I often use voice notes (or little love notes) with my 1:1 clients; more personal than an email or text on a screen, my hope is that they convey the emotion and humanness of well-being, of Ayurveda. Your monthly “LOVE NOTES” here on the membership are my way of supplementing + keeping this ancient wisdom “real,” practical and honest.
Almost every person who finds their way to me arrives with some version of the same question.
“What should I be eating?”
Sometimes it’s more specific — “Should I cut out dairy? Is meat okay for my dosha? Do I need to go gluten-free?” Sometimes it’s vaguer: “I just want to eat more Ayurvedically.” As if Ayurveda is a cuisine. A clean-eating protocol with Sanskrit labels.
And I understand it completely. We live in a food-centric wellness culture. When something isn’t working in the body, the first lever we reach for is diet. Change the inputs, change the outputs. It’s a logical place to start.
But here’s what I’ve watched happen, over and over: someone shifts their foods. They eat more kitchari, cut the coffee, add ghee. And nothing really changes. Or it changes for a week, and then life happens, and they’re back where they started — now also feeling like they failed Ayurveda.
They didn’t fail Ayurveda. They were just handed the wrong map.
Because Ayurveda is not a diet.
I know. It can really look like one. There are foods for your dosha. Foods for the season. Foods that aggravate Pitta, foods that calm Vata, foods that are “too heavy” for spring. There are lists. And if you came to this work through years of wellness culture, or tracking, or trying to optimize — those lists can feel very familiar. Very actionable.
But here’s what happens when we treat Ayurveda like a diet: it backfires.
Not because the wisdom is wrong. But because we’re using an ancient, living, responsive system as though it were a rigid prescription — and in doing so, we cut ourselves off from the very thing it’s trying to teach us.
Ayurveda is a practice of noticing.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing, distilled.
It’s asking: what do I feel? What does my body do when I eat this, move like this, sleep at this time, in this season? It’s asking you to gather information — not follow instructions.
When it becomes a diet, you start eating kale because Kapha season says “bitter and light,” even when your body is depleted and exhausted and actually needs something warm and nourishing. You stop trusting what you feel because the chart says otherwise. And that? That’s the opposite of what this system is built to do.
Ayurveda is trying to restore your relationship with your own intelligence. The moment we use it to override that intelligence, we’ve missed the point entirely.
Before you change anything, just notice. How do you feel in the morning? After meals? When the season shifts? Write it down if that helps. You’re building a map of you — and that map is the most valuable thing Ayurveda can give you.
When you understand that Kapha is heavy, damp, and slow — and that spring tends to amplify those qualities — you have useful information. Not a mandate. If you’re already feeling light and energized in April, you don’t need to aggressively detox. If you’re feeling sluggish and congested, now the bitter and pungent foods make sense — because you noticed, not because a chart told you.
In Ayurveda, craving is intelligence. Your body asking for sweet isn’t weakness — it might be asking to be grounded, nourished, calmed. Your aversion to a food you “should” eat is worth paying attention to. Ask why before you override it.
Remember what we explored in the FOCUS session — the shadrasas. Try including all six in a meal and notice how satisfied you feel, how long it lasts. That’s data. That’s your body responding. Not compliance. Conversation.
Ayurveda has been practiced for thousands of years. You are not going to master it in a month. You’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to get a little bit better at listening — every day, every season, every year. The goal is a more honest relationship with yourself. That’s not a destination. It’s a direction.
This is what I mean when I say Back to Forward is about becoming a more responsive human. Not a more disciplined one. Not a more compliant one.
Responsive.
Able to hear what your body is saying and make a choice — not from fear or a rule, but from actual, grounded knowing.
Ayurveda handed us the most extraordinary toolkit for that. Let’s use it the way it was meant: as a mirror, not a cage.
KEEP NOTICING.
— Lentine