Trauma-informing Ayurveda
Honoring the reality of restrictive & disordered eating and prioritizing a "how" versus "what" approach to Ayurveda's concept of food as medicine
Pregnant & exhausted, yet still very cute.
A few years ago, I was miserably pregnant. I couldn’t sleep; my restless legs were so bad that I couldn’t lay down at night without thrashing. Instead, I’d fall asleep on my feet as I walked from one end of my apartment to the other, bumping into walls.
I was just trying to survive my pregnancy. While I was persistent in attending queer and trans-centered prenatal yoga every week, for one reason or another, most of my self-care practices got distorted or had lost their helping capacity.
Since then, I’ve found narratives corroborating my finding: for many, what worked before pregnancy doesn’t work during or after carrying a baby. Different seasons of life call for different rituals and medicines.
In pregnancy, the Ayurvedic habits around sleeping, waking, movement, meditation, nutrition and digestion that I’d delighted in curating for years before becoming pregnant slipped like sand through my fingers. Tough doesn’t quite describe it; these were the keystones I relied on for my mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing.
At a loss, I went to see an Ayurvedic practitioner. I want to be clear: this practitioner is experienced, kind, and highly knowledgeable. She offered me herbal remedies and guidance around deepening my abhyanga (an Ayurvedic term for self-massage) practice, about which I was diligent.1 She also gave me a sheet of paper with two lists of foods: the ones that I should eat in order to balance vata dosha, which easily becomes imbalanced during pregnancy, and foods to minimize or avoid entirely.
Like most neurodivergent people, I have special interests - topics that I can research, teach, and talk passionately about for hours on end.
When it comes to my role as a healer’s healer, Ayurveda and trauma-informed care are at the top of the list.²
They’re up there for two main reasons:
These two areas of study have been instrumental in my healing journey by connecting me with my innate wholeness, and
With these as foundational underpinnings of my coaching practice, I’ve seen dramatic client transformation time and again. Healing isn’t one-size-fits all. This dynamic combo blends the ancient, highly practical wisdom of Ayurveda with a modern approach to supporting people who have experienced trauma.³
The true medicine is often in the how rather than the what.
I recently learned that autistic women are more likely to have restrictive eating patterns than their non-autistic counterparts. While the news didn’t surprise me, (I was already aware that we women on the autism spectrum struggle disproportionately with our mental health), it reminded me of that sheet of vata-pacifying food guidelines on my fridge back when I was pregnant with Goldie.
Like I said, I was just trying to get through pregnancy. This involved eating a lot of frozen gluten-free pizza (an ideal meal for me at the time in that it contained calories, was enjoyable to eat, and -- critically -- required almost no clean-up).
How could I have imagined that my beloved habits - which created so much personal thrive for me and my clients - would fall by the wayside when I got pregnant?
I was overwrought, and my sympathetic nervous system (think: fight/ flight/ freeze/ fawn) was chronically activated.
When under persistent stress, we lose much of our access to the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for critical thinking.
It makes sense in retrospect that my beloved kitchen sadhana⁴ stalled, and frozen pizza became a mainstay.
The list from the Ayurvedic practitioner stayed up on the fridge for a few weeks. It didn’t end up being helpful. Instead, because I was in a vulnerable place, it hammered down on strong cultural conditioning (the downloading of which I did not consent!) around doing things the right way, and assigning shame and blame for subpar results.
Before this, I’d spent years telling my clients (and myself) to ‘defund the Ayurveda police’ in an effort to help us avoid shaming ourselves for failing to become rule-following Ayurvedic automatons. As in, don’t punish yourself for not following the “rules.” And instead, to think of Ayurvedic guidelines as invitations to experiment.
It was clear to me and my coaching cohorts that the joy of living Ayurveda comes from being creative, flexible, and curious while integrating Ayurvedic wisdom into our lives. There is no one-size-fits-all Ayurveda.
Trauma-informed principles undergird trauma-informed practices
Exhausted and with my forebrain half-offline, I wasn’t up to the challenge of eating mostly vata-pacifying foods. I developed an internal dialogue with a vicious cycle. It went something like this:
“Oh, you’re feeling poorly? Well, look at what you’ve been eating. If you were eating vata-pacifying foods, you’d feel better. What if it’s your fault that you feel like shit?”
When I started noticing myself landing in a freeze state around restrictive eating, I realized I needed to stop seeing that sheet every time I looked at the fridge. So I recycled it.
Many people who get their hands on sheets like this experience energizing results. Not everyone experiences restrictive eating tendencies. Ayurveda treats food as medicine, and incorporating this wisdom offers a path to illness prevention and vibrant health. I don’t think that Ayurvedic practitioners should stop sharing these sheets.
I do, however, think they should be shared after sensitive assessment, and with guidance and psychoeducation around the potential pitfalls of restrictive eating - especially considering that up to 1 in 5 American women have lived with an eating disorder.
My clients are my teachers
It’s not uncommon for coaches, therapists, and the like to help people who have had similar experiences to their own. As a healing arts practitioner, activist, and artist on the autism spectrum who lives with CPTSD, I have had the privilege of coaching many people with whom I have a lot in common. I love working with these populations because our level of shared understanding allows for us to do deep work.
Before getting pregnant, I’d had clients join my program who explicitly (and, I think, bravely) asked me not to talk about food with them. In response, I encouraged them to skip the module on food, and/or dip their toes into the material to whatever capacity they desired (if at all). I urged them to seek support on live calls with coaching if they thought it might help, or with built-in peer support to aid in processing emotions that these topics brought up. Offering these tiered options increases client access choice -- a key principle of trauma-informed care. As they moved through the program, I witnessed how many of them uncovered a more loving relationship with food and themselves.
Early on in my Ayurvedic coaching career, one client with a history of trauma and restrictive eating reached out to me with constructive feedback about how I was teaching about food. I was so grateful that she felt comfortable doing so, and I reflected my gratitude to her.
I considered how I was framing the module where we focused on food (I was mostly repeating what my teacher had taught me), and realized I could shift my messaging to be more inclusive.
I took out language suggesting that, “If you don’t do it this way, you will suffer.” This kind of language is fairly common in the coaching world. It often backfires with me and my typical clientele (we tend to be demand-avoidant types).
In response, I changed my approach to include softer invitations, while overtly acknowledging how difficult some people’s history with food is -- whether due to lack of access at points in their lives, or to the long-lived fallout from discovering in adolescence that food intake was one the few things they could control.
The beauty of Ayurveda is that it’s not going anywhere - when we’re ready, we can always dive in deeper when we get an embodied “yes.”
Diligent to the point where, due to the unpleasantness of my pregnancy, I was put off self-massage for some time. 🙋🏻♀️ I have overachiever tendencies that don’t always serve me.
A recent internet search left me surprised (and excited) that these two don’t often meet. One big caveat: Anjali Deva’s work
Between the contemporary and intergenerational effects of white (and general) supremacy culture, patriarchy, (neo)colonialism, and capitalism, I believe it’s fair to say that trauma is rampant in our culture.
Sadhana is a sanskrit word for devotional practice. My joyful kitchen sadhana included (and is once again beginning to include) habits like making my own sauerkraut for gut health, sprouting my own seeds, and prioritizing locally grown and foraged whole foods.
