Responding to the Mental Health Crisis through an Ayurvedic Lens with Expert Rima Shah

**Anna McBride** (0:02)
Welcome back to SHE Asked, Tools for Practical Hope. I'm your host, Anna McBride, and I'm so excited that you're here today. So today on this episode, I'm going to have a deeper conversation around Ayurveda and mental health. And I'm so excited that my good friend, Rima Shah is back with us today to help us appreciate the complexities around Ayurveda and how it can really help address this very real, very continuing, and almost growing mental health crisis that we have going on today. So thanks for being here, Rima. So glad you're here.

**Rima Shah** (0:41)
So happy to be here.

**Anna McBride** (0:43)
I want to begin with a story, as I always like to. Seven years ago, I had an interesting fall. Almost within months of each other, I lost my younger sister to the disease of alcoholism. And so I was experiencing great grief from that. And within a short period of time from there, my marriage of 36 years fell apart. And I realized that I was having panic attacks and anxiety through the roof. However, I was working with a therapist to address it, and she recommended that I go on medication to help with my anxiety. And I thought twice about it and knew enough about myself that I didn't want to go on medication. I wanted to see if there were other ways in which I could address my mental health crisis. We had just been in India some months before, you and I, studying meditation and Ayurveda. And we knew that in some way, shape or form, Ayurveda was gonna help me through.
So you and I talked quite a bit at that time, relative to my situation. And I picked up certain practices, certain foods, ways to address it, which wasn't immediate, but over time helped me get back to a sense of calm, a sense of center, a sense of I'm gonna be okay. So as you listen to my story of grief, panic and turning toward Ayurveda, what do you see happening in the mind-body system from an Ayurvedic perspective?

**Rima Shah** (2:35)
And I just want to say, because your story is so profound in the sense that, Anna, I was with you before all this happened, and I know the amount of balance that you've worked on in your life, and to just recognize that you can be really doing all the right things, and then when life throws you curveballs, you inevitably fall off the cliff, and just having compassion in that, just in the understanding that how much you take care of your life, there's going to be things that happen that make us fall down, so we can re-evaluate again.

**Anna McBride** (3:11)
Yes. Thank you for pointing that out. That's right. I can forget that I'm human, right? And we all as humans, particularly those of us that are in the mental health fields or in the practitioners of Ayurveda, really work to remain balanced or get centered. Yet, you're right, at any moment, a life situation can happen that can knock us down. And it's good to know that something like Ayurveda can be there to help us. So from an Ayurvedic perspective, what is the whole mind-body system going through when we're dealing with a mental health crisis?

**Rima Shah** (3:50)
Yeah, so, you know, also, Ayurveda is mother medicine. So the reason why you felt compelled to turn to it is because it is divine mother medicine. It will always embrace us because of the way that it is so fully designed to look at your mind, body and spirit. So when you're dealing with a mental imbalance or a crisis or stress that just throws the normalcy of your life out the window, we recognize in Ayurveda several things. First off, there's 14-16 channels to the body, according to Ayurveda. And I say 14-16 because women have two extra channels than men. They have a lactation system and they also have a menstruation system and they're also able to procreate. So, women have two extra channels than men. But there's one channel that every human being has, and it's the channels of the mind. This is the only system of the body that has no physical location, and it's truly actually not recognized by Western science. Western science actually didn't know a lot about the brain, how we process emotions and trauma, and the reason why meditation study groups from Harvard and University of Mass General has received millions and millions of dollars of research is they actually started to learn a lot more about how the brain functions through meditation. So I want you to just take that in that Ayurveda thousands of years ago understood that there is an important channel of the body, has no physical location, but it permeates through the entire physical, subtle and mental bodies.