CHAPTER
2

Practicing Ayurveda

In This Chapter

Ayurveda might seem like a totally foreign practice with tons of guidelines the average person could never adhere to, but this couldn’t be further from the truth! Ayurveda is a highly intuitive lifestyle that’s actually extremely easy to follow. In fact, many of the common health practices performed today are actually Ayurvedic.

In this chapter, I explain what practicing Ayurveda is all about, from eating seasonally to meditation. Then, I bust some common myths and show you how easy it is to bring more Ayurvedic wisdom into your life—if it isn’t in there already!

You May Be Practicing Ayurveda Already

Do you use oils in your diet or beauty regimen? Switch up your diet from summer to fall? Practice yoga or meditation? Take herbs to heal common ailments or drink herbal tea? Use a brush to exfoliate your skin? Scrape your tongue? If you do any of these, you are practicing Ayurveda already.

One of the greatest things about Ayurveda is its simplicity. It doesn’t require expensive superfoods, fancy kitchen appliances, or a strict diet regimen. Ayurveda was created thousands of years ago, before these things even existed. The founders of Ayurveda discovered healing uses of the things around them, from common herbs to oils. Food was seen as medicine, and each meal was your daily prescription.

Because Ayurveda was the first health system, much of what we practice today actually stems from Ayurvedic tradition. The way we think about food, beauty, and medicine comes from Ayurvedic influences. Today more than ever before, people are looking back at this ancient wisdom for its long-standing existence. If you are a coconut oil addict, home remedy maven, or herbal tea connoisseur, you are practicing Ayurveda already.

Your Morning Routine

We all have some sort of morning routine we follow to get ready for the day. Yours might include brushing your teeth while running to the toaster to heat up a couple slices of bread before getting your kids ready for school. Or maybe it’s hitting the snooze button five times until you drag yourself out of bed and somehow make it to work by the time you wake up, coffee in hand. Perhaps you jump out of bed, chug a big bottle of water, put on your sneakers, and push your body through an hour-long workout followed by a cold shower and icy protein shake. Maybe you’re one who naturally wakes up when the sun rises, slowly allows your body to get ready for the day, warm tea in hand, while either journaling or lightly stretching. Is one routine better than the others? I’ll let you decide when you’re done reading this book.

Whatever your current morning routine, the fact that you have one is a sort of Ayurvedic ritual. In Sanskrit, your daily routine is called your dinacharya, or “to be close to the day.” This means being in touch with the earth’s natural cycles, such as waking up when the sun rises and going to sleep when it sets. However, it gets much deeper than that, which I discuss more in Chapters 9 and 10.

Definition

Dinacharya is your daily practice, such as brushing your teeth, washing your face, scraping your tongue, oiling your body, meditating, and eating breakfast. It is highly recommended to have some sort of routine in Ayurveda.

According to Ayurveda, the way you start your day is how you’ll feel for the rest of the day. If you begin your day in a rush, you’ll feel nervous and restless for the duration of the day. If you start slow and tired, you’ll feel lazy and heavy for the rest of the day. If you overexert yourself at the beginning of the day, you’ll feel burnt out for the rest of the day. It’s all about maintaining a very fine balance of waking yourself up without wearing yourself out.

Ayurvedic morning practices include the following:

Oil pulling: This is swishing around oil in your mouth to remove toxins, similar to using mouthwash.

Tongue scraping: This is scraping your tongue with a copper scraper to remove toxic buildup, similar to brushing your tongue with your toothbrush.

Abhyanga: This is self-oil massage to stimulate your lymphatic system, similar to applying lotion.

Dry brushing: This is brushing your skin with a dry brush to remove dead skin cells, similar to using a loofa.

These practices aren’t totally foreign; you might be doing many of them already. I explain more on how you can incorporate these, and other Ayurvedic practices, into your daily routine in Chapters 10 and 11.

Herbal Teas and Remedies

If you drink herbal tea or take herbal supplements, you are practicing Ayurveda. As more people become aware of the dehydrating effects of caffeine and the potential risks of Western drugs, they are switching to more herbal teas and remedies. Coffee shops around the country now offer a rich selection of herbal teas, such as chamomile or rooibos. Pharmacies similarly boast growing sections of herbal supplements to treat a host of symptoms, from hormonal imbalance to unstable blood sugar levels. People are turning back to nature to cure their imbalances. Ayurveda was the first health system to use herbs for medicinal benefits, and modern Herbology is based on Ayurveda.

Herbal remedies are nothing new to the majority of the world. In fact, the World Health Organization has estimated that 80 percent of the world’s population uses traditional therapies, a major part of which are derived from plants. Ayurveda recommends a wide range of herbs, from ginger to triphala, to heal the body from within.

The use of herbal supplements is steadily increasing in the United States. In 2012, one in five Americans was using herbal, nonvitamin supplements, and that number has continued to increase. Americans spent at least $21 billion on herbs and other dietary supplements in 2015. In fact, according to the National Institutes of Health, one third of Americans uses alternative medicine, including herbal supplements, meditation, yoga, and chiropractic adjustments.

Herbal supplements are often an attractive alternative to pharmaceuticals because they offer the same benefits with a decreased risk of side effects. For example, there are no risks of adding too much ginger to your food, besides making it too spicy, because ginger is a root vegetable grown naturally. Our bodies are able to recognize plant-based ingredients, allowing them to cooperate more with our systems.

Herbal treatments also are desirable because they are more affordable than pharmaceutical drugs. For example, the arthritis drug Celebrex costs more than $4 per day, whereas ginger supplements, an Ayurvedic arthritis treatment, cost about 38¢ per day. Even less expensive is adding fresh grated ginger to your meals and teas.

Herbal teas are a large part of the Ayurvedic diet and are actually viewed as medicine. Instead of medicine, as an Ayurvedic practitioner, I often “prescribe” my clients specific tea recipes with certain spices they need to address their underlying issues.

Wisdom of the Ages

Teas are an effective way of consuming herbs because their benefits are enhanced when steeped in hot water. Herbal teas are a great alternative to caffeinated black tea or coffee, which dehydrate the body and put the adrenals on overdrive. Ayurveda recommends countless unique tea recipes, some sweet and others quite bitter, depending on what the individual needs. Common teas include ginger, fennel, and peppermint.

Each herbal tea has a multitude of benefits. Whereas pharmaceutical drugs are intended for only one purpose, most herbs have numerous. Ginger tea is not only medicinal for arthritis, but also a powerful aid for improving digestion and reducing inflammation. Fennel tea relieves gas, bloating, and constipation while also detoxifying the liver. Similarly, peppermint tea relieves nausea, vomiting, and stomachaches, while also cooling the body. Specific herbs are recommended for each body type, season, and environment.

Ayurveda recommends making your own herbal teas to reap the benefits in the most natural form, without the potential risk of chemicals in conventional tea bags. Grated ginger, fennel seeds, or peppermint is all you need, which is also much more affordable than buying tea. Most of the teas Ayurveda recommends are used in cooking as well, and you don’t need too many staples. For teas where you may not have the original ingredient, you can purchase loose-leaf tea. Loose-leaf tea is preferable to bagged tea to avoid potential toxins and pesticides.

Oils

We recently went through a time when people were afraid of oils. We were told that oils in our food would make us fat and should be avoided. Similarly, oils in our skincare products were supposed to cause acne and breakouts.

Today, thankfully, we have learned this isn’t true. All fats don’t make us fat, and not all oil on our skin causes acne—and some can actually heal it. Those same outlets that once advocated the abandonment of oil now have become oil obsessed. They recommend adding oil to your cooking, putting it on your skin, and making it into masks for your hair—something Ayurveda has advocated about for 5,000 years.

Wisdom of the Ages

In Ayurveda, oil is love. In fact, the Sanskrit word for oil, sneha, actually means “love.” To oil your body is an act of self-love. Abhyanga, self-oil massage, is an integral part of the dinacharya daily practice.

Adding oil to your food makes it easier to digest. The oil allows for the breakdown of the food and enables your gastrointestinal tract to better process the food. Difficult-to-digest foods like fibrous cauliflower and kale should always be paired with oil.

Oil is also the key to hydration. Your cells cannot absorb water without oil. That’s why a diet low in oil can leave you dehydrated. Dehydration affects your body inside and out. A lack of oil in your diet causes constipation internally and dry or dull skin, frizzy or split end-prone hair, and cracked lips and nails externally.

The beauty industry has scared many of us away from using oil on our faces because we’ve been told it clogs pores. That’s true for mineral oils found in lotions and makeup as well as animal oils. These oils form a waterproof film on top of the skin’s debris, locking in bacteria, dead skin cells, sweat, and sebum.

However, plant-based oils are similar to the kinds our skin produces naturally and are easily absorbed by the skin without clogging pores. They’re more moisturizing than creams and lotions because they bind moisture to the skin while strengthening skin cell membranes. Oil can be used both for cleansing the skin as well as moisturizing it, which I explain more in Chapter 11.

Ayurveda recommends specific oils for the individual Doshas, or mind-body types. For those with more dry, rough skin, warming sesame oil is recommended. For acne-prone, oily skin, cooling coconut oil is recommended. For moist, combination skin, sesame, almond, or olive oil is recommended, depending on the season.

Ayurvedic Alert

Oils can be used topically or internally because according to Ayurveda, you shouldn’t put anything on your skin that you wouldn’t also eat. Your skin is your largest organ, and whatever you rub on your body makes its way into your bloodstream. Be sure it’s free of parabens, alcohols, fragrances, and chemicals.

More Ayurvedic Practices

Do you brush your skin with a loofa? Turns out, that practice is best outside the shower. Dry brushing, the Ayurvedic practice of scrubbing your body with a dry brush to remove dead skin, is regaining popularity. According to Ayurveda, it’s important to exfoliate your skin so your cells can breathe without a rough layer of dead skin smothering them. I explain more about how to dry brush in Chapter 11.

Have you ever used a tongue scraper? That’s another Ayurvedic practice hitting the modern mainstream. Ayurveda recommends scraping your tongue with a copper scraper to remove ama, or toxins, that have accumulated overnight. As you sleep, your mouth breeds bacteria from your gut, and it’s important to remove them not only for mouth health but also for digestive well-being. I explain more about tongue scraping in Chapter 10.

After a shower, do you ever rub oil in your skin? You guessed it—also Ayurvedic. When practiced the right way, this self-oil massage, or abhyanga, stimulates the lymphatic system, calms the mind and body, and allows your body to release toxins. It can be practiced on your own or professionally in an Ayurvedic massage treatment, part of a Panchakarma, which I discuss in Chapter 22.

As mentioned earlier, Ayurveda has many ancient practices that are in use today. Although many Americans probably have never heard the word Ayurveda, much of their self-care and dietary routines originate from Ayurvedic traditions. You may be dabbling in some Ayurvedic practices already, and this book teaches you many more. Ayurveda doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. In fact, there are many misconceptions about Ayurveda that I debunk next.

Misconceptions About Ayurveda

Some people who have dabbled a bit in Ayurvedic studies may have concluded that it is arduous and archaic or means you have to eat vegetarian curry for the rest of your life. None of these things are true. Ayurveda can be applied to any lifestyle, whether you eat meat, dislike Indian food, or barely have time to cook. In this section, I dispel some common misconceptions about Ayurveda so you can see for yourself how easy it is to follow Ayurvedic guidelines.

Ayurveda Is Time-Consuming

I totally understand this assumption because I made it myself when I was studying Ayurveda in India and thinking how impossible it would be to follow the guidelines when I returned to the United States. However, I since have found it to be completely false. Boiling a pot of beans takes about 1 minute to prepare. Throwing together vegetables and spices in my slow cooker takes about 5. Many of the Ayurvedic recipes I follow are prepared in just one pot. In fact, I have saved time and money by following an Ayurvedic diet because many of the staples, like rice and lentils, are extremely affordable and easy to prepare. All I do is add some herbs and spices, and my meals are ready.

You Have to Be a Vegetarian

Ayurveda does recommend following a mostly vegetarian diet because meat is difficult for the body to digest, but it doesn’t mean you have to be vegetarian. In fact, Ayurveda actually recommends the consumption of meat in two scenarios.

The first is if you are extremely weak, such as if you have an autoimmune disease or are malnourished, and need meat to regain strength. In this case, meat is seen as medicine. Eating it is considered honoring the circle of life because you are taking life in order to survive. High-quality meat provides a great deal of sustenance to the body, which is necessary for those with debilitating diseases or malnourished bodies. Patients are encouraged to eat organic and/or grass-fed meat until they regain health and then can revert to a mostly meat-free diet because plant-based foods have all the protein we need.

The second group Ayurveda recommends meat for is the “warrior caste.” These were the protectors of the land at the time Ayurveda developed. Meat was recommended for the warriors because it invokes qualities of rajas, filling them up with powerful energy and vigor—a desirable trait for those protecting the civilization. We don’t have a warrior caste today, but we definitely have people who overexert themselves physically. Those who are extremely active, such as weight lifters and athletes, and need extra protein to rejuvenate their muscles fall in this category. It’s not necessary for most people, but an option Ayurveda includes.

The reason Ayurveda does not recommend eating meat regularly is because it’s not easy to digest. Our gastrointestinal tracts are far longer than those of carnivorous animals. We also lack the stomach acid lions and tigers have. This causes the meat we consume to sit in our bellies, rotting and causing toxic accumulation, or ama. Ama causes countless imbalances, such as kidney stones, gout, gallstones, ulcers, and other disorders. Many believe a high-protein diet helps them lose weight, but research has shown that consuming excess protein actually has the same effect as consuming excess carbohydrates and causes fat accumulation.

Ayurveda has no strict labels, only fluid suggestions. There may be times in your life when you could benefit from meat, such as if you’re overworked, malnourished, overexerted, or fatigued. There may be times when you’re better on a completely plant-based diet. Some people may need meat several times a year, while others several times a week. What’s important is that you check in with your body to see what you truly need and get out of the habit of eating animal products at every meal just because.

The amount of animal products you might need in your diet changes according to the season and your environment. In the colder, winter months, you need more fats in your diet. Because of the lower temperatures, the saturated fat in meat can help you preserve body heat. You’ll notice that in countries with colder climates, more meat is consumed for that reason. In the summer, you need more fresh fruit and vegetables to cool down.

Whether you choose to eat meat or not is entirely your decision. If you do, Ayurveda recommends specific types of animal products for each body type, which I discuss in Chapter 6. It is possible to include meat in your diet while following Ayurvedic guidelines, as long as you consume it when your body truly needs it, pay the animal respect, and are certain it was farmed sustainably.

Wisdom of the Ages

Ayurveda is a mostly vegetarian diet that recommends meat in two situations—if you’re extremely weak or if you overexert yourself physically. In both cases, meat should be organic and/or grass-fed and respect must be paid to the animal for giving its life for your sustenance.

It Only Includes Indian Food

This is another judgment I made while studying Ayurveda in India because frankly, every recipe I learned was Indian! As much as I love Indian food, it wasn’t the only food I wanted to eat for the rest of my life. So I started creating my own recipes, using Ayurvedic guidelines but with ingredients found near me, such as kale, berries, quinoa, and avocados. It is entirely possible to eat Ayurvedically without eating only traditional Indian Ayurvedic foods.

Ayurveda is more of a framework on what to eat and how. You don’t have to consume just traditional Ayurvedic recipes to benefit from Ayurvedic wisdom. These recipes were created thousands of years ago, in India, and contain ingredients found only in the region. Instead, you can apply Ayurvedic suggestions, such as food combining, eating for your Dosha, changing your diet according to the season, and noticing the qualities of your food, to any type of food—Italian, Mexican, French, you name it. Ayurveda teaches you how to make that food healthier for your body.

Anybody Can Practice Ayurveda

Ayurveda doesn’t require hours of cooking, fancy kitchen equipment, tofu-only dinners, or a lifetime of Indian cuisine. Ayurveda can make its way into your life easily and painlessly, from the way you start your day to the way you prepare your meals. Ayurveda offers many recommendations, and you can pick and choose what works best for you.

There’s no need to change 100 percent of your life overnight to strictly follow the Ayurvedic guidelines. The beauty of Ayurveda is that it’s a lifelong practice. You have the rest of your existence to adapt a more Ayurvedic lifestyle. Take one thing at a time, and let it become a routine. Once that one thing has become habitual, include something else. Consistency is key and much more effective than a crash diet followed by reverting to fast food and sugar.

Ayurveda has so many gifts to offer. The only question is which you’d like to receive first.

The Least You Need to Know

  • Ayurvedic practices aren’t so out of reach, and you might be practicing many already.
  • The way you start your day is the way you’ll feel for the rest of your day, so choose carefully.
  • Herbal teas and remedies are an integral part of Ayurveda and best in their most natural form.
  • You do not have to be a strict vegetarian to follow Ayurveda; you can eat organic, grass-fed meat only when your body truly needs it.
  • Eat seasonally and locally to ensure you are eating the right foods for your body at the right times of the year.