In the time I have now, I can’t even begin to cover the entire story that brought me to Ayurveda as a health and lifestyle choice. It is a holistic system that fortunately has been handed down through the generations to us in today’s contemporary world. Amazingly, teachers have dedicated their lives to keeping this knowledge alive and thriving. I honor them with so much gratitude and love, especially the ones who are here today on this planet.

As this blog develops, I will share experiences and recipes and suggestions that take into account the amazing and wonderful science that is known as Ayurveda.

This weekend I went a little crazy and didn’t follow my ayurvedic program, and quickly I felt the consequences in the form of a terrible headache and congestion all over the right side of my head. It felt like my right eye and ear were both clogged, and the blue vein that runs down the right side of my nose hurt too. You see, on Saturday morning I made the mistake of eating some cold M & M candies that were sitting in the car. Then I had some cheese on a piece of pizza (at least it had whole wheat crust and vegies on it). Then I had a junky vegie burger from Burger King that was slathered with too much eggy mayonnaise that I didn’t expect them to add. By the time I woke up Sunday my head was throbbing with pain, and I spent most of Sunday drinking DeTox and Yarrow herbal teas and napping and letting the toxins flow out of my eyes and nose in the form of clear fluid. By going back to eating high prana oatmeal with dulse and soaked sunflower seeds with maple syrup and milk for breakfast, and some simple vegetables for lunch and dinner, I felt much better without artificial pain relievers by mid-afternoon. But this experience helps me to realize how careful I need to be and how by becoming healthier I have also become more sensitive to toxins.

The Art of Silence course that I just returned from at the Sri Sri Ashram in Uvalde, Texas gave all the participants a chance to enter into a relationship with themselves, nature and God, in a different way from the usual chatty life. When we went into silence, where no talking, reading or writing is done and even signing is minimized, most of us were already ceasing the constant talk that keeps our minds on a roller coaster in the daily grind. I was so anticipating silence that I felt I had already partially started it about 2 days before arrival at the Ashram. To be able to function with others in a smiling, happy way, with singing in the evening, but without meaningless, extraneous babbling talk is such a relief.

There were three of us in the group that rented a car together in San Antonio, two men from India who now live in New Jersey and New York and myself, from rural Southern Illinois. We drove straight west for about 2 hours before the landscape drastically changed from flat and urban to hilly and rural. The West Texas Hill Country is a rugged, rocky terrain full of riverbeds and cacti that peek out at the road with a kind of bright curiosity. It rained lightly for 2 full days from Wednesday afternoon until Friday night. Then, on Saturday morning before dawn, the stars rained down sparkle on my hair as I walked to the 6 a.m. sadhanas session. It’s true what the airport billboards said about the stars in Texas being so close you can touch them. Sadhanas include silent meditation, chanting, asanas (physical yoga postures), and pranayams (breathing practices) that include kriya (purifying action). For one and a half glorious, clear, dry, sunny days we could live without human chatter and breathe some of the the freshest, cleanest air possible in this planet’s current atmosphere..

The three doshas include kapha, pitta, vata. They exist within everyone and everything in nature. They have different properties and qualities from one another, and the purpose of balancing them within your body is to create health.

Health is more than the absence of disease. It is a state of balance. Each of the doshas has one unique property that singularly belongs to that type of life force. For kapha, the unique quality that neither of the others has is heaviness. Pitta is the only one that has heat, and vata is the only one with dryness. All of their other qualities overlap with those of the other doshas.

In a sense, you can find these qualities in various levels in various foods. Tomatoes and chilis are fiery and high in pitta, while soft, wet oatmeal is high in kapha. Dry foods like toast are clearly high in vata. Dry beans need to be well soaked before cooking or they will aggravate a vata imbalance. With further investigation, you can see that these life forces and qualities have constant interaction in the body and in nature, and noticing their signs and foibles can be a very valuable healing skill. I have seen the doshas at work in my own life, dancing together on an infinite field of changing environments and conditions. I have improved my understanding of the cause and effect processes that unbalanced doshas produce, at least partly anyway, through some experiences in learning that I have had in the last few years.