From Yoga to Ayurveda: Mapping our body, mind and spirit

(how Ayurveda came into my life)

Part 1: Yoga

We all have that something. That something that gets us through the tough times. For some, it is a sport, for others its strumming their guitar. For some it is creating on a canvas, for others it is the solace of substances such as alcohol and drugs. We cannot judge. None are better or worse than the other. When taken to excess, all distractions can be detrimental. Run too much, your bones suffer. Oblivion in music, cloud the expansion of life. Passion for painting, missed opportunities for other expressions. Dependence on substances, mental and psychological damage.

Something in our human nature seems to turn comfort into compulsion.

Yoga has been my “saviour”. Yoga has gotten me through my difficulties. Following a sequence, focusing on my breath and body, listening to the calming music; these allow me to transfer my troublesome thoughts to a entity other than my mind, to leave my problems behind. And it worked.

It worked when I felt lost in life, when I didn’t now where to go, what direction to take. I knew where my yoga mat was so I got onto it daily. I did not need to think about it. It feels good not to think, doesn’t it?

So, I practiced yoga when I was underweight and malnourished. I practiced when I broke my arm, creating one arm flows and striving to put little weight on the fracture. I practiced through bouts of acid reflux, enduring the pain as it accelerated with a downward dog. I practiced almost immediately after I had my spinal injury and surgery, going against doctor advice and ignoring the darts of pain or “clicks”. I practiced on despite of these difficulties because “yoga is my saviour”. Relationships suffered, and so did my anxiety, as I became obsessed with my daily morning yoga practice; I had to squeeze it in. I couldn’t leave the house until my flow was done, I couldn’t envision holidaying if my hostel didn’t have a place when I could practice yoga. My “saviour” had changed to an awkward addition.

Attachment to yoga and attachment to the idea that “yoga is my saviour” meant I would rather be right than admit I was wrong, that sometimes yoga was not my saviour, that moving my body this way might be my “devil”.  

Throughout my yoga years, I became aware that the word yoga comes from the Sanskrit language and means “union”, union of the mind, body and spirit. So, could you say I had been practicing yoga all that time? Yes, I was moving my body, but was moving in connection with my spirt and mind? Not at all, I was moving my body to disconnect from my mind and my spirit. The very reason I loved yoga was because though it, I was able to focus on my body, and forget about my mind and my spirit who were causing me sadness and pain. I simply wanted to keep on moving my body, moving further away from my inner soul. So I moved and kept moving. Downward dog, upward dog. Child’s pose, cobra. Moving and moving. Until, I had to stop.

For a while anyway. Falling though the roof and breaking my back, chronic constipation and depression; both of these “trauma” disrupted my yoga flow, forcing me to practice yoga in her truth, uniting my mind, body and spirit. Intention is at the core of yoga. Moving the body, or even the breath, with awareness of your heart, your soul, your thoughts, that is my new understanding of yoga.

This new interpretation of yoga has been a difficult transition for me. Grieving the loss of my old addiction, my yoga to obliviate my thoughts, and accepting that I can find peace in being with the pain, the joy, the anger, the love.

This new yoga, uniting the mind, body and spirit is the only true way that I can use yoga “to get through the tough times” in my life. As I have recently experienced, we are not our bodies, they are always changing. You can lose bodily abilities and functions. So I your yoga practice is dependant on the body solely, attached to the physical, if the body changes, so odes your happiness, your way to get through the tough times in life. Do you want your happiness to be dependent on the body, the body that is forever changing? Not me anyway.

Ayurveda was a term I had come across in my yogic years. Aare that it was a form of Vedic Medicine, my knowledge did not go much deeper than knowing that I was “Vata” or air type, from taking an online Dosha quiz from Deepak Chopra’s website!

Part 2: Ayurveda

Ayurveda came into my life when I needed her most. Let me explain.

Living in Lisbon, I received a message from a woman called Abbey, who I had only communicated with via texts and voice notes. Abbey was an permaculture apprentice at the ranch in Costa Rica where I had been also the year before her. I bought her tools from her and that is how we began our relationship. Anyway, living in Lisbon, this message from Abbey informed me she would be in Lisbon soon taking a “herbal course” and invited me to meet with her for dinner. So, we did.

Abbey explained on her “herbal course”. In fact, she was studying Ayurveda in northern Portugal. Ayurveda, I responded please tell me more. And that is how the ancient art of ayurveda entered my life.

Ayurveda, she told me is a system which is based on the universal scientific stance that there are 5 elements: ether, air, fire, water, and earth. Take the physical planet, first there was empty space (ether). Then, matter fields the void; air allows movement (gas), fire (energy) can change matter from one form to another, and water (fluid) and earth (solid) work together to also allow movement and can slow or speed up this movement dependant on their form. Using this examples to characterise our human body; inside and outside of us we have empathy cold space, air is outside and inside of us, we breathe air in, and release air out as gaseous waste, fire can destroy and absorb in our physical outside world, but fire inside of us can “destroy” and digest food and absorb into our blood stream; water in our body, just like a river, moves essentials like blood and nutrients around our body, and just like a river forms a riverbank of earth, so to our river of blood and lymph, create passages and channels, which five shape to this river of life.

WOW. Such a strangly simple system. For the first time in my life, I understood how my body worked. My body is a conversation of these five elements. Too much ether and air, we become dry. Dryness brings dry skin, constipation, dry breathing, dry bones, and an airy anxiety overall. Too much fire, we become hot. Heat brings high blood pressure, heated headaches, fiery bowels, hot skin, inflammations of every sort. Too much water, we become too wet. Wetness, make the earthy riverbeds “dam”, creates stagnation, low blood pressure, enemas, slow digestion and a sluggish in general.

This is the language of Ayurveda. And how do we treat these illnesses of excess air, heat, wet? By working in opposites! If you are too dry, become wetter. If you are too hot, become cooler. If you are too wet, become drier. And how do we change these states? Through mind, body, and spirit. Through diet, movement, herbs, spiritual practices, relations. Through connecting them all. In union. Yoga.

Abbey confirmed what I already suspected. Indeed, I was a “vata” (too cold and too dry). I had too much air. How was this true for my complaints? How was I too cold? My feet and body in general are always cold, my thin frame had too much empty cold space where blood did not flow. How was I too dry, too much air? My chronic constipation was because my food did not have enough heat and water to flow through my system. My lack of menstruation was due to lack of fluid in my body. My dry eyes, my osteoporosis from my dry bones, my angular cheilitis from my dry lips, my anxiety and indecision attributed to excess air in my mind. Totally cold and dry! So, simple! Let’s start getting hot and wet!

Firstly, I signed up for a 6 week online course with Abbey’s Ayurvedic teacher and employer DeAnna Batdorff entitled “Body Mapping”. Through modules on the elements, the breath and chakra, diet, self-care practices, skin, tissues and so forth, my knowledge and understanding of this ancient art deepened. I would highly recommend engaging on a similar course with DeAnna’s whose passion and playfulness in contagious. Her aim is for us to learn to navigate the map that is our body, so we can travel throughout ourselves with confidence, without dependence on western medial doctors; coming home to bodies; re-establishing the relationship with ourselves.

So, how have I been getting hotter and wetter?!? How have I been using Ayurveda and it’s elemental and opposite theory to treat my cold and dry symptoms?

With this learning, I have begun to treat my symptoms. For my chronic constipation, I changed my diet to a wetter and warmer one. My breakfast of cold overnight oats changed to warm, wet porridge; my lunch of cold wraps and sandwiches changed to warm, spiced soups with bread and protein and dinners of rice and curries with grounding roots such as sweet potato and nourish herbs like cinnamon and cardamom. Ghee was added to most meals, adding more juice to my system (If you haven’t tried ghee on toast, in curries, in hot chocolates and so on, you don’t know what you are missing!).

An example of how Ayurveda takes a whole-body picture of symptoms. Western medicine will say, “Constipated? Drink more water to flush it out!”. But, I was drinking litres upon litres of water each day! Abbey explained, “If there is a flash flood in the desert, will the soil become fertile and nourished?”. No, the dry desert soil will not absorb the rainwater, thus becoming flooded. So too was happening in my body; my body was too dry to absorb the water I was pouring into her, my water intake was coming straight out though urine! How could I make my “soil” wetter so it would absorb the “rain”? Abbey explained the Ayurvedic triad of hydration; for water to absorb into our system we need minerals, essential fatty acids, and probiotics. I never used salt on my food, followed a “clean” diet which excluded oils and butters, and wasn’t taking probiotics as a food source or supplements. So, I started adding sea salt to my food, cooking with, and adding olive oil and ghee to meals and eating kefir and sauerkraut along with probiotic supplements. I was preparing a fertile soil to soak up the rain.

Indulging in warm evening baths, protecting my frame from the cool air with scarves and layers, receiving oil massages (abhyanga) and oil dripping on my forehead (shirodhara), salt scrubs on my body; my self-care routine increased, and as it did, so did my self-love. To increase my juiciness in hope of strengthening my dry bone and stimulating my menses, I slowed down, I moved my body sensually in yoga, I lived life like I was a princess, creating beauty everywhere I went. To supplement my general health, I took Ashwagandha, practiced tongue scaping and oil pulling for my dental health, added gua sha massage to my skin care and mediated daily. And I allowed the juiciness of dreams to destress me, getting 9 hours sleep a night with no alarm in the morning.

Has it worked? Has Ayurveda changed my body, just like it has changed my mindset?

I still have osteoporosis, I still feel the pain in my back. But I know I am eating enough so my bones are now getting enough nutrients. With time, hopefully they will improve. My mediation and self-care and self-love mean that I can manage my back pain and rest when it is aggravating me. I can listen to my body.

I still am not menstruating. But I know that my body is still rebuilding trust in me. It needs to know that I will stick to this new lifestyle of enough food and enough rest to expend even more energy and commence menstruation. Practicing patience is part of the journey. I already feel more of w woman in the fact that I am giving myself permission to be kind to myself. Not too mention, I have noticed my vaginal mucus is wetter and stringier, and only this morning did I observe and pang and a protruding pressure in my female reproductive area…fingers crossed!

And the chronic constipation? I still…No, I am not suffering from chronic constipation!

As much as I am sure that daily probiotics and my new wet and hot diet helped stimulate my bowels and juice up the desert, I am certain that my constipation was a mind-body problem (like most problems!), and that leaving my job, that giving myself permission to press pause and practice giving myself love and leisure, was at the core of the return of my daily poos. Really, what a physical and mental relief!

Am I an ayurvedic expert? Anything but! I know I have only begun to scrape the surface that is a deep dive into the ancient wisdom of this tradition. Herbal recipes, Panchakarma detoxes, essential oils, diffusions, marma points and koshas…there is so much more for me to discover. Which I do hope to discover by pursuing my passion for ayurvedic by taking an ayurvedic course of some sort in her birth country, India. But for now, I will continue to use ayurveda as a philosophy, as a way of observing my elements in my body, notice how they show up, and balancing them through opposition.

Part 3: Union of Yoga and Ayurveda

I began this blog by admitting that I used yoga as a way to block out my mind and spirt. I continued on to list all of my “dry and cold” physical problems I was suffering from; suffering from because I was blocking out my mind and spirit. To put it bluntly, I was not listening to my body, mind, and spirit as one, I was not uniting them, I was not in union, not practicing yoga.

I have explained how Ayurveda has taught me to observe, notice, feel, describe and treat accordingly my body. This begins with the breath, using the breath to observe, notice and feel. Using the breath is the foundation of yoga. Using the breath is the foundation of how we can check in with our body, mind and spirit. Using the breath is how we become our own doctors, our own masters of the body.

How wonderful would it be if this daily breath, this daily observing, noticing, feeling, describing, and treating our bodies accordingly was natural too us? How beautiful would it be if we used the language of the elements in our everyday speech? Imagine living in a world where you would reply to “How are you today?” with “I’m feeling a bit heated in my head”, “I’m a bit dry in my blood” or “I’m a bit clogged up in my digestive system”. It is my dream to teach children the language of cold, hot, wet, dry, the awareness of the elements within them, and the power they possess to balance their body, mind, and spirit. As one. In union.