Happy heat of the summer. I remember years ago reading Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and just totally loving all the characters and the magic fairies deep in the woods. Well, my latest blog is brought to you from Middlesex Fells in the woods of MA! I love doing these video blogs in the woods and outside. I might just keep doing that. Here I'm surrounded by the fresh air and trees. As you can see I am getting a little bit eaten by mosquitoes but, such are all good things tempered with challenges-yes? The mosquitoes quickly ground me back in reality and remind me about the balance in all things.
In this month's woods ramblings, I speak about Ayurveda, the sister science of yoga. Ayurveda is most concerned with lifestyle than physical postures. This past week I did an ayurveda workshop at Kripalu Retreat Center (holy moly, I love this retreat center and am so fortunate to be able to attend from time to time.) Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about that workshop and how the philosophy of ayurveda relates to our tendency to think in terms of black and white, though most of life is gray. If you look at the world and nature itself, everything is about BALANCE. This is why I love Reiki. It's all about helping to rebalance. Same with yoga. Same with Chinese medicine and many other healing traditions.
In ayurveda, everything can be medicine or everything can be poison. It just depends on the person's dosha, the time of day, and the season. It brings a whole new meaning to "everything in moderation." The basis of the philosophy is that your digestion is like a fire. To get the best out of your food, you need to feed the fire adequately. There are warming foods and cooling foods and wet foods and dry foods. We need to find the balance of these elements with what we eat for proper digestion.
Some things I learned based on the Ayurvedic Perspective:
Did you know that eating cold foods can aggravate digestion?
Did you know that our biggest meal of the day should be lunch because that's when the sun is strongest and therefore, that is when our digestion in strongest?
Did you know that eating a salad every day could be not so great for you depending on your constitution?
Anyway, I am fascinated by this perspective and learned a lot. One thing I do in my blog is I relate it to how much we human beings SO want to categorize things as either good or bad. We look at things as right or wrong. How many studies out there are trying to prove whether coffee is good for you or bad for you?!
In this blog the main thing I state is to think more expansively. When we can do this, we tend to have more tolerance for ourselves and understanding about our digestion.