Are you healthy? Most of us say yes without thinking. Our blood tests came back clear, the doctor said there was nothing wrong. We don't count waking up tired, the bloating in the afternoon, the mind that won't settle in the evening. Those just feel like part of life.
Ayurveda looks at this question from a much wider place. Seen from there, the answer changes for most of us. But in Ayurveda that isn't bad news. It's a beginning.
What does the name tell us?
Ayu means life, veda means knowledge. Ayurveda is the knowledge of life. It is yoga's sister science, and like yoga its aim is to set each of us free on our own path. What sets it apart from yoga is its interest in this world. If you aren't at ease in your body, if you live with constipation, indigestion or headaches, you can't move forward. Your attention keeps getting pulled back there. And it isn't only physical; it can be mental or spiritual too. Ayurveda tells us how to come back to balance with whatever life brings as we move through it.
Who is healthy, according to Ayurveda?
In Ayurveda, a healthy person has strong digestion. They get hungry at mealtimes, and their appetite doesn't swing from day to day. Their skin, their menstrual blood, their tissues are healthy, and their elimination is regular. On top of all this, they feel calm and joyful emotionally, mentally and spiritually. And digestion here means digesting life as well as food. The two are bound together.
Seen through this window, almost none of us are healthy. But in Ayurveda, that isn't a bad thing. If my mind feels a little up and down one day, that gives me a chance to come back to balance. Symptoms are a kind of grace: something to work with, something to understand.
Picture a river
The best way I can explain it is with a river. A river nobody interferes with will find its way back, even after it floods. But build a dam across its bed and it gets blocked. The water can't go where it needs to, so it starts spilling over somewhere else.
We have rivers inside us too: our blood vessels, our lymph, the channels energy moves through. When your body gives you a signal and you don't hear it, or you push it down, you build a dam. That movement doesn't disappear. It starts moving through another part of your life. All that disappears is the part you can see.
And the blockage doesn't happen just anywhere. It happens on the side your nature leans towards, where it meets what you inherited from your family. That's why the same symptom doesn't come from the same place in two people.
This is where Ayurveda's two aims come from:
- 1Keep the river from getting blocked.
- 2If it's blocked, help it flow again.
The first is why it's called the wisdom of life. Doshas, the qualities of food, the rhythm of the day: these are the tools we use on the way to those two aims.
I thought it was a list, too
When I first came across Ayurveda I was in the corporate world, skipping meals, with a body that was telling me something every day. I read books first, then went for consultations. Over six months I saw three different people, and I walked away from each one holding a list. I thought I had to do all of it. Of course I couldn't, and I decided that was my own failing. But I was looking at the list, not at the logic behind it.
Most of us look at things this way. We remember the rule and forget the reason. Do you remember why you had to go to bed early when you were at school? What stayed with most of us is that we had to be in bed before the late film came on TV. The reason was simple: so we could grow, so we could wake up fresh.
So what could Ayurveda be for you?
Maybe you've tried things too, followed them for a few weeks and let them go. Maybe you decided that was your own failing. I believed that for years too.
Ayurveda's real question is a different one: what is your body telling you right now? Where has your river slowed down? And when you hear that signal, can you choose to listen instead of silencing it?
What had my body been telling me all those years that I wasn't hearing?