The Simple Ayurveda Podcast: Episode 8
Meet Rachel Jamison of Pickling Salt. She’s studied Chinese medicine, Yoga, Ayurveda, astrology and more. She has a modern, non-conformist approach to wellness and she’s not afraid to say what’s on her mind. I couldn’t love her more and I know you will too.
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episode transcripts
Welcome to the Simple Ayurveda podcast. I’m Angela Perger, and this is a place where we discuss how ancient wisdom can be applied to your everyday life, so that you can be your happiest, healthiest self.
Thank you for tuning in to Episode 8, todays episode is an interview with Rachel Jamison, an Ayurvedic Health Counselor from Pickling Salt. You can find her on social media @picklingsalt. She has a modern, non-conformist approach toward Ayurveda and life, and that is why I absolutely love her and I know you will adore her too. Enjoy.
SA: Hi Rachel!
RJ: Hi, how are you?
SA: Good, thank you so much for being here today
RJ: I’m so excited, I just love listening to all of your episodes so far and it’s a real honor to be your first interview
SA & RJ: Yayyyyy!
SA: So we are here to chat about all things Ayurveda, but before we jump in, can you tell us about yourself?
RJ: Yes, so I got really into the holistic health sphere, just kind of wandering around and trying to figure out my own health issues, and truthfully the first book that I ever read was the Ayurveda Cookbook, the good ol’ classic, and that’s where I started. And then about an 8, 9 year journey through all different kinds of nutrition, Chinese, Amazon, Native American, Western nutrition, I finally went and got my Ayurvedic Counselor license last year, so now my practice is fully Ayurveda over in Somers Point, NJ. And the more, I’m glad that I studied all of those other different, those different thoughts and methodologies and philosophies and medical practices, because now that I know more about Ayurveda, I understand that all of it is Ayurveda, you know? Ayurveda is just the way that you can kind of look at things and adapt things to the individual circumstance. So yea, it was really great to learn all of the other things and then go into the traditional stuff.
SA: I love that, because Ayurveda really is everything that we do.
RJ: It’s everything that we do. It’s just putting on, my one teacher days a different lense. You know, rose colored glasses or blue glasses, put on your Ayurveda glasses you know, and you can see it. But yea, I practice over at Pickling Salt in Somers Point and it is a lot of fun, it’s, I wake up and I love my job, I love what I do, and I continue to be overwhelmed by being able to witness the process of people like yourself that have gotten into the work and take control of their own health and heal their own bodies, and I just get to sit there and hold space and continue to pass this ancient, ancient stuff and try and draw it into the modern sphere and into the western life and into the western lifestyle. So, it’s a lot of fun, yea.
SA: Yea, and that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to interview you so badly in particular is because of your unique approach about Ayurveda. So how do you look at Ayurveda in the modern life?
RJ: Oooohhh, Ayurveda in the modern life. So, there’s something that I picked up when I was just health coaching, that I’ve really carried forward with me now, is that if it doesn’t fit into your lifestyle, it’s not gonna work. So, I’m not gonna come at anyone and tell them that they have to eat these foreign, exotic things, you know? And then not have anywhere to find it besides ordering it online from some source in India that has to get on a boat and ship across that takes 3 months to get, just because it traditionally says in the texts “do this.” It’s like, no I’m gonna have you find something that’s in the grocery store. If it’s not in the grocery store then let’s try something else. Let’s find something similar that’s grown on native soil, that’s grown here that we can use, you know?
SA: Yea, I was just talking about this with my husband last night, like understanding the property of the plant
RJ: Yes!
SA: So the plant can be grown wherever
RJ: Yea, there’s...this isn’t Ayurvedic specific but umeboshi plums are a huge thing in the macrobiotic diet and in a lot of the Japanese and the Traditional Chinese Medicine philosophy. Umeboshi plums, if you don’t live in New York City or San Francisco, I don’t know where you’re going to get those. But, we have prunes here in the grocery store in the bulk bins at ShopRite, they’re pretty easy to find. We have figs that are dried, you know? We have all kinds of different things. Dates are pretty close. But yea, forget about slamming yourself with lychee and trying to find fresh turmeric, which you can find now but when I first started it was like “turmeric?” Like going to the international aisle and hoping you can find it. But there’s other things you can use, you know? So, trying to adapt it, and update it and bring it in is such an important part of the whole thing. You know, using spinach instead of some sort of exotic Indian green, using the salt air, take advantage of the ocean. Don’t hide in an epsom salt bath in the winter time, or in the summertime rather, don’t hide in your bathtub in an epsom salt bath. Go play at the beach, go play in the ocean. That’s what an epsom salt bath is supposed to be, it’s swimming in the ocean. Take advantage. Take advantage of what you’ve got in your neighborhood. You don’t need a neti pot if you go surfing, you know? It’s kind of understanding, my teacher Vishnu Das always says “learn the rules, understand them well, and then break them well.” So know why they’re saying to do something and then see where you can find that pattern in other things. You know?
SA: I love that, and especially as a Mom, like I love that example of surfing and neti and picking and choosing the aspects of Ayurveda that I really personally need in my own daily routine and life, and not getting stressed out about the ones that don’t fit into my day.
RJ: Yea, yea totally, and I love throwing names out there because I have so many teachers that have really inspired me, and Danielle Laporte. Danielle Laporte man, if you haven’t gotten into her, I know you have a little bit, she said something, the thing that got me into her was an Instagram post. And it said “is everything that you’re doing to feel light and free really helping you feel light and free, or is it just another prison but this time you’re wearing lululemon pants.” I was like I love that. Yea, we can beat ourselves up and abuse ourselves with quote on quote “healthy practices”, and then that's not healthy, you know. It’s about Ayurveda life study, life science, the knowledge of life. A living science. It’s about bringing your life back. It’s about vitality, and fun, and living. Not holding up in your house, pickling everything, making your own kombucha, cooking from scratch, freaking out, doing all of your Yoga classes, make sure you’ve done your mantras everyday, have you done 108 mantras on your mala beads four times a day? Are you doing you kirtan? Are you doing your….uhhh! I’m going to meditate myself into like an institution you know? Into a mental house. So it’s gotta be, it’s about supporting your life. And the moment that it becomes suffering it’s the moment that we’ve gone too far. And I think that something you said in one of your podcasts earlier about the middle path. It’s about the middle path. And everybody’s middle path is different. And ultimately, that’s why I fully left the Western model and the traditional Chinese model, they’re a little bit too narrow as to what that middle path looks like. And here in the US, in NJ in particular, we’re so different. We’re such a wide variety of humans here. So, these practices for health that have these very narrow scopes as to like, this for that, it doesn’t work. When you actually start to use it to help people, to teach people about their own bodies it’s like, we need to widen the scope. And adapt it to us, and to modern life, and to modern lifestyles. In Ayurveda traditional Vedic texts in the Brahmin tradition, they don’t talk about proper cell phone management, you know? They don’t talk about TV in the bedroom. I would rather someone have a TV in the bedroom than be taking pills to sleep, you know? But, you know, they don’t have that in the texts so if you get too strict and too traditional you’re kind of left a little bit in the wind. You know? What do I do with blue light in my cell phone, how is that affecting me? Well if you understand the theory and the philosophy as to why we spend time in the sunlight during the day with the full spectrum radiation, ok now we’re looking at a narrow spectrum radiation so we’re getting partial sunlight, so of course that’s going to throw us out of balance in the blue direction.
SA: Right, and it’s like we’re only getting partial so it’s probably feeding that need for more and more and more.
RJ: Ahhhhhh!
SA: So it’s like go outside and enjoy sunlight
RJ: Yes!
SA: so that you don’t have the need for that blue light as much
RJ: I love that, yea the partial exposure leads to a craving, leads to uncontrollable cravings
SA: It’s kind of like just eat that one delicious bite of the fudge brownie, instead of torturing yourself with some low-fat chocolate something
RJ: Yea go for the good stuff. I was talking to someone this morning actually about bacon, you know how many packs of that fake bacon I ate when I was vegetarian, because my body was craving the salty umami thing as a vata-pitta, vata-pitta vegetarian didn’t make any sense. So that fake bacon, the ingredients on the back is outta control. Like, is this really healthy. Is this really bringing me into balance. And then I went to turkey bacon, and it’s like where on the turkey am I getting a slice of fat belly? No, it was full of a bunch of weird ingredients to turn it into something like bacon. So if you’re gonna eat bacon, eat the nicest bacon that you can possibly come across from a pig that was raised well. Do it right, support the guy that’s doing it right. And eat the real stuff. And enjoy every minute of that piece. And you’re going to want to eat the whole pack. You’re not going to binge and go crazy because the body is getting what it wants and is satisfied. It’s not getting tricked on the taste buds. It’s getting it real all the way through, it’s the real stuff. The partial spectrum has us craving more, because we’re not getting what we really wanted.
SA: And it’s taking you out of alignment with nature
RJ: Yea, so if you go all the way through, Ayurveda is about aligning that middle path and aligning that balance through all of your five layers, your five koshas, your five bodies, all the way down into the way that you impact the five layers of the five bodies of everyone around you, every living being and every thing. So if we’re out of balance with Mother Earth, we are not practicing Ayurveda. Yea. Yea and that’s...it’s so big. The scope is so big, and you gotta meet yourself where you’re at. You gotta really take a minute and step back and look with an unemotional completely objective eye and just see, where am I? Where am I in my life right now? And then start to walk forward from there. You know? It’s like, jumping all the way in and going really extreme is just going to knock your pendulum out the other way. So it’s just one step in front of the other, not perfect. Not hardcore, not extreme. Let go of this hyper-pitta peer pressure.
SA: “I’m going to get Ayurveda right!”
RJ: “I’m gonna do this Ayurveda! More, more more! Go America! Woooo!” Yea...no. It’s like, high blood pressure, right? American heart disease, that’s so pitta. Like me and you know it’s all about doshas but yea it’s that like, work until, work work work work work and then retire. And it’s like, no. Let’s live in balance the whole time. You know.
SA: For me that’s where I came up with the idea of Simple Ayurveda is just, that love of simplifying
RJ: Yea
SA: And getting to the core of what’s important and letting the other stuff go
RJ: You’ve totally had that influence on me, because i’m like so extrapolated, I’m so all over the place, and just really expansive, and everything that I”m interested in I’m like “Woah! We can do this and we can do that!” And when you stepped forward with this, like talking about minimalism, and you’re so grounded and nice to be around and then the Simple Ayurveda and like, oh it’s so, tasty! Like, the work that you’re doing Angela is so tasty and so soothing, and it really inspired me to kind of buckle down and narrow my focus, and just like get more simplified, more simple more simple more simple
SA: So what do you think your focus is right now?
RJ: My focus right now is just like, one thing at a time. So the only main project on the books right now is actually getting my podcast off the ground, which, we’re going to start recording next month, and we’re going to start having them available online in January. We may throw some bonus ones out during the holidays but yea we’re going to start recording soon. Me and my friend Chelsea Dineen, she’s down in Asheville, North Carolina. I’m really excited to have you on the podcast. I really want to take the coffee table and flip it over. People come to me and they have these absolutes. They have these “somebody told me it has to be this way,” and I’m like “no, it doesn’t have to be any way, there’s no one way to do warrior one. There’s some safety guidelines. All of the different Yoga philosophies that I’ve come in contact with have different ‘rules’ and a different perfect warrior one, but we know the rules so we know why that was the perfect warrior one for them because of what they were trying to encourage in the body. Does that work in my body? Ok how do I break the rules. Now that I know the rules, how do I break the rules? I ate turmeric with black pepper in it for so long, but as a vata pitta, I was like “man this isn’t really working that well on my tendonitis and my arthritis” until I realized that black pepper is going to exacerbate my issues. It’s going to increase the dry, scrape heat of turmeric. My issues are from a dry, hot, condition. So now I do barley grass powder which is green, a cool color not a hot yellow color, and I do it with MCT oil or coconut. A nice cool, moisture. Right?
SA: And none of those ingredients are in the texts right?
RJ: No, barley grass powder is not in the Indian texts, not in the Chinese texts, not in the Native American texts. Actually I found it in macrobiotics from Japanese texts based on their study of algae, and then the barley grass powder is a totally modern American thing. You know? So it’s like, adapt.
SA: Yea just looking at the properties of these items to figure out whether they’re appropriate for you or someone else
RJ: Yea, most of the time when we come to Ayurveda the first thing you learn is doshas. Right? I wanna throw that right out the window. The more I understand the more complex I realize that is. The gunas, the qualities, the ten pairs of opposites. If we understand that we’re golden. If I’m hot, let me have something cool. If I’m cold all the time maybe my food should be cooked and hot. Maybe if I’m cold and dry and a little bitter maybe I shouldn’t eat romaine lettuce all the time. It’s going to increase my discomfort.
SA: Yea this will be a future podcast episode, I haven’t done the qualities yet and this was like an ah-ha lightbulb for me. If my vata is elevated maybe I don’t need to eat a raw salad everyday for lunch that’s drying me out.
RJ: And your popcorn, when you talked about popcorn. Talk about messing vata up.
SA: Sometimes I want to go and eat a bowl of popcorn, I talk about this in the episode “Boring is the new Zen” and I’ll go to get the popcorn and I go “this is vata elevating I have to put it back” and I put it back and say ok I’ll have golden milk instead. It’s warm and nourishing, it’s yellow, it’s the color of butter, it’s almost like a bowl of popcorn. But I do feel better when I”m done drinking that instead of eating the popcorn.
RJ: Yea, when we spend most of the time in balance our bodies are more resilient against the things that throw us out of balance you know? So we can fool around, because we have to live, but we don’t want to live in that swinging pendulum back and forth. You know, we wanna move in the middle and if you look at the yin and the yang there’s a little hammock in the middle and we’re just kind of swinging a little bit back and forth. And if we want to we can jump out and go on the hamster wheel on the outside, but we wanna be just kind of in the middle and every once in a while go a little crazy. But know how to fix yourself, how to bring yourself back into balance. It’s knowing those rules so you know how and when to break them. I hope this was helpful. I tend to meander a lot because my vata is pretty, pretty squirrelly, especially this time of year in Autumn and October while we’re recording this.
SA: No, it was wonderful, that you so much for being here and sharing so freely.
RJ: It’s such an honor, I’m just in awe and happy to watch your journey and get to be a part of it.
Thank you for listening, I’d love to connect more. You can find me at simpleayurveda.com, on Facebook Simple Ayurveda the Community, on Instagram @simple_ayurveda and on pinterest too @simplesyurveda. Have a beautiful day, namaste.
