AYURVEDA

Learn how Ayurveda can Heal the Body to Help us Live Vibrantly Healthy!

There is a place deep inside us that is reverberating with blissful, creative, energetic, intelligence. It is our basic life force, non-material in its essence and imbued with pure awareness. It is part of our spirit, and the source of our body. It guides, motivates and fuels all our activities, in mind and body. Therein lies a program of ideal health, of all possibilities including achieving our desires and life’s purpose. It is also the source of all healing. If we are in touch with this source and it is flowing unimpeded through every cell of our bodies, we are vibrantly healthy and vital. If not, our bodies’ healing intelligence is not fully expressed and health problems can arise.

This is the vision of health from Ayurveda, the ancient health system from India, and its contemporary, consciousness-based revival Maharishi Ayurveda, which highlights the body’s lively conscious inner intelligence as the heart of all healing. By re-establishing contact with our inner healing source, we reclaim our power--and responsibility---to keep ourselves healthy.

WHAT IS AYURVEDA?

The “sister health science” of yoga, Ayurveda originates from the profound Vedic tradition of knowledge, which is over 5000 years old and timeless in its scope. Ayurveda has been in continuous use in India and is growing in popularity in the West, primarily as an alternative or complementary approach. Ayurveda takes a comprehensive, whole person approach to diagnosis and treatment emphasizing natural interventions such as diet, herbs, daily and seasonal routines and internal cleansing procedures. In addition, the comprehensive Maharishi Ayurveda, uses a wide spectrum of consciousness-based therapies such as:

• the Transcendental Meditation technique

• Vedic vibration

• Sound and light therapies

• Vedic architecture

• Vedic medical astrology

• Yoga

• other health-promoting approaches grounded in the Vedic tradition

A growing base of research supports the effectiveness of Ayurvedic herbal and behavioral treatments for a wide range of health issues including high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers and infections, diabetes, anxiety, anti-aging and overall prevention and health promotion. Ayurvedic treatments appear to work by supporting the body’s own healing including neutralizing free radicals, enhancing immune function and normalizing hormones and brain chemistry.

AYURVEDA AND YOUR HEALTH

Practically speaking, whereas conventional medicine is “one-size-fits-all,” and primarily treats by matching drugs to diseases, often with harmful side-effects, Ayurvedic medicine has a subtler, more expansive framework that looks to eliminating underlying causes and takes into account your individual constitution and current state of mind/body balance.
Rather than simply treating disease after the fact, prevention is emphasized through diet and lifestyle that’s tailored to your specific mind-body type and corrects imbalances before they can lead to disease. Treatments are natural and may include diet, herbs, stress-reduction, purification and lifestyle changes, as well as a variety of other modalities to enliven the body’s own healing response.

HOW DOES AYURVEDIC MEDICINE WORK?

Modern medical treatment is often fragmented with multiple doctors trained to look at only one organ or system treating multiple problems, but no one looking at the whole. In contrast, an Ayurvedic practitioner looks at what is common to all the organs and systems in the whole person, and describes them in terms of three governing factors or doshas: flow, metabolism and substance.

Simply speaking, our health depends on keeping these three doshas functioning properly. Each dosha will give a certain set of symptoms when it goes out of balance, and calls for certain foods, spices, behaviors and therapies to correct them. By treating the underlying dosha imbalance, often multiple symptoms disappear, because they were all manifestations of the same underlying imbalance. For example, digestion, skin rashes and irritability may all improve simply by balancing the fiery dosha called pitta, that is responsible for digestion and metabolism.

HOW DO I KNOW IF AYURVEDA IS FOR ME?

Ayurveda is a fit for you if you:

• Have a chronic health problem you’d like to solve naturally.

• Are tired of taking medication with harmful side-effects.

• Would like to understand why you have the symptoms you have.

• Would like to know the types of foods and lifestyle habits that may be aggravating your symptoms and ones that can alleviate them.

• Would like to be empowered through self-knowledge to keep yourself healthy once recovered.

• Wish to understand your body constitution and learn a diet and lifestyle specifically for you.

If you said yes to any of these, and are willing to be an active participant in your healing including diet and lifestyle changes when needed, then Ayurveda may be just what you’re looking for!

Are You In Balance?

Next in the series: Find out which dosha is causing your symptoms, and learn practical tips to alleviate them naturally.

Read More

SEE MORE ABOUT AYURVEDA

Named “one of the nation’s most prominent Ayurvedic doctors” by the Chicago Tribune, Nancy Lonsdorf, M.D. has been specializing in women’s health for over 20 years. She is the author of two practical self-care guides, The Ageless Woman and A Woman’s Best Medicine and offers online consultations, teleseminars and free book chapters at www.drnancylonsdorf.com.