Alicia Lynn Diaz – Combining Ancient Ayurvedic Wisdom With Modern-day Science

Content by: Alicia Lynn Diaz

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week we welcome Alicia Lynn Diaz to the show. Alicia is the creator of the Enlightened Body System™ and the Soul of Healing Summit. She specialises in helping healers effectively release trapped emotions and revitalise their health through the bridging of Ayurvedic Wisdom, Modern Science and Emotional Healing

In this episode we talk about the principals behind the 6 stages of disease manifestation and how we can implement strategies to prevent health issues in the future, enjoy…

Audio Version

downloaditunesListen to Stitcher Questions we ask in this episode:

  • What are the 6 stages of disease manifestation?
  • How does emotional trauma impact our overall health?
  • Is gut health as important as we’re led to believe?

Get More of Alicia Lynn Diaz

If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy this interview:

Full Transcript

Stu

00:03 Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and welcome to another episode of the health sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do.

00:23 Before we get into the show today you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We’re into wholefood nutrition, and have a range of super foods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, wanna find out more, just jump over to our website. That is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay, back to the show.

00:44 This week I’m excited to welcome Alicia Lynn Diaz. Alicia is a spiritual healer and Ayurveda health practitioner who combines ancient wisdom with modern day science to help clients irradiate illness, dissolve emotional blocks, and start the journey to self healing. In this episode we discuss the six stages of disease manifestation and how hidden emotional trauma can be impact your health. We chat about traditional medicine versus modern day medicine, and the strategies that we can follow to transform our health, starting today.

01:16 Now, I got a huge amount from this conversation. So, enough from me, over to Alicia.

Stu

01:26 Hey, guys. This is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and I am delighted today to welcome Alicia Lynn Diaz to the show. Good morning Alicia. How are you?

Alicia

01:33 Good morning. Thank you for having me, Stuart.

Stu

01:35 No problems. Very intrigued to talk to you about your specialty today, and we’re gonna get into that in a sec. But first up, I just love it if you could just tell our listeners a little bit about what you do, and perhaps why you do it as well?

Alicia

01:50 Yeah, my pleasure. So, I practice a form of wholistic medicine called Ayurveda, which is traditional Indian medicine. And, if you’ve ever heard of this before I’d like you to wipe clean anything you thought you knew of it. And, if you’ve never heard about it before I’d like you to just enter into this conversation with wide-eyed curiosity, because the term itself can be a little bit like, “Oh, how do you pronounce that? What is that?”

Stu

02:18 Yeah.

Alicia

02:19 So, I’ll share what that is. But this form of wholistic medicine is very, very ancient, and really it helps us get back to the science of living in alignment and in harmony with nature. And so, we talk a lot about how our gut health and our nutrition is aligned with the rhythms of nature, and how we can optimize. I like to say, how can we ride the wave, the current of energy that’s available to us in nature and ride that wave of energy, instead of living our life feeling like we’re swimming upstream, so to speak.

02:53 And so, that’s just a quick synopsis of … Ayurveda actually translates to a lot of different things, but I like to translate it as the science of self awareness. The more self aware you can become of yourself and how your body responds to what you put into your mouth, what you see, what you hear, what you feel the more you can, again, ride that wave of energy and harness its power to optimize your health.

Stu

03:21 Fantastic. Exciting stuff, and I’m always fascinated by traditional eastern practices in terms of medicine, especially nowadays where the westernized system is very much, or it seems to be very much based around disease management. And there’s a tipping point right now I think, or I feel where we’re starting to look back towards traditional methods, and we’re starting to slow down, and concentrate more on the energy systems, and the gut, and the mind, meditation for one, as well, trying to ground ourselves.

03:58 So, yeah, very excited about this. So, thank you so much again for your time.

Alicia

04:04 Yeah, absolutely.

Stu

04:06 I stumbled across your work a couple of weeks ago, and in particular six stages of disease manifestation, and I thought I’d love for you to a little bit more about that, because I was fascinated.

Alicia

04:23 Yeah. Well, this is the perfect segue because you just mentioned western and eastern medicine, and some of the … all these different modalities and practices, and information that we have at our fingertips nowadays, especially with the internet, and just so much amazing information out there. So the six stages of disease, this will put a little bit of that into context.

Stu

04:51 Sure.

Alicia

04:52 I’m gonna go through the six stages and show where eastern and western meet in them.

Stu

04:58 Great.

Alicia

04:59 So, when we talk about how illness and disease manifest in the physical body in our physiology, we can trace it through these six stages. And stages five and six are the most manifested forms of disease, therefore the hardest to reverse but all stages are reversible. The first four stages are much more subtle and they require, again, your self awareness, your perception and your connection to your own body, your thoughts and emotions.

05:36 In the first stage, this first stage is called the accumulation stage. So, this is where if the gut is compromised for some reason, or the elimination channels are clogged the system starts accumulating toxins. So, your body can’t get rid of the metabolic waste as fast as it’s producing it, and it starts to accumulate. Think your sink clogged, or your toilet clogged.

Stu

06:01 Sure.

Alicia

06:02 And stage two, it starts to overflow and gets provoked. So, this is where the drain starts overflowing, or the toilet starts overrunning. This is now in your physiology where the gut gets so backed up it can’t keep up with that load the toxins start to spill over. And essentially, the spill over into the bloodstream.

06:24 And in stage three is when they start spreading. So now they’re spreading through the bloodstream, and this is where it starts to become much more dangerous because the toxins are still backing up, everything’s still backing up every single day, every single meal and now the excess toxins are circulating in the bloodstream, and what are they doing when they’re there? They are looking for somewhere to deposit, because they’re still backing up. So, as they’re spreading they’re looking for somewhere to deposit, which is stage four, the deposition stage.

06:53 Now, where are they going to deposit? They are going to deposit in one of the seven bodily tissues that is the weakest link for you. There’s a number of reasons why you would have the weakest link. But basically, those toxins are gonna start depositing into one of the seven bodily tissues that are the weakest link. Once they start to manifest there then it starts to turn into stage five and six, which is the manifestation stage, and basically the stage that the cells start to … It’s called the deposition. I’m sorry, not the deposition, the differentiation stage, which is stage six, where the cells start to not act at all like the normal healthy cell did.

07:37 So, you can think of obvious form of cancer where it no longer resembles a healthy cell, but it’s mutated into something that no longer functions like a healthy cell.

07:50 So, those are the six stages that happen. This process for every single person is unique and different, but what’s interesting is that stages five and six are the stages where western medicine has sophisticated enough diagnostics to pick it up.

Stu

08:06 Fantastic.

Alicia

08:08 So what happened with me, and what happens with a lot of people is they feel crummy. They feel like something’s off. They start to get symptoms in stage three and four, and very subtle symptoms in stages one and two, but you just wouldn’t consider them pathological because they’re more subtle, but you might start going to the doctor at stage two, three or four, and then the doctor’s going, “You don’t have anything wrong with you. You’re fine.” But you’re like, “No, something’s wrong.”

Stu

08:36 Yeah.

Alicia

08:36 And so, you start to think you’re crazy. But, it’s because the tools aren’t subtle enough for you to-

Stu

08:43 Got it.

Alicia

08:44 … understand the process that’s happening.

Stu

08:46 And so, just to put this into perspective for myself, we could be talking about any form of health issue for these six stages of disease manifestation. So, we could be talking about weight gain, poor skin, poor sleep, all the way through to chronic disease in terms of cancer, and autoimmune, that kind of stuff couldn’t we? And, I guess, it all starts from that tipping point where we’re accumulating toxins we can’t … We look at that, I think we use an analogy which is like a kitchen sink. So, when you plumb in a kitchen sink the plumbing’s great, turn on the tap, as long as you’re putting water in that kitchen sink it was flow away irrespective. But, the moment that you start to put stuff other than what is, or has been designed to put into that system that’s when you get the blockages and things like that.

09:41 So, where would we start? And, I’ll guess, is it a prevention is the cure? So, we just start thinking about stage one and being very mindful about the elimination of those toxins, or is it more of a wholistic process at the moment to start on this healing process? Because, I guess, we’re all different on different stages.

Alicia

10:07 Yeah. Absolutely. And the answer is, yes. There’s not really an either or. So, we always wanna take a wholistic look, and your always gonna start with stage one and being able to support the elimination channels and detoxify. But, when something has progress to stage four, five, six you have to meet it with a much more significant practice, or therapy in order to help reverse those, or meet the physiology wherever it’s at, because it’s starting really subtle, and then getting more and more manifested.

10:43 So, some of the examples that you just brought up, someone could start having skin problems at stage three.

Stu

10:50 Yeah.

Alicia

10:50 So, if the colon’s backing up and those toxins are spilling over to the blood, once they’re circulating through the blood, once you’re in stage three you might just break out for no reason in a rash.

Stu

11:00 Yeah.

Alicia

11:01 Or, you might start … That might be where even the beginning signs of eczema happen. That could be … And then, when you have eczema for years, and years, and years now we’re starting to get into, “Oh, there’s been a deposition,” and the lesions are happening in the same place all the time, and it could be deeper manifestations.

11:19 So, the way that that process works obviously is unique, and it also depends on which of the seven tissues did … were the susceptible ones, and which ones were deposited into. So, you wanna meet it at the level of that tissue. For example, if someone had traumatic concussion injuries, or car accident, things like that, something that really jars the nervous system when you’re younger. Or, maybe they played contact sports, football, that kind of thing, and their nervous system was continually bombarded. Maybe, later down the line, that made them more susceptible to Parkinson’s disease, or MS, or something.

11:59 And it’s not everyone who has a lot of concussions is going to get that. It’s what was going on in the deeper physiology, what was going on in the emotions, because negative emotions are also a toxin that builds up toxicity in the physical body and reacts in your physiology in the same way that actual poisons do from the environment.

12:20 So, what are the levels of toxicity that’s building up on a mental, emotional, and a psychical level, and then how have those been accumulating, because your gut is digesting all of the toxins. Its trying to digest all the psychical toxins and mental, emotional toxins. And then, again, so when they get filled up they’re now spilling into one of the tissues, and then that tissue could get susceptible to a disease pathology later down the line.

Stu

12:47 Got it.

Alicia

12:47 So, in order to reverse it you need to start at the level, at the tissue level. You have to start at the reversal of whatever stage you’re at. You need to move it back through those stages, and then you have to always, always, always support the elimination channels.

13:04 One of the things that we do differently in Ayurveda, in terms of cleansing protocols, is a lot of … We use fats very specifically, because a lot of the toxins are stored in fat soluble medium where just juicing cleanses, for example, will start to detoxify but might not get to some of the deeper fat soluble layers. So, we use certain kinds of fats and help dissolve the toxins, and basically bring them from the organs and from those tissues back into the digestive tract, and then you eliminate them out through the digestive tract by optimizing the gut.

Stu

13:42 Fascinating. I’m intrigued. What types of fats do you use?

Alicia

13:47 I’m actually surprised that I even started going down that road, because that’s not usually what I go into. But there’s a cleansing protocol called panchakarma. Panchakarma means … Pancha means five. Karma means actions.

Stu

14:01 Right.

Alicia

14:01 So, we are talking about the five cleansing actions of the body, and I don’t need to go into all those. But basically, what panchakarma does is you therapeutically drink fat every single morning. Usually, traditionally in ghee, butter, so you drink incremental amounts of ghee every day, which start to soften the toxins and dissolve them in the tissues. But, you can also do them vegan. Sometimes they use flax oil, or different kinds of oils.

Stu

14:34 Yes.

Alicia

14:34 But, it’s traditionally ghee that’s used for softening and dissolving those toxins, bringing them all back into the gut, which we call ripening the toxins, bringing them back the gut so that they can be thoroughly eliminated.

Stu

14:48 That is-

Alicia

14:49 And that has to be done during … But I just have to say as a full disclosure, that needs to be … That type of process needs to be monitored by an Ayurvedic doctor, or someone who’s monitoring a panchakarma. It is very, very, specific to each person.

Stu

15:06 I’m smiling internally, because I’m just trying to think about a traditional doctor monitoring the drinking of fat. They’d have a heart attack, pardon just think about, what on earth are you doing? You’re drinking fat, but you realize that there are so many different benefits and uses of fat as well in functional medicine. And I’m just thinking along the lines of coconut oil therapy, for one, for the treatment of Alzheimer’s and just trying to get those beautiful fat soluble nutrients back into the brain. But then, from an Ayurvedic perspective I didn’t realize, and of course, it has a whole different way of use.

15:54 But, yeah. That’s really fascinating. And again, goes against the grain of western medicine. Just-

Alicia

16:03 It does.

Stu

16:06 So, you touched on emotional trauma. And we were having a little chat before about science versus spirituality and things like that, and prior to this podcast I was very science driven. I need to … This needs to be proven in science. And emotional and spiritual can often at the other end of the scientific scale, and so when we’re talking about emotional trauma and how that’s link to health some people might say, “Well, it’s just in your mind. Get over it.” But you realize, or at least I realize after speaking to a number of experts on the podcast, that the emotional side of things has the ability to trigger so many different biological reactions in the body, in terms of switching on and off hormones, and genes that can have a huge impact on our overall health.

17:08 So, I’m really intrigued as to your thoughts on the importance of uncovering deep rooted personal trauma, and how you think that that would impact our health on, perhaps, this six stage scale as well?

17:26 Yes. One thing I would love for you and everyone listening to consider is when you hear about something, or when your in a situation that causes anxiety, and how that … What do you notice happens in your body? You notice you feel tense, or your breathing gets shallow. Maybe you even, if you have an appetite, you’re about to have a meal, you’ll get a phone call that’s really bad news, and you just lose your appetite.

Alicia

18:01 So, there’s … We’ve all had a visceral experience of the mind physiology connection, of the emotional and the body connection, and it’s very, very real that the thoughts, that the things that we focus on create a chemical cascade that is intimately connected with our physiology.

18:25 So, that’s not to … Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and say everything is just your thoughts and you can control it all, but it’s completely, to me, out of the realm of wisdom to think that we can completely separate these things.

Stu

18:47 Right, yep.

Alicia

18:47 And so, when it comes to healing and these six stages, for example, one of the premises …

19:02 One of the premises of Ayurveda that I found very true for myself and all of my students that go through the enlightened body system, where we start to work through the traumas and releasing them in the body. But one of the premises in Ayurveda says that your digestive fire, the fire …

19:23 Let me back up for one second. Ayurveda is an elemental system that looks at our human body as inseparable from nature. So we have five elements that exists in nature and we are made up of all the same elements, ether, air, fire, water, earth. So to go through those real quick, ether is space, space creates the integrity between organs, between everything. Air is the movement, it’s circulation, your blood is moved through your body, it’s circulating just like the air moves in nature and you see the trees are affected by it.

20:05 Ether, air, fire. The fire, the sun brings us life. When it’s in excess in the environment, it’s forest fires like that are all over the Pacific Northwest right now. And in the body we have a fire that is our digestive fire, we have a metabolic fire inside of every cell and it’s what digests, absorbs, assimilates nutrients. When the fire is in excess in the body, that’s what we talked about, inflammatory diseases. Water is obvious, earth is like the building blocks. So I just wanted to make sure I was giving some context.

20:38 So when we talk about this gut fire, the fire is actually digesting food, nutrients, it’s digesting, absorbing and assimilating the physical building blocks of the food you put into it. So that it can form the new cells of your new tissues, because every single day you have cells dying and new ones that are being built.

21:02 So the foods that you’re eating, we have all heard, you are what you eat, but Ayurvedic says you’re not what you eat, you are what you digest. Because you can eat the most pristine diet, but if you’re not able to absorb it properly and digest it then it’s actually turning into toxicity in your system.

21:24 And one of the reasons why you wouldn’t be absorbing it or digesting it properly, there’s a number of different reasons, but since you asked me the question about emotional, is that your gut health, your digestive fire is digesting, absorbing, assimilating nutrients and it is digesting thoughts, feelings, emotions, everything that comes in through your five senses is being digested through your digestive fire.

Alicia

21:54 So everything you see is being digested, because you’re making meaning, you are interpreting everything that you see, the lamp, the objects, the tree, your brain is interpreting. That interpretation is part of the fire in your body. So you’re digesting everything that comes in through your eyes, you’re digesting everything that comes in through your ears, you’re digesting all the sensations on your skin, everything you taste and everything you smell.

22:21 So all the sensory input is being digested through your fire. All of your thoughts, feelings and emotions that you are currently having are being digested, plus all the ones from the past that were undigested. So any situation that happened in the past that you still feel sad about or angry about or triggered about, or was just overwhelming to your body and your mind at the time that it happened, there’s still a lingering, your gut, on some level, your digestive fire is still trying to digest it, under the surface. It’s like having multiple things open, multiple programs open on your computer and the bandwidth gets taken up. The same kind of thing happens in your gut.

23:13 So when your gut is trying to digest emotions and time is going on and it’s still stacking, stacking, and the ability to digest food actually starts to go down because you have a certain amount of fire in your body. And if 1/2 or 3/4 of that pie is digesting energetic stuff, then only 1/4 of it is available to digest food.

Stu

23:46 Fantastic. Wow, it makes me think about how we digest information these days as well, because we’re in a very fast digital space. So this time, we get up in the morning and many of us will switch on our mobile phones and within five minutes of being awake, we’re bombarded with all manner of bad news, social media clutter, emails, all of this stuff which will put our mindset into a very different place perhaps than that would be the best place for us to start our day, which would be perhaps to ground ourselves and I guess awaken slowly and in the right way and looking forward to embracing the day.

24:37 Certainly, do you think that the era that we’re in right now isn’t conducive to good health?

Alicia

24:46 It’s crazy. I totally agree and we’re at this like tipping point where it’s getting so intense that I think that many of us have the call for even more depth and for more freedom from it. Because we have so much information, because there’s so much information overwhelm and overload and there’s so much saturation out there, people like you that are listening to this podcast are trying to fill your mind and your space with positive things that are helpful. And at some point the thing that is most helpful is unplugging from all of it and just getting back to stillness.

Stu

25:28 Absolutely.

Alicia

25:31 Yeah, we’re in a really rare, a unique time in life.

Stu

25:36 It’s fascinating, someone once said to me that if you think about the best time in your life, so the memories that you just hold so dear to you, they said it would probably be at a time when you were out surrounded by nature in some way, shape or form. Perhaps you were on holiday on a beach, perhaps you were walking through the forest or in the mountains.

25:59 I doubt it was a time that you were connected and you read the best post on Facebook or you were at work doing something, you were crushing some day at work. But it is, it’s being able to disconnect and unplug and experience.

Alicia

26:16 And connect with others and experience life in the way that’s most fulfilling. Sorry to cut you off. I was so on that roll with you.

Stu

26:25 It’s true, so you’ve mentioned previously the enlightened body system. Is that your system, your program that allows us to walk through the six stages, etc., and be able to fully understand and deal to those stages?

Alicia

26:45 Yeah, essentially, so in the enlightened body system, this is a step by step creation system that I created from witnessing and watching my clients in my one-on-one kind of clinical practice over the years, seeing the things that were really the most transformational for them. So it marries both the physical practices that you need to do to regain gut health with the emotional healing and energetic practices that support you to eradicate the old stuff that’s been building up over the years, or that might be keeping you just in a downward spiral with your health.

27:24 A lot of people will have recurring symptoms when they get to a certain stage, recurring symptoms that just seem like they can never get ahead of it. So it actually helps break that pattern and that cycle in the body through various breath work practices, very specific sequence of breath work practices, as well as what you put in your diet, how you live your day to day life in alignment with the rhythms of nature to really just create deep transformation that sticks, that stays.

Stu

27:55 Brilliant, fantastic. So the enlightened body system would be for everybody. So irrespective of where you are in your health journey, you might be perfectly healthy but want to optimize your health further. It would still be applicable.

Alicia

28:13 Yeah, the enlightened body system is a system that can be I kind of like a do-it-yourself paced group program. And then I also do offer integrations where they can work, where the students can work more one-on-one with a trained enlightened body mentor or myself, if they have things that they want to work with more specifically. But yeah, so we have a pretty wide range of support available in that. But yeah, I think that answers your question.

Stu

28:42 Yeah, it sure does. So we’ve been talking a lot about the gut as well. Now 10 years ago, at the very start, the conception of this company, so 180 Nutrition, gut health was a little bit of a woo woo subject. Doctors thought, gut health, microbiome? No. It’s just a term that we don’t know anything about and we don’t really put any great standing to.

Alicia

29:16 Of course they don’t, look what they serve in hospitals to people.

Stu

29:20 Don’t take me there, I tell you.

Alicia

29:23 Sorry, I was just talking to a girlfriend about that over lunch and it’s devastating but yeah, of course, they don’t see that connection and that’s okay. It’s not okay.

Stu

29:35 It’s just frightening, but gut health as well as things like chronic fatigue, all of these that were very hard to very quickly diagnose, but very easy to dismiss. And so I’m intrigued on your thoughts on gut health, because over here, right now, and partly because I guess the circles that I frequent in as well, talking to many functional medicine specialists as well. It seems to be the pinnacle of health, like your gut is right at the center of health, if your gut isn’t working then everything else falls apart.

30:22 Western medicine doesn’t say that right now and tends to be more about disease management and treating with a lot of medicines and therapeutics that could be detrimental to your gut health. So what are your thoughts on gut health? Do you think that it is as vitally important as we’re now finding out that it is?

Alicia

30:50 Absolutely. Thousands of years, at least 5,000 years, Ayurveda has been talking about the gut as part of the pinnacle of health and that obviously the six stages that I laid out all start with the gut health. But the one other layer I’ll add to that is gut on the level of physical and energetic, because those six stages like I said, can also happen on an energetic level if there was childhood trauma, that was undigested or unprocessed or still keeping the nervous system stuck in the pattern, that is also toxicity in the system.

31:31 And you mentioned chronic fatigue and there was a statistic I want to say was 60% or 70%, I’ll err on the side of caution, 60% of women with chronic fatigue have had a history of sexual abuse. And there is a huge study done that you can look up called the ACE study, A-C-E, you’ve probably heard of before.

Stu

31:57 I have.

Alicia

31:59 It stands for adverse childhood experiences and there’s a huge correlation that shows that out of these 10 ACEs, if someone has even just one, they are at exorbitantly higher risk of developing different chronic illnesses. If they have two or three or more, they have exponential increases in morbidity and mortality like the main leading causes of death. And I’m not sure, I’m not so great with remembering these statistics, you can easily look these up if you google them, but there’s been just tons and tons of studies derived from the ACE study.

32:40 But basically, the autoimmunity is as linked to adverse childhood experiences as smoking is linked to cancer.

Stu

32:51 My word.

Alicia

32:53 In terms of scientific proof, the statistics show how deeply interrelated is emotional healing or emotional trauma on any level and when we say trauma, I wanted to define that a little bit more loosely even than the ACE study labels it, because there are 10 parameters that they measure on the ACE study, but there are significantly other markers of traumatic experiences that people have, that aren’t listed on those 10 that I’ve found when I take people through.

33:27 So the enlightened body system has a component that is a subconscious mind reprogramming technique, that helps you get to the hidden, almost like dream state, the recesses of the subconscious mind where the trauma is buried and helps it come to the surface to be released. And so I’ve found that when I take people through that process and they find that thing that was released, it doesn’t always fit into an obvious trauma category. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t but a traumatic experience could have been again, anything in your past that you were too overwhelmed with at the time to come into right relationship with, or to understand. So anything in your past that you have and it might be completely repressed.

34:12 And in my case, I went down this journey and found … I was a clinical exercise physiologist, I was a professor, I was in the realm of the fringe edges of Western medicine. I was more on some more alternative, complementary alternative medicine out of my master’s program. But I started getting sick and didn’t know that with everything that I knew about psychology and sports medicine and physiology, I still couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. And I had a lot of repressed emotions from abuse that I had experienced when I was a little girl and I had no idea it was there. I would’ve never guessed.

34:52 And luckily I got to go to India and apprenticed under a world-renowned healer and then I got to study in a clinic and get an Ayurvedic degree or the equivalent of a degree in this country, which we don’t have a degree for it. But it wasn’t until then that I started to reveal that hidden trauma and work at it from the energetic, emotional and the physical level. And the wisdom of these two doctors just completely transformed my experience.

35:22 And I say that because I think a lot of people get into healing because they had their own health challenges and I don’t believe that what worked for me is going to work for everyone, which is why Ayurveda is so special and why the enlightened body system caters to helping someone find the unique aspect of them. Because it’s different for everyone.

35:44 So it’s really about deep introspection and a real deep commitment to releasing the emotional blocks and just trusting that you can have the fullness of health and vitality that you desire to experience, while also following a very scientific method of doing so.

Stu

36:07 We are so complex, aren’t we? Complex biological organisms that sometimes expect that all of our problems can be fixed by going to the doctor and being prescribed a pill. How is that ever going to work?

36:24 And you realize that when we’re talking about psychological and emotional experiences and trauma, that triggers our whole raft of metabolic and biological systems in the body that can set you on any different track to health. And it could be spiraling out of control or it could be moving towards happiness and health, because you’re in the right headspace.

36:50 Boy, oh boy, yeah, there’s so much to consider and we just think that it’s … I’m not feeling well, I’ll go to the doctor and I’ll sit down for 15 minutes and he will say hurry up, we’ve got somebody else coming in. What’s wrong with you? I’ve got a headache, oh, here’s a pill.

Alicia

37:05 I’ll share with you because I really have so much compassion for all of us when we do hit that roadblock and we have nowhere else to go.

37:17 Like one of my students just last week or a few weeks ago rather shared with me that, she did a video testimonial for the enlightened body system, but she was in the ER almost weekly because she was just so violently ill all the time. And just tried everything and everything, she couldn’t work and it’s so debilitating because it just takes away, like illness can just take away all of our freedoms and make us feel like such a victim and so stuck and so isolated and alone, especially when it comes to gut healing things and nutrition things. Because we bond as a society over food, but the majority of the society eats horrible foods.

38:02 So when we go down this path of-

Alicia

38:00 Majority of the society eats horrible foods so when we go down this path of health and nutrition, it can feel really isolating. And then when it’s not working, it’s just more and more and more struggle and whatever. But I thought of her, her name is Michelle, because she was just such a shining example of what’s possible after being that sick and not stuck for that long. And she got to the root of it and started healing her body and was able to release the emotions that were buried under the surface, and she got her life back.

38:35 And she’s working a full-time job that she loves and she’s just radiant. And she’s not sick and doing that anymore. She actually came out to Hawaii for our last retreat which is just like-

Stu

38:47 Fantastic.

Alicia

38:50 … amazing. When there’s dead-ends that you’re hitting and your energy or in your diagnosis or prognosis, know that those might be labels that have been put on you but that they don’t have to be your ultimate path or your ultimate truth. And there are bits of information that you get to take your power back and continue down the path of healing and reversing those six stages because, of course, we can’t blame them.

39:19 Western doctors don’t know that those six stages exist and that they can be reversed because it’s not what they were taught. They were taught how to alleviate the symptoms of stage five and six. And there are many aspects of western medicine that only western medicine can do. I tore my meniscus and I had to get it repaired. I had to go in for surgery and get it repaired. And I’m so grateful that we have, at our fingertips, we just need to understand the scope, the practice of all the different modalities, and ultimately remember that we are the one in the driver seat, that the doctors and practitioners out there are sign posts on your journey but you are the only one driving the ship. And your thoughts create where your energy flows, and your body and your physiology follow suit to that.

Stu

40:13 No, that’s a good point and I’m glad that you brought that up as well about the doctors as well, because I would imagine that no amount of intention and meditation would have healed your meniscus. So, we’ve got-

Alicia

40:27 No. Yeah.

Stu

40:29 We give credit to the medical team.

Alicia

40:33 A phenomenal surgeon and a phenomenal physical therapist and every modality has its place for sure.

Stu

40:39 It sure does.

Alicia

40:40 Yeah.

Stu

40:41 What are your thoughts on nutrition in terms of the right way, or not the right way … What foods do you eat to support everything that you have learned over your lifetime and specifically considering about the Six Stages of the Enlightened Body System? And again, we’re in this time where we’ve got Paleo, vegan, vegetarian, Mediterranean, low-carb, high fat diet, there’s so much information out there. And oftentimes, we can be so concerned and worried about the foods that we eat that we’re switching on these inflammatory triggers in our body because we’re so stressed about it.

Alicia

41:35 Oh, my god, I know, I know.

Stu

41:36 You know? We just get this ludicrous … We’re in this ludicrous situation though I feel like grandparents were never in. They moved simply and slowly. They ate simple foods and they didn’t have to think about any of this nonsense. But how do you eat? How do you eat for the-

Alicia

41:56 Well, that’s a loaded question because I don’t believe how I eat should be how everyone eats-

Stu

42:00 No, I completely agree.

Alicia

42:02 Yeah, every single body is different. And so I will say the one thing that I do that is cross contextual to all body types is to try to eat as seasonally as possible. Try to eat, again, in the rhythm. Your body is going to require different nutrients and different types of foods prepared in different ways depending on the climate that you live in, and depending on the season that you’re finding yourself in.

42:28 It’s like for example, right now, where I live it’s the summer. Where you live, it’s the winter, right?

Stu

42:35 Yeah.

Alicia

42:36 But in the summer, there are certain types of foods that whatever is local, let’s say, before I even give a bunch of examples, whatever is locally harvestable in your neck of the woods is what you should be eating as much as possible of. And there’s actually lots of science to show how your microbiome is positively affected by eating plants harvested from the local microbiome of the earth that you are living on because things that are shipped in from different places are stripped from a lot of those and then you’re getting the microbes from other places, which is fine. But your gut microbiome is most supported by the microbes of your local region because they are actually proliferating in seasonal rhythms as well.

43:26 Before I go down on a whole track of that, yes, seasonal. Your digestive capacity changes through the different seasons. You crave different things in the winter than you do in the summer. Some people are fine with like, “I’m more raw vegan thing during the summer,” and the thought of doing that into snowy winter sounds horrible and that will actually throw out their nervous system doing that or not get the nutrients they need. And maybe a Paleo thing actually feels a little bit better in the winter.

43:55 So it all depends actually on your unique body type and in terms of what are the nutrient that would be most supportive but the thing that I would say is for everyone across the board, that part of your duty in terms of deciphering all these information overload is to start experimenting on yourself.

44:20 You can try some of these protocols for ones that appeal to you that feel like you can try them for a certain amount of time and see if they reset your body. And oftentimes, I’ll see people do one diet and then they’ll start to feel better because it’s so drastically different than what they were doing. So get a boost of energy no matter what diet they switch to.

44:43 But then, at some point, they plateau or they get back down. And so they try another diet and then they feel great, and then it changes because it’s a totally new influx of energy and then what happens? It plateaus and then falls off again to the point where you start to pick and choose from different systems and then maybe you have five safe foods that you can eat and now you’re just stressed out about it all the time.

Stu

45:11 No. It’s so true, isn’t it?

Alicia

45:12 Yeah.

Stu

45:13 It’s-

Alicia

45:13 Go ahead.

Stu

45:16 I was just going to say, you made a really good point about the one type of diet or way of eating. It might be great for the interim but it might not be so great for the long term because we’ve had many people who have gone strictly vegan and felt like they were on top of the world for six weeks. And I could see why because it makes a fantastic reset diet because you’re pulling out all of the junk and you’ve got all these … I always struggle with that word … proliferation of fruits and vegetables and all this goodness.

45:56 But then, it might not work for you six weeks later, eight weeks later because you are missing things that your particular body might need. And I completely agree and our body is constantly changing as well as we mature. We may need different things depending on what we’re doing, where we are and who we are. But what … I was thinking about that question another way. What types of foods do you think create the most issues from what you’ve seen with your clients?

Alicia

46:37 Processed foods, prepackaged foods, rancid oils, oils that are bleached and processed and gone through all kinds of processes that you don’t even know because they don’t have to put it on the label. I’d say those are some of the worst. Just conventionally grown foods, foods that are picked before they’re ripe, things that aren’t local or seasonal to you can actually be harder to digest.

47:08 For example, like for me personally, I can’t digest the bananas that they shipped in that are green from South America but I can eat bananas that I picked fresh in Maui when I was living on Maui. They taste completely different and they process completely different. They don’t spike my blood sugar like the other ones do. They sprayed with stuff and they’re artificially ripened.

47:36 I’d say those are definitely the things to stay away from. And then things that you know you have a reaction to at a given time should be the things that you avoid for a while but that’s not sustainable either. For example, I was gluten-intolerant and lactose-intolerant for a while and I had to come off those things. But ultimately, it’s not sustainable to say, “I’m going to be gluten-free forever or dairy-free forever,” unless you feel very strongly about not eating dairy from a vegan perspective.
Alicia: 48:04 There’s a whole another thing, we can go down about that, but if your body can’t digest it, there is something wrong with your gut. And oftentimes, part of that problem is starting in the lymphatic system.

Stu

48:18 Right, okay.

Alicia

48:21 One of my colleagues, I interviewed him on the Soul Healing Summit. I ran a big summit a couple of years ago and Dr. John Douillard, he wrote a book, a very controversial book called Eat Wheat. And he has gone at it with all the … I think is it Dr. Perlmutter with the Grain Brain. They’ve shared all the science and he goes through all of the Ayurvedic medicine. He said, “It’s not the grains, it’s the drains.”

48:45 And he’s like, “It’s not the gluten, it’s not the …” And he goes through the various eras of human development over the course of millennia in terms of how our gut has developed and the foods that we’ve been eating. And the reason that we can’t eat wheat now is because the wheat has been so adulterated and our lymphatic system is super, super clogged.

49:10 There’s actually a way. I was able to train my body to be able to digest wheat again. And I try to eat very, very specific types of wheat prepared in a certain way that’s really nourishing for the body. But I wouldn’t recommend having to cut out any particular food or food group except for the things that I mentioned that are just highly toxic to the body.

49:33 But we start to find the ratios that work best for our body, for our blood sugar, for our appetite. You start to find the ratios that work best for you, and you start to … Once you detox your body and come into and have a really healthy lymphatic system, you have a robust digestion and then, your gut actually gets calibrated to be more intuitive.

49:58 There’s a lot of people talking about intuitive eating right now, but they just follow what they feel like eating and then what they feel like eating causes them pain. “Well, I feel like eating bread but it causes me pain.” We have to actually calibrate our intuition for it to be accurate, for it to be able to give us the things that are most supportive.

50:17 But yeah, I would say if any food groups, that would be those food groups to take out and then other than that, it’s a lot of experimenting in your own body, optimizing your lymphatic system, optimizing your gut, your drains of your system, healing the fundamental root cause imbalance. Getting rid of the emotional stuff that’s causing baggage and dampening the digestive fire, brightening the digestive fire, getting your enzymes working well, and the rhythms of nature getting them to produce the enzymes.

50:48 A lot of people take a lot of enzymes to try out but then your body stops making them, so we need to actually train the intelligence of our body to be able to produce those enzymes so that you can digest those foods again and then calibrate your intuitive eating capacity.

Stu

51:06 Fantastic. Wow. That’s great.

Alicia

51:09 I hope it wasn’t too complex.

Stu

51:13 No, not at all. And I do think that the overall message, I think, from there is experiment and test and see how you feel because nobody knows how you feel apart from yourself. And sure, we can talk about it and we get tested. But ultimately, you know when you wake up and you’re full of energy and your thoughts are happy and you can crush the day. Outside of that, it’s anyone’s guess.

51:45 We’re just coming up on time and there’s a question I like to ask all of our guests as well that enables us to have a little bit of an insight into you personally as well, and that is what are your non-negotiables to ensure that you crush every day? And when I say that, I mean the things that you do every single day religiously to ensure that you’re at the best for that particular day. And it might be big glass of water when you wake up or meditation, things like that.

Alicia

52:13 Yeah, great. There’s a couple. One is I always take some kind of moment for stillness in the morning, whether that’s some breath work, meditation, holding an intention, singing. I sometimes sing just to keep my presence really focused and to feel the vibration in my body and awakes my cells up. Always, always drink warm water first thing in the morning. I’ve used some different herbs sometimes to help flush the channels in my body which is really important, so that’s a non-negotiable.

52:47 I have to clear the bowels every single day because it actually is connected to your mind and your mental capacity. If you’re not having a full bowel movement first thing in the morning, everything is going to fog up. That’s non-negotiable. And what was the third thing I was going to tell you? What was the third thing that I always do? Oh, scrape my tongue.

Stu

53:08 Oh, okay.

Alicia

53:09 That, I never not do that. Scrape your tongue seven times back to front with a stainless steel tongue scrape before brushing your teeth because that actually helps activate all of the organs in the body because your organ map is on your tongue and it helps optimize your digestion and get rid of some of the sludge that builds up overnight that your body is detoxing out. Yeah, tongue scrape, warm water, empty the bowels, and some stillness at work.

Stu

53:38 Fantastic. The tongue scrape is new. No one has ever said that and I’m intrigued by that. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for all of your wisdom. I’m going to need to go back and listen to this a few times as well to pick out the gems. But there’s so much fantastic info in there. What’s next? What’s on the cards? What have you got coming up?

Alicia

54:02 We have the next round of the Enlightened Body System. It’s coming up next month, so I am interviewing students to come in through that. And yeah, some other exciting things on the horizon in terms of getting people out in nature and just connecting to the rhythms more like I shared, bringing in the inner mastery, the emotional and energetic healing with the outer mastery with the physical practices and that’s really where the sweet spot is. I love sharing that in the group format physically, retreats and that kind of thing. And then also through the virtual Enlightened Body System program.

Stu

54:42 Brilliant. Exciting times. For our audience as well wanting to know more, where can we send them? Where’s the best place?

Alicia

54:52 Just my main website, alicialynndiaz.com. And there are some free gifts on there, yeah, for you audience.

Stu

54:59 Fantastic. I will pop that link in the show notes and any other links that we’ve spoken about today into the transcribed interview. But again, thank you so much for your time. It was-

Alicia

55:12 My pleasure, Stu.

Stu

55:14 Absolutely fantastic.

Alicia

55:15 It’s so great to connect with you.

Stu

55:17 Well, hopefully, we’ll chat again in the near future but really appreciate it. And I just want to make sure that you enjoy the rest of your day.

Alicia

55:25 Thank you so much. If there’s any questions that come through or stuff as you re-listen that you want to go deeper into, we could always have another interview and dive deeper into any one of those topics that is exciting.

Stu

55:35 Yeah. No, I really like the sound of that because I am absolutely positive that there are many conversations that I’d like to dig a little bit deeper. Thank you so much. We’ll speak soon.

Alicia

55:44 My pleasure, thank you.

Stu

55:44 Bye-bye.

Alicia Lynn Diaz

This podcast features Alicia Lynn Diaz who is the creator of the Enlightened Body System™ and the Soul of Healing Summit. She specialises in helping healers effectively release trapped emotions and revitalise their health through the bridging of Ayurvedic Wisdom, Modern Science and Emotional Healing
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