a long post on ayurveda (or: revelations on fat)

If eighteen-year-old me knew twenty-two-year-old me, Past Caroline would have probably been sort of disappointed in Current Caroline. Past Caroline would have raised a lethal eyebrow, judged Current Caroline a New Age hippie sellout, turned heel on her eighteen-hole Doc Martens and bolted. She may not recognize Current Caroline as an evolved version of herself, much in the way that, when backwards-stalking myself on Facebook (as one does), I feel a kind of maternal distance toward that misunderstood, kohl-eyed girl peering back at me.

I still am, essentially, that girl: I will always consider punk rock my first love; I will never pass up a Fucked Up concert; my Doc Martens, though a tamer eight-hole model, remain the most beloved item in my closet. But a few things have changed for the better. For one thing, the depression and anxiety that plagued my late adolescence has become manageable. A thing of the past, even.

The process of pushing out the dark and letting in the light (and this is precisely the New Age jargon that would have made Past Caroline cringe) involves a strategic combination of coping mechanisms.

Now I feel armed with the tools to fight my internal demons, but just overcoming isn’t enough. I don’t want to settle for just “okay,” either emotionally or physically: I want to be the best possible version of myself. So the past year has been one long experiment in How To Make Myself Feel and Act and Be Better, resulting in a daily yoga practice and a gradual evolution into a vegan diet and a true obsession with exploring, and adopting, ancient belief systems.

And I do feel better. I feel great, most of the time. I feel like I am doing myself a favor by eating clean and smiling more and taking slow, mindful breaths. But I also fear that this initial high will wear off; I know that a vegan diet, even a pretty loosey-goosey one like mine, isn’t necessarily sustainable over a lifetime. I worry that I’ll plateau. I worry that there’s still something about myself – physical, emotional, or spiritual – that I’m missing, and that still needs fixing.

No one can expect to heal all by themselves. And that’s exactly what Ayurvedic healers like Katie Grossman – a warm, grounded, radiant earth goddess armed with the knowledge of this over-7,000-year-old science – are for.

I’ve been meaning to visit Katie for almost a year. She’s a lifelong friend of my sister’s best friend Nikki (hello, Jewish geography); and when Nikki told me about Katie, I knew I had to meet her. I don’t quite know what stopped me from setting a time for my sister Alex (my partner-in-crime) and I to visit Katie at her apartment/studio. The pieces just weren’t falling into place, even though I knew this was something that I wanted, maybe even needed, to do. But last night, when we finally made it happen, Katie made me feel better about my lack of follow-through: she believes that people arrive at Ayurveda at exactly the right time in their lives. I believe her.

Here's a tiny little summary of Ayurveda, according to the Veda Holistic Health website: “Ayurveda is the science of life based on the Vedas, the Hindu books of knowledge and wisdom. Ayurveda is based on the idea that the universe is composed of five basic elements: Space, Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. These five elements combine to form the three vital energies called the doshas.”

I’d become a little familiar with Ayurveda (or as familiar as an auto-didact armed mostly with Wikipedia and Hare Krishna websites can become about a millennia-old science). I’d known the basics of the three doshas (vata, the air element; pitta, the fire element; and kapha, the earth element), and I’d known that the goal of Ayurvedic healing (and of life itself) is to harmonize these three aspects through diet and body work. 

Everyone has all three of these elements roiling around inside our fleshy vessels, but there is a hierarchy of dominance. Katie refers to the elements as our daughters: they are all equally ours, and we have to mind and respect each of them; but there is an oldest, a middle, and a youngest child, and each insists their own demands in varying degrees of obnoxiousness.

To “diagnose” our doshas, or our body types based on the balance of the three elements, Katie had us share our general health profiles, our diets , our exercise routines. She then took a peek at our hips and ran a surprisingly firm hand along our arms, gauging the fat and bone.

Then she did something amazing: she psychologized the shit out of us. By discerning our doshas, evaluating the hierarchy of elements, synthesizing our health histories – essentially reading our physical bodies like a book – she swiftly understood our personalities.

So here’s the deal: I’m vata-dominant, with pitta coming in at a close second, and kapha coming in third. My body type reads as vata, mainly because it’s difficult for me to gain weight, but also because my current diet makes me look leaner. But the pitta is in there, and it wants to come out: it’s in the shape of my hips, which actually exist, unlike most vata-dominant women. It’s in the roundness of my eyes and lips, which take everything in and want to express out. “You like to talk,” Katie said, which at first I passionately denied, but then realized is absolutely correct. Just because I don’t speak often doesn’t mean I don’t like to speak: I thrive on self-expression. Self-expression is how I can live with myself, and within the world. I need to be understood, but the vata element, the thinking element, stops my tongue before the pitta element – which stokes the fires of action and passion – can emerge as forcefully as it wants.

This vata dominance, or excess of air, is the source of my anxiety. It’s also the source of my hesitance towards creating attachments to others; my lifelong battle with insomnia; my tendency towards feeling ungrounded and unsettled, which made my transition into city life – which requires a warrior-like armor – especially difficult. Katie also shared that vata types tend towards food aversion, or “food trauma,” which was especially enlightening at this moment in my life. Is that the real reason why I chose to go vegan? Because I’ve developed imaginary traumas to basically everything else?

The key to quelling a vata imbalance, Katie insisted, is fat. This was not necessarily what I wanted to hear, but when she said it, it was like a slap in the face. Or maybe a breath of fresh air. It just made a lot of sense, and the thought of eating the whole avocado (not just a quarter) already made me feel like my over-active nerves could relax, could soak in a good, palliative bath of velvety fat. Fire requires heat: to stoke the pitta, the body requires insulation.

We spent nearly four hours in Katie's little abode, and her wealth of wisdom was overwhelming but truly awesome. She actually believes that most of us don’t eat enough fat, and also exercise way too much, mostly because we’ve been conditioned to believe that eating fat will make you fat. But fat, as long as it's raw and unprocessed, and in balance with carbohydrates and protein in every meal, is actually a good thing. Fat is what makes you human, what connects your flesh to the earth. Fat makes your skin glow and your hair grow in thickets, like it did before you killed it with ridiculous, not-found-in-nature synthetic dyes (I’m talking mostly about myself, here). Most importantly, fat allows your body to develop real muscles, and to protect itself with a layer of padding – which is exactly what I’m missing, and what I need (what we all need, really), in order to feel safe and secure in this warzone of a city. 

So I think Past Caroline would be happy to know she's still a fighter. But I'm happier now arming myself with raw coconut oil and pranayama rather than the old Sturm und Drang.