work life. Balance between this and that. It's actually a very misleading word. Why it becomes misleading? Because we are trying to regain balance mentally. Then balance actually is built in. You know when there's humidity followed by rain, things balance out. We didn't work hard. We didn't say, okay, how are we going to make rain happen? It just happens. Same thing with humans. One day you overdo it or you overeat or you go to three different parties and you eat and whatnot. Next day, somebody gives you a piece of cake or junk food. You're like, I can't. My body is going to get sick. Your body naturally knows how to maintain a pain balance. It's just that in this culture, we get mental about it because we have a mind and we overuse it and use it in the wrong places. We worry about things. We think that I am going to achieve this balance. We keep talking about achieving balance for centuries. Haven't we gotten it yet? Obviously not because we keep talking about it. Balance actually is that your body has a built-in mechanism to achieve homeostasis if you don't come in the way. That's the important point. We think of balance as 50-50. It's not a quantitative measure. Sometimes balance is 90-10. Sometimes home life balance is I'm going to be spending the next month writing a book. I see. That's a balance because that's where my energy is going. You have to flow with that. We get heady about balance and that's why perhaps we never achieve it. We beat ourselves up because we cannot achieve it. We are trying to chase our tail. We have a preconceived notion of what balance looks like. The word balance itself, if you don't dig deeper into it, it implies half-half, night and day. It implies some equality between the two things. There's no such thing. We don't need equal amounts of every element. You talk about our liver. Our liver needs more of the heat element than the water element. Our nervous system needs more of the air and the space element than the heat element. Imagine the nervous system being inflamed. That's what's happening. The inflammation is happening all the way at the nervous tissue level because the elements are misplaced. I think the biggest obstacle for humans to achieve health is their own head. There's so much information. Information makes you get into your head because now you want to analyze it and make sense of it. Yes. We don't want to ever sit with ourselves and think. Things are actually easier than they look. Does it make sense? Your body will tell you. That's really beautiful. Patients come in, came in. I remember in Milford office, older gentleman, total wreck. Keeps going to specialist. Somebody's giving him a pump. Somebody's giving him these green smoothies. He's in tears. He doesn't know who to follow because he doesn't have any system within himself to know. I said, when you walk out of any specialist, doctors, facilitators, whatever they are, out of their clinic or office, and you feel so lost and worried and anxious, you don't know where to turn. You were in the wrong person's place. You were in the wrong person's office. They themselves don't know. They're guiding you with what they know. Everyone wants to know, what is the solution to my problem? I have pain here or I have discomfort there or I feel unwell or my mind isn't at peace or whatever it is. How would you answer that question? So it's important to recognize the problem. I have a pain in my right shoulder. Notice it. Don't jump to any conclusions. Notice it. Check it out. Check it out for a week, 10 days. See if it's persisting. What do you know to do it? Do you know to put your hand there, comfort it, soothe it, massage it? Notice what movements are creating more or less pain. Are you sleeping on the wrong side or did you hurt yourself? Why particularly the shoulder? And then pay some attention to it. Simply put your hand, breathe, and say, let the breath go to the shoulder. Don't worry about how it's going to get there. Just ask the breath, please breathe into my shoulder and ask your blood flow to say, I want more blood flow, more blood flow here. So see if you can soothe it yourself and do the things that you know to do. Nice. When there's a problem, it's never a single problem. It's never going to be just a shoulder pain unless you had an accident just on that and that shoulder got hurt. It's related to your neck. Is it related to your spine? Is it related to your ankles? Is there a stress or a worry that's making just that particular area? Sometimes, you know, arms and shoulders gives us the ability to reach. Do you feel you can't reach? That's more of the spiritual component. Yeah, it's your emotions and your thoughts. Do you feel you have been limited that you cannot reach in some area in your life? Right. So it's not even spirituality. It's looking at your emotional self, your mental self, and not just the physical. I have never found that there wasn't an emotional component to the physical part. They're going to know the answer. It's like, oh, maybe that. So then why am I thinking and feeling this way? So I've been feeling this way for a year. This is not the only area I feel this way. I feel this way. Here comes a can of worms. Now, what do I do with it? So if you understand the depth of the breadth and the depth of the challenge you have, going to the doctor, he's going to do an x-ray and MRI and say, nothing is wrong. Right. Here's a painkiller. You can take pain. Sometimes we have to take a painkiller, too, so we can think straight. But now what created this problem? The shoulder didn't create the shoulder pain. Either it's coming from somewhere else in the body. Then what created that pain? It's your emotionality, your energetics that created the pain that created the injury to the shoulder. So we got to go to that and say, where is that coming from? So your awareness goes up and you're able to connect the dots. You begin to see yourself as a full integrated whole being that you are. You're not running amok with just all shoulder pain, shoulder pain, shoulder pain. It is not shoulder pain. You have emotional pain. You have an emotional dysfunction. You've got emotional challenges, something that you don't know what to do with. You feel stuck in a place where you feel you can't reach. You feel. And it's the things that we don't want to talk about. Always. Yeah. What is it about human nature that we avoid? We distract. We are fearful to actually address the problem. What you're saying is that's actually the way to the solution. We humans are still evolving. For the longest time, the complexity of the emotional problems that we face today, I think there was more innocence. The family units were different. The problems were different. There was not so much coming into our head. People live simple life. And sometimes a grandmother just put something on you, gave you a hug and gave you this tea. So in that she fed your emotions. Yeah. Yes. She gave you tea, but the tea was a symbol of I'm here for you. Don't worry. We're going to gather around you. You're going to be okay. Well, here's nobody's giving you a tea cup of tea. Yeah. You have to Google and say, is there a certain tea? Yes. You may find the perfect herb, but the qualitative component. Yes. I connected with this just recently. I was unwell and I was asking my husband to like, look, can you ask me what I need? Can you make me some warm water? Can you make me some ginger tea? Can you get me a pillow? Can you sit with me and not try to fix the problem? I was really needy. Actually, this morning I was reflecting yet again and realizing how much I was desiring soothing. I wanted to be soothed and I wasn't getting it. And I think I didn't get enough of it when I was little. This need stuck with me and stayed with me. And it really came out when I was unwell. And I realized that, wow, this is going to keep happening. And I realized too, Mina, that I soothe with food, right? A lot of us do that. We nourishing sweet foods like milk, for example, or nuts and seeds, the fatty foods. They help us to feel sedated and they soothe and they make us feel comforted. Yeah. Satisfied. They even make us feel like sleeping, you know, like soothed, lulled into a sleep. And I realized I still have that tendency to choose those foods. And I connected it to this need that I had for soothing. So when you connect with that need, as adults, we all have to do a spiritual reparenting. We all have to reparent ourselves because we were parented by humans just like us, whose needs were not fulfilled. So they couldn't give you what they didn't have. There comes a point, that's the whole healing. There comes a point where you have to do a spiritual reparenting yourself, where you have to, you love to, you have to love your inner child. And I see that in so many of my clients. And especially it makes it difficult when you have a partner or someone at home, because you very quickly project your need onto them that somehow they should know. But that's probably not a good thing to do. Because they're like, what do you mean? Why are you being whiny? Why are you being a child? Here's your pillow. It's not that you wanted the darn pillow. It's how they give you the pillow is what you are after. I wanted the tenderness. You wanted the tenderness. And the tenderness only we can give to ourselves. When you begin to give to yourself, when you begin to be tender and go leisurely, make yourself some ginger tea, hold it, sit with a blanket. Then maybe you can model for your husband. He can see the tenderness and the gentleness and the love that you are being yourself with. Then he may say, when she's ill, she's needing that. Not the tea or the pillow. She's needing your love. And he may give it to you. He may not. We don't know which place he's coming from. Many people, when they feel somebody is needy, they run away because they feel weird. They have never addressed their own emotional needs. When they have to address yours, it's a painful point for them. So they run away from it. I noticed that's a crazy thing about sort of the way the universe seems to work, is that when you really need or want something from someone, that's the time they're not going to give it. It would be nice if everybody could just read our mind and just give us what we need. But they don't know. We nearly need to let others off the hook. Let them off the hook like, I'm good, honey. I know how to take care of myself. That may attract him and say, no, she's fully, she's not wanting anything from me. So I don't need to run away. I actually kind of enjoy how full and complete and she's in herself. I may want to go cuddle with her because I want some of that for me. Nobody wants to give another because you need to give it to yourself first. So especially in spouses, come to a place where you need absolutely nothing from your spouse. You're so full that you just give them. And if they thought the same way, imagine how the relationship would be. So many times in marriages, they're two wounded people. They're like, you give me, no, you give me. They're wounded. Nobody can give to the other. Unless you're so fully yourself that giving just naturally happens. That's the depth of understanding Ayurveda. Somebody, you know, if I tell somebody what I do, they're like, oh, I have this Ayurvedic oil. What products do you have? And I just had that happen yesterday and I said, I don't do products. We have three dimensional people. We want to see something tangible to understand it. It's a problem. I understand why, but it's a problem. Because then we continue to measure the quality of our life and our success by quantitative things, by physical things, when actually the answers lie in the non-physical and in the qualitative. So I said, I don't do products. They're blown. They're like, what else do you do if you don't do products? So, you know, when we follow the same model as the Western medicine does, with just here's a pill, now here's an herb. We really do people and Ayurveda a huge disservice. Amina, we're getting into the myths and facts section here, right? So that's the myths and facts. So people think Ayurveda is herbal medicine. I have many people when I'm asked to speak and they think it's herbal medicine. They're like, well, they just give us the herbs. Nothing that you put in your mouth is going to create magic. If you continue to put other things in your mouth that are creating havoc. So you're putting two contradictory things into your body, creating a conflict. Wow. Between the herb and your food, between the herb and your lifestyle. It's like I'm giving you this herb to calm down, but you're watching Netflix till 2am in the morning. Good example. You just wasted the money and the herb. I am not going to give you herb until I can guide you on how you can align your life to best functioning. Then I can give you the herb. Can't just take the herb and keep running amok. Yeah. And this is the danger that you're, I think you're calling out this danger that Ayurveda could very well go in this direction. Because I think in India, my understanding is it largely has already gone in that direction. It already has. Where people go to their Ayurvedic doctor, they get the pill for whatever it is, and they go home and they take it and they say, that's Ayurveda. Practitioners can run their business that way. Yeah. They are not living that way and they pacify the people. Right. I have a big problem with it. Yeah. And so we should. I mean, that is not true Ayurveda. If you need herbs, slowly we'll get to the place and saying, go ahead and take these herbs. But the herbs aren't going to do anything for you if you don't line up with them. You don't even understand the herbs. The understanding of your body, the understanding of how your being works, it aligns you with your body. That alignment is needed. If you think your shoulder pain is just shoulder pain, no amount of herb I give you is going to work for you. Because you haven't opened the pathways. You haven't opened all the pathways within your being that could lead to that. But you keep taking herbs. You're like, well, that didn't work. I don't like Ayurveda herbs. It's full of blah, blah, blah. So it's nonsense. My teacher always says that if you're going to take a supplement, you should notice an effect. And he also says you shouldn't generally take more than three supplements at a time. No, you should not. They're strong. And the body has to actually do a lot to understand them. Well, if they're Ayurvedic supplements, I think they're much closer to nature, right? They're just the powdered herbs. But many of the nutraceuticals out there are processed, chemical. And the body has a really hard time understanding them. So two things. There has to be a result. And don't take too many at a time. Don't take too many. Many clients, when I had a physical office, they'll bring a bag full. They don't know why they're taking it. Because somebody suggested it's a good idea. It's good ideas gone bad. So I tell them, OK, give this a rest for 10 days, 15 days. And let's see if you notice the lack of them. Good. Yeah, yeah. That we clean out. And then I'm like, OK, then we introduce one at a time. I don't even take Ayurvedic herbs every day. I cannot even do the same thing every day. So Ayurveda is not about some rigid, another yet rigid set of rules and principles that you have to follow. It's deeper than that. Understand your nature. Your nature changes from day to day. Your nature changes from season to season, from age to age. It's understanding your nature. What's needing today? What's the energy you feel around you and which direction? And how does this feel? And how does that feel? So Ayurveda really requires you to be awake. Hence, the whole depth of Ayurveda is a study of consciousness, because when you are awake, you need to be awake and aware so you can tune in to your needs. Yeah. What's around you so you can align accordingly. We are not accustomed to doing that. We find this too stressful. We're like, you just give me the herbs, because we think that if we dump some supplements or some herbs into our body, we can forget about it. Well, it's the same question. Like we talked about cooking. What are you going to do with the saved time? You're going to forget about it. And remember what? I want to forget about it. And then go what? Go watch Netflix, go get a drink, go just waste your time. This is your life. Why would you want to forget about it? Ayurveda is really, in my understanding, if we can reclaim our connection to our daily tasks in life, the things that create our lifestyle and make us human, our way of life is all Ayurveda. Just the things we all have to do every day. That is Ayurveda. And we can take those things back and actually find joy. We find joy when we understand something bigger in a bigger way. When we are educated on what is bigger. Instead of just thinking that if I now follow this set of principles, that's going to be the ticket home to me. That's the attitude that's the problematic. So, so far, we have come to the understanding that the mentality for Ayurveda for people is that you're going to give me herbs or you're going to give me some food. You're going to give me some strict guidelines. Like I had a client yesterday. You're going to tell me to go to bed at 10 o'clock. I said, I'm going to tell you no such thing. You're going to figure that out. You're going to figure out your own intelligence. You have it within you. I'm just going to take you there. Are you going to heal me? I said, absolutely not. I'm not the healer. I'm not the doer. The doer is that. You are the healer. You have it. I'm going to take you there. That's my job. And I know how to do it, if you allow me. So, we think now it's Ayurveda food. That's why I like that. When I wrote that first book, Healing Your Relationship with Food, recipes were the last thing I wrote. I wrote just 40 recipes. And it was the most unpleasant thing that I did. Because I don't want to give you recipes. Again, I'm making you stuck in your head. A quarter teaspoon. I don't even know a quarter teaspoon. Because I don't measure anything. I go pinch, pinch, pinch. And somehow, I don't even taste the food. I don't know how. It's because I get out of the way. I see. I think it must be because I don't worry about it. I think when people worry about it, it's like, follow this recipe, follow that recipe. I think recipes are great. But at some point, you've got to create your own. Recipes are like the training wheels to learn. The training wheels. To learn new skills. To open your mind. Sometimes when you do recipes, I'm like, oh, you can combine this with that. But then I figure it out, right? It's just an idea. Sometimes a reminder or whatever. But it's deeper than that. So, there's no word for Ayurveda. Ayurveda is about you claiming and connecting with your own innate healing power at every level as a whole being. It's really looking at yourself as a whole person. Never just run after a physical discomfort or pain as just physical. When you ask the question, all of you know where that physical pain came from. Because it's you. You know it. You just haven't asked the question. No one has told you to ask the question. So, ask the question. What am I thinking? What am I feeling? How did this come to be? How is my feeling, thinking associated with this pain? Have I had this before? Why do I keep on having this random pain here and there about my emotional life? How is it causing problems in this area, in that area? Be a little scientist, right? Go connect the dots. Go have some fun with it. Go get to know yourself. And then you're going to see, oh my god, it's not just the shoulder pain. Because I guarantee you, it isn't just your shoulder pain. Words of wisdom from the great Meena Puri. You know what I love about you is your singular focus on the emotional and mental relationship to health. That aspect of health. Because it is the one that... That is the root cause. Almost everyone overlooks, as you pointed out, as probably the biggest myth about Ayurveda, the herbs being the solution. It's not the solution. This is the solution. And so, I think that's a huge takeaway from today's conversation. I'm glad. And I actually find very, very... I don't really... Haven't found, apart from my teacher, I haven't really found anyone who does what I do in the realm of Ayurveda. Extremely rare. So when people come to me, they don't know what I do. I said, well, come and find out. Yeah. Because Ayurveda doesn't have really a clear set of... It's a science of work. Or protocols for this aspect of healing, right? And you have studied Ayurveda in the nutrition sense. The answer to every question is, it depends. See how big that is? Because it truly depends. Two people come to me with the stomach issues. They're not going to walk away with the same recommendations or herbs if I give them. Because it's not the same thing that's creating their problem. The problem may be the same, but it's not... The root cause is not the same. You know, a single thought can create arousal. Arousal is a physical reaction. A thought is a non-physical impulse. So I don't understand why people don't think that any other thought cannot create more physical symptoms. If that's connected, why is not everything else connected? It's a great example. You know, it's like, I'm going to take the pill. I don't believe in Ayurveda. First of all, I don't know what that means. Ayurveda doesn't care whether you believe in it or not. It's not a religion. It's not care about your belief. Your body works the way it does. Whether you believe it or don't believe it, it doesn't matter. I mean, the sky is blue. You don't want to believe it, don't believe it. The sky is continuing to going to be blue. We want to take a pill in our mouth. We expect it to create magic. But we put food in our mouth. That shouldn't do anything. Like, is a pill going through some magical pathways that we don't know about? That the food does not go? So it's a simple thing. But somehow we shut our eyes to it because the pill givers keep telling you this is the magic. They're not opening your mind. The pill givers have a lot of marketing experts behind them, right? Yeah. Here's a pill. Here's a bag of chips. Here's a hamburger or whatever the food might be. That's disturbing to me. That is your, would we say that's your biggest pet peeve? I don't understand why we think that we are just bodies when we are constantly filled with thoughts and feelings. Well, we've been indoctrinated through our education system, through our culture, through all the messaging out there in our lives. Question, think, feel, connect, ask questions. Can I just highlight that word feel? Because when I started studying Ayurveda, we're doing food experiments, we're tasting single ingredients on an empty stomach, and we're observing all the sensations in the body, in the emotions, connecting the sensation in the body to the emotions, to the thought in terms of how we feel about that. And we're writing them down. And then, you know, we're having review classes where we're talking about, oh, this person, you know, felt like it was an elephant on their chest. And this person, you know, felt like there were butterflies buzzing in their stomach. And we're talking about this. And I remember at the beginning thinking, this is ridiculous. Like, why are we talking about everyone's feelings? Who cares? But the reality is that those feelings are actually the language of health and the language of disease. It's how we find our way back, right? Yeah, you know, Joe Dispenza, Dr. Joe Dispenza says that thoughts are the language of the mind, feelings are the language of the body. Yeah, so we need to embrace that. And I just want to say that in your presence, I feel very validated, like the fact that I can express what I'm feeling, and it will be heard. And I think that is lacking in our society, in our world, that to just be listened to and validated without judgment, and to have your feelings be exactly valid, because that is your truth. That's what clients get. When I work with people, they can breathe. The brightness in their eyes come back. They feel like they came home. There's a smile on their face and tears in their eyes, because they've been searching for it, banging their head everywhere and not finding it. That's a basic human need. If we can't trust our own selves and be comfortable in our own body and head, you know, that's why we have so much anxiety and depression, because so many of the practitioners tell them, it's in your head. No, it's not in their head. If it is in their head, it's still a valid thing, because their head is a part of them. The thoughts are a part of them. It's not invalid. They're coming from somewhere. Your task is to find out from where. Don't tell them it's in your head. No wonder people are confused, because they think, whatever is in my head and heart, I better just ignore it, because it's an invalid thing. And that's actually the most valid thing there is. So we are in this world of utter confusion, sometimes utter frustration for people like me. So then I'm like, well, I'm going to keep singing my song. I'm going to keep singing my song. And maybe if you like it, you'll listen. That's all I can say. Yes. And though, I know that you've created a wonderful, very affordable opportunity for people to enter into your world. And I would love for you to tell us about it in case anyone wants to take that next step. Thank you. Thank you so much. So after a couple of years of figuring out how to share this knowledge or wisdom with many, many people so they can shift, I created this membership program. It's called the Inner Compass Club. It's a membership program where you pay either $25 if you sign up. When you click on the link within 24 hours, you get $25. Otherwise, it's $30 a month. There's also like a package for a year if you want to do that. But there's no contract to sign. So what this is, it's an online learning portal, where it's your own learning portal. You have your username, password. You log in and I put content there. So I started with this six-step process to heal your trauma, heal your heart, heal your emotions. And it's very succinct. It's every month I put new content. So the content is in the form of video teachings. It's very exact and specific. So the longest video may be 15 minutes long. Like a three-minute video, two-minute video, five-minute video. And there's a guided meditation. There's a workbook. And going into the program, people have bonuses. My free copy of my second book, Wake Up and Heal, Six Steps to Emotional Healing. And my 21 meditations that I created during COVID time. So you have access to that on your online portal. Plus, I do at least twice a month have a private Facebook community. I go into the group and do live Q&A. So people post their questions or they come on live and they ask me their questions and we have a conversation. And we keep moving to the next step, the next step. Again, healing is such a big topic. So this is a great way for people to start. I'm going to continue to make this membership richer and richer just because there's so much to share. Yes, yes. So it's a very small way for people to start. People to kind of step into my world, step into the teachings and be connected that way. And I'm going to continue to grow it, give people more and more and more within this membership. It's going to be a never-ending membership because this is a never-ending topic. Of course. Our multidimensionality, our wisdom, and all of the faculties that we have not used to be fully human. These are conversations that can never stop. So it's a great way for you to start. You can cancel anytime you like to cancel. I have no contract with you because it's for you. If you're not finding it's not for you, then why would I want to force you to give you in? You have to feel it, then you can leave. So it's very cost friendly, very cost, you know, really low cost. Because I want more and more people to attend and be members. And I'm deliberately giving content because I want to handhold people and give them exactly. Because being overwhelmed is our problem these days, right? Because there's so much information. So I want to decipher through and make that information really compact. The link is really innercompassclub.com. Sounds good. And I just want to, you know, highlight for people. There's so much information in the world. There's so much wisdom. There's so many, so many leaders and so many teachers. And it's important for us to minimize and select and hone in on who it is that we really resonate with, and then to stick with that and not get distracted by all the latest shiny objects. Once you go in, give it a genuine opportunity and a genuine chance and really focus on it and be serious about it in order to get the result. Be serious, make a commitment to yourself to rise, make a commitment to yourself to evolve, to rise out of your predicaments. We do have to be conscious of how much we take into our space and what we take into, you know, the mental space. So we do have to be conscious of who we follow because in this day and world, everybody has a mic. Everybody is a healer. Everybody knows everything. Basic, simple things. People have given it all kinds of buzzword names to get your attention. It's a marketing world. Athena, you are the best kept secret in that world. Thank you. I'm not, as you know, I am on social media, but only to a point where I can handle it. I don't go crazy after it. We have these fascinations about simple things. We make it more complex. And that's what I think in this world, we have made it more complex. And I keep my sanity. You know, Ayurveda is about that. I love the fact that it's an ancient wisdom, an ancient science. It doesn't change. And you don't have to be distracted by those latest shiny objects because they change, you know, every day of the week, they're changing. And you can never keep up. And it's overwhelming and confusing. But Ayurveda is never confusing. It's simplifying and it's empowering. To me, it's a breath of fresh air. That's how I felt when I found it. Yeah, it's a beautiful world. And so I invite the audiences, if this is your first interaction with Ayurveda, or if this is where you take your next step on your Ayurveda journey, check out what Meena has to offer and subscribe to our channel so that you can get future episodes of this podcast and stay in my world as well. And thank you for watching. And Meena, thank you very, very much. It's lovely. It's wonderful always to chat with you because we get each other. Absolutely. I love chatting with you. When can we do it again? We should do it often. Why not? Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for watching. Bye for now. Bye-bye.