Ayuerveda & Balance
I love the phrase knowledge is power.. In fact, I choose to rephrase this slightly for clients to read: “knowledge is empowerment”. Empowerment is a really important aspect of our life journey, and without digressing too much here, everything we share within this newsletter is an opportunity to assess: (i) ‘does this hold true to me?’ (ii) ‘if so, in what ways?’, and (iii) 'how does this change what I need at this moment?’
I like to begin with that preface when I introduce potentially new and vast frameworks, like Ayurveda. Ayurveda is a sanskrit word that means ‘the science of life’ or ‘knowledge of life,’ and is a system of medicine based on the idea that disease is caused by an imbalance or stress in a person's consciousness. I find it fascinating (and uplifting) that many Western hospitals now highlight this form of treatment on their websites: Mount Sinai, Johns Hopkins, Cleveland Clinic, NCCIH, and more.
What I invite you to take away from this (for the time being) is the central idea of balance (and a symptom as an imbalance and an opportunity to bring the system back to balance). What does balance mean to you? What does balance feel like? How do you find balance in mind, body, and spirit?
Does balance change with the seasons? According to Ayurveda (and a doshic framework), it does! To find balance in each season, you need a diet and lifestyle that is opposite to the quality of the season (this is the Ayurvedic principle of ‘like increasing like’).
In summer, the fire element is higher with more warmth, dryness and lightness. The increase in environmental heat can influence the onset of inflammatory symptoms such as hay-fever, prickly heat and summer fevers. Similarly, our emotions can also become naturally more ‘heated’ and we may experience a tendency to become slightly more ‘hot under the collar’ in stressful or unexpected situations. So, naturally, summer is a time of calming and reducing heat.
Here are some top tips for a summer routine that will leave you feeling cool, calm and collected during the summer (and next week, we will dive deeper into your underlying doshic constitution and what balance looks like for each):
Wake with the rising morning sun, take advantage of our natural instinct to awaken earlier’
Start a daily yoga or meditation practice that will calm the body and mind, cooling your internal temperature;
As the weather hots up, the emotions can take a similar route. You might find yourself feeling more frustrated or angry than usual (I’ll speak to this next week). A good trick is to take a mouthful of cool water and hold it in your mouth for 10 seconds before you speak;
Before bed, try rubbing the soles of your feet with a cooling oil such as almond, coconut or castor oil to draw the heat down and out of the body;
For a bit of extra indulgence, wash your face in rosewater and fill your room with the scent of relaxing cooling scents such as rose, jasmine, and lavender;
Try to get to bed before 10pm before the levels of the fire dosha ‘pitta’ begin to peak.
