Symptoms as Messages, Ayurveda, Manifesting Illness | Gina Boyd

Send us Fan Mail Gina Marie Boyd is an integrative health practitioner, a spiritual counselor, and a PhD candidate in transpersonal counseling. Her dissertation is called *Symptoms as Messages*, and the whole idea is that the things we're feeling inside of our bodies are actually trying to tell us something. Gina's route here was not a straight line. Investment banking in her twenties, then quitting to do improv and stand-up in Hollywood without telling her family. Then MasterChef (\*ahem\*), a food column, and the presidency of a company, complete with the Gucci loafers and the private jet. Then losing all of it, nearly dying, and walking into an AA meeting in Austin thinking, I am nothing like you people. This conversation covers health, addiction, Ayurveda, the biohacking boom, why the wellness internet feels leaderless, and what happens when spirituality starts telling people what to believe. In this episode: • What transpersonal counseling actually is, and what it does that regular therapy doesn't • Investment banking to secret stand-up: pretending to drive to work and going to improv class instead • MasterChef, steak tartare at the audition, and the producers deciding she "cannot be managed" • Losing everything, and the synchronicity that got her into her first meeting • Raised atheist, with no higher power to hand anything over to • So what is health? A 5,000-year-old answer from Ayurveda • The biohacking question nobody asks: if you're this obsessed with staying here, what are you afraid of losing? • Adding versus subtracting, and why balance is the least exciting right answer • Why everyone online is hunting for one system to believe in, and what that costs • Symptoms as messages, including the client eating spicy food every single night • Correlation, causation, and why stress and illness are so hard to talk about honestly • Science versus scientism, by way of Charles Tart • Thomas Kuhn, paradigms, and why the anomalies piling up right now are being ignored for social reasons rather than scientific ones • Why Gina won't tell anyone what to believe, and what she makes of spiritual leaders who do • Did I manifest this? The real danger in "you created your own illness" • Moving from "what's wrong with me" to "what is this trying to show me" • One book to start with, one thing she was wrong about, and a symptom she's reading in her own body right now Chapters 00:00 Welcome  03:32 What is transpersonal counseling?  06:43 Banking, then secretly doing stand-up  07:32 MasterChef, and "she cannot be managed"  11:29 From food TV to integrative health  13:05 Losing everything  14:39 The first meeting in Austin  15:17 Raised atheist, and what came next  18:08 So what is health?  19:41 Biohacking, and what optimizers are afraid of  21:06 Adding versus subtracting  26:40 A leaderless moment, and everyone looking for a system  28:49 Why it isn't one size fits all  34:02 Successful, sick and using  38:00 Symptoms as messages  41:40 Energy, stress and the profit motive  43:31 Why science and spirituality get treated as enemies  47:26 Science versus scientism  49:02 Paradigms, and why anomalies get ignored  52:07 Telling people what to believe  55:55 Did I manifest this?  59:50 From "what's wrong with me" to "what is this showing me"  1:01:59 A book to start with  1:04:04 One thing she was wrong about  1:05:37 What twenty years of addiction gave her  1:06:51 A symptom she's reading right now WTF Is Anything? is the podcast from Disco, a curated monthly experience that explores consciousness, reality and the unknown. Join us at jointhedisco.com.