Seven Ways to Awaken Your Body’s Natural Wisdom: Ayurveda for beginners

Ayurveda is the indigenous medicine system of Ancient India, with texts dating back thousands of years from doctors, surgeons, and specialists, which parallel all branches of modern medicine. The systems are still alive and practiced today both in lineage folk traditions as well as through medical colleges in India. Ayurveda has been gaining global popularity around the world due to the focus on preventative health measures, holistic nutrition, lifestyle, and traditional cleansing methods. Ayurveda provides a lens for seeing the qualities of the natural world and ourselves as one in the same, not as separate.

Through the understanding of a five-element theory as well as modern and Ayurvedic anatomy and physiology, vaidyas and practitioners often work to identify optimal diets and lifestyles as per clients’ location, age, state of health, lifestyle, and goals. Clients and students of Ayurveda may gain new insights into the impacts of their environments and begin to engage more consciously with all substances in their environments to optimize vitality. While the process is usually individualized, below you will see a few general tips from the wisdom of Ayurveda to start on the journey of reawakening your body’s innate wisdom.

1. Tap into your natural biorhythms with the sun as your guide

In this age of tech, media, and over-productivity, our nervous systems and digestive systems can become erratically programmed. We stay up late stimulating our body and mind, have difficulty sleeping, our eating is based not on metabolism or internal fire, or the time, but instead based on whenever we can manage to get a work break. We lose a sense of natural rhythm. Numerous digestive concerns stem from this lack of rhythm, not to mention cycles of burnout and fatigue.

Ayurvedic practice helps people line up the cycles of nervous and digestive systems with the path of the sun. You’ll notice that the sun gives us an arch that can be our model. Just like the sun, we rise, warm up, burn hot, soften, and sleep. There is a time to wake up our digestive fire, to prepare to take in more food, information, and input, a good time for learning, a time for our biggest meal when the sun is high in the sky (12 -2pm), a time for maximum production, a time to churn and digest this information, and time when we begin to set (light dinner), a time to absorb food and information with less…