BIO:
Kaivalya or Dr. Kai is a Doctor of Oriental Medicine with a Master's in Acupuncture and a specialty in Chinese Herbalism. Her path into holistic medicine began with a love of tea and yoga. She began yoga at age 12, which led her down an inner path of healing trauma. Yoga saved her life and helped her get through suicidal ideation to find resilience, and inner power. She has been studying somatic healing and bodywork since 2013 with various healers in the Asian traditions of Tui Na and Shiatsu. Her herbal path began by healing chronic infections through herbs rather than rounds of antibiotics, which shaped a lasting belief in the body's own capacity to heal with nature. With a deep reverence for nature and a love of the outdoors. She studied biology and environmental science at Montana State University before moving to New Mexico to study East Asian Healing Arts at Southwest Acupuncture College. The transition was guided by the insight that the Earth will ultimately be okay; humanity needs to remember our health is connected to the Earth's health. As a yoga practitioner since 2007 and a 500-hour RYT, including training in Mindful Yoga for Cancer at Duke Integrative Medicine. She has taught over 2,000 hours of classes, workshops, and retreats since 2013. Her work weaves East and West, ancient and modern, around one core belief: humanity's healing and the Earth's healing are a unified process. There is a medicine for this, and her life's work is to weave Earth and human health into one medicine.
SPEAKING TOPICS:
1. The Earth's Health and Human Health is a Unified Process
Hook: Why does the rise of chronic disease track so closely with industrialization? It's not a coincidence.
We tend to treat the body and the planet as separate systems in separate crises. This talk draws the throughline instead: land and body, breath and forests, waterways and blood, weather systems and nervous systems. Drawing on Chinese medicine's ecological view of the body alongside her own environmental science background, this conversation reframes personal health and planetary health as the same process viewed at different scales.
2. Dao of Detox: Biohacking Through the Wisdom of Chinese Medicine
How to unlock your body's natural detox pathways, without the hunger and crash of typical cleanses.
Modern detox culture treats hunger and deprivation as the price of results. Chinese medicine offers a different model, one built around supporting the body's own detox pathways rather than starving them into submission. This talk breaks down what actually drives detoxification at a physiological level, why most cleanses backfire, and how ancient practices anticipated biohacking principles centuries before the term existed.
3. Ancient Womb Wisdom: Where Modern Gynecology Misses the Mark
What 2,000 years of Chinese medicine understood about the menstrual cycle that modern gynecology often overlooks.
For most women, "normal" periods still mean pain, fatigue, and mood swings dismissed as inevitable. Chinese medicine has long treated the menstrual cycle as a monthly diagnostic tool, a window into whole-body health rather than a problem to be managed. This talk explores that framework, what it reveals about symptoms Western medicine often normalizes, and practical ways listeners can start reading their own cycles.
CREDENTIALS
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Doctor of Oriental Medicine, Master's in Acupuncture with a specialty in Chinese Herbalism (Southwest Acupuncture College, New Mexico)
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500-hour Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT), practicing since 2007
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Practicing clinician at Taos Whole Health and owner of Enchanted Medicine LLC
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Over 2,000 hours of yoga instruction since 2013, across weekly classes, workshops, retreats, and festivals
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Specialized training in Mindful Yoga for Cancer, completed at Duke Integrative Medicine
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Currently developing a 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training curriculum
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Teaches monthly yoga and Chinese medicine workshops, including the recurring Ancient Womb Wisdom workshop (next offered October)
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Background in biology and environmental science (Montana State University), informing her ecological approach to health