The Ayurvedic Longevity Prescription
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Dr. Avanti Kumar Singh. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Avanti. She’s an Ayurvedic wellness expert on a mission to show how Ayurveda is a health catalyst to achieve wellness and longevity in modern life. A former emergency room doctor, Dr. Avanti is also a certified yoga therapist and an Ayurvedic practitioner. Her approach brings together Western medicine with the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda that comes from her South Asian lineage. She’s the host of a top-rated wellness podcast, it’s called The Healing Catalyst. She’s the author of the book The Health Catalyst and a new book with Sounds True and an audio book of that book with Sounds True. It’s called The Longevity Formula: Ayurvedic Principles to Reduce Inflammation, Increase Cellular Repair, and Live with Vitality. Dr. Avanti, welcome.
Avanti Kumar-Singh: Hello, I’m so glad to be here. It’s wonderful.
TS: Congratulations on the publication of The Longevity Formula.
AKS: Thank you so much. I am so thrilled. You have no idea, so excited about it.
TS: I know our publishing team reached out to you actually proactively. It doesn’t happen that often, several years ago and requested that you write this book. So that in and of itself is interesting. And then in the writing of the book, you encountered a health crisis you could say of your own. And I wonder if you can share a little bit about that and in the midst of writing a book about Ayurveda and longevity, what that put you through.
AKS: Yeah, it was actually February of 2023 and I was actually about to hand in my manuscript in about six weeks and I got a diagnosis of breast cancer out of nowhere. I have no family history, no genetic markers for it, and it really leveled me, brought me to my knees because I was really upset, really angry because I was thinking I’ve spent my whole life taking care of people in my profession, in my family, and I’ve been living in IIC lifestyle. I’m vegetarian, I never smoked, don’t drink, doing all of the things that I’ve written about for many years and in this book as well. And I thought, wow, here I am with a cancer diagnosis. And it just really made me question everything to be honest. I was like, is this worth it? Why have I been doing this? And what happened for me over the course of that year of treatment?
So I went through treatment, I did every medical treatment. I decided to go back to sort of the Western medical treatment, but I did sort of an integration of everything I was doing as well as western treatment, chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, 15 treatments of radiation and my chemotherapy was pretty intensive. And what I learned through that was that I, Aveda is protective. That was the huge aha I had because the way that I was able to get through my treatment from the day that I was diagnosed to the day that I took my last radiation treatment was exactly seven months. That doesn’t happen for most people. It usually takes a much longer time, and that was because I was able to bounce back my treatments. My chemotherapy treatments were only two weeks apart and they were very intensive. My treatment team, my healing team really did the max with me because they said you’re young.
I was 51 at the time and very healthy otherwise and they really wanted to sort of go after the cancer. And so for me to be able to have chemotherapy every two weeks and be able to withstand that and not have any treatment delays because they really make a determination right before you do your next chemotherapy, they draw labs, they see how you’re doing and they can always do treatment delays. I didn’t have a single treatment delays and then again, after being done with chemotherapy, exactly four weeks later I had a double mastectomy and exactly four weeks later I had 15 treatments of radiation. And I am convinced that the reason I was able to get through that treatment, the way I was able to do that is because of Ayurveda and all of the things I was doing. So I really came to understand that IRA is protective and it really informed so much of the way that I approached this book. I had all these ideas of what I was going to write, and many of those things are in the book that, like you said, your team reached out to me almost two years before and we were trying to figure out what this book would be about and it changed it a little bit for me because of this experience.
TS: I’m curious how it changed the book.
AKS: Well, I think I had that perspective. I had that lens. I wrote this book. The really, the idea for The Longevity Formula came because I was turning 50 and I was thinking about what does the next stage of my life look like? I’m an empty nester. What did I want my life to be like? What was the next phase of my work in the world? I started thinking about all my elders, my grandparents, my own parents who are still living, and I was thinking, how is it that they’ve lived with such vibrancy into their seventies, eighties, nineties? And I really started to think about this. And so I think what happened for me is that it was almost like I had a real life experience of what I was going to be writing about at the age of 51. So I turned 51 by that time. So I think that that’s how it changed it is that it became even more real. It wasn’t just an exercise of thinking about what were my elders going through and what they did in Ayurveda and their lifestyle, how does that square with western medicine, which is what I’ve been trained in. It also became very personal of my own experience of what I was going through. So I think that that really informed so much of how I wrote this book.
TS: And just to ask another question, and I’m so glad also Dr. Avanti, that you’re in good health as we have this conversation and you seem quite robust. And is it fair to say you’re in full remission? Is that Yes. Fair. Yeah, I could imagine somebody saying protective really, it didn’t protect you from getting cancer, and yet you still have this love and devotion and you’re an ambassador for Ayurveda. I could imagine someone else who might’ve said, I’m going to throw the whole thing out and I wonder how you sorted through, really, to come to this place of using a word like protective.
AKS: I’ll be honest, when I first had that diagnosis, I was sitting on the floor in my house in my bathroom crying hysterically and thinking, yeah, forget it. Why am I doing this? I really, really had that moment and I also had that moment when I made the decision to have conventional treatment, also doing all the integrative practices I was already doing. I sort of felt like, oh my gosh, everyone’s going to think I’m a fraud because now I’m going back to western medicine. But I’ve always had an integrative approach, and so for me, I was able to square that. But the Ayurvedic piece, I think what really helped me again is that the reason I use the word protective is that the reality is we live in a very toxic world. We all know that whether it’s from the environmental toxins, the stress that we’re under, the social media, that we’re bombarded with the politics, everything, it’s a toxic world we live in, and unless you’re going to sort of put yourself in isolation in a room bubble, wrap yourself and not have contact with the world, you are going to be exposed to toxins.
I think the point is how well can you deal with the toxins? The reason I say Ayurveda is protective is because if we live in a toxic world, how can we protect ourself? Ayurveda is the answer from my perspective, and that’s how I came to that, and that’s why I can say with such enthusiasm that Ayurveda is protective because that was my experience as well.
TS: And I just want to underscore thank you so much for being so forthcoming here at the beginning of our conversation, and one of the things I learned in your book, The Longevity Formula, is that Ayurveda can be translated as the science of life, which is something that I had heard previously, but also you could say that it has something to do when you translate Ayurveda as the knowledge of longevity. I didn’t know that. So Ayurveda is traditionally associated with longevity. Is that true?
AKS: Yeah, I mean the point is that it’s quite literally translated Ayurveda is the science of life and it’s quite literally a manual for living a long, healthy life. This idea of health span and lifespan, lifespan is how many years we’re on the earth. Health span is what’s the quality of those years, and Ayurveda literally is a manual to increase your health span, so it equals your lifespan. So you have that vitality and that energy and enthusiasm and joy and connection as you go into your later years of life. And so that is for me very much it is a manual for longevity as well.
TS: Where does this term health span come from? Health
AKS: Span has been used quite often in the medical sort of world among my colleagues. There’s been a lot of talk of longevity and this idea of health span is that again, that it’s different than lifespan. We in the medical world and traditional medicine, western medicine, we are really good at keeping people alive for many more years. We’re really good at that. I looked up some of the statistics and the average age or life expectancy in the world in 1971 when I was born, which was 50 something years ago, was only 57 years in 2024. It is now 73 years. So we are really good at keeping people alive for longer and longer times, and that’s our lifespan. But what about health span? What? What’s the quality of life that we’re having? That’s where this word or this idea of health span is like let’s look at how are we living, how we may be living until 78, 79, 90, whatever it is, but are we functional? Are we connecting with our purpose with our community? Do we have good health? Those are the questions. That’s sort of where that idea of health span comes from.
TS: In The Longevity Formula, you introduce a two step approach, if you will, to longevity. You say that it involves two different dimensions and I want to talk about both of these dimensions. One, increasing cellular repair and then secondly decreasing inflammation. And I’d love to understand more deeply what you mean by both of these aspects of the method.
AKS: Sure. So this idea for The Longevity Formula, it really came from me sort of digging into the research of what’s going on when we’re aging, why are we aging physiologically, not chronologically. And really what I kept seeing is that it’s really this idea of the accumulation of cellular damage in our bodies and how really does that happen? There’s two main ways, which is we have a lot of cellular damage that basically we have decreased cellular repair. Our bodies are not able to repair the cells as well as we age chronologically. So that’s the first thing. And the second thing that causes this accumulation of cellular damage is inflammation. So that’s where The Longevity Formula came from, is that really how can we decrease this accumulation of cellular damage that causes physiological aging? And the two pieces that I found that were keys to this, you need to increase cellular repair and you need to decrease the inflammation. Now, I was able to sort of bring that together with I Aveda because when you do those things, you actually nourish the tissues, the seven tissue layers, and that is really sort of the secret sauce. That was what I was asking myself, what are my elders doing? They’re nourishing their tissues into their sixties, seventies, and eighties and nourishing their tissues is really decreasing the accumulation of cellular damage. And that’s how I kind of put it together.
TS: I want to see if I can increase my understanding of this. What is cellular damage and does it just happen on its own and why does it accelerate as I get older?
AKS: Right? So there’s so many reasons for cellular damage. One of the biggest ones that I’m sure many listeners have heard of is oxidative stress. The free radicals that are out there that will attack the cells and they cause all kinds of problems. Cellular damage actually happens from many mechanisms. And I wrote about all of those mechanisms in the book, the nine mechanisms of aging, which are sort of the widely agreed upon mechanisms of aging that we sort of know in western medicine right now. And all of those mechanisms can cause cellular damage and they also can cause inflammation. And so the ways that that happens is there’s many, so let’s talk through some of those, the nine sort of mechanisms, and I think that that might be the best way to think about this. The first thing is genetic damage, damage to our DNA, which is our blueprint. That’s the first way that the cells are damaged. The next thing is telomere shortening, right? Telomeres are the protective sort of caps on our DNA and as we age chronologically, those start to shorten, which then again causes problems in the cell. Mitochondrial damage, protein damage, dysregulated nutrient sensing, mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammaging, all of these mechanisms, they’re all different mechanisms that physiologically will cause damage to the cells.
TS: Let me ask a question, and forgive me if this is really ignorant, but sometimes people age, they’ll say something like, well, this old car, it’s running down and as you’re talking about damage, it’s making me think of something like a vehicle that over time gets banged up here and there. And I’m wondering, do you think, and with in an Ayurvedic model is this notion of the body being like a car that with a bunch of miles on it starts to, its parts are damaged. Does that map onto our bodies accurately in your view?
AKS: Yeah, I think that that’s an interesting, I mean I think that’s an analogy that you could definitely make. The point is is that we are going to age chronologically. There’s nothing we can do to stop that. That’s inevitable. But the thing that’s not inevitable is the physiological aging. Can we slow that down? And so in your analogy of the car, we have a car, we’ve got the tires, the windshield, the brakes, all that over time, days and years go by, those things start to break down. But if we keep them oiled, if we keep them, if we keep rotating the tires and putting new tires on and making sure we check the brakes and put the oil in the car is going to last a lot longer. It’s going to run for many more years.
TS: Bear with me here. Is it better to use the analogy of a mechanical vehicle like a car or is it better or more accurate in your view to think of the body like a garden that gets tended and it has this natural region, and forgive me, but as somebody who doesn’t know a lot about science and how cells work, I’m trying to understand a right-brained way, if you will, to match it to the more left-brained explanation that you’re offering about the aging process.
AKS: I mean, I think again, it’s probably wherever people can sort of access this. And I think both analogies are beautiful and so it is about tending it like a garden and also maintaining a car. I mean they’re both the things you’re taking care of those environments, those ecosystems, and that’s what we’re trying to do with our bodies. It’s sort of if you just leave it to its own devices, a garden that’s not tended to will also overgrow and there’ll be weeds and there’ll be problems. So tending to that garden makes it flourish more. Same thing with the car, same thing with our bodies.
TS: Also, just to keep trying to increase my understanding here, when you’re talking about these mechanisms of aging and the very first one you offered had to do with damage to our DNA blueprint, how does our DNA blueprint get?
AKS: Well, the biggest thing is, so there’s these three things we need to think about is the genetics, the genome, then there’s something called the epigenome or epigenetics, and then there’s the exposome, right? So genetics, that’s the genes are our DNA, that’s what we’re born with. Now there is something that is called the epigenome or epigenetics, and it is what washes over our genes. Basically it tells the genes what should be read and what should not be read. And epigenetics is then on top of that, influenced by the exposome, which is basically the environment we live in. So really when it comes down to it, the way that we can sort of slow prevent DNA damage is through what our DNA is exposed to. And that goes back to lifestyle environment, toxins, right? All the things that we talk about in Ayurveda, in many of the traditional healing systems, that’s where it starts
TS: Increasing cellular repair. You’ve indicated that this is going to have something to do with nourishing the tissues, but what helps cells repair? What helps cells repair?
AKS: There are many things. Probably the biggest thing that I really wrote about was this idea of prana. Prana is the life force energy and the biggest sources of prana are the sun, the earth, and the wind and water. Those are the natural elements and those are sources of prana of life force energy. When we are able to use the life force energy, those sources take them into our bodies and use them effectively, we will actually be able to nourish our tissues and increase cellular repair and decrease inflammation. The tissues are the bridge really is what we’re sort of talking about here in Ayurveda, we believe that the energetic body is the blueprint for the physical body and that all health and illness starts in the energetic body. So if we have any kind of problems, any blockages to flow that will cause symptoms, illness, chronic disease, to show up depending on how long that blockage is there, the tissues are the bridge between the energetic and the physical, and they’re able to take in that prana, that life force energy and convert it and then use it in the physical body.
So cellular repair is really supported through prana. So the more prana that we can bring into our bodies and the more prana that we can move through our bodies, the better our health will be.
TS: Now it’s very interesting that your emphasizing this notion of tissues as the bridge. The one quote that I pulled from The Longevity Formula is that tissues are the bridge between the physical body and the energetic body, and thus have a very important role in illness, health, aging, and longevity. And I wanted to understand this because of course I’ve heard so much and in so much of what we’ve done, it sounds true about your energetic anatomy and how that relates to your physical anatomy, but I never really understood, well, how exactly does it relate in terms of the mechanism of relationship? And when you say the tissues are the bridge, can you help me understand that? Does that mean the cells of the tissues are being informed and shaped energetically, or how do you understand this bridge notion?
AKS: I mean, the bridge is really that energetic piece of what is taking the prana and converting it into the food, the life force energy that then nourishes ourselves that actually helps to repair them. And that’s the bridge from my perspective. So the thing is, is that there is no direct correlation from the perspective of Western and Eastern thought. The tissues as we think about them in western medicine is not the same that we think of them. In Ayurveda, there are some correlations of the tissue layers. You have the rusa, the rha, the mid, these seven tissue layers that correspond to different tissues and cells in the human body, in the physical body. But the way that they connect is it’s almost like a little bit of an esoteric sort of perspective, is that the tissues are that bridge between those two bodies because they can take prana from the environment and convert it into the nourishment for the physical body. So that’s how it is the bridge. It’s not an exact cellular perspective. It’s this idea of prana and that the tissues can take this prana and convert it into what we need to live with health and vitality.
TS: Can you explain more what you mean by nourishment in Ayurveda and if you will, from the cell’s point of view or the tissue’s point of view, what do they see and experience as nourishment?
AKS: I mean it’s really that prana coming in to really nourish them and to help them flourish. If you have tissue depletion, that’s when you have this accumulation of cellular damage. That’s how you relate the two. And as we get older, as we age chronologically, we do have tissue depletion. Now, if we can continually nourish the tissues with prana, then we are going to have nourishment of the tissues and therefore have longevity. So the idea here is always to just nourish the tissues. And all of the practices that I talk about in the book are really focused on how do you nourish the tissues?
TS: What would be signs of tissue depletion? I’d say, oh, I’m aging, and this is tissue depletion, right?
AKS: So anything that we experience as we age, whether it is pain, decreased ability to function, to walk to move, or pain with movement, decreased cognition, all of the things that we think about that are associated with aging, they’re not caused by aging, they’re associated with aging because we can actually reverse the cause is what my point is. So that’s how you explain or how I can explain that my elders are living with a hundred percent cognitive ability into their nineties because they’re nourishing the tissues. They’re constantly nourishing that tissue. They are able to live independently and not live in pain and do all of their household work or go to the grocery store, do all of these daily living activities very well because they’ve nourished the tissues, right? That’s how they kind of come together.
TS: Alright. The Longevity Formula has these two parts, increasing cellular repair, and then the second part decreasing inflammation. Inflammation. Of course, we hear a lot about eat the anti-inflammatory diet. But help me understand from Ayurveda’s point of view what decreasing inflammation means and why it’s so important.
AKS: Well, decreasing inflammation, let’s start from a western perspective. We know that inflammation is related to every chronic illness that we have, and the number one cause of inflammation is stress, is the stress response that we have. It causes cellular damage, it causes more inflammation. So it’s almost like a cycle that happens from an iur standpoint. Inflammation is caused when there is a decrease of energy flow in the energetic body, either because there’s blockages or there’s not enough energy coming through the system. So again, it comes back to prana. It’s about moving that prana in, bringing that prana in, and when we can do that, we can decrease inflammation. That’s the Ayurvedic perspective.
TS: And you write about how there can be such a thing, if I understand correctly as good inflammation, as well as bad inflammation. What’s good inflammation?
AKS: So good inflammation is what we need to protect our bodies, right? Inflammation is not always bad. It is a protective mechanism. If a virus comes into our bodies, our inflammation is what protects us. Our immune system is what protects us, right? Our immune system will cause inflammation to happen to basically protect us. That’s good inflammation. Now, bad inflammation is that chronic low level inflammation that so many of us in the western modern world are experiencing many times without even knowing it. That’s the bad inflammation. The reality is, is that we were not designed to be on high alert 24 7, 365 days a year for our entire lives, but the modern world that we live in, again, we live in a toxic world. Our bodies are put into that mode, and so we’re in an inflammatory response all the time. That’s bad inflammation. So there’s the difference. What we want to be able to do is go in and out of that stress response rather than staying in a stress response all the time. And when we can learn how to do that, that’s when we can start to modulate and everything comes back into balance. We’re not in this sort of imbalanced high inflammatory stress response all the time. That’s the difference between good and bad inflammation.
TS: In The Longevity Formula, you offer dozens, many dozens of Ayurvedic, we could call them lifestyle interventions, things that each one of us could do that will both increase cellular repair and decrease inflammation. And I wrote down just these are categories that you cover, not the actual practices that I’m about to name, but movement practices, ways to be in nature, ideas and practices related to sleep, how we can treat our skin with scrubbing and oil, dietary suggestions, including fasting and water consumption. The timing of when we engage in activities and more. And obviously in a conversation like this, we can only touch on a few things.
AKS: Sure.
TS: I’m going to ask you, you ready for this?
AKS: Sure. Bring it on.
TS: Okay. I like that. Thank you Dr. Avanti for receiving my style here. How about if you just get to name five, one handful that you think are the most important Ayurvedic lifestyle interventions that you would recommend for people that are really interested in longevity?
AKS: Yeah, absolutely. And these are things that I would actually ask all of your listeners to really please do. It’s a prescription. These are the ones I really want you to focus on. The first one is to fast overnight, basically fast for 12 hours a day. Don’t eat when you should be sleeping. It’s that simple. That is probably one of the best things that you can do for your longevity. And that is because of a process called autophagy. Autophagy is a process that we have naturally in our body, which is basically like the cleanup system. It basically is a way to recycle all of those cellular parts, those damaged cells that are hanging around. And autophagy is the process by which we clean that up, recycle what we need, and get rid of the rest. Fasting, we know through western studies, medical studies that show that it is the best stimulant for autophagy. And so if we fast every night, what we’re doing is every night we’re kicking on that autophagy again by fasting overnight, and we’re helping that cleanup process.
TS: Okay. Let me ask you one question about this first point, because you offered it as a prescription. I trust you, Dr. Avanti. One thing that a naturopathic physician mentioned to me because I was having some challenges with sleeping, is perhaps I should eat some protein before bed because I might be waking up in the middle of the night actually because hungry. So I’m wondering what you think, if I’m imagining saying from 7:00 PM to 7:00 AM that 12 hour cycle, no food. Okay, but what about this notion that maybe I’m waking up at two, 3:00 AM I’m having some cortisol spike because I actually want some food.
AKS: So I would disagree quite honestly, because from my perspective, when you eat a difficult to digest meal later in the day, that actually is harder for your body to manage. What we’re doing when we’re going into nighttime is we’re going into cleanup mode. Our digestion is actually not kicking up in the middle of the night because we’re hungry. Right? Back in college and medical school, we would stay up all night to study, and midnight munchies would come because we’re awake studying. We’re like, oh, let’s eat. That’s actually not what’s happening. Our brain is thinking that that’s what’s happening, but it’s actually it’s our digestive system is rubbing up because it’s cleaning up. And so from my perspective, if you eat things that are hard to digest overnight, then your body is trying to deal with that new food that’s come in rather than having the time to clean up what it needs to clean up. So I would actually suggest that you have the protein, the things that are difficult to digest. Protein is harder to digest for the digestive system in the middle of the day. That’s when your digestive capacity is at its highest according to Ayurveda. And so I would actually, actually respectfully disagree with that idea.
TS: Okay, very good. So your first part of the prescription here, the longevity prescription is a 12 hour fast. Well, sleeping overnight. Yep.
AKS: Overnight. Yep.
TS: Yep. Okay. Let’s move on to number two.
AKS: Yeah, number two is morning sun viewing. So first thing, when you wake up as soon as you can, after you wake up, get outside and look at the sun. Now you’re not looking directly at the sun, but get that natural sunlight into your retina. The reason here is that again, what you’re doing is your retina is then sending a message to your brain to basically shut off melatonin and increase cortisol. Melatonin is our sleep hormone, cortisol is our wake hormone, and basically it’s regulating that. Those two hormones control everything downstream. So if those are out of whack, everything else is going to be out of whack. So by doing this morning sun viewing, what you’re doing is you’re resetting your circadian rhythm every single day. So again, get outside 10 to 20 minutes, whatever you can do in natural sunlight, no sunglasses, not through a window, not through a car window. Get outside, take a walk. You can do two things at once. You get some exercise, you get some prana flowing and you’re doing your morning sun viewing.
TS: Very clear. Inspiring number two. Let’s move on to number three.
AKS: Number three, that would be to meditate and breathe. Those are kind of two and three, or sorry, three and four, but I kind of put them together.
TS: I’ll let you count it as one.
AKS: Okay, so meditate and breathe. We know that meditation is one of the most widely studied sort of practices that we have. Now. We know that it changes the brain, it changes our neuroplasticity, it changes so many things. Meditation and breath work are two things that we also know shift us into a parasympathetic mode. Remember I was talking about earlier that we are not designed to be in a stress response 24 7, but that’s sort of the reality of modern, the modern world. What we’re doing when we do this, when we meditate and we learn how to breathe to extend our exhale, to basically take us into that parasympathetic relaxation response, is that we’re learning how to get out of that high stress 24 7 stress response that we’re in. Why is that important? Because stress, again, is related to every chronic illness because of the inflammatory aspect of it.
When we’re in a stress response, we’re releasing all these hormones, including cortisol, which will activate inflammation. Inflammation we know is a huge problem and causes cellular damage, depletion of the tissues, physiologically aging. So if you can just meditate for one to three minutes even, and meditation doesn’t have to look like sitting on a mat on the floor in the lotus position, meditation is anything that allows you to bring your point of focus to something outside of your mind. So every time your mind wanders, if you’re trying to meditate, you just bring yourself back to that point of focus. So it could be a candle flame, it could be washing the dishes, it could be your breath, a mantra, walking your footsteps. Any of these things can be meditative. So meditation is one thing that helps to move us into that parasympathetic relaxation response. And then the breath.
Our breath is absolutely connected to our physiological responses, and our breath is connected to our nervous system. When we extend the exhale to be longer than the inhale, we will actually go into a relaxation response. That’s all you have to remember. There’s no fancy breath breathwork needed. I mean, all the fancy breathwork is wonderful, but in the moment, if you don’t remember what that fancy breathwork is, it doesn’t help you. So the two things you just have to remember is that the inhale excites you and the exhale relaxes you. If you make the exhale longer, you tap into that energy of relaxation. If you need to rev yourself up, you make the inhale longer and you’ll tap into that energy. Very simple. I love this. Okay, let’s go on to number four. Okay. Number four is really probably the most important from my perspective. And it’s about connection.
I didn’t expect that the last part of my book would be so much about connection, but for me, as the year went by of going through that breast cancer journey, it became clear to me that that was probably one of the most important things for longevity that I could talk about. And it’s really this idea of connection with self, connection with others and connection with the divine. For me, that has become such an important part of what I want to teach people is that when we have a sense of loneliness or aloneness that is really detrimental to our health, there are studies that have been done that show that a perceived sense of loneliness is as detrimental to our health to as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, take that in for a minute. That’s significant. It’s a big deal. So when we can do things to allow ourselves to feel more connected, so even if you are feeling very lonely alone, having depressive thoughts, one of the best things that you can do is find a way with something, with something larger than yourself, with another person.
Any kind of connection can help you come out of that. And so I think that that is such an important thing. And there’s little things that I always think about. There’s something I made up sort of the 3, 2, 1 rule, three acts of gratitude or three remembrances of gratitude for the things that you have in your own life. So that’s connecting to yourself. Two is connect with your eyes, your two eyes with two other people, even if it’s just a smile at them or to acknowledge them. You don’t have to say anything you could if you wanted. That’s connecting with someone else. And the last one is just spend one moment connecting with something larger than yourself, whatever that is. You could call it God divine, whatever it is for you or the universe or just nature. Maybe it’s like we were talking a little before we went on about living, being in nature and how energizing that is and how healing it is is because we’re connecting with something larger than ourselves. So that would be the last tip I would have is please connect.
TS: Let me ask you one question about that, Dr. Avanti, because you said that that became more apparent for you through your breast cancer journey. In what way did that show you the importance of connection?
AKS: For me, one of the biggest lessons that I learned, a very personal lesson was that I had to learn how to receive love from others. I was really good at asking for help, getting help, giving help, caring for others, but really taking it in, receiving it was not something I was very good at. And I knew the moment that I got this diagnosis that if I was going to get through this, I was going to have to learn that lesson of receiving love and the experiences I had throughout the journey. For me, receiving love was through connection. It was through this connection in a very, very different way of becoming more vulnerable than I had ever been in my life of being more real than I had ever been in my life. Growing up as a first generation south Asian woman whose parents immigrated from India, I always had to be a hundred times better than everybody else around me.
And then I chose a field medicine which was dominated by men. And again, I always had to be a hundred times better than everyone else. And in that process, you learn to put up masks, you put up the shields, you sort of steal yourself to be in this world and to do the kind of work I’m doing as a physician, I had to sort of harden my heart in a way to be able to make it through the day. And slowly through going back to Ayurveda, I’ve learned to sort of let those shields down to break those walls down. And this journey was the last piece of that was to really sort of say no more. I’m not going to wear those masks. I’m not going to put up those walls. I’m really going to allow myself to just really be the human being that I came to this earth as. And so for me, that was really the receiving of love through connection. That was how it sort of manifested for me, for me.
TS: What would you say to someone who’s listening who says to themselves, I think I have trouble receiving love from other people. I block it. What sort of suggestions might you have as part of your prescription here?
AKS: I think the most important thing is to think about why is it so hard to receive the love? And that’s not something that you can necessarily think your way through and even do on your own. That might be something you need some guidance from a therapist or a friend or a family member. But I think really trying to get to some of the answers of why do I not receive love? The other way that you could do this also I think is to even give more love than you did before. Give more love than you think you’re even capable of. For me, that became a big part of it. Also, when I didn’t know quite how to receive the love, I just gave more love. And then I found that I was able to open my heart to more love. So giving it allowed me to receive it too.
TS: That’s a beautiful answer. Now I said, you could have five parts to the prescription. And I was willing, generous, interviewer that I am to bundle meditation and breathing together. So this gives you one bonus item here, an Ayurvedic lifestyle suggestion.
AKS: The last one I would say is each your largest meal in the middle of the day. That is so important. And I have found over the years of advising people on Ayurvedic lifestyle, that is one of the biggest things that transforms their health. When they start to eat their largest, most difficult to digest meal in the middle of the day, anywhere between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM, that’s when our digestive capacity is at its highest. We can deal with the food much better, and we nourish ourselves much better. Basically, we’re able to keep what we need and get rid of what we don’t much more efficiently in the middle of the day. So I would say do that. Eat a light, easy to digest breakfast and dinner, eat most of the difficult things to digest in the middle of the day. It’ll transform your health and increase your longevity.
TS: Alright, I’m going to open up here. In our last part of our conversation, what I think is a bit of a difficult Ayurvedic, I don’t know if I’m going to call it a can of worms, but it’s a difficult part for me at least, of understanding Ayurveda. When I was first introduced to Ayurveda, it was all about the doshas. Go online, figure out, are you a kafa, Pitta a Vata, Pitta a Pitta, Vata, what type are you? And then each of your type. And I found it quite confusing. And here we’ve had a whole conversation about Ayurveda for health span and healthy longevity. And I don’t think you’ve brought up the doshas once, and I’m like, did we make it all the way through the end of this conversation? But here I, I’m bringing it up. Could you give me the Dr. Avanti way into understanding the doshas and how they relate to longevity?
AKS: Sure. So the doshas are basically the idea that the five elements, air, space, fire, water, and earth, that is what everything in the universe including human beings are made of. And we all have a different proportion of those elements within us. We might have more air, more water, whatever it is, right? Of those five, we have all five elements. Now, the ancients in the Vedas, they wrote down that these five elements combine to make three doshas or bio energies. They’re basically body mind constitutions is what they are. And so they combine to make these three doshas, VA and kafa from the perspective of longevity. Vata, Pitta and Kafa also exists. I just said they exist in all of the universe. So they exist in human beings and nature in the times of day in our food, in our tissues, when our tissues are nourished well by all five elements. And VA kafa correctly, and I can’t go into all the details because it will open a can of worms, but when we’re able to keep Vata Kafa in balance at our natural state of balance, our tissues are nourished more efficiently and more effectively. That’s how they connect from the perspective of dohas to longevity.
TS: Okay, that’s helpful. And one of the things I read in The Longevity Formula is that in Ayurveda, there are these three phases of our life, and that childhood is associated with the Kapha dosha. You’re going to explain all this. I just wrote it down and thought, this is very interesting adulthood with Pitta and then wisdom hood, a great term that you introduce for our lives beyond 50 is associated with the Vata dosha. And I wanted to understand specifically why is Vata associated with the phase of wisdom hood and what does that mean for our healthy tissues as we age?
AKS: Right. So Vata is associated with the wisdom hood years because Vaha is connected to air and space, which is connected to the nervous system and connection with the universe. And the idea here is that as we move into the Vaha stage of life, we have increased air and space. We have greater connectivity to the universe. We start to ask the questions of why am I here? What am I here for? We also start to disconnect or start to later on, start to retreat a little bit from our adulthood. Crazy lives of doing so many different things. But what happens is that as we age, we have more and more VA and the tissue start to dry out. They get drier because those are the qualities of space and air from the perspective of The Longevity Formula. An Ayurvedic perspective is that, again, we go back to that golden principle of increases like and opposites reduce. As we move into the vaha period, if we can actually increase the opposite, right, opposites reduce, then we are going to be able to nourish the tissues. And so much of what I wrote in The Longevity Formula is about basically doing the opposite as we age, so that we can keep the nourishment of our tissues going. And that’s what a lot of the practices are about.
TS: And so the opposite to Vato would be what do we need to bring up?
AKS: So we need to basically bring in more warmth, we need to bring in more moisture, we need to bring in more stability, we need to bring in a little bit more oiliness as a quality. These are the types of things. It’s a very yin time of life actually, because we come out of the middle time of life, the Petha stage, our adulthood sort of householder stage 25 to 50 approximately, which is very much about fire. And that’s very young. As we move into the wisdom hood, we’re moving to this more feminine yin time. And so we want to bring those yin energies up to counteract the yawn energies that we’re sort of going into because of the Baha stage.
TS: As we conclude, Dr. Avanti, I wonder if you can bring your family lineage into our conversation and perhaps introduce us in the book, you introduce us to your grandfather Bji and how he was a natural Ayurvedic practitioner. I wonder if you can share a bit and bring your family forward here.
AKS: Yeah, I’d love to. I am first generation and growing up, I was very influenced by my community, small community of South Asian families. All the women that I saw were either homemakers or they were doctors. And so when I looked around, I thought, oh, that’s what I want to do. I wanted to go into a helping profession. And even though I was living in Ayurvedic lifestyle at home, my eyes were on the prize. I wanted to go to medical school. What I didn’t realize until much later in my thirties was that I had been in this medicine my whole life, this Ayurvedic lifestyle, which is such powerful medicine. And here I was going chasing after Western medicine. And I think for me, coming back to IR Vda meant coming back to my lineage, coming back to my family, coming back to my ancestors, coming back to my grandfather and seeing the things that they did that I thought was just a part of normal life.
Understanding the medicine in everything that they did, whether it was the way they cooked, the way that they decided what time to sleep or how they dressed, the routines that they had every day, those were all medicine, and I didn’t even realize it. And so for me, this whole mission that I’m on of really helping people understand the power of Ayurveda is me going back to where I came from and also bringing the knowledge that I’ve gained from Western medicine and trying to bring the two together so that people can really understand that it’s really the integration of the technology we have in western medicine and wisdom that we have in ancient healing systems. When we come to the integration of those, that’s where the magic happens. That’s where you’ll have longevity and help.
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