What is Ayurveda?

(waves crashing) What is Ayurveda? Ayurveda is really close to my heart. Ayurveda is an ancient system of philosophy of science and art. A way of living that has been the world and sun's greatest parampara. It means a loving lineage that's been held for you for thousands of years according to some sources five thousand years.

It comes to us from ancient India, and is very much tied to the fabric of yoga itself. We can think of Ayurveda, as the soul sister of yoga. Never could they be parted, right. They go together completely. So Ayurveda is this beautiful science if we look at the words of life.

Ayur means life, Veda means wisdom channels. Science its the science of life, of how nature behaves. But it's also an equally importantly science of how you can thrive. Ayurveda we can think of as this beautiful gift from ancient India. But more importantly, Ayurveda is bigger than India itself.

Ayurveda is how all of nature behaves. It's the understanding of the rhythms and tides of nature inside of our own bodies and outside of our bodies. So while we definitely need to study and honor the ancient Indian lineage that this comes from. What I really want you to consider in your own life is that you can really step into this as grandmother wisdom. It's folk medicine at it's finest.

It's the way that your grandmother just knew exactly what you needed when you were sick. This really is the soul essence of Ayurveda and really all traditional medicine and healing systems that align with nature. So, think of Ayurveda as basically your grandmother's wisdom that has been times tested over thousands of years. Ayurveda being one of many branches of this tested wisdom that we can learn from. But what's really cool about it is that Ayurveda is one of the most highly preserved wisdom traditions in this sense.

So who doesn't want to feel more vital and more alive. And more connected to everything around them and themselves. This really is the gift, that Ayurveda offers us. And so there are these three sanskrit words that I like to present that really help us understand not only what Ayurveda is about but also an approach for how you can start to work with it in your own life. And the first word is really the heart of Ayurveda.

It's the goal of Ayurveda and the word is fasta. Spha, means self. The part of you that is the most real, your core essence. You could even think of it as your highest self. Spha, but it's yours, it's the individual self.

Sfata, means to be seeded in or established. So sfata, the goal of this while life wisdom science is to become through my practices more firmly established I am. But more importantly more celebratory of who I am meant to become. So Ayurveda's wisdom tradition teaches us how to get ourselves more in alignment with who we truly are. So that we can fulfill our purpose and so you have this next word which is one of my favorite Sanskrit words.

Sphadarma, spha again as you know, means self. This highest beautiful aspect of who you are. Your individual essence, what you were meant to express on this planet. And dharma which is another way of saying, role, truth, path, so this phadharma is the specific individual purpose that you are here to flower and express. A dog has a sphadharma, a flower has a sphadharma.

Catie Solcox has a sphadharma, and all these dharma's are different, and that differentiation is what makes life beautiful right. So when you see someone or you see a plant or a tree, or the ocean. When you see these beings, fulfilling their highest self, you feel happy right. We've created a whole reality around this and in terms of who we celebrate. And it's generally people who are expressing some highest aspect of who they are.

So Ayurveda really wants for you to become your most beautiful flowered self. So, then we have this word which is really the means. So spha-tantra, tantra has many meanings. But in this case we can look at tantra as the means of expanding into who this higher self is meant to be. So where as sphadharma is what you are meant to become and what your soul longs to express very deeply.

Spha-tantra is the methodology, the tools, the techniques that are going to get you there. So what this teaches us is that all of us come on to the planet. All of us come into this world through the gateway of our mother. With a certain amount of limitations. Some of those limitations are physical, some of those limitations are mental.

And emotional, some of those limitations feel very real, and some of them may be completely self generated. But what this discipline shows us is that we all come in with these limitations. You could call them karma's. So what Ayurveda does is it says my beloved, I know that you've come into this world feeling that you have some lack. That you have some obstacle to this fulfillment of your sphadharma.

I'm gonna provide you with a toolkit that's going to help you parse apart all of your drama. Parse apart some of the aspects of even your physical body that maybe ailing you.` So that you can enter into spahsa where one of my beloved teachers says, when I am in sphasta, I can hear the voice of my soul over the screaming of my senses. And when I can hear the voice of my soul, and this is the essence of yoga teaching. I can know what to do next, that any given moment in time, I have everything inside of me that can make the right decisions for the highest fulfillment of sphadarma. So Ayurveda again is the sister of yoga because what yoga asks us to do is to move into all those ways that we are misidentifying ourselves with something other than soul and spirit.

And what Ayurveda says is, let me support you through the everyday practices of everyday life. So we have this word in Ayurveda, rytucharya, the means by which I'm going to enter into a benevolent. A purposeful, capacious rhythm. Ritu, means rhythm. With life, in such a way that it supports the hearing.

The hearing of my soul's deepest longing. And what I love about Ayurveda is that it's really practical. The mundane becomes a form of worship. In this way, such basic things that I'll go through in a moment, become the word is a portal. The become an entry portal into my relationship, I use the word God but you certainly don't have to.

You can just feel into it at its present moment, right. The highest aspect of life, the most beautiful one we call it. In the shri tradition. So what are some of these portals? That we can enter into through Ayurveda practice and there are many but I want to highlight what I feel like kind of the most seminal.

The first is, basic self care in terms of a morning routine. The ancients say that the morning routine starts the night before. So how I approach my night really will determine, and you know this from your experience how I feel when I wake up in the morning. And then those morning self care rituals are this statement that says my body is the vehicle through which this dharma is going to flow. Therefore I really have to take care of it.

So morning routine, very important. We'll actually give you in another video an example of what a basic morning routine will look like so check that out. The second area is the realm of food, in my experience and I can't remember which ancient text. But one of them says that the first spiritual yoga is our relationship to what we eat. If we have this grunted relationship with food, higher spiritual practice really is challenging.

Because food becomes prana. And life force, at least in the yoga tradition what we feed off of. We use, for spiritual practice. So my relationship to food is incredibly important for my spiritual practice. Unfortunately in our modern world, food is in this crazy schizophrenic state where we either don't pay attention to it at all or we over indulge.

Or we go back and forth and so food practice is just one of the most important things you can do to augment and support your yogic life. The second and probably most important at least in our time. Is the realm of sleep. So Ayurveda says sleep is this other entry portal into bringing the divine into daily life. Robert Svoboda says sleep is the wet nurse of the world.

And we are a world that is so hungry to be nursed. And yet more and more we're sleeping less and less. So the way I approach sleep and really the humbling of surrendering into sleep as more important than perhaps what I have on my to do list or my social calendar. Is a huge part of Ayurveda healing. And power, and growing your power in the world.

And the last of these three pillars if you will of Ayurvedic health is the realm of our sexuality. And certainly this is just not the realm of sexuality as intercourse or partnership. But the realm of all of the ways that I'm utilizing my creative force which is sexual energy on the planet. The maintenance of that, the understanding of how important it is to keep and guard and use this energy wisely. But also the deep, and delicious importance of play on the planet.

Of rest and play and I just imagine like rolling in the grass giggling with somebody. Just doing nothing but enjoying kamashoctic the power of pleasure itself is huge. What the natural world shows us is that this is occurring all the time. All you have to do is look at a cat. What a cat does is self care, licking itself all the time.

Making sure that it's eating enough. Sleeping and resting, playing, and then maybe going out howling at the moon and making love right when it's her season. So cats do this all the time, what a cat doesn't do is work like a crazy woman all day. She is judicious with her energy. She can attack the mouse, eat it, and then she's back to playing right.

So this is just one example of how the natural world is our teacher. And so, if we could humble ourselves as a collective and understand that the rational mind can only hold so much. And that the natural world really is the guru, I think we can tap back into Ayurveda. And when we do that, we can all become more powerful, more healthy, more vital. More plump to be able to practice yoga, thank you.