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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Cate Stillman. Cate Stillman has been teaching audiences how to create health and wellness through yoga and Ayurveda since 2001. She hosts the Yogahealer Real Thrive Show. With Sounds True, she’s the author of the book Body Thrive, and a new book Master of You: A Five-Point System to Synchronize Your Body, Your Home, and Your Time with Your Ambition. In Master of You, Cate presents an innovative program for embracing and accelerating your true capabilities, all through the five fundamental elements of Ayurveda. What I so loved in this conversation with Cate Stillman is she teaches us to relate to the elements not as something outside of us, but as powers that literally make up who we are—powers that we can awaken and mobilize to bring our true selves forward and contribute in the most powerful ways. Here’s my conversation with Cate Stillman:
Cate, one of your gifts is making Ayurvedic wisdom accessible to people. And what I’d love to start our conversation with, which is what I think is on many people’s minds, is, how can we increase our immunity, our own inner strength using the wisdom of Ayurveda during this particular time? We’re recording this right as the global pandemic of COVID-19 is on the rise in the United States. What can we learn from Ayurveda?
Cate Stillman: Ayurveda, like most of the world’s wisdom traditions—I would actually argue all of the world wisdom traditions—grounds us in the elements themselves. And so, our experience of earth and the sky and fire and water, these elements are how we know, how we know the world. And like, modern world, modern life, we’re pretty disconnected from that. And part of how that weakens our immunity it’s like, if we’re not connected to how energy from the universal, from Source, comes through form then we’re just a little bit more and more to get disconnected. And the more disconnected we get from Source energy and Source intelligence, the more we feel disconnected. And in our physiologies the experience of disconnect is along the lines of the emotional body, the experience of fear. And that itself erodes immunity. It erodes the organization and intelligence of our organism, which keeps us safe, healthy, happy, grounded, whole.
So, simply by, when we wake up in the morning by being grateful for the earth and being grateful for the air we breathe and being grateful for the sunlight, it starts to plug our consciousness in, in a way that our human ancestors were always plugged in. And that itself helps us actually relax and attune. That consciousness organizes our organism so that on this day, we’ll actually make better choices for ourselves. We know when we’re afraid the mind gets scattered, we go into fight or flight, and we don’t make good long-term choices for ourselves. And then that can set us on a really bad day, essentially.
TS: Tell me more about a five-element first-aid kit, if you will, for our time.
CS: Yes. Five elements first aid kit. So much of it is just allowing our awareness to go back into when our ancestors would talk about earth and would talk about the sky, and would talk about fire and talk about water. And in this very basic way, starting to orient ourselves to, “What do I need right now?” So, if someone feels really ungrounded, their first-aid kit would be to find the ground. To find the earth element. And this can actually be as simple as starting the day, after you wake up and drink some water, and like you and I talked about in the last podcast for Body Thrive, you’d go poop—[Laughs]—like after you’ve got your morning just kind of starting is to actually do a practice on a mat where you’re connecting with earth element, which might be, you start by lying on the ground. You lie on your yoga mat and you start to roll side to side, and then you might go on to all fours. And you’re just actually, with your awareness, getting energy to move into your body, into the earth. And just feeling like, “Ah, the ground beneath me innately supports me.”
And this is how the elements work. When we attune to the powers of the elements, we feel intrinsically supported. And the feeling of support is what a lot of people don’t have access to right now. They feel like everything is unpredictable. And then because it’s unpredictable, we don’t know what’s happening next, we panic and it’s the opposite. It’s like, I feel a lot of people right now feel incredibly unsupported. So, if we could get our awareness to actually become a lot more primitive rather than sophisticated, instead of looking at how are we going to solve all the problems, given that we’re in a whole new paradigm, we’re in a whole new economy, we’re in a whole new world, essentially, can we just go back to the world that we’ve always known?
Because that will always be here. The elements will always be here. We’ll always need the sun. So, if we can say like, “Ah, can we get up early enough—to give my body and my mind focus today, can I get up early enough to watch the sun rise?” And that would be a first-aid kit in terms of fire, in terms of focus. And as the sun is rising and you’re watching wherever you are go from darkness into light, to ask yourself, “Where do I need to apply my focus today?” And to receive that. To receive that intuition straight from the energy of the sun. And that alone will start to inform, again, the choices that you’ll make later in the day.
And we can do this with any element. Like with water element, water element teaches us a number of things. The first one is receptivity, which happens through softening. So, if we’re hard and aggressive, we don’t receive. But if we’re soft like water, you drop something into water, the water receives what you drop into it. You drop something on pavement, it bounces off the pavement. [Laughs] It doesn’t receive it.
And so, for those of us who are like, “I want to be more receptive to what’s happening in the world right now. I don’t want to block reality. I want to actually just receive what’s going on.” To just simply to do things like to take a bath and to sip hot water and to get in tune with like, “Oh, water is always there for me as well, right now.” And in this way, we can shift our consciousness to relax, to receive, and that alone will start to bolster our own immunity. It organizes that intelligence, that those elements organizes our organisms, so again, we’re more protected from within from being more interconnected.
TS: Let’s keep going. Space.
CS: Yes, space. Space. Space is the gift right now. Now, space scares some people. And it can be scary because for those who have been very busy and very over-scheduled, and we keep it that way because of potentially a deeper underlying adrenaline addiction of just like, “Go, go, go, go, go, go, go.” And so, there’s always too much to do in a day. And say now, like, your days are different. Say now you’re home with the kids instead of going to the job and instead of driving here and there. And now you might be overwhelmed by the space, which can feel like an abyss.
Now, a lot of people love space. A lot of the yogis listening and meditators listening are like, “I’m good with space. I’m not experiencing that at all.” I could see maybe one or two people in my life that might be having that response to having more space. But space right now, having time for reflection is essential. And in modern life, it’s missing. Essentially, we don’t have a surplus of spaces. How most people feel, they feel like their time is not their own. Their calendars are too crowded. Time has to arise in space.
So, having more space, having time to reflect, having time to exhale, having time to actually reorient on an energetic level, too. “Who have I been, and how has that worked for me? And who do I need to become next because the world is changing?” And so, I need to change. I need to become adaptable. That all requires space. And space, if we just actually tap into it right now, space is insane. It’s so big! When you let your awareness travel just from here through the entire planet, and then the planet is part of a solar system, and then the solar system is part of a galaxy, and the galaxy is part of all these galaxies, and it keeps going and it keeps going, and it keeps going. And it is huge. And there’s so much space. And if we allow our awareness to expand into that much space, we might, if we can do this regularly, we can actually start to relax and notice that who we are is space. Who we are is also expanding.
There’s, in Ayurvedic medicine, it’s very, very clear in disease, the diseases where there’s not enough space. The diseases of congestion, the diseases of—even a lot of diseases with heat. There’s just not enough space for things to move. And that’s how most people who are stressed out feel. So, now there’s this huge opportunity as things are changing. But, I love Dave Gray’s book, Liminal Thinking. We’re in a liminal time. We’ve crossed a threshold of normal. Nothing is normal. Whenever you cross the threshold from normal, you have access to liminal. You have access to that which is beyond the threshold of normal. And when you’re in that time and space open, they open up. And if you can be grounded and present in that, if you can exhale and not go into a fear response with it, but actually just embrace, “Huh, I have air to breathe, I have water to drink. It’s OK. What’s going on?” And to let our awareness expand, we tap into a flexibility in our own person that allows us to expand and adapt into who will thrive in the next.
TS: Now, before we move on to the fifth element in this first-aid kit for our time, what would you say to that person who is having a fear response when it comes to the space that they have in their life right now? And as they investigate, “Who am I really during this time?” And, “My life is being reoriented.” And, “Truth be told, yogahealer Cate, I’m afraid.”
CS: Yes, I’m afraid. One of the best ways—and first of all, acknowledging the fear I think it’s so important, and good for you for acknowledging it. So just right there when you can acknowledge like, “I’m afraid.” Now, what’s fascinating to me about fear is how other mammals deal with it. So again, we’re mammals and how we deal with our fear is mostly psychological. But your dog doesn’t deal with fear in the same way. Your dog, when it’s afraid, will shake. And what’s so fascinating to me about this is the shaking releases the emotion from the physiology. And there’s just a really great practice I’m just going to give anyone, I’m like, when you’re afraid, A, noticing the fear, great. B, shake.
And the way you shake and you can get very creative with this. I love this practice from Chinese medicine, or from, I think it’s from Qigong, where you just stand with your feet hip width apart, slight bend in your knees, and you bend your elbows by your side so your hands are straight in front of you, your arms at a right angle, and you just [makes a huffing noise] is the sound you make with your exhale, and you shake. You just actually bend your knees and your hands will pulsate with the bending of your knees and your body. And you just shake. And if you do this, even for—you might find yourself doing this for two minutes, ten times a day, if you feel that intense, overwhelming fear ten times a day. And what you’re doing is you’re just allowing—you’re an animal. It’s scary right now for you, and you’re just letting your body release the fear.
And once you finish it physically, your awareness will shift and you’ll have different ideas. You’ll have a different way of approach. And the idea might be, “I need to lay down on my yoga mat.” That’s a great idea. Fantastic. It might even be, “I need to drink some hot water and just look out at nature and just receive the energy of the tree, which is rooted.” Fantastic. Another great idea. So, the solutions don’t have to be complex. They usually, I find, are simple and free and always available.
TS: And then the element air, and how we can align with it during this time.
CS: So, air element is fascinating. Air is the movement across space. Air is connection. And I’m finding it fascinating right now in even the terminology that was first sort of dished out to us around social distancing. I started to notice this at first with my kid, and then with my online company, and then more and more with other people that are working online. It’s like, social distancing is the opposite of what’s happening! I’m noticing social connectivity happening on a whole new level. And this connection of like, how we connect across space has so much to do with what air element is. So, while our physical bodies might be six feet apart from each other we’re connecting. Humans are very deeply connecting right now. And it’s important to receive that, to notice that. That wow, we as a species, we like to do this together. We definitely like to talk to each other. We like to exchange ideas.
Now, this movement across space is also time. So, how this next horizon of time, like how we’re orienting to the future where we seem to be pivoting like very, very quickly—like the reality of what tomorrow looks like seems to be changing. I’m not sure if it’s going to stabilize by the time this releases, I have no idea what’s going to happen. But what I find right now is there is a unique opportunity as space is opening up and we can have more of a deep-space perspective. We can exhale, we can find a little more time in our calendar. That a space opens up, time opens up.
Now, as time opens up, there’s a unique advantage of being able to step back and see the trajectory of your life, of where you’ve come thus far, and what in that do you love? Like, what in that do you want to bring into your future? And, what in that you want to part from, and just be like, “That was good. It served its purpose. I’m done.” And then to look again into the future, to look into deep time moving forward and being very clear. Becoming more and more clear, because you have more time right now to become clear, who do you want to become next? And then to see that, to start to see the road in front of you, the time horizon in front of you.
And just that when you give your awareness—yoga is so clear on this, and these teachings in yoga. If you give your awareness a point of focus, that point will expand. So, you want to be orienting towards a future that you’re excited about, like really excited about. And it doesn’t have to be grandiose. It should be grounded, actually, in what you most deeply, deeply desire. So, getting clear on what is that in the future, and that’s like a point. And then reminding your awareness continuously throughout the day that you’re going towards that point, then that future for you will start to expand.
And you’ll pick up different ideas, you’ll pick up different conversations, you’ll tune into different things that help you move into the direction of that future.
TS: And really as you’re talking, I’m thinking of your new book Master of You, which is using the five elements to design your life. In the subtitle you say, “your body, your home, your time, ” and to synchronize with your ambition. What do you mean by ambition? You’re saying it doesn’t have to be big. I think most people when they hear that word ambition, they think, “Oh, she’s just talking about someone becoming some big-time mover, shaker,” or something like that. A big ambition. But it sounds like you could be pointing to something else.
CS: Yes. I feel like the word “your” in there is really the critical one, and that’s why it’s in there like one, two, three, four times in Master of You, and then followed by four “Yours” in the subtitle. And this is something that I’ve found in my work with my members in the Awake Living course that was the precursor to the book, and my members weekly were so psyched to have the book now. Is it unique to you? So your ambition—and we could have said your dharma, but people often don’t know what dharma is to them. And so, dharma, in terms of who you are, what you deeply desire, what you sense your life purpose really is and is all about, that’s what we’re most interested in here. And that’s the exploration and the journey.
Because often there’s a lot of not knowing; like, if you could really become anything you wanted to be, which in yoga, as they say, well that’s ultimately what the path of yoga is about, is that freedom. That unbridled freedom. It’s, what do you discover it is that you most deeply want to become, that you most deeply want to do? And so, if it’s my ambition for you, that’s not going to work. What’s your ambition for you? And what we’ve found through working with many, many people is that that discovery process is essential and it’s often a first-time journey.
TS: What do you mean by that, a first-time journey?
CS: Like often people haven’t really gone to the depth of like, “What do I want? What is my deeper ambition, and how do I bring that into an action plan? How do I bring that into what goes on my calendar this week?” That this we find—and I was honestly quite surprised at this and I was like, “Oh, I was a pretty ambitious person myself.” And I’ve always sort sensed like, I know what I want to do and I’m going to take action to make that happen. But what I’ve found in coaching a lot of people along the way and in creating this program and then this book is that often people haven’t—they’re doing what they’re doing because that’s what they were doing, and they got into that for this reason and that reason and the other reason.
But having the time and the space to very deeply ask, like, “Hey, what do I really want to become in this lifetime, and who do I want to become next in this next chapter, and what are the skills and the resources and the assets and the relationships I’m going to need to make that happen?” That I have found is often a first-time journey. Often people haven’t done that a number of times. And in Master of You, we turn it into a system so that you can do that again and again—you can, you know, next chapter of your life by next chapter of your life. So that how you want to be in your body, how you want your spaces to be in your home, how you want your calendar to be, how you want to experience your next level of wealth, or whatever sort of asset building that you want. Like, how do you do that systematically in a way that is so deeply tied to the power of the elements and staying true to your own experiment so that in the next iteration of it you get even better at figuring out what it is you really want, and how you really, for many people, how they want to be a bigger part of the solutions, how they want their life to matter? And just breaking it into chapter by chapter of their life, get better at that iterative system.
TS: Now, Cate, I think a lot of people can relate to the idea that something you say in Master of You that for many of us, our desires are buried under the demands and the whirlwind of our life. And here we are, for many people it’s a time where people are reorienting, they’re asking deeper questions and perhaps deeper desires and ambitions. A sense of, “My true dharma is surfacing.” So, I think people are with us on this part of the conversation. I think the part that is probably not obvious to people is, “How does any of that connect to these five elements? How am I supposed to be relating to the five elements to help me with that buried yearning that I have about my life?”
CS: Yes, I know. And it’s been a fascinating journey for me, and being an Ayurveda medicine practitioner and then writing the body habits book for Ayurveda, and just breaking it down into these simple things, and being someone who has more of a macro-level consciousness, seeing bigger pictures. And as I was coaching people and as I was able to manifest in my life what I wanted for me and my family, I started to realize what was going on with the elements. And that to me was a huge breakthrough. It wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t obvious from when I was in Ayurveda school and as an Ayurvedic medicine practitioner. But the five elements, anyone who’s really studied Ayurveda or yoga, you start to have a much different relationship with the five elements.
And that’s what happened with me. And I started to realize that my space—o, the space is that I can create around me, the spaces that I live in, that is the space element I have the most influence over. So my home, my office, my car, my second home, my stuff—that I can control. Now, outside of my home, I started to lose a lot less control. And those of you live with other people, even within your home you may have certain domains, little pockets where you have a 100 percent control, and then you may have a lot of spaces that are negotiable. And then you may have some spaces in your home where you have no control. So, what I’m talking about now is the spaces you have the most control over. And I found that when you align those spaces to your future self that you’re trying to become, that your space pulls you forward. And when you don’t do that, you keep your space the same and you have a vision of yourself you haven’t become yet and you don’t overhaul your spaces that you have 100 percent control over in alignment, that your space works against you.
And this is now very well documented by behavioral science. There’s been a little bit of it here and there around architecting your environment to breed the habits that you want to have. There’s been some great research in that area. When you tie it to dharma—I found this for my course members, and I’ll find it, I think, with the readers of this book. When you tie it to life purpose, it changes the way you see your space. Like, “Does this space right now support the person who I want to become in the future?” And if you can mark that at a time, if you could say like, “A year from now, this is who I want to be, this is the habits I want this person to have. This is the reality. These are the relationships, these are the experiences I want that person to be having.” Now, great. How does that person use space? And once you shape shift your space to that, this is now supporting your dharma.
TS: Now, I think a lot of people can relate to this, but maybe they’ve read books about decluttering, or even as they’re listening right now they’re looking around the room and thinking, “God, I’ve been meaning to take that picture down. I don’t even like it anymore. I haven’t liked it for a decade.” Or, whatever it is. “It doesn’t feel like the person I want to become.” So, I think a lot of people can relate to that, which is great. But I want to just understand a link for a moment. Here you are, you’re studying Ayurveda, you’re studying the elements. And I’ve met a lot of people, whether it’s Chinese medicine or Ayurveda, they’ve studied the elemental theory and how it relates to health. But I’ve never met anybody who’s tied the elements to how we function in the world dharmically. How we realize our dreams and ambitions. How did you make that connection?
CS: My course members coming out of the Living Ayurveda courses a few years ago, they asked me to teach a lifestyle course. They’re like, “We want to know what you’re doing. Because you’re doing Ayurveda on some level that you’re not teaching us.” And that’s where it started. It started—because I didn’t really know I was doing it. I kind of knew, but not really. I hadn’t felt a system around it yet. And it was this invitation. It was really that, stepping into an invitation for me to actually look at, well, I was super clear on air as time element. Ayurveda teaches that. Not many people understand it.
TS: Let’s go into that a little bit more because I think a lot of people when they say, “I can’t actualize this dharma, this deep ambition that I have, it’s a time problem. I don’t have enough time.” And economics, of course, play into that and responsibilities for my family, etcetera.
CS: Right. Just that. I think there’s got to be a level here, like, no one ever said the yoga path was easy. Even in Ayurveda. No one ever said that. If you look at the true definition of health in Ayurveda, no one ever says that’s easy. Ayurveda and health is like constantly learning from today and applying it to tomorrow. That’s more or less the definition, if you distill it down. That’s not easy. Easy is you learned something today and tomorrow you’re like, “Eh, I’ll do it tomorrow.” And that’s the pattern that a lot of us are in. And there’s a good word for this in yoga. It’s in Ayurveda called tejas. And tejas aligns to the word and the subtitle of ambition. And so, there has to be a deeper desire for better. There has to be. If there’s not that, you’re going to remain stuck. If you’re not that and you’re the person that you just described, you’re never going to have the time. It’s never going to be the right time to make the changes.
So, another way of seeing that, the inverse is also true. The right time is always now, because you have control over now. And so, how do you need to change your calendar today so that tomorrow lines up better? And then tomorrow you’re asking, you’re saying, it’s the same question. Like, “How do I need to line myself up today so that tomorrow changes?” And that’s a very short-term perspective. But there’s also the long-term of really getting that your ambitions have got to be built into your calendar in real time. And as I started to teach this, this is aligned air element. Air is essentially good calendaring. And it’s not just the calendar for things that are your to-dos. It’s also you’re calendaring for the things that are in many ways your free time, your rejuvenation time, your to-don’ts. Just the chill time. But that that also needs to be calendared in.
We need control—and I use that word, I fight with this word all the time, control, and I keep coming back to it. It’s like before I was talking about controlling your space. When we have control over something, we’re taking responsibility for it. So, we could just say, when you have responsibility over your calendaring to manifest your future, and you take that responsibility as seriously as you would take responsibility of say, feeding your children, things start to change. You start to notice the malleability between time and space. And that is what gives you power.
So, in many ways as I was discovering this process with the five elements, it was like, “Oh, this is essentially the powers. We’re taking the power of space, the power of air or wind, the power of fire or transformation, the power of water or flow, the power of earth or resilience.” And the resilience piece and the body piece, we can get into it, but understanding that these elements, that these are our birthright, and as we connect to them, our ability to shape shift our reality and desire in alignment with what we want to experience that starts to go through the roof.
TS: Now, Cate, this might sound like it’s just a language thing, but it’s more than that to me. When we think of these five elements in the way that you understand we can relate to them in order to actualize and achieve our ambition, our dharma, live into the truth of what we feel called to inside of us, are we aligning with the power of each element? Are we honoring each element, are we liberating each element? Or like, what are we doing with the elements? What word would you use, or words?
CS: Yes. I think we’re awakening that power within us. That’s what I experience it as. So, in any indigenous wisdom tradition, and the first peoples, Native Americans, like however you want to say it, Ayurveda. But there was this direct experience of, you are the elements, and the elements are you. And they’re all around you. So, they’re within and they’re without. They’re within and they’re beyond. So, they’re under your control and they’re beyond your control. You can’t control the tidal wave right now with the ocean. You can’t control the tidal wave. You can control your own water element within your body. And so, what I find with this, in water element in Master of You I aligned to your integrity, which gives rise to your experience of flow. And you’re in control of your own integrity. You have domain over that.
So, as you awaken to the power of water, what you notice is like when you’re out of integrity, you know the end of the day when you’re like, “Ah, I shouldn’t have said that in that way to that person at that time.” In my experience that’s the waters, the emotional body, the emotional waters within saying like, “Something is out of alignment, and if you don’t clear it up it’s going to be a problem. It’s going to be a problem for your immune system. That will eat away at you.” So, integrity gives us a chance to come clear. And in that, we learn and grow. Now tomorrow is better than yesterday. So, with any of the elements, this responsibility or this control, it is an awakening of that power within you.
TS: I think that part of the reason making the five elements accessible is hard—I’m reflecting on this as we’re speaking—is that, you mentioned that most of us are living in a kind of, you used the word “sophisticated,” I don’t know if it’s sophisticated, but in a mental, analytical world; compared to—you use the word “primitive,” but compared to a world, whether it’s pre-written language or et cetera, where we’re more ready to say, “Oh yes, I am the five elements.” I think even that thought, “I am the five elements,” it’s a little like, “No, these are like rituals that witches do with the elements,” or something like that. I’m going extreme to make a point. But I don’t think people just think, “Oh, the five elements, that’s what I am. And so I’m activating my own capacities.” I don’t think people think that way.
CS: I agree. I totally agree. And yes, right? Yes. And yet, what an invitation. Especially during interesting times when you look at, so much is actually unstable right now. So we’re in a time of massive instability. We can see it particularly right now in the stock market and in the medical system. In instability, what is remaining stable? The sun rises, the air is clearing because there’s less people moving around. There’s less pollution. So, air element, there, ether element, there’s access to even see the stars and what’s outside. Your physicality is earth element, your physical body. The sun rising, fire element. The water you’re drinking, water elements. And it’s very challenging; the more disconnected and anxious a person is, I would argue the more disconnected they are from the five elements, and the harder it is to start to access it. But that doesn’t mean that—it’s, I guess, challenging, it’s hard, but it doesn’t nearly mean impossible. It just means more little small baby steps heading in that direction.
It also means the greater the reward. Because the further out from center you are, in order for you to be healthy, the closer to center you need to become in order to wander further from center again. So, we want this adaptability and resilience, and someone feels totally disconnected and they don’t notice the own warmth of their own heart, we can bring them back to that just to that simplicity of like, “Wait, feel your body.” And you’ll hear me tap. You’re physical, you’re earth, you’re stable. Now, take a breath in. That’s air. Feel how you can slow your breath down and that changes your relationship to time. So, very simple things like this actually are very grounding for people.
TS: Now, you mentioned that we could talk about resilience and the body and this appreciation of the superpowers, if you will. The superpowers we all have. The power of these five elements. How will that help me with resilience, physical resilience?
CS: So, physical resilience, it’s interesting in the work I was doing as an Ayurvedic medicine practitioner and as a yoga teacher and yoga therapist in my, whatever, 20 years ago, 10 years ago. What I noticed is that if people had the habits of Ayurveda, which are called dinacharya, the daily rhythm habits, which we did in my first book, Body Thrive, of just like, there’s certain habits that if you do them, you build an abundance of energy and your immune system is stronger. You become more resilient. If you have these habits, you actually start to free up a lot of mental capacity. You start to be able to want to do more with your life, and you can do more within your life. So, the precursor to this deeper resilience is the body rhythms.
And in Master of You, I just simplify it into these three rhythms. Like, what are your rhythms around sleeping, around nourishment, and around movement? And if these three—it’s like you can check the box on these three rhythms, meaning, you’re going to bed before 10:00 or around 10:00. You’re able to sleep deeply, you’re able to get into a sleep cycle for seven to eight to nine hours a night dependably, and you’ve built this into your rhythm. This rhythm already exists in the larger circadian rhythm. The word “rhythm” in Ayurveda is a really big word. It’s rta, R-T-A. And in rhythm is the ruler. So, if you’re in rhythm, you get access to deep energy, or universal energy. If you’re out of rhythm, you don’t. So, the rhythm, the circadian rhythm, the day/night cycle, the when we should eat, the how much we should move, all those rhythms, they create a strong, synchronized, organic pattern in our body. And that gives us the ability to be self-organized, and that in itself creates a certain resilience.
But the more unsynchronized we are and the more chaotic our rhythm, meaning we’re going to bed at different times or eating at different times, some days we do movement, some days we sit around all day. The more we’re arhythmic, the more chaotic our own physiology is. It’s not able to organize around the rhythm—the weaker our immune system, the less resilience you have.
TS: Cate, I’m sure you deal with this a lot in your coaching and your work with people. Somebody is listening to this, and instead of feeling inspired, and I’m sure there are many people who are feeling inspired, but at this point someone is feeling something more like shame about their schedule and about how they’ve been nourishing themselves or not exercising. What would you say to that person?
CS: So, I would go back to the like, feel the shame and shake it off. Like, just let—like, process that emotion physically, just move through it, and then ask yourself like, what do you need to do today to really nourish yourself? And there’s been so much on diets and food programs, and I find the word “nourishment” itself is so healing and so helpful.
So, rather [than] needing to like, quit sugar or this or that, or put things that are really hard in front of you, instead just to ask yourself if what—this is such a simple question of like, “What is nourishing to me right now? What is nourishing to me right now?” Like, “What is nourishing to me today?” And you’ll notice your intuition will bring forth some very simple answers. It’ll often be like, “I want a cup of tea.” Or, “I want to lay on the ground.” Or, “I want to put my legs at the wall for a minute.” Or, “I want to take a walk.” Or, “I want to be in bed. I want to like, roll out on my foam roller and go to bed earlier, maybe between 9:30 and 10:00.”
The solutions that your own awareness will generate from that very simple question—and then the key is you following through on it. When your intuition speaks, how quickly do you take action? And if you can shorten that cycle, you’ll notice your life gets easier. You’ll notice that you don’t experience much shame.
TS: Now, at one point in Master of You, as you’re setting up our understanding of the five elements and these powers in our life, you compare forgetting an essential element in baking a cake to be similar—how the cake’s going to turn out if you don’t include one of the essential elements—to what it’s like in our life, if we’re not honoring and aligning and awakening all five of the elements. How might somebody know which of the elements they really need to focus on as the missing ingredient right now in their life? How could they assess that?
CS: So, if you walk into your home and you’re not stoked, just like, “Yes!” Like on all levels, then space. If you open your calendar and you’re not stoked, then time, or air. If your relationships are out of integrity, or you’re out of integrity with money, then water. If you’re not stoked on your body and you don’t feel nourished, then earth. And if you don’t know what you want to do or who you want to become, then fire.
TS: That was a very swift and helpful assessment tool. Thank you. [Cate laughs] Is the goal to be equally awakened, aligned with all five elements? Is that the goal? Or are some people like, “Oh, that’s a fire type.” Or, “Oh that person in there, their strength is really water,” the water element. Or, “No, all five. Come on. They’re part of who you are.”
CS: Yes, I would say all five, they’re part of who you are. And yes, some people have really strong body rhythms. It’s like for me, earth element it’s pretty easy. I’ve always been an athlete and so I’ve always taken care of my body. There’s one person who’s in my course right now and she’s having such a hard time with space and her home, and she’s a single mom, and there’s just stuff everywhere. Like, their system is just to like drop it where you—when you’re done using something, just drop it, move on to what you want to do next. You can see it as pattern usually in little kids. They often have a similar pattern. And so, for her to—and she’s got a great job, and she’s a super loving mom, and she’s got great relationships, and she’s a marathon runner. So, she’s checking a lot of those other boxes. But because the space and home one she’s not checking, like that for her, the handholding process for her with this, it’s essential for her then experiencing another degree of manifestation in her parenting, in her work life, and even I would argue, even in her athletic performance.
So, the one is always the key to the all. And leverage the ones that you’ve got dialed in, for sure. Some people are just amazing with their calendar and with their integrity with their calendar. So, you’re going to want to use that to help yourself with the other elements.
TS: One of the most interesting parts of the Master of You book to me was a section that you call the “Master of You ethos.” It’s a 12-point value system that supports this whole process that you guide people through. And I wonder if we could talk about some of the points. We probably won’t be able to get to all of them, but there are some that I really liked. We’ll just start at the end. The last of the 12 points, “Shift from being a consumer to a collaborator.” What do you mean by that? How could that be part of a value system?
CS: Right. I know, right? Because it’s funny if you think of like consumer reports, and consumer culture, I think for many of us, those words never felt right. For a lot of us listening it was probably like, if you really consider yourself a consumer, we know from our ecological and biological systems that you’re never just one thing. You’re never just consuming, you’re also being consumed by something else. And so, the cycle, if we just go into the cycle of life. Even if I look at—I didn’t create—[in] Master of You, we could say like, I created a product for consumers. I created a book for people to read and to consume it. I don’t see it that way. I see it as we’re all collaborating. Like, we’re all in this together.
A lot of those who have been working in startups and understand user experience, or UX, or customer experience, CX, they know that the feedback they get from the customers actually drives product development. And so in that we can see like, well, who’s really driving the show? Is it a consumer, where the consumers are buying the stuff that the producers are making? Or wait, the consumers are actually creating the stuff because they’re telling the producers what to create. And so, what we’re seeing is actually a lot of the language we were using is just totally outdated. And the more we understand that it’s a collaboration, even your dharma—coming into the next level, the next chapter of your life, it’s going to be collaborative. There’s going to be certain people that are absolutely essential to you making that happen. There’s going to be relationships. There’s going to be skills. You’re going to need teachers or guides or coaches somewhere along the way to help you become who you haven’t become yet.
And so, once we understand this, and we have this as part of our own ethos of like, “Who is conspiring to help me?” Now, I didn’t set out to write books. It was never my dream to grow up and be an author. I wanted to help people. That was very, very clear. I wanted to spread personal and planetary thrive. That was very clear to me from a young age. When I started teaching courses, the course members started to ask me like, “It would be really great if you just organize this into a book.” OK. Now, it’s their idea. It’s not my idea. So, as I’m writing the book, I’m bouncing it back and forth off them. I’m like, “Is this what you guys want? Am I on the right track here?” “Yes, yes, but more of this. OK, more of that, more blah, blah blah.” And incorporating that, and so it’s a very collaborative relationship.
And the same thing like I mentioned happened with Master of You where course members were finishing the Living Ayurveda course, and then they were like, “There’s this whole other thing happening. What is that?” And I’m like, “I’m not sure. I think it’s this.” And they’re like, “Yes, write more about that. Teach us that.” And I started writing and teaching, and it became something. Then it becomes a product so that people could consume, but not really, because anyone reading the book now that sends me an email will be the impetus for the next level of the conversation. So, it keeps going.
TS: Well, let’s talk about it in a way that probably most people can relate to who maybe don’t experience themselves in their life as creators who are listening to feedback, but instead as a consumer who’s buying something online that they need right now and having it shipped. And they had the experience, “I’m a consumer.” How would this ethos change the way they view that purchasing experience?
CS: I would say let’s bring it back. Like, let’s just dial it back a level to something that—most people feed themselves, like, you need to feed yourself. And for those of you who are listening who are in charge of feeding other people, then you have that as well. So you might see like, “I need to put dinner on the table.” And you might be wondering how you can make that even itself a more—so then you’ve got the consumers. So, you are creating something, now you’re the creator and now the consumers are the kids at the table, or the partner or whatever, maybe you see your parents. But even that, how can you turn that more into a collaborative experience? You could sit down and do meal planning together. Like once a week, have a weekly meeting with your people, organize yourselves for the week and be like, “What is going to be on the menu?” And now you’re collaborating in order to create something.
I find this all the time with team and with work and whatnot, it’s like, look at who are the interested parties—and we can go into the Amazon example in a second, but like, “Who are the interested parties here? How are we actually in dynamic conversation creating a future?”
Now, with the Amazon example, say you buy a product and say you don’t like your unboxing experience. The unboxing experience thing is real. It’s a thing. Like, you’re excited about it. You’re getting the thing, and you can’t get the thing out of the packaging. Remember that plastic packaging that no one could get the thing out of, just like getting out this—
TS: I do, actually.
CS: You know, with a razor? Bad, very bad. People got injured, people got sued. That’s how that went. Now, had early on they had a more collaborative, that company that produced that stuff, that plastic, whatever it was called, that hard-shell plastic packaging, had they started testing user experience earlier, they would have gotten feedback and chosen a different route instead of having to retool their factories years later. So, earlier on we see this is, it’s always a conversation. It always is. Now, if we want our voice to be heard, how can we voice ourselves? Now, if we want our voice to be louder, how can we gather other voices to make our own voice louder?
TS: Now, to be honest with you, I loved all 12 of the values that you put into this “Master of You ethos.” But we’ll just talk about a couple more. One, “Embrace a solid B-minus.” I was like, “This is clearly not part of my current value system, but I can see the point.” But explain it to our listeners.
CS: Yes. So, a B-minus can—there’s a number of different ways to think about this. One is, in coaching people for years what I found was that one of the larger issues I’ve found for massive, fast growth was perfectionism. Really, it was probably the most reoccurring theme in it, is that, people would only want to like—say you’re perfectionist, but you didn’t know how to cook. So then you would have this idea that for you to make something, you would just make it way too hard. So, you choose something that actually someone who’s been cooking for a while would be challenged by, and you would choose that to make as one of your first things that you’re going to make in the kitchen. That’s more or less setting yourself up for failure. So, how do you start to back off just in—it’s a bias towards action, is another way of saying it in design thinking. How do you get a bias towards action rather than a bias towards perfection?
Now, a lot of people, with “Aim for a solid B-minus,” if you’re a perfectionist you’re going to be like, “What? Huh? I can do that. Like, people do that?” It helps perfectionist become much more aware of their own perfectionism. And just in that itself, you can see where you’re keeping a bar way too high that’s not biasing you towards action, but it’s actually biasing you towards procrastination. So, when we’re wanting to shift, really shape shift our life, shape shift who we’re becoming next to step into a deeper dharma, there’s going to be skills and there’s going to be even—it mostly shows up in skills that we’re not going to have. There’s even going to be relationships that we just don’t have developed. And if we don’t make it easy to take action to move forward, we might not take action at all. And that’s why we want to aim for a solid B-minus.
TS: I want to let people know that if you want this whole list of 12, the “Master of You ethos, ” you can go to masterofyou.us\workbook and get the entire list. Or you can purchase the book, Master of You. Just the last one we’ll go through: “Adopt a cosmo-centric view.”
CS: [Laughs] Yes. And we had on this a little bit early on, just with the deep space and deep time perspective. So, often if we wake up and we’re in the “I, me, mine,” We’re in the George Harrison song, “All through the day I, me, mine. I, me, mine. I, me, mine.” And we’re just in the now, like we’re in the like, what’s just on our plate, what’s on our schedule today, what happens is, is we lose access to the ground of being. We lose access to the deep peace. We lose access to reflective consciousness, what the yogis call Prakasha-Vimarsha, or the light of consciousness and the self-reflective awareness that’s built into every human being. We lose access to that.
And that’s like the easiest great gift to accept, is that one. Like, that’s what’s always going to be going for us, even when the stock market crashes, even when we don’t know how many—whatever, how much money is in our bank account, or if we have a job tomorrow. There’s an access of the deep time, deep space. The cosmos. That this cosmos, it wasn’t born yesterday. Even if we were to look at human beings that have lived through great trauma and tragedy and travesty, there’s a sense of like, “Oh wait, if I have a deeper time perspective, we know how to do this.” Like, humans are better equipped now to deal with this than ever. And we might not get there if we’re just looking at today compared to yesterday, which is really different. But we could get to that perspective just from looking at, “Hey, can I take it like a thousand-year view of how humans have adapted to great trauma?” And from there we might find an insight and we might see a pattern, and now we’re much more equipped to have a healthy mind, and be part of the solution in the day ahead of us.
TS: What do you think would be a helpful cosmo-centric view right now of the pandemic that we’re in? Like, where does your mind go when you think, “I need a big, deep time, deep space view right now of this experience, and how humans are evolving”?
CS: Oh yes. It’s such interesting times. And I think having words like that like, “Oh, we’re in interesting times.” Like this is where we’re in the liminal thinking. “We’re out of the pattern everybody, we’re out of the pattern.” They say in Wuhan, China, from the massive quarantine, like the birds came out, the skies cleared. There’s new, good things happening even in the pandemic, even in the chaos of it all. Right now, a lot of parents are spending more time with their children. A lot of people are spending more time in the home. A lot of people are spending more time cooking their own food.
And if we look at like, “Wow, this is really freaking fascinating.” If we can back out big enough and look for the good—and this is another fantastic teaching from tantra and in yoga is orient—and the way I say it in Master of You as the first ethos is, orient towards thrive. Orient your mindset towards what is thriving. Always look toward what’s thriving. Because if you just look for the bad, you could get sucked down the rabbit hole and only see the bad, and your immune system. It’s going to get tougher and you will become less resilient. And the less resilience you have, the less adaptability you have. That’s not the direction you want to go. So, look for the good. Orient towards thrive. Notice the big patterns of good right now.
And what I see is so fascinating, we’re getting grounded. Like literally, we’re grounded in our own home. We’re spending more time with our most close-knit relationships, and we’re using technology for high-level relationships. And this is something I’m seeing an absolute across-the-board explosion in. And I bet you guys are too, at Sounds True, where like, I put out a thing to do a talk tomorrow for mindset, for wellness pros, of like, how do you get your mindset aligned to the possibilities right now? And our signup rates are at like, 75 percent. It’s really way higher than normal. It’s way higher than normal. And the only thing I can attribute it to is like, well, it’s the right message at the right time. Right?
And we’re seeing this in terms of, I was just on a networking call where it was like, it was all about what you have to give and what you want to get. And people giving offers were so incredibly generous. And we’re seeing a level of human generosity, of caring for our neighbors, again in a way that we have forgotten about, I would say, as a global culture. So, there’s a lot of that going on.
Now, if we can remember this, and if we can bring this forward into our future, and for those who haven’t adopted technology, like they don’t know how to get online now they’re starting to—some people are like learning how to use FaceTime right now on their iPhone, or whatever. They’re learning how to use Zoom conferencing. Zoom is no longer able to keep up with like—we’ve used Zoom forever and we have a very fast turnaround with uploading our coaching call. For the first time ever in the last 24 hours, Zoom is behind in getting up our recordings. I don’t see that as a problem from Zoom. I get that Zoom trying to serve a way bigger marketplace right now. And to me that’s exciting, that more people can get into the deeper conversations that they want, whether it’s for work or whether it’s for personal growth. And that to me is super exciting.
TS: And just one final question for you. The title, Master of You, you were very clear when you were describing the five elements. When it comes to something like space, the space we can control, what we can have mastery over, the picture that’s on my wall right now that I’ve realized I want to take down. Clearly I can be the master of that. I’m curious, though, how you would respond to someone who says,” Master of You? Really? Am I really going to be a master? Aren’t I always going to be kind of on some type of aspirational curve?” This whole idea of being a master, is that really possible?
CS: Sure. Yes. Let’s look historically again, like there’s always masters. There’s masters and there’s grandmasters. I think that we’d call it Grandmaster of You, like that would set the number a little too high. But yes, that’s the deal. That to me is also the core teaching and the true path of enlightenment is that, yes. You get to run your own show. You get to think your own thoughts. You get to live your own ambitions. There’s certain times and places and there are certain things that happened in history that can facilitate or debilitate you from doing that. But like, you always get you. You always get responsibility or your ability to respond.
And so, all I’m doing here is being like, “Hey, from all that I could figure out and all this study I’ve done, and all the coaching I’ve done and yoga and Ayurveda and life coaching and lifestyle design coaching and the startup and running an online business and team for a while,
from when I can figure it out, these elements are super obvious. Once you get it, it’s right there.” And once you start to get, “OK, I’ve got a really got these five domains—I’ve got my body, that’s earth. I’ve got my space or my home, and that’s ether. I’ve got my calendar, and that’s my time. I’ve got my deep desire of what I want to do, and that’s my fire. That’s my ambition. And I’ve got my integrity and my experience of flow. That’s my water.” Now, at any point in time I can do just a quick check in of like, “What needs help? What do I need to put a little more time and energy into right now? What deserves my focus?”
And in the book, as you know, there’s just a lot of exercises to awaken these superpowers. So, anybody can awaken these super powers. Anyone can become self-mastered in your disability to attune to what you want to become next. So no, you’re never done. No, you’re never going to not have an aspiration. That’s not the point. The point in many ways at the end of the day, what keeps me going is that like, I feel like we’ve got some really big opportunities as a human species right now. And we also have some very big issues as a human species right now. How do we awaken our own unique desire to serve, and how do we step into that, and how do we keep stepping bigger into our ability to be the biggest part of the solutions that we can dream of? That to me, that’s the big, broad end goal that never ends. And yet people can just take this down to the level of like, “I just want to have control of my time, and I want to spend more time with my kids.” Great. Master of You is going to help you right there as well.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Cate Stillman. She’s written a new book Master of You: A Five-Point System to Synchronize Your Body, Your Home and Your Time with Your Ambition. She’s also the author of a previous book with Sounds True called Body Thrive. Cate, you’re so strong, grounded, and the five elements, those powers, they are strong in you. The force is strong. Thank you so much.
CS: [Laughs] Oh, my pleasure, Tami. It’s such an honor to be a Sounds True author.
TS: Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at SoundsTrue.com/podcast. And if you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. And also, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you, and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe we can create kinder and wiser world. SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.
