Keep slowly moving the left middle finger upward until you find a tiny cavern at the base of the skull. Once you have found that point, lightly rest the pad of your left middle finger in that little spot. You have found mastaka granthi. Continue to hold your finger there gently.
Chant om silently to yourself.
Walking through this doorway, you are beginning to align to the primal rhythm.
I believe it’s really about unfolding ourselves.
— ANGELA FARMER, The Feminine Unfolding
Ayurveda means “the science of life,” and it is considered to be a sister science to the practice of yoga. I first discovered Ayurvedic medicine while studying to be a yoga therapist in my early thirties. I was taught just a smidgen of Ayurveda and became so fascinated that I entered a graduate program to study more. In India, it is a very old and well-established form of medicine, and today there are hundreds of thousands of Ayurvedic doctors and practitioners in India. Along with traditional Chinese medicine, which most people know by one of its popular therapies, acupuncture, Ayurveda is one of the oldest systems of medicine in the world. I had been practicing yoga and meditation for years, which helped me learn how to master my will and effort and influence my nervous system, but Ayurveda helped me unlock the golden door of understanding nature and how our cells, bodies, and minds are connected to the larger macrocosm.
In the United States, barely anyone had heard of Ayurvedic medicine when I was studying it, though it has gotten wildly popular in the last few years in the wellness world. Even now, you will see mixed feedback about it if you research it online. Some sources will say it’s the great mother of all medicines, the most transformative form of healing ever to be found. Others will say it’s quackery and practiced by snake-oil-salesman practitioners. Ayurveda is actually a medical philosophy that’s been around for thousands of years, so it comes in many forms and is difficult to nail down. It’s been referred to as ubiquitous, or present everywhere, because its principles have been applied in so many areas — from beauty products, foods, and medicines, all the way to self-help literature and the classes at your local yoga studio. For me, it just made complete sense the first moment I heard about it, and the more I learned about and practiced it, the better my health was and the more alive I felt.
I was more connected to nature. I noticed the moon in the sky more. The plants and trees were suddenly more interesting. And it finally gave me words, albeit in Sanskrit, to explain things I had felt for a long time but had no way to express. Before I knew it, I left my well-paying corporate career in the health-insurance industry to study a foreign form of medicine that no one I knew had heard of or could even pronounce.
Like traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda is based on a five-elements model of health, the five elements being space, air, fire, water, and earth. They provide an uncomplicated, intuitive way to describe what is happening in nature and in a body and its environment. The five elements can be used to understand the properties of what a body ingests, and how these properties show up in tissues and physiology during states of imbalance.
The body is a collection of channels through which air, energy, sound, and different substances and materials travel. Channels go in and out of cells, organs, and tissues. The integrity of the channels is paramount in Ayurvedic medicine. A healthy body has freely flowing channels, and when these channels are overwhelmed, blocked, or damaged, there is some imbalance in the body. Imbalances cause disease, and we don’t want disease if we are trying to conceive. We want to be a receptive and resilient channel.
So how do we nip imbalances in the bud? Modern medicine typically isn’t very effective unless there is some emergency going on. Even then, when the modern medical system solves a problem with drugs or surgical or device intervention, it often ends up creating another problem altogether. True healing is found in other places these days, and it all starts with you.
Healing now will make things easier for you down the road when you conceive. Studying your body can tell you a lot. Pain, inflammation, swelling, digestive issues, skin problems, headaches, tissue growths, and PMS symptoms signal that something needs to be looked at more closely, especially if the patterns remain persistent or get worse over time. Noticing quickly when the body is in a state of health versus a state of imbalance can make all the difference in trying to reverse disease processes. However, if you are like most people, you pay attention to your work, your friends and family, the news, or your thoughts more than you do your own body. That was me when I was in my thirties — until I realized that I’d been dragging this body around with me my whole life and knew very little about how it worked.
We aren’t given a manual on how our bodies work when we are born. Even trained medical professionals don’t always fully integrate their learning on the body, because intellectual knowledge, helping other people, and our own embodiment are completely different things. When I started studying my own body, I noticed how complex it was — how so much is going on all the time in all its nooks and crannies. I felt overwhelmed by how much there was to learn, and it seemed it would take forever to truly understand it. I wondered: Is there a way to learn about health that is instead really simple and won’t feel daunting to tackle? Ayurveda was my answer.
Ayurveda gives insight into the very beginnings of disease by studying seemingly benign symptoms that most people simply discount because they can oftentimes take some over-the-counter medicine for them, but they are a big deal if they persist. All disease conditions — minor or major — have their roots in these small health issues. To prevent and reverse disease, you want to catch it as early as possible, because it’s more and more difficult to address it as time goes on. The good news, which I will explain in subsequent chapters, is that imbalance follows very specific patterns, so if you pay attention, you will be able to detect and rebalance issues.
My goal is to introduce you to a few helpful concepts from Ayurvedic medicine so that you can discover how you can be your healthiest self. In introducing Ayurveda to you, I fear I will convey only a fraction of the brilliance of this medicine, because it is so very vast and wise. Nevertheless, I will try. In some cases I will use transliterated Sanskrit terms because there is no meaningful English equivalent to express certain concepts.
Definition of Health
A person with [a] uniformly healthy digestion, and whose bodily humours are in a state of equilibrium, and in whom the fundamental vital fluids course in their normal state and quantity, accompanied by the normal processes of secretion, organic function, and intellection, is said to be a healthy person.
— SUSHRUTA-SAMHITA
Ayurveda teaches us that a healthy person is healthy in mind, body, and senses. We factor in what enters the body and how it is processed, utilized, and ultimately excreted. We evaluate actual food intake and anything else that comes in contact with the sense organs, such as sound, light, smells, and so on. Anything perceived by the senses is food.
We cannot deny that the mind and body are interconnected. When we feel physical pain, there are often mental symptoms that accompany this pain. When we feel stress, anxiety, anger, or sadness, we feel physical symptoms, too, because feelings trigger energy and fluids to travel differently through the body and can even cause muscle contractions or spasms.
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