Transcript #428 Ayurvedic Detoxes with Siva Mohan MD MPH

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1. Find out what’s in store on this Myers Detox Podcast with Dr. Siva Mohan, who joins the show to give us a thorough overview of Ayurveda, Ayurveda detoxes, and how to incorporate Ayurvedic practices in your everyday life. Siva talks about so many great topics on the subject, such as how it interfaces with functional medicine, the concept behind striping and then replenishing the body through the Ayurvedic cleanses, how she uses Ayurveda with her patients, and some awesome testimonials about how Ayurveda has changed her patients lives. This is an amazing area of holistic medicine and I’m really excited to to have Siva on!
2. Find out what lead Siva to start to use Ayurveda, and what elements of the practice she was most attracted to.
3. Learn what Ayurveda is, how it is used, and what it is mapping in the body in order to foster healing.
4. Learn about Ayurvedic cleansing protocols, and their key principle of rejuvenating the body.
5. Find out the best places where you can do an Ayurvedic purge, and why it is so important to go to these locations.
6. Learn more about what an Ayurvedic lifestyle looks like, how you check in with yourself, and what you do to action changes.
7. Learn about Siva’s incredible Living Well with Ayurveda class, as well as her upcoming app release that guides you through living an Ayurvedic lifestyle.
8. Hear about some of the incredible success stories of people who incorporated Ayurveda into their healing journeys with Siva.
9. Find out how Ayurveda can be incorporated into functional medicine.
10. Learn about Siva’s many resources that can help you begin to learn about Ayurveda, and her final words about incorporating ascension.

Wendy Myers: Hello everyone. I’m Wendy Myers, welcome to the Myers Detox podcast. You can learn more about my work and subscribe to my newsletter at myersdetox.com, and I’m so thrilled because in April 2022, it’s the Myers Detox 10 year anniversary. I just, I can’t believe it, I’m just, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, I’ve been podcasting for about nine years and just pumped out one of these every week for the past nine years and didn’t think that we’d be here but just really thrilled. I thank all of you for your support through the years, and it’s just been a joy doing this podcast and this show for you guys. It’s been an amazing learning experience and journey for me as well. I’m going to keep doing it. We’re going to keep doing ,we’re going to be here for a while, I have a lot to talk about, I got a lot to say. So, thanks so much, you guys for being there and taking this ride with me. It’s just, it’s been my pleasure.

Wendy Myers: So, our guest today, Siva Mohan. So, she’s going to be talking about, Dr. Siva Mohan, she’s a psychiatrist and a specialist in Ayurveda, and she’s going to be talking about Ayurveda and Ayurvedic detoxes and some, you know, basics of Ayurveda, and she’ll talk about how Ayurveda is more like a holistic approach and, you know, how when they do detoxes, they also replenish the body, so they strip away and also replenish, was an interesting concept. And then, she also talks about how long and how thorough an Ayurveda detox is. She’ll talk about some case studies and success stories. And also, how Ayurveda interfaces with functional medicine and conventional medicine, and just a really, really interesting show. If you’ve never really, you know,  you don’t really know much about this topic and you wanted to kind of learn a little bit about it, like myself, I’ve never done a show on Ayurveda, this is a really, really good show.

Wendy Myers: Siva is my friend here in Mexico. I live in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, and she lives here as well. We became friends, and lo and behold, she has this huge health platform. She’s got a great class that you can find on her website at ayurvedabysiva.com. She has about 7,500 people on this, like, basics of Ayurveda class, so really, really highly recommend that. And also, just a note, I have a new course that’s coming out, It’s called The Emotional Detox Program, and I just want to tell you a little bit about that, It’s not out yet, It’ll be out in April 2022, and if you join my email list, you’ll certainly get an email first thing when it’s out, but this is some of the most important work that I’ve ever done, and I don’t say that lightly because what I found in trying to detox people and trying to restore their health is that, there was always something missing from just doing a physical approach. There was always something missing there, and it really bothered me.

Wendy Myers: In my own health and my own journey as well, I always felt like I was doing everything physically for my health, and I just woke, I just wasn’t waking up feeling happy, you know just, happiness and joy just alluded me, and I just couldn’t figure it out, and so, I feel like I’ve finally figured it out, and I incorporated everything that I’ve learned about emotionally detoxing in my Emotional Detox Program, and how to detox using very easy methods that you can do at home. And I think people don’t realize that over 67% of physical health issues are caused by emotional trauma, and that’s staggering.

Wendy Myers: The ACEs study that came to that conclusion, there was a lot of things that were missing from that study as well. So, it’s estimated that 95% of people have physical issues that are due to emotional trauma, and if you like, reassess that groundbreaking study and add in some other things to it, and so, check out the Emotional Detox Program. You can learn more about it at emo-detox.com when that comes out. Like I said, it’s not ready until April 2022. Highly recommended. There’ll be a free webinar and masterclass as well that you can sign up for at emo-detox.com.

Wendy Myers: So, our guest today is Siva Mohan. So, Siva’s a big picture person. She’s an integrationist and a pattern seer, and as a UN Social Affairs Officer and working globally with private clients for over a decade, Dr. Siva realized that even educated, active people are missing the basics of wellness. So, across cultures and continents, people are leading lives set up for chronic disease and discontentment. Siva’s mission is to teach people to feel again, to be able to hear what their bodies and hearts are guiding them to shift. With an MD and a background in behavioral change in education, Siva presents an empowering East-West, mind-body version of Ayurveda, and she guides her audience to build self-awareness, emotional wellness, and clean life energetics. Her book, courses and content can be found at ayurvedabysiva.com. Siva, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’m so glad to have you on because I’ve actually been wanting to do a podcast on Ayurveda for a really long time but, and I just never really had met someone, maybe besides Deepak Chopra or someone that really knew what they were talking about in regards to it. And so, you’re a psychiatrist by training, and so why were you drawn to Ayurveda and incorporating it, you know, when you see clients in, in your practice?

Dr. Siva Mohan: Yeah, that’s such a great question because really, Western medicine, I chose psychiatry within that because it was the subspecialty that allowed me to take into account a bit of what’s happening in people’s lives, right, and to look a little bit at like, why are they with the situation that they have, right? Those two key things like, why is what’s going on, going on, and how can we really heal it, were always interesting to me. So, that’s why I went into psych, but as you know, psych is really just glorified pill pushing. And, that got old after a while, and I felt like I wasn’t healing anybody.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Really, right around the same time, I started having all kinds of serious medical issues, had Hashimoto thyroiditis, I had chronic eczema, I had celiac, nodulocystic acne, all kinds of stuff going on in my body that I wasn’t getting any answers for, and Western medicine was giving me a lot of like, well, okay, let’s just suppress your immune system for the rest of your life with a lot of side effects. And so, on the personal note, sort of simultaneously, I started exploring natural healing options, right? You know, Ayurveda is so much more than just a natural healing approach, which is probably one of the most exciting things for me to share with your audience, right, because I think a lot of them are where I was, where we’re looking for something’s not feeling good, and Western medicine is not giving me answers, and I really want to get to some of the root causes of why I’m here and or look at the bigger picture and truly shift this or truly heal it, not just palliate the symptom, right?

Dr. Siva Mohan: So, I found my way into Ayurveda because of, yes, their natural approaches, but honestly, the natural approaches are never going to be as like, bam!, as the drugs. Let’s face it, right? So, I could put creams on my eczema or my acne or take herbs for my celiac, but it wasn’t as instant of a change, right? So, when we go natural, it really, really is about lifestyle, you know, It’s like you can do NES, you can do all kinds of bioenergetics, you can take all kinds of great supplements, we can do the coffee enemas. These are good things, but ultimately, it’s not like we want to be going to eat a McDonald’s and then come back and just try to save that with a coffee enema, right? There’s a lifestyle that goes with it.

Dr. Siva Mohan: What I found in Ayurveda, which was so amazing for me was, whoa, this is not just like some herbs and potions here, like, this is really an awareness that we build of the energetics of our lives and how those energetics are affecting us, and of the energetic patterns that we’re witnessing in our bodies and our minds. So, there’s the connection between the mind-body that is drawn out, but there’s also drawn out the connection between our being and our lives, and that, I had never seen, you know, I think it was a glimmer of that in what drew me to psych, but I’d never really seen that before. You can go to TCM or you can go to a chiro, you go to wherever, and they diagnose you. They practice on you, and nothing that was truly, I’m genuinely building an awareness and the ability to see these patterns in a way that is shifting the way that I make choices, right?

Dr. Siva Mohan: So, for me, I define Ayurveda almost as an empowerment process because if you know how to make any given choice in a way that is best for you, at any given time because we’re changing, what is best for us is always changing, right, that’s empowerment. So, I feel like Ayurveda is not just the little potions and stuff that I was seeking in the beginning, but it led me to this whole beautiful journey of a lifestyle, and an awareness and an empowerment.

Wendy Myers: So, you make some great potions. I’ve been to your house, you live in Mexico along from where I do, and I’ve had some amazing teas and other herbal potions you put together, but you know, there’s so much wisdom in Ayurveda,  it’s been around for thousands of years, and its, you know, there’s a lot of, you know, history behind it, and accuracy in these traditions that have been passed down for thousands of years.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really important to note, right? Like, I also have a master’s in public health and my background in epidemiology, and what I really learned is, don’t trust a randomized clinical trial. You know, what we can do to maneuver the statistical value of things and how we choose to study them and capture the data all plays into everything. And with Ayurveda, you’ve got thousands of years of observational study, right? So, when we try to replicate that, I’m taking the whole plant of turmeric, which has a spirit and has all kinds of synergistic components that we’re not really sure how they support the, one of the main active ingredients, curcumin, right? So, if I then just try to isolate curcumin and give it to a rat and document the effects,like, I’m not even scratching the surface of what’s possible when I’m really bringing my being in harmony with all of the gifts and healing potency that’s within that plant. So, two points there, you know, one is that we just can’t replicate it, or we’re not doing a very good job, and two, I would take thousands of years of observation any day over randomized clinical trials.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I like you pointed that, that you pointed that out, that you’re feeding a rat some of the, you know, curcuminoid. It’s just not the same thing. And so, well, let’s talk about Ayurveda. So, what is Ayurveda  and what are some Ayurvedic basics and principles?

Dr. Siva Mohan: Yes, so, a lot of times, when you come into intro to Ayurveda stuff, we’re coming at it through the food industry, right? So, there’s all kinds of teas, and supplements, and things like that that are being popularized, and then we’re coming at it through the spa industry because there’s all kinds of like, treatments and skincare lines and things like that. So, those were the two biggest feeders driving people to hear about Ayurveda and what is it, you know, cleanses and spa treatments. So, when you go into it and you Google search it, you get this kind of like, it’s the 5,000 year old science of life, what does that mean exactly?And, when you search enough, you’re going to get a lot of like, dual dosha quiz type yourself, constitutional types, you know, and all of that, in my opinion, is really just a bunch of mass marketing BS because ultimately like, the goal of all of that stuff is type yourself, so you can be excited about buying this product that I’m telling you is, you know, type yourself, live this way. Type yourself, do this yoga. Type yourself, eat this, or et cetera, et cetera, and it just doesn’t work like that.

Dr. Siva Mohan: The basics, if I were to really like, try to narrow it down into like, a most distilled version for someone coming at it totally new, I would define Ayurveda as an energy mapping system. So, what are we mapping the energetics of? Well, as I alluded to earlier, we’re looking at the energetics of, what’s happening in my digestive system? What’s happening in my routine? What’s happening in my emotional patterns? What’s happening in my life? In my relationship? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can look at the energetics of everything, because verything is energy, and we’re essentially just a big energy ball moving through different energetic containers, and It’s really quite easy once you get the hang of it, right?

Dr. Siva Mohan: So, in Ayurveda, we’re mapping energetic patterns, and we’re understanding which ones are not serving us or imbalancing or heading us towards disease. And we’re countering those with different tools and practices to try to shift the patterns in observable, documentable, repeatable ways, right? And then, you see the difference in the experience of the pattern, your digestion changes, your sleep changes, your relationship changes, et cetera, right? So, it’s like this, the actual practice of it, and some basics. We do have this concept of a constitution, and this is the big deviation from all of the Eastern medicines versus the more allopathic “modern medicines,” that concept that, okay, we’re all a slightly unique expression of energetics, right? And so, what a cough may be in me, may be different than why you have a cough and even the nature of the cough. dry hacking versus wet productive, for example, we consider all these things.

Dr. Siva Mohan: In the Western, more allopathic sides of things, it’s a cough, is a cough, is a cough. There are five reasons that you can have cough, everyone that comes in with cough is treated the same because we’re all Homosapiens, and so it’s a very simple sort of like, DSM diagnostic tree that a monkey could do with the DSM app, right? So, then it’s like, well, we’ve taken the part of customizing and sensing SimBiology and really understanding what is the pattern and how do we best counter that.

Dr. Siva Mohan: It’s kind of like, left medicine these days, but it’s still very much the basis of Ayurveda. So, understanding your constitution is more of like,you know, what’s your color, right? Like, you were created a certain way, mom and dad’s gametes came together and created you. And like, there is a categorization system for color, there’s billions of expressions of color, It’s just energy, right, but I still have like, “Oh, this is the red family and the pink family and the orange family.” We start to categorize it, and we bring it all the way down to three primary colors, right? It’s very rare to have just pure red, blue or green, or yellow. Sorry. It’s almost always some combination thereof.

Dr. Siva Mohan: And just like that, in Ayurveda, we take the billions of expressions of energy that are possible, and we start to categorize them, and we can distill it down into three major sort of primal energies just like we have the primal colors that everything is sort of infused with, right? So, the categorization system, I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung up on that, I think people make too big of a deal about it. It’s just most important to understand, we’re looking at energy, we’re looking at patterns. Why are we looking at patterns? Because we want to shift them. Why do we want to shift them? So, we can feel damn good in life. Simple, right?

Dr. Siva Mohan: And the energy categorization, it’s like a skill that you learn over time and, that is what it is. Your constitution now, like sort of, how you were made, that determines your core physical features, color of your eyes, how tall you are, blah, blah, blah. It’s more the genetic component, if you will, right? It’s not as important, in my opinion, like in my book and in my courses and things like that. I’m really teaching people to move away from that traditional Ayurvedic constitutional model because life didn’t change for people very much 5,000 years ago, you lived and died in the same place, the same people, in the same climate, eating the same things. So, the background noise and change was very low, and so, obviously, how you were made had much bigger relevance to what patterns you’re suffering from and that you want to heal from. Whereas now, there’s nobody that has,you know, lived and died in the same place, with the same people, in the same climate, doing the same thing, eating the same foods. Everything’s changing all the time.

Dr. Siva Mohan: And so, there’s this concept we have in Ayurveda called, your current state, and that’s an understanding of what are all the current energetics and patterns that your body, your mind, your emotional body are experiencing. That’s where I go. If I want to heal anything that’s happening with you today, it has to be based on where you are today, not how you were made, right? So, a diet change, an herbal recommendation, a routine shift, a conversation that needs to be had with a special someone, all those things will be based on;  What are you going through today? Where are you at today? And what do you need to feel good today? And so, these are the major, I think, facets of Ayurveda is understanding that we’re energy mapping and pattern shifting. There is this concept of constitution, I don’t think it’s as important these days as really taking a look at your current state.

Wendy Myers: Okay, great. And then, what about Ayurvedic cleanses? So, there’s a lot of talk about that when you go to spas, and so what are some of the different approaches and ideations that Ayurveda takes when it comes to, you know, cleansing and detoxing the body?

Dr. Siva Mohan: Yes, that’s such a good question. So, I think where Ayurveda really shines in cleansing is this one key feature we never, ever, ever, ever cleanse without also rejuvenating. So, it’s always like, viewed that cleansing is a stripping down, clearing away of accumulation, clearing out of things, and that whenever we pump out, clear out, strip away, we always replenish afterwards. And that, I think, is really missing in a lot of the Western cleansing practices, so that would be like the hallmark feature that I think makes Ayurveda unique in that, but also in how ridiculously comprehensive it is.

Dr. Siva Mohan: So, just to give you an idea, Panchakarma is sort of the classic famous Ayurvedic cleansing protocol. You would do this for three weeks, you would go to a Panchakarma center, they make all your food in accordance with the energetics we want to shift, they make all your herbal preparations in accordance with the energetics you want to shift. You’re away from all your family, your work, your responsibilities, so you’re in truly a new neutral, healthy, energetic container. And then, they begin the practices, and they use every single way that the body has to release toxins so that you’re sweating, you’re throwing up, you’re getting enemas, you’re getting herbal steams, you’re getting massaged with oils, you know, It’s like the whole shebang.

Wendy Myers: You know, I want to go there to throw up there.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Totally, It’s like, you know, you go to ayahuasca purge, right?

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I know.

Dr. Siva Mohan: But it’s like, well, if you want to clear stuff from the upper GI and the lungs, the best way is actually upward because that’s what you naturally have access to clear mucus, right? It’s not going to be through your colon, which is really more lower GI and like, the other abdominal distress. So, it’s super fascinating,and you know, you use your sweat glands, they hit your eyes. Like literally, there is not a part of you that is like, not attended to in the cleansing process. The idea is that you come out in those three weeks, and you sort of hit a reset on all of your body tissue systems, they’ve been wrung out and,you know, like rebooted.

Wendy Myers: So, where can you do one of these three-week cleanses?

Dr. Siva Mohan: Yeah, well, I mean, personally speaking, I would never do this anywhere but India and in like, a place that had like, generational practitioners because you can go get Panchakarma certified in places in California over a freaking weekend.

Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Dr. Siva Mohan: No. And then, you know, again, the whole Western marketing thing, it’s like, “Oh, come do a PK treatment with me for three days or two days.” And like, It’s really interesting because if you’re going to go deep and people have a lot of toxins, you’re just going to bring up a lot of stuff in three days, and it’s not enough, you know, to get past sort of like, your phase one detox, right? Like they need a lot longer. So, this is where I think like, your supplements I’d love taking as well, and I think doing things like the coffee enemas or I’m wearing my Harmoni Pendant, you know,  just all these other little things that we can do that are more adapted for the fact you’re still going through all the energetics of your home life and your work life, and okay, you know, yes, you can do a certain amount, but you don’t go really deep in those settings, like, you need to go away and be in good hands for those kinds of things. I would really say in India.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Kerala is ,sort of, like the birthplace of Ayurveda. And so, there are a ton of really like, well established, longstanding Panchakarma centers in the south of India. There’s also some in the north of India, and there’s also a few people who have,you know, established something solid in like New Zealand or Hawaii, but it’s a little bit more rare, but if you want to do something that’s more let me get a taste of Ayurveda cleansing, but I don’t have a whole three weeks, right, then, the lighter version that we would do, for example, is, I don’t know if you’ve heard of kachri Have you heard of the kachri superfood?

Wendy Myers: I have, yes.

Dr. Siva Mohan: So, right now, there’s a lot of hubbub about that because in Ayurveda now, the energetics of springtime are all about accumulation and congestion, stagnation in the body, right? So, we want to counter that and usually with sort of, releasing what’s not serving us, clearing away accumulations, clearing away blockages, stimulating circulation, and getting things moving that are blocked. So, kachri as a, sort of, mono or a hybrid diet with veggies and juice, is a very popular sort of thing. And I, myself, I’m going to do one next week. That’s like, juice, khichri, maybe some steamed veggies here and there, and then taking herbs alongside and then around like, day four or five, adding in the salt flush. And then, you can add in coffee enemas or oil enemas, after the coffee enemas, because we always do that replenishing, we add in the ghee orally after we do the oral salt flush.

Dr. Siva Mohan: So, it kind of goes like gentle, gentle, gentle, get through day three of your caffeine headaches and all of that stuff, you know. And then, as you hit day four and five, then we kick it up a notch because we already know what we’ve been feeding you for a few days and do a little bit stronger on the flushing out of things. Then, day six and seven, we’re already starting to replenish and bring back in healthy fats and oils in all the orifices.

Wendy Myers: I like that. I like the idea of replenishing, and that’s really, like you said, something that is missing from like Western detoxes, so to speak. So, what does Ayurveda as a lifestyle look like? You kind of touched on that. So, what are some other practices that you incorporate living an Ayurvedic lifestyle?

Dr. Siva Mohan: Yeah. So, I think like, I can best describe this as if I wake up in the morning, already, I know like, what’s my mindset. How am I feeling emotionally? How rested do I feel? How did I sleep last night? What does my tongue look like? How does my breath taste? How dry are my superficial tissues? What does my morning bowel movement look like? Do I have an appetite? How does my skin feel? How do my joints feel as I get out of bed? Already, I have so much feedback on the energetics that are happening with my body. So, already right there, I know how to adjust. Well, what am I going to eat today? Which herbs am I going to take today? What am I going to reschedule today? What kind of yoga practice or activity am I going to bring in today? What colors would be soothing for me to wear today? What other self-care practices would be a good fit for me today? You know, it’s like this.

Dr. Siva Mohan: So, it’s this sort of consistent ability to see where am I at and what do I need, right, and when we’re applying that on a day-to-day basis, it really helps guide all of our decisions. I kind of touched on that earlier. So, like, okay, should I take this extra event that just came in my lap? Or how should I adjust? Or, you know, should I cancel this? Or,you know, should I put down this supplement for a while? All these things are things that people just really don’t know.  And they’re, you know, so overwhelmed with all the information coming at them all the time. I think what’s missing is this concept of sensions. And sensions is this very sexy, beautiful word that just really means the ability to sense well what’s going on with you, you know, and that, to me, is the encapsulation of Ayurvedic lifestyle, is this very fluid assess and respond, like I’m feeling this, I’m noticing this, I’m getting this feedback. Okay,I know how to shift the energetics and what I’m choosing to bring in in my experience or my food or who I’m dating, et cetera.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love that because I think it’s so important to, you know, learn to listen to your own body and not just do things or do a diet just because you have an idea in your head, you’re supposed to push through this, or you have to do this. There’s a dogma that a lot of people kind of engage in when it comes to their diet and health and things like that, but first and foremost, you have to listen to your body, and I try to, you know, really get that message across to people I love, but thats, that’s really like kind of ingrained in Ayurveda.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Yeah, very much so, at least in the way that I teach it.

Wendy Myers: Yes, yes. Yeah, and you have..

Dr. Siva Mohan: I am like a rebel in the Ayurveda field so

Wendy Myers: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Just a disclaimer out there. You may not find these perspectives in your traditional Ayurveda studies.

Wendy Myers: Well, that’s good to know, we like that. We like the Mavericks and cutting edge in health. And so, you have a class right now too, don’t you? You have an online class people can take?

Dr. Siva Mohan: I do, I do, I have an amazing class. It’s hosted on the One Commune platform along with Deepak Chopra’s classes and Dr. Mark Hyman’s functional medicine classes. So, I think there’s just a wealth of information in health in their whole platform, but the course is called Living Well with Ayurveda. It’s really my best introduction, yet I’ve been teaching for 15 years now, and I’ve been teaching this intro concept, and each time, I’m like, reinventing it to be more accessible, more digestible, more applicable, right?  So, this is my best version yet.

Dr. Siva Mohan: It’s a 10 day course. The first five days, we go through all the Ayur basics and really teach people to be able to do that energetic pattern mapping and have them do it on themselves, and their bodies, and their emotional state and in what’s going on in few major areas of their lives. So, already, in the first five days, you’re like, “Whoa, okay like, I just looked at my entire experience of life and health in a really new way and got, hopefully a lot of great insight about it.” And then, in the last five days, it’s really more focused towards applying tools and practices to make the shifts that you just identified. And so, there’s a lot on, you know, digestive wellness, emotional wellness, sort of daily self-care practices and things that I think are just like your first line basics to really set the foundation for your wellness lifestyle.

Wendy Myers: I mean, you had 5,000 people on that, didn’t you?

Dr. Siva Mohan: I think we’re like 7,500 now.

Wendy Myers: Oh, wow. That’s amazing.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Yeah.

Wendy Myers: That’s unheard of.

Dr. Siva Mohan: I think people are hungry for this topic, like you said, Ayurveda is becoming a little bit of a buzzword, and no one really knows what it is. And once they realize what’s possible with it, nothing else offers us that. There is no other sort of holistic healing approach that offers us a way to be able to navigate our lives in a way that feels good and supports our health. There just isn’t one, so I think it’s amazing for that reason, and even, I just launched an app, waiting my Apple approval right now, but it’s already on the website and everything where, let’s say people do take the intro course and then they’re looking for, okay, well now, what? You know.

Dr. Siva Mohan: So, okay, let’s start with the three major pillars of wellness lifestyle, food, sex, sleep. When we say food, sex, sleep, it’s so much more than that. Food encompasses also your relationship with nourishing yourself, for example. Sex is all about the input outputs in your life and how much you actually really have in creative life force tank, and how inspired you are, how juicy you feel, for example, right? Sleep has to do also with how well you can regulate your nervous system and actually bring in rejuvenative practices as well, right? So, I created an app where it’s just all right there in your phone, the self check-ins, the reminders, the top things you need to know so yeah, this is a big, exciting time for bringing Ayurveda lifestyle to people.

Wendy Myers: I love it. So, what is the app going to be called? What’s the name of it for people?

Dr. Siva Mohan: Ayurveda by Siva.

Wendy Myers: Okay, great, It’s simple, simple enough. Yeah, and so, yeah. I encourage people to go check out that course on One Commune. Is it free, or is there a charge for it?

Dr. Siva Mohan: You know what? I would just direct everybody straight to my website because right there on the homepage, I have the links to my book to, some people like to read things and do charts on paper. The One Commune course and my app, all right there at the top of the homepage, and that way, you won’t have to search for anything.

Wendy Myers: Okay. Fantastic. So, your website is Ayurveda By Siva. And so, what are some of the more striking case studies on Ayurveda? So, give us some stories here.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Yeah. So, oh my God, there are just so many, but, you know, I think one that’s really relevant these days is an autoimmune sort of situation. So, a woman had rheumatoid arthritis, she had been taking the injections and I think at least four different immunosuppressants for 12 years.

Wendy Myers: Oh, God.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Just this super lovely lady, head of her company,you know,  in a marriage, wasn’t terrible, wasn’t amazing, and oh, my goodness, we just really, through a holistic process of looking at how she moves through her day and the energetics that she’s taking in, and those sort of core pillars of her life and really identifying where the greatest pinch points were, where the greatest points of not feeling good were, right, we shifted her marriage entirely. She shifted into an early retirement, but before even doing that, we worked together for, I think, about two years. She shifted her job dynamics entirely. She shifted her creative, sort of like, outside of work life and identity entirely. She got a lot more active.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Oh, my God girl, she got off of all four of the pills and cut down the injection so that she spread out her frequency to half the frequency. The toxic load that she reduced in her body, and then on top of it, like lost 40 pounds,you know, found happiness in her marriage and in her life again, I mean, it all goes together, right? So, with that autoimmune case, I just was really tickled with how quickly in two, you know, within two years, to be able to do that, like, the amount of suffering that we have saved her from for the rest of her life is huge.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Then, in terms of restoration of function, there was another case that was really striking to me. This was a 73-year-old woman who had hypothyroidism, and she was taking 150 micrograms of thyroid hormone. That’s high dose, like, you start people at 10-15.

Wendy Myers: That’s like 10 cups of coffee a day.

Dr. Siva Mohan: I mean, she came in with, “Oh, it’s genetic. Every woman in my family is on hypothyroid, We all have it.”And , you know, 50 years she’d been taking thyroid hormone. 50, right? So, obviously, we’re not, you know like, expecting a miracle here, but I really felt like I did see a miracle. And again, we had to look at her marriage, we had to look at her home life, we had to look at how she was handling her interactions with people, give and take, and her work, and we restructured a bunch of those things and her diet, et cetera. This woman went down to, in one and a half year, she went down to 25 micrograms.

Wendy Myers: Wow.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Wow. So, I mean, this one case in autoimmune, this other case in rejuvenative, again, there’s just so many cases I could share. There was a woman who couldn’t, went through 12 rounds of IUI. That’s intrauterine implantation, and then all of them failed. We got her pregnant within three months naturally.

Wendy Myers: Wow. It’s amazing.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Kid that have come in with Crohn’s disease, off all medications. That’s huge when you’re with a nine-year-old child, you know. Ayurveda’s amazing because it’s safe and effective for all ages, right? So, you don’t have to worry about drug side effects. You don’t have to worry that it’s not okay for a kid or someone who’s elderly. It’s just looking at the energetics and really addressing the root causes of what’s not feeling good in people’s lives and then supporting them. In these cases that I’m giving you, these are all ones that have big Western diagnoses. These aren’t even just the people that come in unsatisfied in life or feeling like they’re out of balance but without a big diagnosis. You know what I mean? And so, these ones are striking for me because imagine what’s possible, right?

Dr. Siva Mohan: And so, for me, I’m really putting out there that modern medicine is not allopathic medicine. Like, to me, modern medicine, what’s modern? What’s modern is that we have unparalleled access to all of these different modalities and sometimes, overwhelming access. We don’t know where to start, right? So like , that Ayurveda gives us this common platform to be able to see the effects of everything. I can use any tool and understand anything in the terms of energetics. And so, I can bring together what’s happening in the chiropractor, or my supplements, or my therapist, all from that same platform of energetics that puts me in the driver’s seat of what I’m choosing in my health, right?

Dr. Siva Mohan: So, with these cases, I feel like we were really practicing modern medicine finally because we were actually curating which approaches and tools to customize ,what is best for that person in their healing process, and some of those were natural, and some of those were allopathic, but the customization is what I’m defining as modern medicine.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that it’s amazing that you’re an MD, and you can, you know, you know all the allopathic ways to address an issue and also come for the natural side and combine the best of both worlds, as we don’t want to discount all of the miracles and great, like, advances in modern medicine, but we want to complement those as well with natural approaches. Can you talk about the combination of how Ayurveda and even functional medicine complement each other?

Dr. Siva Mohan: Yes. So, you know, I was just talking about this on a podcast because functional medicine, I think, is super powerful. Disclaimer, I don’t maintain a license to practice Western medicine anymore because everything that I do would be so against the medical board. I’d be in big trouble. So, literally, we made these gains with me just leading the Ayurveda, empowering them with knowledge and information to then take back to their doctors. And they were requesting their own diagnoses like,you know, I would like to do labs and check this again, da, da, da. And their doctors were managing all of that. And I think that’s worth hearing for people so that they understand, like, you don’t need someone who has both sides necessarily to be able to achieve beautiful effects like this, right?

Dr. Siva Mohan: But functional medicine,you know, I was talking to the host of the podcast, and he had his levels monitor on and, you know,  was talking to me about his Fitbit and how he’s monitoring all these different things, and he’s looking at the dopamine, and the NAD+, and the blood sugar levels and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he asked me, like, do you think, like, the technology, what do you think of the technology? It’s interesting because I also recently went and got all my genetic testing done and, you know, went to a functional doctor that’s very well reputed in LA and did that. He came out with a list of like, here’s 20 supplements to take every day. It just felt like the sensions, that thing I was talking about is completely missing there,you know. You can track data all day long, but that’s knowledge, and that doesn’t necessarily give you awareness of what to change in your life, right?

Dr. Siva Mohan: And so, I feel like Ayurveda is the missing piece in cultivating that sensions that we can then,you know, take the knowledge and the data that we get from the incredible cool stuff going on in functional medicine and know, how and what to apply for us because it’s not sustainable. You’ll be doing how many IVs all the time and how many pills will you be taking all day, or like, monitoring all this data? It gets exhausting. It’s just like,problem to fix.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. I did that for years, I took a cup of supplements, like, every meal, I think they’re a huge pile. You want to take a few things, you know, per day and whatnot, but yeah, it can get out of control really quickly.

Dr. Siva Mohan: Yeah, like, better to know like, okay, I went drinking last night. I need charcoal or, oh, I can feel this, this and this in my body. Today, I really should reach for this, and kind of, be able to know what shift you’re creating with the tools that you’re creating? and why you want that shift? And  that “why”, is sensions, and I think Ayurveda helps to bring that.

Wendy Myers: So, where should people start if they want to start learning about Ayurvedic lifestyle? Where do you recommend they begin?

Dr. Siva Mohan: I think that really, my book and the course I created that we just chatted about are such amazing, amazing, amazing places to start. They were made for exactly that audience. So, depending on if you’re somebody that really prefers a book and likes to highlight things, and write, and learn through that teaching method, the book is great. If you’re someone who really appreciates high quality video and interactive content in that way, there is also a workbook that goes with the course. Those both are phenomenal places to start.

Wendy Myers: Well, fantastic. So, if someone wants to work with you personally, they want to, you know, engage with you and learn more about Ayurveda personally or learn more about your work, where do they find you?

Dr. Siva Mohan: So, yes, on ayurvedabysiva.com, you can also book a session right there in my calendar.

Wendy Myers: Okay, fantastic. Was there anything that we’ve left out of this conversation or anything, any kind of last parting words for the audience?

Dr. Siva Mohan: Let’s see, maybe the only thing that we didn’t talk about is the fact that as you and I have been dabbling in ascension, I think that Ayurveda also is really a beautiful path to spiritual growth, because if you think about it, if you grow your awareness and then you apply that awareness, that is the definition of spiritual growth in the Vedas, at least, right? And so, all practices that we do to grow our awareness, whether they’re subtle, like, in ascension, or listening to meditation ,or doing all these different practices that we have in yoga, et cetera, everything that allows us to cultivate that awareness is a first step, but then everything that allows us to really apply that awareness more and more in our lives, does increase our consciousness, right? So, I think that that’s the only thing that maybe we didn’t celebrate about Ayurveda.

Wendy Myers: Yes ,and I love that, because I think it’s a very important part of health and happiness is to cultivate a spiritual practice, whatever that looks like for you. It’s incredibly important and something that , I mean, for me, personally, I left for the wayside for many, many years, and now, I’ve revisited that, and I couldn’t be happier. Couldn’t be happier with my relationship with “source”.

Dr. Siva Mohan: So much more free of supplements and all of that micromanaging of health, right?

Wendy Myers: Yes, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, Siva, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and everyone, thanks for tuning in to the Myers Detox Podcast every week. It’s just such a pleasure and a joy for me to bring all the experts from around the world to give you ideas and tips on how to upgrade your life because you deserve to feel good, you deserve to wake up feeling joy, and I want to help you get to that point as quickly as possible. So, thanks for tuning in. I’m Wendy Myers, and you can find me on myersdetox.com. I’ll talk to you next week.