Ayurveda is a holistic health system born in southern India at Karola. The whole system is based on the Tattvas, the Five Great Elements.
Ayurveda works with the elements to examine the energies we perceive in the world. The five elements are earth, air, fire, water, and ether. These five elements create the three unique doshas, or energies, that provide our constitution.
Keep reading to learn more about the doshas, gut health, rituals to establish balance, and how to work with the elements of each season for better health.
Vata, Pitta, and Kapha are the three doshas constituting a person’s constitution.
Examining diet, movement patterns, work, relationships, environments, and habits—especially patterns that cause disease and imbalances—contributes to our overall constitution and lifestyle.
The elements contribute to the overall constitution of the doshas and provide a lens through which to understand how to work with each.
Age and what we’re experiencing affect our constitution, our body, and our overall energy. We’re always degrading once we’re born.
Just as each person has a primary dosha, there is a dosha that describes the current season:
Ali Cramer is a yoga teacher, Ayurvedic Counsellor, and author of Modern Ayurveda: Rituals, Recipes, and Remedies for Balance. She joined us on the Practice with Clara Podcast to share her simple and effective Ayurvedic practices you can make do at home to ease the transition into winter.
Ayurveda is a unique plan for self-care that can carry us through our lives. We’re constantly changing, and the world around us is constantly changing; Ayurveda honors being in the flow and allows us to stay open to it. Nothing is fixed in the world, so we can’t be fixed either.
In Vata season, we’re all experiencing lots of energy moving very fast.
It’s light as opposed to heavy, dry, and irregular. So if it’s fast, we need to move slightly slower. Give ourselves a little bit more time to do things. Vata tends to be cold, so we need to make sure that we stay warm.
In this season, the veil is very thin, so this is the time for creativity and spirituality.
This is a time to journal, meditate, and practice yoga, especially between 2 and 6 AM or PM because that’s Vata’s time. This is the peak part of the day when you want to create. It’s magical, and keeping a meditation practice will help ground you.
Yama is the lord of death, so Yama Damstra reflects the time of year when the veil between our world and the spirit world is thin. Across so many traditions, this is a magical time of the year, an unearthly time. Vata is part of this realm, being very imaginative and ethereal.
—Ali Cramer
We sat down with fellow yogi and Ayurvedic Counsellor Insiya Rasiwala-Finn to discuss the art of ritual, gut health, and Ayurvedic practices.
Insiya has been an Ayurvedic practitioner for roughly fifteen years. Her roots in Ayurveda extend to childhood; born in India, Insiya was raised in a household that promoted Ayurvedic rituals and yoga. From a very young age, Insiya was introduced to using food to heal and promote better health.
Growing up, there were a lot of rules around food. There were lots of things like, oh, we don’t eat this food in this season, it’s not right. We only eat this young garlic, for example, in the winter because the season allows us to digest the heat of the garlic. Food was always thought about in terms of the properties of that food and the effect it would have on the body during that specific season.
When I’m feeling out of sorts, I crave the food of my childhood; perhaps that’s where the term comfort food comes from. The foods that offer us a wave of sustaining and nourishing memories from the past.
I grew up in India, and as a child, the doctor would never tell you that you have so much of each dosha that you have this sort of an imbalance and that you need to do these things to heal. It wasn’t like that; there wasn’t as much focus on the doshas. There’s also a danger in that people get stuck on one perspective, thinking they’re one dosha or a certain way, and then holding onto those tendencies.
During all these years of working with Ayurveda, I would compare my natural tendencies to the environment and the factors that can exacerbate or alleviate them. I examine the environment and external factors and say, here’s what I need to do to work with these things, to bring all the conditions into more balance.
At the same time, I have to remind myself that this is not necessarily who I am; there’s an essence of me that is separate, true, deeper, and where everything is whole and connected, but life happens. Events occur, and we start to lose little bits of ourselves, and we lose energy. All of the things that we do should be to regain that energy to get it back. I can make choices to help bring myself more into balance.
I studied Ayurveda at the Mount Madonna Institute but was introduced to this practice as a child. I was fortunate to grow up in Bombay, India, in a family that really focused on what we ate. My mother and grandmother were really into preparing hot foods and making foods from scratch. My father practiced a lot of yoga, so I was exposed to yoga and using food as a medicine at a very young age.
My mother used food as medicine; I had sinus issues as a child, and she wouldn’t allow me ice cream on cold days. She’d say, ‘Maybe after lunch on a hot day, but not at dinner because it’s going to make you congested at night.’ So, even as a young child, I was introduced to these little snippets of knowledge.
I didn’t think much of it until I moved to the US for university, and then I started to eat food that didn’t feel so good in my system. I would write to my mother, saying things like, ‘I don’t feel so good,’ ‘I’m kind of stressed out,’ and ‘I’m up all night working or studying.’ As a result, I would fall sick. This pattern repeated post-college when I moved to Chicago and took a job in advertising with intense hours and deadlines. I would stay up late and fall sick, knowing something wasn’t right.
– Insiya Rasiwala-Finn
We welcomed yoga teacher and Ayurvedic Therapist Maria Garre to learn more about gut health, preventing disease, and improving digestion through Ayurvedic practices.
Ayurveda treats the body first, and when we follow the basic principles, we take care of ourselves, and in this way, we take care of the environment. We would never hunt or eat a sick animal. We make sure that we’re eating and hunting the proper food. If the plant looks like it’s falling apart, we leave it alone and don’t eat it. That means we’re taking care of the environment; we’re all in it together.
Ayurveda is a medical science from the great land of India, so it’s Indian medicine. It was popular in the Himalayan region over 5,000 years ago and developed into a system of medicine to keep the population healthy. Ayurveda translates to the knowledge of life and the wisdom of experience.
Ayurveda’s premise is to understand how to live in balance and recognize how to live in flow with your entire environment. When we’re in flow, we’re in optimal health. When there isn’t health, that means something got out of balance. We identify with that imbalance, bringing the body back to balance, which means back to health.
My dad is a famous virologist; discussions about viruses and bacteria were discussed at my dinner table.
I love science, but it didn’t meet me in a place where I was fulfilled. I was fulfilled in my head academically, but it wasn’t until Ayurveda that I was fulfilled in my head and heart.
One way to create good Agni is to cleanse. You want to cleanse to get rid of ama twice a year, in the fall and the spring. You cleanse and detox when the sun and moon are balanced. You don’t cleanse during other times of the year; you want to cleanse closest to the equinoxes. During detox, you’re purging the physical and mental ama. Mental fear comes out during a detox. It can be very emotional as well as physical.
Ayurveda treats the body first, and when we follow the basic principles, we take care of ourselves, and in this way, we take care of the environment. We would never hunt or eat a sick animal. We make sure that we’re eating and hunting the proper food. If the plant looks like it’s falling apart, we leave it alone and don’t eat it. That means we’re taking care of the environment; we’re all in it together.
– Maria Garre
Alix Jean, a TCM practitioner, and Japanese acupuncturist, joined us on the podcast to share how she treats the body and witnesses healing transformation through the Hara diagnosis, the treatment used in Japanese acupuncture to assess abdominal palpitations.
With Hara diagnosis within the abdomen, we literally feel a blockage in one of the organs or meridians. I like the immediate feedback used in the Hara diagnosis.
Chinese medicine is based on observations of nature. Therefore, every day is different, and it depends on the season. You would see what’s occurring in nature to decide whether it’s a yin season and go more inwards, such as winter, or a more yang season and spend more time outwards, such as summer. It’s always about balancing the constitution based on the environment and what you’re dealing with on that particular day.
The liver and gallbladder are related to springtime. For spring, the element is wood. With wood, everything moves up and outward.
Wood is represented as growth and leadership. The emotion that corresponds with the liver is anger, and the idea is that the energy moves upward and outward for growth. It can be a positive thing because it’s progressive. When checking the liver and gallbladder meridians, there’s this energy of up and out, this sense of drive, growth, and goals.
Spring moves into summer, and with summer comes the element of fire. Summer is joyful and open-hearted. It’s represented by love and passion. The pathology of joy is overexcitation and doing too much, as in chasing joy or almost like you would chase a drug addiction. It would mean you have too much fire, too much of a good thing. The organ associated with these ideas and elements is the heart.
From summer, we shift into autumn, where we discover the earth element. The earth element doesn’t have one direction; it returns to the center. It’s the grounding and stabilizing source of nourishment. It’s the digestive organ that brings us back to our center.
—Alix Jean
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