Imagine a tripod with one leg missing. Can you see it standing straight? According to Ayurveda, just as a tripod cannot stand on two legs, you cannot be in perfect health if any one of these three elements is not in balance:
• body
• mind
• soul
We experience the truth of this statement all the time: a bad day at work may trigger bodily aches and pains; a toothache could result in depression; the loss of a loved one can lead to a stroke.
Yet practitioners of modern medicine insist on addressing body and mind as separate entities; a heart specialist asks you about your cholesterol level, not about your love life. As a consequence, you have different doctors for different parts: bone specialists, urologists, cardiologists, therapists.
An Ayurvedic physician, however, is always a vaidya. Period. A vaidya is trained to treat you as a whole being, complete with your bone, muscle, kidneys, skin type, likes and dislikes, habits, thoughts, and feelings. And, interestingly, whatever your symptom and however chronic your problem, the diagnosis is always the same: imbalance. This imbalance can be in your physiology, your psychology, or your very spirit. But an imbalance it always is.
So, with apologies to John Keats, I would sum up the Ayurvedic definition of health thus: “Balance is health, and health balance: that is all ye know on earth and all ye need ever know.”
Now, balance may seem to be an abstract thing. So is it possible to set about achieving it the way you would, say, a monthly sales goal? Or does it mean straying into the realm of heart, soul, and such abstract things?
The answer lies somewhere in between. That is because part of good health can be quantified (blood-pressure readings, cholesterol count, heart rate), but an equal part of it can only be judged by quality (calm, optimism, equanimity).
Therefore, I suggest that you start by thinking of your quest for balance as an endeavor to learn an art. I like to think of it as working with clay; healing and making pottery echo each other beautifully.
Have you ever seen a master potter at work? How magically the potter, with delicate fingers and a light touch, turns shapeless clay into a perfect, symmetrical teapot in seconds. But if you have ever tried your hand at pottery, you know what those fingers are doing while the fragile clay spins furiously on the wheel. In those few seconds, they are shaping, steadying, lifting, pressing, pulling, centering, dimpling, raising, and leveling the clay.
I got a firsthand idea of the master potter’s job three years ago at a pottery workshop, where I tried my hand at “throwing” a pot. Having watched the instructor turn out two perfect pots in two minutes, I felt that it would be child’s play. How mistaken I was! I tried to make a pot six times, but each time — at the crucial shaping stage when I slowly lifted the neck — the clay would spin out of control and break into a miserable, shapeless lump. It was terribly frustrating.
The instructor knew exactly where I was going wrong. “Try to balance your pot,” he said. “When you cup that clay between your palms, feel for the slightest lump and the faintest bump. Any protrusion or dent that manages to hide in those tender walls will cause them to lose balance, and the weakest spot will tear.”
Those words exactly reflect the Ayurvedic view of perfect health. In Ayurvedic terms, all illness begins with the tiniest chink or dent in the human vessel. That is why I invite you to put yourself in the role of a potter in love with the clay of your being. Take your body, your thoughts, and your emotions as the malleable clay spinning on the wheel of time, and mold them into a perfectly balanced work of art: a vessel free of lumps, bumps, and dents. Thus balanced, you will be a living embodiment of the Ayurvedic word for “healthy”: swastha. (swa: self, stha: established/steady — “established in the self“).
How does it feel to be balanced? I am sure you have known that feeling on days when you sing while cooking breakfast, lavish someone with compliments, or pirouette around the house for no reason at all. In those rare moments, without even realizing it, you have achieved perfect balance among the following elements:
• your own body, mind, and heart;
• yourself and other people;
• yourself and your surroundings.
For many of us, such moments of complete balance are but pleasant interludes in the tense drama of life. But once you understand and follow Ayurveda, it need not be this way. You can make sure that imbalance, not balance, is the exception in your life. What’s more, with Ayurveda as your road map, you can take the scenic route to balance.
And now, let’s get down to the brass tacks of the journey. What’s the first thing you do before you start on a coast-to-coast trip? You tune in to weather and road conditions, check for possible delays, and fix your vehicle for the trip. Similarly, before you set out to re-create balance in your own being, you need to figure out where the lumps and bumps lie.
According to the Ayurvedic approach, there are two key causes of imbalance:
1. external factors (for example, change of season, pollution, and infection);
2. internal causes (chiefly the accumulation of toxic matter inside us).
The external enemies of balance find it easy to gatecrash when our inner defenses are down. Also, they are more or less beyond our control. The internal enemy — toxic pileup — is one we can combat and defeat. Therefore, our focus should be on cleaning out these toxins. What exactly are these toxins and how do they affect us?
Toxins are easy to understand if you look at the human body as a network of channels; think of them as specialized courier services that receive and deliver packages. Men have thirteen such channels — called shrotas in Ayurveda — while women have fifteen, including the reproductive channels.
|
|
Couriers |
|
Air |
heart, lungs, abdomen |
Food |
stomach, intestines |
Water |
palate, pancreas, skin, kidneys, bladder |
Plasma |
heart, blood vessels, lymphatic system |
Blood |
liver, spleen, blood vessels, arteries, capillaries |
Muscle nutrients |
ligaments, tendons, skin |
Fat |
fatty tissue, arteries |
Bone nutrients |
teeth, hips, joints |
Bone marrow |
marrow, nerve tissue |
Ovum/sperm |
testes, ovaries |
Urine |
kidneys, bladder |
Feces |
colon, rectum |
Sweat |
fatty tissue, hair follicles |
Menses |
uterus (only in women) |
Milk |
breasts (only in women) |
Similarly, the mind and the heart are couriers of thought and emotion.
Try to imagine a traffic jam in any one department, and you can see how easy it is to create chaos and breakdown in the entire channel network. Take the example of blood pooling in the veins of the lower foot — something that happens to many people. To begin with, poor circulation results in poor distribution of nutrients across the cells and tissues. It also reduces the flow of oxygen to and from the body, causing irregular heartbeat, dizziness, and fatigue. The feet swell up and the blood can form clots. In serious cases a clot can travel to the lungs, becoming a potentially fatal pulmonary embolism.
In fact, the root of most minor and major illnesses is some kind of blockage: a tooth pocket filled with plaque, mucus-choked sinuses, accumulated fat, a stone blocking the gall bladder, a clogged artery.
At the stage when toxins are still building up, we sense discomfort, pain, and restlessness. When the jam becomes crippling, we give the resulting disease a name: cystitis, arthritis, diabetes, depression, heart disease, cancer.
Until I began studying Ayurveda, I didn’t realize how easy it is to collect toxins on an average day without even trying. My daily toxin pile accumulates from small acts of neglect: eating a late dinner, omitting to moisturize my skin, breathing shallowly all day, sitting hunched for hours over my computer, hurting over an insensitive comment.
On a rushed day, I go on my toxin-collecting spree more systematically. I work late into the night, depriving my body and mind of the rest they need. I wake up irritable and groggy, with little appetite for breakfast. Whatever appetite I have, I douse with three continuous cups of coffee. I go to work and plunge straightaway into the waiting files. I make careless mistakes, then simmer when they’re pointed out. Just before a crucial meeting, I find I have gone completely blank. How do these acts of neglect translate into actual physical toxins? They generate such substances as acid, bile, cholesterol, and adrenaline. In moderate amounts, these are essential to life. But produced in excess, they overwhelm the body, compromising its ability to perform the routine functions of metabolism and digestion normally.
Thus burdened on the home front, the body finds it increasingly difficult to keep away the enemies straining at its barriers — smoke, dust, nitrates, pesticides — and the agents of disease begin to stroll in. In this stage of weakened immunity, the body becomes what vaidyas call a beej-bhoomi, or “breeding ground” (beej means “seed,” and bhoomi is Sanskrit for “earth”), for disease to take root. It is a seedbed for disease to thrive in, fed with the manure of toxins by a self-destructive gardener. Not a pretty image, but alas true.
In Ayurveda, these toxins are called ama (pronounced “aa-ma”). This deceptively sweet-sounding Sanskrit word literally means “unripe, immature, undigested.” All undigested, toxic matter inside you is ama — whether in the form of food, bile, acid, or negative thoughts.
Because the Ayurvedic perspective encompasses the total picture, it takes into account toxins that germinate in both body and mind. Ama, therefore, is both physical and mental. If ignored for too long, it can even seep into the soul.
Ama in the body almost always begins with inefficient digestion. When your lifestyle is at odds with the needs of your constitution — you skip meals, eat foods that are not right for you, and eat at the wrong time — your body’s vital digestive fire, which vaidyas call jatharagni, dims. As a result, food fails to be totally digested and properly absorbed.
Undigested food, or ama, sits in the stomach and putrefies, releasing toxic chemicals. Slowly, it clogs the intestines and prevents the colon from assimilating nutrients from digested food.
In Ayurveda, this kind of ama is described as a sticky, white, foul-smelling substance that blocks arteries and capillaries. It jams the tissues and cells of the body. This, in turn, inhibits the free flow of water, blood, wastes, nutrients, and air in the system. If neglected, ama spreads and lodges in the tiniest circulatory channels of your body, causing a plethora of symptoms ranging from unease and bloating to heaviness and pain.
These symptoms are your body’s SOS signals, telling you that ama has weakened your innate capacity to heal yourself. Your body is asking you for help.
Why not help your body before it is forced to ask for assistance? It’s easy to do. From time to time, check for ama buildup by asking yourself some basic questions:
• Is my breathing slow and steady, deep and unrestricted?
• Do I experience thirst at regular intervals?
• Is my waste (urine, stool, sweat) output normal? (Healthy urine is light-colored and odor-free, occurring without obstruction or urgency; healthy stool occurs once or twice a day, floats in water, and does not smell foul; sweat should be free of strong odor— and not be either profuse or insufficient.)
• Are my five senses (sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell) performing well?
• Is my skin lustrous and supple?
• Am I generally free of ulcers, lumps, and bumps?
• Do I feel active and energetic?
• Is my breath fresh and are my teeth strong?
• Are my joints well-lubricated and healthy?
• Is my sexual urge normal?
• Do I sleep well?
Do you notice the common thread that runs through these seemingly diverse questions? That thread is blockage. You’re checking for obstruction in all areas of your body — from hunger and vision to elimination and energy. Your answers should give you a fair idea of your ama levels while also pinpointing the trouble spots. I strongly recommend paying attention to the clues you receive from this test. Small discomforts and complaints — whether slight trouble focusing on faraway objects or a recurrent muscle twitch — indicate that disorder is still at an elementary stage and can be turned around with positive effort.
One obvious sign of ama in your system is a coated, “furry” tongue. That is why vaidyas ask you to open your mouth and stick out your tongue; the amount and color of coating on your tongue gives them vital information about the extent to which ama has accumulated in your system.
Though you cannot see it, you can sense non-physiological ama. You can feel it in the little irritations and anxieties that pile up during your day. Slowly, these negative thoughts and energies multiply, leading to bigger problems such as insomnia and depression.
The loss of a loved one, tension at work, divorce — these are the big ama generators. The mind cannot easily process them and the heart cannot easily “digest” them. A pang of jealousy or a creative block will make a small but significant contribution to your reservoir of emotional ama.
Here is a quick mental-ama assessment test. Before you take it, a word of advice: Answer these questions when you are in a relaxed frame of mind so that you can analyze your responses without being filled with guilt or alarm. If you do find yourself being swamped by those feelings, remember two things:
1. The purpose here is not to chide yourself; it is to read your slate as it is, then decide how to wipe off the smudged portions and write a new script on it. Just like a slow, steady hand prints neat letters, a slow and relaxed approach to rewriting your health will always work best.
2. A good gardener knows why leaves develop brown patches; there is a problem at the root level. Similarly, this little quiz could guide you to the root of your own emotional behavior. And when you start from the depths, there’s only one way things can go: upward.
Here are the questions that will help you assess your level of mental ama:
• Am I happy at work?
• Do I have a stable family life and a strong support system?
• Am I happy with my partner?
• Do I have a strong relationship with my coworkers and friends?
• Is my ability to rest — both physically and mentally — adequate?
• Do I handle difficult situations calmly?
• Do I have enough leisure time and do I make positive use of it?
• Do I usually feel calm inside?
You may not have realized it, but this test also gave you a complete self-exam; you actually checked out how your bodily and mental channels are performing. The more often you do this quick check, the closer you will come to knowing your body and mind.
The tyranny of stressful living makes it impossible to resist assault from ama. But we can do the next best thing: slow it down and flush it out regularly.
This is where your actions count; by choosing fresh fruit over a sugar-laden donut and by giving your lunch priority over that pending file, you can refuse to let ama accumulate in your body. Also, by drinking plenty of water and getting adequate exercise, you can eliminate ama from your body at regular intervals. The sweeping action of water ferries toxins to their exit points, keeping the channels clear. I think of it as making sure a kitchen sink always drains well instead of trying to unclog a choked drain. Similarly, exercise improves circulation, thus helping the body flush out toxins faster.
A good strategy for keeping physical ama in check is to reassign the roles played by your mind and your senses. It is easy and habitual to let your senses control your actions. For instance, when you reach out for onion rings in spite of your ulcer, you are ignoring the advice of your mind. But if you give the reins to your mind, you will pass over those onion rings and reach for a glass of water instead.
Tackling ama of the mind and heart requires a different approach. Most of our abstract ama is generated when we pull the mind away from the realm of tranquillity where it naturally wants to go. We chase ephemeral material objects instead of realizing and fulfilling our own deeper needs. In the bargain, all we really get is a heart full of sorrow and a mind empty of joy.
It is, therefore, as important to nourish the mind as it is to feed the body. Reading an uplifting book with your spouse, taking a sixty-second mental vacation when you’re tired, giving more freely to others — these small actions work like vitamins and minerals in your psyche, strengthening and toning it.
While these general guidelines work well for everyone, regardless of gender or nationality, each of us is unique. Therefore, your strategy for achieving freedom from ama should be devised in accordance with your own nature.
All disease, according to Ayurvedic thought, progresses in six steady steps:
1. Sanchaya: the earliest stage of disease. At this point, toxic ama starts to accumulate, hampering free circulation of the vital energies.
2. Prakopa: the disease enters its second phase, in which the doshas are aggravated or excited, causing further channel blockage.
3. Prasara: the accumulated ama moves from the digestive tract into other organs of the body, impairing the doshas and their energies even further.
4. Sthanasamsarya: the moving ama settles in a localized area.
5. Vyakti: the disease manifests itself and the sufferer feels its symptoms.
6. Bheda: untreated or neglected, the disease acquires chronic — sometimes untreatable — dimensions.