What is the foundation of good health?
Excellent digestion. Good health depends on your ability to fully digest all aspects of life (physical, emotional and mental), assimilating what nourishes and eliminating the rest.
When you can’t completely digest food, experience, and emotion, waste gets lodged in the channels and toxins accumulate, creating blockages, imbalances and – ultimately – disease.
When our digestive energy, known as Agni (fire), is robust, we create healthy tissues, eliminate waste products efficiently, and produce a subtle essence called Ojas. Ojas, which can be envisioned as the reservoir of strength and energy that we carry at any given time, is what determines our clarity of perception, emotional and mental stability, physical strength, and immunity. If Agni is weakened, digestion is incomplete and creates waste and toxins. This toxic residue is known as Ama. Low Agni combined with the presence of Ama depletes Ojas and inhibits the production of more. When ojas becomes dangerously low, disease is imminent.
The concepts of “cleansing” and “toxicity” are trending today. Most people accept and understand that the body needs periodic cleansing for wellbeing.
Ayurveda offers timeless wisdom for safe and effective cleansing. But to stop at cleansing would be incomplete. Unique to Ayurveda is the concept of Rejuvenation. From an Ayurvedic perspective, rejuvenation (building strength and vitality) must always follow the depletion caused by cleansing for true balance and well being.
Why Detoxification and Rejuvenation?
When Ama accumulates in the body, it blocks the flow of energy, information, and nourishment throughout the system. Ayurveda considers this build-up of toxins the underlying cause of all disease. A common example of this is the accumulation of saturated fat and cholesterol that is beyond the body’s capacity to metabolize. Over time, this builds up, leading to the blockage of the blood vessels and arteries and, ultimately, to heart attacks.
While it’s easy to understand Agni and Ama in terms of food, it’s important to remember that your mind and heart are continually digesting energy and information as well.
Right now your mental digestive powers are working to break down these words and ideas into components that your intellect can assimilate.
Similarly, your emotional agni is responsible for processing feelings that arise from experience – for example, unexpected criticism, the excitement of a new relationship or the death of a loved one. Can you embrace these experiences, feel the emotions, let them flow, and express in healthy ways that allow you to move on without regret, anger or resentment? If so, your emotional agni is good!
Restoring the Body’s Natural Balance
If your emotional Agni is strong, you are able to extract whatever is nourishing and process what is not. The inability to metabolize emotions, however, produces just as much toxic residue as undigested food. In fact, pent-up anger, long-held sadness, and lingering guilt are more debilitating for most people than problems with physical digestion.
If we want to experience optimal health, it is crucial to maintain a strong digestive fire and eliminate mental, emotional and physical toxins from the body. Panchakarma is a time-proven natural therapeutic process that detoxifies and restores your inner balance and vitality – mentally, emotionally and physically.
Why should I do this?
Stress, environmental pollutants, poor lifestyle choices, disharmonious relationships and more create a toxic load that—if left unaddressed—results in poor health.
Ayurveda offers a unique and elegant process that releases and eliminates stored toxins and restores the body’s innate healing ability. Traditionally called Panchakarma (meaning ‘5 actions’ for the 5 elements employed to achieve the desired results), this unique process offers profound transformational renewal.
Panchakarma (PK) reverses blockages and degeneration quickly. Its effects are profound and long-lasting. PK uses a combination of:
- massage and treatments
- herbal steams
- special foods and nutritional directives
- mild dietary cleansing
- colon therapies
- aromatherapy
- yoga
- meditation
- breath exercises
- nature bathing
- self reflection
to rid the body of accumulated toxins.
Your personal program begins with a thorough exam by an Ayurvedic practitioner, which enables them to recommend a program tailored to your unique constitution and condition. Choosing to immerse yourself for a time in cleansing and rejuvenation will prevent disease, increase longevity and wellbeing, and enhance your experience of life in profound ways.