How I discovered a system of holistic health that changed my life
I will soon be a certified Ayurveda teacher, and I’ve even been teaching others about its benefits as I learn, but one year ago I didn’t know anything about it. It changed my life so quickly that I am completely transformed and I have complete faith in its wisdom. You see, it is a system of mind-body-spirit health that dates back more than five thousand years. It originated in India as part of the Vedic wisdom that also produced yoga. Ayurveda allows us to come into balance in our bodies and minds, but what really intrigues me about it is the fact that it stems from spiritual beliefs that I already held — such as the fact that we are all part of the same cosmic consciousness.
In Ayurveda, everything that is manifested in the physical world has come originally from the field of consciousness where lies infinite potential. Therefore, any ailment we experience at a physical level has a mental, emotional, and spiritual component. There are elements manifested from pure consciousness that makeup everything around us and inside us, and once we understand them, we can begin to balance them and live in harmony with ourselves and our environment.
“Nature has already given us proper instincts for recovering and maintaining balance. Ayurveda principles serve to uncover and sharpen those instincts.”
Deepak Chopra
My journey from illness to health
After giving birth to my daughter in 2015, I thought my pregnancy heartburn would go away. I had never experienced it before that. But it didn’t, and it got worse and worse. At one point, even drinking water gave me heartburn. Every meal left me feeling horrible. I was popping over-the-counter heartburn chewy tablets all the time. I knew this couldn’t be healthy, and I am a person who never takes medicine if I can avoid it.
I finally went to a doctor in early 2020 and they told me to take even stronger acid reflux medication and to eliminate certain acidic foods from my diet. After a month or two, she said, I could re-introduce them to my diet. So, I did this, and I was sad that I had to take such strong medication. I was worried about its effects on my stomach.
I knew there had to be a better way.
The problem with this approach, as I now know, is that she was treating me as if my body was exactly the same as everyone else’s, and assuming that everyone responds the same way to stimuli. Needless to say, this doctor’s approach didn’t work and my heartburn came back again. I was living with it daily.
In July 2020 I was reading a book about the chakras and it mentioned Vedic wisdom, referencing yoga and Ayurveda as other products in the same family of wisdom. I remembered seeing Ayurvedic restaurants when I visited Bali. I never knew what it was at the time, or that it would completely change my life.
I immediately bought a book about Ayurveda and the transformation began. I learned that everyone has a certain constitution, known as a dosha, which is a combination of elements. My dominant dosha in life has always been Pitta, which is fiery. The book said that the most common ailment of a Pitta person is heartburn. I was hooked. It told me how to eat and act in order to eliminate this illness. It worked. It also explained a few food intolerances and allergies I’d recently developed.
I was healthy again, heartburn-free, and completely fascinated.
Ayurveda looks at life holistically
Life is complex but it follows patterns. According to Ayurveda, we aren’t just bodies, we are collections of energy that have mental and physical components. Our diseases stem from digestion, which can produce toxins or nourishment. All of us are different from each other, completely unique manifestations on this planet, and we digest things differently. Knowing that Ayurveda approaches health with these assumptions, it is a holistic approach that promotes this set of ideas:
- Treating only the symptom of an illness without looking at its relation to the rest of the self is like applying a bandaid. It won’t catch the root cause of an illness.
- Looking only at one specific part of the body while ignoring the rest of the person, emotionally and physically, is a disconnected approach that doesn’t take into consideration our whole selves.
- Treating humans as if they will all have the exact same body responses is overlooking the unique constitution of each person.
For those of us that have experienced few chances in life to understand existence in a totally new way, outside of the norms of modern medicine, these assumptions seem strangely intuitive yet at the same time, novel. Our intuitions and common sense tell us that everyone is different. Yet, we often accept that the same medicine or virus will affect each of us in the same way. In the back of our minds, we know this isn’t true in practice. We are just used to thinking this way in general.
We are also so used to isolating one body part — the one that’s hurting or malfunctioning — and focusing on that one problem instead of thinking about ourselves as a whole. We are multi-layered beings with a consciousness aspect, a mind and ego, and a body that is intricately related to its environment. When we really grasp this, we begin to see things in a new light.
Personally, I always think of any problem manifesting in my body as just a small part of its whole. I had an inflamed eye recently, and I knew eyes are related to Pitta. Also, my eye digests information for me. The stomach isn’t the only place where we digest — experiences need to be incorporated into us somehow, too. I thought about how my ability to digest what’s going on was getting overwhelmed. Something in my eye had been working overtime and got burnt out. When I finally understood its full cause, I was able to channel my energy in the right way to heal it.
The takeaway
Some of you reading this won’t have any idea what I am talking about. You might have never heard of an approach that heals us which doesn’t focus on the physical body. You might not want to believe it because you are so used to understanding everything in life on physical terms. I used to be like you. I get it.
However, I hope I’ve opened your minds a bit to a way of healing that really takes into consideration the whole you. You might think that it doesn’t mesh with today’s modern medicine system, but in fact, there are many studies now confirming a lot of things Ayurveda has known for thousands of years. Let me know if you’re interested in learning more in the comments. Or, better yet, attend one of my classes where I assure you, you’ll be enlightened and amazed.
