Rise, Renew. Reconnect.
Welcome to from the Ashes, a podcast where every episode ignites hope and healing.
I'm your host, Valerie Huang Beck, and I'm on a mission to help you embrace your unique potential and become the vibrant visionary you knew you were meant to be.
All right, y'. All.
Hi there.
I am here to record a quick and dirty podcast episode for you all. I just caught back from the Colorado Ayurvedic Medical Association's annual conference on Indigenous Ayurveda. That was the theme of this year, and it was mind blowing.
And so I have to get my thoughts down in podcast form to share with you all, and it's not polished. I have barely any kind of idea of what I'm going to be talking about.
Well, I do have an idea, but I just really want to share some of the takeaways and also some of the insights and breakthroughs that I had personally during the conference around my personal mission,
as well as some of the patterns that I'm seeing in our greater consciousness these days around mental health and burnout.
So during this conference, I actually was flown over to teach primal movement in cultural context.
AKA I decided to teach Capoeira at an Ayurveda conference.
And I honestly, when I applied for this, I really didn't think anything of it. I knew that I wanted to teach. It was very important to me, but I really didn't think that they would take it.
And the reason that I didn't think they would is because with a lot of Ayurveda, it's. It's a lot about talking about Ayurveda as holistic medicine. And so capoeta is not even necessarily indigenous, even though I can make a.
An argument that some of the components of it are.
But I thought it would be really important for me to bring a different perspective to this holistic conference on what healing is and where it comes from.
And it really did fit really well into the conference because at the heart of it for me,
the capoeira part of it, I learned about capoeira through my hip hop friends,
through my street dance friends.
And,
you know, hip hop being an art created largely by the African American diaspora from America mixed in with some Latino culture and also urban New York culture,
it created a very unique environment where people were piecing together these aspects of culture to create a new form of self expression that it was Essentially a container for freedom of self expression through the form of dance, music,
poetry,
visual art, et cetera.
I'm not going to go too much into that, but I then was introduced to capoeira way back when from some of the friends, some friends of mine, and a teacher who,
you know, allowed me to see how close capoeira is in terms of the art form.
It is a martial art. So instead of it being just a self expression form, it's also a modality where people spar, they fight each other, and they also interact with each other all these unique ways.
And one of the things that I noticed is that Cap Water really incorporates primal movement,
meaning like movement that we are all innately born capable of doing,
but that we lose and that. That fall off when we become cultured in society, right?
So crawling and jumping and flipping and standing on hands, all of those things are incorporated into capoeira movement. But it's much more than that because of the cultural context of capoeira, because it was a art form created by Afro Brazilian slaves.
And so they brought their songs over, they brought their singing, and it was, it was developed in Brazil. So a lot of the singing is done in Portuguese.
And it was a way for enslaved people coming from different parts of Africa, right? So they have different systems of spirituality, different systems of music and of practicing martial arts.
And they were piecing together this together in the fields in Brazil and to creating a, essentially a new cohesive practice that became capoeira eventually.
And so it's,
it begs a question of what is primal, what is cultural, what is indigenous,
and at the end of the day, what is healing.
And so I brought that to the conference because I wanted people to see like it's. Sometimes the lineage is broken,
sometimes people are disconnected from their culture.
But if we remain in the mindset of we are broken,
we can't really heal. And so what these enslaved people did was that they pieced together what they knew and created from there. We are never separated from our ability, our innate ability to create.
If we're always present to that, we can always tap back in to our innate wisdom and perhaps also piece together what made us so ingrained in our original ancestral cultures.
Okay, so that's what I brought to the conference. Now there were Native American healers,
medicine people. There were people who practice Ayurvedic medicine, obviously, because it's an Ayurvedic conference.
There were people talking about Chinese medicine, there were people talking about all of it. And also meat as medicine, right. Which is a often Controversial topic in the world of Vedic medicine.
But what I really appreciated about all these topics was they didn't skirt away from what is controversial, because at the end of it, what we really are here to do is to heal, right?
What we're really here to do is to. Is to really distill what is universally applicable in healing and what is culturally specific in healing and what is geographically specific in healing.
And so it is a mix of both knowing what are the universal principles,
what are the things that connect us as human beings and that allow us to heal,
and then what are the things that are in our environment that help us in our specific situation heal?
And the meet at Medicine as Medicine lecture was so impactful on me. It was given by this woman named Asia Dorsey,
who lives in Colorado, who has African roots.
And being so away from the environment that her ancestors came from, how does she then create a healing environment for herself, connecting with what her ancestors ate,
how they lived, and how the indigenous people of Colorado lived and adapted to their environment? She needs both,
and she needs to be able to reconcile the differences for herself so that she isn't stuck in a place where her body isn't really meant to thrive.
And yet finding ways to thrive and adapt, because we are supposed to adapt, our DNA changes according to the way that we live and what's good for us in our environments too.
So having attended this conference, I awoke to a deeper part of my dharma, my purpose that I was afraid of, quite frankly, to embrace.
But looking at my own history, looking the way that I have lived my own life, I've always been very interested in the universal human aspect of healing and taking what I have known from my cultural experiences and.
And understanding what it is, the processes that allow us to become more human and more vibrant in our human experience.
And that cannot be done without social awareness and cultural awareness and political awareness.
And this is where it gets really interesting for me, because I've participated in hip hop culture,
Capoetta and now Ayurveda in a way that for me,
has been really helpful to see what the connecting pieces are of some very different practices.
And at the heart of it, when capoeira came to be, when hip hop came to be, they were not set in stone cultural practices. They were developing practices where the participants of the culture helped to shape it.
Which means that they didn't have a set rules in the beginning.
They were just operating based off of what was working in their cultural context.
So before it became formalized, before it became the elements of hip hop are this, the elements of capoeira were this.
They were operating based off of creation and primal.
I realized that being able to tap into the process of creation is inherently decolonializing.
And the ability to distill healing in the Ayurvedic perspective, to universal principles is inherently primal. Therefore, decolonializing,
meaning that we take the authority out and we put back in the,
the inner wisdom,
the, the connection with self and others that is more organic.
And I realized that for me, it is important to embrace my personal mission of decolonializing health,
specifically mental health.
Because when I think about my own trajectory, it started with my desire to find a way to improve my own mental health without committing myself to an institution.
I don't know why specifically that has always been an interest of mine. But even when I was studying psychological services in college and in my undergrad at Northwestern, I studied human development and psychological services with the idea that maybe one day I would become a therapist.
But what ended up happening was I didn't want to become a therapist because it felt weird for me to,
as a very young woman,
to place myself in a position of authority as a therapist when I had barely lived life myself and I didn't have inner wisdom.
And so after undergrad, I went on this whole journey and that's where I learned how to live life.
And that's where I was introduced to hip hop, Kapwara, Ayurveda, et cetera. In my own journey of living life, I, I really suffered.
I learned wisdom through pain,
but I also learned the beauty of communal society,
really showing up and transmuting pain through art and learning universal principles of healing through Yoga, Kaputa and Ayurveda.
And because of that decision that I made very early on in my, my career and my learning journey is that I have always found solutions to health and both physical and mental health outside of an institutionalized system.
And I really stand by my values and my belief that this is possible for everyone.
But it is a choice,
right? And we all have the freedom, freedom to choose how we pursue our health care.
Even though it's somewhat mandated that we have the option for institutionalized healthcare.
I believe that we also have the choice of creating lifestyles and, and, and following diets and having relationships that are really conducive to our well being and stepping away from relationships, diets and lifestyles that are not conducive to our well being.
So that has become really prominent to me in my consciousness in the past week or so,
and it's given me a new layer of meaning to my work.
It's given a new layer of meaning to what I do in the vibrant, visionary collective and in everything I've done so far with Intrepid Wellness. Intrepid Ayurveda. Intrepid means bold.
It means being fearless in the face of challenge.
And I've always embodied that. Like, make the bolder choice for yourself, not the easy choice,
and have the bravery to look within also to see where are the solutions that I know are there for bringing myself back to balance that, that I might be avoiding.
For some reason.
We are live in this modern society where the system is not necessarily built in our best interests. And it's about time that we acknowledge that healthcare is more reactive rather than preventative.
So really,
it's not built for us to thrive and to have really healthy, happy lives. It's built so that it's there to catch us when our health gets bad.
But that has conditioned us for some reason to allow ourselves for our health to get bad.
And then only when we are in pain, when we have chronic inflammation and disease,
is the doctor really there to help us.
And that's.
That's it. It is what it is.
But then what can we do before it gets to that point?
And most of us aren't taking the time to really consider,
well, what is it that I have to do?
And instead, what we end up doing is like we justify to ourselves abusing our bodies. We justify drinking too much and we justify taking in all the sugar that we want.
We justify the Netflix binges and all of the overexposure to environmental toxins.
We just say that's what life is now.
And then. So when we get sick and we're all miserable, then we go to our doctors and we blame them for overcharging us and for the system making us sick.
The system is there too, to catch us when we fall.
It's not there to prevent us getting sick.
So when I say that we need to decolonialize our mental health, I'm not saying that the system is useless. It just isn't built to do what we think it should do, which is keep us healthy.
And perhaps that's because our definition of health is faulty.
Because in the Western world, in the Merriam Webster dictionary, the definition of health is the absence of disease.
It's not healthy, thriving, energetic.
That's not the definition of health in the dictionary.
When I started studying Ayurveda, one of the things that I took away from it at first was that health is defined as Being truly seated and established in the self,
which is a completely different way of looking at life.
It's. It's looking at health as self esteem. It's looking at health as valuing yourself as somebody to take care of.
And by doing that, by preventing disease in the body, by allowing ourselves to have energy, to have joy, then it gives us access to something greater within ourselves, and that is purpose.
It gives us access to the capacity to give back.
But you don't do that if you believe that health is nothing but just the absence of disease.
And the problem is that our society right now is geared towards creating a type of person that functions in society the way that society wants you to.
So if you look deeper into that, society wants you to be a cog in the wheel,
because that's the most efficient way for us to all have our needs somewhat met,
not quite completely.
It means that there are power dynamics and it means that some people are going to need to work harder than others.
So it's a. It's a machine that creates laborers because we need somebody to do the hard work while we're. Some of us stay on top and make the money.
I could go on a different rant with that, but I won't.
What I will do, though, is that I. I received a really interesting newsletter by Mark Manson, the.
The author of the Subtle Art of Not Giving a ****.
And it was really timely. So I wanted to share the story that he. He share newsletter today that's titled what if there's nothing quote unquote wrong with you?
So it goes like this. I'm going to quote his story.
When I was 15, I was diagnosed with ADHD and the doctors put me on medication. My grades went up, my room got clean, but my interests narrowed. My social life dampened, and I became uninterested in most things in my life outside of what work I was supposed to do.
One day, one of my teachers pulled me aside.
She said, it's great that you're getting an A in my class, Mark. Oh, he said, but you're not the same. You've lost your sense of humor, your creativity, your funny and weird perspectives.
I acknowledged that somehow I felt different.
He then asked me a question I had never considered. Good grades are nice, but are you sure this is worth it?
The question sat with me all summer. And as I spent my summer that year blankly staring at my computer, not really knowing what I even enjoyed doing anymore, I made a decision.
The next school year, I got off the medication. My grades dropped. My room became a Mess again. But I was back to my funny, creative, and often weird self.
I was happy again.
By the time I got to college. I decided that if I was going to live with this thing, I was just going to have to figure out a way to cope.
I realized that I can manage many of my symptoms with some combination of caffeine, diet, and meditation.
I developed protocols for myself. Odd ways of studying that seem to work for my brain and listen to my body work with it instead of against it.
Okay,
so the medication is there not to heal you. It's to make you function in the society the way that society wants it to function.
And what's really wise about what Mark said is that he noticed that he wasn't himself when he was just a cog in the wheel doing good work,
getting the A straight A's, and that his creativity, which is really his superpower, his ability to, like, write these ideas,
was what makes him him.
And if it meant that meant that sometimes he was distracted and had ADHD and,
you know, couldn't keep organized, it was worth it to stay off the medication to be able to tap into that superpower. And ultimately what he had to do and the choices that he had to make were that he had to do certain, certain other practices, meditation, right.
Or take certain things like caffeine to keep him focused in a way that he would be at least functional enough in society to not make a huge mess, but also to stay true to himself and his creativity.
Which is really like, if we didn't have Mark Manson creating the books that he. He's created or the, the content that he's created,
a lot of us would be worse off and he would be worse off.
And so it is really looking at, like, what, what are we doing when we engage and when someone tells us that we're. When we have adhd or when someone tells us we have anxiety, when some of us, someone tells us we have depression, does that mean that we need to.
To be like, oh, now I just have to be stuck on this medication the rest of my life?
Or can we tap into what is our. What are our dysfunctions pointing to that might actually be our superpower or our way of thinking?
Because perhaps we have depression because we see disturbing things in life that we know need to be changed because we know that. That things are unjust in the world.
Perhaps we're getting depressed because of that. And it's not the depression that's the problem. It's the, the societal problems that are making us depressed.
So is it a Sign that we need to take action and. And perhaps participate in society in different way that might help us become the change that we wish to see in the world?
Or do we suppress our feelings and sadness with antidepressants and then go about our day and just do the work that we are told that we need to do?
That's what I mean by decolonizing mental health. It is when. When are we actually giving our power away so that we can oppress our own voices?
And I'm just gonna leave us with that question today because I think it's an important one.
So I got too excited when I was recording, so I had a bunch of other notes that I wanna talk about.
There are a couple of things that I journaled on this morning on decolonizing mental health. So I wanna break down some of the stuff that I wrote to myself and to make sense of it for some of you.
So the first thing that I wrote was the only way to truly decolonize is to prioritize primal. To acknowledge the fundamental truths dictated by natural law and recognize everything else as culturally specific meaning.
There are universal principles of healing that are dictated by nature. What the laws of nature are, right, what's available,
what makes us human,
what allows humans to thrive, what allows other beings to thrive,
the environment has to be clean, things like that. These are all universal, obviously, in terms of how we need to be living in order to truly feel healed and healthy in our bodies.
But then everything else on top of that, like what foods to eat, when to eat, how to eat, depend on many different specific factors that have to do with our ancestral code as well as our culture, as well as culture and land that we live on currently.
And those are not universal.
Those are absolutely very specific to context.
And the more that we can understand what is universal as opposed to what is culturally and genetically specific,
the more that we are aware of when we are giving advice, when it. When is it appropriate advice.
Because if we are telling somebody,
like, especially if we're telling a client to do something that is going to help them, but it's not specific to their context,
and we are claiming something that is culturally specific as universal,
that's actually,
one, it's false information.
Two, it can be potentially colonizing.
So we need to be able to have a wider perspective,
unmarred by our own identity, wounds, traumas, and also our own hubris.
To have a productive discussion on what true healing is meaning that we have to be able to see beyond what is just our framework and what is actually universal truth.
And that takes discernment.
We also have to look beyond our offense,
our own feelings of offense, disgust,
prejudice, and cultural framework to see the humanity behind us all.
And this is required by all sides.
It requires awareness in the patient or client, and it requires awareness in the practitioner.
There are things that we, as patients, when we do, we give a lot of our power away to the doctors because they're supposed to know best. But even this assumption that they know best is,
you know, do they know your. How you grew up? They do. They know your cultural context? Do they know how your people interact with each other?
Those are all things that we as a consumer or client or patient need to be aware of if we're going to be taking advice from a quote, unquote, higher power or authority.
Authority.
And it takes just as much for, or even more for the person in authority to know that whenever they're giving advice, there is cultural context behind it.
Okay, the last couple of things that I want to mention,
there is something called the victim, perpetrator, savior triangle that I want to bring someone on to talk about a little bit more. I'm not going to go necessarily into this, but this is a trap.
This is a really toxic trap because the victim often becomes the perpetrator of an offense because they are. They are.
That is the way that they know the world to be. So, and then there's the savior.
So the savior wants to save the victim because they feel bad for them, because oftentimes the savior comes from the per. The ancestors of the perpetrator wanting to right the wrong.
And what happens is that it perpetuates the cycle of victim, perpetrator, savior,
where it's like, oh, I feel bad for these people because my people did wrong. And so I, I have to be the one to help them.
And it really creates a power dynamic where there is always someone wrong, there's always someone who needs who. Who is being pitied and is having their power taken away. And there's always someone who is the bad guy.
So it sucks to be a victim. And we all have a tendency to fall into victim mentality to,
unfortunately, to avoid responsibility.
And,
you know, being a savior is not necessarily even.
Is not great either, because oftentimes the saviors are the worst because they think that just because they're helping someone or like, quote, unquote, like helping someone,
a victim, it puts them in a morally superior place. And when you do that, that power dynamic can become very corrupt.
I hope to bring that up in more detail in a future podcast.
A Couple of other notes, because during the conference we talked a lot about Native medicine. Not Native American, but Native medicine as a general concept.
And what we found was that Native medicine has the same fundamental principles as Ayurveda.
Then each of the tribes that use Native medicine have specific knowledge appropriate for their ecology and culture that are kept specifically for their situation.
Ayurveda is the same way.
There are universal principles that were derived from spirituality, from philosophy, but then there are some of the texts that expound on those to create culturally specific applications,
specifically in the classical text, for those who lived in ancient India.
And how to separate those two. The universal and the culturally specific is work that needs to be done if we want to really have Ayurveda be applicable in our modern Western world.
Or even if not Western, like, you know, because I'm moving to Asia,
how to make it applicable to other,
other societies and cultures.
Right. Because Ayurveda claims its specific knowledge sometimes as universal,
or at least modern practitioners do,
which is essentially what colonial, colonial mindset is. It's like imprinting your version of what's right onto other people.
And that that is dangerous and problematic. So especially when it's done in good intention,
when people think that they're being the savior,
that can lead to problems. So we're going to sandwich that in to our discussion of decolonizing mental health, decolonizing health, promoting Ayurveda and the principles of Ayurveda appropriately so that the universal principles can be applied whilst while continuing the dialogue, the discussion, and the learning of the how we can take universal principles in Ayurveda and other healing modalities in our specific cultural context.
So thank you for coming along with me in this off the cuff rant.
I hope that it helps to inspire some questions within yourself and I'd love to create a dialogue around this. So in the next couple of weeks, I'm hoping to get some of the speakers that I heard at the Colorado Ayurveda Conference on to continue discussion and also some other people that have been talking about this in a different way.
And I'm so I'm excited to bring more content.
I'm going to be moving to Japan and I am going to be revamping the way that I work as well in the system.
And so we will be publishing podcast episodes every other week now,
perhaps with some exception, but just to continue to keep our pace of work at one that is human and so that we have some room to process and grow in between all of our output.
Thank you so much. For listening and I will catch you next time.
Thanks for tuning in to from the Ashes. If this episode sparks something in you, I want you to know your evolution matters and we're rooting for you all the way.
For coaching, community and resources to help you rise into your full potential,
visit intrepidwellness Life and check out what we have to offer.
If you love the episode, please please leave a comment, share it with a friend, or tag me on Instagram ntrepidwellness Val, because I'd love to hear what resonated for you.
Until next time, keep rising.
