According to Ayurveda, choosing the right food to eat is personal. Although there are many examples of healthy foods out there, Ayurveda believes that foods should be selected based on their natural qualities, compatibilities, modes of processing, quantities and timing.
Ayurveda’s goal is to achieve, maintain and preserve our health and prevent disease. Prevention is the key in Ayurveda. In order to prevent dis-ease we need to create balance by moving with the flow of nature and harmonizing our tendencies.
We all have specific tendencies (or doshas) and it is important to identify your tendencies in order to begin to balance them. Hopefully, you are already familiar with your basic dosha energies. If not, please connect with my dosha post.
These tendencies or inherent qualities are affected by the daily cycle of darkness as it transitions to light, the rhythms in nature (which are the seasons) and the various phases we move through during our life. Therefore, time is a key component for balance in Ayurveda. Time or Kala as it is called in Sanskrit is the cyclic remodeler of our lives.
I will soon talk of the specific lifestyle routines of Ayurveda, but for now I would like to introduce time as it relates to the doshas or the functional energies of Vata, Pitta and Kapha.
We have now, officially, entered into the holidays.
And, for most of us, this is the time when we go far away from our normal routines for eating, drinking, sleeping, exercising and the general schedules we are used to. We communicate and socialize more often and with larger groups of people. We are generally busier with more cleaning, hosting, cooking, projects and travelling.
So, I thought I would provide a few feasible wellness tips for keeping balanced during this holiday season.
In Ayurveda, a dosha is a particular health type or functional energy that we possess. Individually, these doshas are known as Vata, Pitta or Kapha. In combination, they make up our innate constitution and have the ability to govern every function within the body-mind system.
While modern medicine is based on the structure of the body, “dis-ease” is not always evident in a body’s structure. Ayurveda is based on three energies that are functioning behind that structure or the “why” something is happening, its root cause.