WHY ADOPT AN AYURVEDA LIFESTYLE?
Let’s face it :-
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We’re stressed.
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We have multiple competing commitments.
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We have career and economic pressures.
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There’s climate change all around us.
Individually, we are trying our best
to take care of ourselves and our loved ones but collectively we are destroying
the planet, yet cultivating narratives of hope.
There is one more inexhaustible source of hope that is called Ayurveda. It’s
growing in global recognition for its healing and therapeutic benefits, rooted
in a 5000-year old tradition of holistic health and wise living. More and more
people are discovering Ayurveda’s capacity to redress and prevent ill health
and moderate incurable conditions.
Fundamentally, Ayurveda is about
transforming one’s own quality of life: physical and mental.
Now more directly to the point — if I could give you only two reasons to try
Ayurveda and to adopt an Ayurveda lifestyle and mindset, they would be:
1) To detoxify your body
2) To alleviate the effects of chronic stress.
Toxins are all around us. They are in the air we breathe, the water we drink,
the food we eat, the activities we do, and even the thoughts we think. Toxins
are received from the outside world. Toxins are created by our inner world,
including bodily organs and the mind. We get hit by toxins from all
directions.
As toxins accumulate, they interfere with other bodily functions
and systems. That’s why we need Ayurveda. To clean the body on the inside and
out. To keep our engine running smoothly. To lubricate places of friction. To
cool places of heat and re-heat places that are unfavourably cool. To moisten
areas prone to dryness and to dry areas prone to moistness. To rebalance. The
body is very much like a car. It needs routine seasonal and annual
maintenance.
But here’s the
scariest aspect of the problem — the greater part of our stress is unconscious.
That is, we don’t know how stressed we really are. We are not conscious or
aware of the overwhelming greater proportion of our stress. As much as 90% of
our stress is unconscious, silently working in the background of our minds and
in the deepest depths of our bodies. Stress is even accumulated and stored,
like toxins, in various body parts and encoded in our cells. Even if we don’t
remember the causes of our stress, the body remembers. The cells
remember.
We need to de-stress not just at the physical and conscious levels, but even at
the cellular level. Ayurveda is a starting point for cellular-level
rejuvenation and cleansing, but not the final panacea of stress. Much of the
lasting stress relief is done at the individual level through inner work as
well as through subtle and incremental changes to our lifestyle, habits and
nutrition.
Ayurveda is a journey, not a rigid path. It is defined as the
“science of life” and sometimes as the “science of longevity”. It is also
defined as “knowledge of life”. In all cases, Ayurveda is fundamentally
concerned with how to live our life better than before.