In this episode I discuss how I got to where I am, living in India and Bali, writing my first book Eat Right For Your Mind-Body Type and the process of getting the book deal for The Idiot’s Guide to Ayurveda with Penguin Random House.

I hope this episode shows you that you can achieve your dreams as long as you believe in yourself.

Discover your Dharma with my free quiz at https://iamsahararose.com/

TRANSCRIPTION

Episode 002: How I Became My Highest Self and Wrote The Idiot’s Guide to Ayurveda

By Sahara Rose

Namaste everyone! It is Sahara Rose and welcome back to the Highest Self Podcast. In this episode we discuss how you can transcend into the highest version of yourself. In this episode I want to share with you about the creative process and how you can access your limitless potential by tuning in to your highest self. Many people have asked me:

• How do you write these books?

• What is that process like?

• Do you have an idea?

• Do you write an outline first?

• What is it look like?

For me I’m very tune in to feminine energy. That is the energy I feel the most comfortable with. What feminine energy is to more the state of flow. The feminine is Yin energy, it is a softer energy. It allows, it kind of is moving and fluid. I like to think of it like water. It is always adapting and looking at its surroundings and changing in that direction. Masculine energy is a lot more structured. The masculine is the yang energy. It is sharp, it is aggressive, and it knows exactly where it is going to go and both of those energies are extremely important for writing a book.

The first book that I wrote “Eat Right for Your Mind-Body Type” was from a complete state of feminine flow. I was twenty-two years old when I started writing it. I had no idea anything about the book process, I just somehow felt called by from my spirit guides. I’ll discuss more about what spirit guides are, but I felt called that I needed to write this book about Ayurveda. I needed to translate the Sanskrit text in a way that it would be easier for people to understand and benefit from. I felt like this system of Ayurveda, was going to be key for helping my generation especially from me coming from a background of under eating, eating disorders, raw veganism, restrictive diets.

I knew intuitively that Ayurveda has the answers for me and others like me to achieve balance again but I felt like the ancient texts and the traditional teachers and books were not in language that people like me want to read about and as much as I wanted dive into Ayurveda, I was like “How can I share this with others when it was even so hard for me, a nutritional student to understand”.

So, my highest self was like “Girl, you need to be the one who changes it”. So, I sat every single day, the entire day from the time I woke up, I would practice yoga, I would spend probably till three in the morning writing, writing, writing, writing, re-writing.

• How can I make the doshas more easier to understand?

• How can I talk about koshas?

• How can I talk about the stages of digestion?

All of these things that I was not raised with but I felt like this was my path. I did not have obviously a book deal. Did not know literary agent. I did not even know anyone that had a book deal. I was so far out of that. I was living in India at the time, but I knew even if no one reads it, maybe it’s just my mom and maybe not even her but I have to write this book.

Coming from that state of divine flow, I didn’t sit and say “Okay, today’s chapter is going to be about the…” I might have had that kind of intention about the book in the beginning of the day but it always took its own shape, and maybe one day the concept of operating from your soul level just really came through me. Maybe that has nothing to do with Ayurveda, but I said “This is what I have to write about today”. The more I just let myself write from the state of flow, the more creativity came through me and it got to this point that I would sit in front of the computer and my hands were just typing and typing and typing and typing and my mind was like, whoa “What is it saying” and I literally became a channel for the energy.

This higher self above was using my body as a vessel to write down these words that even my mind has never heard before. I was straight up writing Ayurvedic wisdom that I have never learned about. It was one hundred percent channeling through me, from probably a past life where I was an ayurvedic sadu or mentor or something but the entire ayurvedic system came so naturally to me. It was like I was just re-learning a language that I spoke for thousands and thousands and thousands of lifetimes. There was never any question about “Well does that make sense or what is this?” When people have questions about Ayurveda, even if I didn’t know the answer it will just 5:14 *@!*^ there is the answer. I had become so tapped into my higher self that my ego is like “where is this all coming from?” It was a really beautiful moment and I wrote over a thousand of pages of words on Ayurveda at this time.

I even moved to Bali to focus on my writing for 4 months. I was just writing constantly around the clock, it was a really beautiful time. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t easy, my family wasn’t like “Hey girl go to Bali and write this book about Ayurveda would be really cool of you” No, not at all. We’ll talk more about that later, but regardless of the noise, regardless of the fights with my parents and all of the stress on how I’m going to get money? How am I going to survive?

I was literally staying in Balinese people’s guest houses. I was like “Okay, how can I make enough money to survive in Bali this month?” That was literally where I was at because all I can think about was my work. That is a state of creative feminine flow, it’s just this not knowing but at the same time really deeply knowing and it took me many years to finish this book, because I would re-read it and say “I don’t even like how any of this is written, I want to totally change the tone or I don’t like the structure, I want to do it again”. I also graphic designed it all too, so that was a whole other thing that I constantly want to change and turn and I didn’t have a deadline, I didn’t have a plan for it either, I just knew it was going to happen somehow, some way but I didn’t have the answer to that so that dragged it on also for a very long time.

Then later on, years later on, I was doing everything I could to get this book out there. I had the book then had it professionally graphic design, I had it edited by many editors, and I finish the whole thing. It was ready to be on the shelves, so I thought “I don’t want this to be a self-published book that no one reads”.  I imagine this book to be on bookshelves at Barnes and Nobles stores and my parents were like “Girl, who do you think you are J.K Rowling?”

Being an author for them was akin to wanting to be a famous singer or actor or whatever. It was one in a million, one in a billion chance; little did they know that I’m one in 7 billion, we all are. I didn’t give up in any way that I could, I would try to figure out how can I get a literary agent, how can I do the steps, I was researching about it and I was putting the intention out there as well and I was living my truth, I was living by these principles that I wrote about.

Eventually I met a dear friend of mine, Maria who had a literary agent and said I’ll get you in touch with mine and I got in touch with her literary agent and she ended up loving my book and decided that she wanted to basically managed me. So, we signed the contract and we are going to find a publisher for Eat Right for Your Mind Body Type, we sent it out to over 25 editors at Penguin Random House, Hay House, everywhere you could imagine. Except I was getting some no’s and the reason I was getting no’s was because they said “People don’t really know about Ayurveda, it’s not really talked about that much, there is really an audience for this subject yet”, but I said nope, there is, maybe you don’t see it but I know that there is. If there is not enough education I will be the one do the education.

I was sort of at this limbo of like “Okay, I have this book that’s ready to be out there but I don’t have someone yet that believes in it enough to put it out there”. My literary agent, randomly, out of the thousands of literary agents in the United States of America gets a call from the Idiot’s Guides group. The Idiots Guides are series of books, they have like the Idiot’s Guide to Gardening and the Idiot’s Guide to Marketing and whatever, fixing your car. So it’s a series, it’s the official series like those yellow books and it’s published by Penguin Random House a subdivision called Alpha Books.

So, they randomly or not so randomly called my literary agent and they said “Hey, were looking for someone to write an Idiot’s Guide to Ayurveda, do you happen to know anyone?” and she’s like “Oh, I just signed this Ayurveda author, I can get you in touch with her” and they are like “Oh we had this author that was going to write it” they normally give you 6 months to write the book, it’s about 400 pages book, so they had an author to write it, they are 4 months in but the author does not want to finish it, it was just too much work.

Writing these Idiot’s Guides is something definitely not from a feminine state of flow, it’s very structured. You know how they are they have every page like “Did you know or like fun fact or warning” and you have to go with that exact structure. So, they had an author, she dropped out and they said “We are looking for one who can finish the entire book in 2 months” my literary agent was like “I don’t know, I’ll put you in touch”

So they sent me over the table of contents that this previous author had worked on and I’m reading through it and I’m just not vibing with it. They were like “Just make your edits on how you would do it and you can just change things around, if you don’t want then you don’t need to change around” I was like “Hell no, I don’t like any of this”. I changed around the whole thing and they gave me a week to do it and I did it in a day from tapping into my highest self and I thought if I were right now learning about Ayurveda, I was where I was a few years ago and just discovering it, how would I want the book to feel?

• First, I would want to know what Ayurveda is, I would want to know its connection with yoga, something I already know about.

• Then I would want to know about the mind body types, how can I see them? I want to take a quiz; I would want to relate to them more.

• I want to know the recipes, the food stuff sine I’m a foodie and so many of us are.

• I want to know the nutritional stuff and the nutritional theories and the body and the digestive system and how you can tell if you are nutritionally out of balance.

• I want to know about the organs and I want to get more sciencey with this

but then I want to end the book on a very spiritual note and say we are learn all about the science and these mechanisms of how we can heal our bodies so we can tap into our souls. So essentially I made this book like the podcast but I made it a journey of how you can access your highest self and you cannot be your highest self if you are in physical pain and your body is in misalignment.

The reason that we heal our bodies and eat the right foods and go to chiropractic sessions and all of these stuffs, so we can become our highest self, so we can do the things that we were meant to do on this planet. The more I learned about Ayurveda the more I saw that that’s what Ayurveda said as well. The word Ayur means science and Veda means knowledge, so Ayurveda is essentially the science of life, it’s the knowledge of life. It is written as part of the Vedas which were believed to be the most ancient text in the planet and the Vedas have many different parts, Ayurveda is part of the secondary Vedas called the Upavedas. So Ayurveda was essentially their method of healing the body so you can transcend the body and become one. So, yoga was the spiritual practice, yoga was how can you become one with Brahma, with this universal light. That’s what yoga is all about, that’s why breath and meditation is the most integral part of yoga not really the physical practice, just one of the parts.

Ayurveda is how can I fix my stomach problems and my back pain and my kidney imbalance and all of these things so I can truly practice yoga and it all comes down into, how can I become my highest self? So as I am writing this book and reading these ancient texts, I’m like “Wow, this was exactly why I was hired to write this book”. Oh, I forgot to mention as soon as they read my new table of contents they hired me. So, I was given 2 months to write an entirely new 400 pages books which was then edited down to 352 pages, if you have every written a book you’ll know that editing it down is even harder than writing it.

I realized that all of these practices from Chinese medicine which is also based upon Ayurveda, I had no idea myself than year 200 A.D ancient Chinese scholars came to India to learn about Ayurveda because Ayurveda is was first system of health and medicine and in 600 A.D it became traditional Chinese medicine. Chinese medicine is also based off of the five elements, however they changed two of the elements air and ether to become wood and metal so, it’s a little bit different but it is based off of the same tenants. Ayurveda also transcended across the silk road and it made its way to Northern Africa and in to Europe it became what we call now Herbology the use of plants as medicine and it also became our western medical system. In Latin they called it meterios modernas I think, medicas? modernas? I don’t know, the term is in the book but it basically became the system of health that we have today.

I realize that Ayurveda was placed upon my path to have a really deep understanding of healing from a medical to spiritual to emotional and every level in between that and I hope to use this podcast as well to share that wisdom with you. So, when I was chosen to write the Idiot’s Guide to Ayurveda I had to access this totally different side of me which was the masculine. They had me write an entire table of contents that was down to basically the paragraph and it had to have:

• What are my key points in each chapter?

• What do my paragraphs leads too?

• Where am I going to put my fun facts, did you known’s and warnings?

I had to have that planned before I wrote it and I was like “I don’t know how to write a book like this” I’ve never written an outline since I was in high school. I was like just sitting in front of my computer and just let things flow and that is how I wrote the entire last book and other books as well which still I haven’t released and really need to. This was a challenge for me and I was trying to evoke my pitta, my fire energy and say how can I be more tapped into this masculine self and also what is my disconnection about the masculine say about me? I realize that I’m someone who doesn’t do well with schedules, with organization, these are things that don’t come naturally to me, I’m very into my creative side. So, I channeled that and it ended up being the best thing ever, because not only did I had the book done in 2 months even a little less than 2 months but I know every single sentence of that book because it was so deliberate and with my first book I would re-read something and be like “I wrote that? Huh?” because it was totally channeling through me.

I think it’s really beautiful practice to try both and see where you feel more comfortable with. Are you someone that’s more in your feminine and you just let things flow through you or are you someone that’s more in your masculine and you need a structure and a deadline and outline and that’s how you get things done?

So, I invite you to just write anything, it can just be a story of your own life and try to write it in 2 ways. The first way, and give yourself like let’s say three pages or ten pages long, give yourself an amount of pages. The first way just be like “Okay, I’m going to write about my life, this is the story and just go” and some people may just have total word block like “I don’t even know where to begin, I was born and now I’m here and stuff happened in between?” and some people might be like “the day I was born I remember the stars” and be really comfortable that way and then other side, try the masculine way and maybe have an outline of maybe based of the years, every year, like a few key things that happened, maybe it’s based of pivotal moments of your life, like “The god got hit by car, my parents got divorced, I got accepted into my dream school.” Those are the moments how you define your life, so whatever really feels like it’s the best way of defining your life for you, whether it’s years or moments. Write your life story that way and see which way comes more naturally to you and this is going to be a really cool exercise to see if you feel more connected to your masculine or through your feminine.

A lot of people ask me and they say “I want to write book, so what do I do?” well the first thing that you need is you need to come up with a concept that you really feel that there is an audience for. When I started writing about Ayurveda, I really didn’t think through the audience, I was sort of the audience, I was sort of writing it for myself. I believed in it so much that I manifested an audience and a lot of it took a lot of extra work because every single day when I post about Ayurveda I get so many questions of “Wait, what are you talking about?” For me to expand and go deeper into the dochas I have to continually come back to the education point.

So, you have to think of it, do you want to be someone that has constantly be educating people about your subject? Do you want to be first person that they hear about it from or do you want to dive deeper into a topic that people know about more? Something like yoga, people know about yoga, people know about the poses and the asanas, there are tons of books that you can read about it, so maybe you want to add your own point of view and your own twist to it and that is something that your book can be about or maybe this new like medical system or like positive psychology thing, something that no one has ever heard of before and you want to be the pioneer to bring that out.

Then, after you thought of that idea, think, do I want to write this more from my masculine or feminine? You are going to have to channel that both, both of those energies are going to be necessary. What I recommend that works for me is I begin with the feminine, I begin by just writing it all out, often times ill just literally be on the toilet and start writing things on my iPhone and turns into like all of these words of wisdom coming from my spirit guides and I’m like “Guys, slow down I’m trying to write this down” and it’s like “blah blah blah blah and the words of wisdom “and tell them.. blah blah blah blah” and I’m like “Okay, got this, got this.”

Then other times I’m like okay, this article, people asked me a lot of questions about the digestive system, I want to talk about these points and that’s how I’m going to do it and I get those ones done a lot faster because I have that structure, to me they don’t feel as authentic because I’m someone that operates from that feminine but works better as a manual. So, think is your book a memoir that you want to be in poetic pros, is this like a text of spiritual awakening or is this a guideline of “Okay, these are the things that needs to be done, this is a system, this is like a concept” and those things are going to be a lot more thought out.

To become that vessel, a lot of you might be wondering “Well I’ve never had that experience of just sort of like letting these ideas flow through me, I’ve never done that before, how can I do that?” I want you to think less about creating and more about allowing and just allow what is meant to be to come through you. I want you to think of the idea of planting a seed, planting a seed into the earth and a baby a seed planted inside a mother’s body both the earth and the mother are vessels to bring that seed to life. The seed has chosen earth to allow it to sprout into the tree that it was meant to become and the baby has also chosen that mother to birth it into this world and teach it the lessons that it needs to learn for its highest evolvement.

In order to birth a creative idea, we must allow ourselves to become that vessels by opening ourselves up, we become that channel to allow what is meant to be to flow through us. Allow yourself to be the portal between this idea up in the stars and its reality here on earth, you are the chosen medium between these two, and you are the chosen vessel for your ideas. The more clear you can make your mind, the more open of the channel you can become, if you are using your thoughts on fears and doubts and anger and insecurity then you are not allowing space for that creative genius to come through you. The more open you are as a channel, the more creative you become because you are allowing your mind to transcend into its highest version.

Instead of thinking of doing more, think of becoming less. Less angry, less judgmental, less jealous, less competitive, less fearful and instead create time in your life for nothingness because in that nothingness comes self-reflection and self-actualization. It doesn’t mean you have to sit in silence in meditation for 10 minutes a day because again that’s a very masculine way of meditating. The masculine likes to sit and observe while the feminine likes to do and move, so for many of us, for me I have a really hard time with just waking up in the morning and sitting in lotus pose in meditation.

For me my meditation might come after a sweaty yoga class or when I’m cooking and using my hands or dancing and these are all meditation. It’s whenever you can allow your mind to stop its chattering and come into a place of absolute stillness. So, for a lot of us we think “That’s impossible, you don’t know my mind, my mind is always talking to me and 90% of thing is says is like reality television” Trust me, I know how you feel.

We all have these monkey minds but in order to tap into our highest self, we have to allow our minds to flow. So, when you first begin with this time of self-reflection, you kind of have to let the bad thoughts filter through, don’t judge them you just need them to come to surface so the rest can come through later. I like to think of it as clearing the dirty top of a swimming pool so you can access the cleaner and deeper waters underneath. So let whatever thoughts that really need to be heard come to surface and then allow them to pass through, so it can be “Well you need to do this, and what’s going to happen with your friend and you need to blah blah blah and change this” Allow it “Don’t say, hey shut up, just say okay what else do you need to say?” However, do not entertain these thoughts, do not give into them and do not feed them, because that is what they want to grow and expands which keeps our ego very busy and very happy.

When all these thoughts have come to surface, instead of judging them and reacting to them and taking the next step, just say “Okay, is there anything else?” and your mind might have a little bit more to say but eventually it will come to a point that there is nothing else and it may take a few weeks of just letting your mind wonder and allowing the chatter to all come to surface but as long as you don’t entertain the negative thoughts they’ll come through you and disappear. Acknowledge the fears, the doubts, and the insecurities but let them know that they are no longer best serving you in your highest evolvement. They played their role to keep you safe, to make sense of the world whatever it may have been but now they are no longer needed. You are releasing them into the universe, to allow space for your highest selves thoughts and these thoughts are the downloads.

Downloads are essentially messages that we receive from our highest selves they are often rushes of energy like you just downloaded a big zip file and now have to take the time to go through each file and sometimes there ah-ha moments when it’s like someone from up above just gave you a nudge in the right direction. They happen to us constantly, actually numerous times a day, however most of us don’t even realize it.

When we aren’t living on our path, we aren’t able to pick up on these universal downloads, we may be looking at them straight in the face but still not recognize them. For an example, let’s say you were invited to an event that you were really excited for, you can’t wait and then the night comes and for some reason you just don’t feel like going, that’s a sign but you ignore it and you say “You know what, I’m going to hammer through this” and start getting ready and going anyways despite feeling tired but you kind find the right outfit and you can’t find anything and you have all these things you need to do but you’re ignoring it, that’s all a sign. Then you get into your car and as soon as you drive out of your driveway you’re stuck in traffic, that’s a sign. You may even get into a car accident depending on how badly spirit wants to keep you out of the situation and wake you up, those are all signs. The more self-aware you are, the more you can pick up on these signs while they are still little whispers rather than slaps in the face. I want to repeat that, the more self-aware you are, the more you can pick up on these signs while they are still little whispers rather than slaps in the face.

You would have known instantly from your energy that day that the event wasn’t right for you rather than waiting to get hit by the car. Imagine how many accidents we can avoid by tuning in to our intuition and accessing these highest selves downloads. The heartbreaks, the wrong jobs and the traumas all of the things that we could have avoided if our intuition was just a little stronger and we picked up on the signs before we had no choice but to have to. I don’t want you to get to that point where you have no choice but to listen, I want to teach you how to pick up on those signs, so light years before it even comes into your physical manifestation you can pick up on it, all it takes is accessing your highest self.

Thank you guys so much for listening to episode 2 of the podcast. I would love to know your questions, how you feel about this podcast so far? It would mean the world to me if you could write a review because apparently that’s how this podcast get shared and seen by more people so if you could please just write a review and let me know how you feel and follow me or send me a message on Instagram, my Instagram is @iamsahararose. I would love to hear from you and find out more about times that you had felt like you weren’t operating at your highest self and ways that maybe it showed up in your own physical manifestation.

I look forward to hearing from you guys, I also have a private Facebook group called the mind body balancer Facebook group and I have the link of that on my website: iamsahararose.com so check that out, join the Facebook group and we will take the discussion there. Thank you guys so much for tuning in, Namaste.

Episode 002: How I Became My Highest Self and Wrote The Idiot’s Guide to Ayurveda

by Sahara Rose