Member stories

I have no idea where I'd be without Jess, but I'm pretty sure I'd be miserable and sick, probably feeling pretty hopeless and helpless.

One thing I've learned from working with Jess is that not all Ayurveda is created equal. My brain has started tracking some internal spectrum of Ayurvedic skill that runs from the low end of "Turmeric Blogger" up to "Well-Meaning Vibe Herbalist" and "Competent Practitioner" all the way to "Dynamic Systems Wizard."

Jess is, so far, the only Dynamic Systems Wizard I've found or heard about in the Ayurveda space. There's a huge glut of folks in the Turmeric Blogger and Well-Meaning Vibe Herbalist part of the spectrum, a handful of competent practitioners, but only one Jess that I've found.

It's a small thing, but I remember one of the first things that blew me away was that Jess actually listens. Like, she actually listens. And she's not just listening to me and my words, she's listening through me and my words, hearing my tone, my body systems, my emotional arc, personal history, etc.

The other doctors would listen to my symptoms, shrug, and send me off to another three specialists. "I'm an endocrinologist, this sounds like you have a liver issue and an ENT issue, so go see those guys — but honestly, probably just accept that this is what your body is like now, get used to it."

Jess, on the other hand, would listen to my symptoms, get a lightbulb across her face, and say something like "ah, you've got a lot of deranged vata moving through your sensory system, we're going to have to stabilize that before we can work with the layer under it."

Western medicine wasn't really working for me in practice. For chronic conditions and general vitality, I'm not sure it even works in theory.

If you've never read a mainstream nutrition paper, I would recommend doing so to attain the right level of cynicism. The vast majority of them are riddled with p-hacking, have tiny sample sizes, or don't test the actual hypothesis they claim to be about. Many are funded by agricultural lobbies or governments with an incentive to promote specific ingredients (see: many Canadian studies claiming maple syrup is better for you than cane sugar).

After a year with myĀyu:

• I no longer have chronic or severe migraines. In the past several months I've had one short migraine, right after a trip where I drank way too much caffeine.
• About 6 months in, I took a formulation that, among other things, replenishes the gut microbiome. After a few doses, I lost my dairy intolerance completely and permanently, and my seed oil intolerance became mild enough to dramatically expand my eating possibilities.
• I've barely had any skin rashes since starting.
• My exercise endurance is much higher, and I no longer get hives or itching from cardio.
• My muscles feel very different in a way that's hard to describe. I used to have a subtle full-body soreness that isn't really there anymore, replaced by limbs that feel warm, solid, and supple. My muscles are less tense, and the muscle tension that remains is less painful.
• I no longer have period cramps. (I do get one cramp, just a single contraction, per period.)
• When I get mosquito bites, they no longer swell up to the size of a dime or leave dark scars. I honestly did not even think of that as a health problem but it's a nice bonus.

In many of the big categories — digestion, joint inflammation, hormones, energy, mental health — the process was more "two steps forward, one step back." These have all gotten a lot better over time, but with weeks or months where I was more disabled than when I started. Some of this is the natural fluctuation of autoimmune disease with stress and seasons. One big perk has been external motivation to track my health, so I understand the patterns much better now.

I had tried a lot of diets and approaches over the years and kept hitting the same wall. What was generally considered healthy did not seem to improve my symptoms long-term. Several years without sugar, anti-inflammatory diets, careful supplementation. If I kept everything strict I would feel better, but it treated symptoms without touching anything underneath. The root cause remained a mystery.

I had tried the contradictions too: more meat, less meat, more grains, less grains, eating more often, eating less. I knew the food pyramid. I had read the research. None of it resolved anything lasting.

This is when Ayurveda, and specifically Jess, were recommended to me.

What Jess clarified almost immediately was something that should have been obvious but apparently wasn't: it is about the individual. There is no universal diet, no single list of healthy habits that applies to everyone. Going through what I was eating, she told me to cut some foods that are widely considered healthy. Simply not right for me, at this stage, in this body.

That individualised approach did something the others hadn't. It acknowledged my own internal, subjective sense of my reality rather than asking me to override it with general principles. It offered to go as deeply into my physical experience as I had gone into my psyche and soul through other modalities — mostly meditation, circling, and deep inquiry. The depth of what has been revealed through that combination is unlike anything I have experienced before.

My biggest integration from Ayurveda so far is this: it seems to direct me toward the healthy balance that is inherent to my own unique body and being. I am relearning what I need and what to stay away from. None of it involves pushing through, forcing, or avoiding. It is about rebuilding, sensing, learning. I have learned what is soothing, strengthening, and healing for me specifically. I seem to naturally move away from what throws me off balance, inflames me, or crashes me. That is a significant shift in orientation.

I seem able now to look at food and sense how it will feel in my body before I eat it. That makes choosing food genuinely enjoyable rather than a minefield of conflicting information.

Ayurveda has addressed symptoms I have carried since childhood: a strange metallic taste in my mouth, joint pain, swollen lymph nodes. My liver blood values have improved. I am six months into a detox process that Jess has mapped out over a longer arc, and I cannot yet fully speak to how much of the root cause is being addressed. That assessment is still ahead. But I feel significantly better than I did when I started, and that is not nothing after twenty-odd years of looking.

What continues to astonish me is how much this process has deepened my body awareness. I can sense my organs and intestines more — their inflammation, their tension — in ways I could not before. I can at times feel my own skeleton and bones more distinctly. These are early days. But the direction is clear, and I look forward to developing that sense of my interior with more nuance over time.

For many years my health was relatively steady — I'd never had drastic swings, but over time I'd slowly been gaining weight. In the last year, with a lot of stress, I fell back into old patterns of going for sweets when times were stressful, exercising less, sleeping worse. My belly felt big, I felt bloated a lot, and my A1C had crept up to 5.6 or 5.7 — getting into pre-diabetes range. My energy was up and down. I'd sometimes need to lie down in the afternoon, and it was hard to differentiate how much of that was situational, how much was emotional and psychosomatic, and how much was based on what I was eating.

Coming into the program, I was already deep in meditation practice, but I realized I didn't even know what hunger really felt like, or what full felt like. There's so much information out there — workout programs, food stuff, Huberman protocols — it's overwhelming. I wanted something that blended somatic experience and awareness with best practices and protocols, and this was basically the right blend of both.

Working with Jess, the stuff I'd been struggling with seemed pretty straightforward from her point of view. I just decided I'd listen to whatever she said, and I've basically been doing it for the most part. I'm going to bed way earlier and more regularly than I ever used to, waking up earlier more consistently. For the first time ever, I'm noticing that when I eat regularly, I feel better.

What's been really powerful is the connecting-the-dots aspect. All these things — sleep problems, digestive issues, energy crashes — we know about them in isolation, but it's hard to know which dots to connect. Either you get into a conspiratorial mindset with too many dots, or you give up and say "that's just how life is." Having a system that gives you steps and shows you results — you take this, you get the result — is so valuable.

My energy levels have been better than ever before. Not in a "crazy, on coffee all the time" way, but very clear. Each day has more clarity, less heaviness. I can go through my day in a peaceful, contented kind of way. I went to a Super Bowl party and ate a bunch of junk food, and it was fine — because the foundation was already set. It's not that I can never eat unhealthy again. The foundation just allows everything else to happen.