Managing Seasonal Changes with the Ayurvedic Daily Routine

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I was speaking with a client a couple of weeks ago who remarked on how dramatically the weather had changed. “This morning it was 42′ in Mill Valley and last week it was 98′!” This got me thinking about the various changes that happen with the start of the fall season and how they affect our lifestyle going forward toward winter.

The change in temperature is significant. Fall is the season of vata dosha, and this wind energy is increased by changes of any kind, particularly toward cooler temperatures. When the temperature drops. it can increase vata in us both physically and mentally and an awareness of this can help up manage these affects better. Cooler weather also tends to lower our agni (digestive fire) and this can sometimes reduce the efficacy of our digestive system and lead to vata type digestive issues such as gas & bloating or constipation.

When vata is in balance it manifests as freedom and ease of movement, sufficiency of active and creative energy, comortable digestive health and an overall sense of enthusiasm and wellness while still enjoying sound sleep. When out of balance – typically when vata is too high, it can lead to more pain, less stability, digestive inconsistency, difficulty managing stress and sleep disturbance.

In California where early fall lands during our driest time of year, managing vata is even more crucial due the fact that this dryness, combined with cooler temperatures, tends to increase vata even more. When considering how to manage vata now or at any time during the year, it is therefore important to consider these two major causes of increased vata – cooler temperatures and increased dryness. When we understand that these two environmental factors are going to push vata dosha up, then we can also understand how to mitigate the impact of these factors with choices and actions that push them down – namely increasing moisture and warmth.

To balance vata dosta, regularity and routine are essential

But when the season is changing, that change itself can have a significant impact on the balance of vata dosha. Vata is increased by changes of any kind, and it is balanced by regularity and routine. So another way we can think about balancing vata dosha, at the change of seasons or really any time of the year, is moving steadily toward establishing helpful and consistent routines.

Ancient Ayurvedic texts outline a daily routine appropriate for anyone with any constitution called Dhinacharya. The texts describe what each of us can endeavor to do each day to help keep our doshas in balance, our bodies moving freely and our digestive system operating efficiently.

The ayurvedic daily routine

What I love about the ayurvedic daily routine is that it places the activities that we are already doing every day without fail alongside those that either we’d like to be doing but may not yet have worked into our schedule, or perhaps have never even thought of. For example, we already brush our teeth every morning, (presumably), but does each of us clean our tongues? None of us questions the logic of cleaning our teeth every day, but cleaning the tongue using a spoon or a tongue scraper is much less common and has some important benefits that far outweigh the extra 10 seconds it takes to do it.

Tongue scraping can help improve our sense of taste, reduce bad breath, improve dental health, and help stimulate our digestive system. Scraping the tongue is also a way to self monitor our health as it gives us the opportunity to look at our tongue coating and color. If our tongue coating is heavier than usual, for instance, it can indicate a build up of toxicity in the digestive system and this can serve an an early warning to us to take steps to improve our agni and lighten our diet.

Most of us know that regular exercise is a good idea and that at Alignment Lab we are advocates of daily movement. It turns out that just like bathing every day, the ayurvedic texts recommend exercising daily, before breakfast. This is a habit I adopted decades ago when I started doing yoga and one that I continue to this day. If you are struggling to incorporate a regular movement activity into your life, try thinking of it as something as fundamental as bathing every day. Then try doing some amount of movement, however little, every day in the morning, before the inevitable demands of the day derail your best intentions.

A couple of years after I graduated from college when I was working in a restaurant in Berkeley, I was talking with the owner who liked to give advice. Somehow the conversation led to a discussion of bowel movements. He was the first person who ever told me that it was important to have a BM first thing in the morning every day, and he advised me that drinking a glass of warm water first thing in the morning would help to establish and continue the habit. I literally started doing it the very next day and sure enough, I started having regular morning BM’s.

Years later when I learned about the ayurvedic daily routine, I learned that the ancient texts recommend drinking a glass or warm or room temperature water first thing in the morning, Also recommend – evacuating the bowels each morning. I guess my employer at the restaurant was on to something!

As one of our readers you’re probably aware that Alignment Lab offers a cleanse program, typically but not limited to the spring. One of the activities we recommend to our cleanse participants is a daily self massage with warm oil. This is one of the features of the cleanse that I generally get the most positive feedback on. Clients love the way a week or two of applying oil to the head and body makes their skin feel!

It turns out, daily self oil massage is also one of the ayurvedic daily routines, and one that is particularly appropriate for the fall season. Again, vata goes up with dryness and coolness. Applying a constitutionally appropriate type of warm oil to our skin, rubbing it in to facilitate absorption and strengthen the tissue, then relaxing and giving it time to soak in is about as ideal an activity for balancing vata as I can think of. It’s also a great way to preserve the integrity and quality of our skin going forward.

Managing fall seasonal allergies

Another challenge some of us face during the fall season is seasonal allergies. I’ve addressed this topic in a previous post, but I want to reiterate that managing allergies of this type is much easier if you understand the mechanism at work. We’re all exposed to airborne irritants that we have little or no ability to avoid. We may very well have sensitivities to some of these irritants, but we are equipped with tools to help us manage them.

Our nasal and sinus passages have hairs and moist tissue for helping to filter airborne particles before we before we breath them into our lungs, and these tissues also help hydrate and warm the air that we do breath in. Thus our body has a natural defense mechanism against airborne irritants in the form of this filtration system. But if our nasal and sinus passages dry out, airborne particles are not filtered as well and we are more susceptible to them. Dryness also weakens the nasal and sinus tissue and makes it more prone to irritation and reactivity.

Ayurveda and allopathy both recommend using a saline rinse to help keep our sinus passages clear and hydrated, but ayurveda adds a second step not commonly recommended in allopathy in which oil is applied to the sinus passages. The oil, typically sesame oil or a medicated oil with a sesame base, helps to build the quality of the nasal and sinus tissue and improve its ability to filter and resist irritation. At Alignment Lab we often recommend Banyan Botanicals Nasya Oil to our clients for this purpose.

The daily application of oil to the nose is also another of the ayurveda daily routines and it is one that highly recommend, especially in fall and winter. The regular application of oil will also help facilitate the removal of built up toxicity in the nasal and sinus passages, further improving their health and function.

There are many versions of the ayurvedic daily routine

Online searches will yield several versions of the ayurvedic daily routine, so feel free to take a look and expand on what you’ve learned from this article. Personally I’m a fan of Vasant Lad and The Ayurvedic Institute for their wealth of experience and resources. You can read their version of the ayurvedic daily routine here.

It’s likely not every one of the ayurvedic daily routines will speak to you, and if you’re anything like me you may find yourself wondering how you can follow all of the recommendations and still hold down and job and have a life. But keep an open mind. Even adding one or two of these activities to your day can be impactful and in some cases, even life changing.

 

 

Ojas and Agni: Essentials For Lasting Health

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Ojas is a concept in Ayurveda that refers to the purest essence of each of the tissues of the body. For those not familiar with Ayurveda, ojas is perhaps most relatable as expressed by the immune system and our body’s ability to resist and illness and recover from it when it manifests. More broadly, ojas is that aspect of each tissue that supports that tissue metabolically on the cellular level, enabling each of our cells and our tissue as a whole to resist the effects of stress and to maintain integrity and resilience.

Ojas supports our health by helping to support healthy agni. Agni means “fire” and is the word we use in Ayurveda to refer to our digestive fire or our digestive power and intelligence. Having a well functioning agni means that our ability to digest and assimilate our food is sound. We all know the expression “you are what you eat,” and in a certain sense this is literally true. The food we eat becomes the tissue that forms our body, but for this to happen our agni needs to be functioning well, and for a well functioning agni we need healthy ojas.

The feeling of having good ojas is easily relatable. When our ojas is good we feel strong, we feel well, our digestion works and our sleep is good. When ojas is insufficient our sleep can suffer, our digestion will have issues and we’ll feel vulnerable. The fact is, we ARE vulnerable when ojas is low, and it is important that we take steps to increase it or risk further depletion and possibly illness.

Maintaining healthy ojas can be done in several ways. First, we must keep our digestion working well. Ojas is manufactured in our bodies through the digestive process. It is the very refined end product of tissue production and thus not only does ojas support our agni and our digestive health, but our agni and digestive health also support our ojas. This symbiotic relationship between ojas and agni points to the fact that our primary means of maintaining good ojas is by seeing to it that our digestive system works well.

Of course to maintain healthy digestion, the right diet is important. I won’t be going into detail on diet in this post, but what I will say is that with diet, we need to learn to recognize how we respond to different foods and to use this recognition to make better choices. Too many people these days try to seek health through addition rather that subtraction. “I feel depleted so I’ll take supplements or eat more meat.” My experience is that its often better to start with “what can I eliminate?” Eliminating foods we don’t digest well or don’t respond well to takes pressure off our digestive system and helps our agni ignite. This in turn helps improve our ability to break down and assimilate our food, forming healthy tissue and making healthy ojas.

A second key to keeping our ojas at a a level sufficient for good health is making lifestyle choices that don’t deplete us. Avoiding depletion requires that we recognize the activities, thoughts and habits that lower our ojas and eliminate or reduce them whenever possible. For example exercise is generally a good thing and most of us need to do more of it, but like anything, there’s enough and there’s too much. Over exercising is a sure way to deplete ojas and invite illness and even chronic disease in very serious cases.

How do I know if I’m over exercising? This is just a matter of paying attention. While it’s not always easy to pay attention to the messages our bodies send us, learning to pay attention to our bodies is an important ability to cultivate. Yoga can be a powerful tool in this case as yoga, in its essence, is training the mind to be aware. Through yoga we develop the awareness and sensitivity to notice the signs that something we are doing is depleting us. Yoga provides us with asana (postures), pranayama (breath work) and ethical principles that help us to see ourselves more clearly, understand our tendencies and make the necessary changes to address them.

This brings us to the third way we can help maintain healthy ojas – awareness of our thoughts and managing mental and/or emotional stress. Stress is a big factor in lowering ojas. Without learning effective ways of managing stress we will struggle to maintain good ojas and good health. Again, yoga can be a big help with stress management as it trains us to keep things in perspective and cultivate a healthy perspective on life. Many people use mediation practice for stress management. I tend to lump mediation in with yoga because yoga is essentially a preparation for and cultivation of a meditative state, as are the many meditation techniques that are currently popular.

Considering ojas and forming an understanding and experience of it is a powerful way of dialing in our diet and lifestyle choices to best suit our constitution so that we may maintain resilience and optimal health on an ongoing basis. Understanding agni and learning to keep it in good working order is essential for building ojas. When we maintain healthy agni we begin to experience the positive effects of ojas and sense of well being it fosters. Whether it be through yoga or some other awareness based practice, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to develop the necessary skills and sensitivity to recognize when our agni and our ojas are compromised and to take steps to restore them.

 

 

 

 

Building Resilience and What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

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This past Christmas / New Years Tiffany and I traveled to New Zealand with some friends to see my mother and her husband and to do some traveling on the south island. The way that Air NZD runs their flights to and from, we basically had red eyes going in each direction. In an effort to be good citizens we declared our hiking shoes on the way into the country, only to be delayed in a long and inefficient customs line and missing our connection to Queenstown, then having to take an extra flight to Wellington to get there. When we completed the hour plus drive to Wanaka from Queenstown I was a bit tired, but overall not too much worse for wear.

Then on a warm, cloudless Christmas Day, just a couple of days after our arrival, we hiked Isthmus Peak near Wanaka. The hike took nearly 6 hours and involved climbing continuously up 4000 vertical feet on a completely exposed trail. I was physically tired from it, but again, felt pretty good the day after and going forward.

A day or so after that we splurged big and hired a plane to fly us from Wanaka to Milford Sound where we took a 2 hour cruise through the sound before hopping back on the plane and flying back to Wanaka. I am quite prone to motion sickness, and this was not a big stable commercial jet but a 6 seater prop plane that felt like flying in a yellow bucket with wings. The views were out of this world, but also dizzying. My friend seated behind me faired rather poorly, but I managed to walk away from the trip with relatively little impact.

After a 4 night stay in Wanaka we said goodbye to my mother and her husband David, and then Tiffany, our friends and I hit the road for another 10 days. In those days we spent countless hours in the car and never slept in the same strange bed for more than 2 nights. The balance of the trip included more hiking, quite a bit of sight seeing and a lot of restaurant food.

On the way home from Auckland after connecting from Nelson I watched 4 movies and semi-slept for a few hours before navigating customs and catching the airporter back to Marin. Oddly, when I got home from the near 24 hour return trip I felt almost as though I had never left and traveled 1/2 way around the globe and back again.

What I realized from this experience and the reason I’m telling you about it is that I had, without really focusing on it or explicitly trying to cultivate it, managed to build a fair bit of resilience. I can think of no other way I would have made such a big and involved trip with so little relative impact on my health and sense of wellbeing.

This got me thinking about resilience and how it manifests. Most of us can claim at least some degree of resilience in some areas of our lives. I might have good flexibility and enjoy the kind of resilience that affords by allowing me to occupy relatively small and cramped spaces for extended periods, like coach airplane seats for instance, and bounce back quickly from it. Or I might have good strength and can manage lugging heavy baggage through airports or charging up and down mountains in the hot sun without suffering an injury. Or I might have a digestive system that can handle all sorts of foods from all sorts of unfamiliar kitchens with very few digestive complaints. Or perhaps I have an immune system that can handle the stress of a lack of sound sleep and an excess of different environments and degrees of air quality without succumbing to bugs, respiratory or otherwise.

But it’s unusual, in my view, that each of us has all of the areas of our life that afford us resilience in optimal working order, and for most of us any deficiencies in resilience can be corrected with very doable changes in diet and lifestyle. This view has inspired me to write a series of posts on the subject. These posts will address several key areas where we can increase our resilience and they will offer suggestions on how to build and effective bulwark to the inevitable stresses that we all endure, voluntarily or otherwise.

I hope you’ll find these helpful.  As always, I welcome your feedback.

Dinacharya and the Fall Season

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Northern California is for the most part a pretty dry climate, but our fall season can be brutally so. By October we typically have not had any rain for several months and the heat of summer has dried up much of the moisture in the environment. When you add in the effects of our “Indian Summer” with it’s hot temperatures, dry winds and exceedingly low humidity you have a formula for serious vata derangement.

Even as I write this I can feel how much dryer my sinuses are compared to last week when we had that welcome, but unusually high humidity and tropical rain. I can feel the dryness right into the back of my throat, and I can’t seem to put enough lotion on my hands. My experience tells me that these are mild but significant early signs that excess vata is starting to weaken my tissue a little, and if I’m not careful I may succumb to a cold or begin having digestive issues.

Vata or vata dosta is a fundamental physical and psychological energy that helps to move anything that needs moving. Vata is responsible for the movement of our food through the digestive track, for moving the nourishment we receive from our food into and through our bloodstream to our tissues, for moving nerve impulses from our brains through our nervous system and into our muscles and skin and for moving our thoughts so as to enable thinking and conscious action. Vata dosha is light, dry, cool and lacking in it’s own source of stability.

When vata is elevated it acts like a dry wind, weakening tissues and making them more vulnerable to degradation and possible infection. Inappropriate diet or lifestyle choices or external factors such as the weather or season can disturb vata in us and this may begin to negatively affect our health. The effects of elevated vata dosa are subtle at first. Perhaps I’m having more gas than usual, or I’m a bit constipated. I might notice my skin is a bit dryer than usual or I feel a bit agitated mentally and am having trouble relaxing fully or sleeping restfully. Whatever the signs, it’s when these signs first appear that we have a chance to make choices that will offset this excess vata and prevent it from having a more significant impact on our health.

One of my favorite concepts from ayurveda is dinacharya or “the daily routine.” Outlined in the ancient ayurvedic texts, dinacharya is a way for each of us to begin each day in perfect balance with the natural world. Most of the elements prescribed in this daily routine are simple, practical and obvious. They include waking up early, washing our face, drinking water, using the toilet, brushing our teeth, bathing, dressing and exercising. Some activities prescribed in dinacharya are less obvious but no less practical, such as acknowledging the new day, however we may choose to do this.

One daily routine outlined in the classical texts that is not commonly practiced in the western world is the application of oil to the head and body. I call this self oil massage or self abhyanga. Self abhyanga is not complicated. It simply means covering the body from head to toe with a significant amount of oil, ideally one that is suited to our individual constitution. After the oil is applied, preferably in a warm environment, it should be left on for 10-15 minutes, if possible, to allow time for it to absorb through the skin and into other tissues in the body. After this time it should be cleaned off the body during a warm shower or bath.

Oil is frequently used in ayurveda because of the way in which it penetrates into tissues. If the oil has herbs cooked into it, then the oil acts as a carrying agent to deliver the herbs and their properties to specific tissues. More generally oil is used to add liquidity and stability to tissue that may be in need of it. One application of the use of oil that I find particularly helpful is nasya or the placing of oil into the nose. Nasya helps to keep sinus tissues moist, healthy and well functioning and when certain herbs are cooked into the oil the practice can also improve the voice, vision and enhance mental clarity. Placing oil in the nose is also one of the daily routines outlined in the classical ayurvedic texts.

Application of oil is also a simple and effective way of balancing vata dosa. The heavy, moist qualities of warm oil can help to balance the dry, light and cool qualities of vata. Therefore I feel that it is the dinacharya practices that involve the use of oil and which I’ve outlined above that can be particularly useful for us Californians during the fall season.

Here are some more details on how to do self abhyanga and self nasya. Since everyone’s constitution is different, contact me or another qualified ayurvedic practitioner for choosing the best oils for you.

Self Abhyanga

Fill a small plastic bottle such as a travel bottle for shampoo with a food grade oil appropriate for your constitution. If you’re not sure which oil to choose, contact me for help.

Boil some water to warm the oil. Meanwhile, place some old towels (that you don’t mind getting oily) on the floor of your bathroom. Warm the room up so that you not only won’t get cold being in there for 15-20 minutes, but may even have a chance to sweat a little.

Place your plastic bottle of oil into a large coffee mug or similar. When the water is at or near a boil, fill the mug most of the way up or until you’ve covered enough of the bottle to warm the oil well. Take your filled cup and warm oil into the bathroom and place it somewhere convenient.

Begin to apply the warm oil, starting at the crown of your head and working downward. Make sure you use enough oil on each part of the body that the skin there cannot absorb all of the oil you apply. If you have time, rub the oil in using longitudinal strokes on your bones and circular strokes on your joints. Don’t worry too much about getting this right.

When the body is completely covered with oil, leave it on for another 10-15 minutes. You might enjoy doing some yoga postures or other simple exercise, pranayama or breathing exercises or sitting for meditation. When you’re ready or running out of time, take a warm bath or shower and clean off all of the oil. You will likely need to shampoo your hair twice to get all of the oil out.

Self abhyanga can be thought of as an act of self love. The experience should be nurturing and not feel rushed or in any way an imposition. If you’re stressed and/or don’t have time to approach it in this way, leave it until you do.

Contraindications for self abhyana include: skin rash, menstruation, cold and flu

Self Nasya – applying oil to the nose

There are various medicated nasya oils in the marketplace. Typically these have nervine sedative and/or nervine tonic herbs cooked into them. The one that we sell at Alignment Lab and that we recommend is produced by Banyan Botanicals. If you are unsure of which medicated oil to use you can contact me for help. If you feel uncomfortable with using medicated oils you can also use plain sesame oil.

Self nasya works best if you’re lying down and have time to let the oil penetrate deeper into the sinus passages. Warm the oil to body temperature or slightly higher but NOT until it’s hot. Lie down on your back and place several drops of the warm nasya oil in each nostril as outlined in the product instructions. If you’re using plain sesame oil use 8-10 drops.

Remain in a reclining position for 1-5 minutes and relax, giving the oil a chance to penetrate deep into the sinus passages. If you’re using a medicated oil and wish to facilitate the nervine effects of the herbs in the oil, stay 5 or more minutes and give the oil a chance to penetrate even deeper.

*The nose is considered a direct pathway to the brain, and this can be an effective way of delivering the herbs and their properties to it.

For the quickie version, place some warm oil into the palm of your hand. This can be done, for example, during your self abhyanga. Dunk your pinkie finger into the oil and rub it gently into your nostrils. Repeat this 2-3 times for each nostril while “sniffing” the oil with moderate force to get it to move higher up into your sinus passages. Massage the inside of the sinuses to help the oil penetrate in.

*This quickie method can be helpful for keeping the sinus passages moist and enhancing their ability to resist environmental irritants.

The dinacharya are a wonderful way of making health and wellness a part of each and every day. Even if you don’t have time to do every one of the activities prescribed, just having these routines as a touchstone will be a powerful and supportive resource for you. I have learned a lot and received many benefits from practicing these daily routines and I’m confident you will too!

Aligning Ourselves with a Better Diet and a Healthier Lifestyle

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This past spring I offered a cleanse program and there was quite a bit of interest. I guided several clients through the program and there were several others who expressed interest but never followed through. It’s easy to understand why. For some people the changes in diet and lifestyle necessary to participate fully in our cleanse program, even for a short period of time, are a bit far from where they’re at to make the journey.

So I started thinking about how to meet more folks half way (or even 3/4 of the way!). After all, making changes to our diet and lifestyle is not easy. When taking clients through the cleanse I always remind them – “it’s only temporary,” but of course if we’re going to undertake making significant changes, even temporarily, we’d likely want to see some of those changes last, especially if they’re working for us.

If I want to make changes to my diet but I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew, it may work better for me to make smaller changes and to set targets closer to where I’m starting from. In this way I can begin to establish a direction of change that helps me align with my intentions and improves my ability to stay on the path on which I’ve started.

For instance, one of my clients asked me to give him some advice about changing his diet. Before I could do that, I needed to see where he was at, so I asked him to keep a food journal for a week or so and then give it to me to look over. After seeing what he was eating I had several recommendations in mind, but based on his age and his food journal I could tell that he had some long standing habits that were going to be a little tough to break.

I suggested he just do one thing – give up refined sugar, just temporarily, for a two week period. My guess is that he was seeking a bit more than this, but I saw the refined sugar in his diet as the low hanging fruit that would offer the most bang for his buck, or so to speak. If he wasn’t eating sugar he would immediately see the benefits in how he felt and that would encourage him to make other changes leading to further benefits and providing further encouragement. Before long he would have made some pretty significant changes with some pretty substantial results to show for it. In other words it was this one change that I saw as the key first step on his journey toward a better diet.

I wish I could say now that it was a huge success and that he’s eating better and he’s healthier than he has ever been, but alas it’s only partly true. That first step turned out to be one that he wasn’t prepared to make at that time. Nonetheless, my recommendation did seem to plant an important seed in his consciousness. Currently he’s following a different cleanse from a book he purchased recently and he is in fact eating healthier than he has in a long time, maybe ever.

So while I realize I can’t take full credit for the change in my client’s diet (maybe not much credit at all!), his story does illustrate my point. We all have to get started somewhere on the path to better health, and we need a doable plan to get us started. But more than anything we need a first step that points us in the right direction.

 

 

Why Do A Spring Cleanse?

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Now that I’m wrapping up with several clients whom I’ve guided through our Spring Cleanse and Ayurvedic De-tox, and now that Tiffany and I have finished our own annual spring cleanse, I have a few thoughts that I’d like to share with you. First, I recognize that a lot of you are interested in the cleanse but you’re not sure if the program we offer is one that will fit your timeframe, commitments and/or lifestyle. Let me provide a few more details on our program so that you have a better idea of what you’d be getting into if you, should you decide to try it.

Our program generally takes about 2 weeks to complete, give or take a few days. For daily coffee drinkers I generally recommend tapering off in advance of starting the first week of the cleanse. If you count these days you’re reducing your coffee intake, then it can add a little extra time to the program. I also think it’s a good idea for people who drink alcohol regularly to stop for 2 or 3 days before beginning to make other changes to diet and lifestyle. It’s not essential, but even moderate drinkers can sometimes experience a bit of withdrawal from stopping all intake of alcohol and it’s good to get this out of the way before starting this process.

Ayurvedic cleansing is partly about taking as much pressure off the digestive system as possible so that it can do it’s job more efficiently. That job, to transform the food we eat into a form that we can easily assimilate and transform into healthy tissue, can be made more difficult in multiple ways. Eating too fast, eating inappropriate food, eating at the wrong time and eating under stress are just a few of many examples of behaviors that make it harder for our digestive system to transform our food in an optimal way.

Some of these examples, such as eating under stress, may be due to circumstances beyond our control. But others, such as our choice of food, are well within our control and provide opportunities to make choices that are more favorable to our digestive health, better for assimilation, and helpful for producing better quality tissue along with better health overall.

When we make good choices with diet and lifestyle, good digestion and good health tend to follow. But we don’t always make the best choices and our digestion may suffer as a result. When this happens we tend to have poor transformation of food, poor assimilation and may sometimes begin to accumulate toxicity in the digestive tract.

Let me pause here a moment as say that while the above scenario is far from optimal, it is typical for most of us. Life gets in the way of making good choices and as I said, sometimes things are beyond our control. So this formation and accumulation of toxicity in the G.I. tract is something we all tend to have to some extent or another. And when this toxicity sticks around long enough it will eventually be absorbed and follow the food path into our tissue where it can damage tissue health and cause disease.

Again, this accumulation of toxicity is going on to some extent in all of us. However, a proper cleanse is a way of clawing back some of the health we lose as a result of these accumulated toxins, and while I can only offer anecdotal evidence that it works, my experience and that of the clients I’ve guided through the cleanse is a sense of renewal and clarity. The body and mind feel cleaner, better lubricated and they begin to hum along like a well tuned machine (I’m not generally crazy about the machine analogy when discussing the human body but I’m hoping it speaks to you in this case).

In addition to eliminating various foods and beverages to take stress of the digestive system, our spring cleanse also helps eliminate the toxicity that has already made its way into the tissue. This is what makes it different from other popular cleanses or fasts. Our program goes this extra step and and I think that’s what makes it so effective.

Tiffany, myself and our clients have experienced quite a few specific positive changes as a result of doing the spring cleanse. One is less pain in our bodies. Last year a client who has some arthritic joints saw a dramatic reduction in arthritic pain. This year some minor hip/back pain I’d been having resolved during the cleanse. For some clients, minor aches and pains completely disappear.

Another positive change that we’ve noticed in ourselves and in our clients is an improvement in mental clarity. Nearly every person that we’ve guided through the spring cleanse has commented on feeling more clear mentally during and after the cleanse.

The cleanse has also proved helpful to  clients with long standing digestive issues, and some of them have seen those issues significantly reduced or even eliminated during the cleanse. These are folks who have already tried making substantial changes to their diet in the past, such as eating a gluten free diet or eliminating dairy, without really seeing a signifiant change in their symptoms.

The dietary changes in our spring cleanse starts with an elimination of alcohol and caffeine and a short list of hard to digest foods. These changes can have a big impact on how we feel physically, but can sometimes be difficult psychologically (I know they sometimes are for me). I try to remind myself and my clients that however difficult some of these changes might be, they are only temporary and we needn’t feel that we must take on a major overhaul of our diet and lifestyle going forward – FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES!  This is not the point of the cleanse anyway. This cleanse is about making short term changes that have specific intentions meant to have specific effects, and once those effects are achieved then we should feel very free to go back to our normal diet.

Still, longer term changes can and do happen and most clients will decide to continue with some of the changes they’ve made during the cleanse even after they finish. Last spring, for instance, one client decided not to go back to caffeine after her cleanse. She decided she didn’t need it and gave it up. I’m not sure I could ever do that but I fully support her choice and was impressed with her resolve.

I’d also like to emphasize that our spring cleanse is not about pain and suffering. You will be eating three squares a day and will be encouraged to avoid anything that creates a lot of stress for you. In the same way that the cleanse design is partly about taking stress off of your digestive system, it’s even more about taking stress off of you. This give you space to see yourself more objectively and gain some clarity – about your diet, your lifestyle, your body, your mind and your health in general. This space allows the foods, substances or behaviors that aren’t serving you to be brought into focus and it begins a process of letting some things go. Ideally this happens gradually, naturally, and without difficulty.

Still, for those of you who aren’t up for any or all of the above, there are some good ways of making smaller changes this spring that will still have a significant impact. Here are a few:

  • Take a break from alcohol : If you drink alcohol regularly, it’s a good idea to take a break now and again. Try taking 2-4 weeks off entirely and see how you feel. Remember. It’s only temporary!
  • Lighten your diet : The qualities of moist and heavy tend to accumulate over the winter in the form of excess kapha. Look at all of the light green vegetables nature offers us this time of year. Asparagus, sugar snap peas and spring onions help reduce excess kapha and improve digestive health. Don’t like those foods? Just try eating less cheese.
  • Reduce Raw and Favor Cooked : Fresh raw veggies are so healthy right? Well yes, but they contain little or no fire element and can be too cooling for some and place a drag on our digestive fire. The solution – cook your veggies well. Worried about losing their valuable nutrients? Consider all of the nutrients you’ll be getting from your food when your digestion is really working its best!
  • Stop Snacking: Small meals more often is in my view, unhelpful for most people. Our digestive system needs time to complete the process of digestion and having a new meal after 2 hours, however modest, doesn’t allow that process to reach completion.
  • Try Intermittent Fasting: This can be as simple as not eating after a certain time or leaving at least 12 hours between your evening meal and your breakfast. Feeling more ambitious? Try skipping dinner one day a week.

There’s still time to schedule your Spring Cleanse and Ayurvedic De-Tox. If you’re interested or have more questions, feel free to email me any time.

Happy Spring!

 

 

Why Ghee and How to Make It

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Ghee, or clarified butter, is commonly used in Indian cooking and especially Ayurvedic cooking. When made from good quality butter, especially butter from grass fed cows, ghee is loaded with fat soluble vitamins and beneficial fatty acids. And because ghee has a high smoke point, these nutrients aren’t destroyed in the cooking process.

From an ayurvedic perspective, ghee is considered a digestive in that it helps to improve absorption and assimilation of nutrients. Therefore ghee not only provides valuable nutrients on its own but makes the nutrients in our food more available to our tissue. Ghee is also used in ayurvedic medicine as an important carrier of herbs because helps to deliver these herbs and their effects to all of the tissues in the body.

When we make ghee, we are removing the moisture and milk solids from the butter. This includes the lactose and casein protein and therefore ghee is fine for people who are lactose intolerant or have a sensitivity to dairy sometimes caused by exposure to casein.

Ghee can have high concentrations of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) and butyrate. There is some scientific evidence to suggest that CLA my help reduce body fat, inflammation and blood pressure. One study suggested that CLA may also prevent the formation of cancer cells.

Butyrate or butyric acid is a fatty acid important to gut health. Our gut flora make butyrate as it is an source of nourishment to the cells in our colon. Some studies have suggested that butyrate may support healthy insulin levels and thus may help regulate blood glucose. Studies also suggest butyrate may help reduce inflammation in the digestive system and might therefore be helpful for individuals with ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease.

Best of all, ghee is delicious and when made properly has virtually an unlimited shelf life. It can be used in place of any other cooking oil when sautéing vegetables or pan frying fish or tofu, and it’s great spread on toast!

 

Tips for Better Hydration this Fall

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As we approach the fall season, especially here in California, too much dryness is a concern. Dryness increases vata dosha and an excess of vata dosha can interfere with agni and impair our ability to digest, assimilate and form new healthy tissue. If vata dosha gets too aggravated it can start to weaken the body and make us more prone to illness.

Our agni or digestive fire is what enables us to break down and assimilate the things we take in. A well functioning agni is necessary for the nutrient elements in our food to reach and become part of our tissues (for more on agni and its role in digestion, see my recent article and allergies). Good agni is also needed for the liquids we drink to reach and infuse our tissues. Therefore we should consider the role of agni both in digestion and assimiation as well as in hydration.

When vata dosha is high, dryness itself makes it harder for us to absorb liquids. Imagine a patch of very dry soil that receives rain after a long absence. The soil is so dry and hard that the rain water won’t readily absorb into the soil and simply runs off, preventing the parched soil from absorbing the much needed liquidity. A parched body can behave in a similar way. Say we feel very dry and thirsty so we drink a big glass of cold water to quench our thirst, then short time we’re urinating most of the water out. The water has simply “run off” the digestive track without much of it actually being absorbed.

We can help facilitate absorption and hydration by changing the qualities of the water we drink. The easiest way to do this is to warm the water, making it more favorable to our agni and preventing astringency in the digestive track. Think of how your skin feels when you’re exposed to very cold water. The pores close to keep the heat in. The digestive track responds similarly to cold water, whereas warm water relaxes the tissue, helping with absorption.

Another way of changing the qualities of our water is by adding other substances to the water that stimulate the agni and signal the digestive system to assimilate the liquid. The simplest way of doing this is to add lemon or lime to our water. Adding citrus to water stimulates the agni and improves absorption. Adding a tiny pinch of salt further enhances this effect and is also good for reducing vata dosha.

For a superior hydrating drink, adding even more elements to the liquid, to the point of making it more like food, is the way to go. Studies have shown milk, for example, to be more hydrating than water. In Kenya, long distance runners are known to drink plenty of rooibos tea with milk after a long run for rehydration. I recommend making any type of herbal tea that you enjoy and adding a small amount of sweetener such as maple syrup or agave nectar. If milk will complement the tea, as in the case of rooibos tea, then a small amount of cow’s milk or even soy or almond milk will add sufficient sweetness and substance to the liquid for optimal hydration.

Caffinated drinks, while often just as hydrating as water in the short term, can aggravate vata dosha longer term if taken in excess and are therefore not ideal for hydrating. Alcoholic drinks dramtically increase heat in the body. So while a G&T can feel refreshing in the short term, it tends to dry us out later as the heat of the alcohol “steams” away the moisture in the body.

Finally, eating foods with a higher moisture content and reducing our intake of dry, very salty foods can be helpful. As we move further into the fall and the weather cools it makes sense to eat more soups and stews and fewer dry sautéed or roasted dishes. It’s also helpful to sip warm water or herbal tea with our meals, deliberately mixing the warm liquid with bites of food as we liquify the food in our mouths. In this way we can offset the effects of dryer foods and infuse more liquid into any meal and ultimately into our tissues.

 

Understanding Allergies Better for More Relief

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As the weather heats up I find that myself and others are experiencing more difficulties with allergies. Symptoms of sinus irritation, itchy eyes, sneezing and congestion that were less a problem when the weather was cooler tend to increase as the temperature rises. It reminds me to do the things I know I need to do to keep a clear head.

Years ago, before I had much interest in alternative health or even health in general for that matter, I was at an event out in an open field east of Sacramento in the summer. I don’t remember why I was there, but I do remember very clearly that I was suffering. My eyes and nose were on fire and I could not stop sneezing. I was miserable.

A gentleman at the event saw the state I was in and told me a story. He said that there was a time when he would have been suffering the way I was, but that he saw an allergy doctor that helped him. This doctor tested him for sensitivities to a variety of substances ranging from environmental irritants to household chemicals to various foods. After the tests the doctor revealed to him those substances to which he was most sensitive and pointed out that one of these was tomatoes. The doctor told him that if he stopped eating tomatoes he would see a significant improvement in his symptoms. The man followed this adivce and his allergies cleared up.

It’s fascinating to me that a relatively minor change in diet could have had such a huge impact on this man’s allergies. I come back to this story periodically and it reminds me that we all have things to which we’re sensitive and many of them, like environmental irritants or pollutants, we really can’t totally avoid. But despite the pervasiveness of many irritants in our environment, what we eat can still has a significant impact on allergies.

We had a rainy winter and plants are still vital and abundant and many of these plants produce pollens that can be irritating to our tissues and solicit reactions from those tissues in the form of allergy symptoms. Staying indoors when our allergy symptoms are at their worst is an option, but not a long term one and not one that avoids exposure altogether.

Most people I talk to who have seasonal allergies use over the counter medications to manage symptoms until these symptoms pass. Examples include steroidal nasal sprays such as Flonase that reduce irritation to the sinuses and anti-histamines such as Claritin and Allegra that prevent our bodies from producing more histamines, the chemicals our cells produce in response to a pathogen.

I am in no way against using these medicines to relieve symptoms and if I’m really suffering I have no problem getting out my stash of Flonase. But I also believe we shouldn’t limit ourselves to merely treating symptoms. It is within our power to limit our exposure to other irritants, such as those in our diet, and by doing so we can reduce our tendency to react to the irritants we can’t avoid.

Ayurveda has helped me see the tremendous value in understanding and addressing root causes of ill health and has exposed me to effective alternatives to symptom treatment. Ayurveda is a terrific source of “home remedies” or using common, easily available household items or methods to treat common ailments. I’ve found that trying out many of these remedies has given me a deeper understanding of how health problems manifest and made me more effective in making recommendations to clients.

Ayurveda views allergies as being a symptom of defective or deficient agni. The word “agni” means “fire,” and it refers to the digestive fire or the ability of a person or of a particular tissue in a person to break down and assimilate or neutralize a substance. If the agni is weak or not working right then a person or tissue will struggle with the metabolic process, resulting in the production of toxins rather than the production of more healthy tissue. If these toxins accumulate they further depress the agni which may eventually trigger an immune response in the form of an allergic reaction.

Thus an essential part of Ayurvedic treatment and prevention of allergies is to improve agni. Our main agni is our digestive agni and one way we can strengthen it is by avoiding foods that are heavy and/or difficult to digest. Foods high in refined sugar are the low hanging fruit for elimination as they greatly tax the agni and have been shown to dramatically depress our immune system. A 1973 study done at Loma Linda University showed that ingesting 100g of sugar, about the amount in 1 liter of soda, reduced the germ fighting capacity of white blood cells by 40%, and this effect lasted for up to 5 hours!

Another way we can strengthen agni is to use an appropriate herbal digestive. A simple one that will work for most people is a tea made from a decoction of cumin, coriander and fennel.

Boil 1 tsp each of cumin, coriander and fennel seeds (whole not powdered) in 3 cups of water down to 2 cups and sip this tea with meals.

“CCF Tea” will help to strengthen weak agni and regulate agni that is over active. Keeping our agni optimal helps us digest and assimilate our food better and prevents us from producing and accumulating the digestive related toxicity that can put a drag on our immune system and increase our allergy symptoms.

Besides taking the above steps to keep our agni strong and our digestion working well I also find neti- a nasal saline rinse – helpful for relieving allergy symptoms. Many people know about nasal saline rinsing as it’s often recommended by docotors for allergies and colds. In the case of allergies, rinsing the sinus passages with salt water helps clear irritants out of the sinus passages, thereby reducing our exposure to these irritants and our tendency to react to them. There are different ways to do a saline rinse, but my favorite and the one I recommend most is using a neti pot.

Depending on the size of the neti pot, dissolve 1/4 to 1/2 tsp of fine sea salt into boiled, body temperature water. Taste the water for saline content. It should have the salinity of your tears. Place the water into the pot and place the spout of the pot into your right nostril. Tilt the head down and to the left over the sink until the water flows into your right nostril and out of your left. Remember to breathe through your mouth.

For larger pots, use half of the water to pour from right to left and the other half to pour from left to right. For smaller pots use a full pot in each direction. When you’ve finished each side, gently blow the excess water out. Be careful not to blow so hard and to push the water deeper into your sinuses.

While Ayurveda recommends neti it goes a step further. This step, done after the rinse and when the saline solution has been gently blown out of the nose, is to apply sesame oil, coconut oil or a combination of the two to the inside of the nose.

Take a small amount of liquified coconut or sesame oil into your palm. Dip your small finger or a cue tip into the oil and apply it to your nostrils. Sniff a few times to pull the oil deeper into the nasal passages. If you have time, lie down for a few minutes with the head comfortably back to allow the oil to drain in more.

Oil will help to counter the dryness caused by weather and/or the effects of blowing the nose frequently. The oil also helps to strengthen the tissue of the nasal passages, making it more resilient and better able to deal with inevitable exposure to irritants. You may find that applying oil will solicit the impulse to blow your nose. Don’t worry if you must as it may require several oil applications to resolve this feeling and to gain relief from the sinus irritation.

Movement can also be extremely helpful in relieving allegy symptoms and clearing the sinus passages. Almost any intelligent movement will help, but a specific movement that seems to work well is to do a series of standing forward bends.

With the feet paralell and about 1 foot apart, bend forward with the knees straight down to a height that does not require a lot of bend from your spine. Use a chair or a yoga block as a support to put your hands on, but avoid leaning into the hands and keep the weight of the body mostly in your heel bones. Hold the forward bend for 5-10 seconds, breathing through your nose as much as possible. Then come up, keeping the knees straight and the weight in the heels until you are fully upright. Stand upright for another 5-10 seconds and then repeat the forward bend. Continue to alternate between the forward bend and standing upright until you start of feel your sinuses clear or you reach your fatigue point, whichever comes first.

Finally, altering our breathing pattern can be very helpful in relieving allergy symptoms. This is especially the case for anyone who tends to breathe through their mouth or must do so because of sinus congestion. When we breathe through our mouth we over oxygenate our blood, throwing off the delicate balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide necessary to make oxygen available to our cells. When our cells don’t get the oxygen they need, even for a short time, they struggle to metabolize well and this makes it difficult for our cells and the tissues they make up to neutralize pathogens. The following breathing exercise can be quite effective.

Sit quietly for a minute or so and allow your breath to be normal and relaxed. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Start to take smaller, sip like inhalations, followed by normal exhalations (meaning don’t attempt to alter your exhalation). Continue this breathing pattern for as long as is reasonably comfortable. If you start to feel short of breath, take a few normal inhalations until your breath recovers, then begin taking smaller inhales again. Continue this process, staying as relaxed as possible for the full 5 minutes.

With many of the over the counter medications available for allergy relief being so effective it’s tempting to rely on these and forgo other solutions. Ayurvedic medicine provides some easy to do and helpful means of symptom relief, as well as a fairly straightforward view of what causes allergies and how to address this cause at its root. The suggestions I’ve given above are a boon to anyone suffering with seasonal allergies and who is interested in relief that goes beyond symptoms. These suggestions may also provide insights into how other aspects of our health may be contributing to our allergies.