Hello everybody and welcome to a new episode of the Awaken Together podcast.
I'm Kat and today I am joined by my friend Havana Stegner.
Hi Havana.
Hello.
Thank you so much for having me.
Of course and so glad you're here.
So I want to introduce you to everybody.
Havana is an Ayurvedic wellness educator.
She's a yoga teacher, a ritualist, and the founder of Have Healing Arts.
We're in Denver right now but she is soon going to be moving to Portland.
So if you're out in the Pacific Northwest, look out for her in a couple months.
I'm so excited.
Yeah, Jake moves coming.
We met through nurture and it's just been such a joy to know and you are such an old
soul.
Like I am amazed.
So much to give in such a young package.
It's always so inspiring and amazing to just witness you and your work.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate that.
And thanks for having me on the podcast.
I'm really excited to just have the ability to talk about what I do and why I love it
and just connect with you over all things Ayurveda.
Awesome.
Yeah.
So today is going to be like an Ayurveda 2.0.
So Jen and I, we are not super well versed in Ayurveda like you are.
And we did our best last time to kind of give a high level overview of the dosha's as it
was taught to us.
But today we're going to go a lot deeper because we have you as a gift here able to
share that with us.
So first I always like to just start getting to know like you and your story.
So how did you initially get drawn into Ayurveda?
Yeah.
I think like most people who work with Ayurveda or find their kind of life's passion, it's
like Ayurveda definitely found me.
I was teaching yoga.
I've been teaching yoga for quite a few years now.
And I was in a place of feeling pretty good.
Like I've never had extreme health issues in my life, but I certainly didn't feel great.
Like I didn't feel like I was thriving physically, mentally, spiritually, all the things.
And so I was looking for a way to just expand my knowledge and have something to learn in
a tool.
Not even really to give it to other people, but just out of curiosity of like what is
this thing?
I've heard of it from yoga teacher training.
Let me dive in.
And then as I started to learn more about Ayurveda through you know, podcast books, all the
things and started implementing the teachings into my daily life, I was like, oh, I feel
so much better.
Surprise, surprise.
And I didn't even fully realize what level of hormone imbalance and gut issues and brain
fog and just like emotional instability I was having until I reached a place of balance
that I was able to look back and just feel so grateful that I found this medicine.
So then once I had implemented the teachings into my life as best as I could with the knowledge
that I had at that time.
I decided I wanted to dive in a little bit more.
And so I enrolled in the Shakti school that's founded by Katie Silcox and she does amazing
work.
She works with feminine form Ayurveda.
So Ayurveda can be very dogmatic, very old school, where she applies a really awesome
modern approach.
And so I did her year long program and I graduated in January and now I've since founded my
own business.
And I'm working one-on-one with clients as well as creating like herbal blends and spice
blends and massage oils and all those good things.
Hmm, so yummy.
So exciting.
I love to see this journey that you're on now.
It's amazing.
And so you mentioned before like you were coming from a place of not being in balance
and then by utilizing these practices you found balance.
What are some examples of things that you were experiencing before?
And the reason I ask is because I'm wondering if our listeners might resonate with some
of those things and be able to be like, okay, Ayurveda can help me with this.
Absolutely.
So there's all ends of the spectrum of what we experience in terms of our health.
What I was personally going through was just a lot of inflammation, a lot of gut issues
and issues with digestion as like physically as well as being able to emotionally digest
my own life.
Hormone imbalance, which I know is something that you've talked about on the podcast before,
a lot of skin issues that I was having that I've finally just got dialed in now.
It's been a journey with that.
And then just outside of the physical stuff, just purpose and dharma and understanding
spirituality and end my relationship with nature, that's been a huge part of Ayurveda.
Because truly, Ayurveda is just asking the question of how can we be in better sync with
nature?
I love that.
It's what I love about Ayurveda.
It's such a holistic approach, right?
Absolutely.
And that's obviously something I'm super passionate about as a holistic health coach as well is
we can't look at health as just food or just what we do.
It's not just our emotional body, it's spiritual, it's nature, it's everything and.
And so I'm wondering what are some of the things that you help clients with when you
work one-on-one with people?
Absolutely.
So my main focus with a one-on-one client is nutrition for sure and digestion.
So we start by doing a really in-depth intake process.
Like I ask all the very intimate questions for sure.
And then from there, they take away just a few things to work on and we build from there.
And those few things include what spices to use, what spices to avoid, foods to eat,
foods not to eat, as well as daily routine ritual practices.
And then most clients we do a little bit of an herbal regimen.
However, I prefer dialing in the relationship to food, how they're cooking it, how they're
spicing it before bringing in herbs.
Because I think a lot of us look at herbal remedies the same way that Western medicine
looks at prescriptions of like, I'm dealing with this problem, here's this herb, it's
going to fix it when really we want to get to the root cause.
And herbs can do the same thing that prescriptions can do, where they work for a little while
and then they stop working.
Although they'll have less side effects than prescriptions, it's definitely a better route
to start.
So, food, diet, ritual routine, then we move on to more extreme, not extreme, but more
aggressive remedies like herbs.
Yeah, awesome.
That's really, really cool to hear.
And so, when you mention like different herbs for different people and doing all of that
intake, something that the way that I was taught Ayurveda is like, oh, what's your
dosha?
And so, I'm curious how much of like the work that you do with people has to relate
with a dosha, multiple doshas.
Can you demystify that for us?
Absolutely.
So, Tridosha theory is truly everything in Ayurveda, which I love because it's the rule
of threes, it's simple, and it also highlights our relationship with nature.
So the three doshas, pitta, vata, and katha are categories, subcategories of the elements,
essentially.
So we break air, ether, earth, water, and fire, and we break those into the three doshas.
So, in the intake process, part of all the questions that I ask will give me a better
idea of what dosha is highest in the system, or which dosha is, because it can be multiple.
And from there, we use that information to identify what changes need to happen.
So, if someone has really high fiery energy, so they have that really high pitta in their
body and that can look like numerous different things, we might find like cooling spices,
cooling routines, cooling herbs to balance that out.
So Ayurveda operates on the rule of opposites.
And so it's always like increases like, and so if someone's really high in their fire,
really high in their earth, or whatever element we're working with there, we want to heal
that with the opposite instead of increasing it with the same.
That makes total sense.
Super simple.
Yeah, right?
It's just taking that little like zoomed out approach and having a little bit of organization
structure to it to apply it.
So for example, let's take me.
I've learned that when I'm imbalanced, I'm more pitta.
And when I'm out of balance, I go more towards vatta.
And I get like, I'm anxiety prone, my thoughts will race, I get cold.
So what would you recommend someone like I do in terms of diet and the things that you
usually work with your clients on to bring me back to that balance?
Yeah, so with anything, we want to, I think the practice of Ayurveda is really the practice
of study and paying attention.
And so if you notice that when you're really high in your pitta or you're really out of
balance and you switch to vatta, so if we look at the elements of fire and we look at
the elements of air, sometimes the imbalance could happen because your pitta is so hot
that it burns everything up and then there's just air and space left.
So there's that primary secondary approach as well.
So it could be that your fire blows out either because you're burning too much or because
you have something else coming that's taking the fire away.
From there, if you go into your vatta imbalance, you would want which vatta the qualities of
vatta are going to be a lot of movement, a lot of anxiety like you were saying, a lot
of airy qualities.
We want to ground those with more earth and water.
So inviting in the opposite and earth and water, kafa is very grounding for pitta as
well.
Yeah, one of my yoga teachers mentioned that kafa is what we all want more of.
It's like that mom energy.
Right, it's just like so held and loved and seen.
And yeah, I definitely need more of that in my life.
I just feel best when I'm like that.
Absolutely.
I mean, most of us, if you just look at the high-pace society that we live in, most of
us are pitted out because we're stuck in loops of reacting.
We have to defend ourselves.
We're in that fight.
If we're talking about the nervous system, we're in fight a lot.
Or we're vatted out.
We're anxious.
We're driving from thing to thing to thing.
We have a million things on our to-do list.
We're overwhelmed and we're in that kind of flighty space too.
And so what we need is to ground both of those.
And kafa definitely does have its downsides, right?
So every doshas has, there's two sides of the coin, right?
So too much kafa in the system can look like depression or lethargy as well as more physical
symptoms like slow, sluggish digestion, brain fog, all of that.
So we want really the ideas that all three doshas, we have all three of them, and we
want all three to work together so that they can support each other.
Yeah, love that.
And one idea that I want to bring in based on what you were saying of when I'm in balance,
I'm higher in my pitta, when I'm out of balance, I'm higher in my vata.
And so there's this idea in our yaveta called prokhrati and vikrti.
And this is, I think, an important piece of the puzzle that we're missing when we just
go online and do a dosha quiz is we're not even viewing the holistic practice holistically.
So we have to honor it by kind of looking at the whole picture of how our yaveta does
its diagnosis practice.
But prokhrati is your constitution, which is going to be the ratio of each dosha that
you have, but at conception.
And so there's a lot of things that go into play with that.
It's the season that you were conceived in, the state of the health of your parents, even
what they were eating, the night they conceived you, literally every detail in that moment.
So it's not birth, it's your constitution at conception when the sperm meets the egg,
the very beginning moment.
And so that's your baseline.
And so for you, if you're saying like, when I'm in balance, I definitely have those good
pitta qualities, that is an indication that you have more pitta in your prokhrati.
We still have all three in our prokhrati.
It's just whatever ratio.
Then vikrati is the other side of that.
And that's what you're going to find when you take those dosha quizzes or when you have
a conversation with a health specialist is typically our imbalance or our current state.
So that's going to be your higher vata in your constitution.
Could be a vikrati or it's just moment to moment.
There could be, you know, a month that you go through and you're like, wow, I'm experiencing
a lot of kafa in my system, but that's just vikrati.
It's ever changing day by day, even hours within the day, your vikrati can change based
on your environment, what you're eating, et cetera, et cetera.
Wow.
That is so cool.
I feel like that's really the missing piece to my understanding of our vata.
Yeah.
Thanks for painting that picture.
I feel like I just get it better already now.
Yeah.
It makes such a huge difference when we look at it.
I see so many people talking about our Ayurveda and having this level of attachment with their
dosha.
And so they take this quiz and it's kind of like enneagram or personality thing and
you're like, I'm a pizza, I'm a pizza.
And then you make your whole personality a pizza.
And I say you, but I mean, I literally did that when I was starting Ayurveda as I was
so attached to, I'm very high pit to two, but I was really attached to my kaufik nature
because I love the fact that I was at that point in my life more grounding and stabilizing
and funny enough, like my ex was really high in pitta.
I left my pitta and became very kafa to balance him out.
So it was really my vikrati, but that's just the side note.
No, that's cool.
I was really attached to this kaufik nature.
And then when I went to school and when I did some self-study, I was like, wait, I am
super vata.
Wait, I'm super pitta.
I'm so confused.
What am I?
And the answer to that question, what am I wasn't I am this is that I have everything.
So I want all of us and listeners included to when we're looking at Ayurveda to reframe
our perspective and to look at it more of, I have high pitta in my system or I have high
vata in my system.
This is my experience right now.
I'm observing the experience rather than like, I am this and this is how I will always be
and this is who I am.
You know, that whole I am versus I have is very big difference, right?
That's a big shift in the energy that you attach to or don't attach to it.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Because we need the doshas to work together to be in health in different ratios in different
ways for everybody.
So bioindividuality is so important here, but everybody has all three.
Speak in my language with a bioindividuality.
Love it.
And so you mentioned before that you work with clients with like herbs and spices and
I feel like I have not even really brushed the surface on what all of that entails.
So could you share more about like some of the herbs, some of the spices that you usually
work with people on like even like meals?
I don't know.
Like it's just such a mystery and I just want to learn more because I love food and
getting creative in ways that support my health is something I'm all about.
Absolutely.
And this is something with like, I know with your integrative nutrition background, like
that is something that you can just take.
Okay, I have this awesome meal that I've created that's so intentional.
Let me add these three spices on it to now make it digestible.
Yes.
And so that's the biggest thing with with the spices is that spices are medicine, they
carry medicine, they're going to help mediate any imbalances that we're experiencing.
They also help us digest our food.
And so there's this rule in our Aveda where all of our food as much as possible should
be warm, cooked, moist and spiced.
And that helps us break down our food before it even enters our system.
So then it's more bio, bio available and our body can break it down and we can actually
access all the nutrients within it.
I love that.
And it feels so natural.
I mean, especially in this time of year or recording this like early spring, late winter,
and I really still just find myself wanting warmth.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
But I know that there are some people out there like Jen, for example, who really identifies
with Vata.
She loves snacking.
She loves cold foods, crunchy foods.
What would you recommend for someone who that's kind of been their experience with
food and spices, like baby steps to how to get there and maybe change that habit?
Absolutely.
It's I'm all about baby steps in my approach.
So my biggest thing for everyone is to start their day with warm lemon water.
Starting your day with something warm.
If you're like, I'm out of lemons.
That's okay.
I just don't have the first thing you drink in the morning be cold.
And so if someone like Jen who's like, I want all the cold things, if she can just do that
one glass of warm lemon water in the morning, that will create that trust within her system
to invite in that warm.
I love that.
So starting with one thing, right?
And then any adjustments that you can make.
So if you're having like a cold smoothie in the morning, right?
And a lot of people, especially in Colorado, we love our smoothies and we'll drink them
all year round.
It's great.
But maybe in the winter, you add a little bit of dried ginger into your smoothie.
Ginger is a heating spice.
So you take that cold smoothie and you just make it a little bit more accessible for your
body without even heating it up.
Right.
And then eventually you might want to switch to like some warm oats because, you know,
smoothies all the time in the winter can definitely be hard on the body.
But if you're help out on your smoothies, then a little ginger.
Oh, yes.
And I feel like even thinking about this holistically, I feel like a lot of Vata people are cold,
right?
That's like one of those traits with it.
And so if they're starting their day with something cold and wondering why the rest
of the day they're cold, it's like, okay, well, I fully believe in how we start the
day is kind of the energy and the intention that we're bringing into the day.
And so if we're looking to bring some balance into that, like opposites, like what you're
saying, that just like makes so much sense to me.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And even with the more pitot types, like that cooked warm spice, moist rule applies to everybody.
And so I actually had a client who was extremely high in pitta and she drank ice water all
the time.
And it was like, she was literally like, I'm sweating all the time.
I'm so hot all the time.
Like opposite of Vata, right?
But she was drinking ice water because it was what was most comfortable for her to cool
it down.
And it was a process, right?
And she slowly switched and did those baby steps just to not drink ice water anymore.
And her body was able to regulate her temperature.
And similar to, I just listened to your episode with Bridget and you guys were talking about
those little steps, little changes that you can do.
It's the same thing here.
And we're really playing the long game in our Vata.
So if you can change those three little habits, right?
Those that one habit.
It's not going to turn around and be completely better the next day.
It's you're playing the long game.
So step by step, you'll notice those changes and eventually you'll look back and be like,
oh, I used to be sweaty all the time.
And now I can regulate my temperature.
It's pretty cool.
That's pretty dang cool.
Pretty empowering.
Like I did that.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
And thinking about that too, the whole long play, it's something that I've been personally
experiencing as I've been for the past three months or so.
I've been taking two different supplements each day, eight pills total for each.
One is called Myo de Cairo in Nossatil, mouthful.
And the other one is this balance protocol by Dr. Brighton, who is the author of Beyond
the Pill.
And so, yeah, so I've been taking these for about two months now.
And they say that when you're on your third month, that's when you'll actually potentially
start seeing benefit and change.
And so that's something I'm really experiencing is how with herbs and more natural things like
you're saying, not prescription drugs, it's just a longer process.
But there's less side effects.
You're doing something better for yourself derived from nature.
You just kind of have to like be patient.
Yes.
Right.
You're actually healing your body and healing is a long process.
I think are, I mean, I don't think I know our society values efficiency, over longevity.
And so we're looking for like, when we do get sick, we don't want to have that, you
know, chicken soup and really soothe and rest and do the things that we really need.
We want to pop like a dayquil and go back to work.
And we're just suppressing, suppressing, suppressing.
And our Ayurveda looks at the body in the same way that it does look at the emotional
and spiritual wellness.
It's all one.
And so we're suppressing our symptoms all the time.
We're also going to be suppressing our emotions.
And then eventually, most of us, like especially people who have entered into this wellness
realm, like we hit our breaking point at some point where we're just like, I feel like shit
and I don't want to do it this way anymore.
And I want to feel my feelings and I want to know my body and be in sync with nature and
do the things I need to do so that I can embody the idea of longevity and immunity and recovery.
That's the recovery when it comes to my health.
So good.
Yes.
And thinking about hormones and hormone health, you know, the journey I've been on.
Still have a very irregular period.
It's been off the pill for nine months now.
And I'm just really trusting that of the long game and I'm here for it.
I wanted to do all the right things for myself.
What do you think about Ayurveda as it relates to hormone health?
What are some of the tools and rituals that you understand can help the sort of thing?
Absolutely.
So I'm lucky that my program was actually geared more towards women's health.
So we did have a deep dive on hormones and it's something that I'm very passionate about
because I got off my hormonal birth control a year ago too.
And luckily I've had a pretty smooth transition.
But let me tell you, like knowing your body, knowing what it's telling you.
Even my personality changing since that has happened, it's huge.
So I totally feel for you being on this journey.
It's a beautiful one.
17 years of it.
So it's a long time.
I'm going to have, I'm going to record an episode eventually called Gaslet by Birth
Control where I'm just going to like go into all of the things.
But yeah, the whole personality changing, it's real.
It's super real.
And so what are you, Veda says about hormonal health?
I'll go into a few different things here.
So and try to be concise as I can about them.
But we have the seven tissue layers of the body and our Veda.
The reproductive organs, male and female, are the last of the tissue layers.
And so we're talking about food, what's going to be nourished first is your rassadatu, which
is your lymphatic system.
What's going to be nourished last is the reproductive organs.
And so if you eat an apple, right, it's going to take 35 days approximately for the nourishment
from that apple to go from your lymph, to your blood, to your muscle, to your fat, to
your bone, down all the tissue layers into the reproductive system.
And so with that in mind, it's really important that we are intentional about our nourishment
throughout the month because it does take time for those nutrients to reach our system.
And so the same thing with detoxification, right?
If it's so deep in the tissue layers, and we are on those hormonal birth controls or
we do have an IUD, it's going to take longer for that to detox out.
So diet is huge.
Liver health is also huge when it comes to hormones.
And so the big issue with synthetic hormones is that we have too many hormones in our system.
And some of them are ours and some of them are not.
And our poor liver has to process all of it on top of all of the toxins that are in our
air and in our water and in our food.
So it's really taxing on the liver to be on hormonal birth control.
And so doing things like are you abated cleansing, kitri cleansing, as well as love your liver
protocol, which means getting good sleep, lowering alcohol intake, eating your leafy
greens and your detoxifying foods, all of that can be really helpful in clearing out
the excess hormones that are definitely in all of our systems.
Even if you're not on birth control, right?
There's so many hormone disruptors in the air and in the water.
Like shampoo and makeup, everything we touch.
Literally everything is so crazy.
And so that's another thing is part of that.
Loving your liver is truly loving your hormones and so if you can check for fragrance in your
shampoos and everything and check for those hormone disruptors like BPA and aluminum and
all those things that can be really, really helpful to allowing your body to just give
her a break.
So she doesn't have to process so much.
That makes me think about how something I learned recently is how when people are planning
to have a child and it's really in their control, how they should start, both the mom and the
dad should start really focusing in on their health three months prior to conception.
Absolutely.
So they say three to six months and there's so much that goes into it.
And that's part of those tissue layers, right?
So if we're like, I'm going to have a baby next week.
So I'm going to do like a juice cleanse this week and then I'll be feeling good.
Well that juice cleanse has not even reached your reproductive tissues.
So that's why when we want to go into that whole endeavor of having a child, we really
want to prepare every single tissue layer of the body.
And conception with Ayurveda is fascinating and kind of circling back to that idea of
property, right?
So Vastant Ladd, who's written a lot of the literature around Ayurveda, he, reading his
book, he was talking about property and vicarity.
And like I said before, it depends on literally what your parents are eating the night they
conceive you.
And so he's like, if the dad ate a lot of spicy food, then the baby might have a lot
of pitas.
So it's like down to every little thing, including like the seasons.
And so that brings me into my next idea of how every doshha has a season.
And this is part of Tridosic theory.
And so right now we just entered Kaffa season, which is the season of earth and water.
So if you are trying to conceive, Kaffa season is the season of like planting seeds and grounding
and nurturing.
And so Kaffa season, that late winter to spring is the best time to conceive.
Interesting.
That's fascinating.
That's really cool.
I'm learning so much.
I had no idea about the seven layers that makes so much sense, especially with that fun fact
that I just learned about the minimum three months.
Yeah, I have friends who, they, at Electric Forest last year, we were all together and
they were talking about how they wanted to have a baby.
And now they probably wouldn't come to Electric Forest this year, 2023, because if all went
well, they'd have a baby.
And how they ideally would not start trying for at least three months after Electric Forest
to recover from all of the drugs.
All of the fun things that go down.
Oh my God.
Yeah, so funny.
But it's just wild.
And just thinking about that blueprint of what is happening in the world, the seasons, the
parents DNA and how all of that is just like a little snapshot passed on to the child and
then it becomes who we are.
Absolutely.
It's so cool.
And so when we look at the body holistically and we look at the world holistically, it
does show that every little detail matters.
And that fact is not to cause any panic, right?
It's actually supposed to be liberating of like every little choice I make, if I make
it from an empowered and embodied place, can really serve the greater good for my body
and my life and for the earth in this moment, but also in a year, also in a month, even
if it's just like what I have for breakfast in the morning.
Everything's connected and everything's in divine sync.
And are you Veda?
That's why I love it so much is because it's not, there's no segregation in how we look
at the human experience as well as the body.
Beautiful.
Thank you so much.
I've learned so much today.
So many tools to take away already.
And I'm wondering how our listeners can connect with you.
Absolutely.
So on Instagram, my handle is havehealingarts.co.
My website's similar, it's havehealingarts.com.
So you can reach out through either of those platforms.
I also have workshops coming up where we do way more of a deep dive into Tridosic theory
and how this can support your everyday living.
So keep an eye out for those.
That's a great way to connect.
I also teach yoga, nurture, so you can find me there up until I moved to Portland in a
couple of months.
Yay!
Well, thank you so much.
This was so much fun and we'll put all of your links and everything in the description
for this podcast.
But I appreciate you.
Yes, thank you so much for having me.
I hope you guys learned a little bit about Arya Veda and there's so much more.
So definitely check out my website.
Also I have a whole blog with all of these things on it and I keep adding to it.
So if you want to geek out, I'm your girl.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you so much, Kat.
So much goodness, of course.
We'll see you all next time.