Rosie and  Annette first bonded over midlife reinvention. Rosie left her career in law and moved to Bali. Annette left her nursing career and moved with her husband to California just a couple of years ago.

As it turned out both had studied both yoga and the process of detoxification for a number of years prior to ending up in the Yoga Health Coaching tribe and for both their ideas about the process of detoxification have shifted and evolved.They discuss the absolute necessity to tailor make a detox to address individual needs and goals.

Rosie talks about her time at the Hippocrates Health Institute and her training as a raw food chef. Annette talks about her experimentation with raw food and how her ideas about detoxification have shifted as she completely immersed herself in the study of Ayurveda.

Both are about to embark on a sessional detox. Rosie is a mentor in Cate Stillman’s seasonal Ayurvedic detox and Annette is also running a seasonal detox.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• How to work out what you really need from a Detox
• What makes a really good detox
• How to tackle Vata imbalance on a detox
• How to create really great detox recipes

Links Mentioned in the Episode:

• Banyan Botanicals
• NHR
• Annette’s Website
• Rosie’s Website
• YogiDetox Fall

Show Highlights:

• 2:10 — Midlife reinvention
• 4:30 — Anti-inflammatory diet elements
• 7:34 — Styles of detox
• 13:30 — Suggestions for Vata imbalance and smoothies
• 17:00 — What’s in great detox
• 19:00 — How to create recipes

Favorite Quotes:

• It’s almost as if it’s scarier not to do it.” – Annette Shellenbarger
• “Disease…begins in our mind.” – Annette Shellenbarger
• “With time as I head into my menopausal years my digestion has changed.” – Annette Shellenbarger
• “There is no 100% right way.” – Rosie Tait
• “For me now it’s about how I am eating.” – Annette Shellenbarger
• “Then there is the peace and you are not caught up in the madness of this world.” – Rosie Tait

Guest Bio:

Annette Shellenbarger is a Registered Nurse, Ayurvedic Health Counselor, Registered Yoga Teacher, and Certified Yoga Health Coach. As a Registered Nurse, she worked in a kidney transplant unit, pulmonary care unit, oncology, trauma and surgery units, and Public Health.

She is also certified in nutrition through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and is currently a student at California College of Ayurveda. Her life’s desire is to help people change the way they live in order to change the way they feel and age, and is especially passionate about helping people prevent and reverse chronic disease. Annette’s Facebook & Website.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• Why it’s important to look beyond diet for answers to Hashimoto’s
• Why it’s important to look for early signs of Hashimoto’s
• Why being gentle with yourself is key to Hashimoto’s recovery

Links Mentioned in Episode:

• Body Thrive Course
• Body Thrive Book
• YHC Have a conversation
• Gin Burchfield website 
• Dr. Izabella Wentz website
• Stacey Robbins website
• Hashimoto’s book

Show Highlights:

• 4:00 – The western medical model is very limited in terms of autoimmune issues. Functional and holistic medicine look at the entire body as a system, rather than a set of separate systems, and focuses on holistic wellness rather than medication.
• 8:20 – The daily habits of Ayurveda form the foundation for wellness. They are so much more than just diet, and they are hugely important for Hashimoto’s recovery.
• 11:30 – Ignoring our body’s needs and signs of degeneration will only worsen our conditions. It is important to address early patterns of disease in your life in order to prevent more severe disease later.
• 17:30 – Often, we are rewarded for behavior that gets the job done now but will ultimately lead to our burnout. It is important to be aware of this and instead of becoming addicted to high intensity and forced drive, to get into flow.
• 28:00 – Sunlight and connection with nature is critical not only for people with Hashimoto’s, but for all of us!

Favorite Quotes:

• “The medical model is extremely limited.” – Rosie Tait
• “Now that we’ve found dinacharya, it’s safe to say that the habits just form the foundation.” – Rosie Tait
• “With autoimmune disease in general, it is important that we are as soft with ourselves as possible.” – Gin Burchfield
• “Can we be forgiving with ourselves? Can we be gentle with the way that we express those habits?” – Gin Burchfield
• “What if easeful living is the way?” – Gin Burchfield

Guest BIO:

Gin began her career in massage, Ayurveda, yoga, and wellness in 2001, and has been in private practice in Raleigh and Cary, NC since 2008. She now specializes in Medical Massage Therapy and Ayurveda. Gin has also served as faculty in the Therapeutic Massage program at Wake Technical Community College since 2009 and enjoys her work as a Montessori Yoga and Anatomy Instructor through her self-developed “My Body is Science” program. She is currently studying to become a Certified Yoga Health Coach and is offering her new group-coaching formatted, 10-week program PURE HEALTH four times per year. Prior to this, she had the distinction of working at the Chopra Center for Wellbeing, founded by renowned physician and author Deepak Chopra. Here she learned Ayurvedic Massage Therapy and Panchakarma (detoxification) administration. She served as Assistant Supervisor in the Chopra Center Spa before being recruited to work as Therapeutic Bodywork Team Lead at Wellspace, a large integrative healthcare center formerly located in Boston, MA. Check her website and facebook page.

Duika explains how she allowed it to come to life and why it has now taken on a life of its own. The garden emerged as an offshoot to a spot of “guerrilla gardening” Duika undertook at a derelict spot of land next to a railway line. She subsequently managed to secure funding to create both a community garden and a yoga studio in the station, charmingly called the Yoga Station.

As an Aussie based in the North East of England Duika talks about the benefit of being an outsider when facilitating the emergence of a conscious community.She also talks about what she has learned from the experience and why none of us mere mortals should be afraid of grasping the nettle (Yes, that was deliberate).

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• How to effectively manage an evolving community
• What happens when a community you have created takes on a life of its own
• Why it’s never scary to be a changemaker

Links Mentioned in Episode:

• Duika Burges Watson
• Station Masters’ Community Wildlife Garden
• The Yoga Station
• Yogidetox

Show Highlights:

• 3:00 – Duika lived opposite a train line where there was a patch of land that was unused. She started rescuing plants that were already growing there and then began cultivating other plants. She and other interested people formed the community garden organization, which was in need of funding. She set up a yoga studio alongside the garden and used the profits to keep the garden going. While the yoga studio was a success, it wasn’t making enough profit to fund the garden, so they set up a market to fund the garden. Now the garden simply exists for enjoyment without the need commerce or money-raising.
• 7:15 – Rosie draws a parallel between the season rhythms of gardening and the seasonal rhythms yoga health coaches teach their clients to follow. Duika recalls her realization that some of the people who came to the garden, like many people in the world today, understood very little about where their food came from. That disconnection between us and our food has impacted our health.
• 10:20 – Duika’s community was very diverse, and there were differing ideas about what should happen with the gardening space. So they undertook a community survey, compiled the results, and used them to design the garden around what the community wanted. Rather than a negotiation process, the development of the community garden became a community-building process.
• 13:30 – For Duika, the highlights of her endeavors come in small moments like a young person tasting a blueberry for the first time or smelling sage.
• 15:00 – Rosie was particularly impressed that Duika went in with the idea that she was going to create change. Duika says she just followed the process and trusted that everyone involved in the process had something unique to contribute, even if she wasn’t sure what it was. Part of the work became discovering people’s hidden talents and skills and encouraging them to use them.
• 17:10 – In Yoga Health Coaching, we build communities around shared values, but we often look at people like Duika, who appear to be almost superhuman in their ability to do so, and we doubt our own ability. But all we really need to do is gather our fears and find some courage and just do it. You don’t need to be superhuman. You need to leverage your strengths and find others to help you with skills you lack.

Favorite Quotes:

• “We’ve kind of lost the ability to know what’s good for our bodies because we go to the supermarket, and you smell the tomatoes and you don’t know where they come from. So, it’s been interesting watching the evolution of the local community as they start to understand some of these things in a very different way and become more interested in where their food comes from.” — Duika Burges Watson
• “Having a sense of humor helps a lot. So, I think laughing as much as possible is really helpful in developing community,” — Duika Burges Watson
• “It’s not about being superhuman at all. It’s about recognizing that there are lots of bits of superhumanness in everybody that you can draw on.” — Duika Burges Watson

Guest BIO:

Dr Duika Burges Watson is Lecturer in the Evaluation of Policy Interventions within FUSE, the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health – a UKCRC Public Health Research Centre of Excellence. She is most interested in food – from source to senses – and how critical geographic and qualitative methodologies can help reveal different ways of thinking about how we eat. Current research focuses on multi-modal flavor perception, altered eating and the implications of new understandings in relation to health and well-being. Previous research has included work with survivors of head and neck cancer explored the potential of progressive cuisine to enhance the quality of life; food growing and foraging for ‘free’; visceral geographies, urban agriculture and ultra-processed foods, and developments in UK food policy. She leads masters modules on policy analysis (in particular discourse analytic approaches) and the dynamics of evidence in Global Public Policy and Health focusing on contemporary food policy. She is also the patient and public engagement lead for Fuse – the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health. Connect with Duika on her FB page and get more info on Duika’s website.

Batool has dug deep into her ancestral heritage and has drawn on some tried and true modern-day self-care tools to create a book which honours ancient wisdom but is grounded in modern-day practicality. The book has so many things to offer. Amongst other things it brings colour and life to many Hindu deities, is an adult colouring book, and, perhaps most importantly, is a journal which cunningly prompts the writer to delve deep and develop life-changing self care rituals.

Batool is an incredibly warm and generous human being, and in this podcast she shares with us the difficulties she faced getting her project off the ground. She explains how she was able to stay true to her vision despite technical and creative challenges, and bring her vision to life.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants practical advice about achieving a dream writing project from concept to print.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• How becoming an author can help you get your message out
• Why self-care must be at the centre of any big goal
• How to inspire cosmic consciousness

Link:

• Dr. Light Miller

• Batool’s Book The Divinity Within

• Nourish Myself

Show Highlights:

• 2:30 – When writing a book, start with a mind map. This way, you can organize your thoughts with symbols, words, images, and affirmations. Then, once you organize these ideas, they become sentences, paragraphs, chapters, until they become a full book.
• 7:30 – Where did you come from? Where do you want to go? What are your goals? So many of us don’t know what we want to accomplish, what we’re grateful for, what makes us happy. In order to figure out what we want and take steps to achieve it, you can create a vision board for insight.
• 10:00 – We need family, we need love, we need connection with nature, we need friends, we need community, and we need our planet. But we don’t need much more: we don’t need the material things we think we need to be happy.
• 14:45 – Once you have the Ayurvedic daily habits in place, you can create further disciplines, or habits, in order to follow your dharma and achieve success.
•  23:30 – Everyone teaches habits, and there is nothing competitive about it. You just have to be creative and teach it in your own style. This brings your experience and point of reference into your course. 
• 25:25  – Whatever means we take toward it, whether through journal, or vision, or meditation, we all want to achieve the end goal of bliss, happiness, and joy through enlightenment.

Favorite Quotes:

• “When you’re in connection with the universe, the right people show up at the right time.” – Batool Merali
• “We forget to be grateful, we forget to be thankful, we forget where we really came from.” – Batool Merali
• “We need guidance to connect us back to the divine.” – Batool Merali
• “We lose what’s important in our busy-ness.” – Rosie Tait       
• “It’s our own twist on what we think will appeal to the people we’re working with.” – Rosie Tait       
• “We all want everyone to be living a life of balance and bliss.” – Batool Merali

Guest BIO:

Batool Merali is a certified Ayurvedic Practitioner and yoga teacher working in the field of alternate and holistic health for over a decade. She guides people to thrive in body, mind, and spirit; releasing the anxiety that is holding them back in reaching their highest potential and to
experience the magic of life through personal transformation.

Going back to her roots, she found Ayurveda. Health and beauty begins from within. She teaches thoughtful and practical application of yoga, Ayurveda, habit transformation, home remedies to evolve, transform, and lead you to a vibrant, graceful, ageless life.

Visit Batool’s website and connect with Batool on Facebook.

Aileen and Rosie lived and breathed the corporate lifestyle until each found there was very little breath left. Aileen founded and ran a successful contract catering company, and Rosie was a partner in a law firm: each threw in the towel to change direction into health and wellness.

In this episode, the friends discuss how their journeys began with exploration of a plant-based diet as a healing tool, and how their food story has changed to become a story about holistic healing.

Rosie turned to the East, while Aileen stayed with a Western perspective, but the pair discuss how much common ground there actually is between the two, and how much mainstream support there is for Ayurvedic rituals of self-care.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• Why getting the basics right is so important
• How stress influences health
• Why health is about much more than just food

Links: 

• Yoga Health Coaching
• Chopra Center 21-Day Meditation Experience

Show Highlights:

• 6:00 – While in the past, plant-based diets were hard to accommodate, both in the mindset of our culture and in access to healthy foods, healthy foods are now much more mainstream, which is really a win for everyone!
• 8:30 – It’s not just about the type and quality of food you’re eating: rather, it is about how your body systems are processing them and performing. If your body systems aren’t working together effectively, you can’t get the results you desire.
• 14:20 – It is important to meet people where they are in their nutritional knowledge: starting with the easiest possible steps is the best way to get people to create lasting, sustainable change.
• 18:30 – One way to improve eating habits is to create ritual around meal time: taking time and space for your meal, and sitting to appreciate it without distractions, makes your meal more enjoyable and your eating experience healthier.
• 24:00 – Stressful lifestyles not only keep people from giving themselves the time to make healthy changes in their lives, but actually also have negative effects on their hormones and health directly.
• 28:00 – Sleep is incredibly important for overall health: establishing a bedtime routine that focuses on getting to bed and waking early is hugely important, not only from an Ayurvedic perspective, but also a Functional Nutrition one.

Favorite Quotes:

• “It became about more than just the food.” – Rosie Tait
• “It’s not just the fuel that you put into your body, but how your body systems are working.” – Aileen Smith
• “Like a car…, you put in the fuel, but you also have to maintain the engine.” – Aileen Smith
• “It occurs to me that the modern world is trying to produce the science to support what the Eastern/Ayurvedic theories world has been doing for years.” – Aileen Smith
• “Stress stops people putting into place what they need… to support themselves.” – Aileen Smith

Guest Bio:

Aileen Smith is The Health Heroine, and is a former owner/director of The Catering People, Ltd., a hugely successful food and hospitality company in the United Kingdom.

When Aileen sold her contract catering company, she made a conscious decision to change direction and began to explore the role of food as a transformative tool in both a personal and professional capacity.

Now a nutritional therapist, she shares a rage of other therapeutic tools to keep her busy corporate clients firing on all cy

Behind the apparent success there is extraordinary dysfunction. A disconnection from true needs, nutritionally and spiritually. Going to work early when it’s barely light and finishing work as the light fades, at least 5 days a week. Getting things done supported by gallons of caffeine and using controlled sugary snacks to comfort. Relaxation almost always comes with the sledgehammer alcohol.

This isn’t an unusual state of affairs. This is actually a standard way for men and women in the corporate world to work and wind down but the question is, do women suffer in very particular ways?

Kate and Rosie talk about their friendship and their shared experience.

Kate talks about being hit by the mother of all sledgehammers, facing mortality square in the face with a breast cancer diagnosis shortly before her second marriage. She shares how shifts in her habits helped her through her treatment and recovery and why there is no going back. Both consider what might have made them shift earlier.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• Why you might not be as healthy as you think you are
• How to get beyond treating the symptoms of your illness
• How to connect with nature as part of your recovery from cancer
• Why being intuitive is essential to your recovery from illness

Links:

• Julie Friedeberger: A Visible Wound
• NHR Essential Oils

Show Highlights:

• 0.30 Life as an aspiring lawyer.
• 8.24 The Breast Cancer diagnosis.
• 15.30 The role of the Plant Based Diet.
• 17.30  A holistic view of disease.
• 18.30 The role of meditation.
• 23.00 Pushing yourself to the limit and the consequences.
• 23.35 The role of essential oils.
• 26.40 Aligning yourself with nature.
• 29.25 Does it take a health crisis to provoke change?
• 31.45 A Cancer diagnosis means you re-prioritize.

Favorite Quotes:

• 22.00 “I’ve learnt to say no.” – Kate
• 23.00 “I’ve learnt that pushing myself like that is like pressing a self destruct button.” – Kate
• 27.50 ‘You don’t want to sleep walk. You want to appreciate the world you live in.”-  Kate

Guest BIO:

Kate Kennel is a working mum who has recently been declared cancer free. Kate was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly before her marriage and spent her first 6 months as a newly wed undergoing grueling rounds of chemo and radio therapy.

Kate has recently returned to work but has found a new work life balance and has some words of wisdom for women who are stretched to the max believe they have no reason to be concerned about their health.