The Energy Fix Episode 132 - FINAL.mp3
2025-08-05
Transcript
0:00:13 Tansy Rodgers: Welcome back to the Energy Fix, a podcast dedicated to help you balance your energetic body by diving deep into the sweet world of all things health and spirituality. My name’s Tansy and and I’m an intuitive crystal Reiki energy healer, energetic nutrition and holistic health practitioner, and a crystal jewelry designer. It’s time to talk all things energy. Let’s dive in. There’s something your body knows that your mind may have forgotten.
0:00:45 Tansy Rodgers: It’s kind of like that subtle tug when the seasons start to shift. Or maybe when you start craving for warmth just when the wind starts to turn. Or maybe that slowing that happens not from laziness or feeling completely overwhelmed, but from rhythm, from wisdom, from remembering how nature moves and how we’re just. We’re not separate from it. But so often we end up overriding that knowing. And you start to force productivity in this stillness, in that stillness of winter, in that still stillness of the lull in your life.
0:01:24 Tansy Rodgers: We start to chase detoxes in the heart of summertime, when the body’s not meant to detox. We start to fight fatigue with caffeine and silence with noise. And I mean, how many times do you roll out of bed and the first thing you do is grab that cup of coffee? Maybe you turn on your Instagram or your other social media platforms, maybe it’s the news. What if the reason that you felt off is because you were out of rhythm, not necessarily because there’s anything else going on, simply you’re out of rhythm.
0:02:07 Tansy Rodgers: And so today’s conversation is going to really be coming home to that concept. We’re going to be coming home to the fact that there is a rhythm that we naturally step into as human beings that we are wired to and that to be at our at most optimal health, connecting in, aligning with those rhythms is so critical. We’re going to be talking all about that in today’s conversation. Now before we dive in, I just want to give you a few updates as there is so many, so much stuff that’s been going on.
0:02:41 Tansy Rodgers: But things are going to be really ramping up as we get into the mid of August and towards September. So August 8th, that is this Friday. If you are listening to this in real time, I have the finale of the Crystals series right here on the Energy Fix podcast. So if you haven’t tuned in at all yet, make sure you get on over there. I am covering all of the seven chakras, talking about the details in regards to how the chakra feels, when it is aligned or when it’s feeling off and what kind of crystals to use. But it doesn’t just stop there. I really dive into practicality, tactics, rituals, helping you to embody and hone into that chakra or to those crystals.
0:03:28 Tansy Rodgers: And so it’s definitely a great series if you are interested in learning about that or connecting those two. August 9th and 10th that is coming up again. If you’re listening to this in real time, that is this coming soon. Saturday and Sunday I’m going to be at the New Visions Holistic Expo in York, Pennsylvania with my healing jewelry and intuitive tools. So come on out, explore and say hi and meet me and let me know that you listen to the podcast and that’s where you heard about this. That is my favorite way to meet people. I love connecting with you, the listener and getting to just getting to know you and who you are. I talk so much about what’s going on in my world over here, but I really want to hear about you.
0:04:13 Tansy Rodgers: So come out and visit me if you are local or you’re in the area. On August 14th is another monthly Sound and Crystal Reiki group session over at Shavia Healing Arts in Lidditz, Pennsylvania. If you have not experienced one of those, definitely want to come on out and check that out. If you are local or in the area. These are in person sessions so we don’t hold them virtually. You have to be actually here.
0:04:39 Tansy Rodgers: However, if you are and you haven’t experienced them or it’s been a while, why don’t you reach on out and sign on up and grab a spot. They’re so deeply restorative. It is a restorative evening of vibration and recalibration and energetic release and just getting you back into that balance again. And finally on August 28th is another enlightened day at Reiki by Ricky’s in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I have four spots left for either a one on one healing or crystal tune up sess.
0:05:14 Tansy Rodgers: If you’re feeling like your body just needs a reset, these sessions are a.
0:05:18 Tansy Rodgers: Great way to do that.
0:05:19 Tansy Rodgers: And remember, if this podcast has stirred something in you, if it’s made you feel seen or inspired, I would be so grateful if you would subscribe, leave a review or share it out with someone who really needs it. That ripple is how we grow and your support means the world to me. And as a thank you for helping this podcast grow, if you head on down into the show notes, there is a promo of 15% off either some jewelry products or some services.
0:05:53 Tansy Rodgers: You can find out all the details by going down there and checking that out. And again, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for listening. This podcast is one of my absolute favorite things that I do, and it means the world to me to have the support and get the feedback and just connect in with you each and every week. Now onto today’s guest. I am sitting down with Dr. John Duyard, one of the most trusted voices in the field of Ayurveda, longevity and natural health.
0:06:31 Tansy Rodgers: With 40 plus years of experience, Dr. John is the founder of Life Spa, host of the Ayurveda meets Modern Science podcast, and he’s the author of seven groundbreaking books including Eat Wheat and the Three Season Diet. He’s helped over 100,000 patients reclaim their health by blending the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda with modern science. And in this conversation today, he brings that brilliance and that calm confidence to speak on topics like what seasonal eating actually means and how it’s tied to longevity. We’re going to be talking why nose breathing could be the most underestimated wellness tool.
0:07:14 Tansy Rodgers: And he’s going to be diving deep into how aligning with the rhythms of nature can actually heal the nervous system. This episode is both science backed and soul forward, and I can’t wait for you to hear it. All right, let’s get into this episode. Let’s hear the inspirational words and wisdom from Dr. John. Let’s dive in.
0:07:43 Tansy Rodgers: Welcome to the Energy Fix. Dr. John, thank you so much for being here today.
0:07:48 Dr. John Douillard: Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
0:07:51 Tansy Rodgers: Dr. John, I love getting to know you as a human, getting to know you, where you’re at, this place, this time in your life. So I would love to know, first off, do you have a word or a phrase that you’re really connecting to right now in the season of your life?
0:08:12 Dr. John Douillard: Yeah. I’m constantly thinking about one of my favorite phrases, which is do less and accomplish more. And then if you take that a little bit further, which is a little bit crazy, there is another phrase, these are Vedic phrases actually to do nothing and accomplish everything. In other words, that we find ourselves engaged in so much over stimulating activity and we’re just going and buzzing and buzzing and buzzing all day long.
0:08:49 Dr. John Douillard: And we know now that that stress, that incoming stress is directly linked to like metabolic syndrome, extra weight around your belly, cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, all that stuff’s linked to stress. So what I try to do is I try to pull back the bow, you know, like, and when you shoot an arrow, you have to hold it still otherwise you’re going to lose the arrow. Right so it’s the idea of creating some calm and some silence in your life, whether it be going for a walk or a meditation, or just turning down the volume of all the incoming.
0:09:22 Dr. John Douillard: And that allows you to what I call the hurricane effect. And we actually did studies on this we could dive into. But the bigger the calm of a storm, the more powerful the winds. So the more calm we can create, the more productive we can be. So therefore, you can do less and accomplish more by actually getting the rest and the recovery and the rejuvenation and the resonating and the resonance with nature that silence gives you the ability to accomplish so much more.
0:09:54 Dr. John Douillard: And at the highest level of that, like when you think about a runner’s high zone experience, where athletes say, my best race is my easiest race, they feel like they’re doing nothing, you know, but they’re going. Roger Bannister said that when he broke the four minute mile. He said, I was running faster than any man alive, but I felt like I was standing still, going slow. So that’s the whole idea of doing, you know, do less, accomplish more. But ultimately the feeling can be like, I’m doing nothing and accomplish everything. Like you’re not, you know, getting wasted and blown up and exhausted at the end of every day.
0:10:26 Tansy Rodgers: I think we need to weave this concept in today’s conversation because as soon as you were saying that, all I could think about was the guilt and the shame that so often comes up for people when they are doing less but accomplishing more because of maybe some of the conditioning that we’ve had. Traumas, mindset behaviors, societal. Societal conditioning. And so I feel like so many of us get stuck in the rat race because we think that’s the only way to live.
0:11:03 Dr. John Douillard: Yeah, you don’t have to tell anybody that you’re doing less, and all they’re going to see is that you’re accomplishing more. And so that will be your secret that you’ve learned how to, you know, meditate or, you know, go into the, into the forest and kind of, you know, forest bathe if you will, but just, you know, going into the forest and just being still like our ancestors. Just think how calm life was. You know, once in a while, every couple of years you get chased by a bear or something. But generally speaking, our millions of years of evolution were, you know, in complete resonance with the silence of nature and entrained those rhythms and totally locked into our circadian rhythms and biological clocks.
0:11:47 Dr. John Douillard: And now we’re so out of whack and we have absolute hard Science to show that that stress is the link to all the metabolic syndrome issues and obesity issues and things that we’re having now. And if that can actually deliver more productivity, then why not?
0:12:04 Tansy Rodgers: All right, Dr. John, here’s the million dollar question though. And let’s ask you personally, when you have so much to do, when there are so many things on your plate, your to do list, maybe you have kids, a professional career, managing a house, whatever it is, how do you do less? How do you step back so that you can.
0:12:31 Dr. John Douillard: So I’ll give you an example. When I first learned this, it was in the early 1980s and I went to a lecture on yoga and breathing and meditation and ayurvedic medicine, basically, which is the traditional system of medicine in India. And they’re talking about, you know, meditation and getting rest. And I was like, okay. So I went up to him after and I said, I’m training for an Ironman triathlon. I wonder, what do you think is this good for from the, from your perspective? And he looked at me and he said, what is that? And I said, well, it’s a, you know, two and a half mile ocean swim with 112 mile bike, 26 mile run. And he looked at me like I was sort of crazy and said, why do you do that?
0:13:11 Dr. John Douillard: And I was like, no one ever asked me that before. I didn’t have an answer, you know. And so he looked at me and he, like I was sort of an idiot and said, do you meditate? And I said, yes, I actually do. My mother got me instruction in TM transcendental meditation when I was like 17. And he goes, do you sleep when you meditate? I go, yeah, deeply. I get this deep sleep. It’s amazing. I love it. And then he looked at me again like I was an idiot. And he said, meditation is different than sleep. When you’re meditating, you should be alert right in your head, but resting in your body, right?
0:13:49 Dr. John Douillard: And I was like, oh, I’m conked out, you know. And he said, you’re exhausted and that’s why you can’t stay awake in your meditation. I was like, oh, does that mean if I can, you know, meditate more and train less and not sleep when I meditate, that all this training could be okay? And he looked at me and was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, next, you know, try to get rid of me. I took that as my marching lures and I started training less, meditating more, going to meditation retreats on weekends. I went to a two week meditation retreat and I Got and I left there shot out of a cannon. I went into a three month experience of the runner’s high, the zone.
0:14:30 Dr. John Douillard: I started competing at an incredibly high level, started, you know, winning medals in my age group and placing and so on. Not only that, I was in my internship in college at that time too. And my bandwidth and capacity was just off the charts. Like I went into this place where I had so much capacity that I never experienced before in my life. And it was because I was resting, getting the recovery and the rest and the rejuvenation and turning down the volume on a regular basis.
0:14:59 Dr. John Douillard: And that just made me so excited about this. I ended up finally going into India, it was in 1986, and to study their system of medicine and yoga and breathing and all that, and ended up coming back and doing research on and published studies on when you just breathe differently, it can. When you meditate, when you exercise, you breathe through your nose. It can flip the brain into a meditative calm.
0:15:24 Dr. John Douillard: And in other words, in our studies, imagine running as fast as your legs can carry you, but your mind responding to that as you’re in a deep meditation. And so we actually proved and replicated the runner’s high, which means my best race is my easiest race, which means that I’m calm on the inside, that’s the eye of the storm. But I’ve got this incredible, spontaneous, unbelievable capacity that I didn’t have before.
0:15:51 Dr. John Douillard: So it’s not like, you know, you have to do anything more than just pull back the bow and hold it still, become calm, establish what we call being or silence, and then take action. Most of us are just, you know, dealing with all the incoming and the sensory stimulation. We’re overwhelmed. But if we dial it down, create that calm, then we create that eye of the storm. We don’t live in the winds of the storm, all the danger and all that, we live in the calm. And that’s where you hail from.
0:16:20 Dr. John Douillard: And that’s just an incredibly beautiful way to live. And for me it was a mind boggling experience. And I then got super into the runner’s high, started doing research on it, published more studies on it. But that’s really a model for life, you know, it’s not just like you can only get it when you exercise. You can get it while you’re driving your kids to soccer practice. You can get it, you know, wherever we raise six children.
0:16:40 Dr. John Douillard: You know, trust me, if I didn’t have some inner calm, it would have been, you know, curtains.
0:16:48 Tansy Rodgers: So would you say that that was the moment that you realized that all of this was more than a system, rather it was a path of living and living optimally.
0:17:00 Dr. John Douillard: Absolutely. You know, Ayurvedic medicine, which I kind of love, is what I studied, is defined as a study of nature, a complete in depth analysis of nature. And they understood circadian rhythms. They understood that there were times a day when you should eat, times a day when you should sleep, times a day when you should exercise, times when you should think there were seasons, things to do at different seasons. They knew that the foods in every season would have special properties for that season.
0:17:32 Dr. John Douillard: Now we have Stanford research say that the bugs in the soil and on seasonal food are different in each season. And those bugs on that food when you eat it in that season will kind of boost your immunity in the winter when you need it, decongest you in the spring when you’re having allergies and help you dissipate heat in the summer when it’s very, very hot. And so it’s like we are so connected to nature and we’ve done a bang up job in our culture to kind of ignore that.
0:18:00 Dr. John Douillard: And this is such a simple and practical system. Say, here’s some simple ways to reconnect those biological clocks and those circadian rhythms to make life feel like it’s going downstream versus plowing upstream all day.
0:18:14 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah, well, okay, so let’s take just one step back and let’s talk about Ayurvedic medicine. This is a word that holds so much wisdom and I feel like it gets put out there into our western culture, but still there’s not a lot of people who really understand or know even the basics about it. So can you talk about first what Ayurvedic medicine is so that we have that framework to move forward and also why you call it the original longevity science?
0:18:51 Dr. John Douillard: Yeah. So Ayurveda, Ayur means life and Veda means science. So it’s the science of life, a science of understanding. You know, the foods that we should eat should are going to probably better if they’re in season. Obviously they didn’t have processed food. So everything should be somewhat recognizable and not highly processed. We talk about when we should eat our food. You know, we now have really good science to say that the biggest meal of the day should be in the middle of the day.
0:19:26 Dr. John Douillard: And of course, excuse me, all of Europe does it that way. Historically, agricultural societies did it that way. We decided to change all those rules and we pay a price. We treat the symptoms constantly in our culture. You know, someone has High blood pressure. We give them a high blood pressure medication, which is now a lifelong sentence. You’re going to have to stay on that for the rest of your life.
0:19:51 Dr. John Douillard: And that’s relatively new in the last 20, 30 years. Used to be medicines, we’d get on them, get better, get off. You didn’t take a medicine for the rest of your life. Medicine was to get you better. Right now that’s all changed. Maybe there’s financial incentives behind that, but it’s not ideal for us. And Ayurveda was treat the individual, not the condition that you have. So, you know, if you have high blood pressure, we want to dig into the underlying reasons why fix the upstream cause of that concern.
0:20:19 Dr. John Douillard: Let’s look at digestion. 74% of the American population, according to studies, have a digestive imbalance and they complain of it. And what we do for that is we treat the symptoms, say, oh, it’s the wheat. Take the wheat out, take the dairy out. Now we’re hearing take the nuts and the seeds and the beans and the lectins and the nitrates and the goitrogens and the oxalates. And if you go online, there ain’t a lot of food left. You know, there’s meat and maybe a little white rice and maybe some vegetables.
0:20:51 Dr. John Douillard: From the logical perspective, taking that food out of the diet doesn’t fix the underlying reason why you can’t digest it. Most of us were able to digest those foods when we were 18, 19 and 20, but we can’t digest them now. So instead of just taking the food out of the diet and bubble wrapping your diet, why don’t we actually ask questions? Run a fine tooth comb through every aspect of your digestive ability and find the weak link and fix it with herbs and diet and lifestyle and restore function of your digestive system.
0:21:27 Dr. John Douillard: Right? And there’s danger with us just taking food out of the diet willy nilly. Those foods that are, yes, hard to digest provide a benefit for us. They’ve cried, what’s called hormesis, a little bit of irritation that actually we respond to that irritation of eating a harder to digest food with something called gut immunity, which is 70% of your immune reaction. And if you take those foods out of your diet, you don’t have any reason for gut immunity.
0:22:00 Dr. John Douillard: And there are studies that show, like just give wheat an example. People who eat wheat have four times less mercury in their blood than people who are gluten free but don’t have to be. They’re not celiac, they have significantly more Killer T cells, less bad bugs, more good bugs than the people who are gluten free. And this comes from a really cool study that I’ll share with you real quick. It was a study with Amish kids. I know you live in Amish country.
0:22:27 Dr. John Douillard: There were Amish kids, that Amish kids, I don’t know if you know this, they have the lowest rates of asthma on the planet of kids. Their genetic cousins came from the same valley in Switzerland or called the Hutterites. And they came here and they became modern dairy farmers. Everything sterile, everything stainless steel. Where Amish do it the old fashioned way. The kids run barefoot in the barns. They have cows as pets, very traditional.
0:22:54 Dr. John Douillard: And the Hutterites have the highest rates of asthma for kids on the planet. Amish, the lowest, same gene pool. So they looked in the barn to figure out what is it that can make this happen. And they measured the dust in the barn that these kids were breathing on a regular basis. And that dust, that irritant, caused just enough irritation to cause an immune reaction to actually protect them from asthma.
0:23:23 Dr. John Douillard: So we can’t bubble wrap our diet. We can’t bubble wrap our life. These foods, these irritants, these harder digest foods, you know, microbes from the soil that are a little dirty, they all provide and inoculate with us, with us a microbiome that’s diverse and resilient, but also give us the ability to have gut immunity and a really potent digestive system, which is not just about getting the food in your digestive system is also a detox system to get the trash out. And I’m not talking about just pooing. I’m Talking about the 70 million tons of toxic chemicals our government dumps in our atmosphere every year, according to the epa. And that filters down onto everything we eat, everything we breathe, everything we drink, and, and that has to be digested and detoxified.
0:24:15 Dr. John Douillard: So when you just take everything out of the diet, you become weaker in the long run. And so that’s what, what Ayurveda, it’s like kind of a general understand, like why not fix the cost so you can eat gluten and bread again and you can have nightshades and goitagens. And some people don’t eat tomatoes or zucchini or beans. And it gets out of hand where we’re like saying, hey, you know, we have a digestive health quiz on my website for free at LifeSpa. You can just kind of go through and ask your, ask questions about every aspect of your digestion. And it tells you what herbs and what diet and what foods and things that you should do to reboot that weak link in your system.
0:24:56 Tansy Rodgers: You can eat the dark leafy greens, you can take the supplements, you can do all the right things. But if your gut is inflamed or your digestion is sluggish, or if your microbiome is off balance, well, your body is still in survival mode. And that’s why I love Just Thrive probiotics. Unlike most probiotics, this one is actually spore based, meaning it actually survives the harsh environment of your stomach and makes it to the gut alive, where it starts to go to work healing and balancing and rebuilding from the inside out.
0:25:33 Tansy Rodgers: It supports gut lining repair, nourishes the gut brain axis, and it helps to calm inflammation gently and effectively, especially if you’re moving through seasonal changes, stress, deep healing work. This is one of those non negotiables in my wellness toolkit. I love Just Thrive probiotic because of how it has made my gut so much healthier. And it is the preferred probiotic that I recommend out to my clients each and every session.
0:26:06 Tansy Rodgers: Head down to the show notes and click on the link for Just Thrive Probiotics. When you click on that link and you use code TANSY15, you can get 15% off your entire order, not just on probiotics, but on all of their incredible products. So head on down to the show notes, click the link and remember, your body does better when it’s in rhythm. Let your gut lead the way.
0:26:36 Tansy Rodgers: I have so many questions. Oh, okay. So let’s start with this question. Going back to that study with the Amish children and the allergies, would that then make sense of why so many adults start to gain allergies or become more prone to allergies as they get older? Maybe because they’re not running around barefoot, they’re not outside as much, they’re stuck in the house, they are shifting things out of their diet.
0:27:08 Tansy Rodgers: Toxic overload. Like there’s so many different things. But could that be a big part of why allergies I see so often get worse as people get older?
0:27:21 Dr. John Douillard: Absolutely. You know, allergies are just a hypersensitive reaction. And I’ll quote a study that exactly proves what you just said. Studies show that when, and this is the quote, if you don’t digest your proteins, your gluten, your dairy, your nuts, your seeds, beans, well, all the anti nutrients, well, those chemicals that protect plants from predators are hard to digest and you don’t digest your fats, well, now you know there’s fried food that’s not so good. All those environmental pollutants are oftentimes fat soluble.
0:27:51 Dr. John Douillard: So if you don’t break them down, well, the studies show they will be too big of a molecule to get into your blood and nourish you. You, they’ll get uptaken into the collecting ducts of your lymphatic system, which is your body’s garbage can. But that lymph system also carries your immune system. And therefore, if you are letting a lot of undigested proteins and fats getting into that lymph, it’s going to congest your lymph system and that’s carrying your immune system.
0:28:18 Dr. John Douillard: So you’re going to create a local histamine or immune reaction, which is an allergic reaction. So when people have a food intolerance or allergies from the environment, the same kind of thing happens in the intestinal tract that happens in the respiratory tract. They have lymphatic vessels. On the other side of your respiratory tract is called the respiratory associated lymph. On the other side of your gut, your intestinal tract is the gut associated lymph. And that’s where the immune system is carried. But if that gets all congested like a dirty filter, you’re going to get an immune compromised reaction and that’s going to cause an allergy, maybe even make you more vulnerable to an immune event like Covid.
0:29:03 Dr. John Douillard: There’s even lymphs in the brain which dump three pounds of trash out of your head every year while you sleep. And early on with COVID they found that the brain’s lymphatic and glymphatic systems that dump all the trash out of your head. The master computer, they were chronically congested and they link long haul Covid congestion of the brain. Lymph, where the master computer now is so congested, can’t get its trash out, doesn’t know how many fire trucks to send to the fire on main Street. So these are all the really deep insights that they had thousands of years ago. And what I do at Lifespot is I take that ancient wisdom and I find modern science to back it up. And I put the two together and I go, you know what?
0:29:43 Dr. John Douillard: Something that’s been around for thousands of years, time tested, still here today. And with modern science, that might be something worth looking at. Where today science alone, you know, you can find studies that coffee’s good, coffee’s bad, dairy’s good, dairy’s bad, soy is good, soy, you name it, I can give you studies on both sides of that equation, it’s not reliable enough to us to bank on. But if something’s been around for thousands of years and they did it that way and they’re still doing it, I think that end with science.
0:30:15 Dr. John Douillard: I think that’s a safe place to start.
0:30:17 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah. So from an Ayurvedic perspective, what are some of the biggest issues that you see that cause the biggest gut imbalances? And what are some simple tools, steps, plants, herbs, actions, whatever it is to help to start to regulate that?
0:30:37 Dr. John Douillard: Yeah, I mean, you know, you’re so right. I mean, we do eat, we do live in a pretty toxic world. I mean, we spray pesticides and insecticides on our food. Right. So we’re eating foods that not only don’t have any, have a natural microbiome anymore because we killed that. Just like if I took all the bugs out of you and sterilized your microbiome, you would be completely different person. We all would be.
0:31:06 Dr. John Douillard: So when you sterilize our food, we don’t have the microbiome that’s supposed to be inoculating our gut with the right bugs for every season. But also those insecticides and pesticides, what they also do when you eat them is they kill the bugs in our mouth and our digestive system that are designed to make the enzymes to help us digest harder to digest things like wheat and dairy and nightshades and things like that. So everybody says, well, well, don’t eat those foods. I’m going, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That in the long run is going to cause a problem.
0:31:41 Dr. John Douillard: What if we rebooted our digestive strength and studies show that we have the ability with a strong digestion to eat, to digest and break up glyphosate and environmental pollutants and insecticides. Although the best you can, you want to get organic, you want to get non pesticide sprayed foods and things like that. And of course you want to eat of course non processed foods because you know, they really have shown to be the demise of particularly our western culture. You know, it’s really taken a toll on, really amped up the amount of chronic disease.
0:32:16 Dr. John Douillard: And the health indexes in America are just atrocious compared to the rest of the world.
0:32:20 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah, well, let’s take, let’s, let’s add on to that whole conversation you mentioned about seasonal eating. You’ve talked about how seasonal eating actually plays a role. But if we’re talking about this whole gut rebalancing, what do you see as some of the big players in Seasonal eating that maybe most of us don’t actually. That we’re not actually aware of, but need to be in order to balance out that gut health more optimally.
0:32:51 Dr. John Douillard: That’s a great question. And it’d be fun to kind of just give you a little bit more insight into ayurvedic medicine. So it was a study of nature, right? So there’s winter, which is a season that’s cold. We all know people who are cold all the time, right? There’s people who are always putting the covers on, putting a sweater on, a hat and a jacket on. They have more, what are called the winter properties. We call it vata, right?
0:33:14 Dr. John Douillard: And then there. There are people who are like summer, they’re hot all the time and they’re never wearing a jacket. They’re throwing off the covers all the time. We all know people like that, right? And then there’s people who are. Because summer is hot, it’s called pitta, right? And they have a lot of heat naturally in their body. And then there’s springtime. Spring is wet and rainy and muddy. You go for a walk in the woods in the spring, you’re coming back with muddy feet.
0:33:40 Dr. John Douillard: The earth holds on to more water in the spring. We hold on to more water in the spring. But there are certain people who just hold on to more water naturally all the time. And that’s their constitution. None of them are better than the others, but they all have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. So in Ayurveda, there’s three governing principles that represent the three harvests in nature, right?
0:34:04 Dr. John Douillard: So we know there’s four seasons. I wrote a book called the Three Season Diet because we eat from the harvest in nature. There’s a spring harvest, a summer harvest, and a fall harvest for winter eating, right? Nature takes a dorm, is dormant in the winter, it’s kind of more. A lot, really a lot coming out of the ground in the winter. So there’s three seasons. So the idea is that nature would. So you could also then take our body type questionnaire and find out just how much winter, summer, spring you have in your constitution, right? Are you more winter, vata, cold and dry all the time, worried, not sleeping well because that air governed winter.
0:34:45 Dr. John Douillard: Windy, dry, winter quality can dry you out, aggravate your nervous system, make you worried, not sleep well, dry out your bowel movements, things like that. In the summer, if you’re a super hot person and you eat a lot of hot food, spicy food, cheese, wine, beer, chi, all that spicy stuff, then that’s going to overheat an already hot person in a very hot season. So nature said, you know what, I got a plan for this.
0:35:12 Dr. John Douillard: I’m going to give you a harvest of cooling fruits and vegetables to antidote the extreme of that season. In the winter, the squirrels eat nuts and seeds because they’re heavier fat and protein to lubricate and insulate you from the coldness and dryness of winter. You know, and in the fall or in the winter, you get, you know, or in the summer you get cooling fruits and vegetables to cool you down from the extreme of that heat.
0:35:39 Dr. John Douillard: So nature had a plan, which was to give you the antidote in its harvest for the extreme quality of every season. And if you have a body type, let’s say you’re a really cold body type and you’re in the cold winter and you live in Vermont or Pennsylvania for that matter, and it’s winter and you’re eating frozen blueberry smoothies every morning, okay? Well, that doesn’t even exist in the winter if we live off the ground, right?
0:36:04 Dr. John Douillard: So nature would say, if you were in the winter in Pennsylvania, for, for an example, you would eat like the squirrels do, you store nuts and seeds and you’d probably have to hunt and eat more animal protein and more fat to insulate you. Right? So the wintertime is a higher protein, higher fat time of the year. The spring is a time where the harvest is austere. There’s nothing coming out of the ground.
0:36:29 Dr. John Douillard: There’s not a lot of food left over in your storage cupboard. And there’s no pasta or pizza to be harvested. So it’s a naturally occurring, low carb calorie, restricted, in a sense, ketogenic diet. You would naturally go into ketogenesis to burn your own fat for reserve fuel. And that’s why traditional cultures and religions do all their fasting in the spring, because there’s nothing coming out of the ground.
0:36:57 Dr. John Douillard: It’s a very austere time of the year. Right. And then, of course, in the summer, it’s a naturally occurring, high carbohydrate time because that’s when all the grains and the fruits are being harvested to give you excess fuel to help you insulate and get ready for the winter and store reserve fuel. So nature had a plan, but we just ignore it. And what you can do to make it simple, what I did, I wrote a book on this. But it’s really simple to just go to our website, take the summer grocery list, you can print it for free.
0:37:29 Dr. John Douillard: This is a list of all the foods that are harvested in the summer. That will actually help balance the heat in your body. And then the ones with the asterisks are the super foods for each season. So what you do is circle the foods you like on this list, give yourself permission to eat more of those foods, and eat whatever else you want. Just try to not eat processed food and try to make it as organic as possible.
0:37:50 Dr. John Douillard: And then once, when summer comes or spring comes or winter comes, you just take the other grocery list, circle the foods, the asterisks. Foods are the superfoods for that season. Just get medicinal doses of what nature had intended for you, because you want to inoculate your gut with the right bugs with the right season. That’s one and two. You want to get the quality of the nuts and seeds to insulate you for the coldest and dryness of winter.
0:38:15 Dr. John Douillard: The root vegetables, the dandelion roots, and the austere low carb harvest to decongest you in the spring, and cooling fruits and vegetables to help you not get overheated in the summer. It’s pretty logical, right? So you take nature and you say, okay, this is what nature is doing. I’m part of nature, but I’m part of nature that has a lot of summer in it. I have a lot of those heat qualities, and I have a lot of those. Or I have a lot of those cold qualities.
0:38:42 Dr. John Douillard: So if you’re a hot person in a hot season, you got to be a little bit more strict on the summer diet because your tendency to overheat and over and inflame has the word flame in it. So it’s really simple, really. That’s the beauty of a system of medicine that’s not Indian. It’s universal. It’s just the absolute beautiful study of how nature works, and you just apply it to your individual constitution.
0:39:12 Tansy Rodgers: I love that you explained that so beautifully. I love that you have those sheets, too, because that really helps to take some of the guesswork out. I know my constitution is I’m a pitta with a little splash of the kapha. And I find that exactly to your point. I find that if I am eating certain foods that really heat me up during times that I’m already heated, I feel absolutely awful in all ways. I don’t do well with a lot of spicy foods. I don’t do well with a lot of overheated foods.
0:39:50 Tansy Rodgers: I just like very hot soups. I can’t. It’s just too much. That’s so fascinating. What. What ayurvedic constitution are you, Dr. John.
0:40:01 Dr. John Douillard: I’m more of the summer and the spring. It’s called pitta and kapha. So, you know, I need to not. I don’t like spicy food, thank goodness, but like coffee and beer and wine and cheese, all those fermented foods in the summer. Think about it. Fermented foods were historically used to preserve vegetables in the winter. And fermentation uses lactic acid. Fermentation, which is heat. Acid is very hot. So you would do that in the winter when it’s cold, when that heat is really, really welcomed.
0:40:34 Dr. John Douillard: But in the summer, when you’re a hot person in a hot season, eating a bunch of coffee, beer, wine, cheese, all these fermented products plus spicy food, you can take that hot body type and stack hot season to it. Hot foods, fermented foods. And you could overwhelm, overheat, start getting angry, throw pots and pans, get heartburn, get rashes on your skin, get inflammation. Those are all the things that someone with a hot summer pitta body type may experience when they get, you know, overheated.
0:41:09 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah. Wow. Well, knowing your own personal constitution, what part really helped to shift your own personal health? When you learned about it and you took some of those principles and you apply them, what was some of the greatest shifts for you that you noticed?
0:41:27 Dr. John Douillard: Yeah. You know, I think when you look at your constitution, what’s neat about it is not just your body type, you know, like an ecto, you know, endo or mesomorph type. It’s actually a mind and body and emotional type. So you get to. When you take the questionnaire, there’s a mental profile, a physical profile, emotional profile, a behavioral profile. And then you’re totally total body type at the end, which gives you insight into, okay, I’m pitta, Kapha. Right. So I’m, you know, somewhat driven. That’s the pit of the fire, the kapha. Also very easygoing and that kind of thing. Kind of thicker body, you know, not as flexible.
0:42:06 Dr. John Douillard: That’s my constitution. But you could look at the mental profile, and if I’m really high in the. In the mental side and in, let’s say, vata, that could explain why I get anxious and worried because my mind is going way too fast, you see. So the body type questionnaire really gives you deeper insight into what makes you tick. And then you can say, well, you know, what kind of activities should I be doing? What kind of sports should I be doing? What kind of food should I be focusing on? Particularly in the season of my weak link, you know, my summer, I could get overheated and get inflamed. So I make sure I don’t eat a lot of spicy food or hot food or fermented foods. And I list, I eat off the cooling grocery list, which is more fruits and vegetables, which, if you just live off the farmer’s market, you’re going to be fine.
0:42:54 Dr. John Douillard: But not all of us do that. And this gives you kind of a variety of foods. These lists are cool because they give you foods from all around the world that are tied to that specific quality of cooling you during the summer months. So it gives you, like avocados you don’t grow in Pennsylvania or in Colorado, but they’re very warming and they’re very oily. So they’re really great in the winter, you know what I mean?
0:43:22 Dr. John Douillard: And they can be done anytime. But they really have a medicinal effect for antidoting the dryness of winter by having a really good fat in your system.
0:43:33 Tansy Rodgers: There is a difference between feeling tired and, and feeling disconnected. Sometimes what your body needs isn’t more effort. It’s actually energy recalibration. A soft place to hang out and land, a space that’s safe to release, a nudge to come back into the rhythm of who you are. And that’s exactly what happens in a crystal Reiki session. Using intuitive crystal placement, Reiki energy healing, other energy healing modalities, and a deep, energetic alignment, these sessions help reset your nervous system, clear out stagnant emotions, and invite your spirit back into the body.
0:44:17 Tansy Rodgers: It’s gentle, but it’s so powerful. And my sessions also include a lot of intuitive connection, intuitive guidance. So not only are you getting a crystal Reiki session, but you’re also getting an intuitive coaching session. Clients often say that leaving feels lighter, more centered and ready to move forward again. Like they’ve come back into themselves and they’ve gained clarity. If your breath has felt shallow, if your mind has felt loud, if your heart just needs a moment of silence, this one is for you.
0:44:56 Tansy Rodgers: You can head over to tansyrogers.com to book a session, or you can head down into the show notes, click the link to book a session there. Or just simply reach out to me and we can have a conversation and get you on the schedule. Your energy knows what it needs. It’s time to start listening to it.
0:45:20 Tansy Rodgers: All right, I want to fuse all this together now. This is, this is gold information. All right? One of your specialties I know is ayurvedic psychology. And so let’s bring all of that together. We have the gut Brain connection. We know that the gut health directly impacts our mental and emotional health. Right in the very beginning you talked about, what you’re connecting to right now is do less and accomplish more or do nothing and accomplish everything.
0:45:51 Tansy Rodgers: And so that concept, along with the gut brain connection, along with the psychology, I want to talk about what your take is on anxiety, burnout, emotional dysregulation that’s so rampant right now when we’re looking at this from an Ayurvedic perspective. And what does Ayurvedic or Ayurveda teach us about the root of mental and emotional imbalances?
0:46:18 Dr. John Douillard: That is such an important question. And probably the one reason why I really got hooked on Ayurveda, because I mentioned that the definition of Ayurveda is Ayur is life. Veda is the science of science of life. But the Veda is also translated as being truth, something that never changes, right? Science supposed to never change, although that’s not reality anymore. So when you take that definition, the truth of your life, which is who we really are, right? And how do we let who we really are out? That is the fundamental purpose, course and goal of Ayurvedic medicine. Bring the body back into balance so the lake becomes still. And when the lake has come, you can see what’s down there inside.
0:47:12 Dr. John Douillard: And you have more self awareness. And if there’s problems down there, the body has awareness to see and fix those concerns. But you also have the ability to become more self aware of patterns of behavior that we created as young children that were, that may have need, that needed to be there as a child to survive. But we’re still projecting them on the screen today as adults. And many of us absolutely know that they’re not serving us anymore. We do the same dumb thing again and again.
0:47:39 Dr. John Douillard: We go home for the holidays, we start acting like a four year old again. Because our family triggers us on many, many ways. Like we can become more conscious and let something more real out. And that’s the beauty of Ayurvedic medicine, is to create a physiology where the body’s calm. And not only does the calm make you have more activity and more productive, but it also gives you self inquiry, self awareness, where the body can then begin to take action to free yourself from old patterns of behavior. And one of the major tools for that is your breathing. You know, they call it pranayam, but breathing techniques are critical.
0:48:18 Dr. John Douillard: In a recent study with athletes, 91% of them did not have a diaphragm relaxing and contracting fully because we all sit in our car, in front of our computer, on the couch, way more than ever before in the history of mankind. We have a diaphragm which is not functional. And the diaphragm is not just the most important breathing muscle. It’s the number one pump of your lymphatic system. And you talked earlier about why is Ayurveda, you know, the original longevity science? Well, they have a whole branch.
0:48:53 Dr. John Douillard: One of the branches of Ayurveda is the study of the lymphatic system, which is the study of longevity. So their whole system was. If I can study the system that takes the trash out and carries your immune system and delivers fat as energy, that’s longevity. That’s your lymphatic system. And the number one pump for that, your diaphragm. 91% of athletes don’t have one functional. That’s crazy. So if you start strengthening your diaphragm, you start pumping that whole lymph, you start taking the trash out of your system. Once the trash is out, well, you know, if you have a clogged drain like in your toilet, you, you know, you can’t flush it, right?
0:49:32 Dr. John Douillard: So you can’t put anything new into it until you get the waste out. So the limiting system, limiting factor on our body’s health, longevity, you know, happiness on every level is how well we get the trash out. And that’s why the lymphatic system is so important. So the diaphragm studies show that when you strengthen your diaphragm, and this is just a short list, there’s at least 15 studies showing it’ll reverse your heartburn, your GERD, your reflux. Your doctor doesn’t tell you to breathe, but in their own medical journals, there’s study after study after study saying you can breathe away your heartburn.
0:50:08 Dr. John Douillard: Studies show it can lower your blood pressure in three minutes better than the medication. Studies show it’s the number one pump of your lymphatic system, including all the lymph around your belly and hips is congested because of poor lymphatic drainage, which. And poor digestion, because that’s where the lymph starts. And there’s also the brain lymph system, which, when is congested, according to modern science, is linked to anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, inflammation, and even autoimmune concerns.
0:50:39 Dr. John Douillard: And the diaphragm is the pump of the cerebral spinal fluid, which is the brainwashing fluid to push all that trash out. So if your diaphragm is weak, the brain is Going to get congested. The belly is going to get congested. You’re delivering, get rid of the toxins from your joints and your skin is going to become compromised. Like it’s like big, you know, your immune system is going to be compromised. You’re going to get local food intolerances, environmental, you know, sensitivities as well as, you know, a real poor response to an immune event.
0:51:10 Dr. John Douillard: And lymph carries fats as energy. So if you’re tired and exhausted, there’s a good chance that your lymph system is congested. So I’ll give you a real quick, my favorite kind of get started exercise to get your diaphragm, your rib cage independent from each other. And what you do is you take your arms over your head like that. Everybody can kind of do this while you’re sitting there. And then you breathe through your nose and fill your belly only.
0:51:36 Dr. John Douillard: So just fill your belly only and then fill your chest only. Then your upper chest only. And as you breathe in, your upper chest, reach, reach, reach up, up, in and sip a little bit more air in. Then come back down and we’ll do it one more time. And this time, arms go up. Now we’re going to fill the belly all the way. Only the belly. Breathe in through the nose. Feel that belly. Push that belly out. Push it out. Now bring the air to your chest.
0:52:06 Dr. John Douillard: Suck the air into your chest. Chest should be getting bigger, bigger, bigger. Now upper chest and reach, reach, stretch up, up, up. Sip the air in and you should feel a big pull into your ribcage. That’s your diaphragm going down and your rib cage going up. And that will begin to separate your rib cage from your diaphragm. We do it nice and long and slow. And there’s an article called the Best Diaphragmatic Breathing Exercise, and I call that calisthenics for the diaphragm to get that ribcage and diaphragm separate and independent from each other.
0:52:37 Dr. John Douillard: So it’s really important.
0:52:39 Tansy Rodgers: And so how long would you recommend doing that activity? Would you recommend a certain number of repetitions or certain time frame?
0:52:47 Dr. John Douillard: Usually we do like 10 straight up and then we do the same thing, 10 to the side and then 10 to the side. You can do it right in front of your computer while you’re working. I mean, no one’s gonna, no one’s gonna, you know, complain about you, you know, actually doing some very gentle, slow, quiet breathing and stretching while you’re actually even still looking at your computer. I mean, you can literally, you know, you know, get that rib cage open. I was coming out of a restaurant about a year ago and, and some elderly folks in their 80s and 90s were coming out of the restaurant and they had their mouths open. They were huffing and puffing and really struggling to get in and out.
0:53:25 Dr. John Douillard: And so I was helping them get out and I was like, golly, you know, if someone would have told them that if they would just breathe and do this like 5 minutes a day, it would actually reverse their heartburn, GERD reflux, it would actually lower their blood pressure. It would actually increase the flow of the brain lymphatic system to protect them from age related cognitive decline. It would get rid of the extra weight around their belly that they’re carrying. It’ll actually pump their lymphatic system to drain their joints and their skin would be more functional.
0:53:56 Dr. John Douillard: The list goes on and on and on, but most of us just don’t even think. And every time that you get stressed, we breathe a little different, right? And then that stress breathing becomes normal to us. And then another stress comes along, we that we change how we breathe. And in short order, we start breathing shallow like a little rabbit all day long. We lose access to the rib cage elasticity, the lymphatic pumping nature of our diaphragm. And over time, that really is one of the major factors that accelerates the aging process.
0:54:32 Tansy Rodgers: And so outside of working the diaphragm, what other kind of breathing techniques or breathing practices do you recommend to help improve longevity and lymph emphatic movement?
0:54:45 Dr. John Douillard: Really super easy one is go for a walk, breathe through your nose. Right? Because we talked about earlier how nose breathing actually slipped the brain into a meditative comma alpha state, where when they opened up their mouth, their brain went into a fight or flight state. So that was well studied, well published at the International Journal of Neuroscience. So go for a walk. Count how many steps you take breathing through your nose on the inhale.
0:55:10 Dr. John Douillard: Your goal is to do 10 steps for your inhalation. And then your goal is just a goal is to do 15 to 20 steps for your exhalation. So 10 steps through the nose on your inhale and 15 to 20 steps for the exhale. That’s the goal. And that will lengthen your exhalation, which will activate a contraction of your abdomen. So when you breathe out, your, your belly kind of has to suck in to squeeze the air out. That creates an abdominal diaphragmatic cardiac massage, which triggers the vagus nerve on your heart flips your brain into a meditative calm. And all of a sudden, while you’re walking or even running, your body is responding to that which could be perceived as an emergency, as a calm, meditative experience.
0:55:58 Dr. John Douillard: And that’s the eye of the storm I talked about. Now you’re starting to build some calm using a walk as a sort of a metaphor or a tool of stress that you’re going to learn how to handle from a calm place.
0:56:12 Tansy Rodgers: So would you say or find that traditional lymphatic detoxification activities like dry brushing, rebounding, jumping is not quite as effective if we are not using breath work as well.
0:56:31 Dr. John Douillard: And hydration is a key there as well. But they’re all very effective. However, sometimes because your lymphatic system starts in your digestion. And if you just are doing all this stuff to clean the lymph and the brushing and all that, you might be shoveling snow in a snowstorm. You’re feeling better because it works. Right? But we haven’t fixed the upstream reason why you’re dumping undigested proteins in the fastest into your lymph in the first place.
0:56:57 Dr. John Douillard: So there’s three pieces to the puzzle. All those tools to get the lymphatic system moving. There’s herbs for that as well. There’s the breathing, which pumps the lymphatic system, and then where it all starts, which is your digestion, and that has to be reboot as well. When you put all together like we talked about, Ayurveda is going to go after that upstream cause. And not to say, oh well, do a lymphatic massage and you’re going to be fine.
0:57:22 Dr. John Douillard: Where did that lymphatic system congestion come from? You know, and how can I go upstream as far as I can to really give me that self sufficiency and not become dependent on a massage or a pill or a powder?
0:57:35 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah. I have to just make a little note here. When you did that practice for the diaphragm breathing, I went along and I practiced along as you were demonstrating. And I can feel even just in those two demonstrations, a calmness. I feel like there is a little bit of a. I guess, I guess I will liken it to that whole concept of runner’s high. Like my brain feels like it’s firing in two practices of the breath.
0:58:09 Tansy Rodgers: I feel. I feel more expanded. That’s wild.
0:58:17 Dr. John Douillard: It’s one of the most important and profound things. And the one thing I want to tell people is what we just did. The key piece that we did is we did it slowly I made you feel your belly first, then your chest, then your upper chest. If I just went all the way, that would be like an emergency. So I really want you to recognize that the idea of this is deep, but long, slow and deep. And then you park. Compartmental, compartmentalize that whole experience as opposed to doing it all at once. That’s the key.
0:58:48 Tansy Rodgers: Wow. Wild. All right. I want to shift just a little bit and talk about circadian rhythm because I feel like that is a concept that we know about, it’s talked about, it’s researched, but I don’t feel that in our modern society it’s really emphasized the importance of going along with nature’s circadian rhythm. So can we talk about how we become disconnected from it? And maybe one or two practices that can really help somebody to rethink their body with natural rhythms, even in this modern fast paced world.
0:59:24 Tansy Rodgers: Maybe even for people who have to work a second or a third shift job or whatever it may be that is causing them to become out of sync.
0:59:36 Dr. John Douillard: Yeah, I mean, probably the biggest one that almost everybody can do a little bit is to take time in the middle of the day to have a meal. Make that meal time the most important. Even if you have a half hour lunch break, make it count. Don’t eat in front of your computer and gobble it up or have a salad and then, you know, so you can, you can leave work early. Take that time to put the gas in your tank in a calm way.
1:00:04 Dr. John Douillard: Then the other most important thing is to then after you have that meal, you know, relax, eat it, eating it and then relax for 5 or 10 minutes or so and then go for a walk, 15 minute walk or so. And the same thing happens at night. If you have supper, make supper early, make it smaller. It comes from the word supplemental or soup. Like it’s always been designed to be a smaller meal. Lunch was the big meal of the day. Remember the, the Sunday dinners and the, and the Agricultural society? It was the meal of the day, was the big meal of the day.
1:00:37 Dr. John Douillard: But after that small supper, and definitely if you have a bigger supper, try to have it earlier, not late. But don’t just go sit on the couch. You know, even if you go in front of the TV and just march for 15 minutes standing in place and just march with the clicker, trying to find the show you want, whatever, just stand there and just march. That’s simple. The research on that is off the charts. There’s something in Ayurveda called shatapavali, which means take A walk after your meal. That’s exactly what it means. And it was critically important.
1:01:06 Dr. John Douillard: It’s been shown to lower blood pressure, lower your blood sugar, help you get the food out of your stomach faster, help protect your arterial lining. It’s science galore. It’s unbelievable. But no one does that. We just eat a big meal, go on the couch. Don’t do that. Just, you have to just march or get a little treadmill or anything you can do. Go for a walk outside is really important. And then the other things are, you know, things about eating at the same time every day, exercising at the same time every day, waking up at the same time, going to bed at the same time. Our body is tied to rhythms, right. So if we do every day a little bit different, the body’s going, who is, is this guy? Right.
1:01:50 Dr. John Douillard: But if we’re doing the same thing, it affects the regularity of your sleep, it affects the regularity of your biological clocks in sync with circadian rhythms. Really good science behind that. And then of course, we should try to be there when the sun rises and kind of see it, because that’s the kind of synchronizing of your watches to say, the sun is rising, the day is starting, my nighttime clocks are turning off, my day clocks are turning on, and then go to bed earlier rather than later. But if you’re up with the sun, you’re probably going to want to go to bed, you know, start settling down by nine or ten o’ clock at night.
1:02:27 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah. And this is all that health on the inside that so many of us don’t even recognize as being so important, Right? Yeah. And so with, with your over 40 years in this field, I would love to just hear your opinion on what are the three most important things that you believe somebody could do to radically transform their health from the inside out.
1:02:56 Dr. John Douillard: Yeah, well, I think we’ve touched on them, no question. Breathing, you know, doing some simple breathing practices. And whenever you go for a walk or your exercise or your workout, my first question book was called Body, Mind and Sport. It was all about nose breathing, exercise versus mouth breathing. Just close your mouth and breathe through your nose. When you exercise, when you go for a walk, when you go for a hike, definitely do some of these breathing. I have a litany of free articles on my website with instructional videos of how to breathe and take you deeper into breathing practices.
1:03:26 Dr. John Douillard: Make that a part of your life. Definitely making your big meal really, really important in the middle of the day. And the reason is because your circadian rhythms say that your digestion is strong in the middle of the day because your brain in the afternoon kicks in. And do you ever wonder why everybody needs chocolate and Starbucks in the afternoon to get home so they don’t crash their car because they’re cranking and falling asleep?
1:03:52 Dr. John Douillard: So the idea was that you would put the food into your system, and then you would have a full tank for the afternoon. The brain, which is the big gas guzzler, wants 80% of your sugar glucose has been fed. But if you don’t put any gas there or you don’t digest it well, you’re gonna crash and burn and feel really tired. And a lot of people, because they have such poor digestion, they go, if I eat a big meal, I’ll fall asleep. So I don’t. I eat a little something.
1:04:18 Dr. John Douillard: And that’s like, okay, you put gas in your. Put a full tank of gas in your car, your car stalls. So what do you do? You’d never fill your car up again? No, you take it to the mechanic and they fix that problem. If you put a full tank of food in your system and you fall asleep, something went wrong. Let’s fix that thing. As opposed to just not eating the food that’s so critical for us and been true for humans for millions of years, that was the big meal of the day.
1:04:51 Dr. John Douillard: So those are the two most important things. And then I think the third most important thing is based on a book that Mr. Rogers read many years ago from Henry James back in the early 1900s. And it was based on the idea that there were three important things that every human should do. And the number one first thing that they should do is be kind. And he said, and the second most important thing that humans should do is to be kind.
1:05:21 Dr. John Douillard: And he said, the first, third most important thing that humans should do is to be kind. And I think if we practice that, Think about it. The first level, be kind. I can be kind. Anybody? If I want to be at the grocery store, I can be kind. Easy. Okay, I’ll do that one. Then there’s, like, to be kind when people aren’t so nice to you. Right. How do you do that? Well, that’s a bit of a challenge, but I get the idea. It’s probably better for me to be kind than be mean, because that’s bad for me and bad for them.
1:05:50 Dr. John Douillard: And then the third be kind is like, well, I’m supposed to be, like a doormat. People just walk over me. And I’m not supposed to do anything? No, the message there is that. And I Have got good science behind this inside of us like we talked about the truth of us. Studies show that when we love and we give and we care and we’re kind to others, our telomeres, which are indicators of longevity lengthening, the good bugs proliferate, bad bugs disappear.
1:06:18 Dr. John Douillard: Epigenetically, we actually support the production, the expression of healthy and longevity genes. The good bugs in your gut proliferate. Oxytocin, the longevity hormone, proliferates. All this really amazing stuff happens when you give in. Love and kind inside of us, that’s what’s there is love. Our mind is the one saying, well, don’t love them, they might not love you back. So I better, you know, so that is what we created. But we can create a new mindset by being kind. Be kind, be kind. And that third level of kind literally means no one has the power to take away your joy, your happiness and your kindness.
1:06:54 Dr. John Douillard: No one has that power and that means anything from the outside world. Don’t give them that power to make you a version of yourself that you don’t even appreciate. And I think if that’s the mindset piece that’s so critical.
1:07:09 Tansy Rodgers: And yeah, and so here at the Energy Fix, we talk about the physical, the mental, the emotional health, but we also talk about the energetic and the spiritual. And that’s a huge component here at the Energy Fix. And so I love what you’re saying because be kind, give love. That is really you now tapping into the wisdom of the energetics and the spirituality piece of this whole puzzle of being a human being and bring it into living in that spiritual experience.
1:07:41 Tansy Rodgers: And I love how you just fused that together. And you said there’s studies that show what happens when you do the be kind, give love and how it shifts and changes your physiological experience. That is so beautiful. And I think even more important to remember how important that is rather than just saying, oh, I’m going to go to the store, I’m going to get these foods, I’m going to get these supplements, I’m going to do breathing.
1:08:09 Tansy Rodgers: And yes, all of that’s important. But what about the other pieces where you’re nourishing your soul? I love that.
1:08:18 Dr. John Douillard: Yeah. And that’s why I love the definition of Ayurveda, where Ayurveda’s life, Veda’s truth, and it really is fundamentally about the truth of your life. And that’s what we’re talking about here. And that’s why Ayurveda was created. It was created to bring the body back into balance. So like I said, you had a level of self awareness of the truth and the non truth. And if you’re doing the non truth stuff which is just, you know, reacting to the outside world as opposed to you responding from deep within yourself, you know, doing you, that’s the whole point is to give us the clarity so we can stay, take the action to free ourselves from patterns of behavior that we created and needed as children. But surely oftentimes aren’t serving us as adults and we can be more kind and more kind. More kind.
1:09:06 Tansy Rodgers: This was a fabulous conversation, Dr. John. Thank you so much. Where can people find you? What are you excited about in your work? Tell us about LifeSpa.
1:09:20 Dr. John Douillard: Yeah, well, LifeSpa.com is where I started writing articles about ancient medical wisdom. Time tested wisdom with the modern science. I met Deepak Chopra in India and I came back and started teaching medical doctors for him. And my job was to kind of somehow demystify this crazy Indian science. And so I did that by taking the pearls of the wisdom and tying science together with it. And that you can get all like 1500 articles in instructional videos on life’s all for free.
1:09:53 Dr. John Douillard: And there we also have a newsletter where you can get subscribed. I write about three articles per week on these principles. You can just go to the site, type in your health concern and you’ll get a lot of articles about, you know, what you’re trying to deal with or what you’re dealing with with lymph or digestion or anxiety or worry or sleep or whatever it might be. And then of course we have an ayurvedic store there. It’s store lifespa.com where you can, you know, look at all of our ayurvedic. I’ve been formulating ayurvedic herbs. Can you for other companies for many, many, many years, decades and over the time have put together a formula for my patients and that’s what our herbal line is all about.
1:10:33 Dr. John Douillard: And of course I’m on YouTube and you know, Instagram, TikTok, all the social platforms. I do little, little one minute shorts to kind of get people to know that we have this library of articles and videos. Deep dive into the [email protected] it’s like a library and it’s all for free there.
1:10:53 Tansy Rodgers: And all of those links will be down in the show notes. So make sure you jump on down there and get your hands onto them. Dr. John, this has been incredible wisdom. Are there any last words that you would like to lay on the hearts of the listeners for today.
1:11:10 Dr. John Douillard: You know, I think that in these kind of crazy and uncertain times, I think what we ended on is that it’s this crazy mind of ours that gets us into the most trouble. And, you know, we are constantly. You know, our happiness is unfortunately based on what’s happening constantly. So and so we’ve. You know, if something good happens, we’re happy. Something bad happens, we’re sad. So the idea is to become weatherproof.
1:11:38 Dr. John Douillard: Weatherproofed to the ups and the downs, where you do you no matter what, right? Good things are gonna happen, bad things can happen. But inside of you, you know this, too, will pass. You don’t have to be all the way up or all the way down. You can find that kind of place deep inside of you. And what I would suggest people to do is, just like we said in the beginning, find ways to turn the volume down, Whether it be a meditation or with deep prayer or with a walk in the forest or just being still or deep, long, slow breathing, introspection, you know, resonating with the silence of nature in your garden.
1:12:15 Dr. John Douillard: It’s. It’s. You know, it pays massive dividends.
1:12:20 Tansy Rodgers: Thank you so much for being here. And thank you so much for the work that you’re doing and how you are changing your community and beyond. Thank you.
1:12:29 Dr. John Douillard: Oh, you’re very welcome. Thanks for having me, Tansy. Appreciate it.
1:12:34 Tansy Rodgers: So often we chase healing like it’s somewhere out there. Some future version of who we are, maybe some perfect protocol, some finely scheduled appointment. But what Dr. Jhn reminded us today is this. You are already wired for balance. You just need to come back into rhythm with yourself, with nature, with your breath, with your body. So I’ll leave you today with a few questions to think about. What season are you truly in right now?
1:13:09 Tansy Rodgers: And are you resisting it? Or are you surrendering to it? How might slowing your breath shift the speed of your thoughts? And what’s one small intentional practice that you could bring into your daily rhythm? Something, maybe ancient or maybe simple, or maybe simply deeply yours. You don’t need a perfect plan. You need presence. You need softness. You need you. Until next time, keep spreading that beautiful energy you were born to share.
