Thrive with Cate Stillman Podcast

The last episode of our series on stress: Yoga for Stress Management. Check it out to identify pitta and vata patterns of stress and learn what postures will bring you back to balance. 

• How to differentiate pitta, vata and kapha stress.
• What kind of yoga practice is most beneficial for each dosha.

• Have a conversation
• Find Balance and Learn Your Ayurvedic Body Type

• Cate describes her yoga teacher training.
• Cate talks about the benefits of functional movement.
• The power of savasana and Cate’s love of sandbags.

• 4:53 Yoga for the Pitta pattern of stress.
• 8:40  Third Chakra energy and letting go of the need to accomplish.
• 17:23 Yoga for the Vata pattern of stress.
• 25:57 The Kapha tendency of stress.

• “Vata is the energy of wind, and it's air moving through ether, air moving through outer space. It’s the universe expanding and it’s all the movement in the universe. Pitta is the energy of fire, it's the energy of digestion. It’s the energy of intensity, of focus, of goal setting and moving towards a direction. It’s the energy of vision into action. So those energies are really super different. One expands and moves all around in infinite potentiality and the other goes towards an object. Think about it. It’s not the same thing at all. If you're trying to put out a fire, that's one thing. If you're trying to calm down a whirlwind, that's quite another.” - Cate Stillman
• “One of the goals of yoga is to actually become nothing so you can intentionally become something. This practice of dissolution and then reengagement is so deeply healing for pitta types.” - Cate Stillman
• “Bow and allow the breath to lead.”  - Cate Stillman
• “What we need to do is bring all that scattered energy inward and downward. Because what’s happening is the daily rhythm of a person with vata stress imbalance is all their energy is going upward and outward and it’s getting scattered to the wind. We want to cultivate the energy of earth, the energy of water and the energy of fire for a vata reducing practice.” - Cate Stillman 

Is negative stress holding you back? Check out the podcast to free yourself from this pattern and invite your identity to evolve.

• Negative stress vs. positive stress.
• How the five layers of self interact and inform each other.
• Why living in rhythm with the habits enable spiritual growth.

• Order Cate Stillman's new book "Master of You"
• Have a conversation

• Cate describes the qualities of the spirit and intuitive bodies.
• Cate addresses the problem with sticky technology.
• Cate talks about serving others with a surplus of energy.

• 6:05 The five layers of self: spirit, intuition, mind, energy, and physical body.
• 7:45 Asking your spirit what it wants to awaken intuition. 
• 11:17 Asking your body what it wants to awaken desire.
• 19:16 Freeing yourself from negative stress patterns.
• 23:09 Waking up rejuvenated with the dawn.
• 25:37 The connection between meditation and stress.
• 34:21 The Bodhisattva Vow.

• “When someone is grounded and living in the rhythm of life, what the yogis would call an alignment through Dinacharya, to the daily rhythm, what happens is they become strong.  They become mentally strong and physically strong, and they become able to take on more. Taking on more is positive stress, and it leads to adaptability and it leads to increased levels of resilience. Negative stress is stuff that is degenerative.” - Cate Stillman
• “Degeneration creates this lack of integrity, where we’re out of integrity with the life force itself and we’re out of integrity with our day to day life. When this happens, when we’re out of integrity with our own time or out of integrity with our own need for deep sleep or very deep nourishment, cellularly what happens is confusion and degeneration.” - Cate Stillman
•  “You get a sense of who you want to become next from spirit. When we look at spirituality and stress, when we have so much negative stress, we can’t explore the next level of spiritual development.” - Cate Stillman
• “If we understand the pattern we can say, oh who I am is not the pattern. Who I am is the one who can see that pattern. And then ask spirit ‘what do you want right now’, and start to pivot my actions. As soon as I pivot my actions I’m actually pivoting how I appear in the world. I’m pivoting habits.” - Cate Stillman 
• “In this post modern age that we’re in right now, what tends to get the most attention is the mind. We pay more attention to our mind, which is less evolved. That monomyakosha is less evolved or in synch with (that’s all I really mean by evolved) in rhythm with, in synch with, in connection with intuition and spirit.” - Cate Stillman 
• “Many of us need to move our bodies to access spirit.” - Cate Stillman
• “Check in with, what does my spirit want to experience today? And to allow your identity to evolve. This is the work that we do in the courses at YogaHealer.” -  Cate Stillman

What is success? Tune into the podcaste for the Ayurvedic take on mindset, stress and changing your thought patterns.

• What mindset is in Ayurveda.
• How to define success.
• How the habits dissolve stress.

• FREE conversation to Awaken your Deeper Dreams
• Order Cate Stillman's new book "Master of You"

• Cate shares her definition of success.
• Cate talks about sleep deficit disorder as it relates to aligned behaviour.
• Cate offers simple practices to shed stress.

• 2:30 Mind explained as wisdom, intuition and energy bodies.  
• 6:42 Making aligned decisions by acknowledging your crutches and your story.
• 9:10 Defining success with Ahamkara. 
• 13:02 Allowing rest and rejuvenation.

•  “So when we look at what's happening with stress and the vijnanamaya kosha, we're talking about not making decisions in alignment with what we want. Because we always want towards the good, the true, and the beautiful. We always want towards ananda. That's vijnana's job, to point our awareness in that direction. But say we've designed our life circumstances in such a way that we don't get to do what we want. There's a story behind that. And we can spend a lot of time trying to dissolve the story behind that or we can get totally obsessed in the story. But what matters is that we don't perpetuate the story. That we don't take actions in alignment with that story.” - Cate Stillman
• “ We practice the pattern of dissolving the pattern. And we practice allowing these deeper waves of desire to come through.” - Cate Stillman
• “Any crutch that is disrupting focus or ease is perpetuating the stress pattern.”  - Cate Stillman
• “So the way you change that anxiety thought pattern is by exhaling. By getting on the mat, by getting on the cushion, unwinding the pattern. By feeling your own fatigue and moving in a way, breathing in a way that starts to release that fatigue.” - Cate Stillman 

Do you want more order in life? Join us on the podcast to transform chaos into order and experience higher happiness and harmony.

• How the habits and a ritualized life reinforce order and dinacharya.
• The law of the increase.
• Why specificity is important in transforming chaos to order.

• Order Cate Stillman's new book "Master of You"
• Have a conversation

• Cate reflects that when she first learned the habits, so couldn’t easily do them.
• Cate reads from Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules For Life.
• Cate asks listeners to investigate why you want more order this week, and to be specific!

• 4:59 Dinacharya is a prerequisite to experience dharma and moksha.
• 10:42 Cate reads from The 12 Rules of Life.
• 19:41 Specificity as key to reaching your goal.
• 20:48 Turning chaos to order through meditation and sitting in silence.

• “Like increases like and the opposites reduce each other. So confusion increases confusion, chaos increases chaos.” - Cate Stillman
• “We’re not aligning these habits to say that we can do it, or for somebody else's approval, or to be a good girl, or good yogi or good yoga teacher. You’re doing it because there’s just a respect to the order of life. And you want more from life. That’s why you do it. You want to live a bigger life.” - Cate Stillman
• “Having a commitment to these habits as non-negotiables for the rest of your life - and I’m not saying 100% all the time, at all. Aim for a solid B minus but get consistently better at that. Kaizen that B minus over time - is that you should experience more and more predictables. More and more order that lead to better and better things in your life.” - Cate Stillman 
• If you try to have a goal like, I want to feel better, it’s not specific enough. So you can’t take very specific actions to get there. You can’t test and see.” - Cate Stillman

Let’s talk stress and digestion. Tune into the podcast for the Ayurvedic perspective and to learn about doshic imbalances in the GI tract.

• Why stress causes GI problems.
• How to identify dosha imbalances in your gut.

• Order Cate Stillman's new book "Master of You"
• Have a conversation

• Cate asks listeners to squeeze their anus.
• Cate explains the three phases of digestion.
• Cate gets to the root cause of stress.

• 6:04 The art of the sigh.
• 11:32 Parts of the G.I tract and their corresponding doshas.
• 15:54 Vata imbalance and pain due to lack of upana vayu.
• 16:40 Pitta imbalance and pain due to hyperacidity.
• 20:02 Stress and the koshas.
• 23:37 Excess kapha in the gastrointestinal tract.

• “When we start to think of the digestive tract as more of a snake, whose tongue is our tongue, and whose anus is our anus, and that that great carrying channel, that Maha Vaha Srotas, is responsible for what becomes us and what supports us, and what is no longer needed. And so the choice maker, the awareness as choice maker, about what even enters in the five senses, if that choice maker is not relaxed, intuitively attuned, what will happen are bad choices. And bad choice dull down the intelligence of this snake.” - Cate Stillman 
• “If we’re asking the question about stress and digestion we have to get to the root of stress. We already know that stress causes us to make bad choices. Like, good choices, smart choices for the very very short term are usually anti-choices for the long term. Against our long term desires. So with stress we want to look at why we are out of rhythm. What do we really want? That questions of what do we really want to eat, what do we really want to taste, what do we really want to digest, what do we really want to absorb. What do we most deeply want to know in this life? And if our day-to-day schedule isn’t aligned to that, to the who we want to be next, to the what we want to become next, like in real action, in real day to day shifting, evolving, how we use our time, more and more in alignment with what we want, we’re going to have stress. Because we’re living against our intuition.” - Cate Stillman
• “The rhythm of life is the rhythm of communication.” - Cate Stillman 
• “Our intuition is lead by what feels good. It’s lead by desire. Because more good on the deepest level, is not superficial good. It’s not chocolate cake all the time.” - Cate Stillman

What do you desire? Unearth buried dreams in the New Years Dharma Workshop with Cate and awaken where you want to go next!

• Identify your desires, frustrations, recurring issues.
• How to own who you’ve been in the past.
• Unearth how you want to feel, what you want to know and who you want to hang out with.

• Order Cate Stillman's new book "Master of You"
• Have a conversation

• Cate gets ruthlessly honest about what she believes.
• Cate explains the image of the spiral, where the future is bigger, brighter and more aligned. 
• Cate shares her ambition for the year ahead to double her income and work 30 hours a week.

• 9:20 The reason Western women might feel disconnected from their intuition and raised to mistrust their inner guidance.
• 28:16 What are your recurring issues? Reflect on where you’re out of integrity around your to-do list, money, relationships, home environment, at work or daily habits.
• 30:02 Tapasya and the hard work of practice to accomplish growth.
• 44:14 Why Cate believes you are your best investment.

•  “I believe dharma or purpose unfolds in chapters, in waves, and in sets. And this to me is really super important because if we’ve come to dharma from a perspective of you have to have 1 BIG THING to do here in your life, it can be quite overwhelming. It can make the process of understanding your next aligned actions seem scary, big and that you can get it wrong. It can seem like it’s too hard to handle, too big to manage.” - Cate Stillman
• “There’s the pulsation of action, and there’s the pulsation of reflection.” - Cate Stillman 
• “What do you want? And what are you frustrated by? Think of these elements of life; your home, your body, your ambition, your time and your experience of flow. When we’re in integrity in all aspects of our life we experience flow.” Cate Stillman
• “You can even take a deathbed perspective. What would an accomplished life be for you? And I would even go a bit beyond your wildest dreams. If we go back to the buried dreams, what would unfettered you accomplish in this lifetime? And of that, what seems the most up in this next chapter, in this next set of waves. What are you here to do, when your light is fully shining, when you’ve chosen to support yourself with the right people to get it done. I believe your potential matters. I believe what you want to accomplish matters. In the grandest version, and also in the next version.” Cate Stillman
• “In order to accomplish what you said you want to accomplish, what do you need to know? And this is the time to not be cocky. This is the time to not assume you already know how to do what you need to do to accomplish what you want to accomplish. It’s the time to deeply start questioning ‘do I really have what it takes to do what I want to accomplish?’ And if not, what do I probably need to know in order to do that. And again there’s no shame, no guilt, there’s none of that. It’s just honesty.” - Cate Stillman
• “There’s a belief in yoga that you are completely free. It’s the highest belief of yoga. That who you are is unbound. When we live in that way, like, I could have as much time as I want, I could have as much money as I want, I could have as much bliss as I want. As much joy, as much ease, as much impact. When we’re attuned to that we’re attuned to who we are at our essence.” - Cate Stillman

Do you want to sleep deeper at night? Learn the ‘Aaaahh’ breath and my other tips for relieving stress on today’s podcast.

• What you need to go into a deep sleep.
• Why exhaling is important for sleep.
• How the habits can help us release the pattern of fear.

• FREE conversation to Awaken your Deeper Dreams
• Yogahealer website

• Cate talks about yoga, practice and exercise shifting her state of consciousness.
• Cate teaches the ‘Aaaahh’ breath.
• Cate describes the benefit of rocking your spine before bed.

• 7:23 Apana life force energy and anxiety.
• 9:20 Opening the lungs to exhale and digest.
• 11:40 Bedtime practice for unwinding and dropping deeper into your breath.

• “Often there’s a level of just being in flight or flight since in utero. Since the beginning. And so when that happens we really want to understand ‘why do I fundamentally not have the ability to really relax and feel safe?’ Because if we don’t have that then these deeper levels of sleep are going to plague us.” - Cate Stillman
• “If the practice does anything, if shift in the state of consciousness does anything, it helps us realize we’re apatterned. That we’re not the pattern, that we’re not any of the patterns we’re currently in. We’re not any of the patterns we are currently choosing, whether we’re choosing them consciously or from the subconscious, from repetition.” - Cate Stillman
• “Deep sleep is the exhale. The day is the inhale, new life. Exhale is the dissolution. The dissolving of your self-sense. The dissolving of who you think you are. The dissolving of the pattern into the unpatterned.” - Cate Stillman
• “If you can’t sleep you are arrhythmic. You’re out of the rhythm of consciousness. It leads to disease. The opposite, living in synch, in rhythm, in cycle leads to ease. And that’s the choice.” - Cate Stillman

Today on the Yogahealer podcast, Dr. Gary Kaplan, D.O. joins me to chat about the various impacts of stress and sleep deprivation on the brain and overall health.

• What is Mast Cell Activation Syndrome
• What causes brain inflammation and how it impacts our quality of life
• Why sleep is so crucial for long-term health
• How Yoga treats pain
• Why meditation is so effective for sleep and pain disorders 
• Why sleep apnea is so dangerous for your overall health 
• What really causes Lyme disease
• What is EDS and how does it impact the body on a deeper level

• Have a conversation
• The Kaplan Center for Integrative Medicine
• Total Recovery: Breaking the Cycle of Chronic Pain and Depression
• Epworth Sleepiness Scale
• Order Cate Stillman's new book "Master of You"
• Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach
• Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma by Elizabeth A. Stanley PhD
• May Cause Happiness: A Gratitude Journal by David Steindl-Rast

• Dr. Gary explains how to determine if you have brain inflammation
• Cate and Dr. Gary discuss what optimal sleep is, and give advice on how to get it.  
• Cate and Dr. Gary rap on the many benefits of meditation for physical and mental health. 
• Dr. Gary spells out the different forms of Lyme Disease and how to treat them.

• 4:00 - 9:00 Stress and inflammation in the brain 
• 9:00 - 17:00 Optimal sleep and sleep disorders
• 17:00 - 24:20 Sleep Apnea
• 25:30 - 29:30 Disease in adolescents and belief systems
• 29:30 - 36:00 Meditation, processing emotions and gratitude
• 36:00 - 40:30 The benefits of habits on overall health
• 40:30 - 46:00 Lyme disease and EDS

• “Deep sleep is essential because that is when the brain detoxifies” - Dr. Gary 
• “As you start to get sleep deprived (less than 6 hours), after a week of that, your performance level is the same as being drunk” - Dr. Gary
• “If you wake up feeling behind, there is something wrong, and it’s lifestyle based” - Cate Stillman
• “Deep sleep and deep meditation have a lot of similar abilities to detoxify the mental and emotional buildup of activities (the thinking and emotions) that get packed into our day.” - Cate Stillman
• “Our habits are creating the disease” - Cate Stillman
• “Taking care of ourselves should be our first, second, and third priority, then we are much more effective at everything else we want to do.” - Dr. Gary
• “Meditation, we can’t start early enough. We should be teaching meditation in grade schools. We should be teaching yoga in the grade schools.” -Dr. Gary
• “What are our belief systems that are driving our habits? What are our belief systems that are forming our lives? That’s when doing things like meditation where you are really sitting and listening to yourself, you are aware of what is going on that you begin to understand where you can get better.” - Dr. Gary
• “Meditation is a pain in the ass. Because meditation is sitting and being with what is and not judging it. Sometimes with what is is painful. Fear. It’s about what else is there.” - Dr. Gary 
• “Building these habits, these habits that help us be healthy changes us physiologically. They change our brain, they change our immune system, they change our health.” - Dr. Gary

Gary Kaplan, D.O., is the founder and medical director of the Kaplan Center for Integrative Medicine, and author of Total Recovery: A Revolutionary New Approach to Breaking the Cycle of Pain and Depression. A pioneer and leader in the field of integrative medicine, Dr. Kaplan is one of only 19 physicians in the country to be board-certified in both Family Medicine and Pain Medicine. He is board-certified in Medical Acupuncture and has studied and practiced Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine, Emergency Medicine and Herbal Medicine. In response to growing numbers of patients presenting with heavy metal toxicity, Dr. Kaplan received certification in the science and practice of chelation therapy, by The American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM).

A clinical associate professor in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine, Dr. Kaplan was one of the directors of a $1.7 million NIH grant that funded an educational initiative to incorporate complementary, alternative, and integrative medicine into Georgetown’s medical curriculum.

In 2013, Dr. Kaplan was appointed by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Kathleen Sebelius, to the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Advisory Committee (CFSAC). The Committee provides advice and recommendations to the Secretary of HHS through the Assistant Secretary for Health on issues related to ME/CFS.

In 2015 Dr. Kaplan established the Foundation for Total Recovery in order to provide support and find a cure for all who suffer with chronic pain and depression by educating patients, building an online community of patients, doctors and researchers, partnering with leading researchers, academics and innovators, and studying data to find a baseline approach to diagnosing and curing neuroinflammation.

In today’s episode, I rap with epigenetics coach David Krantz about the overlaps between energetic and hard science and where the industry of genetic coaching is bringing the Western World closer to ayurvedic principles.

• What is epigenetics? 
• How to individualize nutrition for optimal health
• How nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics fit into the ayurvedic viewpoint
• What are the advantages of a practitioner using both the ayurvedic and genetic models together
• What is the data around epigenetics and the contemplative practices and the influence these practices have at a gene expression level
• How do Ayurvedic herbs influence gene expression

• Order Cate Stillman's new book "Master of You"
• How your DNA changes your response to Cannabis
• FREE conversation to Awaken your Deeper Dreams
• David Krantz's website

• Cate and David discuss Moore’s law and the importance of genetic testing.
• David shines a light on who should get epigenetic testing.
• Cate and David rap on adrenaline addiction and where it is showing up in Ayurveda and epigenetics and the different perspectives on relieving an addiction.

• 1:20 - 7:30 What is epigenetics and why is it useful for us?
• 7:30 - 11:00 Where is the line between genetics and intuition? 
• 11:00 - 15:00 How do functional medicine and epigenetics overlap?  
• 15:00 - 19:00 How can we change our genetics? 
• 19:00 - 21:50 Understanding Ayurvedic herbs
• 22:30 - 26:00 Nutrigenetics v nutrigenomics 
• 26:00 -  35:00 Stress and addiction
• 35:00 - 39:45 How to work with an epigenetic coach

• “It really does give people an empowered perspective over their health” - David Krantz
• “Thinking about things from a whole systems perspective where everything I do in my life is going to influence genetic expression. Whether you take an ayurvedic approach or you take more of the epigenetic approach that’s looking at individual genes, you’re affecting genetic expression no matter what.” -David Krantz
• “It’s the inner science lab versus the outer science lab.” - Cate Stillman
•  “Ultimately if you want the long term changes it’s a mental/ emotional shift that has to happen.” - David Krantz
• “We like the feeling of being hyperstimulated, on some level.” - Cate Stillman

David Krantz is a certified Epigenetic Coach and sought-after consultant in the areas of individualized genetic-based nutrition and the endocannabinoid system. As a lifelong musician, David sees the various systems of the body as parts of a complex symphony that can be fine-tuned to create harmonious health. He was nominated in 2019 as a Top 100 Health innovator by the International Forum for Healthcare Advancement and is most well known for his work helping creative professionals take mastery over their wellbeing.

Tune in to the Yogahealer podcast for an Ayurvedic perspective on healing Agni for Vata types with anorexia nervosa.

• How to look at the whole individual and the nature of the disease.
• Why seasonal cycles matter.
• What Vata type digestion requires.

• Order Cate Stillman's new book "Master of You"
• Join the Changemaker challenge!

• Questions Cate asks to determine someone’s constitution.
• Cate goes through the spice rack.
• Why you should avoid yellow fennel seeds.

• 7:56 The difference between anorexia and anorexia nervosa.
• 21:56 The benefits of fennel seeds in warming the gut and moving air down.
• 24:16 The benefits of cardamom to awaken desires in the heart.

• “In Ayurveda, all imbalances arise in the digestive tract first.” - Cate Stillman
• “The body likes rhythm, more than anything our body loves rhythm. It loves the rhythm of eating and sleeping and pooping and doing all the things. When the body is in rhythm the body is really really happy. So when the mind starves the body of food it really disrupts all of those rhythms” - Cate Stillman
• “What’s helpful here, as we’re learning how to think about something that might be big and scary and life-threatening like anorexia nervosa, is that if we can see a pattern, we can start to understand it. With understanding comes a perspective change. As we start to be able to understand something that is happening it actually helps us become sympathetic or empathetic even to ourselves. And that’s part of the process of healing.” - Cate Stillman
• “People are intelligent. Plants are intelligent. We just want to mix the right intelligence at the right time.” - Cate Stillman