What is AYurveda?

I use Ayurveda to help my clients Calm the F down. The above quote perfectly captures why I love Ayurveda so much. You learn to love who you are, exactly as you are, and live a way that honors YOU. All of that creates such a feeling of calm and safety. It’s so beautiful!

Ayurveda is the sister science of yoga. It means the “science or knowledge of life.” Ayur means life and veda is science or knowledge.

An ancient science of well-being, Ayurveda is considered one of the world’s oldest forms of medicine that considers the both the body and the mind. Ayurveda was a thriving medicine in India until the British colonization. The British denounced it as folklore and inferior. Therefore, it was replaced with western medicine. However, Ayurveda continued to be practiced in rural areas and monasteries, it is now experiencing a huge resurgence in India and the rest of the world. Because of its emphasis on self-care practices, self-awareness, and living in harmony with your natural rhythms, Ayurveda is an important component of preventive medicine.

I use Ayurveda to help my clients Calm the F Down because self-awareness (and love) is at the heart of Ayurveda. You learn to live in harmony with your own rhythms and dosha. It takes radical self-responsibility, satya (truthfulness), and a shift in self-care (what you think is healthy might not be) to live in alignment with your highest good. Ayurveda gives you the opportunity to be the creator of your life and not the victim of it, which makes you responsible for dealing with your emotional eating, over drinking, messy relationship issues, suppressed emotions, and tendency to numb out. Ayurveda asks you to be present in your life so you can digest all of your experiences and choose your response to life versus reacting to your life’s circumstances. While the asking is HUGE and might seem impossible, the reward is a freedom from suffering and improved emotional and physical health.

In the West, when people talk about Ayurveda you typically hear about the doshas (even though there is so much more!!). Doshas are patterns of energy that make up your unique physical, emotional, and mental being. They govern your mind, body, and emotions.

There are three doshas: Vata, Pitta, Kapha. You have all three doshas within you. You are born with one primary dosha, but you can be tridoshic which means you have all three equally present. The word dosha means “fault,” so they easily go in and out of balance. It is most important to know which one is out balance because you always treat the imbalance.

I weave Ayurveda into the other modalities I use to help my clients Calm the F Down. While there are many nutritional and lifestyle recommendations available, the processing of life experiences and emotions are just as much a part of Ayurveda as eating for your dosha, in fact, mental and emotional processing may be even more important. Yoga means to make the unconscious conscious. This is exactly what we do in coaching.