1.2 How Energy Works + Rhythms How energy works with individuality and constitution Rhythm and cycles How the Doshas work through the Daily Cycle

Transcription

1 CATE STILLMAN

2 1.1 Intro + 3 Dosha Theory Introduction Meaning of Ayurveda Breathe & Notice Best Way of Learning Ayurveda Basics of How Energy Works in the Human Body Doshas Vata Pitta Kapha 1.2 How Energy Works + Rhythms How energy works with individuality and constitution Rhythm and cycles How the Doshas work through the Daily Cycle 1.3 The Daily Rhythms Kapha Energy: 6pm - 10pm Pitta: 10pm 2am Vata 2 6 Vata back to Kapha - 6am to 10am Kapha back to Pitta 10am 2pm Pitta back to Vata 2pm 6pm Vata back to Kapha 6pm-10pm Freedom of Self Habits in Relationship to Spanda Basic Habits Sattva, Rajas, Tamas Integration 1.5 The Koshas Kosha In summary the five gunas are: How to Attune Your Habits with Koshas? Why are the habits so crucial for the five body koshas? Food Body Energy Body Mental-Emotional Body Intuitive Body Bliss Body

3 1.6 Constitutions and Personality Types Three Doshas: Pitta, Kapha, Vata Bigger patterns in terms of constitutions: Personality types and how they go out of balance. Let s Learn About Constitutions: Kapha, Pitta, Vata 2.1 Stages of Life and Rites of Passage Stage 1: Childhood = Kapha Stage 2: Adulthood = Pitta Stage 3: Old Age = Vata Stage of Life and Identity/Habits/Rites of Passage Conception Pregnancy and Birth Postpartum Menopause Death Naming and Puberty Marriage 2.2 What Yogis Eat Moving Away from the Standard American Diet Food Preservation LIving Foods Preparing Foods Spring - Kapha Time Summer - Pitta Time Fall and Winter - Vata Time How to Use this Information Gardening and Foraging Kitchen Sadana Fermentation Dehydrated Foods Animal Products 2.3 Kids + Elders Skin Gut Lungs Exercise

4 Teens Elders How Digestion Changes with Age 2.4 Yoga to Balance Your Doshas Ojas, Tejas, and Prana as a Gateway to Refined Practice Yoga Practices for Vata, Pitta, and Kapha 2.5 Yoga + Energy 2.6 How to Heal; Sanctuary Creating a Healing Space Altars Purge Self Massage Spanda and Depletion How to Heal: The story of Inanna and Ereshkigal Healing Diet Subtle Energy Healing Practices Disease and the Doshas East v. West Perspective What is health? Doshas Vata Pitta Kapha Agni 4 Types of Agni Sama Agni - Balanced Agni Vishama Agni - Vata Agni Tikshna Agni - Pitta Agni Manda Agni - Kapha Agni Dhatus Malas 3.2 What is Health? Part 2 3 main causes of disease from an Ayurvedic perspective: Doshas and Subtle Doshas

5 3.3 Your Tongue 3.4 Your Chakras First Chakra: Root Center Second Chakra: Sacral Third Chakra: Solar Plexus Fourth Chakra: Heart Fifth Chakra: Throat Sixth Chakra: Third Eye Seventh Chakra: Crown 3.5 Why Yogis Detox Vata Detox: Pitta Detox: Kapha Detox: Daily practices for your detox A Breath of Fresh Air Meditation Silence Media & Socializing Make Your Space Sacred 3.6 Spices as medicine Imbalances fostered by each dosha Spice as Medicine Decoder Digging into Spice Ginger Fennel Black Pepper Cayenne Cardamom Turmeric Vehicles for ingesting Herbs Water Fermented Liquids Honey Milk Aloe

6 1.1 Intro + 3 Dosha Theory Introduction Hi, my name is Cate Stillman and I founded yogahealer.com in 2001 to help bring the teachings of Ayurveda into every day life. I've been teaching yoga students and yoga teachers about Ayurveda so that they can tap into the teachings in a way which is not only applicable to their own body, health, and habits but also for raising children and caring for our parents toward the end of their lives. Most of us have children, most of us have parents that will get older and die, or we may need to take care of other children or elders in the community. This intergenerational perspective of Ayurveda and awake living is what you are diving into in this course. Meaning of Ayurveda Let's start by talking about some of the benefits of understanding why you want to live in alignment with nature's rhythms. When we look at what ayurveda is, it makes sense to first break down the word. Ayu - life Veda - the science of or the study of We have the study of life on one hand, and on the other hand we have death. We have aging, disease, and decay. When we examine the study of life we are talking about vitality; we are talking about energy. To understand Ayurveda, the first thing we want to look at is how energy works. What is energy? How are we energy?

7 If we have a very static relationship with our body, then with stagnation, disease develops. If we embrace movement and vitality, health awakens. When we are talking about life, we are really talking about how energy works. The way that energy is organized in the cosmos is that there is one great energy, and there are different ways that energy divides itself. In learning Ayurveda, we want to understand that energy is moving directionally. Breathe & Notice Notice the breath; the outside moves in and the inside moves out. We are in constant exchange. Who we are is dynamic, rhythmic, and communicatory. As you breathe in does the energy move up in your body or does it move down? If the energy moves up in your body, you're out of balance. Energy, when it moves into a relaxed body, will move down. Your belly will relax, energy will come into your lungs, your diaphragm will move down, and your lungs will expand downward. Begin to consider how energy works. Oxygen carries energy, life force carries energy. One of the first places we can start to understand energy is directly from the breath. When we are out of sync with the energies and rhythms of our bodies, the energies and rhythms of nature, that s part of the disease process. Best Way of Learning Ayurveda Throughout this course we are going to use direct perception as a way of learning Ayurveda, and as a way of stepping into a more vibrant and awake life!

8 So again, take a deep breath in and notice how it feels. Relax, so that your diaphragm moves down. As you exhale, notice how the diaphragm moves up and the lungs empty out carbon dioxide. This pattern of down and then up is present across life. When an egg and a sperm come together as a zygote, the first energy is the descent. There's a descending down before there is a rising up. We can observe this from plants as well. They send a root downward before they send a stalk upward. Basics of How Energy Works in the Human Body Imagine the crown of your head and the root of your pelvis or perineum as being on a north-south axis. Breathe in and imagine that there is a plumb line that goes from the heavens through the very crown of your head down through this center line, the midline of your body and out between your legs as if you have a tail, and straight through the area between your feet.

9 Center yourself on that plumb line and breathe. Breathe that deep relaxing breath, where the outside comes in, the center drops on the inhale, and on the exhale the center lifts up and the breath comes out. What you'll find is that there is a polarity. There's an energy above that is very different than the energy below. We experience this as gravity. Feel the line of gravity, feel the plumb line and how you are organized around that. Do you tend to stick your head out? Do you tend to stick your butt back or are you pretty centered on this plumb line? The more yoga you do, the more centered you are on the midline, and that becomes obvious. We have these opposing energies. The energy of outside and the energy inside. The energy of heaven above, and the energy of earth below. Feel that for a moment. The more you feel into these basic elements, the quicker you're going to understand Ayurveda. I teach Ayurveda in a way that is fast paced and based on direct perception. We can study, and study, and study, and have this very cognitive and intellectual experience of Ayurveda. Or we can have a very physical, grounded, embodied, experience. Notice the energy above you. If you wave your hands in the air you ll notice the sky is very light. Now stomp the earth beneath your feet and notice that the earth is very solid, very grounded, very present. It's there. It's earth. You can play with the earth with your hands. You can move it, shape it. The sky and the air, not so much. They are pretty

10 amorphous. As we study these different energies, we ll point to their qualities, how they appear. Are they very subtle like the sky above or are they very gross (physical) like the earth beneath our feet? Doshas There is the one great energy which divides, becoming earth energy below, and sky energy above. In the middle, there is a lot of communication and a lot of transformation. That's the third energy. Ayurvedic theory talks about them as the doshas: Vata, Pitta, and Kapha.

11 Vata Vata is very similar to the air, the sky above you. Its elements are air and ether. Ether is space, like outer space. It s what's happening way out in the broadest expanses of the cosmos expanding. Our universe is expanding. If you wake up in the morning the first thing you think of is that I am living the everexpanding universe, you will start to feel that very expansive nature of spirit. Wow, the universe is bigger today than it was yesterday! How many of you wake up and think that? I really invite you to try that tomorrow morning and see what happens to your awareness and notice that your awareness and your consciousness expands if you focus on expansion. That is the nature of ether. It feels very light, very expansive, very cold. Just like outer space it s very cold and super subtle. It s hard to even perceive. Air is movement through space. So when you wave your hands through the air, you re moving from one side to the other and that movement is air. Moving air through ether combines to form the force of Vata. Vata means wind. Some of you may have heard this in yoga class as vayu. These two are synonymous. As soon as you inhale or exhale a breath, there's movement, which creates vibration. If we have two poles, there's movement, in and out. Movement is the force of life. Stagnation is the force of disease. Feeling these will help you to be attuned to Vata and movement. Start to internalize how all life depends on movement. For anyone who has a desk job, you may have experienced what happens when you have a lack of movement. We now know that if we don't move even for just two minutes an hour, the likelihood of chronic disease skyrockets and there

12 are some great statistics on that now. If you sit too much, or sit for more than an hour at a time, your physiology starts to take on a disease patterning. That's exactly what we are trying to avoid here. Pitta Like Vata, Pitta is made of two elements; the first is fire or heat, and the second is water. The way to understand this is to feel the place where you get hungry, you ll tap into the energy of fire. Physically, it might show up as bile in the body, but I just want you to feel it as hunger. What is the feeling of hunger when you're actually really hungry, when you haven't eaten for 5, 10, or 20 hours? The energy you may find is sharp. When you're really hungry it s not a casual experience. It might come and go. Then all of a sudden there it is in full form, and you're like wow, I'm really really hungry, I'm famished. That sharpness is part of the energy of pita. It's also hot. Fire burns in the body to transform particles from one state of matter into another state of matter. When you take in food, how does that digest? How does it become the tissue of your physical body? When you take in food how does it become energy in order to do things in the world? In Ayurveda we explain this by saying it's part of the energy of fire. Fire is very much synonymous with transformation. It's the energy of change. We know there s fire involved if something changes from one thing or another, if someone changes, if we see someone and they looked one way and now we see there's been a transformation. If someone learns really quickly or learns a lot we say they are bright or sharp. That experience is very connected to fire.

13 Why is water the second element of Pitta? Water actually contains the energy of fire. If you look in someone's eyes and you see the light coming in through the eyes. You know fire gives off light and heat so we have those two main components of fire. Like the sun it gives off light and heat so we stay warm. If you look into someone's eyes you see that light coming out of their eye, you see that spark that is another signifier of fire. However, if you look around their eyeball, you will actually see this watery container of the fire. In the physical body, if fire were just left on its own, it would be burned up, so it s always in a container of water. In terms of disease, we see Pitta go out of balance when someone has an ulcer, an infection. We see fire that's gone out of balance with the water element. In balance fire is surrounded naturally by water. In intestines you have all this bile, which is very fiery and is surrounded by mucous membranes of the intestines, which add the water element. Pitta in general helps the body, mind and the spirit with change. It's a change agent where as Vata is all about movement. Pitta is all about transformation. Kapha Kapha is the third dosha. When we looked at the energy of the sky above that was Vata. The agent of change in the middle was Pitta. Now we ll look at Kapha, which is the energy of the earth below. Ka-pha actually means to flourish by water. Ka is the word for water and pha is to nourish or to flourish. It's the repair mechanism of the body. Its elements are water and earth.

14 Water and earth, when you combine them it makes clay, it makes mud. If you just squeeze your arm you'll notice there a lot of fluidity. We often think of our body as being more solid, but it's actually mostly liquid. We have the same amount of liquid to earth that the planet does. We have about 70-75% liquid to actual matter in our physical body. Water and earth, if we look at their energy, it's the energy of cohesion. It causes things to stick. It's the energy of repair. It's the energy of nourishment. When you get a great night s sleep and you wake up feeling refreshed, all you did was lie on the earth or lie on your bed. When you lie down all systems are slowed down into this murky dream land where repair and nourishment can happen. When you wake up 9 hours later to say, "Oh my, I feel like a million buck!" That's the energy of Kapha. In this modern age Kapha energy is sorely missing. A lot of people aren't getting the rest they need. I learned during research for my book Body Thrive that the typical westerner gets 2 hours less sleep than people did 100 years ago. That's just downright scary. Two hours less sleep at night has massive implications on the repair function of our body. Simultaneously we see immune and autoimmune issues are on the rise. There are new autoimmune issues added to the immune issues list every year. There are diseases now that we didn't even know were autoimmune issues that are now on the autoimmune issues list. Why are our immune systems falling apart? There are many reasons at a very simplistic, very energetic level. It's because

15 this energy needs to be in relationship to the energy of movement and the energy of transformation. The energy of cohesion and nourishment isn't getting enough of our attention. Now that we have a little bit of the language to start to understand these different forces and how energy works the body, we are going to use this to see: How it applies to modern life? How to use these energies and this knowledge to understand each unique constitution? How I may be different from you? How what I need to do for my body and life might be slightly different from yours? We will also look at how these energies work in terms of the greater laws of nature, the daily routines, the seasonal routines, how our ancestors evolved on this earth, on this planet, and how their biorhythms are the biorhythms we ve inherited. If we go against those biorhythms we go from life to death, and from health to disease more quickly. If we attune to those biorhythms we slide that scale from unnecessary aging to the feeling of revitalization, rejuvenation, vitality and repair. We will consider the full spectrum of preconception through death from the Ayurvedic perspective. We will explore what intergenerational wellness really looks like. We will talk about the outer and inner ecosystem. Developing a much more cooperative relationship with nature, and with ourselves as part of nature.

16 1.2 How Energy Works + Rhythms When we think about how energy works it can help to envision our spine as an axis in our bodies. Our North to South axis runs from our Crown to our Root. Both Ayurveda and Yoga talk about Chakras which are energy centres. Having entered the body, energy divides and cross currents of energy develop. These cross currents are rivers or Nadis and they provide the mechanism for the flow of energy. The Chakras or energy centres have two flows of energy passing through. One is heating and the other is cooling. The Ida is the cooling energy and is attuned to Kapha and the Pingala is the heating energy and is attuned to Pitta. Yogis use many breathing practises or Pranayama where breaths are taken alternately through left and right nostrils. These practices activate the Pingala and Ida energies. Utilising practices such as these can help us explore the reality of these heating and cooling energies in our own bodies How energy works with individuality and constitution Some people have energy which has a more downward force, and if that is the case they may well carry more weight in the lower part of their body. Others will have more energy and weight in the upper part of the body and some people are evenly distributed in both energy and weight.

17 In respect of those who carry weight in the lower part of the body, they are likely to be grounded, easy people to hang out with, mellow, sweet, perhaps complacent and they will like to stick with things. This Kapha energy is likely to be centred in the second Chakra or sacral Chakra area. If energy is always going down and there is nothing going up then this type of individual will begin to stagnate and become less active. Emotionally they may become depressed. This happens when energetically more water is carried. Within Kapha the energies of water and earth are different. With excess water there is bloating and fluidity. With excess earth everything is harder. There may be a stubbornness. If there is more fire in the constitution it is related to the third Chakra. Fire rises and has a triangular pattern. This fire will rise and go inward. Fire has a directional energy. If there is an imbalance, the fire is sharp, hot, oily and intense and it will spread. Diseases of intensity are likely to arise and individuals are likely to burn themselves out. In particular, they may burn out their immune system. Pittas may be emotionally intense and over stimulated so they push themselves out of the flow of nature. The Pitta person needs to chill out a little and cool down. The individual may also need to grow in water element, to move in their air element, and diffuse in their ether element. Generally people with this type of constitution will develop diseases associated with inflammation. The energy of Vata is the energy of air and ether and it moves up and out. There is an expansive feeling. If there is excess air and ether, Vatas may begin to feel diffuse. These types may have difficulty maintaining their weight. Energy may well be pulled from centre and dissipated. The energy is moving up and out and the person is ungrounded. There is

18 a directionlessness. There is an insecurity and nothing is regular. The more ether there is the more the energy will go out. This may show up as not feeding the body properly and not being regular in relationships or habits. There will be a lack of grounding and the person may be malnourished and insecure. The energy of dissipation can leave a person feeling exhausted and unconnected. With excess air element there will be movement all around and may show up as being scattered. The person may feel unsupported unnourished with too much to do. These illustrations of what happens when things go out of balance for individuals help us connect with the concepts of earth as solidity, water as fluidity, fire as transformation, and air or ether as expansion. Rhythm and cycles We start from the perspective of ourselves as primates. If we pay attention to cycles then we see bio rhythms influence who we are. If we are in alignment with the rhythms then we experience more life and attunement. If we ignore them we are out of step. So much of health is living in rhythm. How the Doshas work through the Daily Cycle We need to be curious about this. What would it be like if you were in rhythm? The reality is that the more we are in rhythm, the more we are in alignment the more energy passes through us, the more vibrant, joyful, connected, vibrant and abundant we are. The stakes are high!

19 1.3 The Daily Rhythms How does energy work in the daily cycle? We know that energy looks very different. We have different seasonal cycles depending on where we are in the world and different energies that are dominant at different times of the day. For example, sunrise and sunset is different in Alaska than it is near the equator. Recognize these differences. Yet, more importantly, strive to evolve in a way that allows us to embrace our sameness. We may choose to invite an attitude of curiosity of what is true. How are rhythms present? The energies and times of Kapha, Vata, and Pitta are clearly identified on the Ayurvedic clock below.

20 Kapha Energy: 6pm - 10pm Since how we feel today is based on what happened yesterday, let s start by looking at the Kapha energy between 8pm and 10pm. If you have kids, you may notice that a child displays emotional and physical fatigue and tends to be more sensitive and tired in the evening. Adults will feel the same when not plugged into the computer or watching TV. At this time of day, the Kapha energy brings us from the busyness in the kitchen to sitting down on the couch. When the sun goes down, the energy is heavy, dense, condensing, and softening. Emotionally we may experience the need to hang out with people, connect. Or perhaps we will want to be alone and do sweet things like: take a bath, read a book, or take a walk. This time of day, dominated by the energy of Kapha, is characterized as water and earth where the energy is coming down. Kapha is also the energy of renewal and grounding. Each of the different energies has different attributes. Where Vata is movement through space and is very clear, Kapha is cloudy. We can see through air but underwater, it's hard to see. The water is cloudy, heavy, dense, stable, soft; these are the energies of Kapha. Some choices make it easier for our body to do its job. The body knows how to heal and repair. It knows how to live in this rhythm because the primates that came before us lived in rhythm. Will we

21 choose to make it harder for our bodies to heal, repair, and live in this day? If we fail to attune to the Kapha energy by staying up late to get things done and burn the candle at both ends, Kapha can t do its job. If we don't experience the repair of Kapha especially as we get older, we will age faster and the diseases of our ancestors will much more likely be present as our genetics explains it. We know that primates naturally have descending energy historically. By looking at primate eyes, we can tell. With cats it s different. The shape of their eyes signifies as they have about 60% more peripheral range than the primate eye. Our eyes are directed forward. Cats eyes go back. They see better at night. We can't see at night. If we take away light, game over, we can't see. Nocturnal animals digestive fire and sleep schedule is very different from ours. They rely mostly on killing their prey and eat a lot of meat; they have very different physiology than primates. Primates eat in the middle of day so that they could see their food. Primates are also attracted to food with color. As soon as it s dark, color is out of the picture so cats don't care if there are different colors in food. Humans do. So, we can start to see patterns. For example, when we humans are camping, unplugged, without cell phones and away from electricity, we get really tired during the early evening and start to feel a cloudy, heavy, dense, soft energy where we want to go to sleep. That is the energy of Kapha, of living in alignment. How much do we want to tap into the energy of rebuilding? How much do we want to align into the energy of healing, repair, nurturing family time? Or if we are more in a spiritual practice and more an austere phase of our life, how much time do we want to commit to spirit before we go to sleep? If we ride the night time Kapha-Pitta transition wave awake, we are spending energy that's tomorrow's energy. That gets

22 into really tricky territory the older you get. Pitta: 10pm 2am If we go to bed by 10pm, then what happens next over the course of the night is that fire rises in this time of Pitta. You may remember that Pitta in the physical body shows up as bile, which is the energy of transformation. If we have eaten our biggest, heaviest meal at 7pm, 8pm, or 9pm, it's almost impossible to go to bed and have a good night sleep. When the energy in the belly is heavy and full, we are requiring all the bile to come in and digest our food. In order to fuel this Pitta energy, we need to eat an earlier and lighter dinner. If you do, you will likely have cozy family, relaxation and rejuvenation time. When we go to sleep early after having eaten an early and light dinner, over the course of the first part of the night our body starts to clean house. For example, observe a house cleaner and notice how he is busy doing this and that is constantly changing and making the atmosphere go from dirty to clean. In yoga terminology the cleaner is making a dirty (dukha) space into a clean (sukha) space, and the energy of the transformation is the cleaner. The body is doing the same thing in the middle of the night (if we let it) and the energy of that transformation in the digestive system is bile. The only way we can let Pitta do its job is if we attune to the Kapha time and do not eat a too heavy or too late dinner.

23 Pitta energy is the energy of the sun: sharp, hot, oily, spreading. The Pitta in the body scours. It starts to clean house and burn things up. In the old days back on the farm, there would be a burn pile for all the unwanted rubbish. The body does the same thing; it gathers all that is unwanted and puts it into the burn pile for the bile to burn it up. That happens if, and only if, you haven't had a heavy and late dinner. If you've had dinner in the 7pm to 10pm timeframe and it was heavy with lots of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, or simply a lot of mass, the bile gets rerouted and can't show up to do its job. When that happens, the body misses its repair and burn pile effect. It's okay now and then, not a big deal. But night after night it s a recipe for an accelerated rate of aging. It s not just about how long you will live. How good do you want to feel in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s? Do you want to be one of those spritely elderly wise people that can wake up, touch their toes, live in their own house, take care of their own things, and really be connected to relationship? If so, there are ways to design that now. Vata 2 6 From 2am to 4am, the body is starting to move things along in the digestive tract from small intestine to colon, and colon to rectum to start to prepare for the big evacuation of the day.

24 The main physical channel of the body is called the maha vaha srota. Maha means great, vaha means to carry, and srota means channel. So maha vaha srota is the great physical channel of the body, another name for the channel carrying feces. The great energetic channel of the body is called the sushumna nadi. The ida and the pingala criss-cross back and forth along the sushumna nadi, the main energy channel of the body. Image courtesy of Shiv Yog. Blue is the Ida, red is the Pingala, and yellow is Sushumna. So the 2am to 6am is coalescing. What does it want to dump? What does it not want to bring into tomorrow? Pretend for a moment that you are living in sync with an earlier lighter dinner, spending a cozy evening time alone or with family, lights are out before 10pm, and you allow your

25 bile to clean house while you re sleeping. In the Pitta phase of 2am to 6am, the energy starts to move. This is the time of Vata. Vata is air and ether; air moving through space. Its attributes are that it s mobile, it likes to move, and it s subtle (as opposed to gross). One way to understand subtle is that it is more of a spiritual energy than a physical energy. Vata is dry, light, cold. If we are living in sync, what happens in this phase? The first phase of Vata movement is downward; we covered that in lesson one. Consciousness comes in and moves down. In the words of John Friend, root down before you rise up. If we are in sync, we wake up in the morning and the first thing we want to do is drink water and poop. That's the movement of the energy down. The body starts to organize all of that it doesn't want, what it wants to move out. That which doesn't get incinerated gets evacuated through urination and bowel movement. Ideally, that should happen within one hour of rising. Once the energy has moved down, the secondary action is going to be up, and the tertiary action is out. Then we start to have the energies moving in pulsation. Pitta energy moves up, the energy of fire and transformation during the day, and subtle in the middle of night. Kapha moves down. And Vata's energy moves up, down, in, out, and all around; it s very variable. Another attribute of Vata is change. Once you wake up, hydrate, and eliminate, it s time for a breath body practice. The yogis practice breathing to bring the energy up, and in order to move the energy from the inside out and from the outside in. If we do this, we start to understand more subtle differences between the outer ecosystem and our inner ecosystem. In nature we start to attune to that which is outside of us and to that which is within us. When we lighten the boundaries and they become subtler, they start to dissolve and we start to enter a more spiritual way of being. We start to experience a more

26 subtle perspective of who we are in the cosmos. In this time, especially the time before dawn, when we wake up, we hydrate, we poop, we do some breathing exercises, and we may meditate, do spiritual attunement exercises, or even practice gratitude. The time before the dawn becomes a sacred time. The yogis call this time brahma muhurta. Despite their differences, the density of earth and water, the intensity of fire and movement of air, and the subtleness of ether start to become much more one. We start to see from a much more interconnected perspective. In terms of how this applies in modern life, we might start to see our life from more of a deathbed perspective. This is the time of day where you are more tuned into heaven and earth, life and death, and to the bigness of being alive right now. It s that time of the day where you may observe your own evolution and make a life decision like leaving your job to find out what you really want to do next. During these early morning hours is when we often have a realization, so it is necessary to honor that realization. The time before dawn is the sacred hour when heaven and earth is a little bit more interconnected and the veils are thin. Vata back to Kapha - 6am to 10am What happens in the next part of the cycle when we move from Vata time back into Kapha time, after the dawn? The energy again is heavy, dense, stable, cloudy, and soft in this early morning time between 6am and 10am. It is actually when we are going to be the strongest of the day. Kapha is earth and water. It's very strong, dense and stable. If you ask any mountain climber if they would ever leave to climb at noon, their answer would most likely be, No way, I want to get an early start early in the day and have the whole day

27 in front of me! Research has shown that if we need to get surgery, chances for recovery is better if the surgery is done in the morning. A lot of hospitals know this and schedule surgeries early in the morning. During this time, we are a little bit more fully embodied. We have had a full night's rest, we've had the subtle energetic attunement if we are living in natural rhythm and now we are ready to take action and do things! If there is a big project like cleaning the house, start in the morning because in the afternoon you may not have the energy for it. In the transition from Vata into Kapha, we want to bring in movement. In this time of day we need to move the physical body. We need to bring the lightness of Vata into the density of Kapha to live an energetically embodied life. Remember that bile is related to digestion. You might be wondering what you should eat then to experience a lot of strength. Because we know that bile is going to rise in the middle of day and not be used to clean house but to digest our food, we basically want to have just enough breakfast to break our fast so we can get to lunch and be hungry to eat our biggest meal in the middle of the day because that's our one shot as primates in the 24 hour cycle that bile is the strongest. What you should have for breakfast is something with enough distance so you can get to lunch without being cranky and hungry, so you can get to lunch comfortably and be hungry for lunch. It will be different from one person to the next. In general everyone should have breakfast to start the process of digestion and to give the body some energy. How much will differ and in terms of people s constitutions, which will be discussed in a later lesson. Just know that if there s not a lot of bile at a particular time of day, then it's not when we want to be having a big heavy meal.

28 Kapha back to Pitta 10am 2pm Around the time when the sun gets the brightest in the sky is when Pitta rises and bile rises. It s the best time to sit and fully eat, and be appreciative of the biggest meal of our 24 hour cycle. Create time after your meal to chill out and rest. Don t race off to the next thing or go running during your lunch break. It s important not to just blow off this time of the day when our body has historically taken in the largest meal. Many have parents, grandparents, or great grandparents who lived in a more agricultural type of setting and lifestyle. They had dinner around 1pm-2pm. We used to know this as a culture. The biggest meal was not at the end of the day before the industrial revolution came along and people moved from their farms into the cities to work in factories. That s when we invented a new word called lunch. Lunch was considered an insignificant meal because we weren't with our family relaxing and eating a good home cooked meal. So dinner got booted to supper and supper disappeared. When we look at the entomology of supper, the word is related to the word soup, which is having soup later in the day. We would sup the soup. It's a liquid medium, not a solid medium like steak and fries, beans and rice. Soup would happen later in the day because bile isn't strong at that time of the day. Leftover dinner would be put in water and made into a soup. If we look at photos of people 100 years ago they look different, they are more in their bodies. They have more life active bodies. They don't have stuck energy patterns. We don't see obesity. We don t even see overweight people. It's not just that the food has changed a lot such as genetically modified and processed foods. Leaving that aside, look at the biggest possible patterns that we need to adopt. When were they eating? To live in sync with our biorhythms, we need to eat our biggest meal in middle of day and then relaxing afterwards. Then eat soup

29 for supper. If you are thinking, I can't do this! I'm on the run! I'm not into lunch! Just try it for a week and see what happens. Let yourself rest for 20 minutes afterwards. You might find you have the most productive afternoon and most enjoyable evening that you've had in a very long time. And at that time you can decide how you want to live your life, how you want to age and what habits you want to have. Often people's habits are much more flexible than they think. It's about slowly moving in that direction, slowly changing your habits so that you have 10 minutes to focus on eating and 5 minutes after that to relax. You might find a difference in your own vitality. If we've had a really good lunch and our belly has been fed, our brain (which requires an enormous amount of fuel is equally fed. We will find our energy stays really steady throughout the afternoon. Pitta back to Vata 2pm 6pm Vata likes to dance in all the different directions! As Vata picks up we have an opportunity to capture new ideas and be open to the amount of communication that is available in Vata time. It's a great time to work on projects and , things that require a lot of communication and mental energy. Where Kapha is more physical and Pitta time is more digestive, Vata time is more mental. When trying to learn something new, do it during Vata time. If we look at the Vata time of the day where energy is able to move in different directions, the attitude of this time of day is really the attitude of curiosity. There is a lot of creativity. To move ideas across time and space in ether, there has to be something to connect to. It's a great time for connecting and communication. Our mental activity can

30 be very alert and very stable and we can get a lot done but only if we've had a really good lunch. You can also do more subtle things in the afternoon that might involve reading or something that doesn't involve as much physical endurance and energy. Start to see how the energies are connected. If we feed our bodies, the mind is stable and we can become curious. We can have open, connective, communicative relationships. Vata back to Kapha 6pm-10pm This Vata to Kapha transition time between sunset and darkness is the time we want to eat a lighter dinner, or sup the soup, so we can make it all the way through the next cycle to breakfast without excessive cravings and without being cranky and hungry. There is not a lot of bile and we may want to satiate and ground, and have something that enables us to feel the natural calming energy of evening. Some of us may need more fat, more olive oil, some avocado, bone broth, or just a light salad like a fruit salad to live in rhythm. Again we want to enter this time fully fueled. Looking at all the transitions, we see that there is a lot of energy at play. There are a lot of consequences for how we make our choices. If we experience all these cycles we will have all the energy we need. If we are fully present during Kapha, Pitta and Vata times of day, it will start to build our integrity. We will start to step into deeper truth with our own energy. In the next lesson, we will explore our identities, our cycles, and the choices we are making.

31 1.4 Habits of Yogis Choosing our habits, sculpting and designing our identity is a very yogic concept. Svatantrya, where Sva means self and in this context Tantrya means freedom, is the word that yogis use for that which is beyond the five elements, the real freedom that we have when we are living in alignment. So much of yoga, and for those who have studied yoga, is lining up. You stand in the same standing mountain pose and find the midline and Sushumna, the crown to the root. You find the left and right side of the body and you line up. You find your center, your middle. You find your middle from a very non-personal place. Notice your energy and how it s organized. Notice how your physical body arises around this organization. The whole you, the identity part, in yoga is the word Ahamkara, who you are as a personality. Aham means I am and Kara means this. I am this. That's where we start to identify as a personality. For example, "I am Cate from Yoga Healer dot com." We identify as the self. But Svatantrya is who we are more subtly than Ahamkara. Having gone through the daily cycle in the last lesson may have triggered something for you. Notice what you were thinking. Perhaps you expressed, There's no way I can get to bed before 10pm; I am a night owl. I need freedom in my life! Or perhaps the schedule sounds really rigid and you perceive yourself as a much more flexible and adaptable person so you tell yourself that there is no way it s going to work for you. Those thoughts are very much related to "I am this, which is related to who you have been in the past, to an identity that you have of yourself. Ahamkara is very much related to identity. Our identity is reinforced by our habits. Lets look at this in

32 terms of layers. In the core circle we have our identity. Our identity is literally surrounded by our habits. Our habits actually create our identity. Are you a morning person or a night owl. Are you heavy or are you light? Are you 10 pounds under weight. Your habits determine your identity. Are you a spiritual being in nature who prays and believes in a god? How much are your habits tied into your identity? Do you go to church or go down to your knees and prays every night? How much of that is habit oriented? What grocery aisle you shop in at the grocery store? Fruits and vegetable aisle? What stores do you go to shop? Our habits reinforce our identity. And how does everyone else see us? Other people's perceptions will feed into and reinforce our identity. What we have is the experience to help reinforce our identity. As we start to change, other people start to question our changes. We start to hit this I am-ness which is a fabrication and enforced by habits we choose. Spontaneity gives us freedom to choose our habits. This is big, so pay attention. When we are free to choose our habits, our habits create our identity then other people reinforce our identity. Do you see the pickle that we are in when we start to realize that these habits aren't working so well and we decide to upgrade our habits? Do you want new habits? When we do, all of a sudden others don't recognize us and so we start to get a little bit of pushback and resistance. It is often not easy to change our habits because of relationships we are involved in. Freedom of Self The body has cravings because it's been habitually patterned. It's been reinforced day in and day out. So when the body has cravings, it's not just mind over matter; the

33 matter itself needs to change. Perhaps the matter, the physical tissue of the body, has an addiction to nicotine or caffeine or sugar. We start to see if we don't have sugar in the afternoon our mind cracks. It may be hard to imagine giving up your mid-afternoon caffeine and cookie as you start to adopt this way of living in the world: having a bigger lunch, fasting on water until dinner, having a lighter dinner, fasting on water till breakfast, having a lighter breakfast, fasting on water until lunch. Just trying that cycle, the physical body will have to make a change if you've been having handful of nuts or berries or juice and you're eating 6-8 times a day, even if you are just eating little snacks here and there. It's going to be a massive shift for your biochemistry. You're still going to get hungry 6-8 times a day because you've trained yourself to do that. So the habits themselves shift and we have to retrain our biochemistry to be in alignment with this deeper rhythm. As we do, we experience more and more Svatantrya, self-sufficiency. We see the connection of how we design our habits and identity, which means we can design how others see us too. Instead of having this heaviness of other people seeing us and putting us in a box, we actually start to expand and say this is how I'm going to show up! We start to develop relationships in alignment with the habits that we want to have either in this phase of our life or for the rest of our life. Identity, freedom, and daily habits in alignment with how energy works all fit together from a yogic perspective. Habits in Relationship to Spanda Spanda is the origin of the word spandex. Spandex is the material in yoga pants, which is elastic and allows us to expand and contract. Spanda is the pulsation between opposing forces. In Ayurveda we have 10 spandas, 10 opposites: expansion/contraction, heat/cold, dry/oily, subtle/gross, static/mobile. We will not go through all of

34 them. Simply understanding the concept of opposites will give you a sense of the language of Ayurveda and how this relates to spanda, identity, evolution, and health. When we start to discover Svatantrya, we experience the freedom of the self. Many of us feel this experience in yoga when we create space in the body, there is more room for the self. You may feel more expansive and free, more grounded. We see the center opens and also the outer physical tissue of the body gets more interconnected to the space element of breath and we feel more grounded. There are a lot of opposites that happen in yoga! Inhale, touch the sky, exhale, touch the earth. Inhale, lift your chest. Exhale The basic sun salutation is packed with opposites. Stretching in one direction. Moving in the other direction. Bringing the outside to inside and the inside to outside where all these opposites start to be able to find their partner. We also generate heat in the practice and then cool down with savasana. This unites all these different ways the body experiences opposites. The heavy people go to yoga and start to feel light, and the light people get grounded. The flexible people get integrated. The tight people open up. How is this happening? We are starting to bring the different pairs of opposites into communication and as a result we start to become integrated. What happens with disease or imbalance is that we spend too much time in one or more of these gunas. These are all gunas. Guna simply means characteristic. Vata, Pitta and Kapha all have characteristics. Vata: dry, subtle, mobile, cold. Pitta: hot, oily, sharp, hard. Kapha: wet, heavy, contracts, static, dull, soft. When we start to tap into Svatantrya, and the times and

35 rhythms of nature, we realize how we can live in or out of alignment and that it is ultimately our choice. We are free to choose how we age, the level of pain and suffering, addictions, joy, bliss. Underlying teachings of Svatantrya, which is the highest attribute of yoga, is to wake up and be free. Be free of what? Be free of being sucked into one of these opposites! Take someone who has a Pitta imbalance and is a workaholic. That person goes and goes and goes and doesn't tend to their relationships, including the one with their own body. They work so much that they end up driving one task after another so they are out of balance. There is too much sharp, directed, heat, focused intensity. There s an imbalance with the opposite. This teaching says that we are free to choose. We may end up with an ulcer, a series of infections, or perhaps Epstein Bar autoimmune issues (which is related to Pitta imbalance in Ayurveda). From the Ayurvedic perspective, we get a disease and diagnosis then we trace our way back to the choices that ended up creating our symptoms, our gunas, in the first place. These gunas are found cellularly and are also found in the subtle and energetic body. Ultimately Ayurveda and awake living is about choice. You are choosing how to design your experience largely through your habits. Basic Habits Continue to explore conversations and be curious about yoga, habits, patterns, and our mental and emotional evolution. Cate started studying Ayurveda in her mid 20s and then went to school more formally in her late 20s. She was raised in a fairly cognitive academic setting, taught to do well in school, to study hard, and get good marks (which she did). She went to a great college. By the time she went

36 to study Ayurveda, she was overdeveloped in her cognitive functioning, book and lecture learning. Ayurveda is the science of life. So when you start to study Ayurveda, book learning is only going to get you so far. You will start to see that often the mental understanding of a concept is far ahead of your ability to integrate what is being learned so there is a dissonance between mental learning and emotional integration. So what happens is you learn, get a concept like eat an earlier lighter dinner, go to bed earlier, and eat a bigger lunch. That all sounds do able! You might think, Great, I know exactly what to do and can tell someone else cause now I know! Book learning. Check. But it s not integrated. So when it comes time to have a sit down lunch, pay attention to your food, and eat well, you don t because you have this big project you're working on and you don't take a break. All of a sudden it s later and you re hungry so you get a muffin and a coffee and you're off to the races in terms of being out of rhythm, akrama. Krama means living in rhythm, so akrama is the opposite. When you are out of rhythm, it will have its own pull and own tendency and will increase itself, because like increases like. What you are already doing has a tendency and momentum to it. The tendency to stay out of rhythm can increase. And for many people a lot of their patterning, or samskaras, is to be out of rhythm. So, if the pattern is out of rhythm and like increases like, out of rhythm will increase out of rhythm and lead to early decay. This is not the direction we are talking about in this course. This course is all about awake living. We might intellectually know what to do but may not be emotionally in a place to integrate new habits in real time.

37 Sattva, Rajas, Tamas In Ayurveda, there is Sattva, Rajas and Tamas. In terms of spectrums, you can say that Sattva is the energy of clarity, of clear mindedness. In Sattva energy, you can see things really clearly. Tamas is often called the energy of inertia; it's cloudy and unclear. The energy of Rajas is movement, which is very similar to vata. Rajas is the energy of movement away from the center. Rajas pulsates between clarity and cloudiness, between the big wide open and the inert. The spectrums of pulsation is a tantric understanding of the gunas. If we relate this back to the emotions, Sattva is when we are clear and usually also integrated. We can go back and pick up that which isn't integrated yet. For instance, if we are an emotional eater, we may feel great and say, I deserve some chocolate! and then we feel horrible after eating it. In that pattern of emotional eating, we eat in order to satiate or pacify the emotional body. That's our pattern, or samskara, our patterning of our emotional body. And we are in that out of sync pattern with the nature of our digestive tract. It needs a good solid meal and then time to rest and digest. When we live out of sync and have this pattern of emotional eating and then we start to do yoga, it bounces us more to the Sattva side. We start to do more yoga, get more clarity, and start to see our emotions. Rajas, this energetic movement, is shining light like the sun on that which isn't integrated yet, on that which is Tamasic. It starts to enlighten our patterns. The movement to enlightenment is very interesting because it keeps going, expanding. The spectrum gets bigger and bigger, infinitely. The more enlightened you become, the more awake living and awake to our own life we are, the more clarity there is

38 around the parts that aren't yet integrated. It might be food patterning, or patterning around sleep, sex, or relationships that needs awakening. Some of us are in relationships in a way that isn't as awake as we want it to be and we start to see that and so bring more of the darkness into light. The more light we get, the more we can see the parts that aren't integrated in our self or in others or in society at large. We start to work at a new level of bringing darkness to light. We simultaneously use the beauty of the darkness because without it we can't have this evolution or step into the next level of light. So we cooperate and partner with the parts of our self that are integrated because we know that's part of the spanda; it's no less than the light. As we do this we start to emotionally develop and we catch up the emotional body with the cognitive body. As that happens we start to live more empowered, more awake. As we awaken, we notice our habits are no longer patterned by Samskaras. Instead, our habits are really grounded in the natural cycle of things and we start to experience being seated in the self. The Vaidyas or Ayurvedic sages would call this svastha, being seated in the self, which is beyond these gunas and elements which is Svatantrya, innately free. Yet cloaked in these gunas, elements, and doshas we are able to fully participate in our life. Integration How does all of this integrate with this daily rhythm? The daily rhythm in Ayurveda is called Dinacharya, or daily wheel. Day in and day out from birth until death, we cycle on this wheel. This very much relates to the word samskara, which are the grooves that are created on the wheel. Some people will stay up late and they are night owls. And that is what will be grooved into their wheel. We know that night owls are more likely to get into accidents, even bump into things and get injured. We know night owls gain more

39 weight than early birds. We have these great studies that are documenting nights owls vs early birds. We know enough from western science that confirms Ayurveda that being a night owl is not in rhythm. Its akrama, it's a Samskara. You can start to see from this that there s something that's Tamasic, something that's not integrated, something that s still in the clouds that needs to be brought towards light. In this experience we find that we may have patterns with vata, pitta and kapha in this daily rhythm, dinacharya, that are out of sync and yet are part of our identity. Where do you have an out of sync pattern? Are you having an earlier, lighter, dinner (ELD)? Early to bed (ETB)? Are you waking up and having practices to help you start your day right (SDR)? We see that in each of these time frames there are these very simple habits that start to do the Samskara, the outdated patterning. It has an expiration date and it's come up, it's ripe. We can now see the Samskara because there is enough pulsation between Sattva and Tamas. We can now see the pattern and might say, "Oh no, here's the pattern and I'm totally attached to it, how am I going to resolve this?" The process of stepping into health and health evolution, the process of knowing this life, is when we start to say, "Ok, I'm completely free. I want to try this out to see if I can step into the next level of energy integrity, the next level of bodily integration and start to awaken my chakras, start to experience the subtle body anatomy that the yogis talk about and see if it's real. Is that something I can tap into? This practice of integrating may be the path to enlightenment, the path of awake living. When we start to really pay attention to these laws of nature we can see that which are non-negotiable. We can start to attune and integrate the parts of our self that are not that integrated.

40 We can then use the actual habits in our daily cycle, these actual routines, as a catalyst to bring all the parts together. Let us deeply integrate who we are in mind, body, spirit, intuition, and energy The Koshas Kosha Kosha literally means sheath and this layering is a traditional part of Yogic Philosophy. The sheath of consciousness has bodies surrounding finishing on the exterior with the physical body; these additional bodies are also called sheaths. In order to understand the five bodies from a yogic perspective, it is important to understand layering and know that consciousness is at the center. Imagine a knife as consciousness, the sheath around the knife is the bliss body, so the spiritual bliss body surrounds or

41 encases the light of consciousness. The bliss body, or Anandamaya Kosha sheath wraps around consciousness. So, when people talk about mind, body, and spirit, the spirit is the bliss body and the most etheric aspect of the self. Around the bliss body is the Vijnanamaya Kosha. This is the intuitive body or the sheath made of intellect or discernment and is also known as intuition. An initial sense of not feeling ready may be followed by a decision to forge ahead anyway. If hurt; mental, physical, spiritual, or relational shows up, it might be followed by a feeling "I knew better! When that happens you can be sure you are speaking from the intuitive body. The next sheath or guna around the intuitive body is our mental-emotional body, our thoughts and how they attune to our emotions. It may come up as an emotion first or a thought first; thought carries emotion and emotion carries thought. The two are interconnected. This sheath is called the Manamaya Kosha. The next guna layer that wraps around is the energy body, or Pranamaya Kosha. In summary the five gunas are: Bliss body (Anandamaya kosha) Intuitive body (Vijnanamaya; knowledge or knowledge reflecting on itself) Mental-emotional body (Manamaya kosha) Intuitive body (Pranamaya kosha or energetic body) Physical body (Annamaya kosha, which literally means the sheath made of food)

42 How to Attune Your Habits with Koshas? Our habits and daily rhythms need to attune with the five Koshas. If we want to experience health and awakened living and then leave out a part of our whole (a Kosha) it's not going to go well. To access and be able to integrate all parts of the self, we need to attune our habits to all five Koshas. Consciousness is at the center. It wants to move all the way through the layers to the physical body. It wants to infuse all five Koshas and have direct communication from the cells, from matter back to energy and back to spirit. The physical energy of the body, the outside, wants to be infused with consciousness too. When consciousness happens, there is health and vitality; we feel great, strong, clear. When there is murk or muck in one of these bodies and we are not doing the habitual hygiene practices to clear them, there's a lack of integration and integrity. Why are the habits so crucial for the five body koshas? Food Body What habits will keep our food body healthy and happy? Eat 2-4 times a day. Eat the biggest meal at lunch, and drink only water between meals. Little snacks between meals will disrupt the food body. The food body needs 8 hours of sleep at night. Without it food body won t be strong. Energy Body The pranic body is not fed by nutrients; it's fed by prana. Prana comes fro the breath. Our prana will begin to align with our physical body. We feel it in our lungs. We allow the energy to move downward, it then rises up feeding the energy body. To activate the energy body (preferably after

43 we've hydrated and pooped) it is essential to breathe for 20 minutes in the morning before eating. Something like Sun Salutations would work. We are simply looking to move the Prana so this can also be done using a seated Pranayama practice. Here we are just sitting and deeply breathing for 20 minutes or doing the alternate nostril breathing technique Nadi Shodhana. We need pulsation between the poles. Like spandex we go to expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction. If that doesn't happen for 20 minutes every day in the morning, after hydration and poop, and before food, we are not flossing the pranic body and therefore don t have as much energy that day. As Westerners we are taught that we obtain our energy from our food and that's true but it s only part of the story. We get energy straight from energy. We get energy straight from breathing in fresh air. We get energy from circulating the oxygen, our prana, round all cells and we get energy from expelling waste. Most people understand this intellectually but they know it physically. If we wake up, hydrate, have a great bowel movement and feel the energy in our colon it feels scintillating. There is activation of energy and we help balance of the energy body. So if we don't completely eliminate our faecal matter in the morning, which means eighteen inches of faecal matter, we won't feel that full drop of energy or prana into the colon. It is a subtle energy movement. For the Pranic body to experience hygiene, flossing this

44 sheath or Kosha is non-negotiable. It is necessary to wake up, move, and breath for 20 minutes after eliminating. That's just enough time to coordinate, refresh, and integrate for the day. The mental-emotional body needs to be clear. So if you haven't moved the physical body, if you're not fueling the food body with good food and sleep, the mental body doesn't have a shot. It has so much stagnation, it is just crushed. Energy moves from subtle to gross. Gross energy may start to stagnate the subtler energies. Most of us have experienced this on our yogic path. We start to do more yoga and meditation and then begin to experience more subtle energy. If we remember what our reality was like 10, 20, 30 years ago. How gross is/was our awareness? Can we perceive the bliss? Perhaps we have had less awareness of intuition. And if so, it may feel as if we are only living in part of ourselves. That's exactly what we are talking about here. When the energy body and the food body are not clean, we don t feel good. When we don't have basic hygiene practices around when to eat, how to eat, when to sleep, how to move the physical body, and when to move the physical body with breath, then what happens is that these just start to crush on the mental emotional patterns and will be more negative than life positive because the life-positive nature of the mental emotional body is going to come through the Prana (south) and come through direct intelligence through the Vijnanamaya Kosha which is sandwiched on either side.

45 Mental-Emotional Body A flossing habit equivalent for the mental-emotional body is meditation. Physical and energetic practices are going to increase the positivity-generating life force in the mentalemotional body. What is meditation? What is sitting in silence? When we sit, we don't pay any attention to our thoughts or emotions and we sit regardless of whether we want to or not. We sit even if our mind is busy or still. We simply do not pay attention to the thoughts. We don't give all of the emotions our attention or let them rule the roost. Instead we sit and just say, "this too shall pass" and then simply ride the wave of spanda, pulsations or the rising of consciousness. We are consciousness itself. We are at the center of beingness. So we decide to just be and let the chaos do the chaos, let the monkey mind do the monkey mind and we just don t pay attention. When that happens, we get breathing room in the mental emotional body. As we get more breathing room, that's like the floss, like flossing your teeth, the hygiene practice. You're either a flosser or your not. If you're meditating, you are flossing your mental emotional body. And now you have half a chance when a thought comes to simply notice or decide you don't need to pay any attention to the thoughts that comes in and you'll have more of a chance to let it go. Or perhaps a worry comes in and you don t pay any attention, you have a better chance of letting that worry go instead of allowing it to turn into Samsara (a habitual pattern that repeats and repeats and grows as like increases like).

46 In terms of hygiene for the mental emotional body, learning is the key. We know this. People may do crossword puzzles to stimulate their mind because there is a greater chance their mind will continue to work. The use it or lose it principle. There is a popular term now called life learners which came out of the un-schooling movement. What is so beautiful about the concept of life learners is that we are attuned to Svatantrya; we are free to choose that which is interesting. There is a Sanskrit word which is helpful here and it is Raga which is desire. Where is our interest? What are we attached to in a good life positive way? Where is our attachment? What are we interested in? What do we want? If we pay attention to what we want to learn next then we will be more excited! If we are very interested in what we are learning, regardless of what aspect of life it s appearing in, we start to see we are alive, changing and growing! We start to identify ourselves as a verb, as an "ing" for example, learning instead of a noun. We are more in action than we are a static person. I am Cate and I am this just reflects the past. We need to think more in verb terms, to be more interested in what we are doing, what's coming next, and what we are learning. The excitement stimulates the mental emotional body like floss; it s a way of attuning and optimizing who we are and it starts to move a lot of energy. It's exciting to learn a new thing! If a child has just learned a backward handspring in gymnastics, she will run home and yell, "Mom, mom, watch what I can do, look what I learned!" There's energy to it, there's an excitement and it goes to the next level. Pay attention, what are you most interested in learning? Or have you stepped out of learning?

47 Intuitive Body Intuition is called Vijnanamaya kosha. The intuitive body needs its own hygiene practice as well. A lot of the optimization of intuition happens around listening. So if we don't have time and space to listen to our own intuition, if we make decisions more based on our thoughts, "I think I should do this right now! or This is on the schedule right so that s what I m going to do now! but our heart or throat or wherever you feel intuition, is saying "NO, I'm not ready yet. Even though it's not the right timing, we may override it because we are so used to making decisions from our mental emotional body rather than from our intuitive body. When we do this we are not listening. The practices that help us listen are meditation and breath energy practices where we are in our body. The intuitive body often speaks through a physical feeling, through a constricting in the throat, heaviness in the heart, or expansion of the heart, a pressure on the forehead, tightness in the lower back, a sinking feeling in the gut, butterflies in our tummy. This is the language of our intuition. And we all know it and we've all got it. How much do we listen and make decisions from there? Not exclusively but in connection, there is not a hierarchy, not one is higher than the other. The intuition has to work with the mind, thoughts and emotions. But if we are not listening and not tapped into intuition, then chances are we are making life harder for our self. We are living against the natural flow of our intelligence, which is always already available. Sitting in meditation is very good for heightening intuition. Notice what you are feeling when you sit. How are you feeling about this situation? How are you feeling about this relationship?

48 Meditation focused on heightening intuition is different to a meditation where we don't pay attention to thoughts and emotions. This is more of an intuitive meditation or seated practice where we are sitting and feeling your feelings. Ask, "How do I feel?" "I feel apprehensive "What does apprehension feel like?" Apprehension feels like a little bit of tightness right below my heart, in the top ribs squeezing in, that's what it feels like to me right now". That s an example practice that helps us develop our intuition. Speaking from intuition is very important. For example, if you notice you're having a tough time in your relationship and you want it to change and grow and you don't speak to that instead you hold that in. But in your mind you say, "I wish I could just say, hey, I really want this relationship to change and grow." All of a sudden you'll feel a sense of energy movement. Dr. Claudia Walch says, "it can take a lot of courage, you may need to be brave, but as you build that habit of courage, soon it just starts to show up. And soon you're able to just speak and live from your intuition in connection with consciousness and in connection with your thoughts and emotions. Bliss Body Bliss body is Anandamaya Kosha. Anandamaya kosha requires its own hygiene practices. Each of these is linked to the five elements. In Ayurveda and Yoga everything repeats and cross intersects and reinforces. The Anandamaya Kosha relates to the element of ether. The Vijnanamaya Kosha relates to the element of air. The Manomaya Kosha relates to fire. The Pranamaya Kosha relates to water. And the food body is made of the earth. The practices to clear the etheric body include sitting in silence, having time, listening, and all the ones that come from the body as described before will be here now. There's a special practice of just completely letting go of all five bodies, even letting go of ether itself, of

49 the space in which everything is arriving. And it s simply being awareness itself. Being the center. Being consciousness. Sometimes it s called aware ing, which may not make sense, because it s a made up word! When we are aware of awareness, we are just "ing-ing" it. We are just being it. We are just being awareness. It s a very subtle meditation practice. It often takes quite a bit of practice to get to that practice. But it s directly perceiving as consciousness itself. As it happens we feel a lot more pleasure. We actually feel waves of pleasure move through the bliss body. A lot of the tantric practices are to awaken the bliss body, to awaken. When we are in synch and harmonized, there are undulating waves of bliss. When people meditate a lot, you may notice a natural easeful joy shining through their eyes. That's the bliss body coming straight through. You can even feel it in the etheric field around such beings. As they ve dropped enough of the persona and it s just being coming through it s because they have done etheric hygiene practices. The Ayurvedic term Dinacharya refers to our basic daily habits. The most helpful Dinacharya will incorporate the hygiene habits we have discussed. Looking at these habits will help you align with who you are. If we practice Dinacharya daily it s like a record player, it goes around and around. If we practice it daily, day in and day out we start to influence the trajectory in which we move through time and space. It will change the way we age.

50 1.6 Constitutions and Personality Types Vikruti - the term used to describe the imbalanced deviation Prakruti - your underlying nature or individual birth constitution Three Doshas: Pitta, Kapha, Vata We ve talked before about the word Ahamkara. It means: I am this. It s more of a personality type. In Ayurveda there is a word Prakruti. It is a word that explains Constitution. There s another word called Vikruti, and that is a word for that which goes out of balance. We have this arrangement of all five elements and all three doshas in a way that is specific to our unique individual selves. The idea is to have a balance. Say you were born Vata with a good handful of Pitta, and just a little handful of Kapha. That would make you a Vata-Pitta, an energetic type. Say you go out of balance, and overschedule. You would be a Vata, Pitta, Vikruti. I m going to go over this again, but I wanted to give you a snapshot. We all have a Prakruti. Prakruti is our unique constitution. We all have emotional tendencies that make us individual, and it is the same with spiritual tendencies Bigger Patterns in Terms of Constitutions Personality types and how they go out of balance Why do you want to know about your constitution? It s how

51 our energy works in the daily pattern of our lives. If you are tired when the sun goes down, you can feel the heaviness and the decrease of energy. When you go to bed at that point you wake up like a shot, ready to go. That energy pattern is there. We can stay up too late, sleep through the dawn, and be totally oblivious of the energy pattern. Those in the know, who have experienced how good it feels to be in rhythm would never give it up. Being in the flow with nature tunes us into our constitution. It helps release unhelpful patterns and opens up your choices so you can design the body and the life that you want. I was speaking with Sebastian Pole, and he wished his parents had knows Ayurveda because he was a sickly child with imbalances that he needed to continue to mitigate as an adult. He wished that his parents had known about Prakruti and the nature of the imbalance, Vikruti, and knew how to treat it energetically and physically. I was thinking of this because my own child had a fever this morning, and she said to me, this is the second sick day of my life. The child has never been sick. I mentioned to my husband what a strong constitution she has. We consciously prepared our bodies to conceive her and she was raised, not in a perfect environment, but with an awareness of her constitution, and she knows when she goes out of balance. Often it is very subtle. The more we understand Prakruti and Vikruti, the more we pick up on subtle imbalances before they become big imbalances. The energy moves from subtle to gross. From energy to matter. The more aware we are of all this, the more we understand when we start to go out of balance and can prevent a full-on disaster.

52 Let s Learn About Constitutions Kapha Kapha is the energy of cohesion. Its elements are earth and water. Earth flows down and in, and water flows down and out. What they have in common is down. Kaphas tend to be very grounded. Their physical body has more earth and water in relation to fire, air, and ether. Their bodies are larger: a larger shaped head, square frame shape, very steady. A more earthy Kapha will be muscular and solid, and a more watery Kapha will be soft and fluid. There is an intrinsic abundance to Kapha. Their physical strength will also manifest as mental steadiness and ease. People will often gather around them. Think of the Kapha mother s

53 kitchen where all the kids in the neighborhood gather, because there s a sweetness to the vibe she creates in her home. Because Kapha has more earth and water and is very steady and very stable, often what will happen out of balance, Vikruti, is that Kaphas will experience a lot of congestion. Kapha gathers in the stomach and lungs, and is fluid in nature. Kaphas will generally experience sickness in their stomach first. They ll experience loss of appetite, and that what they do eat turns into congestion. They re often got phlegm or mucus in their sinuses, lungs, and throat. This tendency toward stagnation and congestion is a big problem. If we go back to the habits and rhythms that we looked at in 1.3 and 1.4 you ll recall that there s a Vata time, a Kapha time, and a Pitta time twice a day. The out of balance Kapha likes to sleep through the early morning Vata time, because they re so grounded, they have so much heaviness. Sleep comes really naturally. Vata is to airy and light to sleep that much, and Pittas are too stimulated. What will happen when the Kapha sleeps in and blows off their morning breath body practice, is that they ll experience more congestion, heaviness, and stagnation. That s the nature of their Vikruti. That s how they go out of balance. Their Prakruti is to be strong, stable, and easy going. When it s out of balance it becomes symptomology. Eventually if it gets bad enough it becomes depression, and even complacency where the person loses interest in their own life. The habits that will sink their ship are blowing off early

54 morning exercise and eating dinner too late. Those will reinforce stagnation, congestion, depression, and complacency. Of all the routines, these are the two most important for Kapha types. If the Kapha person wants 8 hours of sleep, they can go to bed at 9:30pm and wake up at 5:30am. As they start to firm up that habit and come more into balance, their sleep needs will decrease and they can start sleeping from 10pm to 5am. Kapha starts to lighten up and they get even more strong and stable. At the same time their fire starts to increase and they experience more focus and direction. The complacency and stagnation burn off like morning dew as Kaphas commit to their routine. Kaphas in general should eat a diet that s on the lighter side. If they eat an early, light dinner, and eat seasonally they ll avoid congestion. Typical things that happen for an out of balance Kapha are sinus issues, obesity, lung issues like asthma, all because their pattern is to collect excess water and earth elements. A Kapha type will not burn energy as quickly as the other doshas. Metabolically they are slow burners, so they don t need as many calories. They can have the same meal as someone with different body type, but their body will hold onto more of it. Saving as much as it can for later like a bear going into hibernation. A more Vata body type will disperse energy and give it away. Kaphas need to stay attuned to the questions how do I stay on the lighter side? and how can I truly have a lighter dinner and not break my fast for 13 hours? Not eating between dinner and breakfast gives the body the opportunity to unpack some of what it has stored away. Two seasonal detoxes each year are vital for Kapha types so they can experience the lightness, and get fired up and focused for the next phase of their year.

55 Water retention is a big problem for Kaphas, especially women. If we look at PMS which commonly carries symptoms like water retention and depression, or menopause where some women gain water weight and may experience brain funk where they feel foggy or unclear. This is all Kapha type symptomology. Avoiding this means having soup or salad for dinner, going to bed early, waking up, hydrating, eliminating, and moving! What I ve found from working in the yoga community for a decade and a half is that Kaphas won t push themselves that hard. They are the least likely to really tap into their reservoir of strength and stamina. They have the most endurance, but are the least likely to use it. Then there are the Vata types who are blowing their energy, and hurting themselves or getting sick once it has dissipated. You ve got the Pitta types who have all this fire, and are super focused and are burning themselves out. Like increases like. This is the nature of our constitution to do the things that aggravate our disposition. Until we stop. Until we turn the tide. Then the Kaphas realize they ve got to work hard. Workouts are either softening, cardio, or hardening. If you go to a stretch class, or gentle yoga and have this relaxing, nurturing experience, that s softening. Cardio is when you get a good workout, maybe doing 108 sun salutations, mixing in hand stands and back bends. You re really pumping your blood. A hard workout is where you re creating more hardness in your musculature. In yoga we tend not to have strictly hardening workouts, but say you re a weightlifter, or you go to cross fit, and you do a lot of athletic type things where you don t balance or stretch out, that would be a hardening work out.

56 Kapha types like to go for softening workouts, even though they have the most capacity for cardio and hardening. The latter are what they need the most to stay in balance, in pulsation with their constitution and erode any imbalance or vikruti that has built up. Kapha is soft and easy, so to optimize their workouts they need vigorous long workouts. Which sounds awful to them until they start to awaken that energy, that lightness. They start to feel the strength and refinement that comes with this kind of activity. Just like I mentioned earlier that those who know how good it feels to go to bed early and wake up early in rhythm with nature and their bodies wouldn t give it up, Kaphas who learn the value of these kinds of workouts wouldn t give them up either, because they feel amazing! We do want to mix up our workouts. Everyone should have a variety of softening, cardio, and hardening, and easy, moderate, and vigorous. Kaphas need at least two vigorous workouts a week, and having cardio and hardening be part of those. I want to emphasize that that is what will help break up the heaviness, the stagnation and the congestion. Pitta Pitta is fire and water, and its energy is the energy of transformation. As far as body types, Pitta has that more triangular shape, broad shoulders and narrow waistline. They have very strong digestion, high burning metabolisms, and if they get hungry and don t have anything to eat it s a problem. They get hungry. Whereas a Kapha type might be emotionally attracted to eating frequently, they don t need it physically the way Pittas do, because Kaphas are slower metabolizers. Pittas digest things quickly physically, mentally, and emotionally. They tend to be very focused, intense, and

57 opinionated. The Pitta knows where they want to go to dinner, when they want to get there, what they re going to order, and if something doesn t go according to plan they ll notice. The Kapha is more go with the flow, not having such strong opinions or critical tendencies. Pittas are always right. They re convincing and convinced of what they know. All of this intensity can get them into trouble. If we look at the mental patterning with Pitta, it s very focused. They re very cognitively oriented, and their energy goes up and in. This can lead them to forget their bio-rhythms to where they forget to eat and get a headache, or put off going to the bathroom because they re busy. These are very Pitta type tendencies. Out of balance Pitta in the body often manifests as heat. Attributes are hot, oily, spreading, sharp, intense. The physical symptoms centralize in the small intestine, and are connected to the liver and bile ducts. Instead of moving up and out of the mouth like Kapha, Pitta can move up creating acid reflux and heartburn, or it can move down creating loose stool, diarrhea, and malabsorption. Over time it can turn into Irritable Bowel Syndrome which can exacerbate malabsorption because food is moving through too fast for nutrients to be assimilated. Pitta issues tend to be related to heat and inflammation. Infections are often related to ongoing Pitta imbalance, same with skin irritations. Pitta, we talked about being in the small intestine, and being connected to the liver and bile ducts. The liver filters the blood, and blood is a Pitta system. The red blood cells have the look and intensity of Pitta. They are essential for transportation of oxygen into other cells, and taking carbon dioxide away from them. The liver

58 cleanses the red blood cells. The more excess heat, sharpness, and oiliness are in the body, the more those energies will get picked up by the red blood cells, and then in turn those qualities will be transferred to the liver. In excess they create problems like toxicity, and eventually cirrhosis of the liver if the person is a drinker. These qualities are the same qualities that are in alcohol. There s a reason Native Americans called alcohol fire water! If you give a kid a sip of alcohol, they ll feel the heat of it. For women with PMS symptoms, you ll notice that caffeine and alcohol, all the things the liver is trying to filter out, make your symptoms so much worse. After years of filtering out these qualities, the liver will eventually get full, and the blood will continue circulating them because they re not getting filtered out. At this point it starts to come out through the skin, often taking the form of eczema, skin rashes, or psoriasis. Pitta goes not only to the liver and skin, but also to the eyes which are an organ of Pitta. You ll see this with people who get eye infections, or even rapidly deteriorating eyesight when there is excess focus in the mind and eyes aren t given a chance to cool off and relax throughout the day. These give you some idea of how the Vikruti of how Pitta goes out of balance for the physical body. The mental and emotional body go out of balance with too much focus and intensity. Also, a lack of sensitivity and compassion are signs that Pitta is out of balance. Vata You may remember that Vata is Vayu which means the wind. It is made of air and ether. We talked about Kapha types being square, and Pitta types being an inverted

59 triangle. Vata types tend to be more rectangular, having long, light frames with a greater distance between shoulders and hips. Vata is light, mobile, dry, cold, and irregular. Getting a sense for some of the opposites, where a Pitta will be hot, a Vata will be cold. Pittas will by oily and Vatas will be dry. Kapha types will be stagnant or still, and Vatas will be in constant motion. Where Kapha energy coheses, Vata energy disperses. These are very important things to remember when you re trying to figure out how Vata goes out balance. Vata tends to be really light, and not put on a lot of muscles or fat. If a Vata person becomes obese, the weight will look awkward on their body, it won t spread evenly. Whereas if a Kapha is overweight, that excess gets absorbed everywhere. They carry it better. Their bodies are earth and water, and are made to hold more. Not that anyone should be obese, but this is a way of understanding and recognizing constitutions without regard to weight. The Vata types will tend to have a thin skin that tans easily, where a Pitta will have more red in their skin and burn easily. Vata types will be a light brown to grey skin tone. Their eyes will have less pigment, where a Pittas eyes will be brighter. Kaphas will have big deep eyes; think big doe eyes or deep blue pools. Vatas eyes will be smaller, and tend to be closer together or further apart. Vata is mobile, and that leads to variability and change. When you see someone with really interesting, unusual, or irregular features, think Vata. The mental and emotional Prakruti of Vata is fun, inspiring, creative, easily excited, and changeable. Vata is the wind. It can go in any direction, not just up and in. It can move and turn inside out and backwards. Vatas are some of the

60 most flexible and fun people around. They can also be very spiritual and insightful because there s so much connection with ether. They tend to be artists and healers, Pittas are likely to be visionaries, and Kaphas make great managers. Vatas have the hardest time staying disease free, because there is so much air and ether that they have a hard time being on the earth. The regular cycles of nature are that much more difficult for them. Their energy disperses, it dissipates instead of cohesing. So if they re not very regular in their rhythms, very regular with when they re sleeping and eating, and very consistent with their dinacharya, then they go out of balance really quickly. They start to lose weight, lose sleep, and their immune systems can easily fall apart. In the digestion, Vata lives in the colon. Pitta is in the small intestine, and Kapha is in the stomach as you ll recall. Vata out of balance looks like gas, bloating, and discomfort in the lower abdomen. From the colon excess Vata will move into the blood, making it airy, and from there will move to the mind and manifest as worry. It can easily turn into stress, overwhelm, and anxiety. A Vatas physical body is a lot less strong in general than the other doshas. When it becomes arhythmic, which it tends to do, the digestion loses its rhythm and the Vata become constipated. Constipation then can create malabsorption issues. Vata can coalesce in the bones, which makes it difficult for the bone to maintain its strength, and can lead to osteopenia or osteoporosis. There can even be a weakening of the sexual functions when Vata is greatly in excess. Infertility due to a deep deep dryness. A Vata menstrual cycle might have a lot of pain, because there s not enough fluid for an easy flow. There s also a tendency

61 toward irregular cycles where one month might be 35 days and the next might be 40 days. The best defence that Vatas have against all this is routine. Early to bed, having a good meal at lunch, three meals a day at the same time every day, stabilization. A great tip for Vatas is to take a little bit of cumin or fennel seeds in warm or room temperature water about 20 minutes before you eat to prep the digestive fire. When you re able to digest food easily, you won t get that buildup of Vata in the colon.

62 2.1 Stages of Life and Rites of Passage What we're going to talk about next are the different stages of life and rites of passage. Again, a lot of what you might be finding in this course is basic knowledge. You may think to yourself - oh of course, I knew that or I used to know that. Or people used to know that but for some reason we've forgotten it in modern culture. Or it has become less of a priority. What we begin to see is that the places that we've drifted from hold the basic fundamental wisdom of how nature works. We're part of nature. We are nature. So, the further we get away from that, the more disconnected we become and the more confused we become as to why we feel a certain way. Or why we're demonstrating certain symptoms or maybe why we've developed a certain disease. Or why we have problems in certain relationships, etc. So, hopefully at this point in the course you're starting to put some things together that will not only deepen your yoga practice but will also deepen your relationship to life and help you live a more awake inner connected life. Next we're going to look at the different times of our life, from preconception all the way through death. And, as we look at these different times of life - the different junctures and the rites of passage used to mark them - we realize that there isn't often a lot of significance around rites of passages. Many people have astutely recognized that we don't know how to birth and we don't know how to die. And we don't know how to mature into the different stages in between.

63 What have we lost with the loss of that knowledge? I know the first birth many women today witness is the birth of their own child. Many people have never escorted or midwifed someone though the process of dying. And yet these very basic cycles of life used to be just part of village life, back when we were in tribes. Back when we were in small communities and in extended families, we used to witness births and deaths just as part of growing up. Just as part of life. And so in that there's much more of an acceptance of the different stages and the different processes - physical, mental and emotional - that happen in these different cycles of life. I'm going to simply remind us of what we might be less attuned to so that we can: Optimize our own experiences, our own journey through these different stages Help others that are going through a stage or transition a transformation or preparing for a rite of passage in a way that we can connect with them and be of assistance. Let's take a look at kapha, vata, and pitta - these different energies. We covered in the very beginning how the one energy becomes three forces. It becomes vata and pitta and kapha. It becomes the forces of movement, transformation, and cohesion. As we start to look at the different times of life, we can look at three major stages: 1. Conception until the end of puberty 2. Early adulthood through full maturation and the end of adulthood 3. Old age

64 Stage 1: Childhood = Kapha This very first stage covers the time of conception through pregnancy and childbirth, early childhood through midchildhood, and the teen years. That whole time of life is dominated by the energy of kapha, the energy of growth and cohesion. Kapha means to flourish by water. When you squeeze a baby goo and ooze comes out - they're so moist. Conversely, when you squeeze an elderly person, you're afraid you might break them because living is the process of dehydration. Birth through death is largely a process of desiccation. We dry out. There is less water in our bodies at the end of life than there is at the beginning. Childhood is the kapha stage of life. During this time we are going to have more kapha tendencies towards disease. The diseases of kapha happen in the stomach, lungs, and sinuses. Do you remember having a runny nose as a kid? Are you a parent of kids with runny noses? That is the goo factor and that is actually kapha out of balance. A lot of kids will get sick to their stomachs. They'll have sinus and mucus and lung issues. That's all naturally part of this more kaphic time of life, of childhood. Kapha creates this aqueous environment in which there's a really quick turnover in cells. In the spring, kids grow faster than any other time of year. Spring is the season of kapha. It's the season of moisture in the body. Kapha is Water and Earth. Its energy is to grow and repair. It's the energy of cohesion and bringing things together in the body. So kids are in this lovely, aqueous super quick growth environment.

65 Stage 2: Adulthood = Pitta Adulthood is dominated by the energy of pitta. This stage is ushered in with the symptoms of pitta: intensity, focus, skin problems, acne. That is all part and parcel of pitta time of life. We have this organization - we've now grown. We're in this body. We're looking forward to the future. And, we are starting to get focused about who we are. Ahamkara is developed. The "I am" sense of the self becomes developed. I am in this pitta phase of life. Who am I going to be? I'm going to create that next. And, if someone gets in my way, I'm going to burn right through them. That's more of the teenager phase of life going into adulthood. In adulthood, we take on focus. We take on projects and we really step into our full creativity, whether we actually create a family or we create a career or we work on projects. We move ideas forward. We may have a lot more vision in this time of life. As a child, we generally don't have much vision. We are more present with what's going on. Then all of a sudden we get an idea of the future and now we're starting to plan and look forward to how do we want our life to be. That's all part of this pitta stage of life. Pitta issues are going to happen more with infection and inflammation - issues with the liver, blood, skin, bile. Pitta types will have more of the over focus, and we'll see headaches and migraines. We also see in pitta time of life issues around our prakruti. So, if we have more of a vata prakruti we'll see that arise in the pitta time of life because those imbalances will have worked up over time. Same thing with a kapha prakruti. If you've had kapha imbalances for 20 years, and know you're 40

66 years old, there's a lot of build up of that energy pattern over time. There's the compounding effect. We'll see imbalances of all different types. Stage 3: Old Age = Vata Old age is dominated by the energy of vata. The dates for this stage are changing so much. We have some people living longer even though average life expectancy is decreasing due to obesity, stagnation, lack of exercise, and a lot of processed foods in our diet as a whole. And, among the healthier living people we are seeing a lot of life extension. The vata time of life becomes much longer than it s ever been in the past. Navigating our geriatric years is the name of the game. And, to best navigate those years, it becomes crucial during the pitta stage of life to actually alleviate some of the doshas, some of the imbalances that we may have accumulated over time. If you've had an imbalance for 20 years, you're going to want to empty those doshas out. You want to empty out that excess, errant ether, excess vata, if that's your tendency. If you have pitta tendencies and pitta imbalances and over focus and you build up a lot of toxic bile in your system - you are going to want to empty that out and not carry that into the future. Same thing with kapha. If you have tendencies to gain a lot of mucus and congestion, & build up that force of kapha and cohesion in a way that's toxic, you want to empty that out as you get older. We do that through seasonal detox and seasonal living. And we do that really through just paying attention to the daily rhythms and the body will naturally empty out the excess doshas. With the extension of old age, there is a common scenario that I see all the time people in their 60 s or 70 s with built

67 up imbalances who have never done a seasonal detox. They don t eat seasonally. They don t follow the daily habits of the daily rhythm cycle. Their imbalances have built up not just over a decade or two, but literally over 40 or 50 years. Sometimes even 60 years. And that starts to create a lot of negativity around aging. There's a lot of disease within the body. There are a lot of energetic patterns that carry the doshas - the vata, pitta, and kapha. And whatever the person s tendency, that will be the disease category she falls into. Old age doesn t need to be misery and suffering. We don't need to lose our flexibility. And, from a lot of the conscious elders that I've learned from - we don't actually have to lose that much strength. Yes, we will lose some strength but we don't have to lose nearly as much as people think. When looking at the mental and emotional patterns in this stage, we know that some people are sprightly and peppy as they grow older. And there are some who are decrepit and grumpy putting a negative vibration into the field. And all of that negativity is a sign of imbalance. So, how we do this old age really depends on how we did the other two - particularly the pitta period. Aging is largely a process of desiccation. It s largely a vata process dry, cold, light, subtle. As we get older, we start to let of pitta. We let go of some of the creativity, vision and direction. And as we leave that behind, we start to enter a more spiritual phase in our life. The body starts to fall away and that actually aids that experience of lightening up, of becoming more spirit than matter. If you look back to the kapha phase of life, it's all about matter. It's not about spirit. Most children are not really interested in meditating. Some might be mildly interested, but not like people as they get older. When they really start to turn their attention to spirit, to the divine - if we are religious that might be god by any

68 name. During this stage, there's a turning to that which is transcendent of the material world. Diseases in this stage are vata diseases - diseases of lightness and dryness. This is where we see problems with our bones - osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, osteopenia. We see the muscles starting to fall away from the bones. We see diseases of dry skin. In general there can be more of a frailty, and a weakness in the immune system as we lose the integrity and fluidity of our body. But, again, a lot of this is caused by the build up of vata. Although these processes are a natural part of the aging cycle, the build up of vata takes everything to aggravated proportions. Stage of Life and Identity/Habits/Rites of Passage Most of us haven't been brought up with many rites of passage or with a strong sense of the meaning it adds to our habits and our identity or how these things fall into right relationship. Our identity is self-constructed. We have choice in our identity. Other people will tell us things about ourselves - and it s our choice whether to believe it, to perpetuate it or not. It's not a bad thing to have a personality and an identity, but we want to make sure that we are designing our identity. We want to keep our habits in alignment with the direction that we want to be going so that we are compounding the habits that we want to have as we move through different stages of life. Let's look at this in terms of the different rites of passages in the different stages of life. If we look at rites of passages in general, there's a falling away of identity that happens through a preparation - usually a period of fasting where there's a buildup of intensity and a letting go of the physical

69 body and the personality. There's a period of hunger that comes from the fasting before there's any nourishment. There's a separation from that which is nourishing. It's very interesting to see these things that happen in a typical rite of passage. There's usually a role of being silent or being alone. There's a part of it that has to do with isolation. And in that isolation, in the letting go of nourishment, of the food and the fuel, there's a letting go of identity that starts to happen. We start to wonder, who am I? What is this life? And all of that is essential for the next phase of the identity to emerge. Let s take a deeper look at this by deconstructing a specific rite of passage the preparation for conception. In indigenous cultures, this is a typical right of passage. You actually prepare before you conceive a child. So, what s going on here? Part of it is cleansing the physical body. There might be a period of fasting or a period of nutritional cleansing where you might just be taking liquids, broths, or juices to flush the body of any physical toxicity. All of that is happening on one level the level of the anamaya kosha, the food body. The food body influences the pranic body, so now there is also a shifting of the energy in the body. And there are different rituals that go along with that shift to help prepare the couple for the next phase of their life, for becoming parents. There are these subtle impressions that start to shift the person from being an individual to being part of a new family group. This is the act of actually creating with consciousness itself, the cosmos itself, and bringing forth the next generation. This looks really different than getting drunk and getting pregnant. Actually, many children are conceived from parents who are under the influence of alcohol and are just having a really good time.

70 When we talk about conception as a right of passage, we see a lot more attunement to the shift in identity that comes with parenting. So, in the process of the rite of passage before conception, the couple is invited to let go of the patterning of the physical body. To let go of the patterning of the energetic, mental, and emotional bodies, and start to attune to a whole other way of learning and a whole other way of knowing where they are actually co-creating with the universe. They're letting go of the old self and, in that way, they are practicing dying. They are practicing a death. When we look at every rite of passage, we see that they all have the same acts. And one of those acts is the act of dying. The act of letting go of who we've been. Then by the time we get to death as an elder, we've been through so many of these ritualistic deaths that death is less scary. So, part of a rite of passage is the practice of dying to the past identity, and with that we need to also understand that the habits that reinforce that identity are also going to be subtly dying. We are going to let them go or loosening them up. We ll start to investigate a much more subtle, spiritual or cosmic realm the fabric of energy that underlies the world of matter. Usually rites of passage have intense, physical experiences that start to break some of the limits of who we've been in the past. The actual physical practices themselves will open the nadis. The rite of passage around conception will do this in a very loving and nurturing way because we want the couple to experience a lot of love and nurturance so that is the vibration in which the next generation is conceived. Let s walk through the different rites of passages in life, from birth through death.

71 Conception First, we have this rite of passage around conception. This rite allows the parents to really clear some space and clear their physical body in order to be able to welcome not only the spirit of the child, but also the actual physical form of the child. All of the practices also enhance fertility, so the chances of conception go up significantly. When we compare this to what happens in western culture, what we find is that when a couple wants to have a baby, they have sex. They may be pretty aware of the ovulatory cycle, but there is none of this ritualistic preparation. There's no cleansing of the physical body. There's no mental, emotional, or spiritual attunement that happens as a typical rite of passage. None of that is part of the picture. If the couple has trouble getting pregnant, they may then go to a doctor and the doctor might have them try in vitro fertilization. They ll start to give the woman's body drugs, medicines, and pharmaceuticals. But, those pharmaceuticals have side effects. A side effect is the body s way of communicating that there is a level of toxicity that is affecting the biochemistry. So, these pharmaceuticals have a certain level of toxicity. If the woman conceives, this new life starts off in a body that has been manipulated into conception with side effects. That is the energy in which life begins as opposed to the new life starting off in an atmosphere of high consciousness, cleanliness, and health because the body was really showing it was fertile and ready to conceive. We will see more side effects down the road for the mother and child in the vitro scenario than from the more holistic rite of passage means of preparing the body for conception.

72 What I'd like us to see in this is that there's karma. Karma is cause and effect. If there was a difficulty with conception and we mask the symptoms with drugs, we create or manipulate an environment in which conception can occur but has side effects. These side effects will then create different effects. These will then create more cause, which will then create a different effect, and this creates a cycle. And that cycle reinforces an identity I am someone who is infertile instead of the identity - I'm someone who has excess pitta and if I cleanse that pitta pre-conception then I'm someone who s fertile. These are subtle shifts in identity that start to happen around wellness and disease. Pregnancy and Birth The next rites of passage we have as we move through the stages of life center around pregnancy. These rites honor all five senses of the mother in order to feed the senses of the child. We attune to the idea that we are sentient beings. We taste, touch, smell, hear, and see. And, we can bring in delight. We can attune through that which is bringing joy, that which is delightful. As we do, we grow in terms of how we are able to experience the natural beneficence and abundance of the world. And how we are able to steer away from that which doesn't suit us, that which aggravates us. Then we have birth. Birth itself is one of the most intrinsic rites of passage. For most women who have an unmedicated birth who have a natural birth where there's very little involvement of anything except the natural flows of energy what we find is that there is a massive purge and a massive opening of the nadis, the subtle energy channels.

73 The sushumnas, meaning river or energy channel - is the main nadi. Ida and pingala are the next two nadis. They are the masculine and feminine energies that crisscross at the chakras. Mythologically speaking, in yoga there's said to be 72,000 nadis. The drawings of Alex Grey are an amazing representation of the body electric, these energy channels and subtle nadis. When a woman gives birth, the nadis open up. There's a lot of energy. There's a lot of flow. And, there's an attunement from the gross to the subtle. There's an experience afterwards of truly being one with the universe, of truly being the creative power of the universe. And, there's a spiritual opening that allows the mother and the baby to connect - to really, deeply, share the same field of energy for days and weeks on end. That is what we're looking for. That means that things are going well. That hormones are balanced, that energy is flowing. Right now, 1 in 3 women in the United States and many westernized countries have a cesarean section. Often that is following other invasive pharmaceuticals like pitocin or an epidural. We know that there are side effects from these drugs, but one of the biggest side effects is that the nadis don't open. The energetic channels aren't nearly as open or fluid. The oxytocin levels don't rise so women are going to have more of a problem with depression or with feeling a lot of symptomology and disconnection postpartum. The stakes are very high for how we move through the stages of life, and the kind of identity we have. This is not to say that natural childbirth is the only way to go. If for some reason, you needed to have a C-section, or someone you know needed to have one for the protection of mother and child, it makes sense. This is just a means of explaining the shift in the role and identity through the

74 different rites of passage. Explaining how all five koshas the physical, mental, emotional, intuitive, and bliss bodies are all really connected. Our physiology is designed to have these different rites of passage. Postpartum When we take a look at postpartum, we need to look at what s happening in those first six weeks. There's a saying in Ayurveda - the first 42 days for the next 42 years. Those first six week's postpartum largely determines the health of the mother for the next 42 years. There are a lot of different practices that help the woman adjust to shedding her old identity and moving into the new one. Whether she is going from being an individual to being a mother or whether she is going from being a mother of three to a mother of four, there's a shift in identity. There's a maturation in which we get to reflect. With the rites of passage, after the transformation, there's a period of readjustment, integration, and reflection. The old self has died. We want to fully let go of the old self and the patterns and habits of the old self and then selectively choose that which are the most vital. Patterns and habits that are the most awake and aligned. I often call it the new normal. What's the next phase of normal for you right now? What's your new routine look like that really suits who you are right now and who you are aiming to be in this next phase of your life that's very present for you right now? The practices postpartum are a lot of massage. The woman will receive massage daily to help the tissue of her body realign and readjust. She'll also be receiving a lot of love and nurturance that will just flow straight through her and physically through her breast milk and on to her child. We

75 know from yoga that which is showing up in the physical comes from the energetic. It is the same in terms of the physical tissue of the body the energies that a woman nursing her child feels and the doshas that she feels pass straight through the breast milk. If she s feeling a lot of love, if her diet is very easy to digest - the milk will flow very easily through her body into the child's body with that same energetic and emotional pattern. Likewise, if the woman is experiencing a lot of stress, worry, or doubt, or if her digestion is off because people are bringing heavy foods or she's eating leftovers and everything is dense and difficult to digest and she's not receiving the kind of physical nourishment that she needs - those energies or doshas will get passed on to the child as well and just make it harder for the family to thrive. The rites of passage were designed to influence and help organize the next level of identity. They help usher in the habits to stabilize that new identity. All of these things the rites of passage, the death of the old identity and old habits, the ushering of the new identity and new habits intrinsically work together. Menopause The next big shift in life is menopause for women and retirement for men. We enter a letting go of the time of life. This is another stage of life transformation, another letting go. During this transition from pitta to vata time of life, we are moving from being very creative, from being a manifestor (pitta) to being more of a reflector, reflecting and imparting deep wisdom (vata). If we mark this transformation in time, menopause does not happen overnight. Retirement might, but if we look at the shift from the old identity to the new, it doesn t happen on a

76 certain day at a certain time. There is a shift in who we are, how we are identifying, and what habits we have. We shift from the current phase into the next one. And, if we do so with consciousness, by marking it with a rite of passage where we take time out, by fasting or a detoxification, by building a cave or sanctuary, by moving our awareness inward, by letting the mind unravel, we let ourselves go from knowing who we are to not knowing who we are which is a key part of a rite of passage. We start to let go of the self and we practice dying. The old identity of being the manifestor, of being the creator - we let that die. Then we are able to actually attune and the vijnanamaya kosha, the intuitive body, wakes up. The intuitive body then directs what the next phase is going to be. It guides what the habits should be that solidify the identity at the next phase of life. We begin to see so much more plasticity in who we are. We are more of a verb than a noun. We are more of a becoming than we are a solid structure. A lot of problems arise when we get attached to an identity and then our time of life changes. We struggle because our skin is wrinkling and the muscles are falling of our bones and we're feeling a lot more fragile because we haven't had a rite of passage and we identify as being someone who is beautiful and muscular and has perfect skin. We identify with that phase of life and that creates a world of trouble and hurt because on a deep level we are now not integrated. We are in a new stage of life but we are attached to an old and outdated identity. We aren t often taught how to do these transitions and the rites of passage for this stage of life. Our culture has

77 forgotten how to do them. Most of our friend groups don't enforce this. It's something that we actually need to bring back. And that is part of the aim in this course, to remember so we can bring this back not just to ourselves but also to our families and our communities. Transitioning from being a manifestor into being the wise elder in the vata time of life takes some introspection and reflection to identify what that looks like and how it will go. Rites would include a detoxification, cleansing or rejuvenation. In ayurveda we would do panchakarma or even kayakalpa as a deep cleanse for this transition into the wise elder time. We are really letting go of who we've been and enter the phase of not knowing who we are going to be next. We allow intuition or spirit to start to come in and direct us into the next phase. Death The rites of passage of death are about letting go of the 5 elements. Letting go of the physical body - the anamaya kosha, the earth. Letting go of the pranamaya kosha, the water. Letting go of the fire, the light of who we are - the manomaya kosha. Of letting go of the vijnanamaya kosha, the reflective consciousness, the part of us that knows what we know. The part that knows we are alive and are spirit in action. And, then, ultimately, letting go of spirit itself. We let go of the I am-ness and dissolve into that which is niralambaya, that which is beyond the five elements. If we ve gone through life and had these repeated cycles of witnessing the stage of life is changing, it s time for a rite of passage that enables us to let go of our identity. That enables us to start to sense a new identity and the habits that will stabilize that new identity. And, it's okay because we have practiced dying so many times. We are used to this

78 process of letting go. We are used to it being okay and being different, so that now different is no longer scary. Naming and Puberty If we look at different indigenous cultures, there is often a naming ceremony that happens somewhere between age 5 and 10 usually around 7 years old. The child is now at an age where they can reason and start to self-reflect. They know a lot about karma about cause and effect and what happens from their action. They can see that if he acts nasty to that person, it's not going to end up good for them. During this time, we now have a sense of the child s personality and there is a naming ceremony. We let go of the childhood name and the child is renamed in alignment with their identity and personality. There s often another rite of passage that happens around puberty. For girls it happens at menarche, the sign of first menstrual blood. When we leave out this rite of passage that signifies the bodies ability, the girl's ability, to create the next generation, there is a lot of disconnection from our core power of creativity. I don't know how it is now in our culture, but when I was that age, it was totally avoided. It was avoided for decades before and I am sure it's avoided in certain places now. Menarche is still something we aren t going to talk about beyond advising using protection if you are sexually active. But there's no empowerment of becoming sexually active or becoming capable of procreation. When we don't signify this transformation, there's a lack of empowerment. There will always be a lack of empowerment as long as we blow off rites of passage and blow through these stages of life. As a young girl goes through menarche,

79 she starts menstruation and is empowered by her own creativity. She's empowered and fully knowledgeable of the cycles of menses and ovulation. She starts to study and know her own biorhythms. She becomes more connected to nature, more connected to the moon. And she becomes more connected to other women. If she's empowered from that and empowered from understanding some of the different facets of her sexuality, she will be able to make better choices. This is all about understanding how, as our identity shifts and our habits shift, we are able to choose. This is what yoga is all about. It's all about our freedom - what are we able to choose. It s all about being educated and knowing our identity, knowing our bodies are shifting so our identity is shifting, and knowing who we are and what habits we need to have now. This where there is a huge need for teens to learn about their constitutions, daily rhythms, and their bodies. They need to be mentored. Usually with the rites of passage for menarche, there's a displacement of the parents as the one's who know everything and there's a mentor that's brought in. Someone who s like the great uncle or the neighbor or a special teacher who is brought in and has a natural affinity with the pre-teen or teen. And, the teen has a natural affinity with the mentor. There's a bond that's created that's usually outside of the parental unit that is there for stability, safety, and love. Now that there's a real mentor coming from outside, that totally shifts the identity of the child to being someone who s unique and special, learning and growing as to their unique proclivities. Marriage The last rites of passage I want mention center around

80 marriage. These rites look very much like, in many ways, to the rites of passage around conception. Before coming together and creating a new union, the couple each independently cleanses, going through a process of fasting or detoxification. They each let go of their old identity. They change their name, picking up the name of their partner and a new identity is formed. As we start to see and bring back some of these rites with a little bit more significance, with a little bit more attention, we are going to find that we fall into a deeper rhythm. When we notice that someone's out of balance or we've fallen out of balance, we can tie it to a certain stage of life, a certain rite of passage that didn't happen. We can now go back and start to repair some of that damage just by recognizing it, honoring it and doing our own little mini rite of passage for that in the present. 2.2 What Yogis Eat On this path of learning yoga and ayurveda you may find that you may make different choices about what you eat. First and foremost it's an exploration, and not a path to enlightenment. Diet is a good facet for feeding ourselves, but we don't want to obsess about it. On any path to higher consciousness, we want to start to consume the life force. So we start to find that if food does not have a strong life force, we are not interested. Now this might be subtle, or it might not be subtle. For some of us as we start to do yoga, there are foods that start to fall away; generally those that are low in life force, the processed

81 foods. The more that the food is processed, the harder it is for our body to digest, the less life force there is and the more we have this repulsion to it. The life force that we are speaking of is the plant that we are getting the energy and the nutrients from. The plant has energy or prana, it has nutrients and enzymes. The enzymes are what make it easy for our body to digest and absorb the prana nutrients. Moving Away from the Standard American Diet Food that is dead, basically does not have enzymes. If we overcook food, it renders the enzymes dead. So on one side we have prana rich foods, and on the other side we have the S.A.D diet or the "Standard American Diet". As we start to do more yoga, we become so much more in tuned with prana, we are inhaling and exhaling and filling our body with so much more life force and we are becoming more integrated. Opposites start to find integrity, they start to find their opposite partner. The physiology starts to become more interconnected. We become attuned to what is going on outside of us and how it affects what is going on inside of us. What is going on inside of us really affects what goes on outside of us. How we are, affects our relationships. It affects what we do in the world, how we show up in the world. This includes how others are experiencing us, including how our ecosystem is experiencing us living on it.

82 Are we toxic to our environment? Are we a polluter? Are we a consumer? OR Are we a collaborator, A nurturer? As we travel this path, we want to be more of a collaborator with and nurturer of our environment, the people we are around, and the ecosystem in which we live in. As a result we become a lot more connected to what we put in our mouth, including a connection to the actual plants, where our food is coming from and how it is prepared. If the food is prepared in a way that processes the life force out, then our food becomes energetically dead, or even worse energetically dumb. In which case it might actually disrupt the natural intelligence of our body. Dumb foods, like genetically modified foods, have a disturbed intelligence. For instance when we have a food with a lot of artificial colors or artificial flavors, like fast food, then the palate becomes confused. Why is that bad? It s bad because the palate sends brain signals on what is in the mouth, and then the brain tells the digestion what to do. If the palate is confused about what it s eating, then the wrong signals are sent. Food Preservation Food in which the shelf life has been extended with preservatives can also render the energy of the food inaccessible, in which case the food is dead. There are natural ways of preserving food where the enzymes, the nutrients and the energy stay intact. What Yogis Eat is really focused on life force. The ways of preserving enzymes and life force, is through living foods which are culture, fermented, or dehydrated. As soon as

83 you rehydrate the tea leaves you recover the life force. That is very different than something like Coca Cola. Originally Coca Cola was made from the coca leaf. I got to chew on coca leaves when I was in Bolivia and Peru. They are amazing because they are full of amino acids. They are said to have all of the essential amino acids that our body needs. That was the original plant, the original life force energy nutrients that were behind Coca Cola. Now fast forward 100 years and now you are faced with sugar and a lot of artificial and chemical additives. This makes Coca Cola a dumb food that disrupts your palate into craving more of it. It's not giving your body energy, nutrients and enzymes. In fact it is taking more energy to process than it gives. If you have low energy and you drink a Coca Cola you are actually borrowing energy from your kidneys and adrenals. You are borrowing energy from your organs and depleting that energy over time, which is really unsustainable. LIving Foods On this path of awake living your cravings start to change and you start to attune to that which is more conscious, that which is life enhancing, that which is life positive. As a result your habits start to change, your diet starts to change, and that is natural. It's good to notice and it's good to name these things, because it can help other people in our lives who start to see why we are eating differently, or why you are seeing the world in a different way. The word for a seed in yoga is Bija. If we plant the seed in the earth this Bija holds the intelligence of the entire plant. It holds the intelligence of a plant that can make 10,0000 seeds. When the seed is planted, the first thing the seed

84 does is root down. The first energy descends and then it sprouts up and rises. This is why sprouts are one of the great foods that yogis eat. We eat tons of sprouts because sprouts have up to 300 times the nutrient value of the adult plant per pound in its life phase. We sometimes call kids sprouts because kids sprout up. If you want energy like a kid, eat sprouts. It's very simple, they have that very high nutrient and energy life force that we want. After the plant descends down the root will get stronger, the sprout will start to rise up, and then we have a stalk. This is another thing that we want to start to eat. A stalk has a lot more water element than the rest of the plant. It's the vascular system of the plant. It's where nutrients and energy flow through. Next the stalk will start to develope a leaf. The leaves are full of chlorophyll. The green in leaves is the chlorophyll. Our blood is made out of hemoglobin. We have already talked about the red blood cell and the importance of the red blood cell carrying oxygen from the lungs to everywhere else in the body, and transporting carbon dioxide back to the lungs. The red blood cells are red due to hemoglobin molecules. The chlorophyll molecule and the hemoglobin molecule are the most similar molecules inside and outside the body. The hemoglobin molecule can pick up chlorophyll very quickly and give the body energy. When leaves are an enormous part of our diet, we start to feel a lot of energy. If we look back to our history as primates, the example are clear. Monkeys eat over 300 species of leaves a year. If we

85 look at our early ancestors, or Native Americans even 500 years ago, we will see a huge amount of diversity in the diet. The amount of leafy greens in particular is huge. Most leafy greens are edible. There are way fewer poisonous leafy greens than edible leafy greens. It's just that we got out of touch with our environment. Now all we eat is a piece of lettuce on our sandwich, or a big bowl of salad with a bunch of romaine or a bunch of different farmers market greens. However, we have lost touch with our edible landscape. Leaves are a primary source of chlorophyll, energy, protein (which may be surprising), calcium, and lots of other nutrients and micronutrients. So we have sprouts, stalks, leaves, and the plant continues to send more and more energy into the root. The stalk continues to rise up. We get bigger and bigger leaves, and at some point this plant may decide to regenerate. If it decides to regenerate, it produces a flower. Then the flower attracts a bug, and the bug pollinates the flower. After that we have seed head, and we get seeds. The seeds might be inside a fruit. Eventually the fruit with the seed drops and the whole process starts again. Some plants have huge roots. Take the beet plant or instance. The root is the main part of the plant, and there are only a few leaves up top. Now look at kale, very small roots and massive leaves everywhere. Some plants have their own arrangement of this whole picture. In seeds we have seeds which are naturally high in oil. These are often ones that we are more familiar with. There are also seed spices like cardamon, fennel, caraway, fenugreek, etc. We also have legumes, beans, and grains. For a lot of people this is the main portion of their diet. They eat a lot of legumes and grains, and not as many sprouts, stalks leaves fruits and roots. The more we walk this yogic path and the more we

86 awaken to the plants and the life and the life force, the more these other major groupings start to become important. We might then start to use the seeds more for the oils and the spices, but less as the staples. We will turn more to the roots, the leaves, the fruits, the stalks and the sprouts for the majority of what we eat. Seeds have enzyme inhibitors, particularly legumes and the grains. This is why we see soaking, sprouting, and fermenting traditionally in cultures that used a lot of legumes and a lot of grains. If you pick up the book Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon which has a lot of the research of Weston A. Price you will find that some cultures as recently as 100 years ago used to ferment all of their grains. If you were going to make a wheat bread, you would make a sourdough. You would ferment the grain before you eat it, which enhances the digestibility. I know so many people now have gut issues. They have trouble with digestion and absorption. This comes from eating a diet heavier in legumes and grains and it has less of the fruits stalks leaves and seeds and roots. Preparing Foods Let's look at foods in terms of the different constitutions. We have talked a lot about how Vata, Pitta, and Kapha have different types of personalities, different constitutions, different tendencies, and different disease patterns. They are naturally going to have different needs in terms of quantities of these different types of foods. Spring - Kapha Time If we look closely at what is happening in a plant cycle, in a seasonal cycle, what we find is that there is a season for each of the plant components to develop. Look at the time

87 of season when the seed is developed, generally this happens in the springtime. It's the kapha time of the year when there is more moisture, after the winter time when all of the seeds are latent, and not doing anything. In the spring, there is warmth and there is moisture. The little seed starts to sprout and grow. At this time of year we want to be eating a lot more sprouts, and we also want to start eating leafy greens and some of the bitter roots that have lasted over the winter. Spring is very much a Kapha type of diet. It is a type of diet that is more bitter, pungent and is more astringent, which all reduce Kapha. There is a lot of quick energy, because the energy comes from the sprouts and chlorophyll in the leaves. Leaves in general are astringent and they are bitter. The astringency comes from spices and the energies that have lasted over the winter. The energies of the early spring diet are very, very intense. compared that to the late spring diet where there is all this new growth. There is kind of a crusty taste to food after it has been overwintered. When you dig up these roots and they are very, very strong and have a bitter astringent kind of taste. Summer - Pitta Time After spring we start to have leaves in massive abundance, this is the Pitta time of summer. The sun is closer than the rest of the year and we experience a lot of warmth. This time of year we have a lot of leaves and stalks that contain a lot of water like celery stalks, stalks of swiss chard, or kale stalks. There will also be some of the sweet fruits. Even the sweet peas that come earlier are so sweet. The tastes of summer sweet, bitter, and astringent. Astringent means that they pull in lots of water which keeps the body light and full of life throughout the summer. We also start to see more new roots too like baby carrots and baby radishes. These are generally

88 the sweeter version of the plant. Fall and Winter - Vata Time As we get later in the summer we get a lot more mature roots that start to prepare the body for the next seasons. They start to lubricate for the fall and winter months, which is the time of Vata. The tastes then are sweet, sour, and salty. These are the tastes that start to lubricate the body through the dry season. We have the spring tastes which reduce and scrape the channels of the body from the excess heaviness of winter. The summer time diet which is the cooling sweet diet. It is a higher carb diet which energizes the body and keeps it cool through the summer. The winter diet is a lubricating diet which helps prepare the body for winter. We also have more roots and seeds In the fall and winter time. -

89 How to Use this Information If we are eating in sync we will see where these different food categories come in. Look at the broader patterns of nature first. Then look at what the individual constitutions should be eating. The Vata diet in general is sweet, sour, and salty. Someone who is more Vata, is more ectomorphic. They tend to be longer, leaner, and thinner. The pitta type is more firey, they are more intense. Pittas have a lot of dynamic transformative energy. The Kapha is thick and strong. So the Vata type needs sour sweet and salty tastes. The pitta person who is super dynamic, they need more of the sweet bitter astringent, more of the cooling diet to balance their intensity and focus. The Kapha type which tends to be very strong and very stable needs the diet to be more bitter and pungent and astringent to balance their tendency towards cohesion and stagnation. We are always eating seasonally first. Secondarily we are eating as per our constitution in order to optimize our physiology. We can use this to tailor our diet to our needs if we look at the nature of imbalance. For a vata type of person heading into winter when things are really starting to dry out, we think about how we can get more oils. How can I get more oil from the seed and root in order to lubricate and help to prevent dryness and constipation? If our pitta is out of balance in summer, then we are hot, fiery, and probably getting skin irritations, we think about how we can cool our bodies. One way would be to use those sweet and astringent and bitter foods. You might juice some celery, leaves, and alfalfa sprouts with apples to cool the body down. If Kapha is out of balance in spring showing up with a sinus infection, feeling heavy and complacent, then how can you bring more bitter, pungent and astringent tastes

90 into your diet? Try making a spicy lemonade cleanse so that you can get the bitter and astringent tastes to flush your system of that heavy energy. I hope that this gives us a sense of how to tailor your diet a little bit more towards personal constitutions and time of year in terms of what we should be eating. Gardening and Foraging I want to give you a little insight into what it took for me to get my property where I needed in order to nurture this cycle. In Idaho I have this 1 acre lot that we bought with a very old house and homestead. The soil was disturbed, and it was full of weeds. I started to look through my books and found that a lot of these weeds are medicinal and edible. So what is a plant and what is a weed? If we understand the nature of the weed it becomes a plant. Many of our invasive weeds are not just edible, but they are actually "super weeds". They are these incredibly nutrient dense plants that have a lot of the vitamins and minerals that humans need. We want to be eating hundreds of different species as did our ancestral primates. We want to have a lot of diversity in our diet. We want to have a seasonal diet, and to really start to understand, explore and be very curious about what is growing around us. What is naturally thriving in our environment? In our previous discussions we talked a lot about how our habits change and how our relationships change and how our identity changes in relationship to our habits. What are our beliefs, and what are the habits that reinforce our beliefs? What comes first? For instance if you have the idea that a dandelion is something that you should spray chemicals on if it grows in your yard, then you will have the

91 habit of spraying chemicals on that dandelion. I have the belief that the dandelion is one of the most healing plants on the planet. I think the dandelion lives on every continent now. It is readily available and has dozens of healing properties. It is very bitter and astringent, but it is also very sweet. It has a lot of the tastes that we need in our diets. I may have a habit of harvesting that dandelion plant and if I do, I have just added another nutrient source, another species to my diet. Now my diet has now become more diversified, meaning that I am pulling nutrients in from different sources. If we are just buying food at the grocery store or even the farmers market, we have much less of a diversified palate than what mother nature is providing. Mother earth is providing a tremendous amount of diversity. Even with the loss of biodiversity there is still a tremendous amount of diversity that actually requires human nurturance and participation or collaboration in the spread of diversity. The typical American or westerner today is eating less than 30 species, and for many people it is less than 15 species in an annual diet. This is extremely low and tends to correlate with a very processed, fast food diet. There is a massive movement toward homogenization, industrialization of food, and lack of diversification. This is horrible for our bodies. It means if we eat that way, then we aren t getting all these different phytochemicals and phytonutrients that help us thrive. We are less adaptogenic meaning that we are less adaptable to change as we get older. Nutrification has a lot to do with the direction of where we want to go in terms of how yogis eat. You might just find that as your beliefs change around what you should be eating, your habits will simultaneously change. If I look at my path as a yogi, what I see is that largely what I eat changes dramatically as my beliefs change. As my beliefs mature and become much more integrated and much more holistic in nature, I start having different practices.

92 Kitchen Sadana Kitchen Sadana is a spiritual practice brought into the kitchen. Kitchen Sadana asks the question: Are our habits reflective of what we are trying to accomplish? We might have the beliefs of you are what you eat, or you are what you digest. When we start to up level our perspective in terms of diversification and in terms of living foods we begin to want the following: To bring more living foods To bring more seasonally appropriate foods Bringing more of our ecosystem in to our diet in accordance of what our constitution needs right now A shift in what is happening in the preparation of our food We up level how we are eating and what we are eating. What we start to see then, is that the habits that we have will reinforce the beliefs that we have. We can look at this in terms of being on the yogic path, evolving what you are eating and what you are attracted to. You will be less attracted to processed foods, dead foods, or that which is stripped of prana. You will be repelled or repulsed by foods that are chemically engineered or artificially created. Your tongue will say "that's not food" and you will spit it out. Often on the yogic path, we will intellectually mature faster than we emotionally develop. So, we may have an emotional connection to food. Let's say it's cheesecake. We end up with this strong attraction, because for whatever reason we have these fond memories of when we have eaten cheesecake. When we eat it now, we can start to notice that we don't feel so good after we eat it, but we are still attached to it.

93 There is often a little bit of a process of catch up with food where we need to emotionally develop and get stronger in our practice. When this happens, we start to notice that I used to like cheesecake but I don't anymore, and my habits are more focused toward a much more vibrant body. I don't want to feel the heaviness that comes from cheesecake or other similar foods. Let's look at foods that naturally have the vibration of yoga; living foods or lightly cooked foods. Living foods means that the enzymes are still intact in the food itself. For instance, a living food cracker will usually be fermented and then dehydrated before we eat it. The practices of cooking, and having the kitchen as a spiritual center in the house will enable food to become more digestible, and have the enzymes and nutrients intact. For example: Soak some buckwheat and flax seeds so that the enzymes start to wake up. Add some spices and sesame seeds to get some oil into the mixture. Mix it up and flatten it out into a dough. Dehydrate the dough. Twelve hours later, you will have crackers that have way more accessible nutrients and enzymes than crackers that are processed in a factory. Industrial food preparation uses high heat and preservatives which render the nutrients and enzymes unavailable to the body. When you eat processed crackers you can't taste the energy or the aliveness. They end up just feeling like fillers. As this becomes more obvious

94 in your body, you will end up developing different kitchen habits. Fermentation Some examples of fermented foods are are pickled vegetables, sauerkraut, or fermented vegetables. Fermentation is a way of extending the life of a vegetable, and it increases the sour taste. Sour taste helps refine the bile in our body. It makes the bile stronger. Think of a bratwurst topped with a bunch of sauerkraut and some mustard. Sausage has a lot of protein and a lot of fat, which is heavy and requires a lot of bile to digest. Cover it with sauerkraut, sour taste, and that tastes good. The sour taste actually refines the bile, it strengthens the liver, it thins the blood and it actually makes fat so much easier to digest. Top it with mustard which is pungent and that tastes even better. If we don't have fermented foods in our diet, we are getting the sour taste from processed foods that don't contain the enzymes that naturally fermented foods do. Dehydrated Foods Next, let's look at dehydration. Many of you eat sushi, sushi has nori, which is dehydrated seaweed. Those of you who come more from a European diet, you may see more of the dehyrations coming from dried leaves in teas. Dehydration increases the dry taste of foods, but it is also a way of preserving food. If cooked food is brought above 120 degrees, like if you stick your finger in the pan and it burns your finger, you have now burned the enzymes. The enzymes in the plant that is the food, are no longer accessible to your body. It starts to kill

95 the nutrients off as well. It's not a horrible thing to eat cooked foods. Traditionally in Ayurvedic diet cooked foods were highly recommended especially for Vata types who tend to have weaker digestion. However, if our diet is primarily cooked food and our food is overcooked, what happens is that there are not enough enzymes. When this happens, we start to feel heavier after our meal. We should actually feel more light and more ready for action. Raw and living foods have intact prana, enzymes and nutrients. For someone who is used to eating more cooked food, it is a great idea to start to marinate your salads. Take a bunch of different greens, roots, and seeds and mix yourself a salad with a oily, vinegary dressing and let it sit for 30 minutes to 2 hours. Let it sit and marinate, which will cause the cell walls of the plants to break down creating a food that is much easier to digest. Animal Products I know this is a very controversial subject and I do not want to give an opinion one way or the other. I just want to bring in what animals lend to the diet and whether or not it is a good fit for you. Many yogis on the path will go periods of time where they don't eat meat, and then they will discover that they do better or that they do worse with meat included in their diet. Let s ask the questions: What are your habits and what are your beliefs and how are they influencing each other? Be very curious about that and how it relates to different phases of life. In general, animals in the diet bring heaviness and grounding energy. We are borrowing the energy from the animal into our body. Obviously whatever happened to animal, the karma of the animal, the diet of the animal, the

96 emotional experiences of the animal, are things that we are taking into our bodies. You need to be aware of that. If you are eating meat, you will want to get it from a trusted source. That way you will be able to control the things coming into your body. Mass produced factory farmed meat might make us feel bad about ourselves, giving us a negative subtle vibe. It might make us feel out of sync in our relationships. The foods we take in affect our output of energy. If we look at a typical diet with animals in it that our culture considers to be healthy, what we are finding is that we are not eating the whole animal. We are just eating the chicken breast and not the marrow or the fat. When we don't eat the other parts of the animal it depletes our building blocks for making our own flesh. This can be problematic. Is there a way that we can start to incorporate the rest of the animal into our diets, to source the best farms in order to get a more sustainable, more healthy type of meat? One way is to use the bones and leftovers to make bone broth or stock. On this path of yoga and ayurvedic path you may find that you start to make different choices in terms of what you feed yourself.

97 2.3 Kids + Elders I wanted to have a brief lesson on kids because most of us who are interested in learning Ayurveda or learning how to live an awake life have an intergenerational perspective, we really want to help others, and if we are parents, we really want to help our kids. So, let s talk about this in terms of some really basic ways of understanding what is going on with our kids. I look at basically three systems of my kid's body and I do this automatically now. When a habit is automated it becomes unconscious, it becomes something you just do naturally. Skin We have three systems: skin, gut and lungs. If we look at the three ways that the outer ecosystem becomes the inner, it's through the skin, the gut, and the lungs. Of course, with the gut, the tongue is the intermediary. Spit or swallow. With the lungs, it's the nostrils. With the skin there is no intermediary. One of the first things that I notice with my kid is what is going on with her skin. In the practice of Ayurveda, we do self massage where we use oil on our skin. Instead of using soap on the skin or even if we do use soap on the skin afterwards we will use oil on the skin. I often use coconut oil in a warm climate and sesame or sunflower oil in a cooler climate. The skin is the protector and it is also part of our immune system and is also closely tied to the lymphatic system. So if your skin dries out, that's a sign that the lymphatics are drying out, that there is not enough fluidity, there's not enough kapha, and there's not enough moisture in the lymphatic system. There might not be enough circulation or flow. Knowing what is going on with your kid's skin tells you what is going on beneath their skin and it tells you what their doshas are in their lymphatics or in their

98 blood. For instance, if you have a teenager and your child has a lot of acne, we know that it's not just going to be able to be treated superficially. Many people will pop the pill like accutane for acne, but there's a list of side effects. If we don't want that toxicity, the pharmaceutical side effects, we might to start to look at the root cause. If we know about ayurveda, we would know that if it's red, it looks angry, it is pitta, which is red and angry. So we want to look to see if there is anything in the diet and lifestyle that is aggravating to pitta. Is there any toxicity in her diet that is aggravating to pitta? If we look at a pitta type food list, we see the bitter, astringent and sweet foods, and we look at the dead, dumb and smart foods, we can see that she shouldn't be drinking diet coke. It would be nice to get some of those processed foods out of the child's diet and add more green smoothies and see if that cools down blood and opens up the prana and increases circulation. One should bring in more chlorophyll to cleanse the blood, bring in more sour fermented foods to cleanses the bile. Experiment and find out. This is just a way to start to understand what is happening beneath the surface. Gut To understand the tongue, use a tongue chart to notice what is going on in the entire digestive tract. The tongue is a map of the rest of the GI tract. When you stick out your tongue in the morning and there is a thick coating on your tongue, that means that there is ama or undigested food in the digestive tract. The further back on your tongue, the further down it is in your intestines. The more towards the front of the tongue the more it is up towards the stomach and the lungs. The tongue is a mirror image of your organ body. As we learn how to read our tongue and our kid s tongues, we can start to see imbalances before they come. For instance, if my kid comes up to me and I smell her

99 breath, and it smells a little bit off, the first thing I'll do is say " I'd like to see your tongue." The first thing I look for is coating. Is there a white coating? Is there a yellow coating? Is there no coating and the tongue looks really shiny and dry? I am looking for what it is and I want to know what normal is. So when they are healthy and normal I want to know what that tongue looks like. The more coating on the tongue, the more undigested food that is hanging out in their intestines and in their colon. This build up is going to breed bacteria and viruses, it's going to breed disease and imbalance. So, what we want to do is clear out their digestive tract. What that might look like at my house is that I would cook soup for dinner, cooked vegetables, or very simple foods until this processes it's way out of their system. My kid likes apple sauce and sauerkraut, which helps to move stuff out of her gut. She also loves broth. So she will have some sauerkraut and eat some broth and then she will eat the apple sauce. More than likely this will be all it takes for her gut to digest the rest of the gunk in it. I will give her some tea before bed that has a slightly laxative effect, so that the next morning she will have a normal bowel movement. In the morning there should not be a coating on the tongue. You will want to know what normal is on the tongue. You will want to get a tongue chart and a tongue scraper. I recommend printing the tongue chart and putting it on the bathroom mirror. Get the whole family tongue scrapers. Lungs The lungs are the way that carbon dioxide from our body goes back to the trees. The trees process and absorb the carbon dioxide, then emit the oxygen that then goes into our bodies. What is so beautiful about this is that you realize that the trees need us to exhale. They absorb our carbon

100 and we absorb their oxygen. If this interaction is not happening and there are issues in the lungs like congestion or a cough, there is not a good exchange between the outer and the inner lungs. The nostrils are like the emissary for the lungs, just like the tongue is the emissary for the gut. When they get dried out, there is an imbalance. In Ayurveda we have something called sinus lube, which is traditionally called nasya. I sell this on my website listed above. All you need is a little raw unpressed oil on your finger, then stick your finger up your nose to lubricate the insides of your nostrils. You can even sniff a little oil in the morning. Coconut oil will work if it is melted in a warm climate, sesame oil will do the trick and even a little melted ghee. All you are doing is inviting oil, that rich fatty substance to lubricate your nostrils, into your sinuses so that you can exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide a little bit more easily. Exercise Kids also need exercise. Exercise is huge, I notice a very strong correlation between mood and exercise. If my child has been sitting all day at school, I exercise her. We do stuff like running around the house, play games, have a spontaneous dance party, and jump on the trampoline. Get them moving and do so in a playful way, and that gets them to deep breath. This is so important. If the school does not have exercise related activities in the morning, we will exercise before she goes to school. All you need is 2-5 min of aerobic exercise, such as jumping jacks or running up and down the stairs. This will help your children to get used to exercising in the morning. If you have a teenager, you might just try to get them to do a 5-10 min exercise video before school. They need something fast that gets them in their body, that gets them breathing and gets them feeling

101 good. It will help their mental performance. We know that student athletes do better academically than the rest of the population. A lot of it has to do with the exchange of intelligence as prana, which carries cosmic intelligence and goes into their lungs and then diffuses to the rest of their system. So, again, as a parent you will want to pay a lot of attention and learn a lot more about the health of your child's skin, gut and lungs. I just want to say one more thing about the gut. Food goes in through the mouth and out through the anus. We have this whole system that we are labeling as the gut that starts with the tongue and ends at the anus. So we will want to know our kid's bowel habits. Is your kid is constipated, skips a day or has loose stools? Does your kid have a sour stomach, do they easily get an upset stomach or do they have a nervous belly. You want to know the gut habits of your kid and you want to have them eliminate every day. I know that with my kid, I had to get on her about waking up, hydrating and eliminating. I found that if I don't enforce this that my kid will get too busy during the day and sometimes she won't poop until after she gets home from school. Most kids have to be taught to drink water in the morning. This blew me away as an adult and I thought, why are we not taught to naturally hydrate and poop if this is our natural rhythm? Around ten thousand years ago, before there was agriculture and we were on more of a hunter/gatherer type of diet, we would forage for food that is much higher in water content. So we were actually eating leaves and stalks and fruits that are much higher in water content in general, than pouring ourselves a bowl of cereal which is a dry processed grain and is full of enzyme inhibitors. So, our food used to naturally have a lot more water content in it. If we

102 did hunt and eat meat in relation to the amount of fruits, vegetables, stalks and leaves, it was a very small percentage. The rule is elimination every day is to make sure that the feces is like a ripe banana. It should not be harder or looser than that. If it is there are little things we can do. You can even google Ayurveda and constipation/diarrhea and you can get some great ideas of what to do. Some simple remedies for constipation is dehydration. Is your kid drinking enough water? Does your child's diet contain enough fiber. Having stewed apples for breakfast is a great way to naturally promote stronger elimination before you start to experiment with herb. For diarrhea, you can simply add some nutmeg to the child's diet by mixing a little nutmeg with yogurt and a little water. This is a very simple solution to create a little more binding with in the stool. So make sure that you know what is going on with your child's bowel movements. I want to mention a few things about babies and teens. With babies, the name of the game is taking care of yourself. Taking care of your own energies, diet your own regular scheduled fresh vegetable diet, eating and sleeping on a regular schedule with dyna charia or the natural rhythms. In western culture, a lot of times a mother will take the baby to the doctor and the mother will be completely ignored. If the imbalance is in the mom, the mom is going to pass it on to the baby. If you have a baby, you will want to set the rhythm of the household. You are the midline, the mother is the midline. What happens in the mother's body starts to filter into the rest of the household. So take care of yourself. Manage your own energies and manage your own rhythm and that is the best thing that you can do for your baby.

103 Teens Managing teenager s moods, energy, household habits, and cause and effect What I find, having worked with clients for a long time, is that the ayurveda course is a lifestyle course. It is very similar to what you are doing now, but it will go into a deeper level of the conversation. A lot of what I find with my parents of teens is that their habits eventually influence their children. For instance, if a parent is an early bird, then the children will pick up on that. The same goes for parents who are night owls. Their children will pick up and perpetuate that habit. So we want to have very strong ethics with our own habits and our own rhythms. We also want to teach our teens that our identity can shift, that we are all variable, that we are all independent agents and that we can choose the habits in alignment with who we want to become. We need to have very open conversations about this as your child matures. It is also good to have conversations about the law of karma and what influences what. This will help your teen to start to take responsibility for their body. Say that your teen is carrying an extra 15 lbs. Helping them take responsibility for the choices that they are making that are perpetuating that reality can be a massive service to your child. Just helping them at an emotional level to help them absorb what they are experiencing will help them make very small changes in alignment. There is a very basic practice of habit change called "kaizen," and it means slow continuous improvement. It's the idea of a one percent improvement in order to make something a little bit better. It can be as easy as having a glass of water when your teenager wakes up, or when they come home from school. Maybe it's just about having a little more water throughout the day so that their blood can start to flush some of the excess pita that is processing as they enter this massive time of hormonal change in their life.

104 Another one percent improvement can be to do a body scan before they eat dinner at night, which means just taking a minute to breath and scan their awareness through the body. This gives them a moment to pay more attention to what their body is really hungry for, what tastes good, and what really feeds them. So again, just help them manage their energy. If you notice that your teens are staying up too late working on homework or are socially involved, and that they are exhausted, you have to help them to manage their own energy and draw awareness to what happens when they get to bed earlier and get more sleep and do their homework in the morning instead of staying up late to study. You can even run a 2-3 week experiment where you have them try out this theory and let them see if they stay more emotionally steady and stable. They will see if they are having a better time in their relationships and see if they are doing better in school. So running these mini experiments and teaching your teens to experiment with their body can start to redesign their reality. This is such an amazing service. You can also experiment together by getting them to choose what is for dinner and getting them involved in household chores. This can bring in more responsibility and more design into the household and their lifestyle. I would also look to see if your teen has a lot of mood issues, whether they lean toward irritation or if they lean towards being scattered and being all over the place. You can have them take the constitution quiz. This will help them to become aware of their constitution and any sort of doshic imbalances in their body and pass that responsibility onto them. We also need to take emotional problems very seriously. We know that teens can end up with anorexia or bulimia and also depression. There has been a rise in bullying and

105 suicide. There are a lot of issues that are tied to emotional issues. We also have teens with ADD and ADHD and other learning disabilities. The more we look for the simple solutions, the more we stabilize the daily rhythms in our household. Early to rise, start the day right, drink water, poop, breathing, bringing more plants into our diet, more leafy greens more chlorophyll, eating seasonally and having a decent lunch. The more we get into that cycle day in and day out, the more we see that a lot of those problems and emotional issues start to dissipate It is so important to know this because our culture goes toward complexity. We look for a very sophisticated answer, often to a problem that could be solved with simple habit changes. I have seen this time and time again, year after year with literally thousands of people. Elders This leads into a discussion about how to help our aging parents. What I have learned about helping people with the aging process is to help them to be present with what is and to realize what they can and cannot influence. The subject matter of becoming familiar with the rights of passages and letting go of old identities is an amazing service. Asking someone how they want to be in this phase of their life, what they want to refine, and what they want to take forward with them and what they want to leave behind and that separation process is a conversation that doesn't often happen, but can really help someone. A few other things that can help if the person is really interested and has not given up on themselves, is to help them go through a detoxification. This could mean going to a Pancha Karma center, doing a program like my yoga detox or just doing a cleanse at home on their own like an elimination diet where they simplify what they eat and they start to identify what

106 they eat and to see a relationship between cause and effect. Similar to what we talked about with children is knowing what is going on with their gut, their lungs and skin, will help them to become more aware. The elderly are going to dry out, their skin is going to dry out. Whereas children s skin can be a lot more moist, and teens can be a lot more oily. But by the time we get into our later years, the skin begins to dry out. So oiling the body can very much help with the lubrication of the joints and help the person feel a lot more mobile and a lot less arthritic. How Digestion Changes with Age As we age, our digestive fire becomes weaker. So, if we are over-eating, as we get older, our body is going to build up "ama, undigested food stuff. What happens is that our system gets less resilient to handle ama as we get older. Our system gets more sensitive as we get older. That sensitivity is designed to help us to become smarter, so that we learn from our yesterdays. This is why we call the elder years the wisdom years. It is because if we learn from all of our yesterdays, we simply have an extra twenty or thirty years of yesterdays than people from other generations. In some cases we've had sixty years of yesterdays. We want to reflect that deep knowledge, that deep sensitivity that we have learned over time. Eating that which is just the right amount for our physiology becomes more and more important as we age. Keeping the bowels moving on a daily basis is more and more important as we age, that we don't let energies get stagnant or stuck. In terms of the lungs, continue to be full with the life force, do more subtle practices in yoga, the pranayama practices, the more seated practices as opposed to the more rajasic intense exercises. We can start to let those go and only

107 workout once a week in terms of the hardening and the cardio practices that are more intense. We can start to do more moderate to easy practices, but a lot more of the subtle body practices in terms of the pranayama or breath flow practices. These can be an amazing tool for the elderly to attune to their sensitivity, to feel energized and to feel more vibrant and lively inside in terms of this trajectory and what practices we want to have now in our lives and how those practices will compound over time. The practices that we have in our sixties will influence how we feel, how we move, how we breathe, how we digest and absorb what the actual quality of our body tissue is in our seventies. How do we want the quality of our life to be? What do we want to feel like in our body? Do we want to feel clear and energetic? Do we want to be grounded? Do we want to be wise? Do we want to pass on our deep wisdom? All of these are our potential and they are really a micro reflection of how we are setting ourselves up for our future. One other thing that I would like to add in terms of helping our aging parents, is touch through massaging our elders. In India where Ayurveda co-arose from the sister science of yoga, yoga is the path of enlightenment and Ayurveda is the path of longevity. How do you keep the body healthy and strong? How do you optimize your constitution, your physiology, as you move through the cycles and the seasons of life? There is a practice that as a baby, parents massage the baby and as the child matures, the child massages themselves. The parents are then also responsible for massaging the elders and the elders help massage the babies. There is all this give and take of physical touch. Taking our own hands to heal ourselves and using our hands to heal others. Often we want to help people out of pain and simply just doing a head massage will help. You don't have to have a special degree to rub someone's head. Take

108 someone's hand and just massage their hand with your hand or pick up someone's foot and wash their feet and massage their feet with your hands. These are very simple practices that transmute so much love and so much care. This can really help the elderly person to get back into their own skin, feel grounded in their own feet, and to feel the kind of love that we all want to feel. 2.4 Yoga to Balance Your Doshas What do we want from our personal practice? If we take a long term perspective of our practices: yoga, meditation, diet and lifestyle, kitchen sadana, and even our broad trajectory, what we want to see is that there is pulsation and spanda. There should be this dynamic change happening. What we don't want to do is to fall into a rut where everything we do looks the same day in and day out. When that happens it means that there is stagnation. We are less tapped into our desire, less aware of what we want. Often we have a judgment around what we are doing or how our practice should look like. For instance, telling ourselves we should practice yoga for an hour everyday. We will push this and force ourselves to get it done. When this happens, we push through it without inspiration, and after a little while find ourselves even more uninspired. Ask yourself "What do I want from my practice today?" Write this question on a sticky note and stick it to the end of your yoga mat.

109 Listen to this question and allow yourself to not know. Even if you think you already know, take a moment to really tap into your own wisdom, you might get a different answer. Break it down with these questions: What do I need from my practice today? What does my mind need? What does my body need? What do we need in terms of direction? Where are we heading in life? If we come to our mat, we check in, we breath, we scan our consciousness from root to crown, then we will notice how our body feels, what our mind feels like and how much energy we have today. Even though our mind is telling us to get moving, our body might not feel the same way. You might find that your body is tired. When we start to have a "muscle our way through it" attitude, then we aren't listening. When we do this scan and we find that our trajectory is that we have been working too hard physically, making us tired, but our mind is telling us that today is the day to do a hard work out, than we need to adjust our practice in order to become much more in alignment with who we really are. Listen. Check in. What we want from our practice today, might change over time. Fourteen years into my yoga practice, I am not a level 3 yogi. It has never been an aim of mine. I have been more of one who wants to shift perspective on a more intellectual side of the yogic path. Coming to the yoga

110 mat has always been a focus of mine. What I do changes, so I don't always do asana. Sometimes I do something to do with weights. Sometimes I do something more attuned to tactical bodyweight training or high intensity interval training. Sometimes after I go for a long hour swim in the ocean I just stretch it out for a few minutes. After a while of using the mat, the actual physical mat as a place to check in, starts to become a sanctuary. For many of us our mats are a place to work out and they are also a place to check in. It is important to realize this differential. If we are just using our mat to work out, as a place to check out, or as a sanctuary, we aren't using it to it's full potential. All of these ways of using the yoga mat are important, and we need all of them at different times. Mix up your breath body practices, because chances are if you could be opening up your perspective by varying what you do. Taking a break from your yoga practice, or taking a break from your cycle of yoga where your practices look the same, and do a deeper yoga. Break out of the balance from what is familiar. Start to experiment with different types of movement. What you might find is that it starts to extend and break down the boundaries. It opens up the repertoire. Ojas, Tejas, and Prana as a Gateway to Refined Practice Prana is the subtle form of Vata. It is refined Vata or wind energy. Tejas is the subtle energy of Pitta. Pitta is the energy of focus. The subtle energy of focus is Tejas, and Tejas is insight. Ojas is the subtle energy or the subtle refinement of Kapha. Kapha is the energy of repair. Ojas is the equivalent to the immune system.

111 These are really great themes to help us figure out what we need from our practice. What do I need from my mat today? Do I need insight? Do I need to build my immune system? Do I need to move my life force energy Do I need one of these more than the others, and which is it? If I need to build my immune system, I need to build a practice that is more Kapha in nature. It will be more earthy and watery. This will instantly point to using your mat more like a sanctuary. Using your mat to check in, and to build a deeper energy. If we are using our practice for more of an insight, to figure out which direction to take our life. We want to have a practice that activates the energy of Pitta, and that activates the energy of fire, that gives us focus. To increase our Tejas we might use our mat as a place to work out, and choose poses that direct energy. Bringing our hands together and balancing are great ways to direct energy and directing our attention. This kind of practice will increase our Tejas, it will increase our insight. If what I need from my practice is simply life force energy, the focus will be on breath. It s not to say that other practices might not build Prana, it's just that building Prana might not be their focus. What we find from the practice that is focused on Prana is that we feel energized from the inside out if we have truly been paying

112 attention. That pace of the workout might also be a sanctuary, often it is a mix of the two, where we find that we need to bow to the life force energy and to not control it or just workout and push the body. We are trying to let the body feed off of Prana to refuel itself. Yoga Practices for Vata, Pitta, and Kapha Depending on the season, time of day, stage of life, and constitution, we come to the mat with different energies. Vata reducing practices are great if we are traveling, under stress, have had trauma, or if we've had loss. We would be experiencing more change, more space, and more movement within that space. It could also be that we are in the Vata space because it is the Vata season, so we might want to come to our mat to decrease that Vata energy. Remember that Vata resides in the colon. A standing forward fold reduces Vata by compressing the colon to let out excess air. Simply by folding ourselves in half, the warmth of the third chakra starts to compress against the upper legs, and in that insulation, there is a warmth, there is a groundedness and we tend to feel a little more safe, a bit more protected. There are several positive effects of the Vata reducing practice. Often a person might release a lot of gas or a lot of fecal matter. That energy that was stuck and has now been released. The intention is going to go downward. With Vata intensive practices we want our gaze to look down, we want to move our energy down, we want to pulsate, and we want to allow ourselves to feel the earth beneath our feet. Forward bends, standing poses, seated forward bends, and hip openers are all good choices. Poses like pigeon where we are bowed forward over our front leg start

113 to allow the hips to open and the pelvis to spread. The energy is then able to go from crown to root which is really grounding and balancing to Vata. On the opposite side of the spectrum we have Kapha reducing practices. Kapha is naturally grounded, so we will want to move energy up to reduce Kapha. Kapha reducing practice might look like a lot of sun salutations, where we are moving quickly. We might even kick up into a handstand at the wall. A more advanced practitioner, might go from handstand into a forearm balance. Add in some backbends to relieve congestion in the lungs and to build heat. Repeating these sequences a few times helps to build that energy, to bring the energy upward. We might also do standing poses that are a little more Rajasic. By going upside down and bending backwards, it opens the lung tissues up, it starts to open the pathways up so that the person can breath and not feel so weighted down. This practice has tipped the energy upside down, worked this person out, and bent their energy another way. Kapha accumulates in the lungs and it is heavy. After a Kapha practice a person will feel energized, alert and vibrant. Pitta is heat and it gets focused. It goes up, inwards, and deep. The kind of practice that we want for Pitta is one that will diffuse the energy away from the center. Pitta accumulates in the small intestine and it is a part of the liver, the gall bladder, and the bile ducts. There is a lot of heat, a lot of bile, and a lot of intensity in Pitta. Its energy takes the shape of an upward pointing arrow. Using that as a mental picture, in a Pitta reducing practice we want our energy to go downward and outward. How we do that is to tune into the breath in a grounding way that diffuses the mind. The mind then doesn t have to think. It can latch onto the breath, it is no longer leading. That s a very important

114 attitude shift for Pitta, it s the attitude of surrender. Slow movements that stretch the torso will start to open the area around the small intestine. For example sun salutations or some standing poses done slowly and with less intensity. Pittas usually hate this, because they like to go fast and get fired up. Lying on your belly in poses such as cobra, superman, or any kind of forearm stability poses will stimulate the section around the gall bladder. Do it in a grounding and spacious way where you are simply opening this area of the body, so that energy can start to move out. Pigeon pose, hip openers and forward bends are all similarly diffusing to Pitta. 2.5 Yoga + Energy Let s take a look at doshas and the gunas in the most basic ways with yoga and alignment on the mat. We have talked a little bit about the downward flow of energy. I want to represent that with a downward facing triangle. We have also talked about kundalini rising. I want to represent that with an upward facing triangle. What we are left with is a six pointed star. This symbol represents the A shape that is part of the human psyche part of our mythological context with shapes in history. What we have here is the energy of down and the energy of up. If we make this into a human being, we have the head and we have the tail. We have the shoulders and we have the hips. The legs and arms protrude from the upper and lower extensions, but the main energy centers are the four corners of the torso, the crown and the root. How is that helpful? It gives us a lot of context. So just hold that image in your mind as we start to look at that on the mat. Energy should be flowing both down and up in order for us to really do yoga.

115 What is yoga? It means to yoke. To yoke means to pull with a yoke around the oxen pulling the plow in order to plow the field. It's all about connection or union. Union of spirit and matter, union of God and you, of the spiritual and the physical, and of your individual consciousness with unity consciousness. There are all of these unions that start with yoga. It's all about connection and hooking things up. So, if there is too much energy flowing down and not enough flowing up, or vice versa, then we do not have yoga. What does this look like in class? If you have a yoga student who comes into class and is hyper and all over the place, then that's more energy going up. If they come into class sort of ho-hum, then that s more energy going down. In yoga we tend to become grounded and inspired or both. We start to get much more embodied. We get strong and we get flexible. That's what yoga is all about. We have the six pointed star, and we have these directional energies. Apana Vayu - Downward Flow Prana Vayu - Upward Flow These two energies are what we want to balance. That s why we often warm up with Sun Salutations. You are inhaling and exhaling the pulsation of the upward and the downward flow. When we see what is happening behind the scenes of yoga, we get much more clued into what is happening at the four corners of our 6 pointed star. We have the two shoulders and we have the two hips. The shoulders are where the humorous bone connects into the

116 torso. The hips are where the femur bones connect into the hip sockets. We want to open these. These are like four gateways, and as they open the center can expand. The center line is the Sushumna Nadi, the main energetic channel. All the chakras are in there and a lot of cool stuff happens. As we open the shoulders, it allows the up and down of that channel to flow. We try to get full mobility, full capacity in there, to build more expansion for the center. For instance, if you are doing a lot of backbends in yoga, and you are getting lower back pain, and your hips are opening more and more, but it is not helping, look in the other direction. Open your shoulders more, because if your shoulders are closed, you'll feel it in your back. If there are problems in the lower body, like menstrual cramping, constipation, or even massive issues with hip joints disintegrating, we can see locally that there are issues here. We can start to fix that by doing the opposite. If the problems are in the chest and there is congestion in the lungs, the first thing we are going to want to do is to open the shoulders and the upper body. What we are also wanting to do is to open the lower gateways so that energy can also go down. We also might see issues of the upper body and issues of the heart. The person feels heart pain or pressure around their heart, which might indicate issues in the hip area or the other lower parts of the body. Look at correlating factors that create stuck energy in the body to help get back into the natural release of up and downward flows.

117 2.6 How to Heal; Sanctuary We've looked at how energy works and how our bodies operate. As well as the laws that influence our bodies, like the law of gravity - where we have a north and south pole and that first downward flow. We've also looked a little bit at the law of increase. If we have a doshic pattern, for instance, if our vata is out of balance, it will tend to keep going out of balance due to the compounding effect. We ve looked about this in terms of samskaras and the daily routine as we cycle around day after day after day. Whatever imbalance we have, let's say we have an imbalance in pitta, will become exacerbated and will start to go more in the direction of imbalance and come out of sync in our circular rotation. If we start to skip our midday meal and go out of balance, we ll start building up excess pitta in our constitution. We ll start to bring ourselves away from center. Let's look at this in terms of the law of the increase in pitta. So we have spanda and the law of increase. In Ayurveda, the law of increase is simply that like increases like and the opposites reduce each other. Hot will bring down cold. Soft will bring down sharp. Mobile will bring down stable. Stable will bring down mobile. The opposites are going to have a neutralizing effect on each other. The same sharp will increase sharp is going to have an aggravating effect. Now, let's talk about this in terms of how to heal. If we see that there's a nature of imbalance in pitta or maybe it s an imbalance in vata or kapha, we need to find our way back to center. Find our way back to rhythm and wholeness. To do this, we need to look at how like increased like. How did we go out of balance? Often what happens, when we look at the natural pulsation of culture right now, is that the spanda and the spectrum of pulsation, the spectrum of our energy, will tend to go more

118 out than it will go in. Our energy will be pulled out instead of being both pulled in and out. That may look like a lot of energy going out for work, but not a lot of energy coming back in for play. If we ve forgotten how to play, we are going to be out of balance. What happens over time with this imbalance is depletion. We start to lose our connection with joy, and with spirit. We lose our connection with our intuition and ourselves. We start to feel frazzled, worn out, and disconnected. And, because of the law of increase, we might develop addictions. We might find that we need a glass of wine to wind down at the end of the day. We need a cup of coffee to get started in the middle of the day. We need some sweet treats to reward ourselves for all the hard work we are doing. We start to develop habits that increase the imbalance themselves. Creating a Healing Space What we need to do is learn how to create a healing space. We all want to have a sanctuary before we need it. What I have found in coaching many students and clients over time is that some people have a sanctuary and some people don't. Some people have a belief that they don't have room or a need for a sanctuary. We want to have a place to go that we can bring our energy into center. Altars Many people have an altar in their home, if they come from a spiritual background. If you are a regular yoga practitioner, you may have a place where you come to your mat and you use your mat as a space to check in with yourself. Others will have a place where they sit on their meditation cushion. The idea here is that you want to have a sanctuary. You want to have a physical space where you can go to check in with yourself.

119 On the yogic path, on the path of awake living, we need a physical place for us to build in energy. We need a place that allows us to start to build and reflect the energies that we want to cultivate in ourselves. Then, if we have an experience where our energy is going out too much and its not coming in enough, we now have a place where we can go to check in. Where we can tap in, do a body scan, relax, and connect. All of that starts the path of healing. There are a few other practices I want to explore besides having an altar. Practices that will provide a place go when things get rough. We want to have identified a place and be using it before we need it. Purge When we look at how to heal, one of the biggest factors is having a healing environment. There's a teaching that comes from behavioral science on architecting your choices. You want to architect the choices that you want to be making. Let takes for an example, you're noticing there is a lot of clutter in your atmosphere. There's too much stuff around. You notice you don't feel relaxed at home. I would suggest you do a big purge of the house. Use something like the book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and actually go through every physical object in your space. You start with your clothes then move on to your books, then your paper, then your kimono, which is basically everything else. Then you go into your into your memorabilia. You systematically go through every physical thing in your life and decide if it something that sparks joy. Is it something that is part of my evolutionary path? Or am you just done with this. You actually create an environment where everything is on vibration with who you want to be now and the direction that you are going. It is so important that we create an environment in which we

120 can architect our better choices. If there's stuff in our environment that's vibrating more at one of the more outdated versions of ourselves, it's going to pull us back. We are going to feel less inspired, less connected. And, we are simply going to make choices that are more part of our old outdated pattern than our part of the new alive pattern that we want to reinforce, step into and compound into where we go in the future. What this might look like is that we actually do find room in our house to have an altar or to put our mat or have a cushion. We refresh our altar with things that are deeply meaningful to us right now in this phase of life that we are in. Things that are reminding us of that which we want to reinforce in our life. Of the new identity that we are stepping into and the new habits that we are strengthening around our identity. Self Massage If we look at some other practices in terms of things that will help us heal and what to do with time when we have time and space to heal, we want to practice self massage. Not just rubbing oil on your skin for a few minutes a day, but for 15 minutes a day. Using your hands to connect to yourself and to notice what feels good. Maybe learning a few of acupressure points and learning where on your body it feels good to apply a little pressure and make a few small circles. Learning what essential oils resonate with you right now. Which ones resonate with the different energy centers or chakras in your body or with the different energy points or acupressure points in your system. Using your hands to heal and taking time to do longer self massage is very helpful. Spanda and Depletion There is a common pattern that I have seen in working with

121 clients: the individual is so energetically out, all her energy has been going out that she develops an autoimmune disease because there wasn t enough pulsation. If we remember, the spanda is like spandex. The amount of energy that goes out has to be equal and opposite to the energy that goes in. If we don't and we have more energy going out and not enough energy going in, we start to become depleted. With this pattern, you can become very depleted. And, usually what happens after that is there's a crash. Usually there's a lot of excitement. It's like a panic high - energy goes up, up, up. And then it crashes and you can't get the energy back up again. And you are way down. And you want everything to return to normal, but it can't because you re depleted. This can manifest in various different ways: chronic fatigue, multiple sclerosis, adrenal fatigue, thyroid disfunction. Usually an imbalance shows up diagnostically in the somewhere in the endocrine system. Or a person may simply feel out of sorts. This can also happen with deep emotional trauma. It can happen through divorce. It can happen with death or loss. All of a sudden we are catapulted to a place where we are in the low of the low. Our modern culture is very extroverted and is very externalized. There's this sense that we should always be upbeat and always be happy and ready to go. And there is this idea that this is what health is. But it's really not. That's only part of the picture. The other part is that there are times when we really need to go inward. There are times when we need to let go of needing to be anyone for anyone else. Times when we need to let go of the smiley happy face and do some deep healing within. I've often seen women that are postpartum that didn't get the kind of care they needed. They didn't take good enough care of themselves. They didn't have enough support and they end up not being able to take very good care of themselves or their baby. They end up

122 needing to do this healing at a time when they also need to support their baby. The consequences can be really quite stark. We want to pay attention to these cycles. How to Heal: The story of Inanna and Ereshkigal Let's talk about what happens in the low of the low. This is a time when we want to really know how to heal. And, if we are in that lower energy and it feels like a lower vibration of healing, we want to know how to tap into and release into it. We want to know how to find the good, find the joy of bringing ourselves back together - to integrating or restitching the parts of ourselves. I want to tell the story of Inanna and Ereshkigal. I read about this story in the book The Descent to the Goddess. It s a Greek goddess story, but there are elements of it that come from various cultures over time. Inanna is on her throne up in heaven. She has a beautiful crown. She is bedecked with jewels. One day, she gets a call from the underworld where her sister, Ereshkigal, lives. The underworld is in the bowels of the earth, in hell. Inanna learns that Ereshkigal has just lost her husband. Now, Inanna has to descend down to hell in order to honor her sister in mourning. The underworld is not very extroverted. It isn t shiny and bright or full of crowns and jewels. It is a very deep inner place. And there are rules governing the descent into the underworld. In order to descend down, Inanna must remove her crown. She has to leave her throne and remove her crown and jewels. And, as she goes from the gateway between heaven and earth, she has to start to disrobe. She has to let go of all her outer garb. As she continues her descent through all the different layers of the earth, she has to let go of her flesh. She has to give up

123 her body parts and her musculature. By the time she actually makes it down into the deep inner bowels of the life force, down to Ereshkigal, Inanna is nothing. She has literally dissolved. She has no identity, nothing that's connected to this goddess. She is just her own essential nature. And Ereshkigal picks up Inanna and literally impales her over a spike - and that is her warm welcome from her sister who s in deep mourning. There are a lot of elements to this story. What's beautiful about it is it talks a lot about the feminine in the descent and the unwinding. This is what the energy of healing is all about. It's not shiny or happy. It's not extroverted. There are ugly phases of it. It's deep and gory. By the time Inanna gets down there, she's in the skin and blood and bones and there's just not much left of her physical body. She needs to remake herself again to ascend back to heaven. And when she does, she is made anew. She knows her own inner core strength in a way in which she had no idea before she made the descent and before she reinvented herself. The reason I tell that story is twofold. First, The Descent to the Goddess is a great book and it's a great story. There's another book, Finding the Goddess Within, that tells the same story in greater detail. Second, and more importantly, it's very important to know that mythology comes from our psyche. This idea of having these times where we dip down and go through a deep healing process, that is part of life. There is nothing wrong with needing time to heal. Healing Diet The healing diet looks very different than the festive celebratory diet. It is a liquid diet. It's mostly broths. If you eat meat, it's bone broths. If you don't eat meat, it's root vegetable broths and broths that have some stocks, leaves and spices in it. We want know that we have the basic tools to bring our

124 system down to zero. How do we return to zero, to the very slow healing vibration? A liquid diet will help. To return to zero we need to bring our senses inward and of the shiny, flashy world. We need to let go of external engagements and scheduling. We need to temporarily let go of friendships while we just return all of our energy to center. We return to our mat where we check in and do body scans. We do a lot of very slow restorative yoga practices. We make time for incorporating corpse pose where we actually practice letting of the body and dying, practice entering deep stillness and bring awareness to the center. These are the practices of healing. Every detoxification cycle I teach in the yogidetox, we do a little mini version of this of checking in and letting go. What happens on the other end is that we emerge. And, we emerge anew, more deeply aligned and more deeply empowered. Subtle Energy Healing Practices There are other practices that will benefit you during healing times: self-massage, self-reiki, yoga nidra. These subtle energy practices will help you grow a deeper, more intrinsic and integrated energy. My hope is that in this course on Ayurveda for Yogis, on awake living, we are learning a bit about the most basic ways to understand how energy works, how the daily rhythm works, how to attune, how to heal, how to have a more inter generational life perspective, how to more deeply nourish ourselves, how to more deeply nourish others, and how to be in right relationship with our own life. Disease and the Doshas When we look at healing, we also need to look at disease. I want take a brief look at the disease process and describe it so that we have a deeper understanding of the doshas.

125 Think of the doshas as a bucket. Regardless of our constitution, when we bring in energy, we bring in life force energy and all of our experiences - and all that goes into the bucket. All of our day to day and what we do, goes in the bucket. Let s say I'm a pitta type person and I have pitta type imbalances: overly focused, pushing the envelope, burning the candle at both ends. What happens is pitta will start to build up in the bucket. And, if I do this day after day, year after year, season after season, slight imbalances start to happen. I may have loose stools or hyperacidity. Then I may develop psoriasis. Then I might develop some other disorders. What happens over time is that the bucket gets so full it starts to overflow. And, as it overflows, the doshas start to leave the digestive tract and flow more in the bloodstream of the body. Now the imbalances are moving deeper. And, as the imbalances move deeper, and we keep doing the same behaviors. We keep pushing the envelope and burning the candle at both ends. What happens next is the doshas look for a place to land. They look for a weak area of the body. And let s say that the thyroid gland is weak. Excess pitta starts to go to the thyroid gland and plants a seed. Now the body has a place to start dumping the excess pitta and pitta starts to build up. It starts to create qualitative changes in the fabric of that tissue. So now the thyroid tissue itself starts to develop a pitta imbalance. We start to see inflammation and destruction of that tissue. Over time, if we don't change our diet and lifestyle, if we don't get the kind of healing that we need, that seed starts to grow a tree. This is the tree of disease in ayurveda. If we keep doing this we could end up with need to get our thyroid removed or being on synthroid for the rest of our life. And, those would be the fruits of the disease. What I want you to see here is that the doshas vata, pitta,

126 kapha are not only the energies of the life force, they are also the energies of disease. If they build up in wrong relationship to each other and we have lots of little signs and symptoms of this along the way we get this full manifest disease process. If we start to witness that we are slightly out of balance, we need to look at what we can shift in our daily routine to bring us back into balance. What that starts to do is erase the disease. It starts to unwind the doshas. We can erase the tree of disease if we are not in it too far. And, we can start to empty our bucket and a live a life in alignment. That's really what Ayurveda is about. It's the science of life. It's the science of living in rhythm of living an awake life, of living in sync and alignment with the life force energy of learning and growing as we age. It s being an interconnected part of the inner generational life process from preconception all the way through death, and helping others on this journey in this experience.

127 3.1 What is Health? Part 1 Learning Ayurveda is learning about a whole new perspective and language than what we were raised with. It s a new way of seeing things. We look at our physiology in a new perspective, from an eastern viewpoint, and examine who we are. East v. West Perspective Western Perspective: Objective Logical, rational Study of matter Study of cadaver, death, and the physical body Data analysis, measurable numbers Pulse reading - a numerical set of information Eastern Perspective: Subjective Intuitive Study of energy Study of myself, all parts of my being and what makes me alive Dynamic Pulse reading - an intuitive reading with insights. In Ayurveda we are awakened to the flow of energy. We are energy, before we are matter. Energy moves from subtle to gross, and has an effect on our health. An awareness of our subtle body anatomy and the mind- body connection is part of the eastern perspective.

128 One perspective is not better than the other. There is not a hierarchy or judgement. We are just noticing the differences. What is health? We are not just matter. We are spirit. We have 5 Koshas, layers, or sheaths. We have a physical sheath, an energetic sheath, a mental sheath, an intuitive or higher intelligence sheath, and a bliss sheath. Our health is based on all five bodies being healthy and connected. It is a multi dimensional approach. Where are your weak spots? What areas or what layer of yourself can you be more aware of and work with? Doshas Vata / Pitta / Kapha Balanced doshas create health. How are your doshas in balance? Any dosha can build up and become excessive. Karma = cause + effect Our choices and actions can increase certain doshas and we can notice gunas (qualities) as symptoms. There is no judgement in karma. It is simply noticing the effect of our choices and actions. Symptoms, the result of excess doshas, can show up in different bodily tissues, especially where we have weakness. The quality of the excess dosha flows to a weak point in the body. Weakness can be inherited, and part of our ancestral lineage. It can be a historical weakness based on an experience you may have had as a child or earlier in life. How can it not be so? What energies are causing the reality? And how can we change? We look at the doshas, the symptoms, and our patterns to create greater health and balance.

129 Vata Element: wind Gunas: dry, light, mobile, rough, cold, unstable Symptoms: scattered thought patterns toward the negative, pain, dryness in the body, feeling cold, hair falling out, restlessness, fear or worry Causes: Vata aggravating lifestyle- no schedule, not eating on time, not sleeping on time, not sleeping well. Not nourishing ourselves well. Being hyper stimulated. Creates instability for the body and mind. Instability linked to the force of vata. Pitta Element: Fire Gunas: Hot, sharp, oily, spreading Symptoms: excess heat in the blood or liver, skin rashes, hyperacidity, sore throat, loss of voice, redness in eyes. Causes: Pitta aggravating lifestyle: hot, spicy intense food, drinking wine or liquor, staying up past 10 pm, working late, intense focus and overworking, black tea or coffee, acidic or non alkaline diet, excess stress causing acidity. Kapha Element: water and earth Gunas: wet, heavy, stable, flowing Symptoms: congestion, clogged sinuses, heavy or slimy

130 mucous, feeling dull or blah, uninspired, lack of spark. Causes: Kapha aggravating lifestyle: Heavy, rich foods, excess dairy, eating late dinners, overeating, sedentary lifestyle, lack of exercise routine. Agni Agni means our digestive fire. It is the feeling of hunger. The base of the word ignite comes from agni. The attributes of agni are hot, light and sharp. It is similar to pitta. The job of agni is transformation. It changes food into energy and matter, our bodily tissues. There are many locations and forms of agni, with the biggest one being at the base of the stomach in the main digestive tract. This is called jathara agni, and our main focus. Other agnis include cellular agni (existing in each individual cell), elemental agni (in each of the five elements), tissue agni (in all seven tissue layers of the body - plasma, blood, muscle, fat, bone, nervous system and reproductive tissue.) 4 Types of Agni Sama Agni - Balanced Agni Sama agni is to have balanced, healthy digestion. It means no bloating, gas, heartburn or constipation. The food enters the mouth, flows through the body, creates energy, we form healthy bodily tissues, the waste forms well and moves out. It is very efficient and no energy is wasted.

131 Vishama Agni - Vata Agni Vishama agni is irregular. The wind from vata makes it scattered and weak. Like a small, weak fire, adding fuel creates smoke and excess waste. Fuel isn t burned properly. Solutions: eat on a regular schedule and create regularity. Eat with the natural daily rhythm. Stoke the fire. Use spices. Spice blend -- CCF = Cumin + Coriander + Fennel. Use equal parts of each spice, ground. Add one teaspoon to ½ cup water and drink 20 minutes before mealtime. Tikshna Agni - Pitta Agni Tikshna agni is sharp and intense. It s too strong, and blazes up quickly and easily. People with teekshna agni experience hangry - feeling angry when they are hungry. It creates IBS, diarrhea, loose stools and causes malabsorption. Food moving too quickly through the digestive tract and not being properly digested prevents the nutrients from being absorbed. Hypo or hyperglycemia are also caused. Solutions: Take out pitta aggravating foods and spices, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, red meat, and too much acidity. Reduce stress and acidity. Create healthy balanced meals with a good proportion of healthy fats, vegetables, and protein. Eat three well balanced meals a day in a relaxed and present manner with an easeful mindest. Manda Agni - Kapha Agni Manda agni is weak, wet and heavy like kapha. It is soggy and damp. The lining of the stomach can get bogged

132 down with excess water. More mucous and phlegm is created. The tongue might have a coating or appear white. Solutions: Add more spices to the diet. Make a digestive choorna (spice mixture) such as the CCF (cumin, coriander and fennel) and add ginger. Adding spices helps heat up the kapha and allow the water to flow out of the body. You might see sweat pour out of their armpits, water flow out of their eyes, snot flow from their nose. This releases the excess kapha and manda agni can shift to sama agni. What is health? Balanced doshas and balanced agni is an important part of health that we have talked about so far. The allopathic definition of health is based more on the absence of disease. Ayurvedic definition is similar but elaborated on. In Ayurveda, health is having a diet and lifestyle in sync with nature s rhythms, doshas in synch with nature and each dosha (vata, pitta, kapha) are balanced without excess. Agni, the digestive fire is also in a balanced state. One very important function of agni is to create good bodily tissues. Dhatus Dhatus are bodily tissues, of which there are seven layers. These seven tissues are: plasma, red blood cells, muscle tissue, fat tissue, bone tissue, bone marrow (nerve tissue) and reproductive fluid. The seven layers have to be healthy and formed well.

133 We can also have an excess or deficiency of a tissue. What if we have excess fat tissue? The quality of the tissue is also important. When we look at osteoporosis we are looking at the quality of the bone. Ayurveda also states there is a trickle down effect. When there are issues in the lymph fluid, it will affect the other remaining tissues. When we see the issues early on, we can take action and nip it in the bud to prevent problems down the road, and erase the disease pattern. At what level of tissues do my issues arise? This can give a lot of insight. Example: We have a lot of anxiety and our nerves feel that they are in tatters. We can look back and say we have some work to do, to undo the build up of the dosha that is causing the issue at the level of bodily tissue. What is health? Seven layers of tissues that are well formed, that are efficiently formed, strong, and in right relationship with the physiology. When this happens, the subtle energy of kapha, ojas, builds. In allopathic medicine, this is the equivalent of a healthy and strong immune system or immune integrity. Ojas is a reflection of the seven layers of tissues being integrated. It is a reflection of balanced agni, and a healthy balance of doshas.

134 Malas Malas are the waste products of the body. Even our waste we produce has a purpose! The three main malas are feces, urine, and sweat. The fourth mala is menses or menstrual fluid. Feces - It is important to have a full evacuation of the transcending and descending colon, 18 inches of feces, every morning. Urine - Urine should not have a strong smell. It should have a slightly sweet smell and the color of straw. Not too bright, and not clear. There should also be a descent amount. Sweat - Sweat shouldn t smell too sour or have a very strong odor to it. Overly sour or strong body odor is a sign of excess pitta. Not sweating is also a sign of imbalance. Sweating can be used as a therapy to reduce pitta and kapha. Menses - Menstrual fluid serves a function as a waste of the tissues. It clears out the blood and allows the immune system to release anything that isn t wanted by the body. Our doshas can also be seen in the menstrual fluid. vata: scanty, small amount of fluid that is brownish or maroon. pitta: very bright red color, a lot of blood loss, can almost be like hemorrhaging kapha: mucous in the menses, profuse and very watery. Looking at our menstrual fluid helps us to notice how healthy we are. When there is a strong imbalance in the doshas, it

135 can be relieved or expelled with the menstrual fluid. When we don t experience an array of symptoms that show our imbalance, the monthly cycle can be an easeful experience with heightened intuition. Each monthly cycle is an opportunity to reflect on the way we were living for the past month. We can ask ourselves: what were my past choices and how was my lifestyle? These daily choices correlate to our monthly menses and any symptoms or lack of symptoms we might experience. 3.2 What is Health? Part 2 When the Doshas, Agni, Dhatus and the Malas are all functioning, we know our bodily processes are working well. When this is the case, we are eating well, pooping well and we have waste coming out and nutrients coming in. We have balance but our experience of balance is always dynamic. Another aspect to health is health experienced through the senses and this is linked to the three main causes of disease from an Ayurvedic perspective. 3 main causes of disease from an Ayurvedic perspective: Pragyaparada. The formal definition of this concept is a failure of the intellect. It is possibly more helpful to think of it as a failure to learn from experience. For example if you fail to avoid foodstuffs which have given you joint pain in the past you are failing to learn from experience.

136 Failure to pay attention to the senses. Hearing. If you attune with someone who is pleasant, observe what is in the field of resonance and notice what you are attracted to, this is all to do with hearing as connectivity and is based on vibration. Touch. We experience touch through the skin. So wearing polyester or manmade fibres will feel unnatural next to the skin. Seeing. We are bombarded with visual stimulation and we must know how and when to understand when we are being overloaded. Tasting. Our tongues can discriminate. We know if something is too salty or sweet but often we ignore it. Smelling. If we smell food that is delicious we will get excited and vice versa. It s important to pay attention to the senses. When we ignore our senses or impulses we run into trouble. Parinama. Not being in right relationship with time. There is a lot that can accelerate disease in terms of not being in right relationship with time. For example eating foods out of season will make us feel out of sync. Historically humans have had periods of scarcity and abundance. Eating only what was available at that time. Much of our food is now eaten out of season and is grown in a monochrome culture or is a GMO foodstuff. This causes confusion in our physiology. Our body loses it s rhythm. We might find ourselves detoxing through movement e.g. yoga. but we might also find ourselves attracted to cleanses

137 which are mimicking a by gone era when there were periods of scarcity.tuning into this and learning from our yesterdays will help us prevent disease. V. Lad: Definition of health One who is established in health has properly balanced Doshas, balanced Agni, properly formed Dhatus and proper elimination of Malas or waste. Well functioning bodily process and whose mind soul and senses are full of bliss, is called a healthy person. Ayurveda considers health to be a state of prefect balance between Vatta Pitta and Kapha corresponding to to one s individual Prakruti, in a balance of the 7 tissues and three waste products. Health does not mean absence of defined disease. When Doshas, Dhatus and Malas are in proper functional relationship there is perfect balance of the body senses mind and consciousness there is clarity happiness joy peace and love. Good robust Agni allows the state of health to manifest and balanced Agni is also the outcome of balanced Doshas Dhatus and Malas. At a cellular level this translates as a perfect balance of Ojas Tejas and Prana and a predominance of Sattva in the mind. One s senses of well being reflects the inner state of health. Practically speaking the most important aspect is harmony between the Doshas which results from dealing with the physical and emotional aspects in one s life. Another aspect of a healthy body is attaining Sattva. With Yoga a practical experience of moving into the body starts to develop. A feeling of being at one with the body.

138 We start being at one with the physical body and then start to experience the subtle body anatomy. This happens as we begin to feel more inner connectedness and the effect of Karma. It s an experience of cause and effect. For example making the connection that when I eat this I feel this way. When I don t have a good bedtime routine I feel this way. When I hang out with this person I feel this way. Suddenly when we start to feel more inner connectedness we have control over how we age and we have synergy. The ancient wisdom of the Yoga Sutra teaches us more about this. The text sets out what happens on the path of paying attention and then refining how we use attention. It goes on to describe what happens when you have some grasp of the practices, what happens when you have refined, what you do with your attention. You become more capable and awake and live life at a different pace. You are more awake and more interconnected Doshas and Subtle Doshas As we balance the Doshas we build subtle Doshas and capacities. Prana is the subtle Dosha of Vata. It s a subtle energy of movement. Once you have it you must decide what to do with it. Will you spend it or save it? Perhaps the key is to spend it wisely. Tejas is the subtle Dosha of Pitta. It is focus and it gives us insight. We feed what we focus on. Our Tejas is like a fire and the fire burning is our focus. Of all the things we could attend

139 to we attend to one. The fire creates light and sight or insight. Tejas give us the light we want. Ojas is the subtle force of Kapha and it translates to immune integrity. It s the gel of consciousness. Ojas holds the energy and light. We build Ojas by attending to our daily rhythms. We don t have a chance unless we are in rhythm with nature. We run into problems if our subtle Doshas are not in balance and these problems are common. Our Prana may go up and Ojas goes down. If this happens we are likely to develop autoimmune issues which might in their early stages look like anxiety and digestive issues. When our Tejas rises we become very focused. If we are not simultaneously nourishing we will develop problems. We end up with a fire that will burn up Ojas and we see diseases of inflammation. If we don t have enough Prana,Tejas and Ojas goes high we are probably experiencing a poor quality Ojas. In this case we might see diseases like Depression or ones related to obesity. When we embrace diet and lifestyle changes we create a rise in Prana, Tejas and Ojas. We can handle more and do more. We want more Prana, we have more energy and clarity and we have more endurance.this is what we look for as Yogi s. It puts us in a position to have a much more positive impact.

140 3.3 Your Tongue Your tongue is able to tell you everything you need to know about the digestive tract! Just try swallowing and really noticing what happens next! If you let it, the tongue will help you decide what should come in, and what should stay out of the body. It s a simple spit or swallow test. The tongue will tell you what you need to know but you have to be able to listen. This process of listening is what is being developed on the Yogic Path. The power of discernment. As we progress on the Yogic path our needs change and our tongues signal the changes required; it s a process of detoxification. So how about reading your tongue! Our tongues should be healthy pink. If we look, our tongues will tell us what is going on in different parts of our body. Most of the charts are drawn mirror image i.e. as if you are already looking at your tongue in a mirror. The area down the middle of your tongue corresponds with the Sushumna or main energy channel in the body and also with our spine. The line runs from crown to root.

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142 What about some features? Look at the tongue. Do you see cracks? The area down the centre of the tongue corresponds with the spine. If you have a crack down the centre of the tongue either you have a problem with the spine or alternatively a disturbance in the emotions which move up and down the nervous system in the spine. If you see a crack towards the tip of your tongue this corresponds to the cervical spine and you may be experiencing problems there. You can also spot problems in your lung area which corresponds with the lobes at the front and sides of your tongue. Your heart is in the middle between lungs. The kidneys are on the lobes at the back of the tongue and the spleen and liver are below the kidney s on the left and right side respectively. tongue map - body thrive book.. What about the colour of your tongue? Is is red? No coating? You may have excess Pitta! Is your tongue dry and pale or brownish then you may have excess Vatta! What if it s more of a white colour possibly with a bit of mucus? In that case you may have excess Kapha! Other things which you might see!

143 Look out for white or yellowish goo which is essentially undigested food or Ama in the digestive tract. Ama is undigested food. It will show up as a coating on the tongue. If you see this you have toxins in the digestive tract. It could be that you are eating the wrong kinds of food for example foods out of season. Tell tale signs that you have Ama are feeling sluggish or having a hard time getting out of bed, if you have joint stiffness or stiffness on rising there is definitely Ama. Any malaise is also a tell tale sign of Ama. If left unchecked over time a build up of Ama will lead to massive problems. Ama will move into the bloodstream and problems such as Arteriosclerosis may develop. Ama is going to be affected by the Doshas. If mixed with Kapha is turns white. If mixed with Pitta it turns red or yellow or green and if you have a Vatta imbalance it will be more brown. Something else? Think you have teeth marks on your tongue? Well maybe but more likely what you are looking at is scalloped edge to your tongue which indicates malabsorption of nutrients. If that s the case, you need to get your cumin coriander and fennel seed mix on the go, twenty minutes before eating to get your absorption back on track. You might notice a tremor in your tongue. If you do this it indicates movement in the nervous system. Your fix is to look to calm the nervous system and combine with diet and lifestyle adjustments which will reduce Vatta.

144 Start looking at the tongues of people in your life. What is it telling you about them? Are there any warning signs. You can combine your own tongue observation with use of a tongue scraper. Take the time to notice what is going on. 3.4 Your Chakras Chakras mean wheels or energy centers. So much of why people get pulled in to yoga is because we start to want to know about our physiology. Who am I? What am I capable of? What can this life be like? How good can I feel in this body? We start to awaken to the idea that there is a lot of undiscovered territory within our own physiology. In mediation or at the end of yoga, there's this experiencing of waves of bliss, of some delight. Maybe we find that the more we practice yoga, the more we feel joy, connection, care, and love. And this love is not just for I-me-mine and my family. It s a love for the whole - for our fellow citizens, our planet, and maybe even the cosmos. We start to have these shifting waves of perception. Even our perception of who we are starts to get confused, and we start to see that we are all one. We start to have unity consciousness as part of our perspective. These things are very natural on this path of yoga. I love how Dr. Douglas Brooks explains the evolution of this experience - I'm not like you becomes I'm something like you which becomes I'm nothing but you. That's really the beginning of the opening of unity consciousness, where we start to see things from a very different perspective. What often happens is that we start to notice where our own centers of gravity are. We start to notice the subtle

145 patterning in our mind and emotions. And, usually through the practice of meditation, we start to awaken to how much is optional. In the practices with the physical body, diet, lifestyle, and rhythm we start to see how much pain, discomfort, suffering, and symptomatology is optional in the physical body. Whether it s bad skin or constipation, bloating or carrying an extra ten pounds, we start to wake up to exactly how much is optional and exactly what it's costing us to be akrama or out of rhythm. As part of this, we start to discover that there's this whole subtle body anatomy. We start to hear words that are enticing, like chakras. Chakras are wheels or centers of energy where energy goes from stagnant to kinetic to mobile to in dynamic pulsation. We've talked a bit about how energy works and about the first descent of energy on the nervous system. The nervous system spinal column and the spinal cord lies within the main channel. The chakras are in this system. This descent of energy is the natural flow of prana. It is the natural flow of vata downward. What we call apana vayu, the descent. Then on the yogic path, there is a desire to move the energy back up. This channel in which the energy is moving is called the sushumna. Sushumna is the main energy channel and it's often likened to a snake. We also covered two other energy channels the ida and the pingala the heating and cooling currents. The heating channel, like pitta, is the pingala. The cooling channel, like kapha, is the ida. These two channels crisscross, intersecting on the different energy centers. When we are doing our practices on the mat or on the meditation cushion, if you are doing breathing practice, what happens is that the

146 strong downward energy current starts to wake up. And as it is called in yoga, the kundalini starts to rise. In mythological teachings, kundalini is a snake at the base of the spine that wraps itself three and a half times around. The snake is asleep until we start doing the practices of yoga, which wakes the snake, and it starts to rise up, crisscrossing at the chakras. It starts to change the center of gravity, change our thoughts and emotions, and change the ways we make choices and take decisions. Let s look at these different points of intersection now that we have a foundational understanding of descending energy and the spiritual practices that make the energy rise and help it to wake up and integrate these different energy centers. First Chakra: Root Center Element: Earth; related to kapha on a vibrational level because of this element Location: Base of the pelvis; bottom of the perineum All of the different chakras relate to different endocrine glands. Root chakra is related to the adrenal gland the fight or flight. If an outsider comes into the tribe, we fight or, if we're going to lose, we flee. That is this primal energy center. If this is our relationship to life, we are living in root chakra. We are in fight or flight response. We're in a stress response to our own life. We have a root chakra imbalance because we're not grounded. We re not connected. We're not relaxed. If root chakra had a mantra it would be I am here, I

147 deserve to be here. If we are in a fight or flight response, we are all over the place. Where's home? Where do I deserve to be to make my nest? That feeling of I am here, I am rooted that's root chakra. If our adrenals are healthy, we are in a state of ease. We feel grounded. We know who our peeps are. We're inner connected there's a feeling of knowing ourselves, of knowing our tribe and being at home. This will even translate to being at home in ourselves. If we are at home in ourselves, feeling grounded with our nerves in a relaxation response, then things are A-Okay. And then stressful events can happen and we still know who we are. We are not thrown into a pattern of disintegration. This is root chakra. Second Chakra: Sacral Element: Location: Water Pelvis As kundalini rises, the second chakra is the sacral chakra. It's much more sensual. If you think of water, water likes to slosh. This energy center is based in desire. There's a feeling of tapping into life's pleasures. The second chakra s mantra would be I desire. If we are operating from second chakra, we might be chasing sensuality or chasing one desire after another. We might be really into sex or good food or pleasurable experiences. And, we might be really adverse to other aspects of life to work or mission driven aspects of life. We might be operating more in terms of personal desire. That's second chakra. The healthy side of it is, we are sensual beings. Sex, food, sleep these are pleasurable things. When we are in touch

148 with that pleasure, and not overdoing it we can be in a right relationship to experience incredible tasting food, the beauty in a day, the wonder of being alive. That s a good healthy relationship with second chakra. Third Chakra: Solar Plexus Element: Fire Location: Solar Plexus Third chakra is our power center. Its mantra would be - I do. I take action. I am powerful. It is personal power. If we are living from a place of personal empowerment, we are living from a third chakra relationship to life. Third chakra emotions, thoughts, vibrations are going to have a lot to do with who we am and what we do in the world and what we've accomplished. Fourth Chakra: Heart Element: Air Location: Heart Center The mantra for the fourth chakra is I love. I am love itself - not only am I here, not only am I sensual, not only am I gifted with this power to act and do, but I am also love. When we tap into it, we start to tap into a higher state of being. The lower three chakras have a lot more to do with the physical world and with survival. The fourth chakra opens into an entirely different dimension where we have care. And, we have care without needing the care to be reflected back. This care without needing care is very powerful.

149 If we are more in a codependent love relationship, that's probably got a lot more to do with second chakra, and we are probably living much more from a second chakra place. But if it s - I love and I don't need the love back - that's the sort of love that is possible. Many of us as parents have experienced this with our children where we can love them and we really don't need anything back. That sort of love is possible with anybody. Fifth Chakra: Throat Element: Ether Location: Throat Ether is space it expands and is vibrational. It s the sound of my voice. Fifth chakra is I express. There's a creative nature in here. I create. I have a voice and I can voice truth. It is very much connected to the heart. That the voice rises up and out from lower in the body. Fifth chakra is I speak truth. And, I'm connected to a higher insight and I give that insight voice. These are the five main chakras, and they correspond to the five elements. From an ayurvedic perspective, the five elements and chakras are diagnostic pathways. We have different therapies with each of the chakras that are related to the doshas and elements. As a yoga student, you should know a little bit about the chakras and how they are related to the elements and how they are related to different energy centers in the body and different emotional and thought patterns. With this knowledge, you can start to build a relationship with your

150 chakras, and, if you are practicing yoga, start to understand the subtle energies and shifts in perception and experience that will arise. If you want to take a deeper dive into the chakras, there's a great book by Anodea Judith called The Wheels of Life. I highly recommend any of Anodea Judith s books on the chakras. Sixth Chakra: Third Eye Element: Fire/Ether Location: Third eye; between the eyes Third eye is I see. It's I see as consciousness sees. There is really no I. This is a beautiful, subtle teaching of yoga. It's a beautiful thing to come to your mat and move from the backside of your body instead of initiating movement from the front. Third eye is situated internally, not externally, and slightly above and behind the two eyes. There's a name for this position - the cave of Brahma. Brahma is the divine, that which can truly see. From this cave of Brahma, we see out through the eyes. When we say I see, we need to drop the I. Drop the personality. The personality is in the front body. Straight consciousness is the back body, which is why on the mat we want to move from consciousness itself. When we see as if from behind our head, we see as consciousness is looking through us. We are consciousness seeing but we are not filtering it through our personality. That is what's being communicated at this energy center of third eye. The word clairvoyant is a beautiful French word that

151 describes what's happening at the level of third eye. Clear vision. I see clearly. Seventh Chakra: Crown Element: Beyond the elements Location: Crown of the head; pineal gland The seventh chakra is I co-create. I am connected. I am divine. This is all part of the experience of when the crown chakra is open. There is an experience of being divine in action without needing to take credit for anything. There is no need to have any sort of personality about it. We just show up as evolution in action for the good of all, fully connected as a spiritual being living in a body. That is the potential of an open crown chakra. You may have seen pictures by artist Alex Grey where there's a lot of energy that happens. It seems like energy is pouring up and out and energy is pouring in and down and through and the gateway is open. That's the seventh chakra experience of being fully connected, of co-creating with consciousness itself. So we have the three lower chakras and then the three higher chakras, which are much more about awakening. They are much more spirit and higher conscientiousness based. There are correlations between the lower and higher chakras: crown to root, third eye to sacral. The heart chakra is the bridge in the middle. With the chakras there are different inner sections and levels of complexity, but for right now we are just starting to notice the chakras. Some people are going to be living in the bottom three chakras, much more physically related. There's

152 no judgment on this, it just is. We'll just see it reflected in the belief system, habits and choices. Then there are some people, particularly in the yoga world, that are much more open in the upper chakras but have issues in the lower chakras. They may have lower back pain, constipation, bloating and other lower body issues because some of their physical survival needs haven't been addressed. There are shadow issues below. The chakras are another map, another context and way to start to see who you are, get some insight around who you want to be next, and even self diagnose. 3.5 Why Yogis Detox Let s talk about why Yoga students, their teachers, and in general, why yogis need to detox with relation to Ayurveda. One of the main reasons we detox is to get the gunk out of the trunk. By a seasonal detox, or biannual detox, we are able to take out our inner trash. The gunk or trash in this case is any buildup of the doshas and ama/toxins in the body, which can be physical, mental and emotional. The detox gives agni a space to burn, and air to fan the flames, allowing the build-up to incinerate/burn and move out of the bodily tissues. At the end of summer, you probably have a build-up of heat in your blood and liver. At the end of the fall you probably have a build-up of dryness in your lymph, colon and nerves. At the end of winter, you probably have a build-up of cold and stagnation in your lymph, lungs and fat. At the end of

153 spring, you probably have a build-up of damp and cool qualities in your lymph and stomach. When you use the change of seasons to dump off imbalanced doshas through a detox, you uplevel your health, stop disease and have a deeper connection with mind-body & soul. I ve led thousands of people through the Ayurvedic detoxes since I founded the Yogidetox in We usually detox twice a year, in spring and fall. October and April as a Global Community movement. The most predictable outcomes reported by Yogidetoxers are the release of excess weight, improvement of sleep, and the overall falling in love with one s life. On a yogic path we come to the mat and get an insight what yoga is and can see that the field of yoga is very big. We also get an inside of what Yoga Really Is when we see that the internal universe is as big as the external universe and we start to change and grow. The process of detox is a way of taking something out of our normal everyday lives and starting to shift some of our habits and patterns into alignment with who we want to be next. Within the world of detox you have choices fast or slow, intense or gentle, cooked or raw, whole foods or liquids, juices or soups. The basic idea is always the same. During a detox you simplify what you take in through your five senses. You purify and rest. As you emerge, you nourish and protect your new fondling state of clarity, serenity, and purity. We detox in Ayurveda by the body types of Vata, Pitta, Kapha.

154 We start by time-out taking all systems down to 0. We begin by simplifying our diet and our lifestyle. We may not want to socialize much, not do much, not have much of an appetite or not want much to eat at all. In Ayurveda, the detox is not much about kicking the doshas out, but just letting our digestive organs rest in a way that we sync into Nature s Rhythm. We are aiming to reset our digestive system, getting sama agni to get more efficient. We allow more space for spirit and for our body to get more clarity Vata Detox: Here our goal is find a deeper rhythm, find our center, harmony and balance. Feel nurtured, feel grounded, relaxed and loved. 1. Stick to a schedule 2. Feel grounded, natured 3. Build a sanctuary, a place of healing 4. Eat warming easy to digest foods like kitchari, warm soups, broths, stews, one pot meals 5. Do a daily massage 6. Sit in silence, journal, meditate, go for a walk in nature 7. Be stress-free 8. Gentle Yoga 9. Set your goals, 10. Avoid stress and anxiety and plan your meals ahead in the day. Pitta Detox: Our goal here is to release the intensity. Basically, Chill-Out and relax. We also want to be free of any chemical

155 sensitivity like caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, etc. 1. Have living liquids, soups, broths, smoothies, fresh juices, green fresh foods 2. Avoid hot spicy foods, alcohol, stress 3. Take a long relaxing walk instead of intense workouts 4. Relax, chill out 5. Restorative yoga Kapha Detox: Our goal is to release mass, lose weight, experience lightness, remove build-up of toxins/ ama, balance kapha, reduce mucus, coughs and colds 1. Spicy lemonade diet (master cleanse), living liquids, broths, and stews. Spice in foods 2. Avoid heavy foods, sedentary life style 3. Exercise, do more yoga It is so important to clean house once or twice a year. We build up all these toxins in our body from not only undigested food or ama, but by taking in all the chemicals & toxins from the environment and emotions and our life-style. As a yoga student, yoga is a way of living in enlightenment. When you emerge from a detox you feel smarter, lighter, clearer. You reset your digestion, your mind, your taste buds, your food prep habits, and your menu-ordering habits.

156 A Breath of Fresh Air Breathe through your nose for 20 minutes upon arising. You can do sun salutations, take a walk/jog, go for a bike ride, etc. Start each day with a meal of prana. Then, whenever you are struggling with the limitations imposed by the cleansing process, you can remember to simply go outside for a 5-30 minute walk and breath through your nose. This is the most simple form of pranayama or a breathing exercise

157 to clear the body and mind channels of stagnant energy. The channels that carry the breath, the life force, then will be able to transmit more energy on a cellular level, enabling a clearing of thoughts and emotions. Though simple, this is an essential and powerful technique when used regularly. Meditation Meditation is essential for cleansing. Begin and end your day with meditation. Even if it is brief, it is essential. Allowing yourself the opportunity to meditate for a few moments each hour, or at least 10 minutes every other hour will greatly enhance your cleansing experience. Whenever you feel overwhelmed or have intense cravings or emotions, take five minutes for deeper breathing and meditation. Sit formally for a half hour a day, preferably at the same time each day. Silence Increase the amount of time spent in silence in your precleanse. Your deep cleanse should be spent in silence as much as possible. If you are working, plan the silent days for when you have days off. Explain to the people you are living with your intention and ask for their support. During the cleanse, you are encouraged to move into silence whenever possible and appropriate. Silence also cleanses the mind, and reserves more energy for the body to remove toxins. In silence we have access to witness consciousness and the more subtle states with increased depth. Media & Socializing To enhance the ability of your mind to detox and your awareness to enjoy our naturally blissful undercurrent, take in fewer distractions through your eyes and ears. Limit conversations, TV, radio, movies, and web surfing, the

158 news, random reading, and other ways that you may ordinarily take in stimulus. Also, try to give yourself a week with less happening, less socializing. This will deepen your intuition and pleasure during cleansing. When cleansers feel over-scheduled it creates frustration. The mind and body don t release as deeply. Make Your Space Sacred Deep cleaning your living space and especially your kitchen is unfathomably beneficial to the cleansing and renewal process. If I m overwhelmed by the project, I hire help and we do it together. In your kitchen, donate what you haven t been using. Include food stuff and appliances. If you don t already have a meditation and yoga space in your house, now is the time to create one & begin using it daily. Naturally, you ll also feel an impulse to clear your kitchen, house and wardrobe of energetically-draining extra stuff.

159 Sample:

160 3.6 Spices as medicine On the path of the yogi, you often become much more aware of what you put in your body and its effect on what your body wants and what resonates. We become aware of the very simple solutions to small imbalances. Let s look at a simple natural approach to help address imbalances with spice. Imbalances fostered by each dosha Dosha Kapha Pitta Vata Qualities and Symptoms Coldness, Heaviness, Wetness, Mucous Sharpness, Heat, and Intensity, Acidity Mobility, Variability, Gas, Bloating These symptoms are caused from imbalances in the dosha. Often they don t seem like a big deal. We might brush them off or pop a pill, but as we become more sensitive, we ask how can I treat the symptom at the right causal level. Simultaneously we don t want to take things with known side effects. We don t want the potential toxicity of modern pharmaceuticals. So we aren t just going to turn to an antibiotic or pain pill. We might not even want to turn to an antacid which inhibits our body s abilities to maintain the right acid alkaline balance. We wake up to the fact that there are side effects from a lot of over the counter drugs we have been raised with, or pharmaceuticals we are currently taking. We might hit a

161 place where we discover we don t want to use these any more. We want to dig in and discover more effective remedies for simple imbalances. That is what this is about. In general, the spice cabinet is the medicine cabinet. Spices are the first real medicines for the yogi. We have been talking quite a bit about food. We know we want to have a much more intimate relationship with our food, our ecosystem and with where we are sourcing our food. Start to find out about that and get much more involved. We also want to understand how to use spices to correct these small imbalances that arise as part of living. So let s just look at how to do this in terms of some of the things that are naturally on your spice rack. What is on your spice rack? Here are some examples of what you might have. What is the relationship between the plant/spice and each dosha.

162 Spice as Medicine Decoder Spice Energy Vata Pitta Kapha Comments Dried Ginger Fennel Seeds Cumin Seeds Heating Balances Balances Balances Cooling Balances Balances Balances Heating Balances Increases Balances In excess can aggravate Pitta Brings energy down Cardamom Slightly Heating Increases Increases Balances Opens the heart Black Pepper Heating Balances Unbalances Increases Balances With honey powerful expectorant, caution high pitta Turmeric Heating Increases Increases Balances Antibiotic, antiviral, anti-inflammatory Raw caution can damage liver Cayenne Heating/ Drying Increases Increases Balances Heating and drying moves out kapha Digging into Spice Ginger Ginger is heating. In normal amounts, ginger increases agni without increasing pitta. How does this happen? Agni and Pitta are quite different. Agni is the power of digestion. Pitta is the force of heat. Ginger is a very interesting spice, because it increases the power of digestion without actually increasing pitta.

163 Ginger, in normal amounts, is VPK balancing, although in excess it will increase pitta. Ginger brings Kapha down and warms Vata up. If we have mucous from kapha, ginger is going to be great. Likewise, with bloating or gas from vata, again ginger is going to be great. Even with nausea and pitta, ginger is likely going to be okay. But because it increases agni slightly, we want to balance it with spices that are a little less heating in nature. Fennel Fennel has an interesting energetic. We have been looking at which way energy moves in the body throughout this course. We are learning that different spices and herbs can direct energy to move in different ways. Fennel has this really cool quality that makes energy go down. It increases downward flow. This is called apana vayu in Ayurveda. This can be great, and very useful. Say there is bloating, and you eat food and feel full, and the food almost seems to get stuck. I hear this from many people who have a lot of vata in their constitution. They eat food and it just gets stuck and their stomach gets distended. You often hear I feel like I am four months pregnant by the end of the day even though I haven t eaten very much. There is all this buildup of air creating hardness in the abdomen. The use of fennel sends energy down. It is balancing to vata, pitta and kapha. It is another one of these herbs that is great for everyone to add to their diet. At most Indian meals, or when you leave and Indian restaurant, they will give you a little bit of fennel seed and some sweet candy to chew and refresh your breath. The

164 fennel is also aiding the entire digestive process by helping the meal settle and go down. Recipe to add fennel to your own diet: Toasted Fennel Ingredients 1 cup fennel seeds 1 cast iron skillet 1 glass jar with lid 1 plate Instructions Measure seeds Pour into cast iron skillet Heat on medium to medium low until just fragrant. Do not burn. Remove from heat. Pour onto a plate to cool. When cooled add to a glass jar. Place jar on the table. Chew 1 tsp after meals to support digestion. Try this and notice how fennel enhances your digestion and absorption. Black Pepper Let s look at black pepper. Black pepper is very much going to increase agni. Because it is very heating, it is going to increase pitta and decrease vata and kapha. What does this mean? It means that if there is excess coldness in the system, it is going to heat it up, and if there is mucous or kapha in the system, it is going to burn it up. If there is excess pitta, and the person always likes to add

165 pepper to everything, and that is going to aggravate pitta. When we start to see spices, we can really use them to design and shape what our experience is like. In excess, black pepper will actually aggravate vata because of its drying effect. Black pepper is very drying to the body. Cayenne If we look at another pepper most of us have in our spice cabinet, often it will be cayenne. Cayenne will increase pitta, but it is also going to increase vata because it has a drying effect. It s going to pull excess moisture out of the tissues. If you have a lot of kapha in your constitution and you are heavy and dense and mucous-y, congested with gunk in your sinuses and you are carrying excess weight, Cayenne is kind of a miracle. It s going to spice things up, start to dehydrate you and pull that excess moisture out of your cells. You are going to feel a lot lighter without having all that aqueous water weight in your system and phlegm in your mouth and general throat area. Cardamom Some spices are more energetically complex than others. Cardamom is very energetically complex. It has a spiritual component. In Ayurveda we have so many different tools of analysis to describe the energetics of herbs. Cardamom is a very

166 special herb that opens the heart center. We talked about the chakras earlier. If you even open the bottle and smell cardamom you will experience this. You will notice that your senses will pick up on something. They pick up on a more etheric nature and a sweetness and a life-positive joyful feeling. There are emotions that are tied to these spices. When you grind a spice it starts to awaken a lot of energies in the body. It is a great thing to do. You ll notice in different cultures the practice of spice grinding. There are various versions of a mortar and pestle scattered all over the world. Japan Suribachi and Surikogi Mexico Molcaljete y Tejelote This ancient practice of grinding food spice has been with humans for many thousands of years. As you grind your spice, you inhale naturally and your sense of smell wakes up, and this wakes up your ancestral memories. Notice that with cardamom there is always a heart expansion. It is balancing for all three dosha. Not all herbs are, but cardamom is. In excess it will aggravate pitta, because it is slightly heating. It is often combined with fennel. This is a really easy way to increase your agni, and is another thing that cardamom can do when matched with fennel to balance the heating. Fennel is not hot and so is balancing to vata pitta and kapha. It also helps balance agni. They can be easily combined in a tea Recipe Cardamom & Fennel Tea Ingredients ½ tsp cardamom powder ½ tsp fennel seeds ( no need to roast) 8-16 ounces of water

167 Stainless Thermos Instructions Fill thermos with hot water Add spices Screw the cap on to steep Sip throughout the day as your water. This tea is amazing for helping refine the seven tissues of the body and build a stronger digestive fire sama agni. It tastes really good. This is the way to start to understand that all of the spices in your kitchen become and end up much more of your medicine cabinet. You start to be able to prevent disease. If you have bloating, you take care of that with cardamom fennel tea, and it doesn t turn into constipation. Wastes don t build up in your system. If you have a lot of hyperacidity and pitta, you might mix the cardamom fennel tea with a little licorice root to help pacify the acidity. Mucous is a problem you want to knock out quickly. You take a mixture of ginger, black pepper and cayenne and mix it with a little bit of water and shoot it. All of a sudden you will notice mucous is coming out of your body, until it becomes clear, and then stops. Turmeric Turmeric is a yellow spice. It has become sort of a hip popular spice. Good for turmeric! We need a lot of turmeric because it is anti-inflammatory. So if there is inflammation in the body, turmeric helps clear it out. It is tridoshic, meaning it is great for vata, pitta and

168 kapha. It balances all three. Turmeric has a scraping action. It can help scrape cholesterol out of the blood vessels and impurities out of the digestive tract while at the same time being anti-inflammatory. Turmeric decreases inflammation. A lot of people are taking turmeric to decrease inflammation in the digestive tract, other people are taking it to decrease inflammation in the joints, so they can have more fluidity in their joints. There are many benefits in turmeric, especially in Indian food, which is where Ayurveda arises. Turmeric is in basically every meal. It is a staple baseline herb. I noticed when I was living in India and eating turmeric three times each day. I couldn t believe how easy it was to move in my body. That much turmeric in my body was absolutely profound. Here again you can mix turmeric. It has a lot of antibacterial, antiviral type properties. We can mix it with ginger if there is a flu, a bug, a cough or a cold. The more mucous there is, the more we are going to want to mix turmeric with other spices that are going to take kapha down a notch. So we want to use the hotter spices the more mucous there is. On the other hand, the more sensitivity to heat there is, we want to combine turmeric with the more neutral spices like fennel and cardamom. There is a great book by Dr. David Frawley, and Dr. Vasant Lad, called The Yoga of Herbs. I highly recommend The Yoga of Herbs. It should just be a reference to start to understand how to use food and spice as medicine. You want to get comfortable with how to use

169 some of the most common herbs and plants as medicine to support your health. Vehicles for ingesting Herbs How do we best take these herbs and spices? How do we bring them into our body? Let s talk about the vehicles we use to carry spice into our digestive tract, blood, and tissues. Water Water is a very common method. Teas are easy to make and ingest. In addition to tea, water is used to make a digestive aid where you mix spices directly into water and take just before meals. Fermented Liquids A Tatakra is a yogurt fermented milk with spices. Ayurveda, being a lacto vegetarian diet, relied historically on dairy from local cows. Obviously the state of affairs with dairy has changed. Yogurt is a fermented liquid which will naturally enhance the good bacteria in our gut. We could even use something like sauerkraut juice. Get an organic locally grown cabbage, shred it, making sauerkraut. If you do this you will have extra sauerkraut juice around. It is full of probiotics that are good for the gut. I almost always have sauerkraut juice around. Because this is what I do, I make my own sauerkraut. I might mix the juice with digestive spices if I have a digestive imbalance. So the mix would be fermented liquid and digestive spices. This is amazing for digestive issues and really all sorts of doshic imbalances.

170 Honey The benefit of mixing herbs with honey is that it is a sugar. Sugar is picked up in the blood very very quickly. It gets metabolized in the blood and brought into the tissue. It goes right to the blood and right from the blood into the muscles. Honey brings its own characteristics to the mixture. Honey is heating and honey decreases kapha. Honey is scraping in nature. So a lot of imbalances for kapha, and medicines for kids will be mixed in honey. I make one where I just take turmeric, ginger and cloves for their heating properties, and I mix that all in honey. I call it Boo Candy, after my child, whom I nicknamed Boo when she was really little. I called it candy rather than medicine because I wanted her to like it. So since she was about a year old, I gave her a little Boo Candy in the winter and fall to prevent coughs and flu. We still make it. Boo Candy is on my counter right now. She had some this morning before school, because there is a lot of stuff going around. It is great for decreasing kapha. Boo Candy is also really good for the lung and sinus tissue and the different locations where kapha arises. Milk Milk is particularly suited for the nervous system. Say we have insomnia, issues with anxiety. To address these types of issues we mix our herbs in some milk. Take a little bit of turmeric with honey and ghee or fat. Fat is another delivery system. An example of this type of herb in milk mixture is Golden Milk. Many yogis take this. They will heat up a little bit of

171 milk. It doesn t have to be cow s milk, it can be almond milk. Heat it up and add a little bit of ghee or high quality oil almond or sesame if you are vegan. Mix that with a little bit of sweetener and a little turmeric for its antiviral properties. You don t want to boil it, just warm it. Golden Milk enhances sleep. There are so many stories of people who discover Golden Milk and start to sleep through the night really well. In general, any sort of nerve tonic is great taken before bed in a milky type substance as the vehicle, so there is fat. This is the fat soluble way of taking herbs. Aloe Another one of our favorite vehicles in Ayurveda is aloe. Aloe, very much decreases pitta. So if there is any kind of hyperacidity, or if there is irritation or acid in the bowel, or an over intensity of focus, aloe is your friend. Aloe is also very supportive for skin issues, like blotchiness, redness, and acne. Put the spice in an aloe base. You can also buy as juice or gel. Or you can grow an aloe plant and peel off the leaves and scrape out the middle when you need it. Mix the aloe with water, add your spice in there and take that as your medicine. Spices are medicines. All of these basic food uses as vehicles are called Anupanas. Simply knowing a little bit about the different ways to bring spices into the your body is powerful. There are very simple ways to balance the dosha with what you already have at home. This knowledge really empowers you on your yogic path. It

172 keeps you from having to use medicines that are toxic or not on the same vibration that you are right now.