Announcer (00:00:04) - This is Dream Power Radio, the place where your dreams turn into reality. Here is your host, Debbie Spector Weisman.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:00:13) - Hello, hello, hello and welcome to Dream Power Radio. I'm your host, Certified Dream-Life Coach Debbie Spector Weisman. This is the place we talk about dreams, both daytime and nighttime dreams, and how you can use them to make the internal shift to a life you love and rediscover the truth of who you really are. Today's episode is all about our health and how to maximize our well-being. Long before they were MRIs, CT scans, chemotherapy, and the like, there was Ayurveda, a treatment that goes back over 7000 years and it's still being used all over the world as a holistic healing method. We're going to explore all facets of this approach with Doctor Victor Briere, a noted Ayurveda doctor and Kundalini yoga teacher. Victor is co-founder of the International Institute of Ayurveda and specializes in diagnosis and health counseling. And he's the author of the book Pulse: Unveil the Art and Science of Ayurvedic Pulse reading. Welcome to the Dream Power Radio, Victor.
Victor Briere (00:01:19) - Thank you for having me.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:01:20) - Oh, it is my pleasure. Victor, just to start off, could you explain to our listeners what Ayurvedic Healing is?
Victor Briere (00:01:28) - Sure, absolutely. So, as you mentioned, it's a very old healing science, and that means it draws on thousands of years of time-tested techniques to basically understand how the body really heals and what to do to foster that healing. So we can go on forever about what Ayurveda really is. But in brief, basically, it's going to deal with anything you take into your body, including food, sense perceptions, liquids, your breath, all that is one pillar of health. Second pillar of health is sleep. How well you sleep and your rhythm, your daily rhythm. How follows the sun and moon. And the third is how you use your creative energy or basically how you engage the world, including your relationships. So by keeping these three pillars healthy and strong, you allow your body to maintain its health.
Victor Briere (00:02:25) - The body is pretty much always, for the most part, attempting to reach a point of balance inside and homeostasis while managing thousands and thousands of complex operations at once. So Ayurveda basically helps foster that internal healing power that every human and animal has present inside of it, not just in every living thing.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:02:46) - Right. You talk one of the things you talked about as a pillar was the way we eat, eat and drink to stay alive. Why is that so important to this process, and what are the types of foods we should be eating which to avoid?
Victor Briere (00:03:04) - Well, I mean, your body is literally created out of the food you eat, the air you breathe, the water you drink. And it's important not to forget your sense perceptions. So everything you take in through your sense organs is subtly integrated into the tissues of your body, through the nervous system. And how the nervous system functions are highly dependent on what our perceptions are in the world. So all that stuff is, is literally building your body on a moment-to-moment basis.
Victor Briere (00:03:33) - So if you put in low quality ingredients, you end up getting low quality tissues, which are much more subject to collapse or disease or malfunction. You put in high quality ingredients, the right food specific for your needs at that time, which is going to be different for every person. There is no universal food to eat or avoid, and that's something that you have to go over on a very personal basis. But, you know, we can speak generally if you eat a bunch of processed foods with a bunch of toxins in it, you eat at the wrong times, you eat under stress or duress. All those things start to break down the digestive process, and then your body can't assimilate nutrients properly informed, proper tissues out of.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:04:22) - And Ayurveda also puts an emphasis on the vagus nerve and the atomic or atomic nervous system. Why are they important to our health?
Victor Briere (00:04:34) - So in Ayurveda, the vagus nerve is called the prana nadi, which means the channel that carries most of your life force.
Victor Briere (00:04:41) - And it's got very specific functions in the body, but mainly it deals with how we engage the world on a social level. So human beings are wired. All mammals are pretty much wired to be social creatures. So like for example, right now we have an epidemic of loneliness going on that's never been seen before. Very delirious to health. And basically, the organ system starts operating completely differently when we are threatened. And isolation is a huge threat to our nervous system, whether we think it is or not. So that extends beyond our personal opinion, our nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, which means it's doing a bunch of automatic things without our conscious thought, is registering how well we're relating to the world and other creatures in the world. And anytime we get into a threatening situation or a part of a threatening situation, we go into more of a defensive state, which is not conducive to healing. So it might keep us alive, or it might save us temporarily, but we're meant to return to a more safe, secure, open, tight mode inside of our bodies.
Victor Briere (00:05:57) - And that's when any kind of healing, recovery, tissue repair happens. And so Ayurveda has long known this. And so a lot of the Ayurvedic therapies or modalities are geared towards helping people create a sense of safety and calm inside their own skin so that the body can actually do the repair it needs to do and isn't always triggered.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:06:23) - Does that mean that stress is actually more harmful to us than we might realize?
Victor Briere (00:06:28) - Yeah, far more harmful. I mean, we're all capable of handling stress, and stress is inevitable. It's, you know, how acute the stress is. So you can go through an extremely stressful event that can be extremely harmful, right? The body can shut down or go into hyperdrive too long. But in our modern day, for a lot of us, not all of us, unfortunately, a lot of us are experiencing very acute stress. But for a lot of us, it's a chronic stress where 2000 times a day we get triggered and then bounce back and get triggered and bounce back and get triggered and bounce back. And we never really resolve that. And over time, that takes a huge toll on the health. And if people were to consider stress a disease, I think we would all take it more seriously.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:07:16) - True. Although I guess if in our Western world if it was called a disease, there'd be some pill to take for it. And I imagine you don't really advocate that.
Victor Briere (00:07:27) - No, that's not the answer and will never be the answer, unfortunately, because that's not how the human body works. There's no single pill that could possibly organize the human body in a way that it needs to function harmoniously.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:07:39) - You're also a pulse reader. I imagine that involves more than taking someone's blood pressure. So please explain what it means to be a pulse reader.
Victor Briere (00:07:48) - So pulse reading is part of an automatic diagnostic tradition where you use three fingers, and you place them on the radial artery. And it's learning a skill that's kind of like learning any other skill. When you learn to read the cues that the pulse sends off because of the connection with the heart rate, the variability of the heart rate, and the messaging that it can send to all the organs in the body.
Victor Briere (00:08:14) - Someone can learn to read through the pulse, the condition of everything that's going on in the body, so you can read the status of the internal organs, the qualities of the tissues, how the major life forces vata, pitta and kapha are engaged in the body. And then from that, you can start a conversation and surmise a lot of things going on inside. And it can show you kind of the hidden things that people often don't know about, right? Or it could be very confirming where, you know, you read someone's pulses and it becomes quite clear that their kidneys or their liver are in peril. And lo and behold, 25 years ago they had hepatitis, and that damage is still showing through. And the pulse and then everything that that means about what the liver's functions are in context of the rest of the body can become apparent.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:09:06) - So I'm not quite sure I totally understand this. How does putting your fingers on person's pulse tell you that there's problem with the liver?
Victor Briere (00:09:17) - Well, over thousands of years that are been developed. And basically the way it works is that you get a pulse and you're manipulating the pressure in the local area of the pulse by manipulating the fingers. And then, because of the way that the pulse and the heart rate variability and pressure and strength of the pulse and temperature of the pulse and all those things are coming together, are communicating through that wavelength, you learn how to read it like you learn how to read a book. I mean, it's a little bit more subtle than that, but the idea is the same. You would tune your nervous system to understand what those sensations mean in the context of that person's body.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:09:58) - Interesting. In the subtitle of your book about pulse reading, you do use the words art and science. So how do these disciplines merge together? And is all Ayurvedic medicine both art and science?
Victor Briere (00:10:13) - Yes. And you know, by science, especially in the modern world, it's like, well, if we don't have a study that can guarantee results at least a certain amount of time, that is not scientific, right? Or they call it a soft science or whatever.
Victor Briere (00:10:26) - But the truth is that humans have capacities that go beyond just factual, repetitive understanding of a similar phenomenon over time. And so the art part is about the pulse reader and their capacity to develop an intuitive sense and have enough experience with the human body and the human psyche to kind of. I'll say deduce without thinking about what's going on. You know, you develop a sense of feel a touch, and you can reach places that simple, factual understanding can't get to.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:11:07) - I understand more about it now, and I was really curious to talk with you today, because I want to get your take on this. Well, I had medical issue a few days ago. I had a bad reaction to a wasp sting, and my hand swelled up to twice its size. Would I have been better off with Ayurveda over the course of antibiotics I was prescribed by a doctor?
Victor Briere (00:11:31) - Well, one of the tricks with Ayurveda in the modern day is I can't answer that question legally because I'm not allowed to talk about anything--you know, I can't give you Western medical advice, right? So I could only tell you what Ayurveda would do for that kind of situation. And then the choice would be up to you. So the Ayurvedic solution is going to be definitely put some herbs on topically. You'll take some herbs internally because that's an acute event, right. But then. And so, you know, it will subside over time and your body will go back to normal. But the deeper reason is why are you allergic to the wasp sting? Right? Why did your body have that reaction? Whereas the person next to you might get stung and hardly even notice, right? So that is going to involve your digestive system and how much toxicity is in your body, how reactive your immune system is, right. And all those things. And so then a full aggravated protocol would actually try and eliminate your wasp allergy altogether over time by improving the overall function of your system. And, you know, basically make it so that the immune system doesn't have to be so reactive to something like a wasp sting. Same general idea with food allergies, right?
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:12:50) - Okay, well, it means that I've got a lot of toxins in my body that I wasn't quite aware of, I guess.
Victor Briere (00:12:57) - Yeah, or your immune system's particularly reactive to certain ones, but even still, that can usually be traced back to a digestive issue. Usually.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:13:07) - Understood. Okay, we'll take a short break here. We are speaking all about Ayurveda with Victor Briere, and we'll be right back.
Announcer (00:14:24) - Welcome back to Dream Power Radio with your host, Debbie Spector Weisman.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:14:30) - Yes, welcome back to Dream Power Radio. I'm your host, Debbie Spector Weisman. And we're talking about Ayurveda with Doctor Victor Briere. Well, Victor, are there any particular conditions that are best helped by Ayurveda over any others?
Victor Briere (00:14:47) - Yeah. Definitely. Especially in today's world. A lot of the lifestyle, chronic lifestyle diseases are really helped by our data. So you know, number top ranking, number one right now on the list is diabetes which is called Prameha in Ayurveda. And many like MS or chronic pain or I mean there are tons right. Chronic skin conditions, anything like that where when someone changes their lifestyle, their approach to stress and their approach to relationships. You can do tremendous work on those kinds of illnesses where a lot of other modalities won't because they just go for like, you know, trying to tweak 1 or 2 things inside the body, which will rarely be enough of an impact to harmonize and heal a whole system. Because you got to remember that in most cases, these chronic diseases are the manifestations, right? They're what we see or feel. They're not the root--the roots existing silently in our body somewhere often.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:15:54) - And would you say it resides in the root? Would it involve the way we think about things? Or is it always related to some kind of what we would call an illness, physical illness inside us?
Victor Briere (00:16:10) - Well, those two things are inseparable. All diseases are psychosomatic, sometimes because of just the way our minds work in and of themselves, but also because of the way we think, the way our minds work, our attitudes, stress levels. We attempt to adapt to those and cope with them. And oftentimes that leads to negative behaviors for the body. So, you know, classic example is I had a really hard day. I'm in a bad mood and I'm going to drink three glasses of wine. I'll feel better that day. And in doing that, one time is going to do very minimal damage to the body, right? But doing that day after day after day after day, of course, is going to cause major problems over time.
Victor Briere (00:16:57) - So there's no. So if someone then gets a liver issue but doesn't feel anything in their right side of their body, but they break out in a rash, right? They're going to say, I have a rash, I need to put a cream on it. But that cream is going to do hardly anything. It might temporarily assuage a rash, but it's going to do nothing to deal with the liver issue, and it's going to do nothing to deal with the reasons why the person's drinking so much.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:17:23) - I see. It might go back to what you said about Ayurveda and chronic diseases. Does Ayurveda actually cure chronic illnesses or just keep them under control?
Victor Briere (00:17:36) - It does. It can do both. It can. It can both reverse them, and it can manage them. There are just different there are different classifications of disease depending on the person, how far they're willing to go to heal the chronicity and the nature of the disease. Some diseases can be managed but not completely reversed, and others can be completely reverse.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:17:58) - Can Ayurveda help with addictions?
Victor Briere (00:18:00) - Definitely. Especially some of the mental components of Ayurveda. How to train the mind. It's a huge part of Ayurvedic healing, to train the mind properly and to take on disciplines that help the mind regain its true nature beyond kind of the fog and delusions of life that we all encounter. And so addictions are hidden inside those, and so living a healthy lifestyle can give you the energy to train the mind, which then allows yourself to get to the roots of why you even have the addiction in the first place, and then even becoming aware of it. You still have to fight the battle against addiction, right? And find a new way, which is no easy task at all. But it's definitely possible. And Ayurveda is huge on emphasizing working with that part of ourselves. They're really innovative. There's really no healing without engaging the mind and the body together.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:19:04) - And I imagine it could also involve just a total change of mindset and change of lifestyle in order for it to be sustaining.
Victor Briere (00:19:12) - In some people, it's total and other people it's not. Some people take a few changes. Other people need a complete overhaul. It just depends on how they're living and what kind of disease they're developing.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:19:23) - Okay, let's go back and talk a bit about stress. If somebody comes to you, say they're stressed out and they want to get some relief from that. Walk me through a typical--if there is such thing as a typical--way you would approach it.
Victor Briere (00:19:39) - Well, I mean, the first mode because it's not psychotherapy, right? That's not the goal of what I would try and do in a clinical practice. But you know, the first very simple question is why? And, you know, they're going to tell whatever stories they tell. And some of them might be accurate, some of them might be not accurate in the sense that maybe they don't even really know why they're so stressed out. Right. But a lot of times the major issues are pretty in their face and apparent.
Victor Briere (00:20:09) - And, you know, part of creating a protocol for someone for healing is to attempt to address that in some creative way that's very applicable for the person. So a classic example is someone comes in and they're having financial trouble, right. And that's really stressing them out like constant. So I obviously can't sit there and solve all their financial problems. But you'd be surprised at how much built into the health issues is a big drain on finances. So spending lots of money on alcohol, drugs, meat products, cheese products, junk food, all that stuff, right, can actually go a long way for a lot of people in resolving some of those issues. If they're on that level, of course, there are bigger financial issues that people face, but you get the idea, right? And of course an Ayurvedic practitioner is not going to promise to be able to solve stresses. But a lot of times, because we're in the healing world, we have resources, and we could point people in the right direction who are experts in that area and who could help that person solve those problems.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:21:18) - Well, you're talking about a holistic approach to medicine in Ayurveda.
Victor Briere (00:21:24) - There's really no other approach. I mean, if you don't deal with-- the body acts as a single unit, so you can't really isolate parts. Of course, in some emergency situations you gotta patch things up and do a band aid in an isolated fashion. But when you're talking about healing over time, you have to deal with it holistically.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:21:45) - And is Ayurveda different from other kinds of holistic treatments?
Victor Briere (00:21:52) - They all share routes. Ayurveda and Chinese medicine are the oldest and Unani medicine which came from the Middle East. But that was all pretty much the same region, you know. And so they all drew from each other. And then different things have shot off from that. But they all definitely share roots in the mentality and philosophy around healing.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:22:13) - You're also a Kundalini yoga teacher, right? Is there a connection between Ayurveda and yoga?
Victor Briere (00:22:23) - All yoga they developed at the same time. Ayurveda and yoga. So Ayurveda was a pathway that a lot of people would use to keep their body healthy while they practice yoga to engage their spiritual life. So the two, they're called sister sciences. They are completely compatible with each other.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:22:42) - So, Victor, what got you interested in Ayurveda in the first place?
Victor Briere (00:22:47) - I had a back issue when I was a teenager when I was 18. That was really annoying, but not like major threatening, right? And I wanted to get rid of it. And so I grew up in West Los Angeles. I didn't know anything about holistic health, and I started going to doctors, and basically, I got put through a mill because my problem was kind of unidentifiable. And basically the solutions that were offered to me were exploratory surgery or painkillers, which I knew that wasn't going to do anything. And I definitely didn't want to start taking painkillers as an 18-year-old. And exploratory surgery didn't sound very promising. So eventually one of those doctors sat me down and said, look, you've been to a few of us, and I gotta tell you, with you're kind of issue, we're not going to be able to help you. So you should seek something else. So I went to a yoga class in my college town, and I really liked the yoga teacher. I asked her to do a one-on-one session with me and basically within like two weeks, she had a problem I'd had for years completely resolved just by manipulating my musculoskeletal system. And so I was like, wow, there's something here, you know. So I did some traveling on my own, and I ended up coming back to Los Angeles and met my more permanent yoga teacher, my mentor. His name is Joe Rich, and he introduced me into the deeper arts of yoga, the more spiritual side of yoga, and then also said, hey, you know, have you ever checked out Ayurveda? And I hadn't at the time, and I was looking for a change in career from real estate, so I pretty much just took it on and dove in and started learning the science and understanding and started seeing the results for people and all the ups and downs of it, watching people heal and refuse to heal and heal and the whole nine yards.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:24:50) - Victor, is there a final thought you'd like to leave for our audience?
Victor Briere (00:24:53) - Yes. So there's a word in Ayurveda called Rogi. R-O-G-I . And Rogi is what we would call a client, right? But there's a particular definition that I grow more and more appreciative of over time. And it's very simple. Rogi is someone who is seeking healing. So I think that's really important, because anyone dealing with the health issue has to contend with how much they're willing to do in order to really heal that health issue, what they're willing to adopt, what they're willing to give up right, in order to change enough to heal. And I think it's a really important question for people to ask themselves before they seek an answer. Because in our cultural subconscious or whatever you want to call it, we've been brought up to believe that for the most part, unless it's really bad, you can just take a medicine. And unfortunately, that just ends up kicking the can down the road.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:26:00) - Well, Victor, how can people find out more about you and your work?
Victor Briere (00:26:05) - Really easy to get a hold of. You can email me at reception@iiayurveda.com. And if you want a consultation or you just want to chat, or if you have questions, just feel free to send me an email. And we do consultations over Zoom in person. I'm always happy to help.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:26:31) - Wonderful, Victor, thank you so much for being on Dream Power Radio today.
Victor Briere (00:26:35) - Thank you for having me.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:26:37) - We've been speaking about Ayurveda with Victor Briere. I hope you've enjoyed today's program. If so, please hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any future episodes. Until next time, this is Debbie Spector Weisman saying, sweet dreams everybody!
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