Seven Ways to Awaken Your Body's Natural Wisdom: Ayurveda for Beginners

Ayurveda is the indigenous medicine system of Ancient India, with texts dating back thousands of years from doctors, surgeons, and specialists, which parallel all branches of modern medicine. The systems are still alive and practiced today both in lineage folk traditions as well as through medical colleges in India. Ayurveda has been gaining global popularity around the world due to the focus on preventative health measures, holistic nutrition, lifestyle, and traditional cleansing methods. Ayurveda provides a lens for seeing the qualities of the natural world and ourselves as one in the same.

Through understanding a five-element theory as well as modern and Ayurvedic anatomy and physiology, vaidyas and practitioners often work to identify optimal diets and lifestyles as per clients’ location, age, state of health, lifestyle, and goals. Clients and students of Ayurveda may gain new insights into the impacts of their environments and begin to engage more consciously with all substances in their environments to optimize vitality. While the process is usually individualized, below you will see a few general tips from the wisdom of Ayurveda to start on the journey of reawakening your body’s innate wisdom.

1. Tap into your natural biorhythms with the sun as your guide

In this age of tech, media, and over-productivity, our nervous systems and digestive systems can become erratically programmed. We stay up late stimulating our body and mind, have difficulty sleeping, our eating is based not on metabolism or internal fire, or the time, but instead based upon work breaks. We lose a sense of natural rhythm. Numerous digestive concerns stem from this lack of rhythm, not to mention cycles of burnout and fatigue.

Ayurvedic practice helps people line up the cycles of nervous and digestive systems with the path of the sun. You’ll notice that the sun gives us an arch that can be our model. Just like the sun, we rise, warm up, burn hot, soften, and sleep. There is a time to wake up our digestive fire, to prepare to take in more food, information, and input, a good time for learning, a time for our biggest meal when the sun is high in the sky (12 -2pm), a time for maximum production, a time to churn and digest this information, and time when we begin to set (light dinner), a time to absorb food and information with less agenda-filled activities (after dinner), and, finally, a time to wind down and fade to the solace of sleep.

Take a look at your day and divide it into morning, late morning, afternoon, late afternoon, early evening, evening, and nighttime. Now look for an easy space where a single change will have the most impact on your energy level. Is it an earlier, more sustaining lunch? Turning off the screens at night? What will make the greatest difference in the whole twenty-four hour cycle for you?

2. Rebalance with food (and find time to cook)

For modern working people our day-to-day life can sometimes feel quite hectic. We rush out in the morning, eat on the run, work through lunch (usually a meal of dry leftovers). We’re famished by the time we get home and begin invading the cabinets seeking snacks, comfort foods, or alcohol, and finally end our day with a heavy dinner. Oftentimes we have trouble sleeping, and wind up in a cycle of fatigue and poor sleep.

Ayurvedic practitioners typically look to find downtime in our client’s routines, where it’s going to be easier to create a habit of cooking and prep, ensuring a nourishing lunch every day. I often recommend harnessing the power of modern inventions like crockpots and slow cookers so that by morning one has a home-cooked meal that does not take a big chunk out of the evening to make.

Once you establish a rhythm of cooking, you can work with a practitioner to fine-tune the nuances of ingredients and Ayurvedic food combining principles. Ayurveda believes not only that “you are what you eat” but further that “you are what you digest” looking at the entire process of eating from the food preparation to the healthy development of tissues, digestive process, body’s energy levels and overall vitality (ojas) when choosing recipes for each person.

3. Take deep breaths before eating and eat in silence.

Take deep breaths before eating and eat in silence. Did you know that often people experience gassy bellies simply from swallowing too much air while eating (a.k.a eating on the run or talking too much?). Turn off the television. Set the scene for a more relaxed experience around food if at all possible. Try to establish an environment of peace around food. That will help you to feel your feelings as you cook, eat, and digest.

4. Notice what you grab for when you are eating from emotion.

When you are sad, what tastes do you crave? When you’re anxious or busy, what do you gravitate towards? What are the qualities that you are really looking for in the food? Sometimes it’s a sense of stability and grounding. Are there other ways that you can receive that? Sometimes it is love that you are craving, in which case picking up the phone and calling a friend might be really what your body is telling you. The more we can learn to sense what true hunger actually feels like in the body, in our stomachs, feed it when it is there and recognize other needs as just that, we are able to tune in better to patterns of emotional eating.

5. Try a food diary.

Especially when people are sensitive to various foods with sensitive digestion, a food diary can help to notice not only what foods, but what kinds of environments and other emotions are present when we feel well and unwell. Use a classic pen and paper or try video notes if that helps.

6. Get out in nature and notice the qualities present.

Dry vs. oily, heavy vs. light, warm vs. cold… All of the qualities in nature are present in us and also present in the foods we eat. By engaging with the qualities of foods, we start to make the connections about what our bodies need to come to balance.

7. Create a relationship with a teacher or practitioner

A relationship with a teacher or practitioner is a special relationship, which can lead you through guiding questions tailored to the ins and outs of your personal life. This relationship can help you to draw important lines of connection between the influences in your current lifestyle and diet, the way you feel, and to identify what optimal wellness would mean to you.

Enjoy the journey and remember, there is no wrong place to start. Take one tailored step with consistency and your life begins to transform.