Finding Radiance

Ayurveda is pretty great, it turns out

Aug 10, 2024

[Note: “Radiance” has undergone some shifts since I wrote this, and is now called “MyAyu.” You can check them out at myayu.com.]

In the past 3 days, I’ve given 3 different impromptu hype sessions on how good my Ayurvedic treatment with Radiance has been — so now seems like a good time to put some milestones in public without needing to rant at people one by one. I’ll mix in some context as we go — but let’s start with a couple of the big things:

I’m not lactose sensitive anymore. For years I’ve been getting worse and worse at handling dairy products, they were messing with my stomach increasingly badly from my late 20s onward. After working with Jess (the doc at Radiance) for a couple months, she told me to try something with normal milk, I tried it and… I was fine. I’ve been having milk, cheese, and ice cream ever since, no problems. It’s weird to me that this was apparently so easy and no one ever told me it was possible.
I have an autoimmune thyroid disorder, and when I started working with Jess, my blood tests were looking bad. My antibodies were crazy high, my TSH was crazy high, my thyroid hormones weren’t in a great range.
Within a couple months, my blood tests were all normal, except for the antibodies which were (merely) reduced to about an eighth of what they had been, edging closer and closer to normal range.
(Worth noting: my endocrinologist made me re-take the blood tests because she was certain this was a mistake on the part of the lab — the results were too good too quickly.)
Early in my autoimmune diagnosis, I had a few weeks of what I can only describe as on-and-off dementia. I’d lose days in a row to the most intense brain fog I’ve ever experienced. I was constantly confused, my heart rate was all over the place, my body felt wrong and my head was buzzing all the time.
My endocrinologist told me “Yeah, that’s just what your life is like now, probably. Get used to it.”
When I went to Jess, she said something different: “I’m so sorry that’s happening to you — I think we can fix that up for you in a month or so.”
…She fixed me up in a month or so. I’ve only had one pseudo-dementia day since then (it’s been 5 months or so), and that was after I’d taxed myself with travel and bad food for a couple days.

It feels like I should share how I got involved with Radiance.

I was pretty desperate earlier this year. I’d gotten serotonin syndrome, then woken up half deaf and found out my thyroid doesn’t work. Everything was going wrong, my head felt like a bad acid trip, I was experiencing daily body horror of being stuck in a chemical cocktail that felt like a hell realm, my partner at the time was mostly not particularly sympathetic to what was happening to me — it was a bad time. Add to all that the fact that my doctors were fully unhelpful and basically telling me that the rest of my life would be a slow descent as my hormones stopped working… I was feeling pretty desperate.

So when someone on Twitter told me that traditional medicine systems tend to handle chronic illness better than allopathic medicine, I was willing to give it a shot. They pointed me towards Radiance, and I took the meeting.

In the first meeting, it turned out I couldn’t really afford the usual price. They seemed to be at an early stage, looking for more clients, so we worked out a price I could afford, and they asked only that I talk about my experience as I go.

I laughed and told him “I talk about everything I do — I kind of compulsively post on twitter about anything that’s happening with me. So I will be talking about it; the risk for you guys is that if it doesn’t work or the service sucks, I’m going to talk about that too.”

His reaction? He laughed and said “Yeah, I’m not worried about that.”

Looking back, that confidence was pretty much everything I needed to know. And we were both right: I’ve had a continuing urge to talk and write about Ayurveda, and honestly I have nothing to say that isn’t soaked in ecstatic gratitude.

Over the years, I’ve picked up some random symptoms that come and go. Occasional gut pain and inflammation, waking up with headaches and feeling like crap some days for no discernible reason, losing my ability to eat dairy, getting fatigued seemingly at random, joint pain creeping in…
Everyone I talked to told me about the same thing: “That’s what happens when you get into your 30s, age creeps up on you, huh?”
…That was bullshit, it turns out. Since the first couple months where Jess helped me get back on my feet, I’ve learned that my default days feel clean, clear, energetic, with no major gut problems or vague “aging” symptoms. Those symptoms only come back when I imbalance myself for awhile, and it’s always pretty easy to trace them back to exactly why they’re happening. They’re not “mysterious” or “random” signs of aging — they’re because I ate poorly and messed up my sleep schedule, or because I didn’t exercise for 5 days straight or I found a food trigger I can’t handle right now.
Related to the above point — Radiance has managed, on at least 3 occasions I can remember, to give me weeks where I feel better than I have since I was a teenager. High mood, high energy, clear mind — feeling like I can do anything, and having the energy to back it up. Apparently those periods shouldn’t be a rare thing, if I’m well-balanced.

I’ve talked with a couple other people taking the Ayurveda route about the above points, and a vision is emerging. There’s a sense where we see ourselves as guinea pigs to test the potential of this kind of lifestyle. If it does end up being capable of providing lasting clarity, energy, and — dare I say it — radiance, then we’d love to be able to share that fact with more people.

Think about some of the people in this scene we’re a part of (at least that many of you reading this are part of). If some of those people can get unblocked in a way where brain fog, physical problems, and emotional turmoil are no longer major obstacles, just imagine what a scene of those folks could do. The mind reels. And I’m increasingly convinced that Ayurveda is a major piece of the puzzle.

The Ayurvedic medicines I’ve been taking are super fun to say. “Hinguvachadi Gulika.” “Bruhat Vata Chintamani Rasa.” “Rasnairandadi.” …Trust me, it makes the whole thing more delightful.
This one’s a little harder to point directly at… Maybe I can start by analogy.
A lot of people have noticed that modern life is difficult due to a lack of community. We have to do everything for ourselves, including things that otherwise would have been held in community. Whenever I find myself embedded in a (non-dysfunctional) close-knit community, I’m shocked at how much tension is removed from my emotional and material plate. It gets distributed into those relationships, and we’re all stronger for it.
I’ve experienced something similar with Ayurveda. It turns out, when my body is in a state of balance and energy, there are a lot of things that usually take effort, but now they just… happen. On their own.
Meditation has been one good example — all these techniques and tricks and patience that I sometimes need to drop into a deep state, they become unnecessary. Emotional regulation too, all the ways that I manage and process my feelings, all the ways I put effort into my emotional life… they become increasingly irrelevant. Emotional processing takes less conscious effort, and becomes more of a natural process that drives itself, like digestion or breathing.
I don’t have a good handle on how far or how deep this goes, but I’ve been struck by it multiple times, so it feels worth mentioning here, if only as a reference point for future me.

I’ve come to find out that there’s very little overlap between Actual Ayurveda on the one hand, and what I think of as “Turmeric Blogger Ayurveda” on the other.

The 5 years of Ayurvedic medical school and years of experience have given Jess a dynamic competence that’s astoundingly clear from the first time I met with her. She knows her stuff, and her competence was a big help in taking the treatment seriously enough to feel the effects. She had me taking detailed notes in a spreadsheet every day, including everything that was going on with my body, my food, my moods, my thought patterns and subtle somatic signals, all of it. From that spreadsheet and our conversations, she’d zero in on what needed immediate attention, what was pointing towards root issues, and so on.

This wasn’t what I’d been expecting, given my previous exposure to Ayurveda. My previous encounters were mostly places serving “Ayurvedic” meals, which seemed to just mean they used a lot of herbs. Or blogs with Ayurvedic habits which mostly seemed to be breathwork and… eating a lot of herbs.

Actual Ayurveda, I’ve been surprised to learn, is astoundingly precise and dynamic. There are certain “healthy” foods that I’ve been told to stay away from, not because they’re bad but because they would affect my specific system in specific negative ways for the time being. There have been time periods where I’ve been told to eat a lot of some particular food, and other time periods where I’ve been told to stay away from that same food. Ayurveda can’t be reduced to some vague affinity for natural foods, or certain herbs, or even to a strict diet of what seems healthy. It’s incredibly specific and personalized. Not only will what worked for me not work for you — but even what worked for me a couple months ago might not work for me tomorrow. Finding a guide to help me through all this while I was in crisis has turned out to be one of the biggest strokes of luck in my life.

There are some other things I’ve experienced with Ayurveda that are honestly weirder than I want to talk publicly about right now, partly because I don’t think some of you would believe me unless you experience it yourself, and partly because I wanna keep collecting data and seeing if they remain true for a longer time before I say them in public.
One of the ones on the border that’s just a little weird: A couple months I started a series of medicines whose stated purpose was to scrape out old metabolic waste that had gotten stuck in particular tissues of my body. I cycled on and off of these a couple times, and every single time I started taking them, the next day I’d be awash in old memories from a very specific period of my life, a difficult period that I’d never really dealt with and processed. I spent a lot of time those days having those old emotions wash over me and process through my system.
…As far as I can tell, the medicines that were physically scraping out wastes were also releasing and scraping out trapped emotional waste from that very specific period in my life, which was related in ways I won’t get into here, but… I don’t know man, it was weird. I didn’t expect the mind-body connection to be that direct and that strong, just from an herbal mix with a fun name and some basic dietary instructions.
In one meeting with Jess, we were talking about summer plans and she stopped mid-sentence and asked “wait, you probably don’t like the summer much, do you? Is heat really difficult for you?”
I said yeah, despite having lived in Vietnam for years, I really dislike summer. Heat does not sit well in my system at all.
She nodded and said “Hopefully, with the work we’re doing on your system, heat is going to get easier and easier for you to deal with. These next summers should be less unpleasant.”
And you know what? This summer has already been notably easier to deal with. My body still gets hot, but it doesn’t register as a problem as much as it has in the past. It’s got more of a matter-of-fact tone to it, like a car engine running too hot. Just a simple “oh yeah, it’s hot — I should get back inside before too long” rather than my usual “Oh GAWD, get me out of this wretched sun and let me melt into goop until the air conditioning can reconstitute my essence!”
It’s a small thing, but it’s noticeable and it’s nice.
Ayurvedic eating isn’t particularly restrictive, it turns out. Jess never says things like “you can’t eat X, Y, or Z.” At several points, she’s point-blank instructed me to eat what I’d usually think of as “unhealthy” foods, either because I clearly needed to get psychologically out of what she called food jail, or because the foods turned out to be perfectly fine for me, only “unhealthy” in my mind.
At other points, she’s gone out of her way to find ways for me to eat things I love, figuring out how I can eat them in a way that still feels good. For example, I had sweet pastries with my coffee a couple days in a row in Portugal, and it made my head feel buzzy and bad. I told her I’d stay away from pastries from then on, and she said “No no, you like that pastry. Let’s figure out if it can work. I assume you ate it in the morning? That’s not great, but you can try eating it in the evening, after your system is kind of coated in other foods. That should buffer you from the bad effects.”
And she was right! I tried the pastry after dinner one or two days per week, and it was perfectly fine. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t eat it, but that I had to find the right way to eat it. A lot of things have turned out to be like that.
Lately, every time I see someone I haven’t seen in awhile, I get some version of “oh wow, you’re looking healthier!” Which is more than anything just a nice little ego boost, but still. I’ll take it.

I started working with Radiance with this attitude: “I’m desperate, I’ll try anything — you guys get one month of credit where I’ll do whatever you say, and then I’ll re-assess based on how it’s going.”

At the end of that one month grace period, my response was “okay things are looking better. I’ll give you another 2 months where I’ll roll with whatever you tell me to do.”

This has continued up to present, where my current level of trust is, apparently, “if you tell me that I should go spend a month or two in an Ayurvedic hospital in India, then that’s what I’m going to do; excuse me a moment while I buy my ticket.”

That’s maybe the most telling detail I can give about my experience with Ayurveda: I started this year working with Radiance out of a sense of skeptical desperation, willing to try things out for one month. I’ll be finishing this year in a hospital in India, because they said I should. My skepticism is still hanging around the edges, but so far everything they’ve had me try has worked gangbusters, so… I don’t know man. I’m closer and closer to all-in at this point. Take from that what you will.

Final bonus disclaimer bit — if the picture I paint above seems a little too rainbows-and-roses, that’s because that’s how I’m feeling now, after ~6 months working with Radiance. But I can’t lie: there were multiple points early on where I was about to quit. Things would get better for a few days, then get worse again. I’d go through several days of extremely restricted food, my symptoms would be all over the place, my body was in chaos as my disease and my new situation all struggled to find balance.
There were a couple times when I wanted to drop the whole thing. “I’ve been at this for weeks and I’m still having days that feel horrible, I’m still an emotional wreck, my life is still falling apart! Why the hell should I keep at it?”
One of my friends who’s also working with Radiance has a similar stage towards the beginning. He just wanted to quit, no miracles were happening and he felt like crap.
We both stuck with it anyways, and I’m profoundly glad. But I can’t deny that there were periods in there that profoundly sucked. That may or may not be true for you, for your life, for your body — but it’s worth mentioning. The effects have been amazing for me, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had hellish days or weeks along the way.

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