Ayurveda

Understanding The Basics of Ayurveda

Short Audio Introduction:

Ayurveda is a holistic, natural system of health, originating in India more than 5,000 years ago. Perhaps the oldest extant medical system in the world, Ayurveda’s teachings are timeless. Now, when looking for natural, holistic, and safe ways to create health for themselves and their families, people in the West are interested in Ayurveda for its vast knowledge and effective treatments. Ayurveda offers remedies for illness and is designed as a preventive medicine that supports consistent health and longevity.

A Complete Medical System

Ayurveda is a complete medical system. It treats the whole person as an integrated being: body, mind, and spirit. Ayurveda is a comprehensive medical system that includes: surgery, psychotherapy, pediatrics, gynecology, obstetrics, ophthalmology, geriatrics, ear/nose/throat, and general medicine. All of these branches are subsumed in the holistic practice of Ayurveda, which takes into consideration all aspects of your life, and employs a variety of healing modalities to support your health and thriving day by day, year by year.

Non-specialized Treatment

Ayurveda doesn’t specialize, which means it doesn’t focus on healing just one organ or one symptom at a time. Your Ayurvedic practitioner will be interested in your history and all of your physical symptoms (headache, stomachache, sore back, etc.). She will ask you a variety of questions and perform a physical examination. Her examination helps her understand what is causing you to experience uncomfortable symptoms and disease.

Then, she will give you recommendations to treat the symptoms and bring you back into balance, primarily through lifestyle and diet. The recommendations will be nourishing for your body, mind, and spirit. As you eat the foods and herbs she recommends, savor the tastes, scents, and textures. Support the healing power of these herbs and foods with trust in their healing potential. Your thoughts, energy, and beliefs will help your healing process. In addition, the appropriate foods, herbs, and lifestyle changes give your body, mind, and spirit the support to heal.

Once you are feeling well again, your Ayurvedic practitioner will give you recommendations to maintain balance, which is the condition for optimal health. When in balance, you’ll notice what it feels like to be enjoying good health and immunity. Your symptoms will disappear, you’ll feel less irritable, you’ll think more clearly, you’ll catch fewer colds (if any), and you can even reduce or stop suffering from seasonal allergies. You’ll feel well and be able to enjoy your life more.

When you start to get sick, if you choose not to make changes in your diet and lifestyle and instead only take allopathic drugs for the symptoms, it’s likely that your symptoms will worsen and/or recur. In Ayurveda, the idea is to create harmony in your mind, body, and spirit so your body can support its own healing and become well enough to discourage recurring symptoms and the development of disease.

What is the Benefit of Ayurveda as a Holistic Practice, One that Doesn’t Specialize?

As a holistic practice, Ayurveda creates overall health, recognizing that body, mind, and spirit are interrelated. So, its goal is twofold: to alleviate the discomfort of something such as a headache, stomachache, or cold, and to bring you into balance to prevent those symptoms from recurring and worsening.

Your body wants to be well, and it’s designed to function in harmony with the natural world. To create health, your body must be able to perform its vital functions, which include the absorption of vitamins and minerals, and the elimination of toxins. Rather than just suggesting a quick fix, Ayurveda gives you the tools to create a state of harmony in your body and mind so that your body can perform its required functions to keep you healthy.

The Beginnings of Ayurveda

In a way very different from many modern Western medical discoveries, Ayurveda didn’t originate in laboratories or research centers. More than 5,000 years ago, while in meditative states, rishis in India began to understand the nature of life, health, and longevity that has come to be what we call Ayurveda, the science of life. This, combined with more than 5,000 years of observing the systems inherent in the natural world, forms a study of the complex nature of our existence. One of the many gifts of Ayurveda is the vast knowledge of the plant world, which has helped create one of the most fine-tuned pharmacopoeias of natural medicines the world has known.

For millennia, in India they’ve known that meditation and present-moment awareness are vehicles for tapping in to the wisdom of the universe. When you meditate, becoming still and quiet, you open to knowledge and wisdom beyond your studies. Knowledge is of the mind; wisdom is of the heart. Combining learning through study and receiving through meditation reveals the wisdom of living.

More than 2,000 years ago much of Ayurveda’s wisdom was transcribed into Sanskrit. Many of those texts are still around today. Ayurvedic specialists learn from the wisdom of these texts and from the wisdom of practitioners who combine that knowledge with their proven experience in Ayurveda and allopathic, or traditional Western, medicine.

You Have the Same Elements as the Eternal Cosmos

One of the philosophers of this age, Kapila, is credited with the philosophy of creation known as Samkya from the roots sat, meaning “truth,” and kyah, meaning “to know.” This “knowledge of truth” is the foundation of Ayurveda. According to Samkya philosophy, before physical matter existed there were two eternal forces: consciousness that is pure awareness, called Purusha, and a force of creativity/action called Prakruti. Purusha, awareness, is considered the male energy of the universe. It is pure awareness. It is the universal intelligence and consciousness that just is. Prakruti is considered the female energy of the universe, which is awareness plus choice and the desire for creation. It is from the energy of Prakruti that the universe, and each human being, has come into existence.

Ayurveda’s nontheistic creation story is compatible with theistic beliefs. If you believe in a creator, it’s also possible to incorporate the realization that you are made of the same elements that you experience outside. Samkya philosophy explains that your physical and energetic bodies are composed of the same elements as the natural world.

Samkya explains that each human being is a microcosm of the macrocosm (the universe). Each person’s physical makeup is a combination of the five elements of the universe. Everyone is individual in his constitution, and he is always in relationship with the energy and elements outside of himself. So, Ayurveda looks at health in terms of the individual’s constitution and how to keep that in balance with the changing external elements.

Your Relationship to the Cosmos

Here is the story of creation according to the rishis who realized Samkya philosophy: Before the creation of life on earth, there existed two eternal cosmic forces: Purusha (pure awareness) and Prakruti (creative energy). Everything that is created comes from Prakruti, and Purusha is the eternal witness, with no participation in creation.
Prakruti is energy that contains the three gunas, or attributes: sattva (creative potential), tamas (inertia or destructive potential), and rajas(movement/kinetic force), in balance.

One by One, the Elements Formed

From Prakruti, the force of creation, the soundless vibration “aum” began to stir. “Aum” is said to be the first energetic vibration from which all else is born. All matter is energy at its basic unit, and “aum” is the first vibration of energy.
The vibration “aum” had to be vibrating somewhere. It was vibrating in space; that’s how the rishis realized the element ether. When the element of ether began to move, it created air, the element of movement. As air began to move, it created friction, which creates heat, the element of fire. Fire has the property of transformation. Because of fire’s transforming property it caused elements of ether to liquefy into water and coalesce into matter, earth. From the earth, all living matter is created, grows, and returns. This includes all the food that is nourishing to you, the water you drink, and vitamins and minerals you get from the air you breathe and the sunshine you soak up. You are of the elements, and you thrive and grow based on your relationship to them. Living in harmony with the elements keeps you healthy, youthful, and balanced. Ayurveda explains simple, natural, and fun ways to achieve this balance.

How to Create Balance

To achieve a state of balance, which leads to health, these are the three principles you’ll keep in mind:

• Your state of being and everything you see, touch, taste, hear, and feel can be described in terms of qualities.
• Like increases like.
• Opposites balance.

Creating health in Ayurveda means creating balance. You will be able to adjust your diet, type of exercise, and other factors in your life to help you stay in balance throughout the various times of day, various seasons, and various times of life. Being in balance supports your biological functions, your psychological equilibrium, and your youthful spirit.

The Science of Life

Ayurveda is called the science of life. This way of life supports your getting healthy, staying healthy, and enjoying your life with youthfulness in body, mind, and spirit. Through this science of life, you will observe yourself, your family, your loved ones, and the natural world in terms of qualities. You will be able to use these observations to realize how to bring yourself and your life into balance. You’ll renew your relationship to the world outside you, knowing what you need to do in response to the changing times of day, weather patterns, seasons, and years of your life so that you stay healthy.

You Are All That Is

When the rishis realized Ayurveda, they realized that all life is connected, and that health is based on recognizing this wholeness and interconnectedness. Your health is based on your recognition that you are a whole being—body, mind, and spirit—and that your existence is in relationship to all that is.

According to Ayurveda, you are both individual and a part of the entire fabric of existence. The way the elements were arranged in you at your conception makes you unique and individual. The precise choices you will make to balance yourself will differ from what your parents, your friends, and your children need to do for balance. This is because everyone is unique. At the same time, you and your loved ones are all part of the same tapestry of life. You, the sun, the moon, the flowers, the earth, your animal friends, and all beings are exchanging the same energy. You are all affected by the elements in nature, and you all have those elements at work inside of you. Because everyone and everything is connected, you are not separate from all that is.

What Ayurveda Is Not

Because Ayurveda is making its way from East to West, it’s possible for the modern reader to approach Ayurveda with preconceived ideas that are misconceptions rather than coming to the ideas with an open heart and mind. Be open to the wisdom of Ayurveda and see if it resonates with what makes sense to you deep down.

Ayurveda Is Not a Religion

Ayurveda takes into consideration your body, mind, and spirit because they are all connected. What does it mean to take into consideration your spirit or your relationship to spirituality? The truth of your existence is that you are in relationship with the entire universe. When you go outside in the sunshine, you can feel that you have a response to that energy. When it’s cold out, you have responses that are different from your responses to when it’s hot outside—you have mental, physical, and energetic responses.

You are made up of atoms of energy; even what appears to be solid matter is energy at its basic unit. In this way, your connection to all that is, to a source larger than yourself, is an energetic connection. You are energetically tapped in to the eternal wisdom that is held in the universe; you and the universe are of the same elements. In this way, there is spirituality because this connection is of a nonphysical nature. When you connect to all that is, you are tapping in to that part of you that is eternal and has the powerful healing potential of the source of energy of all that exists.

You also have the ability to move your awareness in the realm of bliss, or Samadhi. Meditation and yoga nidra, yogic sleep, are two vehicles that have the potential to take you to the experience of this state of awareness. This also is not religious belief. It is another state of awareness that is possible for you to experience when you deeply relax and just “be.” In the peaceful experience that is called Samadhi, you experience your connection to all that is. And your body has time to restore and renew itself. You may also begin to realize the nature of life in ways that others cannot explain to you. When you open your eyes, after having meditated, you will often feel a sense of your wholeness. It’s a comfortable feeling like pure love, and a stable contentment as though you’ve awakened from the perfect sleep and know and feel that all is well. When you’ve experienced this, it can be called a spiritual experience of recognizing your wholeness, your healing potential, and your connection to existence beyond just what you see, feel, taste, touch, and smell.

Ayurveda is founded on the belief in your connection to all that is. Ayurveda encourages you to believe that you have the ability to tap in to the healing power and wisdom that you seek. This wisdom is within you and all around you. The spiritual aspect of Ayurveda is that you are connected to the spirit, to the divinity that you seek. You are a co-creator in the healing energies that exist in the world.