Restoring Balance With Mindful Eating, Meditation & Movement with Deborah Charnes
Episode #51: Show Notes
Meditation doesn't mean sitting still for an hour, and yoga is so much more than pretzel poses. In this episode, I sit down with certified yoga therapist Deborah Charnes to explore how ancient wellness practices can transform your modern health challenges.
Deborah shares her personal journey from childhood chronic pain to becoming a bilingual yoga therapist and author of From the Boxing Ring to the Ashram. This conversation is packed with practical wisdom about yogic diet principles, Ayurvedic constitutions, and how to use lifestyle changes as powerful healing tools.
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Deborah’s Childhood Health Challenges
Deborah's wellness journey began early. As an adolescent, she experienced severe back pain and severe stomach problems.
Fortunately, her parents sent her to specialists who recommended lifestyle changes rather than surgery or drugs. From a young age, Deborah learned to incorporate modifications like putting a piece of wood underneath her mattress for a firmer sleeping surface.
These early experiences taught her about postural alignment and core strengthening, though she didn't know those terms at the time. Both her back and stomach are chronic issues that will be with her forever, but they haven't had any negative side effects for a very long time because of the way she manages them.
What is Yoga Therapy
Most people don't know what a yoga therapist actually does. As Deborah explains, yoga therapy is more therapy than yoga. The physical component of yoga is just one aspect of this comprehensive approach to wellness.
In the Western world, yoga is often seen as fast-paced, heat-building body exercise. Deborah emphasizes that yoga is not about doing a handstand or pretzel poses. The vinyasa style of yoga has become so popular in the West, but true yoga is about being comfortable in your seat.
True yoga is a lifestyle that incorporates many different components. The main branches that Deborah uses with all her students and clients include breathwork, which is becoming more popular now, and meditation.
Meditation Doesn't Have to Mean Sitting Still
This is one of my favorite topics from our conversation because I'm definitely someone who can't sit still for long periods. Deborah's approach to meditation is refreshingly practical.
From an Ayurvedic standpoint, we're all born with certain constitutions. Some people's constitutions are kind of ADHD, Type A prone. This is so common in the West, partly because of the way our culture pushes people to be.
While it's possible to sit quiet and meditate like the Buddha for an hour or more, there are so many other ways to enjoy meditating or being mindful. Deborah's favorite meditation practices include:
Jigsaw puzzles, which she's been doing since she was a kid
Adult coloring books with nice soothing images
Weeding or gardening
The key is that meditation isn't about shutting off your brain. It's about focusing it. When you're doing a coloring book, jigsaw puzzle, or weeding, you're focusing on your task and hopefully your mind isn't wandering as much to thoughts like "What am I gonna wear tomorrow?" or "What am I going to eat today?"
It's really about developing a mindful attitude, which ideally you turn on every day throughout the day.
The Three Pillars of a Yogic Diet
Deborah has created on-demand workshops about the yogic diet because she wanted to reach more people. Her book contains two or three chapters that approach this topic from different aspects. The yogic diet has three main pillars:
Pillar #1: Mindfulness
Our Western society teaches people to go to the drive-through, pick up food or stick it in the microwave, and stuff it in your mouth while driving, watching TV, or on a Zoom call. This is completely different from how our grandparents or great-grandparents cooked and ate.
Deborah has great respect for people who have their own gardens or do foraging and embrace the whole slow-cooking concept. What's so important is to know the source of your food.
The lifestyle of quick eating, where your meal is done in 60 seconds and maybe finished eating in two minutes, is not healthy for so many reasons. We need to be more mindful about what we consume, how we consume, and why we consume it.
Another important element is cooking with love and serving with love, which is so common in many cultures and creates healthier meals regardless of what you eat.
Pillar #2: Do No Harm
From a yogic perspective, the first rule of law in yoga is "do no harm." This applies in three ways:
Do no harm to yourself. Eating fast food three times a day is definitely not healthy for you.
Do no harm to any other living being. A true yogi follows a vegetarian diet, though Deborah doesn't tell her clients and students they must be vegetarian. She tells them they need to be mindful about what they eat and the source of what they're eating.
If people are going to eat eggs, she recommends free-range eggs. She's lived in multiple countries where it was common for people to have their own chickens for fresh eggs, or their own cows for fresh milk and homemade cheese. This is a much healthier approach for many reasons, and traditionally these animals are treated without harm and with love.
Do no harm to the planet. We have done so much harm to the planet for so many reasons, and there are so many things about our diet that contribute to this harm.
Pillar #3: Everyone is Different
This pillar comes from the Ayurvedic principle that what you need and what's best for you may not be what's best for someone else.
Deborah uses the example of her mom, who thought everyone should drink a quart of milk a day because that was what she was taught. They lived in the Midwest where there's a lot of dairy. Her mother was lactose intolerant but still drank that quart of milk daily, just switching to lactose-free milk.
From an Ayurvedic perspective, you are born with your constitution, and then life, the time of day, the season, and what's going on around you affect it. Some constitutions do very well with dairy. Other constitutions don't do well with dairy at all.
Some people need cooling foods like peppermint. Other people need heating foods, and when Deborah says heating, she doesn't mean the temperature but rather spicy foods.
The Connection Between TCM and Ayurveda
I was curious about how traditional Chinese medicine relates to Ayurveda, and Deborah found so many similarities between the elements in TCM and Ayurveda. While they're not identical, there are many commonalities.
One similarity is the fire element. In TCM, practitioners will say you have too much fire or not enough fire. An entire chapter in Deborah's book is about digestive fire.
What most people don't recognize, but TCM does, is that if you have too much or not enough fire, it's not just about digestion. It's not just about heating up your body and staying warm. Deborah wears a sweater even with her windows open on a beautiful day because she doesn't have a lot of fire.
Experts talk about how if you don't have enough digestive fire, it can even affect your emotional states. The digestive fire is your engine, and if it's not properly tuned, you're gonna have problems beyond just digestion.
Simple Herbal Tea Recipe for Better Digestion
Deborah makes her own little herbal teas that are so inexpensive and appropriate for people of all constitutions. The basic recipe is simple:
Fennel seeds
Coriander seeds
Cumin seeds
This tea is good for everybody and costs almost nothing to make. Deborah always has her homemade herbal teas on an empty stomach in the morning, and it's also great to have before bed.
She also makes a variation that adds cloves, which she loves for the smell and flavor. However, she notes that cloves are not for every constitution, so that version isn't recommended for everyone.
Using Diet as a Therapeutic Tool
Every yoga therapist has to have the same checkmarks to be certified by the International Association of Yoga Therapists. It's a pretty rigorous review process, but all yoga therapists are different because they come to yoga therapy with different backgrounds.
Many yoga therapists might be MDs or mental healthcare practitioners. They might have specialty focus areas such as Parkinson's or heart health.
Deborah's approach is that first and foremost we have to be balanced. That's why she likes TCM, because it's all about being balanced and there are many different ways of getting balanced, including acupuncture with needles. Deborah has been having acupuncture done on herself for almost 40 years.
From a food perspective, one of the easiest ways to get balance is with your diet. Throughout her entire life, Deborah has known what her constitution was at conception and how it alters. If she feels it's getting out of whack, one of the easiest quick fixes, though it doesn't mean it's gonna fix it completely, is through diet.
She's not talking about counting calories. She's talking about what spices may be better to incorporate or to remove. And it's more than spices, but that's just something easy that you can add.
Teaching Free Spanish Yoga Classes
One aspect of Deborah's work that really touched me was her commitment to offering free Spanish language yoga classes for women and children in different countries.
The first time she taught a free class in Spanish was to cancer survivors in Dallas through an organization in Gilda Radner's name. Gilda was a comedian who succumbed to cancer when she was very young. That first class was specifically for cancer survivors in Dallas, all women of a certain age.
Through her travels, Deborah has taught at an elementary school in Costa Rica, taught in Nicaragua two years in a row, and taught for six weeks to high school students in Belize.
She emphasizes that our Western expectations are ridiculous. You should be able to do yoga anytime, any place, anywhere. You don't need yoga attire. You don't need a yoga mat.
In the schools in Costa Rica and Belize, they were on concrete floors and just moved the desks aside. They were in small spaces with no AC in very hot, humid conditions. In Nicaragua, she worked with both visitors from all over and hotel and restaurant employees.
Why Deborah Wrote Her Book
In reality, yoga therapy traditionally involves working one-on-one and you don't have a whole lot of clients. The number of people you can positively affect is gonna be a very small universe.
As soon as Deborah became a yoga therapist, she started to offer therapeutic workshops. The difference between yoga therapy and therapeutic workshops is that workshops take something that might have common threads and address them in a group setting.
For example, she does Gutsy Yoga for digestive disorders and Dem Bones for bone health. From a therapeutic workshop perspective, she tries to help a wider variety of people, but it's not the one-on-one approach.
Writing a book allowed her to reach so many more people. The concept of her book is rooted in one of the practices in yoga: to give thanks to all the teachers who have shaped you along your way. Deborah thinks this is a beautiful practice that everyone should do.
Her book has 12 chapters, and each chapter is based on a different guru of hers around the world. After the 12 chapters, there's a 13th, kind of an extra, which acknowledges her mom.
Lifelong Learning Journey
Like me, Deborah is someone who will never stop learning. There's always something new to discover. She has many certifications in a variety of health and wellness areas, and most of them aren't even on her website because when you're a lifelong learner, they keep accumulating.
As a yoga therapist, with every day and every client, Deborah always feels there's so much more to learn. She tries to incorporate different elements into the different things she offers.
Some of the modalities she has great respect for include Reiki (she's a Reiki master) and reflexology. She has studied both traditional reflexology and marma, which is Ayurvedic reflexology. Sometimes she offers people a combined Reiki and marma or reflexology session to have both elements together.
Women's Health & Yoga
In the last two years, Deborah has taken more than 150 continuing education credit hours all about women's reproductive health, prenatal yoga, postpartum yoga, and yoga for fertility.
This focus came about because her daughter was pregnant and facing some hurdles. Deborah realized there was so much she didn't know, even though she'd been doing yoga all her life.
Interestingly, Deborah came to yoga on her own without knowing what yoga was. She instinctively knew that breathwork and meditation were the only things that helped her stomach. The diet helped, but breathwork and meditation really made the difference. She found these practices without ever having heard of breathwork or meditation.
Her daughter was born almost 40 years ago, and Deborah did all components of yoga throughout her pregnancy. As soon as her daughter was born, she pretty much started everything back again. Learning more about what's right and wrong for pregnant women, she realized she shouldn't have done some of those things.
What's fascinating from the Ayurvedic lens is that there are so many commonalities between what a pregnant woman should do, what a woman on her period should do, and what a menopausal or postmenopausal woman should do. Those three times in a woman's life require different approaches.
In reality, yoga was created by and for men. Women have different needs. In our society, and Deborah includes herself in this, we think we have to do what the guys do. We don't want to be holding ourselves back. We want to be superwomen.
But Deborah learned that superwomen need to chill out. They need to get grounded. They need a more cooling practice.
Women didn't even practice yoga until maybe a generation or two ago. Deborah recommends a book called The Goddess Pose, which talks about one of the first women in yoga.
When Your Constitution is Out of Balance
We're supposed to be balancing ourselves with everything we do, working toward homeostasis. Deborah shared a fascinating insight about diet and balance.
Little children, particularly those under a year old, supposedly eat what they need to eat. If you're not giving them candy, but if you give them an apple, a piece of bread, or a piece of chicken, they supposedly instinctively pick what their bodies need.
Unfortunately, as we develop, we create cravings. In addition to cravings, we have what society tells us we need to eat. Society taught Deborah's mom that she needed one quart of milk a day. Other countries don't do that at all.
Society teaches you that you have to eat certain foods in a certain way. Then you develop cravings, and the more you give into those cravings, it's just like with alcohol or drugs. The more you give in, the harder it is to pull back.
It's very easy to be addicted to sugars, soft drinks (which are sugary), caffeine (which is considered a drug), carbs, and cheese. There are so many different foods we can become addicted to, and if you eat too much of them, it puts you out of balance.
How Acupuncture Led to Balance
Deborah had a shoulder injury for almost a year. She did physical therapy and got non-traditional treatment. Finally, she got acupuncture and did three different sets of treatments. After the acupuncture, her shoulder reset and rebalanced.
She says that sometimes we really need something to work those meridians and unblock whatever is blocking us. She also mentioned that the way she was taught yin yoga, she learned to lead it as if it were needle-less acupuncture. When she does yin yoga, she's stimulating her meridians and unblocking them.
It's amazing how meridian wellness therapies work so effectively and often so quickly.
Final Thoughts
We have a saying on this show: There is no perfect. But with the wisdom Deborah shares about yoga therapy, Ayurvedic principles, and mindful living, we can certainly get closer to balanced, healthy lives.
Meet Our Guest: Deborah Charnes
Author of the award-winning self-help book, "From the Boxing Ring to the Ashram," Deborah Charnes is a bilingual Certified Yoga Therapist (C-IAYT). She has coached tumbling two-year-old toddlers and mentally spry 90-year-olds. Deborah has led therapeutic workshops and yoga classes around the world. She has practiced all eight limbs of yoga for 50 years. She immerses herself in the ancient teachings as well as gleaning insight from modern medicine and tech findings. Moreover, she doesn't stop learning from a wide scope of holistic modalities.
Meet Our Host: Jennifer Robin O’Keefe
Jennifer Robin serves as a relatable, down-to-earth, REAL Wellness & Success Coach. She’s not a fancy, perfect makeup, airbrushed kind of woman. She’s been told many times, in a variety of environments, that she’s easy to talk to, and makes others feel welcome and comfortable. Her mission in life is both simple and profound: to make others feel worthy.
Professionally, Jennifer holds several wellness certifications including Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) Tapping, Thought Field Therapy (TFT) Tapping, Reiki, and more. She continuously expands her knowledge in the fields of Qi Gong, Xien Gong, Vibration/Energy Wellness and Natural Health. She also studied extensively with Jack Canfield, and serves as a Certified Canfield Trainer, authorized to teach "The Success Principles."
She’s an active reader and researcher who loves to learn, and one of her biggest joys is teaching and sharing what she’s discovered with others.