“[W]ellbeing is something that we all need. Wellness is something that we're being sold.”
~Dr. Shailla Vaidya
This is the third installment of the Women + Wellbeing Interview Series. Today’s interview is with
, who I had the pleasure of learning from in a Yoga for Women’s Wellbeing workshop that I attended last year. I love that Dr. Vaidya blends together the perspectives of Western medicine and Eastern philosophy. Her work these days focuses a lot on burnout, especially with physicians. Burnout is something I’ve personally experienced multiple times and I get questions from my students often about how best to handle it.Meet. Dr. Shailla Vaidya
Dr. Shailla Vaidya MD MP CCFP(EM) C-IAYT is a physician focused on Mind-Body Medicine in Toronto, Canada. She is trained in Family and Emergency Medicine, as well as Yoga Therapy, and holds a Master’s in Public Health from Harvard University. For over 20 years, she has practiced with diverse and marginalized populations, innovating healthcare.
Dr. Vaidya combines Eastern Wisdom with Western Medicine to help people heal from stress. She has created multiple trauma-informed, therapeutic Yoga and Lifestyle Medicine programs. These include the Rest, Reset Rise! Burnout Recovery Program, the Reconnect Program for Brain Injury and Neuroinflammatory Conditions, as well as the Live Better Lifestyle Medicine Program. She is also teacher-trained in the Mindful Self-Compassion Program and Self-Compassion for Healthcare Communities.
Dr. Vaidya is a dynamic speaker who engages her audience on the science of stress, the process of yoga, and the importance of compassion for personal well-being and organizational resilience. You can follow her work and writing by subscribing to her Substack publication, Re-Union.
The Interview
This interview has been edited slightly for clarity and brevity.
ASHLEY ZUBERI: A lot of the work you do now is with burnout. I want to hear some of your perspectives on burnout, but also I want to hear your perspective as a physician because you straddle both of these worlds and that's quite unique. What does wellness mean to you?
DR. SHAILLA VAIDYA: I actually love that you're calling this women's wellbeing as opposed to wellness because I think the “wellness industrial complex” gets taken on as a form of capitalism. I really think wellbeing comes back to when you're actually well in your body, meaning that you feel good, you have energy, you’re able to perform your activities of daily living and work, and do all the other things that make life worth living. This whole idea of “wellness” has become about striving to do other things when we're already so busy in our lives.
Right now wellbeing is something that we all need. Wellness is something that we're being sold. To me, they're very different things. Wellbeing is really coming back to rediscovering who we are after life happens and being able to live from that place.
ASHLEY: I love that. What is the difference to you between health and wellness?
SHAILLA: I don't know that I see a lot of difference between health and wellbeing. For me, it's very much intertwined. A lot of people have ideas about what it means to be healthy—you must have a slim body, you must fit in certain clothes, you must look a certain way and do certain things. Being healthy is so much more than that because we know our bodies change over time and we know that we have so many different types of bodies. We can all be healthy in our body as it is and eat well, sleep well, and have wonderful relationships.
Health sometimes can be compromised by so much that's happening in our society. Right now we're going through this crazy amount of inflation. The cost of food is going up, the cost of shelter is going up, and so many things are causing us stress that may contribute to us being ill. Being healthy can encompass so much but we can be well within an unhealthy environment. We might not be thriving and we might not actually be able to pursue the things that we want to pursue because there's so many other things happening in the world. There's internal wellbeing, there's how we relate with our environment, and then how we are in the bigger sphere of economies and societies. It's complicated, actually.
ASHLEY: I think that's why it's so easy for people to just default to “let's sell you wellness.”
SHAILLA: I think that creates more problems. We think we have complete control over everything that makes us well. I think that isolates us from people who don't have all the choices that we may have—the privileges that we may have—to be well.
Then you get the libertarianism aspect where someone might think, “I'm taking care of my body, so I should be okay, and I don't care about you,” as opposed to looking at how the community needs to be well for all of us to be well and to be healthy.
I see the wellness industrial complex as taking advantage of those who have money and maybe even those who don't, but who choose to spend on it. It's a privilege.
The onus is on us as individuals. Obviously we have to take responsibility for our own wellness. Only we can do that for ourselves. Nobody else can do that. If we accept that, then it's also accepting that taking this pill or these supplements aren't necessarily going to bring that to us either.
It's challenging, but I think we have to be in charge of our wellness and we also have to recognize that our wellness is interconnected to everybody else's wellness.
ASHLEY: Why is it so hard for women to be well?
SHAILLA: Women do so much in society that is not compensated. We’re working the second shift, we're taking care of everybody else. We're mothering, grandmothering. Our jobs never end and we're socialized to put everybody else first. If we didn’t, everybody would die. If the women weren't doing the jobs, people would suffer.
We have this important role in society and yet it's not very well compensated. And also we've lost our community around that where our families were all living together and caring for the family was a multi-generational affair. Now, we're more isolated. We have more of a nuclear family and there's more that's falling on to the hands of women. And that's not to say men don’t do things. There's lots of fabulous men out there doing a lot of wonderful things. But then there's just certain physical and bodily things that women do better or are more used to doing. I don't want to say better or worse because you can't really compare apples and oranges, but I think that we carry a lot right now in this day and age.
There's a lot of expectations on women. We have a lot of expectations for ourselves. We've been sold this idea that we can do anything and we can, but we might not be able to do it all at the same time. I think what needs to happen is we need to slow down. We’re just not getting enough rest. We’re not getting enough time to reconnect and to replenish ourselves. Often we have to do that in community and I think the pandemic made it so much worse because now all of a sudden the kids were home, we were working, there was a lot on women's plates.
ASHLEY: Do you have kids, Shailla?
SHAILLA: I actually don't have children, but I'm an aunt and I'm a daughter to elderly parents. I have lots of caregiving responsibilities and I've been a physician. Though I'm not a mother, I don't feel like I'm doing less.
Don't get me wrong. I think mothering is a huge time commitment. I just think that all through time we've always had the aunts. In my family, if everybody was busy with their kids and I was the one who was free then I would have had to pick that task up. I'm thinking of my neighbors who don't have kids and yet they're the ones running around looking after everybody's aunts and uncles and all the elderly because they're not busy taking their kids to whatever on Saturday afternoon.
I don't think it's unusual to not have children. And I also think our family units and society still depends on everyone to get stuff done. I do sympathize with the mothers during the pandemic, because they had a lot to carry.
ASHLEY: As you mentioned, you're a physician. You also have this background in yoga. Can you speak a little bit to the intersection of spirituality and science?
SHAILLA: I don't see it as separate. I think some people think spirituality is different than science. I think science is actually proving what's spiritual. I think that's a really beautiful place for us to be right now in this day and age. Yoga for me is something I grew up with as part of my culture. But I also grew up with lots of scientists.
We grew up to question everything. Question yoga, question the teachings, question whatever you learned and ask, does it make sense? Is it applicable? Certain spiritual traditions and wisdom traditions have stood the test of time because they still make sense. They've not been contradicted. Science is now proving them. I really think that this intersection is becoming closer and closer as our technology becomes better able to measure things. The questions we're asking in science around spirituality are starting to demonstrate effects as well. We know that the most resilient people are the ones who have a spiritual community or spiritual practice. We can see this in their resiliency. We can see this in all the other factors that come up.
I don't really see that much of a difference between spirituality and science. People who are spiritual and who are scientific, both are people who are seeking. They seek truth, they seek answers. They practice. People who want to hijack spirituality or hijack science will poopoo either side, but, when you actually understand it, what makes good science and what is sound spirituality, the two, for me, are actually in line. What you need to be a good scientist is to be curious, to be observant. These are the things you need in your spiritual practice as well.
ASHLEY: I love that you bring up this questioning, because to me yoga is unique because it asks you to question everything. If you compare it to other world religions or types of spiritual practices you don't always see that. And I love the questioning.
SHAILLA: The not-questioning comes when a spiritual practice is hijacked for another purpose. If we look at contemplative traditions in general, they're contemplating. There's wisdom in Christianity, there's wisdom in Judaism, there's wisdom in Islam, there's wisdom in all of them. They were all contemplative traditions and yet when we're taught not to question, to believe, or have faith without questioning, that's often when we're in situations where the knowledge has been hijacked by someone who wants people to follow. And I think that has been done with religion.
I see that a lot in my sister-in-law’s family. How she has described her upbringing was very much not to question things, that this is how it is. Just put your head down, keep going. And for some people that's a survival mechanism. Maybe they don't question it and maybe it still gives them back things. And so they follow.
ASHLEY: Can you speak a little more about the work you do with burnout and share a little bit of your story?
SHAILLA: When we get burnt out we often wake up going like, “What the hell? Who am I? Why am I doing this? How did I get here?” We start asking those questions. I started off as an emergency doctor and I burned out from that. I was practicing yoga while I was doing emergency medicine, but really it was the questioning and the philosophy that brought me back to what my values were. Physiologically as I was burning out and I was practicing yoga I could feel the changes in my body. I could feel it was happening.
For so many of us we get into yoga because it feels good. When I teach these practices for physicians, they don't really want to know the science because they're like, “Yeah, yeah, the science, we get it. But we know it feels good so we know it's changing something.”
After emergency medicine, I went into family practice. I was introducing yoga to my patients because they were coming in with symptoms that I could really relate to around fatigue, sleep issues, anxiety, and depression. So I was just sharing what I did. At the time I was working in a community that had a large South Asian immigrant base, and they were actually quite removed from their practice and the traditions of their culture. They immigrated to Canada, they were working, living the immigrant life or the life of anyone who's got a family, a job, trying to make it, trying to pay the mortgage, trying to establish themselves. You could see the effects of stress on them. I would bring them back to the practices of yoga and the focus of the mind. Maybe they had back pain and we would do some asana. Maybe it was stress and anxiety and we would do breathing techniques. It just started to become part of my practice. And for them, because it was a part of their culture, it was something that they knew. It really tied them back to what their grandparents had taught them or what they'd seen in their family. I didn't actually have to do as much with them because once they got onto that they started to bring those practices back to themselves.
They knew it was working and I could really see the changes that they were making consciously in their lifestyle, their diet, and their sleep. Then I just started to use the same practices with my non-South Asian patients and they were equally getting better.
One day, it was about 2010 or 2011, I started to screen my patients for adverse childhood experience scores, and what I noticed was a lot of the people who had adversity in childhood, it would be related to increased depression, anxiety, and physiological disease. When I realized that a lot of the people who I was pulling out the yoga tools for had these higher scores—because the regular medical toolbox that I'd been taught, the Western toolbox, wasn't really helping them—I made that connection that, “Oh my goodness, all these people are getting better. These practices seem to be calming their nervous systems.” Then it was a no-brainer to start to do it more.
At that time I became more aware of the research around mindfulness, stress, polyvagal theory. In my own self, I was going through a pretty toxic workplace environment. Even though I loved my patients and I love the work, management where I was working was incredibly toxic. There were some things going on in the background that they were trying to cover up. After that experience I was totally burnt out and all I could do was go to yoga. That gave me comfort—go to yoga, release this, let this go. I knew with the research that I'd read that this was something I wanted to formalize in my practice. I was doing it as part of my day-to-day with certain patients, but I really wanted to make this my practice.
That's when I decided to get my yoga teacher training and pursue yoga therapy training. It's changed my life and I know this is what I’m supposed to be doing. It really brings back a lot of ancestral knowledge. I think back to conversations I've had with uncles of mine and aunts who have taught me things through time. I’m just pulling it back together—it makes sense.
The next time that burnout came was when I had a concussion. Modern medicine as I was able to access it wasn't helping. I had this insider view because I'd worked with concussion patients. I understood at that point the stress response, trauma, the importance of completing trauma, the neurophysiology of neuroplasticity, inflammation. At that point I would say, once again, yoga saved my life.
ASHLEY: What do you do for your own wellbeing then? You've mentioned your yoga practice. Is there one particular thing that you are drawn toward?
SHAILLA: There are times when pranayama practices really helped me. We're doing this interview in the winter, just coming into spring. I find in the heaviness of this season—it’s kapha season—I have to come back to the asana that is suitable for me in this moment but also challenges me. Breathing helps me focus.
And then, of course, my meditation practice. I meditate every night. I do abhyanga, which is more of an Ayurvedic practice. I also try to follow Ayurvedic principles in what I'm eating, which is not always easy. But when I do, boy, do I notice a difference. That's what I come back to.
ASHLEY: What has most helped you reconnect with your authentic self?
SHAILLA: I do the asana, the pranayama, the meditation. That brings me closer to who I am, it gives me clarity around what I want to do next or where I want to focus my energy. If I don't focus my energy, I find it just gets dissipated during the day.
For me, waking up on time, doing a practice in the morning to help me center, taking my dog for a walk, coming back and having breakfast, following the energy of the day, and making sure that I'm not overdoing it is what my practice is.
It's that mindfulness practice—I don't actually like the word mindfulness. I feel in Western culture we get stuck in the mind. In Eastern culture, we think of ourselves as separate from the mind. My practice makes me more aware of who I am aside from my thoughts, aside from what I think I should be doing.
It helps me center so I can develop clarity around what I would like to pursue next, what my body needs, what kind of discipline I need in my life, or what kind of actions I need to really bring me back to a place where I feel whole and feel good.
ASHLEY: Is there anything else you want to add?
SHAILLA: I think that we're so busy as women that we actually are disconnected from nature and our natural cycles. That's the biggest thing to recognize as women: we do cycle.
We cycle through the day, we cycle through the month, we have a menstrual cycle until we don't have one anymore. I feel like we're going so fast and we're striving so much in our society. For women to stop and come back to themselves, have compassion for all that we're doing, and to really listen to what our bodies are telling us is so important. What our body needs is often the opposite of what society needs us to do. Trying to find that balance is very difficult, but it's so important for our health and our wellbeing.