The Shakti School

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3 Steps Toward Divine Feminine Ayurveda

A Movement Towards True Ayurveda and Healing

Feminine form Ayurveda is the true Ayurveda of ancient India. You might wonder—what does it mean for something to be the true Ayurveda? There are two answers to that question.

The first is that before India came under British rule, Ayurveda flourished not only as a system of medicine, but as a spiritual practice. Healing was known to be a spiritual affair, medicine and spirit were one. The influence of the West in India changed India’s approach to medicine. The wisdom of Ayurveda was all but lost under British rule. For Ayurveda to have legitimacy as a healing system, it needed to conform to allopathic (Western) medicine’s approach. Thus, it was stripped of its spiritual and feminine roots.

Second, it was the women of India who continued to practice the Ayurveda of pre-colonial times. There are two reasons for this: i) woman had always been the communities’ healers, both in the West and in the East. Their knowledge was passed down orally; and ii) In the age of modernization and patriarchy, women were excluded from the healing arts, medicine became institutionalized and one had to study for many years in order to “practice medicine”. This excluded woman who were mostly kept out of higher education and the sciences.

In the West, the eradication of feminine form healing arts was exhaustive due to the millions of women killed during the witch hunts that cycled through Europe and the Americas. We have of our Indian sisters to thank for keeping the flame of feminine form medicine lit for us.

That is why I refer to feminine form Ayurveda, and why my students have now come to call it Divine Feminine Ayurveda. It’s an approach to health that is radically different from the “traditional medicine” that we are familiar with in the West. It even differs from what Indians of the last few hundred years have known due to the Westernization of Ayurveda in India.

Begin Now: Divine Feminine Ayurveda

1. Intentionally cultivate and expand your community. The human Ātman, soul, desperately wants to be seen. Not necessarily fixed or saved, but simply witnessed and loved unconditionally. Organize a potluck and extend the invitation to your outer circle of acquaintances, plan a community activism meeting and get in the habit of regularly volunteering your time to a nonprofit. Feminine medicine comes through the oral tradition, through community, and through relationships. It’s not entirely taught and learned through a textbook, it’s learned through direct experience and relationship.

2. Honor your desires—spring is when we are intuitively most attuned to our deepest driving desires. We learn Divine Feminine Ayurveda not through the pre-frontal cortex alone, but through the back of the brain and body as well. This is foundational because it means that we first heal ourselves and learn the healing arts through our own practice of self-love and self-healing. It means digesting the material IN and WITH the body, not just the intellect.

There exists a culturally imposed need to be very masculine about our approach to health: What pills, what herbs, what’s wrong with me? With a feminine approach to health, we’re not adding anything, instead we are subtracting what isn’t real anymore, what’s not serving us. Divine Feminine Ayurveda ask us to find the place within our being that is already balanced, that needs nothing else, and begin the process of healing from there first.

A practice to connect with your subconscious self:

For 40 days, first thing every morning, write down your dreams. The more you practice this the more you will remember from your dreams. Our beloved Ayurveda father, Dr. Vasant Lad, explains in our Shakti Ayurveda School textbook: "Dreams are a discharge of the nerve cells, the drainage of incomplete thoughts, actions, and feelings. In a dream, you finish unfinished business and the brain is able to restore order”[1].

According to Ayurveda, dreams are classified as vata, pitta, kapha. Vata dreams are very active, includes: flying, death, autumn and are sometimes fearful; pitta dreams are fiery, includes: feeling of having arrived too late, being embarrassed, problem solving, summer; and kapha dreams are often romantic, includes: doing something slowly, eating, spring or winter.  Dr. Lad says “Classify the dreams, then treat the dosha and you will have good results”.⠀

Many times, studying our dreams gives us a window into the subconscious—our deepest anxieties and dreams.

3. Adaptability as health. The adaptability of our nervous and immune system is directly linked to the strength of our Ojas, the subtle energetic honey of our body. Think of Ojas as your psychophysical container or shield. When Ojas is strong, we have abundant energy, strong immunity and can adapt to the ever-changing circumstances of life with ease.

My go-to super ojas building plant is Shatavari (Asparagus racemosus). It’s a staple in my kitchen and I always recommend a student on the path of Ayurveda befriend this unctuous plant. Shatavari builds the tissues and fluids of the body. It’s a nutritive tonic, powerful adaptogen and a wonderful demulcent for vata-type bodies that struggle to retain water. It’s especially recommended for regulating and rejuvenating the female reproductive system. To stay hydrated, strong and lubricated, use Shatavari to make a tea. Let it steep as long as you like (a whole day even!) and then sip it warm, little by little, throughout the day.

Divine Feminine Ayurveda understands that there is no ideal health. That the mind/body complex is never in perfect balance, but always in flux. When we study Shakti, Life Force, we see that she is always shifting and changing. For that reason, she is not reaching for a standard of perfection, but instead concentrating on her own resources of adaptability. Feminine form medicine understands health as your ability to adapt to the changing environment and circumstances of your life.  Divine Feminine Ayurveda is subtle.

The Laws of Nature

Divine Feminine Ayurveda is the ancient wisdom of the body and the cosmos. It reminds us of what we have forgotten--it asks us to remember, Smarana, our ancient knowing. Divine Feminine Ayurveda is deeply connected to nature. It awakens the deep knowing: You Are Nature. You are Already Connected to Nature.

Our society has confused scientific opinions, social media, and advertising, with the limitless knowledge that lives in our hearts. Instead, feminine form medicine asks us to trust ourselves and our bodies. It’s a practice of radical trust, creativity and insight in ourselves: radical self-sovereignty. It asks us to claim our power, our experience and our understanding of our bodies.

Divine Feminine Ayurveda asks us to trust in OWN bodies, as our bodies contain the intelligence of the cosmos, the intelligence of nature. Nothing external can help us if we are not in conscious communion with our body. It posits that we can find balance through our OWN resources.

Divine Feminine Ayurveda bows to nature as the eternal feminine, the most creative and nourishing channel of this world. It is not static or idealistic. It has no preconceived notions of what our body should look like or our minds should be like. It is not authoritarian structures, it is not statistical averages and standards. It is fluid and adaptable.

With this self-sovereignty and trust in nature, feminine form medicine stresses the importance of asking—What do I need now?

It’s a meditation on self-love as the very first step in healing. It’s a mentorship with Self. We are in a moment of revitalization of the feminine. We are remembering Her and finding the courage to live from the heart. We are awakening the Divine Feminine Ayurveda.

 

[1] “Chapter Five Dhātus.” Textbook of Ayurveda, by Vasant Lad, Ayurvedic Press, 2002, pp. 161–162.

A version of this article appeared on Banyan Botanicals blog on June 20, 2018.

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The Four Glorious Goals of Life

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When our digestion is good, our sleep is deep and our emotions and sexuality are being channeled properly, we have more energy to engage in our passions and pursuits in life—in Ayurveda, our foremost pursuits are known as the four goals of life.

According to the Vedas (the spiritual root texts of Ayurveda), your soul has four goals or desires, which the texts call the purusharthas, “that which is for the purpose of the soul.” The Ayurvedic tradition takes these four core human motivations and gives us permission to enjoy and pursue them, while not becoming overly attached to any of them. In this way, we can enjoy pleasure, seek success and purpose, strive for material gain, and seek out the practices and mentors that will teach us how to live a more integrated, enlightened, soulful life. By no means will my general overview do justice to the complex tapestry of what these four motivators are or how we can succeed in their fulfillment, but I do hope to give a brief summary, as they are paramount in our sense of total health and happiness.

Life Goal #1: Luscious, Everyday Pleasure

The first goal of life is kama, meaning pleasure or enjoyment. (Surely you’ve heard of the Kama Sutra! A sutra is a teaching, making the Kama Sutra the “pleasure teachings.”) If we are to live life fully, we need life to feel good. There is nothing like the sensory stimulation we get from smelling a baby’s skin, stroking a kitten’s silky fur, seeing a peony in full bloom, or feeling a man’s deltoid dipping down to the nape of his neck. What brings you deep sensory satisfaction?

The great news is that Nature has set it up so that many of the things that feel good to us are also physiologically and emotionally good for us. Science shows that touch (whether a massage therapist’s or a lover’s) increases the hormones in our body that keep our immune system functioning.[EN1] It’s a downright miracle that just the smell of onions simmering in olive oil causes our body to release the very digestive enzymes that it will use to process the food when we eat it. That’s Divine Intelligence, and Mama Nature’s way of saying, “Relish this moment!”

The problem with all this wonderful kama comes when we overindulge. Remember in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when Augustus Gloop ends up as a piece of fudge after falling into the river of chocolate? Without proper guidance, the out-of-balance, overindulging aspect of our senses can ignore our internal attempts at regulation. If we leave our senses in the driving seat, we run the risk of overdoing it—whether it be booze, chocolate, shopping, sex, TV, or exercise.

The secret to true fulfillment in the realm of pleasure is self-awareness, moderation, and nonattachment. Nonattachment has not always been an easy thing for me to practice. When I enjoy something, I sometimes wanna hold on. Talking to the Divine has helped me build a form of surrender. Whenever I feel myself clinging to pleasures, I will stop and say something like, “Oh, Divine Mama, let me trust in your infinite abundant sources. May I know that this pleasure may rise and fall, but that you are continually dropping your grace into my life.” When we cling, it is as though we don’t believe in all that the Universe offers; it is as if we are saying that we don’t have faith that pleasure (or whatever it is we want to cling to) is abundant and always waiting for us. It helps me to simply pay attention. I know that I don’t need to cling because when I’m paying attention, I see that the beauty is always being dropped down onto me.

Another way to practice non-attachment is to be deeply aware of the present moment while enjoying pleasure. Think of it as simultaneously relishing and releasing.

Life Goal #2: The Means for Prospering

The second goal of life is artha, or the ways and means of prosperous living. Artha is related to the tools that help us move forward in life. A place to live, enough money to pay the bills, good health, proper clothing, and even our iPhone are all examples of tools that help you move through life with more ease.

Just as we want pleasure, we also love the feeling of abundance and good health. It feels good to rest easy knowing that our basic needs are met. It’s hard to think about the meaning of life when we are pawning our jewelry or arguing with credit-card company minions. And in fact,

Ayurveda encourages us not only to pursue financial abundance, but it also states that without a certain sense of ease around finances, our advancement toward knowing who we are is hindered. Why? Because if we are worried about finances, our mind becomes easily disturbed, fearful and distracted. A similar thing happens with our health. If we are sick, it’s hard to meditate, help our kids with their homework, or launch our dream business.

Imbalance in artha occurs when we become greedy or too focused on materialism. When we have thirteen shades of lip-plumping lipstick and feel we really need just one more, we may have an accumulation problem. I will never forget walking into my neighbor’s house. She had amassed 157 stuffed animals. Shoes (still in their boxes) were stacked from floor to ceiling, wall- to-wall. She had a guest room full of purses (piled on a virtually invisible bed, price tags still attached to many of them). The primary motivating force in her life had become acquiring things. She had slowly built up a safety bubble composed of teddy bears, high heels, and handbags. I think that if we are honest, many of us have a little bit of the crazy-teddy-bear lady inside us. Ayurveda teaches us how to embrace our love for stuffed animals without smothering ourselves with them.

Artha can also be imbalanced when we mistakenly think that we need nothing. I know a few spiritual people who feel wrong or guilty for wanting nice things, like a warm home, soft clothing, or a chocolate bar (even if it’s organic, fair-trade). This is the opposite end of the artha spectrum, and it is just as harmful for our total wellness. The lesson? It’s okay to need things—in moderation and for the purpose of the higher good.

Life Goal #3: Roll Out of Bed With a Purpose

The third goal of life is dharma, or our essential life purpose. In the craziness of daily life, many of us forget what a mind-blowing opportunity it is to be in a human body (as opposed to being born a honey badger). Ayurveda says that every human being comes into this life with a specific dharma, and until we are living that dharma, we will not be happy. My teacher, Rod Stryker, says there is a you-shaped hole in the Universe just waiting to be filled with your full expression as an individual. Until you figure out how to embody your full expression and purpose, you will feel out of sync with what your Higher Self longs to become.

Dharmic pursuits do not necessarily have to fulfill any holier-than-thou requirements, however. Dharma has nothing to do with what we could call “a job,” but is more likened to the unique thing you bring to the table in any of life’s circumstances (be it a job, a relationship or a project). What is more, people working in jobs that may not have cache in society can be quite important on the cosmic scene. For example, have you ever met someone with what our society may consider a lowly or bad job, yet they seem to be totally in love with it? Or they use it to make your day better? That is the embodiment of someone living her dharma.

416A5869416A5804a416A5782In order to align with our essential life purpose, we need enough balance to actually hear the inner voice of our intuition. Most people who are fully working in their passion will tell you that they had no choice; their job chose them. They say they feel a kinetic flow of energy when they are working in the realm of what they love. Researchers such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are now confirming the existence of a creative psychological flow space that people enter when they are working in their dharma. Time seems to slow, even stop. Energy levels are high, and there is a feeling of aliveness and presence that gives us even more motivation for the work at hand. Feeling this flow space is a good indication that we are aligned with our dharma and in what Csikszentmihalyi calls the optimal experience in his book Flow.

Life Goal #4: Give Me Liberty

The fourth goal of life is moksha, or freedom. Ultimately, behind all of our actions lies the drive to move beyond the recurring cycles of pain/pleasure and birth/death, and to feel the happiness of not being subject to these polarities. Moksha is waking up in the morning and feeling fearless. Moksha is the sense that there is nothing out there that will bring us ultimate happiness—it’s all inside ourselves. Moksha is truly needing nothing and no one to be whole and complete.

The further we advance on the path of knowing who we are, the more this goal becomes clear and the more we can align our life choices with things that will support our own true freedom. If we become too attached to the idea of freedom, we run the danger of becoming a holier-than-thou, spiritual egoist. I have seen students and friends attempt freedom through the path of what psycho-spiritual experts call “spiritual bypassing”—basically attempting to run away from the “bad” world by checking out into some flaky spiritual zone where we don’t deal with our issues. The teachings state that this is impossible. We can’t run away from pain or pleasure, birth or death, or even our own internal struggles (karmas). What we can do is learn how to become a loving witness to all of life’s duality.

Real moksha is about tapping in. It’s about seeing the bigger picture, what life looks like beyond our own motivations. You can measure your success in the realm of moksha by how fearlessly and joyfully you live your life in this current, imperfect world, as well as how well you surrender your negative feelings when you don’t get what you want. It’s also about seeing things as they really are and moving beyond the material world. But the stuff that flashes on billboards, the phone calls, the dinner dates, the news, and the warm touch of a loved one are all very real to us, so the more we work toward knowing who we are, the more we can delight in the existence of this illusory, temporary world of the senses, while at the same time experiencing the Divine delight behind it all. In this sense, we become free because we are fully and delightfully engaged with the temporal beauty of life as it is unfolding.

~Katie

Read more in Healthy, Happy, Sexy!

Photos by Naomi Huober

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Sister Sciences in the Vedic Tradition

Ayurveda is a complex and ancient system of well-being, and just as Western medicine is based on biology and other sciences that can take a lifetime to understand, Ayurveda has many foundational concepts and tenets that you can explore and deepen your understanding of for years and years.

For our purposes, there are some basic principles that we’ll start with, so you have a clearer grasp of Ayurveda’s view of the universe—both macro and micro—and our relationship to it and each other. These basic tenets of Ayurveda are really a jumping off point both for beginning to introduce Ayurvedic ideas into your everyday life and for further study, should you wish to do so, of the deeper philosophies of Ayurveda.

If you have a yoga practice, you can also look at this Ayurvedic foundation as a way to deepen that practice. The mat-based poses many of us would refer to as “yoga” encompass just the tip of the iceberg that is the broader Vedic tradition. A part of this breadth is Ayurveda, yoga’s forgotten, but incredibly important sister science.

Think of yoga and Ayurveda as two interrelated branches of the same massive tree of Vedic knowledge, each playing its own role in your journey towards health, happiness and vitality. While yoga typically deals with the use of techniques such as asana (postures), mantras (sacred transformational sounds), and pranayama (the management of energy), Ayurveda deals with reducing disease and healing the body and mind.

Yoga supports your health, and living an Ayurvedic lifestyle supports your spiritual journey. While yoga supports healing, it is the ancient art of Ayurveda that teaches us how to heal.

~Katie

Read more in Healthy, Happy, Sexy!

Photos by Naomi Huober

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Eat Well

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That you are what you eat may be standard wisdom, but according to Ayurvedic tradition, the state of your mind, emotions, and your environment while you eat also has direct impact on the way you feel. These teachings (as well as modern scientific nutrition studies), show us that eating in the right way can reduce stress and promote calm.

The ancient yogis taught that one of the first and most important of spiritual practices was food sadhana, the art and discipline of what, when, where, why and how we put food into our bodies.

For physical, emotional, and mental health, it may not be enough to just load up on organic fruits, veggies, and grains. Even if we eat super-healthful food, if we consume mindlessly, eat in a rush, or shovel it in while texting or similarly distracted, the body can’t settle into its digestive processes. And if we eat while feeling sad, angry, or under significant stress, the digestive fire gets weakened, and instead of feeling satisfied, the mind will feel disturbed post-digestion.

Here are 10 simple Ayurvedic tips for cultivating calm-body nutritional habits:

Prepare your food with love.  The energy of the cook is always in the food. Avoid eating meals that may have been prepared in anger or resentment. Ayurveda understands that we not only eat the food, but also the emotions of the chef. So, if you are angry or distracted and can’t seem to focus, put down the kitchen knife, pick up the phone, and order some yummy take-out instead.

Awaken to your food.  Begin to bring consciousness to your eating habits. As you are preparing the food, sense that you are offering it up to your divine self. Tune into the smell of freshly baked bread, the color of sunny turmeric, or the texture of jasmine rice in your hands, even before you taste the flavors of the food.

Tune into nature.  When we eat, we are not only consuming the food on our plate but also the stimulus in our environment. According to Ayurveda, the impressions we take in through the senses can disturb the mind and hinder digestion. If you are watching television or reading the newspaper, you are “ingesting through your eyes,” causing prana to move out and not inward where it needs to be for proper digestion. It is highly recommended that you eat in or near to nature. If that’s not practical, even placing houseplants within view of your table will help. Of course, birds and flowing streams are an added bonus.

Savor the chewing. Take time to chew your food slowly, until it becomes an even consistency. Ayurvedic practitioners recommend chewing each bite of food 30-50 times so that you begin to break down the food in the mouth before it travels the rest of the digestive tract. Complete chewing allows complex carbohydrates, sugars, oils, proteins, and other minerals to reach maximum levels of absorption.

Make eating a ritual.  Pause for a moment as you sit down to eat, mindful of what you’re doing and where your food came from. Possibly offer up a prayer of gratitude for all the people, animals, plants, and Universal forces that brought the meal to your plate.

Let it digest. Following your meals, take some time to relax to let your food digest before going on to your next activity. Even if it’s just for 5 minutes, it is helpful to take a small pause between your meal and the next activity. One of my Ayurveda teachers in India offers this easy little ditty for remembering a post-digestion ritual:“After lunch, rest a while. After dinner, walk a moon-lit mile.” And allow at least three hours between meals to allow your food to fully digest. If you feel hungry, sip herbal tea.

Stop before you’re full. This is easier to gauge when you eat mindfully and slowly. When you overeat, you weaken agni, or digestive fire. Whatever you don’t digest will turn into accumulated toxins in the gut. This has a dramatic impact on how you feel physically and mentally.

Take a lunch break. Make lunch the largest meal of the day, and take time to eat it. Digestion is strongest around mid-day, when the sun is at its peak. The body’s rhythms mirror the rhythms of nature.

Watch emotional eating. Do you turn to the chocolate or coffee when you feel overwhelmed or exhausted at work? Do you dig into a bag of chips when you feel lonely? If so, try to consciously make a different choice like taking a brief walk or having a cup of herbal tea and see how you feel.

Do table meditation. Before eating, take a moment to close your eyes. Bring your attention to your belly and breathe slowly. Ask yourself, “What do I really need?” Before eating, ask yourself, “Am I hungry, or am I just angry (tired, lonely, exhausted, bored, etc.)?” This is the crucial moment where we have the capacity to move from the unconscious realm of compulsive and dysfunctional behavior, and into the realm of awareness and calm. From this place, we have better access to the inner teacher that knows what we need for nourishment and strength.

This article was originally published in the Yoga Journal Blog on January 26, 2012.

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Healthy Happy Sexy Bonus

Below are resources and bonuses from Healthy Happy Sexy: Ayurveda Wisdom for Modern Women

Did the book help you uncover something or find more bliss? Let us know your thoughts and feelings with the hashtag #HealthyHappySexy

✨ Founder of Jivamukti Yoga, Sharon Gannon’s First Experience of Ayurveda

✨ Sianna Sherman's mythic story of Durga - Fierce Mother Goddess of Love

✨ Love Makes Us Receptive to Change, with Special Guest Dr. Claudia Welch

✨ Try this Body Yantra practice for 40 days! You might also like the Inner Bliss Meditation, or the Womb-Heart Meditation

✨ Yoga Nidra Recording

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People and Their Deepest Darkest Secrets

I get the honor of meeting with people in private sessions where they reveal to me their deepest, darkest secrets. Here is what most people are so afraid to admit. Its also what ALOT OF US SHARE. Ready?
  1. People want to be having better sex and more intimacy with their significant other.
  2. People feel fat.
  3. People feel totally unworthy of their dreams.
  4. People do one or more things “too much.” They eat too much sugar, drink too much wine, smoke pot, and the most shameful one – they eat for comfort. The crazy part? They know it.
  5. People don’t do one or more things that they really want to be doing. For some reason they gave up yoga, meditation, painting, writing, or singing. And the soul weeps for their lost muse.
You see, sometimes we KNOW what we should do, and we don’t do it. And we know what we SHOULDN’T do and we do do it. You still with me? Tantra says this about our weird inner battle – there is no good and no bad. You shouldn’t do or not do anything. It’s all about what is useful and loving at any given point in time. Breathe. A Sigh. Of Relief.
But it’s still not an excuse to go catatonic in the Lazy-Boy watching The Bachelorette. Tantra also says that until we feel that we are living our purpose, we are gonna’ suffer. That purpose is both service to the world, as well as spiritual liberation (with a side of just straight-up pleasure).
~Katie
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Ojas: The Power That Sustains Us

Ojas (OH-JUS) is one of the three subtle forces in our body. Think of ojas as the container that holds your abundant energy. It is the ultimate energy reserve of the body and mind. It is the purest essence of Kapha, and physically, it is related to reproductive, hormonal, and cerebrospinal fluids.

I love the metaphor of ojas as the body’s natural honey: it is the delicate and refined essence we produce from the plants and other vital essences we take in. Ojas is the force that enables us to sustain that change over time. Think of it as your psychophysical container or shield.

As a society, we don’t respect this energy enough. The more ojas we have, the more impervious we are to illness and the negativity of others. Robust ojas acts as a soft shielding, helping us ward off stress and disease brought on by physical pathogens as well as psychic pathogens (emotional vampires be gone!). The more ojas we have, the more impervious we are to the negativity of others, as our own spirit has a good, strong container. Ojas gives us an overall sense of satisfaction with life. As you might suspect, our modern Western culture is chronically low in ojas.

A person with good ojas is calm and content, and has both strong immunity and endurance. This is the most important element for most of us to cultivate. It is especially true if we are trying to conceive a child, deal with a stressful life event, or overcome an illness.

But increasing our level of ojas is not just a matter of building it up. It is also about  not losing or wasting it.

When you are overstimulated, for example, if you spend hours on the Internet, drinking coffee, and texting friends, you lose energy through the five senses in ways you aren’t even aware of. This leaves us feeling depleted and can brings on depressive or anxious sensations.

The practice of pratyahara, that is, controlling our senses by moderating our speech and sexual energy and getting proper rest, relaxation and sleep, helps us preserve our vital energy. The next time you feel depleted, think of drawing the mind inward instead of reaching outward for comfort. I like to lie down and practice feeling the sensations in my body, turning my focus inward and letting any stagnant emotions rise to the surface.

START NOW: Feel A Connection to Your Ojas

This exercise will help you feel the strength of your energy reserve.

Find a comfortable position and close your eyes.

Take a few deep breaths. Relax for a minute, allowing your breath to deepen and smooth out.

Now slowly start to draw your attention away from your thoughts, emotions or aches, and drop it down into your belly, holding it there until you feel sensation. Then, slowly, bring your awareness into your heart.

Remember a moment in your life when you felt very deep love. Perhaps it was the birth of your child, a merging into the arms of your lover, being hugged by a parent, or the bliss you experience when you help someone in need. Maybe it was a time when you let yourself be totally vulnerable. When you add love to your point of focus, it builds your ojas.

Bring that moment fully to mind and notice where you feel the sensation of love in your body. Allow this sensation to move, to expand and permeate every cell of your being. When you grow the feeling of love inside your body, you boost the power that enables you to remain strong and wise in the face of heartache, disease and change.

Relax into this loving container, watching how, over and over again, you will gain and lose the feeling, and how you can refocus and experience your inherent enduring, sustaining power."

~Katie

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Kick off the New Year with Delicious Self-Care – The Ayurvedic Daily Ritual

Alright ladies and gentlemen, it’s the New Year. We are all a-buzz with that excitement of new vistas and catalytic potentialities. And, wanna’ know the best way to super-charge your dreams? Start taking care of your body. Your mind will thank you.

Here is my basic Daily Ritual, pulled straight from my soon-to-be-published book on living healthy, happy and sexy with ancient Ayurveda:

Morning Routine

Your morning routine begins the night before: Getting in bed by 10 or 10:30 PM (can be a little later in the summer) will help you start the morning off right.

  1. Wake up at sunrise: If you are exhausted, sick or elderly, please sleep as long as you like. Upon waking, do not get out of bed right away. Try to be aware of your body and feel grateful to be alive before your toes touch earth. Pray.
  2. Drink warm lemon water: This helps to wash the G.I. tract, flushes the kidneys and stimulates peristalsis. If your digestion is sluggish, add 1/2 tsp ginger root powder.
  3. Nature calls: Going to the bathroom upon waking will help clear your digestive system. A healthy “motion” will have a soft brown log quality, little odor and will be well-formed (like a banana). Undigested food, foul odor, mucous, excessive dryness or “pellet-like” quality suggests a digestive imbalance. Altering diet, lifestyle and using herbs will help better this.
  4. Gently scrape your tongue: Buy a silver tongue scraper. Scrape from back to front 5-8 times. The tongue is a mirror of your intestines. When there is a thick white coating on the tongue, it is indicative that ama (toxins) are present. Tongue scraping helps prevent diseases of the oral cavity, improves our ability to taste, gets rids of old food debris and prevents bad odor in the mouth.
  5. Wash the face, mouth, teeth and eyes: Splash your face with cool water. Wash the eyes with cool water or real-deal rose water. You can also buy an eye cup at most pharmacies and use for washing the eyes. Massage your gums with sesame oil. This improves oral hygiene, prevents bad breath, increases circulation to gums, heals bleeding gums and helps us maintain strong healthy teeth.
  6. Mouth detox: Take 1-2 tablespoons of pure sesame oil (not toasted) in the mouth. Gargle and swish until it creates a liquid texture (about 10-15 minutes), and then spit out into trash can. This strengthens teeth, gums and jaw. It also improves the voice, and is said to remove wrinkles from the cheeks! I know you may think 10-15 minutes is a long time – but, just swish it around while you do something else (like your self-massage).
  7. Use a neti pot: Add 1/4 teaspoon of salt to warm water in the pot and drain through each nostril. Afterwards, put 3-5 drops of warm sesame oil or ghee in the nostrils to lubricate the nose. This keeps the sinuses cleans, improves voice, vision and mental clarity. Our nose is the door to the brain. Nose drops nourish our prana and enhance intelligence.
  8. Abhyanga (Self-massage): Massage is one of our greatest allies for total health. It nourishes and soothes the nervous systems, stimulates lymphatic flow and aids in detoxification. It also improves circulation, increases vitality, nourishes the skin and promotes body/mind balance.
  9. Exercise: One of greatest allies in moving towards balance, exercise boosts the immune system and is an excellent way to counteract depression. Exercise daily to half capacity. We want to get a little sweaty glow, but not burn out before our day begins.
  10. Bathe: Use natural products.
  11. Meditate: Begin your day with some form of breath-work and meditation. Start with five minutes and work up to at least 20 minutes daily. I sometimes do my meditation before exercise, which is also fine.
  12. Eat breakfast.

Lunch Routines

  1. Try to make lunch your biggest meal of the day. Eat in a pleasant, calm place without distraction.
  2. Take some time to bless the food prior to eating.
  3. After eating, if you can lay down on your left side for 5-20 minutes, this is ideal. Why? Because it helps the digestive organs to do their work to assimilate the meal. If you are at work, even just leaning to the left side in your chair will be helpful.

Afternoon/Early Evening routines

  1. One afternoon routine that helps you deeply relax into your evening is the practice of yoga nidra – a yogi nap. Its also nice to do this prior to dinner, just before sunset.
  2. Eat light at night: Having your last meal before sun-down, and at least 3 hours before bedtime will ensure better sleep. If you feel don’t feel hungry, drink one of my nighty-night tonics like my Golden Yogini Milk.

Nighty-Night Routines

There is no excuse, anymore, for us to not be sleeping. Women need sleep. Men need sleep. Bunnies need sleep. Everybody on the planet needs 6-8 hours of sleep on a regular basis. As Ayurveda expert and author, Dr. Claudia Welch says, “Every cell in the body needs stimulation, and every cell in the body needs nourishment.” Just as we need to exercise, we also need to surrender into rest.

It is also impossible to accomplish your goals if you are chronically sleep-deprived. Plus, your mind/body uses sleep as the washing machine for the subconscious mind. If we aren’t slipping into deep dream-time every night, much of our toxic, unprocessed emotions and experiences don’t get drained away. As Dr. Robert Svoboda says, “Sleep is the wet nurse of society.” Raise your hand if you feel like you need to be wet-nursed?

Ayurveda offers an ideal way for transitioning from the activity of the day into the sacred chamber of sleep. Following these routines will make sleep come effortlessly, and will help keep you asleep through the night:

  1. Set the mood: Depending on the season (in the winter it may be earlier), start turning off overhead lights after dinner. Avoid fluorescent lights always, but especially at night. Low lighting helps tell your body it is time to go to sleep. Lots of light confuses your circadian rhythms and messes with the natural hormones that pull you into the “sleepy feeling.” One of the first questions I people who suffer from insomnia is, “Are your overhead lights still on at 8 and 9 PM?” Switch to low level lighting, candles, or install dimmers on your overhead lights to set the mood for sleep.
  2. No more screen-time: Set an intention to turn off all screens (computers, cellphones, TVs) by 8 or 9 PM. Science now confirms that screens and lighting are also messing with our circadian rhythms.
  3. Be in bed by 10 PM: Have you ever noticed that you get a second wind around 10:30 PM? That’s because the metabolic energy your body normally uses for detoxing you while you sleep gets diverted to mental energy, and we get activated. Our body detoxifies and rejuvenates from 10 PM – 2 AM. When we stay up late, we truly do miss out on beauty sleep. If you currently go to bed at mid-night, use the fifteen-minute rule. Each night, trying going to bed a mere 15 minutes earlier. Within a few weeks, you will soundly sleeping at 10 PM.
  4. Take a warm bath: Taking a scented warm bath can help reset the nervous system towards sleep. Use oils such as frakenscense, myrrh, lavender, honeysuckle, jatamamsi, sandalwood, chamomile, neroli or pure rose for deep slumber.
  5. Avoid too much mental stimulation: Don’t watch evening news. It’s toxic for your dreams. Similarly, avoid planning your future, having intense conversations or any other activity that promotes mental movement before bed.
  6. Light a candle, read a sweet book that makes your heart melt. Say some prayers, and turn in.
  7. Unravel the day: There is a powerful meditative practice for unraveling the day. It actually builds your power of assimilation and boosts memory. Once in bed and laying down, mentally go backwards through your day in increments of 30 minutes. Try to simply register what was happening to you during the day without judgement. Notice your feelings, relax and let all events go. End with the point where you woke up in the morning. Gently drift into sleep.

~Katie

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