Our Bodies
Our bodies are a mirror of everything that is going on in our emotional, mental or spiritual realms. Our aches and pains, tensions and even diseases are often a reflection of an imbalance in the mind or our emotions.
Often we have stopped trusting our bodies, and see them as machines that can go wrong, rather than temples which need to be honoured.
Ayurveda
Rediscovering ourselves through Ayurveda helps us to relearn our bodies. Dating back 7000 years, Ayurveda is the oldest known holistic lifestyle and medicine paradigm in the world. And it is still deeply relevant today.
Ayurveda is the roots of eastern medicine from India and helps us find our own rhythm. As a sister science with yoga and meditation, it works on healing the subtle and spiritual bodies as well as the physical and can help us take responsibility for our own health.
Ayurveda is a constant balancing act. The change in seasons, our environments, what we eat, how much we exercise, our emotions and our mind-set all affect this balance.
Understanding Ayurveda
In Ayurveda, we are all unique. We are not diagnosed on a symptom, but our whole mind-body-emotions are taken into consideration.
There are three doshas (body types.) It is rare that a person is purely one type or a balance of all three, usually people have a combination of two. The body types are vata (air), pitta (fire), kapha (earth/water). Once we have established our body type, we can use it to find the best diet, types of massage or styles of yoga to suit us.
Summing up the doshas in a few lines is quite hard, but here is a general summary.
Vata people are full of creative impulse, but might not have the focus to see a job through. They have a short attention span, sleep less, often forget meals and get distracted easily. In their bodies, they tend to be dry and creaky, as they are governed by the element of air and tend towards aches and pains more than the other types.
Pitta people are fast and decisive, they take action. They are ambitious, mentally-focused, natural leaders and multi-taskers. They like to eat and get irritable if they miss a meal, but they are medium-build not overweight. They tend to be fiery of nature as they are the element of fire and they tend to get angry, irritable and frustrated easily. They like competitive sports and often have violent or fiery dreams. Physically, they tend to have sensitive skin and digestion due to the fire element, tending more towards skin problems and inflammation.
Kapha people are slow and dependable. They have endurance and stamina, but can only focus on one thing at a time. They are the maintainers. They deal with stress and emergencies in a very calm manner. They sleep for long hours and tend to put weight on easily, in fact they are the most likely to become obese as they crave sweet foods and are not so motivated towards sport and exercise. They tend towards respiratory problems, mucus and colds because of the watery element.
Tapping into your own Innate Healing Wisdom
Often our minds have a way of dealing with trauma or painful events… it is to bury them deep inside. Deep inside the very cells of our body, within our muscles, bones, skin, and organs. We create disease within the body through not expressing, honouring or letting go of our pain, grief and anger.
As women, a lot of our self-worth is tied into our perception of the body. Do we honour our bodies or do we curse ourselves about our weight and shape? We create a lot of negative stories around our bodies and this in turn can create stress and disease within the body.
Sometimes our eating is out of balance because we don’t feel good about ourselves. We may comfort eat or limit our intake of food to punish ourselves.
In her book,
A Path of Practice, Swamini Mayatitananda tells the story of Barbara who had been sexually abused as a teenager and was now suffering from an eating disorder. Swamini writes “I recommended whole grains, including barley, millet and buckwheat and organic vegetables. I especially wanted her to eat root vegetables, sweet potatoes, radishes and parsnips to fortify her lower body, because I sensed the tissues of her reproductive organs were still suffering from the memory of the abuse. Lots of fresh fruits would increase her vitality and sense of joy. I also recommended that she eat nuts so that she would have something crunchy to chew away the negative memories.”
Eating With Awareness
Swamini Mayatitananda believes that preparing and eating food with awareness helps us to rediscover our natural rhythms.
She adds, “Not only do food sadhanas (daily practices of cooking as meditation) impart rasa (taste or essence of life), they also nourish and influence our life force.”
Swamini encourages us to eat with our hands, grind our own spices in a pestle and mortar and bring awareness to the sensual nourishment of food, and not simply the physical nourishment through calories.
There are six tastes in ayurveda which need to be balanced. Depending on our dosha (body type) three of the tastes serve us better than the others, but luckily the mantra of ayurveda is everything in moderation.
Certain foods and tastes can be tamasic (toxic) to your system. The key to having a healthy system is getting rid of toxins (ama) from the body.
Some foods are tri-doshic which means they can balance all doshas. Sometimes you need to add a particular spice to create balance, or cut out the dairy.
Ayurvedic Tips For Women
There are a few essential recipes for balance within every woman. Hari Kaur, author of
A Woman’s Book of Yoga recommends taking ¼ cup of milk or soya milk (shot) with 1 tablespoon of sesame oil and a little honey. It helps keep women energized especially during the period and gets nourishing oils into the body.
Yogi Bhajan, who is the Master of Kundalini Yoga recommends that in the week before our periods, women should eat eggplant. He also recommends mangoes, food of the Gods. Both eggplants and mangoes are seen as the same shape as the womb.
When we start to honour ourselves through food, we are honouring our bodies and honouring the universe.
For more information on creating balance through the doshas:
Ayurveda, A Life in Balance and A Path of Practice by Swamini Mayatitanada – see her site www.wisearth.org
Ayurveda for Women, Robert Svoboda
A Woman’s Book of Yoga, Hari Kaur Khalsa
Online, there is an easy-to-use dosha quiz at
www.chopra.com
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