May 1, 2017

Meet Monica Yearwood of Hamsa Ayurveda Lifestyle Center in North Center

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Monica Yearwood.

Monica, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I was always interested in spiritual studies as far as I can remember. By the time I was in high school I was meditating and experimenting with being a vegetarian. My freshman year in college I frequented meditation retreats and was a regular at the Hare Krishna temple on Sundays. But at the same time I experienced a great deal of sadness around life and in general felt a disconnect from any sense of real inner purpose.

Societal constructs seemed to lock people into a way of life that kept them from an intrinsic joy that I believed belongs to each person. Materialism, aging and death were especially depressing to me. These feelings coupled with a growing interest in drug culture lent me toward being prone to unhealthy avenues of dealing with my inner conflicts. By the time I was in my early twenties I found myself in a pretty unhealthy sate. I went and saw a psychiatrist who gave me several prescriptions for Attention Deficit Disorder, Depression and Insomnia. I walked out of her office, looked at the prescriptions and threw them in the garbage. It didn’t seem right to me. That was one of the best decisions in my life. From there, I immersed myself in kundalini yoga and saw a shamanic practitioner regularly. I went on and got certified in yoga and energy work and went back to get my BA from the Maharishi University of Management. When I was at the Maharishi University I learned about ayurveda and decided to study it exclusively. At that time, there were only a handful of schools in America so I moved to Florida and studied at The Florida Vedic College. I moved back to Chicago to open up my practice and opened up Hamsa Ayurveda in 2013. There are many stories within this story, but I tell this one because ayurveda and natural methods of healing have helped me immensely. It’s amazing to see people heal once they reclaim their health.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
No, the road has not been smooth. Healing isn’t smooth. You peel back the layers of yourself and you confront the parts of yourself that tend to remain hidden. But as you evolve and recover and reclaim yourself you discover an inner strength and commitment to persist that wasn’t there before. You become happier and healthier. As for the business, that hasn’t been smooth either. We have an esoteric science, called ayurveda that we are trying to communicate to a modern world. It teaches that by aligning with the cycles in nature you maintain your health and when you desynchronize from those cycles in nature you foster disease processes of all kinds. This is an interesting message to a community of people who live in a city. A city, where it is easy to forget the moon hidden behind the lights and cars and sirens. Mostly ayurveda teaches that our health can be reclaimed through our lifestyle and it is a birth right and responsibility to realize our individual purpose. But, the reclamation takes effort, persistence, awareness and a willingness to peel back the layers of self. All of this requires changes in lifestyle. Changes in lifestyle have inherent challenges. Actually, lifestyle change is some of the most difficult work a person can do — we tend to be very deeply engrained in our ways, habits and belief patterns. The road, is not smooth. In fact, if you find yourself on a smooth road for too long with this work I question your efforts. The familiarity in habit is smooth. The route to who you are is for people who are willing to go off roading. You have to be a pioneer and see the terrain of your being as uncharted territory in order to create new paths and new ways. That is the way of change. Incidentally, this doesn’t mean it’s always ‘hard.’ Contrary, the more you align with the self the more effortless it becomes. You get familiar and at ease with the unfamiliar. You give yourself the opportunity to be something different.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
We specialize in ayurvedic and yogic practices that help to awaken the ability to self-heal. We believe that the body, mind and spirit possess an inherent ability to regenerate from whatever ills us. Unfortunately, it is toxicity from the environment, faulty digestion and emotional stressors that inhibit our ability to self-heal. I write cleanse programs that utilize diet, herbs and daily activities that rid the body from toxicity. We have an ayurvedic spa where we give treatments that our clients can use in conjunction with our programs. We also have mind/body oriented classes such as nia and yoga.

What were you like growing up?
I was super friendly and outgoing. I loved performing, singing and being in front of people. I had a good family. I enjoyed child hood. I also communicated with plants and believed I had super powers. I would practice moving objects with my mind, and making potions in my sink. This is somewhat ironic as I feel like much of my job is actually a return to my childhood.

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