ova wellbeing is about balance. A chicken egg can be balanced on its broad end with patience, by finding its imperfections and balancing it on three points. This can be done at any time of year, contrary to the popular belief that it is only possible during the Equinox. Rather, it is more likely the breath and heartbeat of the balancer that throws off the subtle precision of the balance than any outside force. We are the balancer and we are the egg. The more we can know about our own heartbeat, breath, subtle energies, and other forms of self-awareness, the better we can find balance amidst our imperfections.
ova wellbeing is about physical health and the practice of Ayurvedic principles to heal unwellness. Ayurveda is an ancient medicine that teaches prevention of disease and body awareness to be able to sense imbalance when it arises, at its source. Digestion is the entry point to making changes in the entire body/ mind/ spirit system, as the digestive system is the process that turns the outside world (food/ information/ emotion) into our bodies (flesh/ thoughts /beliefs). It is a place that we can easily make changes, where we can have a lot of influence. Ayurveda offers a tool to educate our selves about what we choose to put into our systems and what we should keep out, while maintaining flexibility about those boundaries. Flexibility and learning how to flow with the circumstances of life are some of the gifts Ayurveda can offer us in the search for physical, mental and energetic balance in the day-to-day living of our lives.
ova wellbeing is about emotional and spiritual health and using Ayurveda towards the integration of our feelings, thoughts and beliefs to heal the deepest parts of our selves. Most peoples on this earth are yearning in their hearts to heal from pain of centuries ago, our parents’ traumas, our own wounds. Healing can come from learning to settle into the body, with breath and meditation, with ritual and imagination. Each person will resonate with a different technique. Using practices from the same tradition as Ayurveda as well as spiritual traditions from around the world, we learn ways to connect to our past, our earth, and our webs of social interconnectedness; this is the path to finding the true self. This is an active, participatory process, whereby the client becomes their own observer and awakens awareness to their own systems. Each one of us can become our own healer.
ova was created out of necessity, from a deep call for healing of the body, mind and spirit as one. A call that I heard in myself as well as in the collective. This site is dedicated to the healing of our brokenness. We are each broken or wounded by different forces, be they cultural or institutional, or even self-imposed. Most peoples also have inherited a broken spiritual path, where we do not know the traditions of our ancestors and are disconnected from our spirituality. The structures that keep our cities buzzing may in fact have damaging side effects in our more subtle beings.
The ancient system of medicine called Ayurveda was developed by rishis, or seers, over 5000 years ago. Their clarity of mind and esoteric understandings were able to bring forth the practical wisdom that we can use today, within and outside of that culture, for the understanding they brought forth is truly universal. In fact, Ayurveda is one of the ancestors of the modern practice of biomedicine, and the two intermixed widely with the process of British colonial occupation of India, to the benefit of both parties. However the vaidyas, or Ayurvedic practitioners were eventually banned from their practice by the British in the 19th century. This erasure and erosion of Ayurveda was damaging to Indian culture and the Vedic tradition. It is important to recognize these histories and complexities as a consumer of medicine and “wellness” in the West.
I do my best to honor the roots of the Western medical system and the multifaceted context of Ayurveda, which comprises knowledge on the mind/ body/ spirit, as well as wisdom on how to live a mundane and spiritual life. It is my pledge to continue to study and learn more of this beautiful and holistic wisdom on the nature of humanity and the universe, and to use that understanding to heal the wounds that have been created historically by the process of colonialism which takes the knowledge out of context and oppresses the creators of that knowledge.
My job as consultant is to translate this wisdom into simple concepts and practices for each person to grow in their clarity of mind and in their energetic balance, which will create physical wellbeing and begin to open the doors to spiritual connection as well. The difference between wellness and wellbeing is that wellness is an adjective, it is a description of an object. You become an object to be acted upon by a person or institution. Wellbeing, on the other hand, is an action, it is a way of being in the world that can be learned and practiced by subjects, each one autonomous and forming their understanding of self with the tools that Ayurveda provides.
You decide: will you be the subject of your own life and live it to the best of your ability? Will you choose wellbeing?
my story
My own first exposure to Ayurveda was in 2011, during a yoga teacher training program in New York City. I began to experience great shooting bolts of energy up the right side of my back in certain poses. At first, I thought it was related to an old injury to my shoulder, which was where the energy seemed to reach towards, but after speaking to an Ayurvedic doctor, I better understood. The first time I sat with this woman, her hands on my wrists taking my pulse and her heart penetrating my being as I told her my story, I knew I had found something powerful. … [read more]
ova wellbeing 