The Shakti Lineage: Returning to Ayurveda Through the Feminine Body
Ayurveda has always lived beneath the surface of my life, long before I ever learned the language for it. Long before the Sanskrit. Long before the protocols. Long before I understood that the body whispers in a dialect older than memory.
I found Ayurveda the way many women do — not through textbooks, but through the slow breaking and rebuilding of a life.
Through mold illness that stripped me to the bone.
Through trauma that lived in my tissues like an echo.
Through the exhaustion of being the caretaker, the healer, the responsible one.
Through the unraveling of an identity that held too much for too long.
Ayurveda was not a modality I adopted.
It was a remembering.
A return.
A way of listening to myself again.
And when I discovered The Shakti School, that remembering deepened in a way I didn’t know I needed.
A Feminine Medicine Path
Most of us who step onto the healing path come in carrying more than symptoms. We carry lineage. We carry trauma. We carry nervous system patterns that did not begin with us. We carry the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to mute, minimize, or medicate.
The Shakti School is one of the few Ayurvedic schools that acknowledges this inheritance.
It teaches Ayurveda not as a rigid set of rules, but as a living, breathing feminine lineage — as something that moves, cycles, spirals, dissolves, and reforms, just like the women who practice it.
Ayurveda is often taught intellectually.
At Shakti School, it is taught somatically.
Embodied.
Felt.
Heard from inside.
This is why the teachings land differently. They don’t bypass the emotional body. They don’t treat the nervous system as an afterthought. They don’t separate the physical from the spiritual.
Instead, they recognize that women heal in layers, and that Ayurveda is sophisticated enough to hold all of them:
the biology
the energy
the emotion
the lineage
the memory
the intuition
the mystery
It is rare to find a school that honors all these levels at once.
A Conversation That Changed Something in Me
In 2024, I joined Katie Silcox — founder of The Shakti School and a true feminine lineage holder — for a podcast conversation that surprised both of us.
We talked about anger — the kind women swallow until it burns from the inside out.
We talked about parasites — physical and metaphorical.
We talked about mold illness — the literal and symbolic ways the body rots under perfectionism and self-abandonment.
We talked about trauma — how it threads through the bones and breath.
We talked about my book Cherry Pie, and the stories that shaped me.
We talked about ancestral wounds, nervous-system collapse, spiritual initiations, and the strange beauty of becoming undone.
The entire conversation felt like an unearthing.
You can listen to it here:
🎧 Episode 219: “Anger, Parasites & Cherry Pie with Lisa Gunshore”
https://theshaktischool.com/ep-219-anger-parasites-and-cherry-pie-with-lisa-gunshore/
What struck me most about Katie was her capacity to hold all the pieces without needing to force them into neat rows. She understands that healing doesn’t move in a straight line, and neither do women.
It moves the way energy moves — in spirals, seasons, cycles, womb-like rhythms.
Sitting with her felt like sitting with someone who remembered the same things I remembered — a medicine I carried in my bones long before I learned its name.
Why I Stand Behind The Shakti School
I have spent more than two decades in the worlds of Ayurveda, functional medicine, Ayurveda coaching, yoga, trauma healing, ancestral work, and intuitive development. I’m incredibly selective about what I put my name beside.
Here is why Shakti School stands apart:
It understands that healing is feminine by nature.
Not gender — essence.
Receptive. Restorative. Cyclical. Listening.
It teaches Ayurveda as a relationship, not a rulebook.
Which is how Ayurveda was always meant to be learned: through lived experience.
It honors the nervous system.
This alone places it in a different category than most programs.
It is trauma-informed.
You cannot do deep work without this.
It respects the shadow.
Not everything can be “loved and lighted” out of the body.
It prepares real practitioners for real people.
People who are dealing with mold illness, perimenopause, trauma, burnout, inflammation, epigenetics, ancestry, nervous system collapse — the REAL landscape of 2026.
It is a home for women like us.
Women who are bridge-builders.
Women who remember the old world but are building the new one.
Women whose medicine runs deeper than a protocol.
2026 Trainings — If You Feel the Call
If you feel drawn to walk this path — whether personally or as a practitioner — the 2026 trainings are open:
Ayurvedic Wellness Coach (2026)
https://programs.theshaktischool.com/courses/2026-ayurvedic-wellness-coach-training?ref=b03524
Ayurvedic Health Counselor (2026)
https://programs.theshaktischool.com/courses/2026-ayurvedic-health-counselor-training?ref=b03524
Both are powerful containers.
Both honor the feminine.
Both offer a depth of transformation that is extremely rare right now.
And more importantly — both are aligned with the kind of healing I believe the world needs from women in this era.
If You’re on the Threshold…
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you're already remembering something about yourself — a thread you've been following, a calling that won't leave you alone, a voice that has been waiting for permission to be heard.
Consider this your sign.
The path doesn’t begin when you enroll.
It begins when you feel the pull.
If your body says yes, follow it.
That yes is how every feminine lineage begins.
With devotion,
Lisa
