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"The health of the entire Earth lies in honoring the female energy and its interconnection to nature's rhythms" ~Maya Tiwari

My mission is to support mothers in coming home to our body's innate wisdom, creativity and health by cultivating hormonal health, womb wellness, embodiment and intergenerational healing.  I support mothers through rights of passage into motherhood and into menopause with the ancient medicine of Ayurveda, lineage healing in service of ourselves, our daughters and future generations. The combination of ancient wisdom with somatic body s literacy helps us inhabit our body, and truly nurture and nourish ourselves through huge rites of passage like childbirth and the natural transitions of peri-menopause and menopause.  

My long-term vision is to foster multigenerational communities of women to come together and share their wisdom, support true health and authentic wellness through each natural stage of life, thereby collectively healing ourselves, the planet and planting the seeds for future generations. 

My background with Ayurveda, Embodiment, and Women's Health

I chose to study go deeper into Ayurveda and Women's Health after having my first son.  I felt such a lack of awareness, understanding and care during the postpartum phase that I knew I had to look beyond the Western mainstream model of postpartum care and women's health more broadly. Through Ayurveda I discovered a deep well of ancient wisdom that spoke to my soul and helped my body, mind and spirit heal and regenerate little by little. 

Once I entered peri-menopause after having my second child at 39, I knew I had more to figure out about my hormones, my health and this new terrain of my body in this stage of life and stage of motherhood. So, with the little time I had as a mother of an infant, a toddler and a bonus son who was a teenager at the time, I dove head first into learning about the connection between postpartum health and menopause.

In all honesty, it wasn't easy to find a lot of information about maternal health and hormonal health for mothers who are simultaneously in the midst of the postpartum time and perimenopause it's kind of a newer development in this stage of our evolution, at least in terms of the increasing amount of women who are having babies later in life these days

I studied as much Western science as I could when it came to perimenopause and menonpause but none of it spoke. to continuum of our health during the initial phases of our postpartum experience, how we take care of ourselves during our menstruation and how both of those potent seasons of our lives are connected with our health during menopause. Therefore I kept coming back to Ayurveda and ancient wisdom to understand how these rites of passage connect and intersect throughout our lives on the physical, emotional and spiritual levels

From there, I began sharing what I had learned about how each season of our lives carries gifts and challenges, and the ways in which our hormonal blueprint is designed to support us and not to torture us, despite what we so often hear in the modern mainstream-dominant culture. What I try to share with mothers as we explore the gifts and challenges they're facing through whatever season of life they're in, is that the more we get to know how our hormones and our bodies naturally change through each phase and season of life, the closer we come to the embodied sense that we are part of Mother Natures's beautiful design 

The longer, more personal version  of my background  

My own health journey has definitely been a combination of learning the hard way and re-learning to trust that innate inner wisdom. It’s taken many detours, painful losses, challenges and a near death experience to realize what I've already known deep down~ that we are all part of the magic that is mother earth and we all carry her intelligence within.  

At the age of thirty-five I fell in love with a man who would become the father of my children. About six months into our very new relationship I got pregnant, and while we were naturally a little overwhelmed by the reality of starting a family together given that we barely knew each other, we still decided to embrace it 

At the time I was in the final stages of getting my PhD from UCLA. By then I had been in academia for nearly ten years! I was heavily invested with mountains of debt and years of study, many exams, and so many presentations, conferences, and research. But even though I didn't consciously realize it at the time, my heart and my soul did not want to be on that path. It was taking a toll on my body. I was a spinning my wheels, suffering from serious insomnia, and self medicating with all kinds of things I won't name here. 

A couple of months after getting pregnant I went to visit my mom and help her through some very intense mental health issues. Soon after I arrived to her house I began to feel some pain in my womb. Several hours later I found myself passed out from internal bleeding due to a ruptured fallopian tube. It was an ectopic pregnancy and for a variety of reasons I wasn’t able to get to the hospital in time to detect it before it ruptured. I lost consciousness and literally felt my body dying. It was a very close call, I even broke my jaw as I landed flat on my face from passing out in front of the ER doors, But thankfully I made it in time for surgery. 

During the healing process I found myself experiencing so many mixed feelings. I was overwhelmed with immense gratitude that I was alive, yet I also felt a lot of resentment arising that I couldn’t quite explain. My hormones were wreaking havoc on me (if you’ve had a sudden loss of a pregnancy, you can probably relate). The trauma of the whole experience also left me with consistent nightmares and I had so much anxiety. 

Still, something inside of me was telling me that my confusing and overwhelming emotions were also coming from a place much deeper than the immediate trauma and hormonal imbalances. I knew it was time to muster up the courage to set out on some soul searching. On my soul searching journey I slowly became more more aware of how I had been mistreating my body for much of my adult life. 

I started to get honest with myself about how my lifestyle and certain choices weren't serving me or honoring my body, my womb, and my soul. I came to realize that these choices and patterns were being driven by unconscious beliefs about what I felt I deserved and didn’t deserve. I was making choices based on past wounds, trauma, ancestral and familial imprints, a lack of worthiness and a lot of cultural conditioning.  

For so much of my adolescent and adult life, I pretended to have a tough exterior because I was deeply afraid of my feelings of vulnerability. I tried to prove to myself and to others that I could handle anything, including the abuse I allowed into my body and that I myself inflicted on my own body. I thought if I was tough enough to handle that than I would never need to be held, understood, or to have to say what I truly needed. At a certain point I didn't even know what I needed or how to identify my own feelings. I had numbed myself for so long because the alternative was to uncomfortable and painful I didn't want to touch it.  

Between my own early family imprints and the larger cultural and societal influences at play, I had developed unconscious habits stemming from a belief that I wasn't entirely worthy of love or health. Until I almost died. Until I had a taste of creating a being out of love and then losing that being. Until I began to discover that its natural to want to be held and cared for. More importantly, I realized I needed to learn how to hold and care for myself in more authentic, compassionate and healthy ways. Of course, in some ways I'm still learning how.  

I also began to see the connections between the scars in my womb that led to the ectopic pregnancy, and the pain I was carrying from my mother’s womb, and my grandmother’s womb and my great-grandmothers… and on down the line….It was through this soul searching journey that I truly began to reconnect with my womb and with the loving pulse of the universe, None of this was not an immediate awakening. In fact, it has been a circular, unfolding process and is still very much a committed path of self-compassion.

I tried to soldier on with my Phd, but I was feeling more lost every day. My partner suggested we go to Burning Man (it was my first time and his 13th or 14th). I said sure, and off we went. Anyway, we're pretty sure it was there that my son was conceived; and once my son was old enough to start dancing and busting out some moves, I became convinced that the playa, is in fact where he was conceived. That was my last time to Burning Man. 

After my son was born, I sat in front the of computer trying to crank out a dissertation, but all I wanted to do was either snuggle with him or sleep or both. I kept trying to convince myself to finish. But little by little my attention was either focused on him, or on learning about how to take care of myself during this transition into motherhood

Eventually I got pregnant again when my son was still under a year old and was still breast feeding. It was a surprise to say the least. But a couple of months later we learned that the baby's heart had stopped beating so I had to wait until it was time for it to make its way out of my body. In retrospect, this spirit helped me let go of a part of myself that was in the process of dying. I didn't go back to work on my dissertation and I slowly let go of finishing my Phd, and began to let go of the guild and shame I had been feeling about not finishing it. 

Motherhood, Miscarriage & the Mystery of it All

After loosing a pregnancy and nearly loosing my own life, then the experience of birthing a child, then loosing another pregnancy, and yet again birthing another child two years later, there was no way around developing a much deeper, more profound connection with my body and surrendering to its wisdom. I now have two young children and it's  been a hormonal roller-coaster ride, and a beautiful, amazing, chaotic, exhausting, wild journey!

Motherhood has broken me open and revealed to me some of the wounds inside that still needed healing as well as some of the limitations and lack of understanding and support in our society when it comes to motherhood and to women's bodies and health in general. It also brought a sense of longing for a deeper more rooted connection with the Earth that I felt that I had lost

As a mother I discovered a source of strength inside that was truly unbreakable, yet at the same time so many feelings of vulnerability that were more profound than I ever knew possible. 

Motherhood makes glaringly clear that we need a lot more support. than we're led to believe, at every level. It has also reminded me that there’s strength and vulnerability in just being with our true nature, and remaining present through all the natural changes and rites of passage we go through as women. 

Motherhood brought up a sense of longing for wise elders who could help guide me through these transitions with awareness and intention. I searched and eventually found wise elders from whom I've learned so much from! I'm still learning and always will be. And I've decided that I too, will one day become a true wise Elder. In the meantime, I hope to share the wisdom that I've received and earned through my own life experience and life lessons, and through the guidance of my Teachers and support of true Medicine Women along the way.

And that's how I came to do the work that I do with mothers. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope it has given you a small window into who I am. Perhaps we've shared some similar experiences and insights in our lives. 

With love,

~Eden

P.S. If you're curious about my professional / educational background: After studying yoga for over twenty years, teaching for ten years, and exploring Ayurveda throughout, I decided to formalize my studies in Ayurveda  as a Practitioner with the Wise Earth Ayurveda School founded by the world renowned Ayurvedic Healer and Teacher Mother Maya Tiwari. I have continued to study and stayed connected with Wise Earth Ayurveda through Mother Mayas Womb Shakti Medicine program. I have also studied hormonal health with Dr. Claudia Welch an mentored with Mary Thompson.

I also have an M.A. from UCLA in international studies with an emphasis in Education.  

Before becoming an Ayurvedic Educator & Consultant,  I worked in Community Health Education  and activism for many years. I traveled as a Health Educator and Researcher to many countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Portugal, Armenia and Spain. I also had the pleasure of working in Health Education here in California with diverse populations from various parts of Latina America and other parts of the world.