Welcome to the Libido Lounge with Amish Shah

Dr. Diane Mueller: Welcome to the Libido Lounge, where we focus on all things love, lust, and libido. We believe that fabulous sex is as important to health as exercise and good food. Hey everybody, your libido expert Dr. Diane here. Welcome back to another Libido Lounge interview. I am really thrilled to introduce you to my friend, my colleague, Amish Shah, who is an Ayurvedic expert and also the producer of an amazing documentary on Ayurveda and more called The Natural Law. In this particular interview, we’re going to really talk about libido and the uniqueness of your lifestyle choices. One of the things I love so much about Ayurveda is how much it really identifies that the choices we make on a day-to-day basis regarding food and exercise and herbs and more really is dependent upon the uniqueness of our makeup—and that trickles down into libido.

Dr. Diane Mueller: So as I introduce Amish here, we’re going to go down some very interesting roads, really get you understanding Ayurveda and more. And just hang with us till the end, because we’re going to tie everything we say throughout this interview—we’re going to tie it back to libido—so you understand how this fits for the uniqueness of you. So welcome today—it’s so great to have you.

Amish Shah: Thank you. Thanks for having me—so amazing.

Dr. Diane Mueller: Yeah, it’s so wonderful. And I know so many of our listeners—this word “Ayurveda”—for some, they’ve heard of it, and for other people, it’s gonna be, like, “Are you what?” Like, “What is this word?” right? Can you just introduce this—you know, introduce the concept, why this is so passionate, and how this type of medicine and really, like, lifestyle approach is different than a lot of what else is out there?

Understanding Ayurveda

Amish Shah: Yeah, so Ayurveda comes from India—ancient India. It’s a medicinal science—not just a medicinal science—it’s—Ayurveda translated means “science of life.” Ayur meaning life, and veda meaning science or wisdom. So it’s the wisdom or science of life. Now, thousands of years ago—over 5,000 years ago—they had cataloged eight different branches of this science, from psychiatry to surgery to immunology, pediatrics, geriatrics—they’re, like, wait a second, like, wow. And so this comes from India, from over 5,000 years ago, and in the Indian subcontinent, it’s been tested across billions of people across thousands of years. So it’s time-tested, and time always will, you know, keep the truth—like, if something isn’t real and doesn’t work, it eventually goes away with time, right? But this is timeless wisdom, and that’s what I love about Ayurveda.

A Personal Journey with Ayurveda

Amish Shah: Now, I learned about Ayurveda through my own experience. Now, granted, I have—my parents are from India, I grew up in New Jersey, and now I live in California—but they would always, like, give me concoctions growing up. They didn’t understand how it worked—they just knew that it worked because their mother told them, and their grandmother told them, and their great-grandmother told them. And so it was just passed down through lineage—because, hey, you have a stomach ache, do this; you got a sprained ankle, put this on it, you know. So it was always, like, take something from the Earth and use it—that’s how they always thought. So growing up, it was just, like, do these things, and I was, like, okay.

Amish Shah: I battled a major sickness throughout my whole entire life, and 10 years of that—in my 20s and 30s—were just excruciating pain. It ended up that I had eight ulcers, and I reversed all of the damage that had done to me—with leaky gut and, like, you know, the left side of my body was functioning, my high cholesterol, elevated white blood cell counts, pre-diabetic, pre-thyroid—I was, like, what the heck is going on? Ayurveda literally helped me reverse all that through my 10-year journey of filming the documentary. I filmed experts like Deepak Chopra and Dr. Basant Lad, and you know, this science just started to prove to me that—I just saw so many different, like, use cases for it—from things like ADHD and just general rashes on the skin to cancers to MS to—sorry, I said ADHD—to, you know, chronic fatigue, chronic issues, autoimmune-type conditions, cancers. And so I was just, like, this is the most amazing science I’ve ever stumbled across because it works. And the more I learned about it, the more I was convinced—in the beginning, you’re, like, what? And then I can kind of get into how it works, and that starts helping, like, this kind of—whoa—like, that makes sense, and that makes sense. I can get into it if you want me to.

Dr. Diane Mueller: Yeah, yeah, I definitely want to get into it. And I definitely want people to have an understanding of some of the—like, the doshas—like we talked about offline—and some of those principles that really help people understand that, oh, the uniqueness for what their genetic makeup or their tendencies are is so different. Because I think even in, like, day-to-day—like, one of the things I imagine you see, like I do—is it’s so easy to get online and be, like, oh, this is the supplement that’s gonna help everybody with chronic fatigue, or this is, like, everybody needs keto, or everybody needs paleo—or it’s—

Amish Shah: That’s exactly it. That’s the—in the West, we’ve created this system where it’s just, like, here’s the magic pill, or here’s the magic food, or here’s the magic diet, or here’s the magic workout, or here’s the—fill in the blank—here’s the magic whatever you want it to be—it will solve whatever your issue is. In Ayurveda, it’s a little bit of a different approach, right? In the West, we’re, like, oh, you have a stomach ache—let’s fix something to fix the stomach. Ayurveda says, let’s look at the stomach, yes, but what’s causing the issue in the stomach to happen in the first place? So it’s the science of prevention as much as it is the science of reversing.

The Foundations of Ayurveda

Amish Shah: So the way that Ayurveda works is they try to look at a balanced approach of the universe and the human body. My documentary is called The Natural Law, and the reason why it’s called The Natural Law is because there’s certain laws that exist in nature that, if we go out of bounds of these laws, we can get sick, we can get diseased, and things go wrong. So nature, as we know it, is all around us—we’re born in and of nature. When we are nature, we tend to kind of isolate ourselves sometimes from nature—like, oh yeah, we’re not a part of that world, we live in a box, and we drive a car, and we don’t, you know—but we are—we are nature.

The Five Elements

Amish Shah: And so we—and the universe, and the whole entire universe—Ayurveda says consists of five basic elements. That’s ether—or space—just empty space; air—right, there’s air going in our lungs, and there’s air from clouds, there’s air, you know, all different kinds of ecosystems; there’s fire—like a big fireball in the sky right now that’s warming up the whole entire universe, or at least our galaxy; there’s our body temperature, 98.6—there’s some kind of heat element there; water—we’re made up of 75% water, the Earth is 75% water; and then there’s earth, right—there’s structure to us, there’s plants, there’s shrubs, there’s buildings, right—there’s, you know, things that have structure—earth-like, solid, sedentary.

Amish Shah: Those five elements are what make up everything in the whole entire universe—from the galaxies to the stars to the planets to the black holes to our bodies to the ground to the shrubs to the plants to the trees to the cats and the dogs and the horses and everything—everything is made up of—even this table in front of me and this light in front of me is made up of the five elements, just in different combinations. Me and you are also made up of the five elements, but in slightly different combinations of it.

The Three Doshas

Amish Shah: Now, those five elements then combine to create physical forces. So ether and air, when combined, create movement—right, everything moves in the universe, it’s constantly moving—breath, food, planets, ants on the ground moving. Fire and water together create transformation—right, what happens when you boil water? It turns into steam, and it disappears—it’s gone. What happens to food when it goes in our body? Well, it comes out very different than the way it went in—so it’s constantly transforming—the universe is constantly transforming. When we mix water and earth together, that’s structure—well, you know, why aren’t we a puddle of water on the ground? Because we have structure—we have tissues and ligaments and skin and bone, and we have structure—so do plants, and so do buildings.

Amish Shah: So ether and air combine to make Vata—or movement. Pitta—fire and water combined to make transformation, which is Pitta. And then Kapha, which is the last physiological kind of force, is water and earth—so that’s anything that has structure. So everything moves—Vata; everything transforms—Pitta; and everything has structure—Kapha. Now, those three forces that exist are what make up the whole entire universe—just like I said, the five elements. So between the five elements and the three forces, we all contain a certain amount of each of these to some extent. And it’s something we’re born with—something that’s conceived upon conception that we actually achieve—and then when we come out, we live in this world, and we’re taking in the toxins or things that are maybe not good for our body, and that balance gets thrown off.

Amish Shah: So I have a certain amount of Pitta, you have a certain amount of Pitta; I have a certain amount of Vata, you do too—and the plants do, and the animals do, and elephants have—everything’s slightly different. So there’s saying that when that gets out of balance, then we’ll start noticing something—like, oh wow, that’s a rash—and then there’s six stages to the disease. So Ayurveda knew this thousands of years ago—that first you might get something, like, oh, I have a migraine, or, oh man, my neck hurts, or I have a rash—and then from there, it progresses.

Balancing the Doshas

Amish Shah: So Ayurveda respects the body’s inner intelligence by understanding that if my Pitta is elevated, I can use the natural environment to heal me—I can reduce Pitta-causing foods and increase Pitta-pacifying foods. I can take Pitta-pacifying herbs to bring my heat in my body down. If I’m Vata and I feel cold and there’s air moving around me, I can take—I can eat warm foods, right—something that’s going to be the opposite of Vata, something that’s going to bring more grounding energy to me—potatoes, heavy foods, right. And Kapha—if it’s, like, you’re slow and you’re lethargic and, you know, maybe you want to—you’re having trouble digesting—maybe a little chili pepper, something spicy, a little bit—something to bring the heat up in your body. And so Ayurveda looks at this very uniquely, and everyone is very unique, right? There’s no one-size-fits-all approach—it’s, like, oh, for you, paleo, and for you, you can do South Beach, and for you, you know, do something else—it doesn’t work like that. Everyone is—some person might need more carbs, some person might need protein, some person might do better with more vitamins or more minerals of a certain kind—that’s how Ayurveda works, and that’s the beauty of it.

Connecting Ayurveda to Libido

Dr. Diane Mueller: Thank you. And I want to go, like, a little bit deeper into that and to help people just kind of start connecting this on a layer to libido, right? You know, we’re talking about libido and sexual health—we’re talking oftentimes about the body being vital, the cardiovascular system working, somebody is not in an inflamed state, the psychology is good, the nervous system’s good—so all of these things, right, can be impacted by these day-to-day lifestyle choices, by what their dosha is—whether it’s Kapha, Vata, or Pitta, right? So how does somebody—they’re hearing this, and you’re saying, okay, well, if you’re cold, eat warm foods—so that part’s obvious—but how does somebody begin to understand what their tendency is, right—their tendency they came into the world with—in order to, say, choose on a day-to-day basis how to stay grounded, how to keep their inflammation down, those sorts of things?

Amish Shah: Yeah, and, you know, the best way is—you know, you can take a quiz on our website, which will give you a basic foundation of what your doshas may be—it’s just a quiz, it’s for informational, educational purposes—we always recommend to see a practitioner for, you know, getting a true analysis of what’s happening—but libido is very specific in Ayurveda, and libido has to do with a couple different things, right?

The Mind and Libido

Amish Shah: In Ayurveda, first is that there’s the mind, right? They say the mind plays a very important role in Ayurveda, and the mind can make a lot of things happen to your libido—stress being one of them, you know. That can cause libido to completely not function—it can cause ulcers—I mean, stress literally can cause ulcers, so imagine what else it can do to the body, right? Depression can affect libido, anxiety, fear—these are all things that we want to reduce, these are all things that we want to bring down. We want to reduce, like, the—you know, there’s a lot of Vata that happens in anxiety, for example, right? So anxiety is Vata—so what do we do to kind of reduce that Vata? Well, you could do things like breath work, right—they have different kinds of breath work that you can do to help that. You can do massage—self-massage helps so much, you know—our body needs touch, and massage helps so much.

Physical and Energetic Practices

Amish Shah: There’s certain yoga poses that can help—such as camel pose, rooster pose—and, you know, meditations can also work—meditations—there’s—in yoga, which is a sister-related science to Ayurveda—in fact, yoga is contained within Ayurveda to some extent—it’s their sister sciences, yes—but what Ayurveda and yoga say is that there’s chakra centers, I guess you could say—are energy centers in the body—so when you’re meditating, and you can move your attention to that area of your libido, you can actually move prana or ojas there. So this is where it starts getting into energy a little bit—and they say that ojas is what—ojas is vital force—it’s the force in our body that allows us to have a libido, to be excited about things, to be happy about things, right—it’s vital force, it’s energy, it’s for us to be able to live and do the things that we do every day.

Amish Shah: And it’s that ojas that we need more of—so dates, for example—food—I’m talking about dates, not just going on dates—but really—right—but maybe there’s something to that—dates and dates, right? So eating dates and sprouted almonds and—you know, there’s so many things in Ayurveda—warm golden milk, for example—there’s so many things in Ayurveda that can help—from breath work to yoga to foods, even herbs, for example—you know, ashwagandha can help calm and strengthen the nervous system; saffron is great for—it’s a very kind of moving, kind of blood, kind of libido-enhancing kind of herb or spice—I’m not sure if it’s one or the other—and then for males, shilajit—it increases testosterone—it’s not saying that women can’t use it, but it has testosterone-increasing effects—and for women, there’s shatavari, which helps regulate hormonal balance.

Holistic Libido Support

Amish Shah: So thousands of years ago, they knew that these are the small things that we could do to help our libido—from the mind, to remove the stress, anxiety, fear, depression—you can do that with breath work and through meditation, right; through the body, you want to reduce the foods that are causing, perhaps, more Vata in your body; you want to take herbs that are calming for the body, that produce more blood flow in the body as well, and more hormones—the hormones that you want; and then there’s yoga, where yoga—you’re doing specific poses, and you can meditate on certain areas of your body to help that flow of energy, to move that prana, to move that ojas into the area—to enliven it, to make it alive, to make it work.

Conclusion

Dr. Diane Mueller: Amazing, yeah. And unfortunately—I know we could go on and on and on, and we’re already out of time—this goes so fast—but you guys, I wanted to have Amish on today because everything that he’s talking about—like getting to the uniqueness—the uniqueness of you, right—the uniqueness of you and what is going to help really restore your libido—we’re going to go into way deeper in an upcoming summit that I interview him on in much more detail. So I’m really excited about that—we’re going to have all of that in the show notes of how you guys—it’s totally free to register. We’re also going to give you information on how to find his Natural Law documentary, ‘cause that’s going to go into this a lot more—and can we put that quiz link in the show notes? Is that—

Amish Shah: Absolutely, absolutely, you can.

Dr. Diane Mueller: Thank you so much—that’ll help people a lot too. So we’ll include that in there for you guys as well. And thank you so much for being here—I think it’s just really important to open people’s awareness to the uniqueness of not only this medicine but of themselves, right? Are there any concluding comments you have for everybody today?

Amish Shah: You know, there are many more solutions than what’s out there. Our ancients knew how to live in the natural world, and I think it’s very important for us to start reflecting upon that and using some of those solutions in today’s modern world. And I just implore you to go explore the documentary, check out our talk on the summit—I think you’ll truly get a lot of benefit out of it. And yeah, I’m just excited about the future.

Dr. Diane Mueller: Thank you so much for being here, and thank you, everybody, for tuning into another episode of the Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Diane, reminding you to always stay classy, sexy, and a little badassy. Thank you for listening to the Libido Lounge. Please don’t keep me a secret—please share this with your friends. YYou can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, as well as the Modern Libido Club—for so much more!