That holistic understanding of health shaped how I came to Ayurveda. The premise I was already working from, that the physical, emotional, and psychological are not separate realms but different expressions of the same thing, meant I was primed for an approach that treats them that way. Work on any one of them and something shifts. Work across several at once and reality starts to move in ways that feel qualitatively different.

I had tried a lot of diets and approaches over the years and kept hitting the same wall. What was generally considered healthy did not seem to improve my symptoms long-term. Several years without sugar, anti-inflammatory diets, careful supplementation. If I kept everything strict I would feel better, but it treated symptoms without touching anything underneath. The root cause remained a mystery.

I had tried the contradictions too: more meat, less meat, more grains, less grains, eating more often, eating less. I knew the food pyramid. I had read the research. None of it resolved anything lasting.

This is when Ayurveda, and specifically Jess, were recommended to me.

What Jess clarified almost immediately was something that should have been obvious but apparently wasn’t: it is about the individual. There is no universal diet, no single list of healthy habits that applies to everyone. Going through what I was eating, she told me to cut some foods that are widely considered healthy. Simply not right for me, at this stage, in this body.

That individualised approach did something the others hadn’t. It acknowledged my own internal, subjective sense of my reality rather than asking me to override it with general principles. It offered to go as deeply into my physical experience as I had gone into my psyche and soul through other modalities, mostly meditation, circling, and deep inquiry. The depth of what has been revealed through that combination is unlike anything I have experienced before.

What the Body Started Showing Me

Working with Ayurveda began sharpening my interoception in ways I had not anticipated. I started sensing my subtle freeze and fight-or-flight states more clearly, noticing how they seemed to pause my digestive process. I became aware of how insensitive I had been to how certain foods actually affected me, how much I had been numbing or ignoring signals that were there all along.

The medicinal formulations Jess prescribed seemed to support a return toward balance, but they also did something else: they sensitised me significantly. I became much more reactive to food than I had been before. In some cases intensely so. Eggs, milk, sweet potatoes could produce harsh headaches, nausea, intense sweating, and in some cases hallucinations. This sounds unpleasant, and in the moment it was. But it also did something very immediate and clear: it showed me what my body actually wanted and what it didn’t, with feedback so direct and strong that it became easy, almost natural, to only want to eat what felt genuinely good.

The sugar craving is the clearest example. I had probably had chocolate most days of my life and a persistent craving for it at all times. That craving is gone. It has taken almost no willpower. Over three months I have had chocolate once, not through discipline but because the wanting simply isn’t there in the same way. I still choose treats sometimes, but I choose them differently, from a different place. The old pattern of eating something that made me feel bad and continuing to eat it anyway is no longer something I do.

My biggest integration from Ayurveda so far is this: it seems to direct me toward the healthy balance that is inherent to my own unique body and being. I am relearning what I need and what to stay away from. None of it involves pushing through, forcing, or avoiding. It is about rebuilding, sensing, learning. I have learned what is soothing, strengthening, and healing for me specifically. I seem to naturally move away from what throws me off balance, inflames me, or crashes me. That is a significant shift in orientation. Psychological and physical healing seem to move through the same door, and if I am honest, so does anything I would call spiritual.

I seem able now to look at food and sense how it will feel in my body before I eat it. That makes choosing food genuinely enjoyable rather than a minefield of conflicting information.

What Is Shifting

Ayurveda has addressed symptoms I have carried since childhood: a strange metallic taste in my mouth, joint pain, swollen lymph nodes. My liver blood values have improved. I am six months into a detox process that Jess has mapped out over a longer arc, and I cannot yet fully speak to how much of the root cause is being addressed. That assessment is still ahead. But I feel significantly better than I did when I started, and that is not nothing after twenty-odd years of looking.

What continues to astonish me is how much this process has deepened my body awareness. I can sense my organs and intestines more, their inflammation, their tension, in ways I could not before. I can at times feel my own skeleton and bones more distinctly. These are early days. But the direction is clear, and I look forward to developing that sense of my interior with more nuance over time.

I am describing this process as one of the biggest gifts of my life. I genuinely did not think some of this could get this good.

A personal recommendation

There are also challenges and things to watch out for in this ayurveda process but I am all in all very grateful and have described this process as one of the biggest gifts in my life. The approach that Jess Vellela (www.ayu.academy) - my ayurveda doctor - offers is not just any ayurveda approach and I can actually only speak for her way of working. I would immensely recommend anyone to work with Jess who has mysterious or chronic health challenges or wants to build a strong physical balance in their life.

She is very knowledgeable, attuned, effective and offers guidance and hope to people in situations who have lost all hope in treatments with other practitioners and health systems. She offers her work online available for wherever you are.

I want to write more about my process since I find it incredibly insightful

I would love to hear what you think about this and what gets touched in you.

The past weeks I have found myself spending hours writing. It feels like being asked to write about the health journey I have been on for the past 6 months. Asked by whom? I dont know - maybe the process itself. It feels honestly like its been too impactful to not share about it.

The past six months I started going into Ayurveda with the guidance of Jess Vellela, an ayurveda doctor, and this seems to become one of the biggest gifts that I get to experience in my life.

I will write more about the insights I am making in the intersection of healing physical health through ayurveda and the depth of my own psyche and unconscious that get illuminated through my therapeutical, embodiment and contemplative practices.

I have not shared this publicly about my health here before and feel curious and also a bit shy about how it will be perceived. Please let me know.

#1 Something Has Always Been Off

I have a long history of feeling like something in my body was not quite working. Not dramatically. Just off. A pervading sense of being out of balance that has accompanied me for most of my life.

I became conscious of my sugar addiction at six. Even at that age I could notice how much I was suddenly oriented toward it and how it altered my inner state. Around the same time I was already seeing doctors for pain and bad posture because my hips were positioned in a way that made one leg effectively longer than the other. I ground my teeth loudly in my sleep from at least age four. From seven onwards I kept asking my mother why my fingers hurt, and we did my first arthritis test when I was ten.

Eleven more years passed. Four more arthritis tests. The finger pain persisted until last year.

When I was thirteen years old something shifted more dramatically. After a minor riding accident I started experiencing daily strong back pain, migraines, and very high inflammation markers in my blood. Doctors looked for causes for several years. They found minor ones; I think they always find minor ones if they look long enough. But I don’t believe any of those were actually central. Eventually they gave up and stopped what had been fairly scattered treatment anyway.

I am not going into all the details. That is not my point here. My point is to give you a sense of how my internal experience has long been shaped by a prevailing sense of being out of balance and its physical manifestation.

The Question I Kept Asking

For a long time I was genuinely unsure which of two things to believe: that there was a significant physical root cause, or that my perception was creating the sense of imbalance and pain through psychological and emotional processes. I wanted to know which one to focus on.

When I leaned into the physical cause I kept looking for pain and found myself getting more lost in it. If you look for pain, you find more pain. I also intuitively did not want to identify with the sickness. As a teenager I could sense that doing so might keep me locked to it.

Over the years I learned to work with perception. I could stop constantly focusing on the pain, and I could learn to feel pain without suffering, because those two are not the same. That was genuinely useful.

But even after that shift the sense that there was a physical reality that was simply not quite right persisted. Following that thread, rather than dismissing it, led me to insights that made a real difference to my quality of life. Some of these were counterintuitive to common knowledge, which is why the presence of good teachers and practitioners became significant.

What I Had To Unlearn

Stretching is not necessarily good. It is easy to push too hard, and for people with hypermobility, which I learned I had in 2024, stretching can be quite harmful. I had been spending an hour a day stretching because it was supposedly good for me. I was told to stop almost all of it.

The attitude that I just needed more discipline or motivation to exercise was also wrong for me. That framing, subtle as it was, meant I always pushed myself to run more, do more, work more. Fatigue became the body’s way of taking the power away from me to push any further. This is, I think, one of the roots of chronic fatigue and burnout: not weakness, but a system that has learned the only way to get rest is to collapse.

Instead of pushing, I had to learn to move without pushing. In practice that meant running slowly for one minute and then stopping. Allowing myself to be. In the first months of this it was genuinely difficult to stop rather than continue past my resources. My body had been unsafe for a long time because I had such a long history of overriding tiredness that I could no longer feel the signals of tiredness at all. Once my body trusted that I would actually respect its limits and allow rest, it relaxed. More resources emerged. On most days I could run longer; on some days I simply did not feel like it, and I had to respect that too.

When I Say “My Body,” I Mean Me

When I say “my body” I actually mean myself. When I talk about my health, my sickness, my symptoms, I mean me. I am doing all of that. I am creating all of that.

I don’t hold this as religious truth. But I find it enormously useful to look for the truth in it because it opens up more exploration of the unconscious. Usually we say “it’s just a cold” and stop there. Going deeper into how I was creating my symptoms helped me see that I was using sickness as permission to rest, to stop. It felt better to simply learn to allow myself those things without needing to get sick first.

As I learned that, the symptoms started to fade. It is simply nicer to rest because you want or need to, not because you are ill.

This also made me aware of how much I had pushed past my body’s limits even as a child. That pattern was probably learned partly from the collective shadow of overworking, of placing work above health. Strong in German culture, but not only there. As I rested more, my exhaustion signals slowly started to return. The body begins communicating again once it trusts you will actually listen.

The Body Mirrors the Psyche

Hypermobility, as I understand it, is a genetic phenomenon where different parts of the body, fascia, muscle, joints, intestines, skin, have learned to extend past their natural limits. Joints move into a range where they strain and potentially damage surrounding tissue. The body registers this as danger, and muscles start to tense up chronically to compensate, trying to hold joints in place and prevent dislocation.

What struck me is how clearly the physical phenomenon describes a psychological one. Not feeling your limits. Pushing past them until the system registers danger and starts to contract. Extending yourself beyond what is actually available. Not feeling your own signals or edges. Locating your awareness outside yourself rather than inside.

That is my psyche, quite precisely. I learned to accommodate, to be flexible and adaptable, to not feel my own needs or limits, to hold tension below the surface to desperately keep myself together while appearing loose and easy.

Physical phenomenon and psychological phenomenon are, at some level, the same thing. The body is a manifestation of both conscious and unconscious life. We can push emotions and inner experience away, but we are only pushing them into the unconscious, where they will surface wherever we have least control, because control was always an illusion anyway. The unconscious manifests through symptoms, tensions, and sicknesses we are creating without knowing it.

Why This Matters for Healing

This becomes especially significant in something like an Ayurvedic healing protocol. In my experience you cannot heal physically without also working with your emotions, your psyche, your unconscious. These are not separate tracks. But when you work with both together, things can shift enormously.

Reflections I have found useful in my own journey, and in work with clients:

What am I gaining from this symptom, this tension, this sickness? Why am I creating it? What need is it fulfilling? Is there a better way to meet that need?

This is not a radical approach; others have illuminated it before. But I have not seen it mapped through the particular lens I am working with here. Which is why I wanted to write it down.