Unveling the Astonishing 5,000-Year-Old Science of Ayurveda with Victor Briere & Chelsea

the wellness plus podcast today I am joined by Victor Brier and he is the co-founder of The International Institute for ayurva Victor specializes in ayurva for the automic nervous system for addiction and for diabetes all of which we are going to touch on in today's show Victor welcome thank you so much for joining us today can you tell us a little bit about what brought you into this career path and what brought you here today sure thanks Chelsea uh yeah so I started out as a person who knew nothing about holistic health I was kind of like a typical Californian guy uh just doing the normal thing up until about the age of 18 when I had my first kind of real health issue it was nothing serious but it wouldn't go away it was chronic like this this yeah it was like a nagging pain in my back so I did what most people in my world would do is I just went to doctor and they would send me to another doctor and then they sent me to another doctor and tried this and that and it was one of those problems that was not definable within the box of what we already had going on in our society so there was no diagnosis and after a few years of kind of searching for an answer one of the doctors at um UCLA in Los Angeles just said look you're young this isn't life-threatening um No One's Gonna help you you need to go find another exactly wow yeah which actually I thought was really cool of him because he was just like stop stop running around you know unless yeah that's it's a different perspective almost and it led you I guess to you know this other type of healing right so I started opening up my world to other Alternatives because I still wanted relief and um I found yoga and um you know I was this 18 at that point I was like a 19-year-old college kid uh with no experience doing yoga but I tried it out what 20 years ago it wasn't quite as popular as it was now so I had to kind of be like all right so um it was out of the norm for me okay so I I started practicing it and I could tell that it made a difference pretty immediately wow okay yeah and so then I said okay well this is a threat I want to follow and so I scheduled a private session with the yoga teacher and said hey can you help me with this problem and she said sure So we spend an hour together and she gives me a few uh postures to do and within like two weeks it was gone what insane yeah so that kind of that really opened my mind um to it's like wait there's a whole world of health and healing out there that we just don't know about yeah it's not just the Western medicine or your primary doctor there's millions of other avenues that must have been really like a light bulb moment for you yeah it was and you know in this case obviously this isn't true in every case but in my case I didn't have to take any medicines I didn't it was just purely using physical manipulation um so yeah so then for the rest of my time in college and then after I did some traveling uh my experiences weren't full form Med with that experience as a foundation so I kind of had my eyes open um for more practices that I could do and then eventually that led me to ayurveda which is the sister science of yoga and I got really into that and made it my profession long story short that is such an interesting phrase the sister science of yoga yes because I know yoga has is obviously blown up I I guess especially even since the pandemic when everybody had to work out at home the yoga videos really blew up and I feel it has helped a lot of people with so many different things but I mean a lot of people wouldn't even be aware that there is a sister science to yoga could you go into what is irva for somebody who has no idea at all sure ayurveda is a holistic system of medicine and when we say holistic what we mean is that it it will identify isolated parts of the body and things going wrong with it but that's always in the context of the whole system okay so the reason we want the liver to work right is so that the whole system can stay healthy the reason we want the pancreas to work right is so that the whole system can stay healthy and there's an acknowledgement that there's no such thing as a pancreas floating in outer space um everything in the body is affecting everything else in the body so you might have a problem showing up here but the root can be somewhere else and then there's a chain of effects that eventually manifest in that area but we don't want to be so you know in our modern era of of medicine that it's like oh I have a pain here that must mean there's a problem here and here only yeah absolutely where the Mind goes which is fine but unfortunately that's not health is a bit more uh subtle there a more nuan exactly so holistic means we take the whole into account always um and ayurveda is one of the oldest systems still practice today so it's over 5,000 years old um it's practiced heavily in India obviously Nepal Sri Lanka and it's come to the United States but in a kind of adapted form okay how how so how so would it be adopted here well because of the restrictions and limitations in the states I see it's not medically licensed in the states and in India today it's kind of it's the primary form of healthcare is it am I right in saying that it's it's one of three Okay so yeah in India the primary forms of healthcare ayurveda alpath which is Western medicine as we know it and Homeopathy are the three primary forms of Healthcare in India whereas in the states all we have is allopathy oh okay and if I went to a clinic in an arua clinic in the states how would what would my experience be how would I be treated if you were to show up well there will be a wide variety of experiences um because it's not um it hasn't been conformed under a government structure right so interesting that's a double-edged sword on the on one Edge it means there aren't a lot there's not a lot of oversight but the other edge of swords that means that people are very free to practice uh the original principles without an insurance company coming in and saying you have to do this this and this then you have the agenda of billing and so you only do this you know that whole mess is avoided but there's not a lot of structure from the government so you got to take what yeah swings and roundabouts yeah exactly so if you came into like my clinic for example um we would sit down you would have sent in forms like you're used to with your health history and so on so forth and for a first consultation I spent at least an hour we talk about your health history we go over patterns in your body um when did things start when how are things now what might be the affected factors and the goal is that uh in the conversation um I get an idea of what what lifestyle diet stress emotional so on so forth genetic patterns are at play that are C creating the pathology causing your ailments um so really is that whole body approach that's kind of the core of it right right and you know in ayurveda there's no such thing as a five minute appointment no quick diagnosis yeah so then you know I'll also palpate your abdomen I'll take your pulses I'll look at your tongue your face and so you know there's all that kind of stuff and then yeah and then we'll talk um we'll have a conversation about okay this is how we should proceed which is going to be different for everybody um depending on what they're going through and that's the beauty of ayurveda is that everything's pretty tailored to the person's situation it's not a one-size fits-all solution no not at all and what would be some of the more common um I guess not problems health issues that people would come to you you in your clinic with well my clinic we deal a lot with weight and weight management and blood sugar management because you know the CDC put out a report uh seven months ago six months ago you know and while we these numbers aren't like the perfect numbers that measure everything to the T they give you a very strong impression of what's going on in the states so you've got 80% 80 80% of the USA population that's at least overweight what yes I know it's shocking yeah and then you have 50% 5 Zer that has high blood sugar oh gosh right and so and it's not like you know oh 80% well you know a bunch of people are two pounds overweight so they're technically overweight because 40% of that 80% is obese wow okay yeah yeah so it's a big problem um and weight gain is caused by a huge variety of factors it's not just how many calories you take in um so on the quality of the food or genetic I'm sure it goes on and on on and on and on and they all come together to form a weight issue um so that's something I deal with with almost everybody because it is almost everybody at this point it's 80% yeah exactly right so there's that um I deal with a lot of skin issues a lot of bowel issues uh I mean lot of chronic pain um the list goes on yeah and how would a a client usually find you what what would it be a primary care doctor referring them is it their own research yeah typically uh Word of Mouth uh that's the biggest way or the internet or um uh once in a while another colleague you know either from the AL apathic world or from uh the holistic health world will refer and yeah typically that's how that's how people do it or podcasts or podcast absolutely yeah absolutely yes in my research I found information about the three doshas now I didn't go any further I wanted to be explained by the experts so would you mind going into the three Doses and what the influence they have on health my health sure um yeah it's a good thing you didn't go further because uh that is one of the big misconceptions in ayurved today that kind of interesting yeah it water like if you go on Google and type in PA kafa or Vata or doshas or you know one of the first things gonna come up is learn your Dosha take a quiz um yeah right like it's your star sign or something exactly right and um unfortunately those are wildly inaccurate um and can be extremely mislead and you know with a thing like Health that's not so good absolutely it's dangerous hey guys I would like to take a moment to introduce you to our app yoga plus you will have access to an incredible selection of videos led by top instructors in yoga Fitness Nutrition and so much more download our yoga Plus app available on IOS and Android today [Music] heah [Music] [Applause] [Music]