#2 Going Deeper - the first 6 months with ayurveda

The second essay in a series of essays about my body, my health and ultimately myself

#2 Going Deeper

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.