Ama Vivek
Swami Maharaj Swami Ananda Chaitanya Maharaj Yoga Vidya Italia TTC Dayananda Saraswati chinmayananda vidya vahini trust ama vivek sri mission Bhubaneswar Yoga Vidya Ashram Chennai Sudhananda Foundation Meditation Ganga Utterkashi Dhyana
Our Body and We!
Ayurveda points out that diseases differ mainly because people are so different. Although biology does acknowledge that all of us were born with “biochemical individuality,” this has a few practical implications in the doctor’s office. Biochemical individuality means that no one is average. At any given moment, your cells and tissues do not contain an average level of oxygen, carbon dioxide, iron, insulin, or vitamin C. Instead, they contain a precise amount unique to that moment, to the physical condition of your body, and to the state of your thoughts and emotions. Your body is a three-dimensional composite of millions of tiny differences, and by learning about them you can make dramatic improvements in our health. At this level, perfect health is a very specific biological phenomenon.
Respect Your Uniqueness
Everywhere you look, your body is doing something unique with every molecule of air, water, and food you take in, guided by its innate tendencies. You have the choice to follow these tendencies or modify them, but to recklessly oppose them is unnatural.
In Ayurveda, living in tune with nature – easily, comfortably, and without strain – means respecting your uniqueness.
The first question an Ayurvedic doctor asks is not, “What disease does my patient have?” but, “Who is my patient?” By “who” he does not mean your name but how you are constituted. He looks for the telltale traits that disclose your body type, also known as your prakruti. This Sanskrit term means “nature” – it is your basic nature he wants to uncover before he turns to your complaints and symptoms.
The Ayurvedic body type is like a blueprint outlining the innate tendencies that have been built into our system. A glass of whole milk contains 120 calories, no matter! who drinks it, but one person uses those calories mainly to store fat, while another converts most of it into energy; a child’s body extracts lots of calcium to build new bone tissue, while an older person passes the same calcium out through his kidneys (and may convert it into a painful kidney stone if his body can no longer deal efficiently with calcium).
By knowing your body type, an Ayurvedic doctor can tell which diet, physical activities, and medical therapies should help you and which might do no good or even cause harm. A pizza with extra cheese can be potentially lethal to someone with advanced artery disease, for example – the fat ingested could be the last straw that ruptures one of the deposits of fatty plaque blocking a blood vessel to the heart. Massive heart attacks have resulted from the tiniest of these ruptures. Yet the same pizza would be relatively harmless to the rest of us; high fat is even desirable for those who cannot gain weight on normal diets. Knowing who you are – and your prakruti – is an invaluable clue to what you should eat.
These are three important reasons why knowing your body type is the first step toward perfect health:
1.The seeds of disease are sown early:
It would be hard to find a heart patient in his forties who had not shown some suspicious signs in his twenties. A pathologist examining the arteries of a deceased 20-year-old can see premature streaks of fat that are liable to create a future heart attack. Even 10-year-olds will already be prone either to allergies or to chronic overweight, high cholesterol, or peptic ulcers. But at this age, when incipient disease is easiest to treat and prevent, symptoms are often difficult to read. By understanding body types and their specific strengths and weaknesses, you can begin to take preventive steps when they do the most good, long before overt illness appears.
2.Body types make prevention more specific:
Nobody is prone to every disease, yet most of us try to prevent as many as we can – cancer, heart attacks, osteoporosis, and so on – moving uncertainly from one medical scare to the next. If you try to prevent every disease without knowing your particular predisposition, you are stabbing in the dark.
Heart attacks, cancer, and diabetes happen to specific people, one by one. It only makes sense that prevention must proceed on the same basis.
3. Body types make treatment more accurate once a disease appears. Generalized treatment – prescribing Valium to everyone who is anxious or antacids to everyone who has an ulcer – is a hit-or-miss affair; it assumes that a given disease is the same in all people. But as we have seen, this is not true. According to Ayurveda, three people may feel anxious at three different levels of stress. Their ulcers may result from three different diets, job pressures, or difficulties at home. In effect, they are suffering from three different diseases, all of which happen to travel under the same name. This is true for people who chain-smoke, compulsively overeat, or suffer from allergies and asthma. In all these cases, the Ayurvedic body type is remarkably accurate, as you will see, because it can pinpoint what is happening inside each individual.
Know Your Body Type to Understand Yourself
Finally knowing your body type is essential to understanding yourself. When you find out what is actually going on inside, you will no longer be bound by society’s notions of what you should be doing, saying, thinking, and feeling.
One of the delights of learning about Ayuveda is its insight into little things you probably dismiss as idiosyncrasies. I request you to drink a glass of orange juice in the morning, but some people get heartburn or an upset stomach from it. This is not abnormal. It is a sign that they fall into a specific body type for which the acid quality of orange juice is not ideal.
A person whose nerves are jangled by a cup of weak coffee is by nature different from someone who downs three cups of black espresso without feeling a thing. When you react to a cup of coffee, a cold draft, criticism from your boss, a love note, or rainy weather, your body type is sending you a signal. It is a very personal signal that you alone can tune in to. If you start to listen to all these signals that are sent to you day by day, minute by minute, you will notice that they affect your moods, behavior, perceptions, tastes, talents, attraction to other people, and much more.
The phrase “body type” is only a hint at what prakruti means – it is really your world, the personal reality you generate from the creative cord inside. More accurately, we might call your prakruti your “psycho-physiological constitutional type,” a phrase that includes both mind (psyche) and body (physiology). I am avoiding this phrase for the sake of brevity, but it is worth remembering that your physical body type has a mental aspect as well.
Swami Maharaj Swami Ananda Chaitanya Maharaj Yoga Vidya Italia TTC Dayananda Saraswati chinmayananda vidya vahini trust ama vivek sri mission Bhubaneswar Yoga Vidya Ashram Chennai Sudhananda Foundation Meditation Ganga Utterkashi Dhyana
Our Body and We!
Ayurveda points out that diseases differ mainly because people are so different. Although biology does acknowledge that all of us were born with “biochemical individuality,” this has a few practical implications in the doctor’s office. Biochemical individuality means that no one is average. At any given moment, your cells and tissues do not contain an average level of oxygen, carbon dioxide, iron, insulin, or vitamin C. Instead, they contain a precise amount unique to that moment, to the physical condition of your body, and to the state of your thoughts and emotions. Your body is a three-dimensional composite of millions of tiny differences, and by learning about them you can make dramatic improvements in our health. At this level, perfect health is a very specific biological phenomenon.
Respect Your Uniqueness
Everywhere you look, your body is doing something unique with every molecule of air, water, and food you take in, guided by its innate tendencies. You have the choice to follow these tendencies or modify them, but to recklessly oppose them is unnatural.
In Ayurveda, living in tune with nature – easily, comfortably, and without strain – means respecting your uniqueness.
The first question an Ayurvedic doctor asks is not, “What disease does my patient have?” but, “Who is my patient?” By “who” he does not mean your name but how you are constituted. He looks for the telltale traits that disclose your body type, also known as your prakruti. This Sanskrit term means “nature” – it is your basic nature he wants to uncover before he turns to your complaints and symptoms.
The Ayurvedic body type is like a blueprint outlining the innate tendencies that have been built into our system. A glass of whole milk contains 120 calories, no matter! who drinks it, but one person uses those calories mainly to store fat, while another converts most of it into energy; a child’s body extracts lots of calcium to build new bone tissue, while an older person passes the same calcium out through his kidneys (and may convert it into a painful kidney stone if his body can no longer deal efficiently with calcium).
By knowing your body type, an Ayurvedic doctor can tell which diet, physical activities, and medical therapies should help you and which might do no good or even cause harm. A pizza with extra cheese can be potentially lethal to someone with advanced artery disease, for example – the fat ingested could be the last straw that ruptures one of the deposits of fatty plaque blocking a blood vessel to the heart. Massive heart attacks have resulted from the tiniest of these ruptures. Yet the same pizza would be relatively harmless to the rest of us; high fat is even desirable for those who cannot gain weight on normal diets. Knowing who you are – and your prakruti – is an invaluable clue to what you should eat.
These are three important reasons why knowing your body type is the first step toward perfect health:
1.The seeds of disease are sown early:
It would be hard to find a heart patient in his forties who had not shown some suspicious signs in his twenties. A pathologist examining the arteries of a deceased 20-year-old can see premature streaks of fat that are liable to create a future heart attack. Even 10-year-olds will already be prone either to allergies or to chronic overweight, high cholesterol, or peptic ulcers. But at this age, when incipient disease is easiest to treat and prevent, symptoms are often difficult to read. By understanding body types and their specific strengths and weaknesses, you can begin to take preventive steps when they do the most good, long before overt illness appears.
2.Body types make prevention more specific:
Nobody is prone to every disease, yet most of us try to prevent as many as we can – cancer, heart attacks, osteoporosis, and so on – moving uncertainly from one medical scare to the next. If you try to prevent every disease without knowing your particular predisposition, you are stabbing in the dark.
Heart attacks, cancer, and diabetes happen to specific people, one by one. It only makes sense that prevention must proceed on the same basis.
3. Body types make treatment more accurate once a disease appears. Generalized treatment – prescribing Valium to everyone who is anxious or antacids to everyone who has an ulcer – is a hit-or-miss affair; it assumes that a given disease is the same in all people. But as we have seen, this is not true. According to Ayurveda, three people may feel anxious at three different levels of stress. Their ulcers may result from three different diets, job pressures, or difficulties at home. In effect, they are suffering from three different diseases, all of which happen to travel under the same name. This is true for people who chain-smoke, compulsively overeat, or suffer from allergies and asthma. In all these cases, the Ayurvedic body type is remarkably accurate, as you will see, because it can pinpoint what is happening inside each individual.
Know Your Body Type to Understand Yourself
Finally knowing your body type is essential to understanding yourself. When you find out what is actually going on inside, you will no longer be bound by society’s notions of what you should be doing, saying, thinking, and feeling.
One of the delights of learning about Ayuveda is its insight into little things you probably dismiss as idiosyncrasies. I request you to drink a glass of orange juice in the morning, but some people get heartburn or an upset stomach from it. This is not abnormal. It is a sign that they fall into a specific body type for which the acid quality of orange juice is not ideal.
A person whose nerves are jangled by a cup of weak coffee is by nature different from someone who downs three cups of black espresso without feeling a thing. When you react to a cup of coffee, a cold draft, criticism from your boss, a love note, or rainy weather, your body type is sending you a signal. It is a very personal signal that you alone can tune in to. If you start to listen to all these signals that are sent to you day by day, minute by minute, you will notice that they affect your moods, behavior, perceptions, tastes, talents, attraction to other people, and much more.
The phrase “body type” is only a hint at what prakruti means – it is really your world, the personal reality you generate from the creative cord inside. More accurately, we might call your prakruti your “psycho-physiological constitutional type,” a phrase that includes both mind (psyche) and body (physiology). I am avoiding this phrase for the sake of brevity, but it is worth remembering that your physical body type has a mental aspect as well.