Member stories

I have no idea where I'd be without Jess, but I'm pretty sure I'd be miserable and sick, probably feeling pretty hopeless and helpless.

One thing I've learned from working with Jess is that not all Ayurveda is created equal. My brain has started tracking some internal spectrum of Ayurvedic skill that runs from the low end of "Turmeric Blogger" up to "Well-Meaning Vibe Herbalist" and "Competent Practitioner" all the way to "Dynamic Systems Wizard."

Jess is, so far, the only Dynamic Systems Wizard I've found or heard about in the Ayurveda space. There's a huge glut of folks in the Turmeric Blogger and Well-Meaning Vibe Herbalist part of the spectrum, a handful of competent practitioners, but only one Jess that I've found.

It's a small thing, but I remember one of the first things that blew me away was that Jess actually listens. Like, she actually listens. And she's not just listening to me and my words, she's listening through me and my words, hearing my tone, my body systems, my emotional arc, personal history, etc.

The other doctors would listen to my symptoms, shrug, and send me off to another three specialists. "I'm an endocrinologist, this sounds like you have a liver issue and an ENT issue, so go see those guys — but honestly, probably just accept that this is what your body is like now, get used to it."

Jess, on the other hand, would listen to my symptoms, get a lightbulb across her face, and say something like "ah, you've got a lot of deranged vata moving through your sensory system, we're going to have to stabilize that before we can work with the layer under it."

I had tried a lot of diets and approaches over the years and kept hitting the same wall. What was generally considered healthy did not seem to improve my symptoms long-term. Several years without sugar, anti-inflammatory diets, careful supplementation. If I kept everything strict I would feel better, but it treated symptoms without touching anything underneath. The root cause remained a mystery.

I had tried the contradictions too: more meat, less meat, more grains, less grains, eating more often, eating less. I knew the food pyramid. I had read the research. None of it resolved anything lasting.

This is when Ayurveda, and specifically Jess, were recommended to me.

What Jess clarified almost immediately was something that should have been obvious but apparently wasn't: it is about the individual. There is no universal diet, no single list of healthy habits that applies to everyone. Going through what I was eating, she told me to cut some foods that are widely considered healthy. Simply not right for me, at this stage, in this body.

That individualised approach did something the others hadn't. It acknowledged my own internal, subjective sense of my reality rather than asking me to override it with general principles. It offered to go as deeply into my physical experience as I had gone into my psyche and soul through other modalities — mostly meditation, circling, and deep inquiry. The depth of what has been revealed through that combination is unlike anything I have experienced before.

My biggest integration from Ayurveda so far is this: it seems to direct me toward the healthy balance that is inherent to my own unique body and being. I am relearning what I need and what to stay away from. None of it involves pushing through, forcing, or avoiding. It is about rebuilding, sensing, learning. I have learned what is soothing, strengthening, and healing for me specifically. I seem to naturally move away from what throws me off balance, inflames me, or crashes me. That is a significant shift in orientation.

I seem able now to look at food and sense how it will feel in my body before I eat it. That makes choosing food genuinely enjoyable rather than a minefield of conflicting information.

Ayurveda has addressed symptoms I have carried since childhood: a strange metallic taste in my mouth, joint pain, swollen lymph nodes. I feel significantly better than I did when I started, and that is not nothing after twenty-odd years of looking.

What continues to astonish me is how much this process has deepened my body awareness. I can sense my organs and intestines more — their inflammation, their tension — in ways I could not before. I can at times feel my own skeleton and bones more distinctly. These are early days. But the direction is clear, and I look forward to developing that sense of my interior with more nuance over time.

I spent a lot of time "biohacking." I experimented with my diet, supplements, exercises and stretches, meditation, psychedelics, bodywork, and self-therapy. I found a lot of levers I could pull to either heal my body a little bit or get better at enduring discomfort. I was able to hold down jobs and complete my undergraduate and master's degrees. More cracks started to show during my PhD. I was demotivated due to a poor research-group fit and exhausted from working through pain. I was also getting burnt out on Make Body Work Good, which had for so long been a fun, exciting project.

Last year, I saw several recommendations for MyAyu (at the time, part of a company called Radiance) on Twitter, from friends, and in private Slack and Discord groups. A lot of these recommendations had the specific traits I use to find signal in the noise that is most of alternative medicine. People described lifelong or years-old conditions reversing, and qualitatively new experiences of health, things they could never have predicted happening. (This is a heuristic I've come to from personal experience, but there's some scientific backing: the placebo effect is mostly mean reversion, so it's interesting when you find a case of someone not reverting to their mean.) One reported experience that was particularly exciting to me was a lot of people resolving their food intolerances: I had thought of mine as a fixed feature of my life, often expanding and claiming more of the territory of cuisine, but never retreating.

I was drawn to Ayurveda's tactile, Powder Game-like description of the world in terms of elemental forces. I also appreciated the philosophy of solving health problems deeply, rather than slapping a Band-Aid on symptoms — or in my case, not even that. I had also been despairing about my career. Every job I was genuinely interested in was at least a 9-5, hours I knew I couldn't sustain for very long.

For many years my health was relatively steady — I'd never had drastic swings, but over time I'd slowly been gaining weight. In the last year, with a lot of stress, I fell back into old patterns of going for sweets when times were stressful, exercising less, sleeping worse. My belly felt big, I felt bloated a lot, and my A1C had crept up to 5.6 or 5.7 — getting into pre-diabetes range. My energy was up and down. I'd sometimes need to lie down in the afternoon, and it was hard to differentiate how much of that was situational, how much was emotional and psychosomatic, and how much was based on what I was eating.

Coming into the program, I was already deep in meditation practice, but I realized I didn't even know what hunger really felt like, or what full felt like. There's so much information out there — workout programs, food stuff, Huberman protocols — it's overwhelming. I wanted something that blended somatic experience and awareness with best practices and protocols, and this was basically the right blend of both.

Working with Jess, the stuff I'd been struggling with seemed pretty straightforward from her point of view. I just decided I'd listen to whatever she said, and I've basically been doing it for the most part. I'm going to bed way earlier and more regularly than I ever used to, waking up earlier more consistently. For the first time ever, I'm noticing that when I eat regularly, I feel better.

What's been really powerful is the connecting-the-dots aspect. All these things — sleep problems, digestive issues, energy crashes — we know about them in isolation, but it's hard to know which dots to connect. Either you get into a conspiratorial mindset with too many dots, or you give up and say "that's just how life is." Having a system that gives you steps and shows you results — you take this, you get the result — is so valuable.

My energy levels have been better than ever before. Not in a "crazy, on coffee all the time" way, but very clear. Each day has more clarity, less heaviness. I can go through my day in a peaceful, contented kind of way. I went to a Super Bowl party and ate a bunch of junk food, and it was fine — because the foundation was already set. It's not that I can never eat unhealthy again. The foundation just allows everything else to happen.