In today’s episode, I speak with Dr. Ashley de Luna, doctor of naturopathic medicine, craniosacral therapist and yoga instructor. For this conversation I’m trying something new. I’ll be breaking it up into two parts. The first part is this episode and will provide backstory on Ashley including details of her own struggles with depression and how she discovered naturopathic medicine. We talk about how a diet with protein and fat is good for mental health, why mindfulness practices like yoga work and the science behind it all.
In our conversation, Dr. de Luna also provided some practical tips that can be applied to nurture mind, body and soul. This is the second part of the conversation which will be released a week from today, if you’re listening live.
Once again, I experienced some minor recording issues with this podcast so thank you for bearing with me. I’m positive I’ve figured out the issue though and this should be the last podcast sullied by this particular problem. If you prefer, I’ve transcribed the episode and it can be read below.
Dr. Ashley de Luna on Instagram
Ashley:
We’re here in sunny San Diego. It’s gorgeous out, had a beautiful morning of yoga and connecting with people and here we are. It’s been a great day.
Eric:
Nice. Do you do yoga every day?
Ashley:
I don’t do yoga every day. I’m a yoga instructor, so I teach yoga a handful of times throughout the week and I also practice a handful of times throughout the week. I have been a yoga instructor for about seven years now.
Eric:
So you wear a lot of hats.
Ashley:
I wear a lot of hats. Yes.
Eric
Let’s just get started with your interest in neurology. Where did that start?
Ashley:
Yes. So I never expected to find myself here, but here I am. I always knew from a young age that I wanted to be a doctor. That was very clear to me. I graduated high school a year early so I could start to shadow different doctors in their field and to find out where exactly I fit. What I found was not what I was expecting to find. A lot of doctors bluntly told me “you’re not meant to do this” or “you shouldn’t do this”. And also the doctors that I was shadowing… this was back home. I was born and raised in New York. A lot of the doctors, they, um, they didn’t seem passionate about what they were doing. They seemed kind of gray in their aura. They seemed exhausted, overworked, like they lost their passion. Like they lost their drive. And I was just kind of being fired up by my passion. So I hit a wall there. I kind of held on to that. I wanted to be in the medical field in some way, shape or form. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew that that was my purpose. I moved from New York to California, started doing my undergrad degree in just general biology, you know, getting the prereqs for premed and whatnot. And I had joined the AMSA group, which is the American Medical Student Association, and I think it was like week four or something. A naturopathic doctor came in and this naturopathic doctor was so full of life vitality. He was the perfect picture of health. He was so passionate about what he did, kind of what I was expecting to find behind all the other doors that I had opened, and he introduced me to naturopathic medicine and it was through naturopathic medicine that I found neurology.
Eric:
What kind of doctors were you shadowing before in New York?
Ashley:
Yeah, I was shadowing anesthesiologists, rheumatologists, cardiologist. I shadowed a bit. I just wasn’t really sure where I fit, but I was open and nothing felt right and I think we can all kind of relate to when something feels right, you just know and you resonate with it, and I was not resonating with anything but with naturopathic medicine, it was immediate. It was a full body reaction where I just knew that that was what I had kind of been looking for and it was in my first year of naturopathic medical school that we were doing all the basic sciences to kind of get us ready for all the pathology and pharmaceuticals and blah, blah blah. And my professor in general neurology, just neuro anatomy, his name is Datis Kharrazian and anyone who knows neurology that is listening to this podcast knows that he is an unbelievable world renowned scholar, researcher and practitioner of neurology. He would show us different parts of the brain and of course he would teach us what he was supposed to teach us, but he would also show us these videos, these videos of his patients in his office who would come in with numerous neurological complaints. And these are pretty severe complaints, deeper than we’re going to go into in this podcast, but things like neurodegenerative disorders and really things that inhibited their day to day function. Different kinds of neurological lesions and he would be able to pinpoint where they were. He would have them come in, play with their brains a little bit. And by that I just mean kind of challenged different pathways and then he would be able to completely change the way that they functioned in one visit. And he would give them exercises that they could do at home to kind of maintain these new neural pathways that he had just laid down. I’m so grateful I learned it spring quarter of my first year because that guided my pathway through the rest of medical school. And I focused on neurology, mental health. And then that took me into all different things like gut health and other things that we won’t get into.
Eric:
So let’s just back up a little bit. Naturopathic medicine might be a term that some people are not familiar with. What is that? What does that entail?
Ashley:
So naturopathic medicine is a kind of primary care medicine. It is centered around prevention and optimizing health. We use things like herbs, supplements, a lot of nutrition, lifestyle medicine as well as pharmaceuticals when indicated. I like to think of naturopathic medicine as doctors that just have a lot of tools in their tool belt. And it’s really beautiful because then medicine becomes individualized to the patient based on what they need, what they’re interested in, what they resonate towards, and it becomes an art. So there’s no one size fits all. And naturopathic medicine, it’s very individualized and using the least invasive processes first before kind of working up the ladder into what we would say and are most familiar with in Western medicine.
Eric:
What would some examples of modalities in naturopathic medicine be?
Ashley:
Yeah, we do a lot of physical medicine, so things that you’ve probably experienced before. We’re actually trained in chiropractic manipulation, but each state has its own regulations based on how we can practice. That’s interesting. But that’s a conversation for another day. So we’re trained in a lot of physical medicine, chiropractic manipulation, hydrotherapy. So using water to stimulate detoxification and also for healing. We use herbs, herbal medicine and teas, tinctures, supplements, a lot of nutrition. We do all sorts of things. A lot of injection therapies.
Eric:
Is CBD something that’s being used in naturopathic medicine right now?
Ashley:
CBD is a beautiful herb and it’s kind of really booming right now as far as everyone’s consciousness is opening up to the powers of this plant. It’s one of the plants that we use, but there are so many herbs out there that it’s tight. It’s not usually the first herb that we go to, but it is a beautiful, powerful medicine and we definitely support it.
Eric:
So where does your passion come from? You said you were always, you always knew you wanted to be a doctor, but is there someone in your family that inspired you to follow that path or is there a personal experience? How did you initially know that this was the general direction you wanted to go?
Ashley:
It’s interesting because a lot of my friends and colleagues, they have that story that something that they realized that they wanted better or they wanted something different. And truthfully, I never had that. I just knew and I’m so grateful that I knew. I’ve just always been obsessed with the body. I’ve always been obsessed with what’s going on. I would be that little girl in the doctor’s office and they would be asking me questions. I would be shooting questions right back. Just so curious as to how this body that we live in works. just always been kind of a truth seeker in that sense. And truth led me to medicine and understanding the science behind everything. And then kind of moving further in that, my search for truth and how the body operates led me to naturopathic medicine and realizing that the body does have all these mechanisms in which it heals itself and restores. And if we support that, then health is the only outcome.
Eric:
You mentioned on the phone that you’ve had your own experience kind of going through some dark times. I’m sure that that’s played a role in your interest too maybe a little bit, what was, what was that experience like for you?
Ashley:
Yeah, I think I was depressed for a long time. I didn’t know that that’s what it was growing up as an adolescent. I was sad often for no reason or so I thought no reason. And I remember asking my mom if she would take me to talk to someone and she said no. She said that she would not take me because she didn’t want me to be medicated. And in one sense that’s, that’s nice because I wasn’t kind of numbed to what I was feeling. But in the other sense, I was just left with this heavy feeling that I kind of carried with me from my adolescence into my early twenties. I carried it for a long time. So yeah, it was definitely depression that would kind of fluctuate with anxiety and just being a medical student and a student. The stress is high, so anxiety just comes with it. So that also sent me on my own personal healing journey of to understand why. Because if anyone who’s listening to this podcast, or you, I mean who have experienced depression, sometimes it just feels like a heavy, dark cloud and it weighs you down and sometimes you can’t see through the fog to actually understand why you’re there, what’s on the other side. And I was in that for a while and that frustrated me. I got to the point where I was mad about being depressed and mad about carrying something with me and I felt like I was, I was wasting part of my life. I truly felt like that. And I thought that I was just going to spend most of my life in this fog without truly living. And once I got mad enough, I started to get help in terms of a mental health specialist, but also I started to help myself in terms of all the things that I was learning in school. I started to really reflect them back to myself and see where I was falling short.
Eric:
So your education kind of became a tool for your own use as well, simultaneously. That’s pretty cool.
Ashley:
Absolutely.
Eric:
Was there a specific trauma or something you could pinpoint your negative emotions to? Or was it just something else, indescribable?
Ashley:
So since we’re being completely honest on this podcast, I think that most of my depression that I carried around was related to the addictions that were in my family and things that I carried and I blamed them on myself. If I was a better child, this wouldn’t happen if I was smarter, if I was nicer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of it was mine. It was never mine. It was always someone else’s. But I would carry it and hold it. And we’re empathetic beings in nature and we connect with people on so many levels that we don’t even realize. And I think that I was carrying a lot of my family’s pain as my own.
Eric:
Wow. Yeah. I can definitely relate to that circumstance because in my experience, I, uh, my family experienced a death an uncle, one of my uncles, my mother’s youngest brother. And it was very sudden he was actually murdered. And so it’s interesting how in events that don’t really affect you directly… It didn’t happen to me, but the ramifications in the family, the relationships changed, you know? And it took me, like you, many years to figure that out. It’s crazy. What were some of the things that you noticed as you got older that you realized were not normal and were not… okay? Were there specific examples you can give?
Ashley:
Just as far as symptoms that I was feeling or things that I was experiencing?
Eric:
Yeah – was your anger directed inward? Was it making you an introvert? You know, how was it manifesting in you?
Ashley:
I definitely, when I was in the thick of it, I wouldn’t even want to have eye contact with other people. I wouldn’t even want to connect with them on that level. So I spent a lot of time in my bed, kind of facing the wall. My poor, now husband, boyfriend at the time would just, he would hold the most beautiful space for me and just let me feel that way, which I’m grateful for because you can’t be forced out of it. So it would definitely show up in my relationship to myself, but it would show up in my relationships to my loved ones. I would feel like I would snap at them or just take out deep angers that I had with my frustrations in life on my relationships. And then then it would bounce back at me and slam me to the ground because then I would feel horrible for talking to the people that love me and support me in this way. So that would happen often. I definitely got to a point that I was considering taking my own life, which was kind of the changing point for everything because my now husband, at the time, he was like, this is serious. You have to get help. You have to work through this. I know that you don’t know what it is, but you have to figure it out. And he actually found someone for me who is both a counselor, but she does energy work as well. And she was able to just hit the nail on the fricking head, like first visit. She was able to just kind of see through everything. And just that aha moment of knowing what it was and not feeling like you were just lost in this thick fog and understanding that why already started kind of the healing process within me. But that was just the first layer.
Eric:
What else did you do from there to continue the healing?
Ashley:
So a lot of what I did to heal was actually lifestyle things and that is another reason why I’m so in love with neurology. I think kind of to back up and to just give you a little glimpse of who I was during this time, I was an overstressed medical student. I was exercising for probably at least an hour a day. Your podcast listeners can’t see me, but I’m very petite. I probably don’t need to exercise that much. I was a strict vegan so I was not getting any sufficient fat in my diet. Also I was very limited in protein because I was not eating animal protein and I was only eating… I was trying to get as much protein as I could through veggies, but it’s just hard. I already mentioned the stress was out of control and stress just has a whole slew of effects on the nervous system. And because I was so stressed I wasn’t eating properly, so I was eating a lot of sugar. My digestion was completely off. So I just feel like in total I was not in a stable place and my mental health really was a representation of that as well.
Eric:
You mentioned fat. That’s an interesting thing to point out whenever we’re talking about deficiencies and what was, you know, contributing to your depression. What role does fat have in the operation of a healthy brain?
Ashley:
So our brain is fat, which I don’t think I fully understood for a while. Our brain is made of fatty acids. They create the actual structure of the brain and also it creates the myelin sheath which wraps around nerves that helps us to have nerve conduction. So if we’re not ingesting fat, that part of our structure ultimately is compromised and we need integrity of all of our cells for them to operate efficiently and fat actually creates the membrane of every single cell in your body. So not only the brain but every single cell. Your brain definitely shows symptoms if you’re deficient in fat and the good kinds of fats too, not like all the fats we get just by eating a standard American diet. Like healthy fats that we used to get ancestrally, like a lot of good fish oils and DHA and EPA. Those are direct medicine for the brain.
Eric:
If there’s no fat in the diet, what is happening to those neural connections?
Ashley:
If there’s no fat in the brain… Just to put it as simply as possible, the brain can’t function the way that it was designed to function. The cells in the brain, the neurons, can’t communicate efficiently to one another, but also because every cell is, is outlined with fat, if the cells become leaky, then the cell itself can’t function and each cell has a very unique thing that it’s making and is important for the process of the way that the nervous system function. So if the cells can’t produce what they need to, then the entire structure kind of falls apart and decays. So the brain actually changes size, changes shape.
Eric:
Oh wow. So it can decrease in size if you’re not getting the proper nutrition?
Ashley:
Absolutely.
Eric:
What about protein? You mentioned that as well. What role does that have in mental health?
Ashley:
I’m so happy that we’re talking about protein because I think when I was a vegan I was, I thought I was the healthiest vegan and, and this is nothing against plant based diets – I fully support that some people can really thrive on them. However, it’s just truth of the matter that when you are eating a plant based diet, you are not getting protein that you would as if you would have meat. Protein are kind of big structures and they’re broken down in our body when we digest them. Two amino acids – amino acids are little building blocks that we can then reassemble to create different proteins. Proteins create the structure of the body. So not only if you’re protein deficient are you kind of limiting your ability to create structure in every single cell in your body, but these amino acids, the building blocks of the proteins are what we need to make neurotransmitters. So things like tryptophan… Everyone’s like, “Oh, Thanksgiving, turkey, you get tryptophan.” Yes, you absolutely get tryptophan, which helps you make serotonin.
Eric:
What is serotonin?
Ashley:
Serotonin is the happy chemical. I mean we have all sorts of different neurotransmitters that kind of overlap and function with one another, but serotonin gives you that happiness, that, that contentment with life. And if you don’t have the building blocks to make that neurotransmitter, there’s no other way that you can make it. Same with tyrosine. Tyrosine is another amino acid that is needed to make dopamine. Dopamine is what gives us motivation and drive. In depression, a big piece of that puzzle is that we don’t have motivation to do anything. We don’t have motivation to feel better. We don’t have motivation to exercise, to move, to connect, to reawaken to our passions in life because we feel passionless and I think that a huge piece of my story was that I wasn’t producing adequate neurotransmitters. Not because my body didn’t know how, but because it didn’t have the building blocks. I was so nutrient depleted and I didn’t even know. I didn’t know. It wasn’t until I took a nutrition class in medical school that we went through what we ate for a full week. We wrote down breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We put it into this online program that broke down everything that we were getting and I realized how short I was falling. And I was, it was traumatizing for me. Truthfully, I thought I was doing so well with nutrition and I was not,
Eric:
Was that a catalyst for you to switch your diet right there?
Ashley:
So the catalyst to switch my diet, that was a big piece of it. It was also because my husband and I started a farm, so we had chickens, so we had all fresh eggs. So I started eating eggs and I noticed how just much better I felt. Not only mentally, but physically. I felt like I was gaining muscle mass and my muscles weren’t as sore and I just felt like I had more energy. But that’s, there’s a lot of really great things that we get in eggs. Um, and then from there I just started craving it because for a while I just, it wasn’t even a thing for me to not eat meat. I never wanted it. I had an aversion to it. But then once I started eating eggs, my body started feeling so good. I started craving it and I found myself standing over a turkey on Thanksgiving and my husband’s like “eat it!” and then I ate it and here we are now.
Eric
So now are you pretty unrestricted in what meats you eat?
Ashley:
I am pretty unrestricted in what meats I eat. Just being a very empathetic person, I’m a Yogi. I like to eat meat that I know those animals lived good lives and that they were not subjected to violence. So I know all the farmers where I get my meat from, I buy them all locally. I know what they are fed, I know the lives that they get to live. I know that they are happy and that vibration is in their body and that’s what I’m consuming. So that’s really my main determining factor. And the quality of the meats.
Eric:
You mentioned that you were, even when you were depressed, you’re exercising for an hour a day. Did you find that that was helping you change your emotion at all or was it just fatiguing you?
Ashley:
I think that’s one of the only things that helped me honestly. And my exercise was only yoga at that point. And this is actually kind of a good transition into what goes on in these mindfulness practices and what helps, what is going on as far as the neurology. So yoga, I would practice it probably like an hour a day and I would also teach and I found that, even my husband noticed that, even if I felt horrible before I went after I would be a different person even if I was just teaching, even if I wasn’t practicing. And it’s because even teaching yoga is a mindfulness activity. Anything that we drop into the moment is a mindfulness activity. And when we do something that is mindful where we kind of detach from all the external thoughts, when we detach from the ego, from all the things that we think we are, and we’re just in the moment and we are, all of those things stimulate the frontal lobe of your brain. The frontal lobe of your brain is the part of your brain that actually makes you uniquely human. There are no other species on the planet that have a frontal lobe. And it was evolved. As we became bipedal and started standing on two feet and seeing the world, it completely changed our consciousness and our ability to interact with the world and have intention and live with goals. And in depression, studies have shown that the frontal lobe is not operating the way that it should. It’s not firing at the frequency that it should. And to kind of put it loosely, it just gets lazy. If the frontal lobe isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do, kind of more primitive structures in the brain takeover, like the emotional brain, the deeper structures in the brain that were there, as far as evolution, to keep us alive. But if we fall out of this place of mindfulness and living with our human brain, we can fall into these more primitive brain structures that were really designed to make it so we could run away from a threat and reproduce, but we can’t live life the way that we are supposed to. So things like yoga, movement. All movement lives in the frontal lobe. Breathing slowly stimulates the frontal lobe. Meditation stimulates the frontal lobe and when you’re teaching a yoga class, you are, it’s like a moving meditation.. So I have to be completely present or else I won’t know what I’m doing. So I think just that act of slowing down and being present with something other than the silly thoughts that were consuming me, all these dark thoughts, it would reawaken that part of my brain that reminded me who I was and why I’m here and what I’m supposed to do. When we evolved, we would have to remember if there was a tiger around the corner or if a certain watering hole had a bear, all these things, we would have to remember them. They would have to scare us enough that they created memory and then the deeper structures in the brain kind of protect us from revisiting those places. So a lot of people that kind of can’t pull their consciousness out of those deeper brain structures and into the frontal lobe and to what makes us human. They live out of fear and out of feeling threatened. What that does, it sends a message into our autonomic nervous system that we are not safe and it stimulates the sympathetic nervous system. This is the branch of the nervous system that’s all about fight or flight. So even though we’re talking about the nervous system, it has implications in the endocrine system. So what happens is when we feel that we’re threatened or not safe, then our adrenal glands secrete norepinephrin, epinephrin, cortisol, all these chemical messengers that go into the blood and tell the entire body that you’re not safe and that you’re threatened. It changes your physiology. So I would say more so those deep brain structures are involved in anxiety, but depression is just an overall… where the frontal lobe, where the entire cortex of the brain isn’t as awake as it should be, and it’s not able to inhibit some of these emotional thoughts or these untrue beliefs that we have about ourselves. It’s very nice to think about it now, kind of looking back, because I see how untrue all the things that I used to tell myself were. But yeah, we get stuck in negative thoughts like I’m not worthy. I’m stupid. I don’t deserve to be alive. All these thoughts that are just so negative and they’re not true. They of course they’re not true. But we identify with them because we hear them and they’re coming from within us in some way, shape or form. So they’re coming from somewhere. And if you don’t understand where they’re coming from, of course you identify with them. And that’s kind of what creates our ego, our false sense of self are these beliefs that we have about ourselves and the beliefs of how the world works. But another reason why mindfulness is so powerful because it reminds you that you are not those thoughts. You are not the thoughts that others have about you. You are you, you are the person observing all of that. The person standing above it looking down. Um, yeah, I definitely got caught in them a lot. And going back to kind of the brain, what we use is what fires. So the brain likes to operate in paths that are easy, in circuits that are easy and that it’s used to walking down because there’s less resistance. That’s how habits are formed. And I had negative habits, very negative habits, of how I would talk to myself, how I would show up in the day, how I would show up in my life. And it’s not until you break those circuits and start to lay down new pathways that that becomes your default and that becomes the way that your brain will just fire on its own.
Eric:
Do you still find negative habits, bad habits in yourself that you’re continually correcting for?
Ashley:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is, I don’t know how many years it took me to kind of build up that those bad habits, but it’s taking, it’s a daily practice and that’s why I love mindfulness so much because it’s that daily reminder that I have. But yeah, they definitely still come up. I am still very much a human who experiences all ranges of emotions, but it’s much easier now and I’m not as attached to them. I don’t identify with them now when they come up and if I hear myself saying it… and it’s so nice having a partner that has been through all of this with me, because when I say something like that, he’ll just look at me and be like… that’s not true. You know this. And he’ll just give me that look. And I’m like, oh, okay. You’re right. I’m falling back into this. Come back to myself center. But yes…
Eric:
Sometimes it can feel like Whack-A-Mole. All of a sudden there’s two more over here. And you have to tend to those. But like you said, I think it does get easier once you equip yourself with the proper tools. So we’re actually already halfway through. Maybe that’s a good spot to transition to some of the practical things…