Hi everyone, and welcome back to For the Curious and Confused, a podcast for people who want
to understand different perspectives of the world through the people who inhabit it.
I'm your ghost, your host, Dom McTaggart, and today's guest is Mayim Vega, a former
NASA computer scientist turned holistic life coach, public speaker, and author.
Mayim is the founder of Arruca.com, a service founded on holistic health and wellness.
Her approach blends scientific reasoning, holistic health practices, and spiritual insights
to create a powerful framework for personal transformation.
She also holds multiple certificates, including those in nutrition, herbalism, holistic health,
and neuro-linguistic programming.
This blend of scientific rigor and holistic wisdom allows her to offer a unique integrative
approach to health and wellness, helping individuals unlock their potential and achieve lasting
success.
So Mayim, thank you very much for being here today, and I'm excited to speak to you about
some of these topics.
Yes, thank you so much.
I'm glad you're my ghost today.
Yeah, we'll see how that goes.
So first question, could you just give us a bird's eye view of who is Mayim Vega and
what motivates her?
I think the most important things that I would say about me are number one, that I'm a mother,
and I think that really drives most of everything that I do.
Number two, I'm a very religious person.
I'm an Orthodox Jew, and faith is also very much a guiding principle in a lot of the things
that I do.
And I'm a wife, my first major was computer science.
I just loved logic and reason and programming, really, when I was a child.
I think my love for computer science started in middle school.
I took my first programming class, and I remember I was one of the few.
Usually it was just me and maybe one or two other women in my computer science classes
oftentimes.
And I'm 46 years old, I have seven children.
And after my first child, I decided to become a work from home mom, and kind of quit my
career in computer science in order to...
Because I didn't feel like it was natural.
I didn't feel like it was natural for people, like what animal on earth has a child, and
then shortly after puts him in the care of strangers, right?
For the majority of the day.
In nature, we do find communal child raising, where you raise your child in a pack or in
a herd or something like that, but never where you're isolated from your child for most of
the day.
And I just thought, this is not natural.
And if it's not natural, I just felt like I have this inner faith that the further away
we go from nature, the more in trouble we are, and the more we have to compensate.
So we can't be cavemen anymore.
Of course, I don't want to be a caveman anymore, but just trying to compensate for all the
ancient ways that we've lost, I think that has really guided me.
And then as an entrepreneur, I did app development and digital marketing for mostly high-tech
companies straight out of NASA.
That was the easiest thing I could do as a work from home mom, basically programming
for other people in more corporate environments and high-tech environments and stuff like
that.
And then I got really sick and I had very debilitating migraines.
And I thought that I was going to die.
And I was taking the over-the-counter medication at first, but after a while it got really
bad and I couldn't sleep and I couldn't work anymore.
And I couldn't take care of my children.
So at that point, I was like, I need to do something.
Had my husband rushed me to the emergency room because I was just in so much pain.
And the doctor and the nurses, they asked me a bunch of questions, ran a bunch of tests.
And eventually at first they thought that I had a brain tumor, but eventually they ruled
that out after a CT scan.
And they said, well, good news, you don't have a brain tumor, bad news.
We have no idea what's wrong with you.
Here's some strong painkillers.
There's nothing we can do for you.
And so that wasn't the only problem that I had with modern medicine, but that was sort
of like the last straw.
And I suppose I have a very extreme personality as well.
And so I just decided from that day on to just take charge of my own health.
And that's when I enrolled in courses.
Well, not that day, but eventually enrolled in courses for nutrition and herbalism and
holistic health.
And I was able to find my cure, the root cause, not just a band-aid cure like all the painkillers
were, but the real root cause of what was happening to me.
And just stepping back, I was like, how crazy it is that these doctors with their degrees
and this expensive equipment and expensive hospital, they couldn't tell me what I learned
with some certification programs.
It wasn't even a degree program.
And I was able to learn the root cause.
And I'm not saying that I learned everything in those programs.
I continued to learn in different programs and certifications and courses.
But now I'm training people in the medical profession.
Some of my students are doctors and nurses, nurse practitioners, et cetera, who are learning
nutrition and herbalism and things like that for me.
And that just goes to show how lacking our modern medical system really is when it comes
to true health and healing.
But again, I really think that the key is going back and trusting in more natural ways
and going back to our ancient roots.
And even though I do sort of quote unquote unnatural things such as vitamin supplementation,
for example, Megudas vitamin therapy, obviously our ancestors didn't have vitamins, but it's
because we lost our ancestral ways that we have to substitute and do things like vitamins.
And I did a red light therapy session last night at my friend's house, they're holistic
doctors and that felt really good.
And I had to do that because I don't get out in the sunshine enough, just little things
like that.
So did that answer your question?
Yeah, that's a great introduction.
Thank you.
I think the first question that comes to mind from that is how do we know when we've gone
too far down the way of something that's an unnatural remedy versus a natural remedy?
Because you mentioned that vitamin supplements is kind of an unnatural way to get the minerals
we need.
But then you said doing red light treatments, which one can say that our ancestors didn't
have that back in the day either.
So how do we know what sort of techniques are still under the category of natural versus
ones that are too modernized?
Well I think anything modernized should compensate for what we've lost in our more natural ways.
And so there's a holistic doctor and dentist by the name of Dr. Weston A. Price.
He's no longer with us, but he wrote a very popular book in the holistic health movement
called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.
And he's not the only one, but he's one of the popular ones.
And he wrote a book about his research.
He traveled all around the world to study different indigenous tribes.
And he found that they were in excellent health.
They didn't have the same diseases that we have in our Western world.
They didn't have cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, all these metabolic and other
issues that are the leading killers in the Western modernized world.
He also found that they had perfect dental health.
Their teeth were straight and free of cavities, even though they didn't brush their teeth.
And their women were still giving birth and fertile at the time when our women in modern
society are having menopause.
And the men were still viral.
They were still hunting.
And they were also much more valued for their wisdom and guidance than we tend to treat
our own old people today.
Because as we get older in modern society, usually we have Alzheimer's and dementia and
all these debilitating diseases.
And they just didn't go out the same way in those native cultures.
And he studied people all around the world, native tribes all around the world.
And he also found that as they started entering into modern society, adopting modern food
and modern lifestyles, they started getting the same diseases that we get today as well.
With the processed food, they would spend all day in the sun, basically, virtually all
day in the sun.
In shade sometimes, of course, but grounding, fresh air, sunshine, nature, and free of toxins
and toxicants.
And they were healthier.
So that always stuck to my mind as what is healthy and what is not, and what is the cause
of disease.
And there's a missionary doctor by the name of Albert Schweitzer, I believe.
He found the same thing.
So I think that's how we know.
Did that connect?
Oh, definitely.
Yeah.
I think there's a lot of things that I think resonate with people, particularly just like
the nutrition, sleep, exercise, hydration.
Those are some of the topics you just mentioned.
And I hope we can go into that more a little bit.
But I just want to maybe go back and talk more a little about your background, how we
got into this.
So you mentioned being into coding back in middle school.
So I guess, could you talk about how your relationship with science, what it was like
as you were growing up, and then how that contributed to getting your role at NASA?
Well, I don't think it was science as much as it was just logic.
I think logic was more what I was really into.
My parents actually said that I should be a lawyer.
You love to argue, you love to use logic and reasoning to win debates and stuff.
You should be a lawyer.
Not sure why I didn't do that.
But yeah, computer science was my field of choice.
And I had a lot of fun in the classes.
I think that's why I chose it.
I loved creating things.
I'm a very creative person.
I think that's why, maybe that's why I chose computer science is because I got to create
things instead of just argue legal issues or something like that.
Right, right.
One quick follow up question on that.
What languages were you working with either back in middle school when you were first
starting or at your time at NASA?
Well, I learned the basics, which should be back in that day, I guess.
I don't know what the basics are today, but I learned C, C++, Java, assembly language.
And when I was actually at NASA though, we used Unix and Perl, actually Perl.
And yeah, those are our name, for our team.
Those are the languages that we use.
And then later on when I became an entrepreneur, it was more PHP, actually.
PHP and JavaScript.
Yes, you mentioned that you ended up leaving NASA after you became a mom.
And that kind of, I think, from what I am understanding, led to your transformation
into this holistic space.
So could you fill in a little more maybe about how you decided to leave NASA with that transformation
happening?
Well, leaving NASA wasn't about becoming a holistic healer.
Leaving NASA was about becoming a work from home mom so that I could be with my children
and raise them.
NASA had a really great daycare.
It was right outside the security gate.
And so I could go and breastfeed him, my first baby, right after.
But yeah, it didn't feel natural.
NASA was probably one of the easiest jobs I've ever had because in college, I was a waitress
and I was a telemarketer.
And those are kind of more pressure.
And NASA was just fun.
It was great working with the team.
It was great working in a research environment.
It was great working for the government because we weren't profit driven.
We were more research driven.
And then we used to get different guest speakers, different scientists and authors and just
really great thinkers who would give talks to everyone that was at the Moffitt Field
Air Base in Moffitt Field near Mountain View.
And we had, there's this inventor of Mathematica once came to speak with us, you know, that
computer program.
Yeah, that was my first introduction to coding and man, that'll blow you away.
Yeah.
So he was a really smart guy.
And what's interesting is that at NASA, there were different theories of origins.
So there were different people believed in different origin theory.
So not everyone believed in evolution.
There were some people that were Christian, they would believe in creation science.
And then the Mathematica guy, he was very early in his life because he didn't believe
in either of those.
He believed that there was a mathematical formula that created the world and he was
trying to figure out what the formula was.
I was like, wow, that's so interesting.
I got a life mission there.
Yeah.
I guess when you make enough money, you can do these esoteric things.
Yeah, definitely.
So how does this, the next question is how does being able to kind of label yourself
as a former NASA scientist that kind of has kind of a wow factor to it.
How does that impact the speed with which people will believe you to be credible or
competent in some way or capable?
It's great.
I think it really lays the foundation of, oh, you're not just some woo-woo person.
That's also because I'm a very religious person.
So that's like two strikes against me for the irrational person.
You're religious and then you believe in all these holistic, kind of ancient remedies,
sunshine and herbs and things like that, which I mean, it's not like they're devoid from
science.
I'm not into crystals or it's not like I don't believe in energy healing or things like this,
but I would rather lean on...
I don't like to discredit anything that I don't know enough about.
I don't like to warn like, oh, that's just like phony woo stuff.
I like to investigate a matter thoroughly before I discredit it.
So if someone says, oh, do you do this?
I'm like, well, no, I don't know anything about it.
So I'm not going to speak positively or negatively either way.
Yes.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, no, go ahead.
I was going to say for those two groups you mentioned, like the woo-woo side of being
holistic and then also the religious aspect, it seems like there's a very small population
of both of those groups that are very loud and kind of like almost paint the general
narrative that most people kind of believe about both those groups.
But then there are plenty of people within those groups that don't necessarily subscribe
to those kind of loud people who are self-described to that group as well.
So that kind of makes it difficult to navigate the general populace sometimes because of
those reasons.
Yeah, because if you tell someone you're religious, they're like, oh no.
If you tell someone you're holistic, they're like, oh no.
You can only have so many strikes against you before you're not even allowed into someone's
presence.
They won't even give you a chance to get to know you.
Yeah.
So that NASA scientist label really, really helps you out to an extent for that.
So I guess the next question kind of leads into that.
Do you believe that there are stigmas around terms like holistic healing or holistic life
coaching?
And if so, what do you say to address some of those stigmas?
You touched on this a little bit of being able to approach it rigorously, but if you
could expand a little bit on that, that'd be great.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot of stigma with the word holistic.
And you're either holistic or you think it's weird.
Like you're either on that side or you think you're crazy.
And from what I see, people who are holistic, they either grew up holistic with their parents
and such, or they had a really bad experience with the modern medical system like me.
That was kind of my journey.
And then they kind of switched.
Not like right away necessarily.
There was a process of me becoming fully holistic and believing that most of the things that
they put in our food and water and medicine and chemicals that we use on a day-to-day
basis are actually harmful.
There was a process.
It didn't happen overnight, of course.
It was many years of study.
So yeah, there's definitely a process.
And the way I kind of combat that is that I try to...
I think what wins people is number one, your own experience.
If I tell them I did this.
I know that won't work with people who are scientifically trained because they're trained
to kind of discredit that.
So that's anecdotal.
But for the average person, anecdotal is probably the most powerful thing, I would say.
The second thing that I try to do is I try to always quote...
For me, it's hard to memorize actual studies and facts and stats.
So what I try to do...
What comes very easily to me is to memorize principles and stories and people.
And so what I do is usually when I talk or I say I coach someone or something, like I
just told you a story about Dr. Weston A. Price and his research, and you can Google
him and you can read his book.
And so everything that I say is very researchable and verifiable.
I guess maybe for areas of holistic healing that you're wanting to explore more, or you
gave the example of some things you don't necessarily know about and so you need to
look into them a little more.
How does your background in the computer science and the logic driven, how does that influence
your approach to holistic living?
Well, it has to make sense to me.
And for example, homeopathy does not make sense to me yet.
Can you give a brief explanation on what that is?
I can, but I would be telling you as a non-professional and non-practitioner.
So I might butcher it.
So I see a homeopath sometimes.
My logical mind does not believe in it, but my experiential mind believes in it because
it's worked for me at times.
So homeopathy is based on the principle of like cures like.
And so I think it was Hahnemann, that was his name.
He believed that if you took a substance that produced the same symptoms as what you are
experiencing that it will heal, it will heal you.
But it wasn't like a chemical effect, but it was on a, I suppose, a vibrational level,
a vibrational effect.
And it's going to sound woo woo when I describe it.
I described it to someone once and they're like, you know, the more you talk, the more
I get a headache as you're describing this.
I'm like, I'm sorry.
I know it sounds crazy.
Anyway, so this is how you make a homeopathic remedy.
You take something that produces a symptom of what you're trying to cure and you put
it in water and then you shake it vigorously and then you dilute it and then you shake
it vigorously.
And this is over a process of time.
This isn't like necessarily just one day.
You keep diluting.
Sorry, do you have an example of that?
I'm thinking of like aspirin.
You said nonchemical, but is there, what can we reference this against?
I mean, they use arsenic in some homeopathic remedies.
Okay.
So, okay.
So stuff that you might not necessarily want to be dealing with in like the modern sense.
Sometimes they'll use herbs that you would take on a normal basis.
So there's like some physical thing that just goes in there.
That's yeah.
Yeah.
It is something that produces an effect.
As a chemist, you would say, yeah, this produces that effect.
You'd say, yes.
But they dilute it and they shake it and dilute it to the point where if you were to test
it under a microscope, there's pretty much no trace of that original substance left anymore.
But what they say is that the water, however, carries the memory of that substance on some
kind of vibrational level and that it helps and it cures.
So for me, I'm like, oh, maybe it's just placebo, right?
Maybe it's just placebo.
But I don't know.
I've taken some homeopathic remedies and you know that there's probably the best anti-itch
remedy is homeopathic.
I don't remember the name of it, but the most popular one is actually a homeopathic remedy.
So I don't like to discredit it and I don't go to homeopathy by default, but sometimes
when the cure eludes me, I will visit my homeopath and I'll just be like, hey, what do you think?
And even if it is a placebo effect, it works and it's safe.
So why not?
That's my opinion.
So how do you remedy the fact that, so you said that something needs to make sense to
you in order for you to kind of- For me to promote it.
Yeah, I'm probably going to use the word like prescribed.
So like as in something that you put out there for other people and then you just mentioned
how your personal experience, that seems to work for you.
So how do you reconcile the, you wouldn't prescribe it because you don't logically understand
it, but you can still emotionally resonate with it.
And so you would do it yourself.
Does that kind of make sense?
Yeah, so I'm very experimental and I will experiment with things that I don't understand
yet if I have a credible source that I trust that recommends it.
But when I coach and teach people, I don't prescribe because I'm not a medical doctor,
but I just, I don't recommend for them to eat anything or take anything, but I'll recommend
for them to study something or to read a book or watch a video or read an article or things
like that.
Those are my prescriptions.
My prescription is knowledge.
And so if I know, if I've studied on a certain thing like vitamin C, like I just said, also
for example, the carnivore diet has been very effective for me and others.
Iodine, I'm an amy into iodine therapy, certain herbs, which yeah, then I will totally advocate
for it.
But if something is not so well researched, but you know, there's nothing else that I
know of that I can recommend, then I will say, you know, this, some people say this
works.
You know, some people say that works.
Interesting.
So moving away a little bit from the sort of the, some of the physical moments of this,
when you moving into experience a little bit, when you reflect on some of your life's most
challenging moments, were there specific beliefs or internal narratives that either helped
or hindered your capacity to grow something like burnout or posture syndrome or something
of that nature?
I think everything that has greatly hindered me is, has been the catalyst to help me grow
greatly.
And so one of them is of course, what I just mentioned with the, with the migraines that
were very debilitating.
And the second time in my life when I felt like, and I thought I was on my deathbed at
that time, the second time that I thought I was on my deathbed was, was when I got,
when I was, when I got hypothyroidism.
My husband actually diagnosed me and I was like, yes, I think you're right.
And so I just went ahead and proceeded to treat myself as if I had hypothyroidism and
I was able to recover.
And that I felt like threatened my life as I was, I couldn't regulate my, my body temperature
when I would get these hypothyroid attacks, just all of a sudden.
Now I understand what triggers me, but I didn't know at that time what triggered me.
So it would come out of the blue, it seemed.
And I would just start shivering and it would, you know, I'm in Texas, so it's like a hundred
and gets to a hundred and five, a hundred and six, a hundred and eight, a hundred and
nine sometimes.
And I think it was like a summer day, 105 degrees.
And I got it, my first hypothyroid attack and I started shivering.
Like I was having, it looked like I was having a seizure.
And I asked my husband to get me my down, my winter down jacket.
And I started sipping, he made me some hot tea and I went outside to warm up in the 105
degree weather because I was so freezing cold.
And it took me like an hour to, to, to, to get stable.
And so that, that was very, that was very hard.
And I, as a naturopathic herbalist, I was able to figure out, you know, nutritionally
and supplement wise and herbal wise, how to treat myself.
But to really get to the root cause I, I turned to a life coach.
And the reason why I turned to life coaching is because in the past when there were, there
were, I had issues in my life, like stress, stress induced.
Stress was a stress, it partly a stress induced problem.
And talking to a conventional, let's say psychiatrist or therapist or something like that.
Their go to, their default go to is to prescribe you medication.
And I knew that I didn't want that and I didn't want to go that route.
Was your stress more physical or emotional?
You're talking a lot about these physical symptoms.
Was there an emotional aspect of that as well?
Well, as an entrepreneur, I would say I always live kind of like a high stress life, but
the additional stress in my life at that time was, so I have seven children of my own and
then my husband's mother adopted two children, but she, she kind of became too old to care
for them properly.
So we had agreed to take care of them after she passed away, but we felt like we had to
do it before.
We had to do it now because they were just not getting the education that they needed.
Very basic things.
She was trying her best of course, but she just couldn't physically.
And so I homeschool my children.
So I started homeschooling them too.
And it was very stressful because they didn't know our ways, they were troubled and it was
just very hard to integrate them into our family.
And I really didn't feel like I was getting any support from my husband or his mother.
And I was like, I was ready to divorce my husband.
I was ready to give up on the two adopted children.
We didn't adopt them, but we were just, we're kind of like the guardians.
And then that was one of the triggers for my hypothyroidism.
So I knew I needed counseling of sorts.
So I turned to coaching because that was, in the holistic movement, that's very popular,
coaching.
And it was really good.
We got marriage coaching instead of marriage counseling.
And we had had marriage counseling in the past.
Marriage coaching was different and it was, I feel like it was better because therapy
often focuses on your past and kind of healing your past, which is not a bad thing.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but the coaching really helped us move towards a better
future.
It gave us tools to cope and work together.
It was like team building.
It was like treating our marriage as if we were a sports team and we were a new sports
team.
So how can we effectively play the game of life together successfully?
And that was just, it was a great approach.
Yeah.
I've heard a similar phrase of like making sure that it's not you versus the other person,
you guys against the problem.
So what's a framework that people and couples in general can use to shift from that one
versus one mindset into the, you can use this metaphor of a team.
A team versus the opposition.
Yeah.
I think, well, one of the things that they got me to understand, I don't want to speak
too much for my husband because I can't speak for him, but just to assume that he's not
against me, that he does, he's not anything that he's doing, that he's not doing it because
he wants to do something negative to me and that he wants to help me because it's in his
best interest to help me.
And if he lacks in anything, in my opinion, that there are better ways of communicating
our needs.
But I think that the foundation is, I felt like the foundation was me feeling like he
didn't care and that he just wanted me to do everything by myself, which he also portrayed
by his choice of words and his tone.
So they gave us both just better ways to speak to each other, different tones and different
mindsets.
I think that's the most important part of coaching is they helped us to have different
mindsets, mindsets that were more positive, more resilient, more supportive, things like
that.
So we got marriage coaching and we also got, I personally got life coaching for myself.
And that's when I just dealt with my own personal struggles, thoughts that were very self-defeating.
For example, I kept saying to my coach, I have to take care of these children.
I have to take care of these children.
It's my responsibility.
It's my duty.
And then, but then at the same time, I felt like it's very heavy weight of that and I
didn't like it.
I didn't like this feeling of I have to do this.
I have to, I have no choice.
And then my coach got me to think, you don't have to, you don't have to do anything.
You're a free human being.
What if you just said that?
What if you said you don't have to?
And I said, well, but if I don't have to, then what if I, maybe I'm a bad person or
maybe they won't be the best that they can be.
But just her helping me to understand that I didn't have to do this, that it was my choice
and that I was actually, because I was choosing to do it, it just empowered me and it made
me feel like I was doing a good thing instead of doing something that I had to do.
And I don't know, it may seem trivial, but it was really powerful, that mindset shift
for me.
Yeah.
It sounds like a shifting kind of the ratio of the self-criticism talk and the self-compassion
talk.
So how do you, I guess you've kind of alluded to this, but what strategies do you use to
be able to have more control over maybe a self-criticism that drives growth, maybe not
necessarily criticism in that sense, but something that drives growth in you versus something
that drives the acceptance of the now?
Probably both, right?
Driving growth, I think comes with acceptance of now.
And I think I probably, I mean, the coaching really helped me.
And I think that my religion, that's where my religion plays a part as well, where as
a Jew, I believe that as an Orthodox Jew, I'm not sure about all Judaism, but this is
what I learned from, because there's different branches, that everything comes from God,
everything comes from one source, and that everything is ultimately for my good.
Even if it's bad temporarily, it will be good in the end if I react to it in a healthy way
instead of in an unhealthy way.
And just having that mindset and that faith that everything that comes to me will ultimately
be for my good, that helps me to cope and think of strategies and just reframe things
in a way that is positive.
And so I could say the same thing about my health.
All of my health crisis, my first one led me to become a naturopathic herbalist.
My second one led me to become a holistic life coach, because it was such an important
part of my own personal healing.
This is something that I need to incorporate into my practice as well.
And I think it's also, it's been a really great tool for raising my children as well,
helping them have a positive mindset.
That sounds like some really strong systems to have in place.
So I want to be cognizant of your time.
So my last question is going to be, is there anything that I haven't asked you about that
you think would be helpful for the audience to hear?
I think that-
Yeah, sure.
Well, you know, just because I heard a little bit about your background and like why you're
doing this podcast and things like that.
I really believe that every moment is a gift and that we're always changing as people.
And so what you do now might not be what you do in the future, but every single part of
your journey will ultimately play a role in your ultimate self, which is going to be a
combination of many different experiences and kind of not be afraid to experience different
things or try on different roles.
And there's a very negative, we tend to speak negatively about people who are jacks of all
trades, but master of none.
There's something very negative.
But I think to neglect many other things can lead to a very boring life sometimes and also
an unfulfilling life.
And so not to be afraid really to follow your heart as cheesy as that sounds, but still
also taking hold of the things that have served you well in the past as well.
That seems like a great place to end.
Yeah.
Thank you for that last insight and for answering all those other questions.
And yeah, so thank you for being here.
I really appreciate it.
Awesome.
Thank you, Don.
Have a great week.
Thank you.