Every book accomplishes its own spiritual journey before being born, and this one is no different. Join me in an inspiring transformative voyage to abiding health.
This book has the potential to change your state of health for the better — permanently. Health is not just a possibility that you might achieve. It is a reality, an underlying natural state of being. Health will manifest once you begin to live in alignment with Nature’s intelligence. This is the promise of Ayurveda, India’s five-thousand-year-old system of health and healing.
When I was growing up in India, I witnessed a spiritual master, my grandfather, whom I addressed as Baba, remind the diseased and the suffering of their abidingly healthy nature. He taught them simple ways to align with Nature on a daily basis, and enigmatically, this ignited powerful healing of body, mind, and soul. While there wasn’t a focus on the symptoms of disease per se, I saw cancers disappear, ulcers heal, and chronic depressions lift.
I think I had rationalized that these “miracles” were possible because my teacher was a spiritually realized being. Clearly, my guru’s spiritual presence was undeniable. But as I grew up and observed more, I recognized that Baba’s skills in transmitting a highly rational science of Ayurveda lifestyle were also a key factor. I am so glad that my teacher imparted to me his spiritual conviction along with his scientific knowledge, which includes Ayurveda’s lifestyle wisdom. His teachings and his blessings have taken the form of this book so that more and more people can discover the truth of health for themselves.
Reading and implementing the lessons in this book can be a rite of transition, from a life lived routinely or unmindfully, to masterful living, encompassing the freedom that comes from embracing health consciousness, self-determination, and Nature’s blessings to proactively influence the course of your health and well-being. Health alone will completely undo the paradigm of disease permanently.
Ayurveda proposes two methodologies toward approaching health. The first is preventive and promotive. It proposes protecting and enhancing health with a set of lifestyle practices. This is the “wisdom” approach of evoking inner health, known as swasthya-raksha in Sanskrit. It incorporates at every step lessons from the spiritual sister sciences of yoga and Vedanta.
The second methodology is “restorative.” It includes disease management using herbal drugs, body treatments, and even surgery (though surgery is no longer an active modality in Ayurveda today). This methodology is known as vikara prashamana in Sanskrit. Both approaches are equally valid, at appropriate junctures.
However, we must not quit evoking health at any point of time. If disease management via drugs is taken up without a parallel investment in a healthy lifestyle, the body becomes a battleground all too quickly. There is a wellspring of power within us, a spiritual truth, that we must honor; and we never give away our power to any disease, just because we have a scary-sounding condition with a grim prognosis. In fact, it is now more than ever that we must activate our latent health response through a scientific lifestyle that is in sync with Nature’s laws. If you are consuming Eastern or Western drugs, a healthy Ayurveda-inspired lifestyle in conjunction will expedite recovery and additionally facilitate well-being.
Your body is remarkably wise and possesses self-repair mechanisms. “Trust it some more, and help it heal itself,” Baba explained to me. Besides, Ayurveda lifestyle is often enough in and of itself to activate the dormant “health response.”
And at the least, lifestyle is like evocative art; it suffuses our consciousness with all-new possibilities of being and becoming. A lifestyle that makes us feel fulfilled and optimistic at some level will positively impact our beliefs and feelings about our universe and ourselves. Sometimes you will find that you are smiling through the day, and for no particular reason.
When we examine Ayurveda’s source literature, spanning from the Vedas (4500 BCE) all the way to the sixteenth century (that is, texts progressing from the remote past onward), it was lifestyle wisdom that occupied the central stage. Disease management gained increasing priority in the later texts. In fact, this is how the sages who gave us the ancient Vedas and original spiritual sciences of Ayurveda, yoga, Vedanta, meditation, sacred art, architecture, music, and dance lived! They boldly cultivated radiant health day by day as an expression of their god consciousness. They were not living in constant fear of disease. They thought health, lived health, and enjoyed health. It is no wonder that their ancient teachings offer original wisdom that holds the potential of making our entire planet healthy today. Even if disease came to the wise seers (as decay is part of the natural order), they would heal it (or accept it) with grace and beauty, without collapsing their entire consciousness into a “broken-shattered” mode.
Unfortunately, many Ayurveda practitioners today choose to “fix” disease and eschew time-consuming patient education on lifestyle. At times, the practitioners possess academic knowledge of lifestyle principles but not a lived knowledge borne from personal experience, and hence, they are very much bound in “disease consciousness” themselves, often harboring negative outcome beliefs, which invariably reduce the chances of recovery. They are also quick to prescribe herbal drugs. For example, instead of elucidating the lifestyle wisdom pertaining to healthy sleep, far too often the endangered herb Nardostachys jatamansi is prescribed for insomnia. I call this a “prescriptive” model of Ayurveda, very similar to the Western medical approach that matches drugs with symptoms but does not care to address the underlying life (style) issue. It encourages dependency on drugs, not self-reliance through leading a balanced life, which is greater than any drug. I personally stay away from this mode of Ayurveda.
This book, instead, restores the wisdom teachings on lifestyle to their rightful place and shines the light on health. This book will thereby empower ordinary people, you and me, because lifestyle sets us free to craft our own health, in our own homes, on our own terms.
My Experiments with Evoking the Health Response
My guru imprinted my soul with a spiritual seed of relentless conviction in the self-healing and self-repairing mechanisms of the living body. My entire life and message as a spiritual teacher revolve around this power, which is inherently spiritual. My own journey with a genetic disorder that confines many people to wheelchairs (yet, has spared me) and my ability to cheerfully withstand the severe aftermath of a traumatic neck injury — without painkillers or surgery, with hope to heal fully one day and courage to continue undeterred with my life mission, in spite of everything — has strengthened my belief that deliberate and unhurried self-loving lifestyle practices synced with Nature awaken health as well as personal power and courage.
The same idea has been confirmed again and again, not only in my personal life and private practice, but on a larger scale through public teachings, community education, and wellness initiatives undertaken in California since 2007 through my not-for-profit Vedika Global, a foundation for the living wisdom of Ayurveda, yoga, and Vedanta.
To confirm my learned belief that a health response can be evoked through lifestyle implementation alone, I experimented for over a decade by creating several drug-free lifestyle courses (taught by my well-trained graduates and myself) and lifestyle clinics in California overseen by my school’s graduates. In both, I deliberately bypass the paradigm of disease management and, instead, focus on evoking health of body and mind through lifestyle teachings plus personal empowerment through connecting with a disease-free, ageless higher Self as the underlying reality.
Anyone, of any age and any constitution, whether healthy or sick, was welcome to sign up. Participants were as young as ten years old and also as old as eighty! And what did I find? They all got better! Within a matter of weeks, both course and clinic participants started reporting increased well-being. Some even shared their latest blood test results or other clinical findings — unsolicited by us — to rejoice in their newfound health parameters.
Many of them were shocked, too. What was going on? How was health sneaking up on them so quickly, merely through education in a health-evoking lifestyle and healthy beliefs, in spite of years of ill health and after their doctors had given up on them, or worse, when they had given up on themselves?
While their actual results were based on length and commitment of engagement with lifestyle practices, there was not a single participant who reported a deterioration of health.
Countless individuals with beginning, chronic, or advanced disorders were reclaiming health and well-being, simply by implementing lifestyle changes impacting core personal areas of food (ahara), rest and sleep (nidra), and sexual and behavioral self-regulation (brahmacharya and sadvritta) in the overall context of prescribed daily regimen (dinacharya) and seasonal regimen (ritucharya). Lifestyle practices even improved the well-being of people with terminal diseases, and some reported outliving their prognosis or at least feeling more at peace until the last day. It was uncanny and incredible.
By shining the light on health and consciousness, the miracles I witnessed with my guru Baba, in his lifetime, had now begun to accrue around my initiatives with health versus disease. This was a powerful reinforcement of my own belief systems.
I was convinced that I was onto something and that perhaps a scalable clinical as well as educational self-help model could be crafted from my spiritually anchored lifestyle teachings that evoke the health response. Perhaps it was time to simply stop overly focusing on disease anyway. Is counteracting disease with herbs (versus synthetically designed drugs) still battling it anyway, keeping us locked in disease consciousness? Are we merely changing our doctors from Western medicine to Eastern medicine providers, but each time getting locked up all over again in disease-combating dogmatic belief systems, prescriptions, and protocols? Are we scaring ourselves again and again (with disease), forgetful of our natural inheritance, which is health?
Are we panicking and creating more work for ourselves in medicine instead of simply realigning the quality of our lives with lifestyle adjustments? Have we generated a tremendous number of myths around disease, and its heavy-duty management, instead of evoking the sweet song of health from the truth and light sourced within?
I am all for modem medical intervention, when necessary. I also advocate no single approach, as a judicious integration is the wisest way. However, I do wonder if we need a greater, or at least parallel, focus on a healthy lifestyle, which will greatly support us in overcoming disease by evoking a health response from within. Is it time to begin a new narrative after all?
Further — and this pertains especially to those who have an intrinsic belief in naturally sourced drugs as an alternative to pharmaceuticals — an important question to ask is whether we are overmedicating ourselves, simply because the medicine in question is from a plant source and not created in a laboratory. Should a natural drug be the end of our quest for health? Are we settling for less?
These were some of the questions that were arising in my mind. Sadly, the bane of reductionism is so pervasive that it has also quietly crept into the domains of spiritualized systems like Ayurveda. Instead of being seen as a health-promoting system, more and more, Ayurveda is taught, practiced, and promoted worldwide as a complementary system of disease management. Herbs are safer than prescriptive drugs; we know that (although some will even question that), yet all drugs mask the body’s self-regenerating mechanism to an extent; hence, I believe that herbs must be prescribed as an exception, or in advanced conditions only, and never without accompanying lifestyle restoration teaching.
According to the Botanical Survey of India, 93 percent of Ayurveda medicinal plants are endangered today.1 Even so, unfettered export by India and import and consumption worldwide burgeons. Patent wars on Ayurveda botanicals are being fought in multiple courts, and the bulk of claims are filed right here in the United States (including battles over neem and turmeric). Now, almost every drug company on the planet wants to cash in on Ayurveda’s ancient pharmacopedic wisdom. Shockingly, all institutions of Ayurveda education in India, and more and more now emerging worldwide, continue to impart a medical paradigm focused around these disappearing herbs, blissfully ignoring the magnitude of the environmental problem.
When it came to using plant-based medicines, my teacher modeled an ultraconservative, almost reverential, approach. I too prefer utilizing spice- and food-based home remedies or employing garden herbs that we can grow in our own homes in a relatively short time. I also consider it my responsibility to screen for botanicals that are not endangered before utilizing them myself or prescribing them to others. This is vastly preferred to consuming and prescribing wild-grown herbs — some of which take decades to grow and ripen.
Are we ultimately expecting our environment to foot the bill of natural medicine? We still have time to put aside our fallacious notions about disease.
This book fills a gap in promoting a spiritualized and health-focused, environmentally sound, ethically rooted Ayurveda lifestyle so that more and more people can adopt these practices in their lives along with a sense of dharma, or social responsibility, toward our planet and its environment.
Conceivably, what I am sharing through this book is the best-kept secret of humanity, and this information will help many more people reclaim sound health. Ayurveda’s lifestyle wisdom is tried and tested and is, above all, an economical solution to the epidemic of wide-ranging lifestyle disorders like hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and psychological/stress-induced disorders, including depression, that humanity is facing today.
I am glad I followed my inner voice to expect the miracle of health, no matter how poor the prognosis may be. The thank-you cards, letters of acknowledgment, tears of joy, and flowers of gratitude are countless and still arriving. And don’t just take my word for it. Read comments and stories of transformation from course and clinic participants throughout this book.
Healthy Lifestyle Triggers Genetic Changes — A Clinical Study
You can understand how pleased I was to confirm that what I learned from my teacher has an echo in the science of epigenetics, according to which, our genes are not fixed but fluid, and our environment — composed of our daily food, habits, thoughts, quality of relationships, and daily self-care routine — impacts our genes, both positively and negatively. This rang a bell with me right away, explaining why I did not manifest gross physical disability in spite of a genetic predisposition. My Ayurveda lifestyle and positive health outcome belief were perhaps my best allies in this journey.
A study by Dr. Dean Ornish, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds more light on the far-reaching health benefits reaped by my course and clinic participants from apparently minor lifestyle variations.2 As reported by Reuters: “In a small study, the researchers tracked thirty men with low-risk prostate cancer who underwent three months of major lifestyle changes. As expected, they lost weight, lowered their blood pressure, and saw other health improvements. But the researchers found more profound changes when they compared prostate biopsies taken before and after the lifestyle changes. After the three months, the men had changes in activity in about 500 genes — including 48 that were turned on and 453 genes that were turned off. The activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down.”3
While we cannot literally amend our genes, a change this dramatic is possible when we positively modify our lifestyle.
Karma and Continuation of a Spiritual Legacy
And finally, I should tell you, I did not simply wake up one morning and decide that I was going to be a champion of Ayurveda’s lifestyle wisdom. I believe it was my karma or my spiritual destiny that decided, even before I was born, that I would indeed write the first book (an authoritative bible of sorts) on Ayurveda lifestyle wisdom. No other books (in any language) address Ayurveda’s lifestyle teachings in this depth, along with the spiritual, philosophical, and scientific context and step-by-step instruction.
I am one of the fortunate teachers born into a family of teachers with an uninterrupted educational lineage, a family that has lived as well as transmitted this ancient wisdom for untold years in the plains of northern India. I have not only mastered the knowledge academically, I have also lived it.
As for the word lineage, it sounds mystical these days, but the idea is common enough in India where, for centuries, sacred and healing knowledge was carefully passed on from mentor to disciple in the rarefied environment of a special family-style school called gurukulam. Here, Vedic education was imparted to the student for a minimum of twelve years. I studied for fourteen, along with regular schooling, and graduated as an acharya, which means “a master spiritual teacher of lived Vedic knowledge who teaches not only by word, but through role modeling by behavior.” My education was rigorous, to say the least, yet spiritually charged and always experiential.
When I was growing up in India, living and learning this knowledge in the family of my teacher, I had no idea that one day I would be writing this book for a world audience. And yet, this is what has happened. This is less a testimony of my life journey and more of a shout-out for Ayurveda. What is the truth cannot be kept under wraps for long. More and more people are seeking Ayurveda’s lifestyle and benefiting from its transformative wisdom.
I hope this wisdom will change your life for the better too, as it did mine. But first, you have to believe that anything is possible.
Shunya