The path from suffering to bliss is one of radical transformation. In Ayurveda this transformation is facilitated by what is known as the inner fire. In this chapter we will explore what this inner fire is, how it acts in our body-minds, and how its imbalance affects us. Balancing our inner fire is an integral part of the Bliss Rx.
Fire is a significant component of worship and rituals in many cultures. Fire rituals were performed in ancient times to attain specific results, such as rain in times of drought or relief from plague or other contagions. The deity of the desired outcome (for example, rain) was propitiated through the element of fire via offerings of grain, fruit, fragrant wood or incense, ghee (clarified butter), and other ingredients into a specially constructed fire pit. As the fire burned, mantras (words, phrases, or prayer) were chanted to absorb the fire’s energies. It was believed that fire had the power to carry the prayers and aspirations of humans to celestial realms, then carry divine blessings back to humans.
Known as agni, this inner fire plays the central role in our physiology. It is the fire that maintains life, preserves the functions of the body, and determines whether we are afflicted with disease and how we think and feel. It is often associated only with digestion, but not of food alone. Agni is the intermediary between our external and internal worlds. It enables us to take in the world through our senses, process it on the physical, subtle, and causal levels, and act accordingly. It is the pulse of intelligence within each cell, organ, and organ system, as well as the mind, intellect, and emotion. Impaired or dysfunctional agni is therefore the root of all ailments of the mind and body.
Agni: The Force for Transformation
On the physical level, agni aids digestion of food through the marvelous cascade of digestive enzymes and juices produced in the mouth (saliva), stomach (gastric juice), and intestines (bile and pancreatic juices) that progressively break down food into smaller and smaller components that can finally be carried by the circulatory system to every cell of the body. Pause for a moment and consider this. The oatmeal you had for breakfast this morning is steadily being transformed into your cells! Your body is not only sustained by food, but at the most basic level is the result of the magical transformation of food into what you see in the mirror. Agni is what makes this transformation possible through the intelligent cascade of enzymes, hormones, and chemicals. Just as the heat of cooking makes food more digestible or palatable, the heat of agni in the various chemical reactions enables the conversion of what we consume to the structure of the body.
At the cellular level, agni takes the form of the principle that governs the actions of the subcellular structures and the pathways of cellular metabolism, converting the gross components of nutrients to their subtle essences of prana (energy), tejas (radiance), and ojas (immunity). Prana, tejas, and ojas are the subtle purified essences of the three doshas, which determine the functioning of the body and the mind.
Prana
Prana (called chi by the Chinese and mana by the Polynesians) is energy, the subtle essence of the vata dosha. If you’ve ever been in a yoga class, you’ve probably heard the instructor asking you to breathe in certain ways to increase prana in your body. You may have felt a freshness, aliveness, vibrancy, or a sensation of tingling during certain breath exercises or in other situations like being in nature. Although prana is most often associated with the breath, it is not the breath. It is the life force that makes breathing (as well as all other body functions) possible. When prana is depleted, life comes to an end. As we saw in The Bliss Model, prana resides in the subtle body, flowing through thousands of invisible channels that crisscross throughout the body and supply every cell. When prana flows evenly through these channels, the body is adequately nourished and displays vitality and absence of disease.
Prana is responsible for growth, how we adapt to our changing situations, and equilibrium of the body and the mind. It promotes healing via the immune system and enables the movement of electrical impulses from one neuron to the next in the nervous system. Prana is the life-creating force of our reproductive system and therefore determines how long we live and the quality of our lives. Evenness of prana corresponds to evenness of the mind and fuels creativity and enthusiasm for an activity. Erratic flow of prana results in hyperactivity of the mind, lack of clarity and concentration, anxiety, and misapprehension.
The amount and quality of our prana is determined by the quality of our agni. Agni finds and soaks up the essence of the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink, converting it to prana and propelling it through its innumerable channels.
Tejas
Tejas is inner radiance, the subtle essence of the pitta dosha. It is the quality of light and heat within us that enables the “cooking” of food into its various nutrients and of sensory perceptions, thoughts, and impressions. Consider this: How does your brain process a Granny Smith apple? It only sees “green” and “round,” and it has no ability to call it an apple or the feeling it evokes in you. Tejas is the principle that converts the brain’s information into the meaningful sensory perception of “Yummy! A juicy apple!” and of the associated action of your hand reaching for it.
Tejas drives the hormonal system (particularly the thyroid, pancreas, and adrenal glands), maintains body temperature, and gives skin its luster and coloration. Since it controls metabolic processes, imbalanced tejas leads to imbalances in electrolytes (such as sodium, magnesium, and others) in the blood. In the immune system, tejas is the force that enables the recognition and destruction of toxins and microbes. Most importantly, a derangement in tejas is the root cause of all inflammatory conditions in the body, including heart disease, arthritis, cancer, and others; more on this later.
In the mind, tejas is responsible for our determination and drives us to purposeful action. It is quite literally “the fire in the belly” that spurs us on our chosen path. An out-of-balance tejas leads to greed, excessive competitiveness, insatiable ambition, anger, hostility, and vindictiveness on one extreme, and lack of drive, laziness, and inertia on the other.
Tejas is the heat of prana and is assimilated into the body and mind by agni. Think of the flames of a fire in your fireplace. Prana is like the height of the flames, while tejas is the associated heat. Agni is the amount and quality of oxygen in the air that fans the fire. The more balanced the agni, the more even the prana and the tejas.
Ojas
Ojas is the vital reserve of the body and the subtle essence of the kapha dosha. It is the end result of balanced agni and the digestive process that results in immunity, strength, and endurance. You can’t miss someone with abundant ojas—they are filled with optimism, youthfulness, seemingly endless stamina, and the ability to accomplish many tasks with unearthly ease. When we think of digestion, we may only think of the stomach and intestines. However, digestion in Ayurveda is said to be an elaborate process that progresses through the various tissues and takes nearly a month for completion.
Digestion begins in the stomach and the intestines, where nutrients are absorbed and waste products are excreted. The absorbed nutrients are carried to the liver, where agni breaks them down into their fundamental molecular elements, forming the following in succession: plasma, blood, muscle, fat, bone, nerves, and, finally, reproductive tissue. Each tissue has its own agni, which takes in the material from the previous tissue and turns it into what it needs. At each stage of tissue formation, increasingly subtle wastes are removed from the body. Ojas is the final product of this elaborate process. Milky and ephemeral, it is said that a healthy body has a single handful of ojas: five drops of this reside in the heart.
Ojas is the crux of our immune, nervous, and reproductive systems. It is the subtle essence that lines the cells, giving them structure and enabling the flow of prana. The strength and quality of agni determines the amount and quality of ojas. In the previous example of the flame, ojas determines the strength of the flame and how long it will last.
The quality of our ojas determines how we respond to stress and change. When our ojas is depleted, we become overwhelmed, lose our sense of humor, and feel like we have lost direction. An imbalance in any one of the three subtle essences results in an imbalance in the other two. Conversely, the effort to improve the quality of any one of them results in improvement in the other two.
Imbalanced Agni
Pause for a moment and reflect on the image of a fire in the fireplace. When you picture it in your mind’s eye, what is its most predominant quality? It is a source of light and heat, of course, but if there is one word you could describe it with, what would it be? The word that pops up in my mind is dynamic. It does not remain still and is constantly changing form, turning fuel into ash.
Picture the following scenario. You are out camping with your friends on a beautiful summer evening. Someone decides that a campfire is in order, and you take charge of building it. If you were a Scout, as I was, you have this down pat. You choose the ideal spot based on the direction of the wind and the elevation of the ground and away from dead bush. Next, you start gathering the required materials: tinder to start the fire such as dry leaves, kindling such as small branches to get the fire going, and fuel wood such as bigger logs and branches to keep the fire burning.
The campfire is the analogy for agni, while some of the common issues with building it represent the issues that lead to its dysfunction in the body-mind. If you decide to build the fire on a day when there are gusts of wind, the strength of your fire will vary. The flames rise and subside with the wind. Inconsistency of agni in the body-mind leads to inconsistent digestion. If you have this type of digestive power, your agni will be variable, and if I were to ask you about hunger, bowel movements, sleep, or state of mind, you might answer that they are inconsistent; you are hungry some days but not others, you are constipated some of the time but not always, you sleep well some nights but toss and turn on others, you catch your mind racing some days but not always. This variable agni is the hallmark of an imbalance in vata.
Going back to the imagery of the campfire, if you decide to build it on dry grass in an area with an overgrowth of dry underbrush, you will quickly have a disaster on your hands as the fire spreads uncontrollably. This is what happens when the agni is overactive. If this is your condition, you might respond to the above questions differently. You might be so hungry before a meal that you see red! You might have frequent diarrhea and heartburn, get easily upset and angry in interactions, and have a hard time going to sleep. Overactive agni is the sign of pitta imbalance.
Now imagine that you’ve built the campfire in a safe place and have successfully started it with tinder and kindling. What would happen if I placed a bundle of large, wet logs as the fire began? They would choke the flames, analogous of an underactive agni. You’d recognize this to be your condition if you never felt hungry, if you frequently felt like the food you ate just sat for hours in your stomach, if you were more often constipated than not, felt unrefreshed upon waking up even when you feel you’ve had a good night’s sleep, and often felt unmotivated and lazy. An underactive agni is the sign of kapha imbalance.
If your campfire was built under ideal conditions where the flame remains steady and the byproduct is a uniform ash, that would correspond to a balanced agni, where the various tissues undergo appropriate metabolism and excrete the unwanted byproducts; the mind is filled with sweetness, contentment, enthusiasm for life, and love for self and others; and the senses are pervaded by bliss.
Recall that the essential quality of agni is dynamism. An imbalance in agni therefore results in the opposing quality of stagnation. This quality of stagnation is called ama. Ama is the subtle substance that is responsible for the many physical, mental, and emotional manifestations of imbalanced agni.
Ama, Disease, and Suffering
When agni is out of balance, digestion and metabolism in the body and mind suffer. Not only is there incomplete digestion of food in the stomach and intestines, but also at the subsequent tissue levels. Ordinarily, unique waste products are eliminated at each step of tissue metabolism. However, a variable hyperactive or underactive agni is unable to complete the metabolic process. The residue is a subtle substance that is the opposite of ojas. Instead of the sweet-smelling, milky, and nourishing ojas that lines cellular membranes in the state of balanced agni, what accumulates is the sticky, foul-smelling, and heavy ama. The digestive tract is the first place where the ama accumulates, presenting as diarrhea, heartburn, sticky stools, indigestion, loss of taste and appetite, and abnormal weight gain. When it goes unrecognized, ama begins to disseminate from the digestive tract into the deeper tissues, accumulating between cells and clogging the channels of the organ systems.
At the physical level, ama deposition in cellular membranes and in between cells results in disruption of tissue metabolism. In arteries ama accumulation causes a disruption in the endothelial lining, and inflammation ensues. Similarly, disruption of channels of elimination leads to stiffness and degeneration in joints; fibromyalgia, fatigue, and pain in muscles; fat accumulation leading to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and obesity; menstrual disorders such as heavy periods with clotting and pain; fibrocystic changes in breasts and ovaries; symptoms of congestion such as chronic sinus pain, swelling, and water accumulation; post-nasal drip; and skin disorders such as acne and other blemishes. As ama continues to accumulate in particular channels, cellular immunity diminishes and can result in autoimmune diseases as well as various cancers.
The particular channels that become clogged and result in particular diseases and conditions depend upon the specific weaknesses of our body-minds, based on the superhighways we have built in our brains, the habits and lifestyles we have accrued, and the genes we have inherited (remember, however, that the latter is minor compared to our habits and lifestyles).
At the subtle level, ama leads to the tamasic state of inertia, laziness, dark moods, greed, cunning, hatred, sloppiness, and an overall distorted perception of life or the rajasic state of mental and physical hyperactivity, inability to sit still, lack of concentration, aggression, competitiveness, rivalry, hostility, anger, outbursts of rage and violence, and lack of regard for others. Quite simply, ama obscures bliss and health.
At the causal level, ama traps us further into suffering and takes us further away from bliss. A balanced agni leads to the sattvic state of bliss characterized by contentment, mental quiet, peace, happiness, equanimity, and compassion.
However, as important as ama is as a causative factor for disease, it is not to blame in many instances where disease occurs merely as an imbalance of doshas even in the absence of ama. Imbalance of doshas is also mediated by agni.
Fire, Mind, and Heart
As we begin to understand agni, we learn to decipher our relationship with food, exercise, and other lifestyle choices. For instance, if we are unable to digest and release past trauma and pain, food becomes the comforting factor used to cover up the underlying discomfort. Eventually, food turns into the enslaving master of our senses and our lives, resulting in obesity and disease. In this case, the imbalance of agni that makes it difficult to process our past events is the root cause of our food addiction. We can go on diets, undergo bariatric surgery, restrict calories or food groups through mental dialogue, or exercise obsessively to lose weight. Focusing entirely on the body, we can push away the pain and try to forget that it is there.
However, the imbalance of agni continues unchecked where the pain lurks in the background, ready to rear its head at the first given opportunity. Sooner or later the pain wins, and the benefits gained through “hard work” dissipate with a vengeance. All the weight returns, and the cycle of suffering goes on endlessly.
When eating to mask deeper issues, food can provide comfort while eating and shortly thereafter, but, like all other substance addictions, it is accompanied by guilt, shame, and inadequacy a few minutes or hours later. The vicious cycle of eating-feeling bad-eating thus propagates itself in a spiral. We are at war with our bodies. Like violent wars in the world, these internal wars can never fulfill our wish for good health or to feel better about ourselves. We assume that it will be easier to accept ourselves after we lose the weight and have our lives together. Such a future time never arrives because the fundamental problem of self-loathing has not been addressed. This is a pattern I see on a daily basis in my medical practice. It is the result of an out-of-balance agni, the mental and emotional effects of which cannot be escaped.
On the other hand, as soon as we begin to accept (and, further, love) ourselves just the way we are, we have set the motion for agni to return to balance. When the fire begins to burn steadily, the courage to deal with our past experiences and current life situations begins to arise magically from deep within. Our neurohormonal superhighways begin to change course, resulting in the transformation of our physical, subtle, and causal bodies. Bringing the agni back to balance is therefore the first step toward healing.
The Fiery Ritual of Bliss
Ultimately, agni is the consciousness that determines whether we cling to suffering or return to our rightful nature of bliss. Symbolic of the rituals of the old days, we can learn to pour our thoughts, emotions, habits, actions and lifestyles into this steady, calm, and benevolent fire. Like the ideally built campfire, agni uses everything we offer to it as fuel and transforms it into ojas, the sweet nectar. Ojas is known as the bliss molecule since its quality and quantity are also dependent on those of prana and tejas. Balancing agni to increase the quality and quantity of ojas is therefore the goal of the Bliss Rx, as we will see in Part 2.
Summary
- Agni is the principle that maintains life, preserves the functions of the body, and determines whether we are afflicted with disease and how we think and feel.
- Impaired or dysfunctional agni is the root of all ailments of the mind and body.
- Agni converts the gross components of nutrients to the subtle essences of prana (energy), tejas (radiance), and ojas (immunity), the subtle purified essences of the three doshas that determine the functioning of the body and mind.
- Prana is the subtle essence of vata and is responsible for growth, how we adapt to our changing situations, and equilibrium of the body and mind.
- Tejas is the subtle essence of pitta and controls metabolic processes, determination, and purposeful action.
- Ojas is the subtle essence of kapha that determines immunity, strength, and endurance. The quality of our ojas determines how we respond to stress and change.
- An imbalance in agni results in stagnation, which is called ama. Ama is the subtle substance that is responsible for the many physical, mental, and emotional manifestations of disease.
- A balanced agni enables our neurohormonal superhighways to change course, resulting in transformation of our physical, subtle, and causal bodies. Therefore, the first step toward healing is bringing agni back into balance.