Heather Grzych on The Wisdom of the Body

Ayurveda, health, and what happens when life changes us

What happens when your body starts changing before you fully understand why?

What happens when the things that used to work for you stop working?

When you're exhausted even though you're doing everything "right." When you know you need to make a change but can't quite make yourself do it. When your health symptoms seem to have as much to do with your life as they do with what you're eating.

These are the questions that have increasingly shaped my work.

I'm an Ayurvedic practitioner, author, podcast host, and healthcare strategist. But those titles don't really explain what I do.

I'm interested in the relationship between the body, the life we're living, and the person we're becoming.

I didn't come to this work through one path

My career has moved through several worlds that don't necessarily look connected at first. I began my professional career in healthcare, including working in product development for a health insurance company. I later consulted with some of the biggest and most influential brands in healthcare.

That experience taught me to think about health at the systems level: how people make decisions, how healthcare products are designed, how organizations work, and why having access to information doesn't necessarily mean people know what to do with it.

Then I went much deeper into Ayurveda. I earned a master's degree in Ayurveda, became a Ayurvedic Doctor-Level Certified practitioner, and wrote The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility. My master's thesis examined the psychological, physiological, and spiritual effects of fasting in both religious and biomedical frameworks.

I also served as president of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association.

But clinical practice changed the way I understood health. Because eventually you realize that people don't walk into your session as a collection of symptoms. They walk in with jobs. Relationships. Children. Parents. Ambitions. Grief. Habits. Responsibilities.

And a life that is quietly changing underneath everything else.

The body doesn't exist in a vacuum

One of the things I appreciate most about Ayurveda is that it doesn't require us to separate the body from the rest of life. How you eat matters. How you sleep matters. How you digest matters.

But so does what you're doing every day.

So does your environment.

So does whether your life still fits you.

So does whether you're living in a way that your body can actually sustain.

I've seen this clinically. I've worked with people who tried supplement after supplement for problems that didn't fully resolve until something else in their lives changed.

I remember one client who couldn't sleep more than about six hours a night. She had tried virtually every Ayurvedic strategy we could think of. Then we noticed something interesting. She slept well when she was on vacation. Eventually, she changed jobs. Her sleep changed dramatically. Nothing about her bedtime routine had been the magic answer. Her life had changed. And her body responded.

That experience has stayed with me because it illustrates something I see again and again: Sometimes the body is responding intelligently to the life you're living.

Why I call the podcast Wisdom of the Body

This idea eventually became the foundation for my podcast, Wisdom of the Body.

I've spent years talking with people about health, behavior, change, identity, and the strange things that happen when our internal experience doesn't match our external lives.

And I've become increasingly interested in questions that don't have a simple health hack attached to them.

Why do we sabotage changes we say we want?

Why do we stay in situations that no longer fit?

Why can highly intelligent people have such difficulty making decisions?

Why can you know exactly what you "should" do and still not be ready to do it?

Why does your body sometimes seem to know something before your conscious mind does?

These aren't new questions.

In fact, lately I've found myself returning again and again to novels, ancient myths, religious texts, and films.

Different cultures. Different centuries. The same human questions.

How do we know when it's time to leave?

How do we move through uncertainty?

How do we let go of an identity that no longer fits?

How do we become someone new without losing ourselves in the process?

It is strangely comforting to realize that we are not the first people to wrestle with any of this.

Ayurveda is a lens, not a limitation

Ayurveda remains central to my work because it gives me a sophisticated way to think about the relationship between physiology, environment, behavior, digestion, energy, and individual differences. But I don't see Ayurveda as a replacement for modern medicine or as an answer to every problem. And I don't think everyone needs an Ayurvedic protocol.

Sometimes what someone needs is a better understanding of what's happening.

Sometimes it's a change in how they eat.

Sometimes it's a clinical intervention.

Sometimes it's recognizing that their current life is no longer sustainable.

Sometimes it's making a decision they've been avoiding.

And sometimes it's simply having someone who can look at all of those pieces together. That's the part I find most interesting.

Health isn't always about fixing what's broken

I've become less interested in the idea that health means constantly optimizing yourself.

There is no shortage of people willing to tell you what supplement to take, what diet to follow, what workout to do, how many hours to sleep, or which new health trend you absolutely must try.

Most of us don't need more information. We need better interpretation. We need to understand which information actually applies to us.

That's particularly true for the smart, curious, high-responsibility people I tend to work with. They've usually done their research. Sometimes they've done too much of it. They know there are 14 different opinions about what they should eat. They've listened to the podcasts. They've read the books. They've tried the supplements.

The problem isn't a lack of information. It's figuring out what matters.

The work I'm interested in now

Today, I continue to practice clinically part time while writing, podcasting, consulting, and working on projects related to health and strategic change.

I also coach my son's Little League baseball team.

That may seem like a strange detail to include in an article about health, but I actually think it belongs here.

Coaching has taught me a lot about people. You can give someone the perfect instruction and they still may not be ready to execute it. You can tell someone exactly what they need to change and accidentally make them less capable of changing it.

And sometimes the best thing you can do is pay attention, understand the person in front of you, and figure out what will actually help them move.

That's how I think about health, too.

I don't want to treat people like projects. And I don't want to give people another rigid system to follow.

I want to help them understand what is happening in their particular body and life—and then make intelligent decisions from there... because your body is not separate from your life. It is living through it.

And sometimes the symptoms, habits, resistance, energy shifts, and changes you're experiencing aren't simply problems to eliminate.

They may be information.

The question is whether you know how to read it.