25-YO Hyderabad Mother Turned Her Postpartum Experience Into a Solution for 10000+ Women |
The first thing Keerthi Aashish noticed in her postpartum was the silence. Not the quiet of a sleeping newborn, but a heavy, internal quiet — a fog that settled between her and the world after her daughter’s birth in early 2023. At 25, she was surrounded by a family that ran a medical college, by doctors and specialists, and by well-meaning advice. Yet, she felt utterly alone.
“I could feel the symptoms of PTSD, but I couldn’t pinpoint those feelings. It was just a very rough phase,” she recalls to The Better India. “Nobody really tells you how to cope postpartum. Everyone talks about pregnancy… but after the baby comes, there is nothing.”
The scripts of new motherhood — exhaustion, joy, chaos — were replaced by a harder reality. “I couldn't sleep at night because my baby was waking up every hour. I was tired, I was so depressed, I would binge on sugar… there's weight gain, there's hormone changes, there's exhaustion… and above all, you have to look after a newborn.”
Even her mother and grandmother, who had suffered themselves silently, could only pass on the same cryptic solace: this is just how it is. “There's no reasoning behind it,” Keerthi says.
She is vice chairperson of Maheswara Medical College and Hospital in Hyderabad and holds an Economics degree from India, along with an MBA in finance from France. She was immersed in a world of allopathic solutions.
“Allopathy-wise, we have a lot of backing. We have a team of doctors, specialists, you name it.” But in the face of her own hormonal tumult, that backing felt abstract. The system she was part of had no clear protocol for the silent storm she was weathering. “When you don't have the required help to understand your hormones better,” she realised, “you need to help yourself.”
Three months in, desperate for a sense of agency, she found a thread online: seed cycling. The term felt foreign, a wellness trend from afar. But as she read about pumpkin, flax, sesame, and sunflower seeds, a memory flickered. This wasn't new.
“It came across as a very Western concept, but it's been rooted in our traditions for very, very long. We do eat these sesame laddus during postpartum, but nobody really explained the tradition or the science behind it. We were just eating it because our elders said so,” she says.
With nothing to lose, she started blending........