The Body Remembers the Way: A Conversation with Dr. Ellen Vora
Some people arrive and your nervous system exhales. That’s how it felt the first day I met Dr. Ellen Vora—psychiatrist, acupuncturist, yoga teacher, and author of The Anatomy of Anxiety. Her presence is grounded, medicinal, and deeply embodied. In our latest Embodied episode, we explored how anxiety is less a problem to “fix” in the mind and more a whole-body message asking to be felt, honored, and translated.
Medicine that starts in the body
Ellen’s work gently challenges the old story that anxiety and depression live only “from the neck up.” She invites us to see anxiety as the body’s stress response—often modifiable—rather than a fixed destiny. Sleep deprivation, blood sugar crashes, inflammation, hormone shifts, gut imbalance, alcohol, and even mouth-breathing can create what she calls false anxiety: avoidable suffering rooted in physiology. Sometimes a small, compassionate intervention (yes, even a spoonful of almond butter before the commute) steadies the system enough to change a day, a week, a life.
Then there is true anxiety—the meaningful ache that arises from being human in an impermanent world. It is not a pathology; it is purpose. It asks for presence, community, ritual, and the kind of surrender that builds trust in life. True anxiety doesn’t want to be silenced; it wants to be witnessed, metabolized, and integrated.
Crying as completion (not a failure)
We live in an emotion-phobic culture that apologizes for tears. Ellen reminds us that crying isn’t the problem; it’s the medicine—one of the body’s ways to complete the stress cycle. When we allow a real cry (the kind that moves through us in waves, beyond the tidy “I’m fine now”), our system receives the message that we are safe enough to feel. The heart softens. Space returns. We become more available to love.
Yin, yang, and the right to rest
Another thread we followed is our collective over-identification with yang—doing, producing, pushing—and the cultural suspicion of yin—rest, receptivity, intuition. Burnout blooms when rest is treated as a reward instead of a right. We spoke about honoring cyclical energy: the monthly tides in many bodies, the daily solar rhythm in others, and the seasons that ask us to expand, to harvest, and to go dark so something true can root. Ambition has a place; it simply flourishes when braided with recovery and reverence.
The ineffable made useful
What I love about Ellen is that she is both scientist and mystic. She can read the literature and also listen to the quiet clarion call in the body. In our conversation, she shared about writing her new book—how some chapters feel like a jazz improvisation with the Mystery, translating vibration into language. It’s vulnerable to create this way. We both named the old fear: Will I still be recognized if I show this truer self? And we returned to a simple compass—integrity over approval. There’s a small hurt in being judged, but a greater hurt in abandoning what we know to be real.
A gentle invitation
If anxiety is visiting, begin with kindness to your physiology: eat in a way that steadies you, sleep like it’s sacred, breathe through your nose, step outside, feel sunlight. Then make room for what is true: grief, tenderness, awe, uncertainty. Let tears come. Ask your body what it knows. Trust the answers that arrive wordlessly first.
Dr. Ellen Vora’s bio: Ellen Vora, MD is a board-certified psychiatrist, acupuncturist, and yoga teacher who takes a functional medicine approach to mental health—considering the whole person and addressing imbalance at the root. She received her B.A. from Yale and her M.D. from Columbia and is the author of The Anatomy of Anxiety.
I loved this conversation. It felt like soul-sister territory—two women listening with our whole bodies, remembering that healing is less about control and more about relationship: with food and sleep, with grief and joy, with the Mystery that moves us.
🎧 Listen to the full episode on your favourite podcast platform — or press play below to join the conversation. And if it serves, share it with someone who needs permission to rest, to cry, and to trust what their body has been whispering all along.
