Healing Your Relationship With Food With Ayurveda
Hi Satiated Podcast Community! I'm starting the first episode of the new year off a little differently. Two years ago I got the impulse to create a podcast. Not knowing where this was going to take me or even what exactly I was going to share, I was driven by wanting to further support those struggling in their relationship with their food and body. I've been there and I know how lonely and isolating it can feel.
This past year, the Satiated Podcast has doubled its number of downloads. We're growing and it's exciting! With growth comes change. There are so many incredible practitioners out there with a similar passion to support you in your relationship with your food and body, challenge diet culture, and support you in cultivating a deeper connection with yourself. I want to bring in these other incredible teachers, counselors, practitioners, coaches, therapists to diversify the support you receive here.
That change starts today. Each month, you will now receive new interviews and still solo episodes with me. I'm thrilled to be bringing in the wisdom and experience of others. You can utilize the tools I have been teaching here for the past 2 years. Notice how your body responds to different perspectives, different teachers, and different offerings. This is an opportunity to discover what resonates with you and what doesn't, what challenges you, what makes you feel seen and understood, what feels like it's outside your comfort zone. Take in what you want to take in and supports you in feeling emotionally and physically satiated and leave the rest.
Without further ado...
Welcome to the Satiated Podcast where we explore physical and emotional hunger and satiation and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host, Stephanie Mara Fox, your Somatic Nutritional Counselor. Today I'm super excited to have Marissa Angeletti with us. She is a Somatic Therapist, Ayurvedic Practitioner, Movement-Based Trauma Specialist, and Therapeutic Movement Educator and Practitioner. Marissa is a dear friend, we connected in the Denver yoga scene and over our passions for Somatics and supporting others in their relationship with our food and body. So, welcome Marissa!
Marissa Angeletti 2:40
Thank you, Stephanie. I'm so glad that we get to have this conversation through the ethers for everybody to hear. I think there's so much that we share in our personal and professional interests. And I feel so honored to have this talk with you. Thank you.
Stephanie Mara 2:56
Yeah, me as well. I'm so glad to have you here. So first off, I would love for you to talk more about your work. And I think we can kind of start off with what is Ayurveda and go into that because if there are individuals listening who haven't kind of delved into the yoga world, they may not know what Ayurveda is.
Marissa Angeletti 3:16
And that's not super uncommon. Yoga kind of came to popularity in mass in the West, unfortunately without Ayurveda for, you know, a large part of the population and I would say in the last several years, it's definitely gaining more and more traction and becoming a little bit more commonplace. So Ayurveda, like Yoga also originated in India, and it's a very holistic, comprehensive wisdom tradition medicine system. It's actually the first known medical system ever, it predates anything. And Ayurveda believes that we come into our vitality and our health and our intelligence and our wellness and our vibrance, through aligning with the rhythms and intelligence of nature. The word itself, Ayur Veda, Ayur means life and Veda means truth or knowledge. And so I love to think about this and a lot of folks would agree of like that the science of life or the truth of life, the truth of being who you are right like living in accordance with your fullness, your integrity. And the thing that's so beautiful about Ayurveda, though it has protocols, is that it's not dogmatic. So, the way I live in my truth in accordance with nature, and the way that you live in your truth in accordance with nature are most likely going to be different and there's room for that. And the way we can support coming into that harmony and that place of truth is through things like lifestyle shifts, food inspiration, diet shifts, herbal medicine, subtle body support, spiritual practice, movement practice, really anything and everything you can think of can fall under the umbrella of Ayurveda.
Stephanie Mara 5:19
Yeah, I love that we're starting here. When I started healing my gut, in my early 20s, Ayurveda was actually the first, like, after kind of going the, you know, traditional model route of just like, okay, you know, let me see what's going on here. And then not really being held by doctors and being just like, mmm we don't really know what's going on with you. You know, it was kind of Ayurveda was the next thing that I turned to, and seeing Ayurvedic practitioners was such a first amazing step of how is my body actually trying to talk to me through the symptoms and how am I out of connection or out of balance in some way that it just started to shift my relationship with food and body just even learning Ayurveda.
Marissa Angeletti 6:02
Yes, and I'm glad you mentioned symptoms, too, because symptoms will tend to be the thing that grabs our attention. But what we're really after, with Ayurvedic practice, and I would argue with Somatics too is we want to get to the root cause, right, we want to see what's underneath all the layers that's actually causing the imbalance or the discomfort or the harm. And so you may engage in practices to kind of tamper symptoms enough that you can start to dig out, you know, what's underneath all those layers. But you always always want to be working in service of what started this, right. What is driving this thing? Not just, oh, this is the thing that's, you know, happening right now that doesn't feel good. But what caused it and why is it stuck around for however long it's been sticking around.
Stephanie Mara 6:59
Yeah, what have you found as you've started to blend Somatics and Ayurveda, kind of the overlaps, or what have you found really effective in supporting individuals with Somatics and Ayurveda, in helping people heal their relationship with their food and their body.
Marissa Angeletti 7:15
Yeah, well, one thing that I love to offer in that realm, from an Ayurvedic perspective is Ayurveda believes there is nothing that is good and there's nothing that is bad, and that anything can be medicine, anything can be poison, it depends on our relationship to it, how frequently we engage with it, the quantity, right. And so if we juxtapose that, on to this sort of dichotomous model of food relationship, many of us have been sort of conditioned into, we can see how a different understanding of looking at food besides this food is good, and this food is bad, can really open up a lot and Ayurveda brings definitely some practices that we can talk about, but also just a paradigm of 20 words, 20 adjectives, I call them the Ayurvedic adjectives, and their Gunas, which means descriptive words that apply to anything and everything in our physical reality, including food. And so we can take this model and start to go, oh, this food that I've been calling, "bad", actually has Gunas or qualities that, let's say are soft, oily, and smooth. Okay, so then if I'm having a response to soft, oily and smooth, I know that I have some work to do, right? Like I am bringing my conditioning or my lived experience to these neutral words. Because for somebody else in a different experience, soft and smooth and oily are going to be medicine, or even for that same person, right? So that the context is so important. And Somatics can come in when we go oh, I'm having a response to these words. Where do I feel it in my body? How can I use my body to help me sequence out the response I'm having to these words or to this food item. And then Ayurveda can come back in and say here's how to begin to look at it or begin to consider it perhaps in a more neutral way. And that's just one way. But I think they pair so beautifully because Ayurveda can bring in the comprehensiveness, I'm going to say that's a word, the comprehensive nature of externals things, you know like herbal support, like lifestyle and daily routine, like spiritual practice and energetic work as examples that somatic practice may not have. So I find that they can, they can kind of fill in the gap for the other. And I also find that there's a lot of similarities from both modalities in terms of the way one utilizes one's body and space. And the movement tendencies one has, I wrote my master's thesis on this, because it's what started to get me really excited about blending the two. And that, for me, has been a really satisfying place to work with folks around. Okay, if I know this about my client, from an Ayurvedic perspective, that most likely means, of course, there are nuances, but in general, I can most likely begin to think that they might display these tendencies in their movement or in their body. And from my somatic perspective, I can come in and I can fact check that. And I can bring in all these beautiful somatic tools to help that person find balance in their movement repertoire.
Stephanie Mara 11:05
I love that. I really hear something that I'm exploring with a lot of those that I work with is it's sometimes it's the physical realm, and sometimes it's the emotional realm. And it's not one or the other, it's often both. And I really hear what you're doing is with Ayurveda, you're kind of bringing in, okay, it might be this, you know, emotional realm, and then somatics, it might be this physical realm, and it's a blending of both, that it's not one or the other. And what I often find is that a lot of when someone's kind of trying to heal their relationship with their food and body, it's really focused on the food, like the What are you eating? And if I just figure out that, that everything else will be healed, and it's so much deeper than that.
Marissa Angeletti 11:48
So much deeper, this, you know, what we would say emotional hunger versus physical hunger. If it were only about the food on your plate, it would be so much simpler. But any food that you can call to mind in this moment right now is going to hold some kind of emotional charge for you. Maybe that charge is positive, maybe it's negative. And both of those are in quotes, right? Meaning supportive or just regulating. But if we think about the kind of centerpiece that food plays in our life, it is connected to a myriad of emotional experiences, some are celebratory, some are ritualistic. Some are based in grief, some are based in coping skills. And so the food and the physical body become a paradoxical way of externalizing, something internal, but then also dissociating from it. And Ayurveda has this really beautiful way of saying, let's make it physical by looking at the qualities of your food through the Gunas, but also through the elements of nature. So these descriptive words I'm talking about, these qualities comprise the five elements, ether, air, fire, water, and earth. And the five elements hang out in pairs to constitute the six tastes, or the six different predominant flavors of food. And its elemental, meaning its physical, right? So we can start to go sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter, and astringent, those are the six. Each of those is correlated with an emotional need. And so what starts to happen is, if I am, let's say, restricting a food group, or a flavor profile in one of those, most likely, I'm also feeling deprived, or I am consciously restricting that emotional hunger that it's correlated with. Likewise, if I'm binging a food group or a flavor in one of those elemental profiles, I am likely overindulging or binging the emotional experience correlated to it.
Stephanie Mara 14:13
Yeah, that is so fascinating. I'm just like loving this over here. I'm wondering if you could give a specific example where you've really seen that play out and like more detail, because I'm just like, fascinated by this right now.
Marissa Angeletti 14:27
It's so fascinating. I'll give the one that I think I've seen the most frequently, and it's actually with the first taste, which is sweet. And so the sweet taste is composed of the elements of earth and water. And even if you haven't studied Ayurveda before, if you just think earth and water, you're going to get some kind of association, right? So if we, if we trace that back to these descriptive words, we get stable, we get cool, we get soft, we get heavy. And if we correlate that to a food group, items in a food group, we're talking about grains, we're talking about sweet potatoes, we're talking about dates, certain root vegetables also fall here. And what happens with some frequency is that clients will come in, and they'll say, I'm not eating carbohydrates. Okay, for how long? And usually, it's not just a month or two, it's been going on for some time. And if we follow back, when they started not eating carbohydrates, we come to find that that began during some sort of emotional turbulence in their life, and was then compounded by the cultural conditioning of carbohydrates are not good for you. And so then what begins to happen is, the person who's not eating the carbohydrates, instead, is going to have cravings for refined sugar, which isn't, you know, refined sugar is not a bad food. But what's happening is it's coming out sideways, because the person feels as though they can't have rice, or they can't have bread. And so now they're trying to satiate a physical hunger for rice, or bread or sweet potatoes with a super-concentrated, super-potent form of earth and water. On the emotional realm, this person is depriving themselves of nourishment and the primary emotional drive of love. And so we often see somebody who's restricting carbohydrates that they're feeling malnourished in regards to love. And maybe that's self-love, maybe that's relationship with partner, maybe that's relationship with a caregiver, but in some context of their life, they're not receiving emotional love, they're also not receiving physical love. And so they're trying to compensate for it by eating something in a much more condensed manner than they might otherwise.
Stephanie Mara 17:12
That is incredible. And just the correlations of what I'm really hearing also is, we have to normalize that actually cravings have wisdom to them. And that we've really learned, like, we've really learned to, you know, fight against our cravings, or see that they're wrong or bad, or we just have to get rid of them. But actually, there's something there to be listened to, because they have so much physical and emotional wisdom to offer.
Marissa Angeletti 17:43
Absolutely. And the wisdom of Ayurveda would add to that and say, when you're in a state of discomfort or imbalance, you're going to crave something that is most similar to your imbalance, which means you're going to drive that in even further, right. But when you're in a state of balance, when you have a craving, as long as it's not harmful to you, then listen to the message of the craving. Because, you know, in our work with disordered eating and body, if you reject the craving, and you repress it, and you push it down, and you ignore it, it just accumulates and builds more strength over time. And then when you finally get the opportunity to, let's say, "indulge the craving," you don't actually feel satisfied. And you may actually feel worse because you've deprived yourself of it for so, so long. And you've labeled it in your psyche as something forbidden. And so now even though you've had the craving you've attached it to wrongness in some way.
Stephanie Mara 18:54
Yeah, I mean, it feels so counterintuitive that actually the foods that have been denied that I know that in our work, we're often like, Okay, we need to heal that relationship with that food, and we actually may need to even eat it more. And that, so often individuals are like, I just need to cut it out entirely to gain that sense of like, regulation, that they're looking, for the sense of safety. And it's like, okay, you may feel uncomfortable at first by eating these foods, but you will feel more comfortable long term by actually healing your relationship with that food.
Marissa Angeletti 19:28
Yeah, when you can allow everything to be all in. You have much greater space for equanimity and balance within your ecosystem. And that's something I think Ayurveda and Somatics do really well, right, like no food is good or bad. No sensation in your body is bad. No movement in your body is good or bad, right? Everything is on a level playing ground because everything holds information. I brought this up a few weeks ago and in another talk I was having, a beautiful practice from Ayurveda that is, is to take the food that's holding the emotional charge, and present it to yourself in a new way. Ritualize it. So you get a beautiful place setting, you get a beautiful glass, you light a candle, and you put the food in this, you know, beautiful place setting, and then you eat it that way. And you see what happens. And I've had a lot of clients do this and experience a shift. You know, in our context in Ayurveda I say like, set the table for spirit, right? Like, think about goddess or the divine within you. You're not any different. So if you have that image in your head of how would you do it for spirit, do it for yourself and see how that shifts the context that you're coming from, when you engage with the food.
Stephanie Mara 20:53
Yeah, this makes me think of, I know you offered a group called holy hunger. And I would love to hear more about that offering that you did and kind of what was offered there.
Marissa Angeletti 21:04
Yeah. So that was a group I offered around this time. And it's coming back in early spring of 2022, which is so weird to finally say that year. So if anyone's interested, you'll see details for that soon. But this was a group offering for women around food, disordered eating, body image, using somatics, and using Ayurveda, and we really took a deep look at emotional hunger, physical hunger, but also spiritual hunger. So looking at the subtle body realm, and how that can play into cravings. Intelligence, daily habits daily routine, we looked at the model of the koshas, which some of us may be familiar with from yoga, we also deeply explored this thing we call Agni in Ayurveda, which is the power of your digestion or your digestive fire. Agni is so, it's so beautiful to understand, because it's not just a physical process. It's also an emotional process. And there are 13 different types of Agni, which is a really different lens to look at digesting, then from a Western lens of I eat something, it moves through my organs, and it comes out my organs, and I'm done. There's actually a lot more subtlety going on. So we spent some time looking at that. We did some work of emotional processing, we did some embodiment. It was a really beautiful experience. And I'm really excited to offer it again because I don't know how often we get to relearn certain things through a really, what's the word I want to say? through a lens that merges different perspectives that are complementary.
Stephanie Mara 22:56
Mm hmm. Yeah. It's funny. Your body was talking before the words came, you were putting your hands together and I was like merging. Oh, yeah, there it is. Yeah, that is Somatics right there, that the body sometimes talks to you before you're even consciously aware of what's coming through.
Marissa Angeletti 23:13
Yes, thank you for naming that. So now everybody knew what I was doing in the vocal pause.
Stephanie Mara 23:22
I'm curious if you could give the satiated listeners a piece of wisdom you feel like you offer a lot of your clients or you want them to walk away with around Ayurvedic and Somatics, what do you feel like that piece might be?
Marissa Angeletti 23:40
That you have to love yourself enough to nourish yourself. And that is an edge. But I know for me and my experiences with disordered eating, that was a big missing piece. And it's continued to be a missing piece for the folks I work with. If you don't believe and feel in your core that you are worthy of love, and you are worthy and capable of receiving nourishment, and it is safe for you to be loved and nourished, right, if we're going with that sweet example, you will maintain a fear around the foods and that taste.
Stephanie Mara 24:26
So beautifully said. You know I see it as we can approach the food piece like we were talking about before like you can be so focused on if I just heal this thing if I just figured out what to eat, that it's a very surface-level layer of healing. That it's just like at some point you kind of have to drop down deeper into why this behavior this pattern this relationship with food and body came in to begin with trying to protect you in some way. And what actually are you trying to get out of that behavior that really is about these core human things of like, wanting to be loved, wanting to be unconditionally accepted, and that it actually starts there, that when you start providing yourself with that, then your relationship with your food and body might change.
Marissa Angeletti 25:14
Yes. I love that. And I always share, you know, whether I'm teaching or working with a client that none of us chooses this behavior, like, nobody is like, Ooh, I know, I, I definitely want to have disordered eating, or I definitely pick an eating disorder. It comes up from a wisdom place of helping you regulate and helping you get through a period of time in your life that you needed to get through. It's a survival mechanism. And so, what we need to do now is not only the emotional repair work of what happened then but also the present moment awareness, the present moment orientation of where's my nervous system now? Where's my body in time and space now? And how do I feed that? No pun intended. How do I feed myself that information so I can do the dual process of past experience and present experience healing, and Somatics and Ayurveda have really powerful ways of helping you orient to the physical reality of the moment in a way that is more clear.
Stephanie Mara 26:30
Yeah, it's funny. Every time I keep saying those two words together, I want to like mush them together into one word like Somatics and Ayurveda. Every time I say Ayurveda first, somatic comes out kind of funny, because I'm like, oh, I want it to be like one word, because it's such a beautiful union of, you know, they really blend together so beautifully. And so I'm wondering what's coming up for you in kind of this new year? What's your offerings? And yeah, how can people also stay in touch with you and your work? Because, gosh, your work is just amazing and so needed in the world.
Marissa Angeletti 27:03
Thank you, Stephanie. You can find me on Instagram and my website, inlokahmotion. And in January, January 30th actually, 2022, a dear friend of mine and I are hosting a day long virtual retreat, called Original You, and we're going to be using Ayurveda, hypnotherapy, and Somatics to drop you into a place of nourishment and love. This idea came to be because I really wanted to work with her and we were brainstorming, and I said, I'm really sick of this rhetoric of "New Year New You." So if you're someone who's also tired of that rhetoric, come join us. And then in early spring, Holy Hunger will be returning so this is a group for women to explore relationship to food, relationship to emotional, physical, spiritual hunger, through the lens of Ayurveda and Somatics. And then I'm always accepting one on one clients as well.
Stephanie Mara 28:12
Awesome. And I will drop all of those links in the show notes so that people can easily find that and click on it. And, just thank you so much for being here today. It's always wonderful connecting with you. And you know, we've known each other for a really long time now, and have been in very similar worlds of supporting individuals around, you know, their relationship with food and body and disordered eating. And we've talked plenty around what we disagree with in kind of the mainstream approaches to all of that. So I'm just so glad that your work exists and that people can find you and connect with you and even going back to that, like the whole "New Year New You", like, mmm how about, you know, it's still you and let's heal the relationship with you so that you feel more resonant with the you that you want to be in the world. And that, you know, I know, that's work that you do in the world, too. And so, you know, thank you for doing what you do.
Marissa Angeletti 29:08
Thank you.
Stephanie Mara 29:11
Yeah, and to everyone listening, thank you so much for being here and listening and tuning in. If you have any questions, I will drop Marissa's links that you can contact her or you can email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime and looking forward to connecting with you all again very soon. Have a great rest of your day. Bye!
Keep In Touch With Marissa Angeletti:
Website: http://inlokahmotion.com/
Events: http://inlokahmotion.com/events-pg
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inlokahmotion/