Avanti Kumar-Singh, MD: The Ayurvedic Longevity Prescription

December 24, 2024

Avanti Kumar-Singh, MD: The Ayurvedic Longevity Prescription

Avanti Kumar-Singh — December 24, 2024

The term Ayurveda is traditionally defined as “the science of life.” Physician and leading Ayurvedic teacher Dr. Avanti Kumar-Singh has another definition: she calls it “the knowledge of longevity.” In this podcast, join Tami Simon in conversation with Dr. Kumar-Singh about her new book, The Longevity Formula. Take a listen as they discuss the many ways that Ayurveda can support high-quality living, especially in your later years, by increasing cellular repair, decreasing inflammation, and keeping you connected with “your people and your purpose.”

Learn more about integrating Ayurvedic principles into Western medicine; lifespan versus health span; vitality, enthusiasm, and joy; forging stronger ties with your community and purpose; the causes and effects of cellular damage; the nine mechanisms of aging; bringing prana, or life-force energy, directly into your body through your natural surroundings and your diet; how all health and illness begins with the energetic body; what nourishment means in the Ayurvedic perspective; the Ayurvedic understanding of body tissues; good inflammation (yes, that’s a thing!); five Ayurvedic lifestyle interventions you can explore today; breathwork and the adage, “the inhale excites you and the exhale relaxes you”; giving and receiving love; the five doshas, or elements; and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

Avanti Kumar-Singh, MD, is an internationally recognized Ayurveda practitioner, certified yoga therapist, and former ER doctor. Her approach brings together Western medicine with the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda that comes from her South Asian lineage. Dr. Kumar-Singh is director of Ayurveda at BIÂN Chicago, hosts The Healing Catalyst podcast, and offers courses on integrative medicine. She is the author of The Health Catalyst and has been featured in the Huffington Post, Goop, mindbodygreen, and more. Learn more at avantikumarsingh.com.

Author photo © Pooja Shah

900 Episodes and Counting…

Subscribe to Insights at the Edge to hear all of Tami’s interviews (transcripts available too!), featuring Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Adyashanti, and many more.

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Each week on Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon interviews leading voices in the Mind/Body/Spirit space about a vast spectrum of fascinating ideas. Since 2009, Tami and her guests have been exploring the edge of understanding, nearly 1,000 episodes on the honest work of change, including spiritual discovery, awakening, intuition, purpose, trauma, and grief.

Photo © Jason Elias

Also By Author

No other posts by author

You Might Also Enjoy

Kimberly Ann Johnson: “Becoming a Sexual Alchemi...

What if aging isn’t the slow closing of your erotic life, but the doorway into its most alive season?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Kimberly Ann Johnson—sexological body worker, somatic experiencing practitioner, birth doula, and author of the new Sounds True book Erotic Seasons: Tuning In to the Rhythms of Women’s Sexuality and Spirituality—about what she calls erotic sovereignty, and the sentence that closes her book: the female body is its own spiritual path.

Join Tami and Kimberly to explore:

  • Erotic sovereignty—your relationship to your own life force, and why it stays with you across every season
  • Why the goal isn’t a more regulated nervous system, but a more responsive one, and what it means to run more charge
  • The four erotic seasons—maiden, mother, virgin, crone—and the surprising reason virgin comes after mother
  • Why hormonal transitions are “wet clay”: golden opportunities for repatterning that our culture teaches us to rush past
  • Menopause as a death rehearsal, and the life review that arrives decades before we expect it
  • Hot sex and warm sex—widening the range beyond adrenaline, and learning the language of the pause
  • “Hormones are gods”: the collective endocrine system, and why living intergenerationally may be the original hormone therapy
  • Becoming a sexual alchemist—arousal as healing energy, and why care is the whole ethic

Whether you are 25 or 75, Kimberly offers a map for meeting your body’s changes as thresholds rather than losses.

Please note: this episode includes candid discussion of sexual abuse and sexual wounding, including Kimberly Ann Johnson’s own experience.

Listen now, and meet your body as the path. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

The Point of Insight | Our Medicine Lives in the Wound


What if the very thing that wounded you is the source of the medicine you’re here to give?

In this month’s Point of Insight, Tami Simon shares a personal story: minutes before going live with an archetypal astrologer, she was told—correctly, and within seconds—that she carried “the mother of all mother wounds.” That single moment became the culmination of a much longer, gradual unfolding: a lifetime’s worth of “drops,” from a mentor she called the Queen of the Reframe, to an interview with yoga teacher and activist Seane Corn titled “Your Pain Is Your Purpose,” to an email from a business coach whose four simple words reframed everything—your karma is your dharma.

Join Tami as she reflects on:

  • How a lifelong feeling of not belonging became the soil for a life’s work helping others feel connected
  • The difference between sudden insight and the slow, gradual “boiling water” of a tipping point
  • Why real breakthrough requires going all the way through pain, not around it
  • Joanna Macy’s question—”What breaks your heart?”—and how grief and care become fuel for service
  • Why “never turn away” may be one of the most important spiritual instructions there is

This is a shorter, solo reflection from Tami—released once a month on the Insights at the Edge feed—on where our deepest wounds and our clearest purpose meet.

Listen now. →

Find the original Insights at the Edge episodes here: “Seane Corn: Your Pain Is Your Purpose“

Just One Question | Pānquetzani: How Do We Honor Our ...

Tami asks Pānquetzani how she would put words to the devotion she so clearly feels toward her ancestral line. The answer starts in the body. During her first postpartum womb adjustment, Pānquetzani felt an anger release that she is certain wasn’t hers — it was inherited, and it had arrived alongside the gifts.

That’s the premise of her work as a traditional healer of Mesoamerican and Mexican medicine: the gifts and the wounds come together, and tending the wounds is the job. Her ancestors survived colonization and violence, and they didn’t survive it only for themselves. So she owes them reverence — paid not in words but in living. Slowing down. Crying. Dancing. Sensual and sexual pleasure. All the things they may never have had the privilege to do.

Then there’s her son. At fifteen he taught himself metalwork — knives, swords, bows, tools. Pānquetzani showed the work to her eighty-three-year-old grandmother, who said, oh, your grandfather used to do that. A whole family trade back in Mexico, a shop, generations of it, and nobody had ever mentioned it. He found his way back to it because he was given room to follow what he loved.

In this episode:

  • Why ancestral gifts and ancestral wounds arrive together
  • Making your life an altar — reverence as something you live rather than something you say
  • Healing lineages backwards, and telling the dead their suffering wasn’t in vain
  • What thriving actually means: joy, energy, celebration, and getting your medicine to the people who need it
  • The inheritance beyond the physical — the energetic, mental, and social resources previous generations went without

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Pānquetzani. Find the complete interview in this feed or at soundstrue.com