Lean on Ayurveda

Ep 22 - Women’s Empowerment & Hormonal Health in Ayurveda: Less Fight, More Surrender

• Vytaute Liutkeviciute • Episode 22

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What if the power you’re chasing is already yours, but buried under constant striving? We take a clear-eyed look at women’s empowerment through the Ayurvedic lens and ask the braver question: what changes when we stop gripping outcomes and start trusting right action paired with real rest. The answer is not passivity—it’s stronger agency, steadier hormones, and choices that match our true capacity.

I share a pivotal story about learning surrender during my son’s hospital stay and how that moment reframed my idea of strength. From there, we unpack the patterns Ayurveda often reveals in driven women: pitta pushing for control and vata fueling fear, leading to overplanning, rigid timelines, mental dryness, and joy that depends on external wins. We connect these patterns to fertility and reproductive health, exploring why softening resistance can free prana, support the sacral center, and bring back creativity and libido.

You’ll hear practical ways to live this balance. We talk about designing weeks for the energy you actually have, not the energy you wish you had. We explore oiling the system—sleep, nourishment, gentle movement—as soma to stabilize agni, your inner fire. We practice allowing other people to be as they are to end the hidden battles that drain you. And we lean into trusted guidance—from teachers to the quiet intelligence of your own body. Along the way, the Gita’s teaching lands with fresh clarity: you have the right to action, not to the fruits of action. That single shift calms the timeline and makes space for mystery.

If empowerment without surrender breeds anxiety, empowerment with surrender breeds grounded confidence. From that place, decisions feel clean, boundaries land with grace, and timelines soften without losing momentum. Press play to reclaim a form of power that nourishes you back. If this conversation speaks to you, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a woman who could use a little less fight and a lot more flow.

Learn more about my work: https://leanonayurveda.com/

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SPEAKER_00:

Hi and welcome to the Lenan Ayurvela Podcast. Here we explore how the ancient wisdom of Ayurvala can help us gain a deeper understanding of our body and open the gateway to finally feeling better.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello, this is Vitote, your host, and today I'm welcoming you to episode number 22. For a number of women who come to work with me, we end up working on increasing their capacity to surrender. So from the Ayurvedic perspective, each time that I'm working with somebody and I um you know see them for a two-hour intake session, I get um, you know, quite a good bird's eye view of a person's life and their patterns. And anytime that usually when there is um you know some like elevated pitta or vata involved, we might see patterns like a desire to plan excessively, organize excessively, risk manage excessively, and this desire to control the outcome of everything in life, right? Of areas that we might not have control over. And so I say that um most of these things that I mentioned they are related to the pitta dosha, but the vada dosha is the dosha that rules fear, right? So a lot of these things where we are like risk managing excessively and planning excessively, a lot of that is actually rooted in fear, right? A fear of losing control. So that's why I say um that it's both of these doshas usually involved, and um oftentimes when these things um become excessive, right? So you know, planning and organizing and risk managing in itself is not inherently bad, it's necessary, right? We need these things in our life, we need that structure to function. But when um these um things become excessive, it can start to have a depleting effect on our body, on our mind and our emotional health, right? And then we end up living in a state of constant resistance, inevitably when things don't go as planned, right? And we end up in the state of constant stress over a particular outcome. And living in this constant resistance has a huge toll on us, it comes with a very high price tag, especially for women first and foremost, because that's depleting to our hormonal health, which is at the root of our reproductive health. And that's why one of the first things that I teach women who truly want to take care of their reproductive health and take care of their reproductive health in a really deep way, not at the surface level, is to learn how to let go of this resistance. And today's conversation is actually inspired by a client of mine who is currently on a fertility journey, and so we're working together on developing her capacity to let go of some of that resistance during our time together. And the other day, um she asked me what I thought was a brilliant question. She asked whether learning to surrender is not the opposite of women's empowerment, and I thought this was such a great question to ask. I actually never put these two together and never thought of these two concepts as um, you know, being in opposition, but I can totally see why some people might perceive them as being opposite of each other, and so this is what I want to talk to you about today. How can we reconcile this idea of women's empowerment, of a woman standing in her power, and this capacity to surrender and to let go of resistance? So before we begin, we can look at what each of these terms actually means, and then we can look at what these terms are associated with, which is not necessarily their true intended meaning. So I went to look up the definition of women's empowerment, and um I found as many definitions as there were sources talking about it. So, since there isn't really like one authority that I personally hold more qualified to coin a better definition of this concept, and there doesn't really seem to be one definition that is more legitimate than the other. In fact, from what I saw, some felt quite neutral in nature, some felt really militant, like um actually having the word striving for equal footing um as part of the definition of what women's empowerment is, and that presence of the word strive I thought was really really strong. Um, but um one that felt more neutral in nature was the definition of the European Institute for Gender Equality, and so they define women's empowerment as a process by which women gain power and control over their own lives and acquire the ability to make strategic choices. So we can take this definition as a base, and um my personal understanding of what women's empowerment means for me it's a woman standing in her power. I don't feel like there needs to be necessarily an expansion of that, um, but others might disagree. So, in that case, you know, a more descriptive definition like the one I just read can be helpful. So I also want to stress that I am not an expert in gender studies nor in feminism nor in human psychology. So here I'm really unpacking this from my personal experience as well as my experience with Ayurveda and its traditions. Very ironically, though, um, what I have personally experienced with women's empowerment and what I am seeing in quite a few women around me, and especially in women that seek Ayuretic guidance, is that we actually lose quite a lot of power when we think we are chasing women's empowerment, and I will explain why. So, my own personal experience. Um, a while ago, about 15 years ago, I was also on the route to being a striving woman, ready to climb the corporate ladder. I was I had such a motivation to climb the ladder and to like you know work late nights and be ready to be right at all costs and ready to show that I can do it on my own, and I can do it better when I do it on my own, independently, and without help, because that's what would give me brownie points in the eyes of others. Um, and that went for work and in my relationships, and um, you know, like strife for me in that phase of my life in my early 20s was a badge of honor because the way I saw it was that I was doing the hard stuff and chasing opportunities that my family back home didn't have, right? And many women in my family didn't have, so it felt like I was reaching for the stars, and there's nothing shameful about it, there's nothing shameful about this chasing um the way I see it now, it was just a phase in my life, and women's empowerment was most definitely on my mind in a sense that I wanted to feel able in the external world and external matters, but what ended up happening is that by chasing those external matters, I lost touch with my internal matters, and that was the root of my problems. So, surrender as a term was most definitely not part of my vocabulary back then, um, and it would not have been a word that I would have appreciated to hear, that's for sure. And it wasn't until some very painful events in my life later on that I started learning to surrender. The first time I believe I truly experienced surrender consciously was the night when I was holding my three-month-old in the hospital bed, and I was waiting for the morning hours for him to be taken away to have pretty major surgery. So this was um, you know, a very painful time in my life, and I remember that night so clearly still. I remember exactly how I was lying down and how I was holding him and watching the hours go by. I spent most of the night wide awake, and um I was holding him close to my chest and breathing through the pain. I was preparing for this experience. Um, in the weeks leading up to this moment, um, there's a book that has helped me greatly navigate this painful time, and it the book is called No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Trans Transforming Suffering by Tit Nathan. And that was truly the first time I remember surrendering consciously to the circumstances and abandoning resistance. That was the first time that I knew that my tool was basically breath and understanding that there is nothing I can do but trust. And I consider this moment to be a somewhat of a turning point, kind of like a painful initiation in my life into the art of letting go, but it's a lesson that I'll always remember and that still guides me today. It's um kind of like the beginning of my own journey to learn to surrender to what is, and I am still largely doing this work. Um, it's been many years since this experience, but I continue to peel the many layers. Um, and what I realized over time, and especially you know, when yoga and agarveda became my daily companions, is that living in a state of strife doesn't come for free, it's actually really, really costly. And the cost, um, as I already mentioned in passing at the beginning of this episode, is that of depletion for the body. So, you know, our hormonal health and our reproductive health definitely take the toll. The rigidity of our body tissues, right? There's like tension in the neck and the shoulders, most definitely tension in the pelvic region. As to the mind, the cost of living in a state of strife is that of mental depletion and mental dryness. So things like you know, low creativity, low libido, low capacity for joy. We need we might need like really big things to happen for us to feel joy. Like I was not able to feel the joy for the little things back in the days, you know, when I was constantly reaching and strategizing and planning and you know, really clinging onto what I believe the outcome should be. I wasn't able to generate joy myself, like my joy would be dependent, my capacity to feel joy would be dependent on good things happening to me. And that, as we know, is not something that we can always guarantee because it's an external circumstance, right? If we want to live a joyful life, we need to have the ability to generate that joy internally, and in the Vedic tradition, this is and in the yogic tradition, this is the realm of the second sacral chakra, the juicy, watery realm in the center of our pelvis that allows for a juicy life, right? A life of pleasure, a light, a life of creativity, whether it's creating a human being or creating you know art or projects or whatever outlet that speaks to you. And when we're constantly striving, whether it's you know outside the home or inside the home, like striving in our relationships, um, especially as women, we pay this price of losing the juiciness of life, and we become out of touch with our pelvic region and with our root. So here is my irony: by wanting to be empowered and to achieve more, I actually lost my power as a woman. So, yes, I had financial power. Maybe I even had some kind of prestige power, if that's even a thing. Um, but it ended up feeling hollow, right? Because what I was chasing was not rooted in what I was truly needing, right? And what was truly important to me. I didn't know what was important to me, I was busy chasing stuff, right? And if what I was chasing felt hollow, how can a woman who feels hollow inside be empowered? She can't. So even though externally I may have looked like a very empowered woman who had certain financial prestige and certain um job prestige, it was actually pretty meaningless, ironically, because it wasn't rooted in my true self. Right? So what appears empowering is not always what feels empowering. I didn't necessarily feel like I was standing in my power. Most of the time I actually felt like I didn't want to be where I was. And by comparison, you know, when I made this career U-turn from the outside, it might look like I took an unempowering decision because I surrendered a job which was incredibly difficult to get. I surrendered a financial independence to start building an independent practice in a completely new field from scratch, right, which um you know doesn't have financial security at all. I have never felt more empowered in my life and the way that I am designing it. And coming back to the definition that we saw from the European Institute of Gender Studies, women's empowerment being the process by which women gain power and control over their own lives and acquire the ability to make strategic choices. I can now say that my strategic choices are actually very different from what I thought my strategic choices were back when I was disconnected from my body. For example, right now, my strategic choices are creating a loving home for my kids and my husband and being able to adapt my working schedule to my family's needs. So actually, this podcast episode is a great example of me doing that because it was supposed to be aired last Friday. But um currently uh we have a family member who is going through a considerable health challenge where a lot of my assistance is needed, and I'm happy to provide that assistance. And so if I were to strive and I would be trying to do it all, um I would have you know pulled an all-nighter and got that episode out, but I have a different strategic plan, which means that like I'm currently finding myself in a situation of considerable strife given my family situation and logistically, and so my strategic plan in things that I can control is to strive less, right? Not add to that, right? So I am, although I am striving a little right now because it's a difficult circumstance for us all, but I'm reducing my strife in the ways that I can, meaning that this podcast episode is airing a week later, and that's okay, right? So this is just um one example of surrendering to circumstances, right? And accepting that um we have a certain amount of resource, and so um right now another part of my strategic choices include learning from dear teachers and continuing to train in the Vedic tradition. That's something that really feeds my soul, so that you know that is always part of my plan, but it has nothing to do with climbing a ladder that I don't don't genuinely care about, which is something that I used to strive for in my earlier life, and again, there is nothing wrong if you genuinely care about your career as a woman. You can absolutely care about your career and practice non-striving, right? That's what I'm trying to get at. That there are ways of being in this world and interacting in this world without constantly being militant about something. We do need to be militant about some things, but when we're being militant and combative all of the time, we basically get ourselves in a state of depletion, and we're we get ourselves in the state of disconnection from our pelvises, from our tailbones, from our roots, and then we're just combating for the sake of combating, and we lose our sense of self. I think the issue with this word surrender, um, which um you know I I really see the positive of surrender when I hear that term, but I think um some might interpret it as giving up or being indifferent or being passive or like even being a doormat, you know, and then when it's placed together with this idea of women's empowerment, that's when it might seem that these two terms don't go together, and they mean completely opposing things, but I disagree, I don't see them as opposing as having opposing meanings. For me, a surrendered life is a life when we know when to take action and when to exert our boundaries, but we also know when to stop resisting, and we're not enslaved to this impulse to keep gripping onto things we cannot change, right? Um, it's when we cultivate this ability to be able to melt into our being and welcome what is, and it's not even about renouncing our deepest desires. So, as I was explaining to this client of mine who is on a fertility journey, it's not about her, you know, her giving up her dream of being a mother, but it's about surrendering to the fact that even though um she can take action, she can do certain things to favor her fertility journey, right? And to support her body, it's also about recognizing that how and when and if it happens is not up to her, right? It's up to the unseeable, up to the logically unexplainable. Because if it wouldn't be, then the scientific methods would work 100% of the time, right? But the truth is that sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, and uh it's written off to chance, but there you go, chance is the it's part of the unseeable, and that's what you know the Vedic tradition would call divine intelligence, stuff that we can't explain logically why certain things happen to some people and certain things happen to other people, right? Not everything can be calculated, planned, and strategized. There's also space for the mystery of life, and just surrendering to that can free up so much prana, so much life force. Um, it's like my yoga teacher says that when a muscle is relaxed, the muscle is stronger, that muscle is more elastic. It's never a good idea to stretch a tight muscle because you will injure yourself, right? They need to be relaxed first, and so I believe that we can use this also to describe women's empowerment in a way. A relaxed woman who knows how to surrender, how to relax into her circumstances, is going to be a much stronger woman as opposed to a woman who's constantly striving and resisting what is happening, what is happening around her, right? And we're being encouraged to fight so often on a daily basis. We're encouraged to, you know, fight for our careers, we're encouraged to fight for our rights, we're encouraged to fight signs of aging, uh, we're encouraged to fight the symptoms of approaching menopause. Um, we're encouraged to fight the way our bodies look. So, you know, it's not to say that fighting any of for any of these causes is right or wrong, but simply how much of our day do we spend fighting? How much of our resources Are directed towards us striving for something, right? So again, I'm not saying that doing so is wrong, but what is the proportion of us engaging in this kind of like battle-like mindset? And do we have something to balance it with? Because then everything around us, including our bodies, becomes a battleground. And just like that metaphorical tight muscle, which is already stressed out and stiff, we're trying to stretch it in all these directions, forgetting that the first thing we need to do is to help that muscle relax and surrender. Right? So in my own life, um I can speak to some examples how I found more balance between, you know, reaching out for stuff, um accomplishing stuff that I think is important to me, but then also finding that downtime for surrender and acceptance where I am not battling, I am choosing purposely not to battle, to put the sword down and trust that you know things will work out the way they will work out. So, for example, um giving myself way more rest than I thought I needed. That um my understanding of how much rest I need changed dramatically as I dove deeper into Ayurveda and understood the needs of my body, you know, and the constitution that um it holds and the state of balance that it was in, right? I understood that I need a lot more rest than I thought I did, and that also means that I had to go through a lot of adjusting my own expectations about how much stuff I could take on because I have the enthusiasm, I really do. I have no shortage of ideas, um, but you know, I had to accept that I can only do so much, like developing this awareness um about the resources that are available to us and not overusing them because it's tempting, right? We can always borrow more energy from tomorrow, right? By you know, by staying up late or by you know working more than we know our body can handle. But if we do this again and again, that will come with a price tag. And so now every Sunday when I plan out the week ahead, I usually do that on Sunday. I always keep this in mind, I know realistically how much I can accomplish, and that means I plan accordingly, I schedule accordingly. That means that most of my weeks, there are always exceptions, but I would say really most of my work weeks are planned in such a way that I follow my pace, which allows me to be to be available for other areas in my life, right? Like family, like home life, like my own health and sports. And another thing that we can kind of segue into here is that um an important part of me feeling more empowered through surrender is learning to be okay with the possibility of being talked about in an unpleasant way, and um you know that means that I know that sometimes I will not meet somebody else's expectations, and they will have an opinion about it, which they may voice to me or or in their own circles, um, and I need to learn to be okay with that, right? So this was a huge part of my journey as well, as somebody who um is on a path of being a recovering people pleaser. Um, this is what um happens in women very often that we really want to like save and help everyone, and I have certainly seen this pattern in some of my clients, um, you know, the ones that um feel they that they have this mission to rescue and mission to you know put others first, um, which you know, depending on how um much of our resources we put towards that, but very often the tendency is to put a lot of resource towards that, which might seem very nice, but it puts us in the battleground for a lot of the time, which doesn't allow for that surrender piece, you know. So part of my own journey of learning to surrender during parts of my day is accepting that I cannot please everyone, and people will talk about it, people might say things, you know, they might have an opinion about it if I don't show up somewhere, or if I don't participate somewhere, or if I don't come visit, um you know there is that part of acceptance that needs to happen that the world will not stop if others have an opinion about you, and this is something that takes a little while to digest. Another lesson that um I had to learn and that I I would say I'm still learning is the lesson of being generous with others in a way that I allow them to be as they are. This is a huge um lesson in surrendering to what is and learning not to want to change people. Um, this has certainly been relevant in you know, in my inner circle, the people who are closest to me and my kids always remind me of that, you know, um, of that allowance that I want to have towards them as a mother to really um allow them that freedom to be as they are and not to try and make them into some somebody that they're not and somebody that I would like them to be, right? But the same goes towards our partners. Very often we might have um you know we we might want them to be a certain way, and when they're not, um you know it it makes us again like if we are the striving type, it can turn our home life again into this battlefield, right? Where we are trying to convince somebody of something, right? So when we are on this journey of learning to surrender, we can ease off in trying to convince and convert people, um, you know, to our own truth, our own perceived truth. Part of the journey is also learning to lean into good guidance, and for me, this looked like really leaning into the teachings of my beloved teachers of yoga and Ayurveda. Um, but it can really be you know it it it this could take form of you leaning into like good advice of a friend, it could be leaning into the support of a partner, um a support of a colleague, um, or you know, your own guide or advisor that you trust of whatever area in your life, whether it's you know a business coach or whether it's a health counselor, whether it's your I don't know, your dance teacher, um whatever it may be, but really practicing this surrendering into the teachings or advice that you trust and you find valuable. And then of course, beyond the human realm, um I would say learning to lean into the trust of the divine, uh trust you know, of that the universe has your back, um, trust that there is a divine intelligence and we are part of it, and you know, life is a big play, and everything has a reason, and we most of the time we have no idea what the reason is, right? Despite this um, you know, compulsion to rationalize everything in the world that we live in, there's so much we don't understand and we never will, and we um you know, if we find peace in that, um that can be really valuable in taking us off the battleground every now and then. And as we learn to lean into the guidance of other people or you know, nature or the divine, we can also lean into the guidance of our own body, which um you know, in my opinion, can only be accessed through surrender, you know, through surrendering to the felt sense, to what sensations we are feeling in our body, right? And through absolute acceptance. Um, and this is also something that is not a quick fix, and just like when we develop a relationship with a person, um this requires relationship building, this requires regular practice of coming back to our bodies and checking in with them. So whether that's through somatic work, whether that's through your um yoga asana work, or whether that's achieved or cultivated by working with a good body worker, I believe we all need to have some kind of pathway that you know paves the way to us building that relationship into surrendering to the guidance, to the wisdom that our body holds and is communicating to us. Another huge lesson that I learned along the way on this journey of inviting more surrender in my life is understanding that I have the right to action, but the results that come from that action don't belong to me. They're not up to me, and this is one of the most important teachings in the scripture, in the yogic scripture of Bhagavad Gita, um which took me quite a few years to integrate. Um, but it's a teaching I remember very often because you know, situations keep on coming up where I need to remember this line, and I need to be reminded that I have agency, and also what happens when I use that agency is pretty much entirely out of my hands, right? So I can do what I perceive to be the right thing and be at peace that I have done all that I could. And for me, this has been um one of the most liberating teachings I've ever received because it freed up so much space in my life. It allowed so much of my anxiety to just fall away. So this is particularly helpful if you are, for instance, on a fertility journey, right? And you might be taking a lot of action to help your body, right? You might be seeing all sorts of specialists, you might be having some medical procedures, you might be seeking holistic advice. Um and if you integrate this teaching that you do have the right to do these things, right, and and really like go for your desire, to take action towards your desire, but the final result is a mystery, right? Um and if you really feel into that, you will feel much freer in your life, as opposed to like really gripping on a timeline that you might have created for yourself arbitrarily, perhaps um, you know, perhaps having like read certain information about what happens to a woman's body, you know, when when she turns 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, you know, and the clock is ticking. And so we need to make this happen. And if it doesn't happen this month, then this is trouble, and then we're gonna have even more pressure the next month. So really absorbing this teaching that the final result of our actions does not belong to us, we don't get to decide that. That is not our realm of competence. We can find this freedom of doing what we can, and then resting in this trust that things will work out a certain way, that is surrender, and it doesn't mean that we will like the result, maybe the result will suck, and maybe we will need to, you know, grieve, maybe the result will be great and we will be overjoyed. But while we wait, if we can manage to surrender part of that timeline, to soften that timeline and also allow for the mystery to also play its part, there is so much more relaxation that can happen in your body, your physical body, and your emotional body and your mental body. I have certainly, most certainly observed in my own life and in the life of my clients that we take much better decisions as women when we feel relaxed and soft in the center, soft at the root, and when we feel nourished. That is where our empowerment truly lives. From that place, we can take really powerful decisions. They're gonna be really smart decisions because they're gonna be measured up according to our resources, our inner resources. They're not gonna overexpand our energy. It's those decisions taken from that place that are going to feel the most aligned for us, and they're gonna take us to that place of empowerment where we actually want to be, as opposed to you know, us taking agitated decisions like that tense, tight muscle that is being pulled and stretched. And in the previous episode, in episode number 21, where I spoke about Ghee, um, and I spoke about how Ghee is this reminder that fire always needs to come with fuel and nourishment. We have the Agni principle, the principle of fire, right, which is the flame, which is combat, which is reaching out and achieving and action. And then we have the principle of soma, which is you know, not solar but lunar, which is um acceptance, resting, which is surrender, and that is where a lot of us, especially women, need to be spending quite a bit of our day in because otherwise we end up depleting ourselves in the combat zone. And I believe that in today's um narrative, which is encouraging women to you know to seek empowerment, it's really missing that peace, it's missing that surrender peace and only encouraging women to focus on this outwardly action, the you go girl, and shatter that ceiling narrative. What happens is we go ahead shattering ceilings, but many times we forget why we are doing this in the first place, and what is truly important for us. We end up doing what we've been conditioned to think is important, which a lot of times doesn't correspond to what you know matters to us truly. And so there we are out there depleting ourselves and depleting our endocrine systems and depleting our reproductive health. In my opinion, women's empowerment and surrender, so cultivating this capacity to surrender, are inseparable and they must come together. Because empowerment without surrender results in women who keep aiming high but lose themselves in the process, and a lost woman is not an empowered woman, a lost woman is an anxious woman, and this is a lesson that I have learned in my own skin. I will leave it at that today. I know this episode was perhaps a little unorthodox, but nevertheless, I hope it was useful for you, and I'd be curious to hear if you have similar or different stories or experiences with regard to feeling empowered and this idea of surrendering to what is.com. I'll also put it in the show notes. And I can't wait to reconnect with you in a couple of weeks. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to leave me a review or rate it because that really helps others to discover the show. If there is a woman uh in your life who you think would need to hear this episode, feel free to forward it to them. Thank you for being here until the end and listening until the end. I appreciate you're here. See you next time.