“We Are What We Eat” Series, Part V, Finito!

Today we summarize this series on the diet’s Ayurvedic dimensions and role in maintaining good health and preventing disease.  In Srimad Bhagavad Gita, Lord Kṛṣṇa compares Himself with the digestive fire, or agni, which assimilates and digests food in order to sustain Life.

Though diet plays a vital role in Ayurveda’s healing modality, these “rules” flex and bend gracefully according to the transient nature of living in your particular body.  Your constitutional make up (prakriti) is unique as are your current needs for balance (vikriti); thus, your dietary needs are also unique.  You will not find pre-set body weights or calorie counting instructions in Ayurvedic Dietary Theory.  You will find recommendations for listening to the voice of your physiology to hear what, where, when and how you should eat.  You will find instructions to include the six different tastes – sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent and astringent – at every meal, favoring those tastes that are suited to your current needs and incorporating lesser amounts of the rest.  Including different tastes at each meal reduces cravings and balances appetite and digestion naturally, providing clear instructions via the senses, supported by the voice of your own physiology.

Food influences both physical activities and psychological activities.  Agni requires food to maintain the body’s constant activity, much like a furnace providing heat in exchange for the life of a tree; the body of Earth.  Improper, excessive, heavy, and cold food extinguishes this fire and produces endotoxic substances called Ama.  For supplementation, Tattva’s Herbs offers Ginger, Triphala, Chyawanprash and Trikatu to stoke the fire of Agni.

The Ayurvedic way of cooking brings together a harmonious collection of fresh wholesome ingredients into a feast for all your senses.  In a well-prepared Ayurvedic meal, a medley of tastes, textures, colors, aromas and flavors blend together to restore balance to your body, mind, spirit, senses and emotions.

Ayurvedic Relief for Muscles and Joints

Ouch!  In response to lifestyle, diet, and emotional pattern, our doshas; vata, pitta, and kapha, can easily move out of balance. These imbalances slow down agni, or digestive fire, resulting in the toxic by-product of inadequate digestion known as ama.

Vata, the main active dosha, brings ama into the colon.  From there, ama travels throughout the system, lodging in the bone tissue and joints, giving rise to the stiffness and pain characteristic of chronic joint disorders.

Ayurveda works through both diet and supplementation to remove ama from the joints and move it back to the colon, where the body can then eliminate it.  For this, we need to keep the colon clean and active.  Triphala is the most commonly used herb for cleansing the colon, or the combination of Triphala and Guggul.  Ayurveda recommends general techniques to increase the intensity of agni and burn up the toxins harming the body.  We begin with our food by adding more spices to the diet, such as turmeric, chilis, pepper, cardamom and cloves when cooking.  Herbal extractions of Turmeric Curcumin and Boswellia support a healthy inflammation response and ease of movement, while Ashwagandha helps balance all the doshas and reduce negative effects of stress in the body.

Various oils may be applied to the skin to help the body clear toxins, relieve pain and restore mobility.  Ayurveda has used two traditional oils in particular for thousands of years:  Maha Vishgarbha Oil and Maha Narayan Oil, both containing dozens of herbs in a sesame oil base. Massaging these oils into painful areas can improve flexibility, stiffness, muscle fatigue, circulation and ease pain. These oils when massaged into the skin can also assist in breaking up blockages. After oil application; warm heat, yoga, bath, and mild exercise can further relax and relieve the body.  Tattva’s Herbs Joint Care Oil, featuring Boswellia as a topical option, is also a potent and cooling application for both chronic and acute situations.

You May Also Like to Read – How to Enhance you Inner Strength using Ashwaganda?

Agni and Plants

An excerpt from The Yoga of Herbs – An Ayurvedic Guide to Herbal Medicine

by Dr. David Frawley and Dr. Vasant Lad

Ayurveda views the health of the body as the functioning of a biological fire governing metabolism. It is called agni. Agni is not simply a symbol for the power of digestion. In the broader sense, it is the creative flame that works behind all life, building up the entire universe as a stage by stage unfoldment of itself, which, thereby, contains within itself the key to all transformations.

Agni is present not only in human beings but in all nature. It has a special ab

ode in plants, which contain the agni of photosynthesis. When agni is strong, food is digested properly, toxins of various kinds, largely from undigested food particles, (called ama in Ayurveda), accumulate and breed disease.

Plants contain agni, through which they digest sunlight and produce life. Herbs can transmit their agni to us, their capacity to digest and transform, and this may augment our own power of digestion, or give us the capacity to digest substances we normally cannot. The agni of plants can feed our agni. Through this interconnection, we join ourselves with the cosmic agni, the creative force of life and healing.

The agni from plants is magnetically attracted by its opposite nature to the negative life-force of the ama, or various toxic accumulations in our body. The result is their neutralization and a restoration of harmony.

Herbs can be used to supplement agni and thereby restore our autoimmune system. This restores the power of our aura, which is nothing more than the glow of our agni.

By their very nature the fight herbs and spices can feed agni, directly strengthening the basic energy of the body-mind, allowing for the right digestion, not only of food but also experience.