Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom: A Complete Prescription to Optimize Your Health, Prevent Disease, and Live with Vitality and Joy

To my guru, my grandfather, my Baba,

For transmitting to me his lived wisdom with such grace and compassion.

Baba planted the spiritual seed of who I am today.

To my mentors, my mother and father,

Due to their trust in my inherent capacities and calling,

My seed blossomed into who I am today.

To my companion, my husband,

Through him, I understood the purpose of soul collaborations.

My seed strengthened into who I am today.

To my shishyas, my beautiful students,

Through their dedicated living of my teachings,

The seed of my knowledge shall live on tomorrow.

This book is for you.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Dr. David Frawley

Preface

INTRODUCTIONThe Art of Ayurveda Lifestyle

CHAPTER 1The Science and Spirituality of Ayurveda

CHAPTER 2Celebrating an Awakened Sky

CHAPTER 3The Importance of Elimination

CHAPTER 4The Art of Naturally Sparkling Smiles

CHAPTER 5The Delight of Oiling, Bathing, Sense Care, and Beauty Rituals

CHAPTER 6Crafting Sacred and Seasonal Meals

CHAPTER 7Sleep, Sex, and Exercise

A FINAL WORDReleasing Healing Intentions into the Universe

Acknowledgments

APPENDIX 1List of Recipes

APPENDIX 2Healthy Elimination Resource Guide

APPENDIX 3Oral Health Resource Guide

APPENDIX 4The Ayurvedic Diet Resource Guide

APPENDIX 5Glossary of Sanskrit Words

Notes

Index

About the Author

About Sounds True

Copyright

Praise for Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom

FOREWORD BY DR. DAVID FRAWLEY

Acharya Shunya is a dynamic and original teacher in the Vedic tradition, well trained on many levels of study with great traditional teachers and her own extensive personal practice. I have watched her teaching and healing center develop and flower over the years according to her consistent attention, dedicated efforts, and long-term vision.

Acharya Shunya’s motivating ideal is of a global Vedic education, arising from a firm foundation of right living according to Ayurveda, which she is developing in Vedika Global, her organization and school. She shares this Ayurvedic basis for developing our higher potentials in life in her book, Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom.

Ayurveda is not just another system of disease treatment, but rests upon a profound inner science of positive health and natural living. It shows us how to harmonize ourselves with the greater universe within and around us, with all its secret powers and divine blessings. Ayurveda’s concern is not simply with the treatment of disease but with optimal well-being for body, mind, and consciousness extending from every cell of our body into the Infinite.

We can compare the modern medical doctor with the fireman who puts out a fire in a house, namely the fire of disease in the house of the body. An Ayurvedic practitioner does not merely take such a defensive role; he or she teaches you how to build a fireproof house in the beginning and maintain it over the full course of your life. This constructive and creative lifestyle foundation of Ayurveda is both protective and transformational.

Ayurveda teaches us how to promote and nourish optimal well-being, not simply how to destroy pathogens. It helps us awaken our own inspiration to higher living, not simply offering us drugs to sedate us. Acharya Shunya shows us this detailed Ayurvedic blueprint to build a healthy, creative, and conscious way of life, from right diet and exercise to right thinking and meditation.

Acharya Shunya teaches us how to determine our unique Ayurveda lifestyle and align it with the forces of nature as they are specially arrayed and rhythmically changing within us. Ayurveda’s view of the three doshic types is unique, powerful, and without parallel in the main medical systems available today.

Ayurveda’s system of right living and behavioral medicine is vast, multileveled, and encompasses not just our physical reality but our subtle energy system and deeper thought patterns. Ayurveda is a medicine of the universal life which is enduring, not simply a passing fad or a temporary phase in the development of medical science. It represents both the wisdom of the past and the future evolution of consciousness for our species in our perennial quest for lasting happiness and truth. Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom clearly and consistently guides us in this direction.

In my own work with Ayurveda, I have emphasized Ayurveda relative to the mind, our behavior, and our daily activity. I think this is the most important aspect of Ayurveda, though its ability to treat specific diseases, particularly of a severe nature, has its compelling value as well.

Ayurveda increases both physical and psychological immunity, promoting longevity for both the body as a whole and for the mind, brain, and nervous system. As we realize that well-being is a function of how we live, we will come to better appreciate Ayurveda’s great contribution to world health.

Ayurveda takes the wisdom of yoga and its philosophy of the unity of existence and unfolds it relative to both physical and psychological health and disease. It is the medical side of yogic thought and healing that many are seeking today. As such, it naturally leads us to the practice of yoga and meditation such as Shunya explores.

Acharya Shunya is one of the pioneers in the growing field of Ayurveda in the West. Her book fills an important place in our appreciation and application of Ayurveda in our daily lives, providing many simple prescriptions to help us take control of our own health and happiness.

Ayurveda helps us reclaim our lives and shows us how to live our lives as a great adventure in consciousness open to the flow of divine grace. Acharya Shunya provides important guidance and practical tools to do this. I welcome her addition to the growing literature on Ayurveda and look forward to her future contributions.

PREFACE

Every book accomplishes its own spiritual journey before being born, and this one is no different. Join me in an inspiring transformative voyage to abiding health.

This book has the potential to change your state of health for the better — permanently. Health is not just a possibility that you might achieve. It is a reality, an underlying natural state of being. Health will manifest once you begin to live in alignment with Nature’s intelligence. This is the promise of Ayurveda, India’s five-thousand-year-old system of health and healing.

When I was growing up in India, I witnessed a spiritual master, my grandfather, whom I addressed as Baba, remind the diseased and the suffering of their abidingly healthy nature. He taught them simple ways to align with Nature on a daily basis, and enigmatically, this ignited powerful healing of body, mind, and soul. While there wasn’t a focus on the symptoms of disease per se, I saw cancers disappear, ulcers heal, and chronic depressions lift.

I think I had rationalized that these miracles were possible because my teacher was a spiritually realized being. Clearly, my guru’s spiritual presence was undeniable. But as I grew up and observed more, I recognized that Baba’s skills in transmitting a highly rational science of Ayurveda lifestyle were also a key factor. I am so glad that my teacher imparted to me his spiritual conviction along with his scientific knowledge, which includes Ayurveda’s lifestyle wisdom. His teachings and his blessings have taken the form of this book so that more and more people can discover the truth of health for themselves.

Reading and implementing the lessons in this book can be a rite of transition, from a life lived routinely or unmindfully, to masterful living, encompassing the freedom that comes from embracing health consciousness, self-determination, and Nature’s blessings to proactively influence the course of your health and well-being. Health alone will completely undo the paradigm of disease permanently.

Ayurveda proposes two methodologies toward approaching health. The first is preventive and promotive. It proposes protecting and enhancing health with a set of lifestyle practices. This is the wisdom approach of evoking inner health, known as swasthya-raksha in Sanskrit. It incorporates at every step lessons from the spiritual sister sciences of yoga and Vedanta.

The second methodology is restorative. It includes disease management using herbal drugs, body treatments, and even surgery (though surgery is no longer an active modality in Ayurveda today). This methodology is known as vikara prashamana in Sanskrit. Both approaches are equally valid, at appropriate junctures.

However, we must not quit evoking health at any point of time. If disease management via drugs is taken up without a parallel investment in a healthy lifestyle, the body becomes a battleground all too quickly. There is a wellspring of power within us, a spiritual truth, that we must honor; and we never give away our power to any disease, just because we have a scary-sounding condition with a grim prognosis. In fact, it is now more than ever that we must activate our latent health response through a scientific lifestyle that is in sync with Nature’s laws. If you are consuming Eastern or Western drugs, a healthy Ayurveda-inspired lifestyle in conjunction will expedite recovery and additionally facilitate well-being.

Your body is remarkably wise and possesses self-repair mechanisms. "Trust it some more, and help it heal itself, Baba explained to me. Besides, Ayurveda lifestyle is often enough in and of itself to activate the dormant health response."

And at the least, lifestyle is like evocative art; it suffuses our consciousness with all-new possibilities of being and becoming. A lifestyle that makes us feel fulfilled and optimistic at some level will positively impact our beliefs and feelings about our universe and ourselves. Sometimes you will find that you are smiling through the day, and for no particular reason.

When we examine Ayurveda’s source literature, spanning from the Vedas (4500 BCE) all the way to the sixteenth century (that is, texts progressing from the remote past onward), it was lifestyle wisdom that occupied the central stage. Disease management gained increasing priority in the later texts. In fact, this is how the sages who gave us the ancient Vedas and original spiritual sciences of Ayurveda, yoga, Vedanta, meditation, sacred art, architecture, music, and dance lived! They boldly cultivated radiant health day by day as an expression of their god consciousness. They were not living in constant fear of disease. They thought health, lived health, and enjoyed health. It is no wonder that their ancient teachings offer original wisdom that holds the potential of making our entire planet healthy today. Even if disease came to the wise seers (as decay is part of the natural order), they would heal it (or accept it) with grace and beauty, without collapsing their entire consciousness into a broken-shattered mode.

Unfortunately, many Ayurveda practitioners today choose to fix disease and eschew time-consuming patient education on lifestyle. At times, the practitioners possess academic knowledge of lifestyle principles but not a lived knowledge borne from personal experience, and hence, they are very much bound in disease consciousness themselves, often harboring negative outcome beliefs, which invariably reduce the chances of recovery. They are also quick to prescribe herbal drugs. For example, instead of elucidating the lifestyle wisdom pertaining to healthy sleep, far too often the endangered herb Nardostachys jatamansi is prescribed for insomnia. I call this a prescriptive model of Ayurveda, very similar to the Western medical approach that matches drugs with symptoms but does not care to address the underlying life (style) issue. It encourages dependency on drugs, not self-reliance through leading a balanced life, which is greater than any drug. I personally stay away from this mode of Ayurveda.

This book, instead, restores the wisdom teachings on lifestyle to their rightful place and shines the light on health. This book will thereby empower ordinary people, you and me, because lifestyle sets us free to craft our own health, in our own homes, on our own terms.

My Experiments with Evoking the Health Response

My guru imprinted my soul with a spiritual seed of relentless conviction in the self-healing and self-repairing mechanisms of the living body. My entire life and message as a spiritual teacher revolve around this power, which is inherently spiritual. My own journey with a genetic disorder that confines many people to wheelchairs (yet, has spared me) and my ability to cheerfully withstand the severe aftermath of a traumatic neck injury — without painkillers or surgery, with hope to heal fully one day and courage to continue undeterred with my life mission, in spite of everything — has strengthened my belief that deliberate and unhurried self-loving lifestyle practices synced with Nature awaken health as well as personal power and courage.

The same idea has been confirmed again and again, not only in my personal life and private practice, but on a larger scale through public teachings, community education, and wellness initiatives undertaken in California since 2007 through my not-for-profit Vedika Global, a foundation for the living wisdom of Ayurveda, yoga, and Vedanta.

To confirm my learned belief that a health response can be evoked through lifestyle implementation alone, I experimented for over a decade by creating several drug-free lifestyle courses (taught by my well-trained graduates and myself) and lifestyle clinics in California overseen by my school’s graduates. In both, I deliberately bypass the paradigm of disease management and, instead, focus on evoking health of body and mind through lifestyle teachings plus personal empowerment through connecting with a disease-free, ageless higher Self as the underlying reality.

Anyone, of any age and any constitution, whether healthy or sick, was welcome to sign up. Participants were as young as ten years old and also as old as eighty! And what did I find? They all got better! Within a matter of weeks, both course and clinic participants started reporting increased well-being. Some even shared their latest blood test results or other clinical findings — unsolicited by us — to rejoice in their newfound health parameters.

Many of them were shocked, too. What was going on? How was health sneaking up on them so quickly, merely through education in a health-evoking lifestyle and healthy beliefs, in spite of years of ill health and after their doctors had given up on them, or worse, when they had given up on themselves?

While their actual results were based on length and commitment of engagement with lifestyle practices, there was not a single participant who reported a deterioration of health.

Countless individuals with beginning, chronic, or advanced disorders were reclaiming health and well-being, simply by implementing lifestyle changes impacting core personal areas of food (ahara), rest and sleep (nidra), and sexual and behavioral self-regulation (brahmacharya and sadvritta) in the overall context of prescribed daily regimen (dinacharya) and seasonal regimen (ritucharya). Lifestyle practices even improved the well-being of people with terminal diseases, and some reported outliving their prognosis or at least feeling more at peace until the last day. It was uncanny and incredible.

By shining the light on health and consciousness, the miracles I witnessed with my guru Baba, in his lifetime, had now begun to accrue around my initiatives with health versus disease. This was a powerful reinforcement of my own belief systems.

I was convinced that I was onto something and that perhaps a scalable clinical as well as educational self-help model could be crafted from my spiritually anchored lifestyle teachings that evoke the health response. Perhaps it was time to simply stop overly focusing on disease anyway. Is counteracting disease with herbs (versus synthetically designed drugs) still battling it anyway, keeping us locked in disease consciousness? Are we merely changing our doctors from Western medicine to Eastern medicine providers, but each time getting locked up all over again in disease-combating dogmatic belief systems, prescriptions, and protocols? Are we scaring ourselves again and again (with disease), forgetful of our natural inheritance, which is health?

Are we panicking and creating more work for ourselves in medicine instead of simply realigning the quality of our lives with lifestyle adjustments? Have we generated a tremendous number of myths around disease, and its heavy-duty management, instead of evoking the sweet song of health from the truth and light sourced within?

I am all for modem medical intervention, when necessary. I also advocate no single approach, as a judicious integration is the wisest way. However, I do wonder if we need a greater, or at least parallel, focus on a healthy lifestyle, which will greatly support us in overcoming disease by evoking a health response from within. Is it time to begin a new narrative after all?

Further — and this pertains especially to those who have an intrinsic belief in naturally sourced drugs as an alternative to pharmaceuticals — an important question to ask is whether we are overmedicating ourselves, simply because the medicine in question is from a plant source and not created in a laboratory. Should a natural drug be the end of our quest for health? Are we settling for less?

These were some of the questions that were arising in my mind. Sadly, the bane of reductionism is so pervasive that it has also quietly crept into the domains of spiritualized systems like Ayurveda. Instead of being seen as a health-promoting system, more and more, Ayurveda is taught, practiced, and promoted worldwide as a complementary system of disease management. Herbs are safer than prescriptive drugs; we know that (although some will even question that), yet all drugs mask the body’s self-regenerating mechanism to an extent; hence, I believe that herbs must be prescribed as an exception, or in advanced conditions only, and never without accompanying lifestyle restoration teaching.

According to the Botanical Survey of India, 93 percent of Ayurveda medicinal plants are endangered today.¹ Even so, unfettered export by India and import and consumption worldwide burgeons. Patent wars on Ayurveda botanicals are being fought in multiple courts, and the bulk of claims are filed right here in the United States (including battles over neem and turmeric). Now, almost every drug company on the planet wants to cash in on Ayurveda’s ancient pharmacopedic wisdom. Shockingly, all institutions of Ayurveda education in India, and more and more now emerging worldwide, continue to impart a medical paradigm focused around these disappearing herbs, blissfully ignoring the magnitude of the environmental problem.

When it came to using plant-based medicines, my teacher modeled an ultraconservative, almost reverential, approach. I too prefer utilizing spice- and food-based home remedies or employing garden herbs that we can grow in our own homes in a relatively short time. I also consider it my responsibility to screen for botanicals that are not endangered before utilizing them myself or prescribing them to others. This is vastly preferred to consuming and prescribing wild-grown herbs — some of which take decades to grow and ripen.

Are we ultimately expecting our environment to foot the bill of natural medicine? We still have time to put aside our fallacious notions about disease.

This book fills a gap in promoting a spiritualized and health-focused, environmentally sound, ethically rooted Ayurveda lifestyle so that more and more people can adopt these practices in their lives along with a sense of dharma, or social responsibility, toward our planet and its environment.

Conceivably, what I am sharing through this book is the best-kept secret of humanity, and this information will help many more people reclaim sound health. Ayurveda’s lifestyle wisdom is tried and tested and is, above all, an economical solution to the epidemic of wide-ranging lifestyle disorders like hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and psychological/stress-induced disorders, including depression, that humanity is facing today.

I am glad I followed my inner voice to expect the miracle of health, no matter how poor the prognosis may be. The thank-you cards, letters of acknowledgment, tears of joy, and flowers of gratitude are countless and still arriving. And don’t just take my word for it. Read comments and stories of transformation from course and clinic participants throughout this book.

Healthy Lifestyle Triggers Genetic Changes — A Clinical Study

You can understand how pleased I was to confirm that what I learned from my teacher has an echo in the science of epigenetics, according to which, our genes are not fixed but fluid, and our environment — composed of our daily food, habits, thoughts, quality of relationships, and daily self-care routine — impacts our genes, both positively and negatively. This rang a bell with me right away, explaining why I did not manifest gross physical disability in spite of a genetic predisposition. My Ayurveda lifestyle and positive health outcome belief were perhaps my best allies in this journey.

A study by Dr. Dean Ornish, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds more light on the far-reaching health benefits reaped by my course and clinic participants from apparently minor lifestyle variations.² As reported by Reuters: In a small study, the researchers tracked thirty men with low-risk prostate cancer who underwent three months of major lifestyle changes. As expected, they lost weight, lowered their blood pressure, and saw other health improvements. But the researchers found more profound changes when they compared prostate biopsies taken before and after the lifestyle changes. After the three months, the men had changes in activity in about 500 genes — including 48 that were turned on and 453 genes that were turned off. The activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down.³

While we cannot literally amend our genes, a change this dramatic is possible when we positively modify our lifestyle.

Karma and Continuation of a Spiritual Legacy

And finally, I should tell you, I did not simply wake up one morning and decide that I was going to be a champion of Ayurveda’s lifestyle wisdom. I believe it was my karma or my spiritual destiny that decided, even before I was born, that I would indeed write the first book (an authoritative bible of sorts) on Ayurveda lifestyle wisdom. No other books (in any language) address Ayurveda’s lifestyle teachings in this depth, along with the spiritual, philosophical, and scientific context and step-by-step instruction.

I am one of the fortunate teachers born into a family of teachers with an uninterrupted educational lineage, a family that has lived as well as transmitted this ancient wisdom for untold years in the plains of northern India. I have not only mastered the knowledge academically, I have also lived it.

As for the word lineage, it sounds mystical these days, but the idea is common enough in India where, for centuries, sacred and healing knowledge was carefully passed on from mentor to disciple in the rarefied environment of a special family-style school called gurukulam. Here, Vedic education was imparted to the student for a minimum of twelve years. I studied for fourteen, along with regular schooling, and graduated as an acharya, which means a master spiritual teacher of lived Vedic knowledge who teaches not only by word, but through role modeling by behavior. My education was rigorous, to say the least, yet spiritually charged and always experiential.

When I was growing up in India, living and learning this knowledge in the family of my teacher, I had no idea that one day I would be writing this book for a world audience. And yet, this is what has happened. This is less a testimony of my life journey and more of a shout-out for Ayurveda. What is the truth cannot be kept under wraps for long. More and more people are seeking Ayurveda’s lifestyle and benefiting from its transformative wisdom.

I hope this wisdom will change your life for the better too, as it did mine. But first, you have to believe that anything is possible.

Shunya

INTRODUCTION

The Art of Ayurveda Lifestyle

Ididn’t realize how sick I was until I got healthy. At twenty-two, Brittany Barrett was taking eighteen pills a day — prescription medications from physicians who told her there wasn’t much they could do about her pain and nothing they could do to cure her illness. She had been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. My body was literally eating holes into itself, she said, and my life felt like it was on hold. I had moved back in with my parents. There were times when I had to remain close to a bathroom. It was devastating. I tried to keep a positive attitude, but I was numb. I was depressed. I went to support groups, but that made me even more depressed."

After just a year, this San Francisco Bay Area resident became free from the condition that had once plagued her. She healed herself through the Ayurveda system of health and healing, which is India’s traditional and time-proven method to establish physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. It is a way of eating, a way of living, a way of approaching life itself — and it is inherently medicinal.

I have been imparting Ayurveda lifestyle wisdom for the last twenty-five years, and I am grateful that I have lived the principles outlined in this book since birth. My teacher, my guru, was my grandfather, Baba Ayodhya Nath, a renowned Vedic teacher and healer of his time, and the line of wisdom bearers in my family goes back uncountable generations, all the way back to the holy Rig-Veda, the oldest wisdom scripture, originating in India. When I was nine, my guru formally initiated me into rigorous study of the Veda, along with three important bodies of knowledge that originate from the singular Veda: namely, Ayurveda for abiding health, yoga for a pure mind, and Vedanta for elevation of spiritual consciousness.

I now impart this same timeless and transformative wisdom through a traditional schooling format called the gurukulam, in which the authentic teachings — derived from original ancient texts as well as instruction from my guru (my grandfather) and our uninterrupted lineage dating back several thousand years in India — come alive through embodied and experiential education, including lifestyle, well-being, cooking, diet, healing, god-consciousness, meditation, and yoga. My students feel uplifted, peaceful, balanced, happier, healthier, blessed, confident, and on the path to self-mastery. But perhaps even more important, students feel part of an ancient tradition and trusted lineage in which they feel held — and at home.

I will never forget the evening when, giving a talk on the fundamentals of Ayurveda lifestyle wisdom at a Bay Area bookstore, I found myself watching an exceptionally beautiful young woman in the front row who sat staring at me with tears running down her face. I could see that she was taking in every word. Afterward, Brittany Barrett introduced herself and said, You’ve changed my life. I’m going to pursue my health because you have inspired me. What had ignited her was the message that her body was not broken, but rather that an ailing body is out of balance, and whatever it is about the body that’s out of balance can be brought back into balance. It was quite a different message than the one this troubled young woman had been hearing for years from Western medicine!

Britt was touched by my talk, and I too was touched — by the strength of her intention. That night, I dreamt of this young woman. In my dream, I took her hand and led her back home to the sacred town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, India. It was here that I learned the Ayurvedic principles I teach. The dream turned out to be somewhat prophetic because Britt did, indeed, follow me — not to India, but into an exploration of Ayurveda.

A few weeks later, Britt registered for a three-day retreat on getting in touch with one’s inner shakti, or spiritual power. Making such a connection within oneself is fundamental to Ayurveda. Though at this particular retreat I didn’t lecture on Ayurvedic dietary recommendations, I do always make certain that retreat participants eat correctly by providing healthy, balanced meals cooked from fresh foods appropriate to the season. I hadn’t reckoned, however, that participants might show up with their own food! This is exactly what Britt did, following her ideas, gleaned misinformation, about what she needed to eat to address her digestive problems. She sat down at the dinner table, telling other participants, Oh, your food looks so good! It’s too bad I have to eat this, and unpacking a meal of raw fruit and yogurt.

It’s a funny thing about food misconceptions. In the West, yogurt, with its live cultures, is often seen as a miracle food, and fresh fruit is thought to be as pure as water itself. This is not, however, the case. I discuss this in much greater detail in later chapters, but for now, I will simply point out — as one of my senior students did that day to Britt — that fruit and dairy are an incompatible food combination and, taken together, are quite difficult for the body to digest.

At the time, Britt thought, These ladies are really nice, but they don’t know what they’re talking about! It was, of course, Britt herself who didn’t know. And how could she? Her medical doctors had told her that her diet made no difference in ulcerative colitis; she need only continue taking her eighteen daily pills. To her credit, Britt saw the inherent fallacy in this — how could food be unrelated to digestion! — and so she explored the diets she found in the media. This was how she’d found my lecture in that bookstore.

Britt walked away from the retreat with a list of five things she was to do daily:

1.Wake up early each morning at a set time.

2.Have an altar in her room and put fresh flowers on it every day.

3.Every morning, meditate on her healing for fifteen minutes.

4.Stop eating (or minimize her consumption of) harmful foods — toxin-generating foods, such as yogurt, cheese, processed foods, and cold foods like raw salads.

5.Eat beneficial foods such as mung lentils, or green gram; homemade Ayurvedic buttermilk; clarified butter, or ghee (Ayurvedic clarified butter); and good spices like turmeric, cumin, fennel, and ginger.

These lifestyle and dietary principles, especially numbers 4 and 5, are discussed in detail in later chapters, but this simple list was enough for Britt to work with. And work with it she did. Every day she went down this list, and before long she noticed that her bowels were less erratic and that her mood was beginning to elevate.

I feel this kind of transformation is a testimony to the power of Ayurveda. With just a few lifestyle changes, instrumented daily, the body becomes strong enough to begin healing itself. This is because Ayurveda principles and foods work with — and never against — the body’s innate intelligence.

Recognizing the undeniable improvement in her health from following five simple precepts, Britt signed up for the beginner’s self-care course at my school, Vedika Global. I designed this course with people like Britt in mind, to help them awaken to health. Students learn the basics of Ayurveda lifestyle under the direction of experts. Students are given the fundamentals to support a healthy lifestyle and eating habits. In addition to going over theory, in every class they also cook healthy foods, timeless recipes that heal each time they are consumed. Learning these skills, students are then able to awaken their own self-healing. Britt, as it turned out, was inspired to study further.

By the end of her first year of study with me, Britt’s ulcerative colitis virtually disappeared, and she was completely symptom-free. She was also able to wean herself off prescription antidepressants she had been taking since she was sixteen years old, and you can imagine how proud she felt about being free from those chains!

What had begun as a year of self-healing was transformed into an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of this magical science! Britt then completed a three-year practitioner-level training with me, and since 2012 she has been attending to clients herself, offering them advice and giving to them a list of five daily directions that is quite similar to the one she received herself.

The profoundly personal and deeply enriching style of my traditional gurukulam’s training (a spiritually transformative educational process based on the ancient Vedas) immediately and irrefutably deepens self-awareness. Britt’s journey went beyond academics into real life, into a living, breathing immersion in Ayurveda lifestyle wisdom under my watchful eye, and this built profound confidence in her. Step by step, Britt transformed her health, and as she did this, she matured emotionally and spiritually until she was prepared to give back to society. Today, she is featured on popular blog sites and in magazines and is in the process of launching a television show on healing with food. Moving from desolation to hope, from isolation to connection, Britt has become a light for her community in her own unique way, and Ayurveda lifestyle wisdom has successfully anchored her at every step. Seeing my student give from the fund of knowledge she has received makes my heart overflow with gratitude. I bow again and again to the great sages, the rishis, who selflessly granted us this invaluable knowledge of Ayurveda. I thank my primary teacher, my guru Baba Ayodhya Nath, who passed this treasure on to me, precisely and without shortcuts, along with the certainty that health of body, mind, and soul is our inherent state, that it is our human birthright.

In the final analysis, Nature is the grandest of all teachers. It is Nature herself who beckons us to come home to her by following Ayurvedic lifestyle practices, which are nothing other than manifestations of natural laws of the cosmos. Ayurvedic wisdom reminds us that our entire life is an opportunity to make the natural yet discriminating choices that will bring us into balance and reclaim the deep spiritual harmony that lies within us.

Let us explore the living wisdom and Ayurvedic lifestyle practices that changed the life of this young woman. Perhaps you, too, can benefit from adopting an Ayurveda lifestyle!

Ayurveda: A Path to Self-Fulfillment

It is said that some five thousand years ago, India was home to the spiritually evolved beings who were the rishis, or sages, of Ayurveda. After a prolonged spiritual quest and untold years of meditation, these great souls elevated their consciousness to the point that they could receive the special healing wisdom that is known as Ayurveda. This Sanskrit word translates as the knowledge of life.

To rid ourselves of the suffering that afflicts body, mind, and soul, we do not require specialized technology to combat disease (and dis-ease). What we need is an affirmative knowledge of life and how to lead it in such a way that in each moment we experience being in alignment with Nature, which is both our source and destination.

Thus, Ayurveda is a science of conscious living that originated in ancient India, that flourishes today in modern India, and that extends its influence worldwide. Ayurveda teaches a lifestyle that, when lived, prevents disease and optimizes health and well-being.

Ayurveda addresses body, mind, and spirit in one sweep. It restores hope and wholeness in a gentle and constructive fashion. Rather than struggling with disease, Ayurveda opens us to our own natural wholeness. Ayurvedic principles remind us that we are self-healing creatures and that we can maintain — or regain — good health by choosing healing foods, a balanced lifestyle, and inner calm.

The Gateways of Positive Change

Ayurveda is the recorded insights of visionary, spiritually inspired, out-of-the-box scientists, the rishis, who were keenly in dialogue with the transcendental realities of life. You could say that these sages were the original researchers who discovered Ayurveda and advanced its use among the rest of humanity.

Ayurveda’s sages observed Nature deeply, meditating on her rhythmic changes — the days, the seasons, the phases of life in birth, aging, and death. They concluded that while change is the essence of life, it is possible to adapt to these changes artfully and, by so doing, to reap abiding health. Balance in our adaption to change means health, and the lack of balance translates as ill health. These teachings became encoded over time in the great science of Ayurveda.

The natural wisdom that humanity once possessed when we all lived close to Nature has been collectively forgotten. This is not anybody’s fault, as such. The urbanization of our natural landscapes has forced on us forgetfulness and alienation from Nature. For this, humanity pays a large price. Thankfully, however, Ayurveda reminds us that we have nothing to fear, for there is no such thing as a permanent damage. As long as we are alive, we can embrace new beliefs that spawn fresh choices and reap new fruits. New beginnings are the essence of life.

In fact, Ayurveda reassures us that these changes in Nature are actually gateways, lending opportunity for a deeper communion with the essence of life and abiding health, which is our true nature. To pass through these gateways, however, requires life wisdom and alignment with Nature. The sages, therefore, teach humanity perhaps its first lesson on how to navigate Nature through an artfully lived lifestyle, first and foremost.

Wellness Encompasses Both the Material and the Spiritual

The Rig-Veda, the oldest of India’s scriptures and the source book of the Indian worldview, declares, The truth is one: the wise call it by many names.¹

This is a greatly liberal perspective. Truth, precisely because it is truth, need not be artificially broken up into realms of existence and operation — one truth for the external world, which is the territory of the scientist, and one truth for the internal world, which is the focus for the mystic. Rather, truth is one, indivisible and nonnegotiable, and the living being is a perfect meeting ground of the material and the spiritual dimensions of truth. In Ayurveda, this truth is known as satyam.

Consequently, Ayurveda is a unique medical science that is beyond the limitations of scientific or physical realism (materialism), which claims that only matter is real and that all else is imagination. Nor is Ayurveda limited to spiritual idealism. It is, rather, a judicious mix of the material and the spiritual in terms of both relevant levels of understanding and of healing. Ayurveda offers a highly creative and original understanding of the human plane of existence and its challenges to health from the perspective of both the material and the spiritual.

This is why Ayurveda does not force us to box ourselves into being either 100 percent spiritual entities or 100 percent material entities. Ayurveda accommodates both paradigms in recognition of our inherent multidimensional existence. This position is mature, to say the least, and five thousand years ahead of its time. Transcending opinions and differences, it offers the benefit of inclusiveness to us all. While the sages of Ayurveda were deeply spiritual, they were also dedicated to scientific rigor and methodology. And this is how the sages were able to glean the highest transcendental truth that lies both within and beyond the world of matter.

Ayurveda is both a gentle, nurturing, mothering, healing art — a way of living in alignment with Nature and with humankind’s spiritual essence — and an efficient, matter-of-fact, methodical way of correcting, balancing, and fixing health through the protection of good health and the prevention and management of disease. Ayurveda goes beyond dogma to recognize and highlight the fact that life cannot be understood by only one set of mechanisms or theories. Thus, Ayurveda accommodates a variety of designs and wellness strategies.

Learning the Old but Ever-New Principles of Ayurveda

Ayurveda’s fundamental principles have stood the test of time. They are in as much use today in the twenty-first century as they were in ancient times. The survival of Ayurveda is a living testimony to the accomplishments of its scientist sages. Ayurvedic concepts have delivered consistent, and at times astonishing, results over time. This book weaves these same eternal principles through lifestyle teachings. The practices you encounter in this book have stood the test of time. They were valid then, they are valid today, and they will be valid tomorrow.

I am fortunate to have studied with a modern-day sage of Ayurveda, my guru, my grandfather and teacher, Baba Ayodhya Nath, whom I simply refer to as Baba. It is a generic name, spoken affectionately, in the same way that in the West we might call someone Grandpa. Baba is also the title used all over India to address holy people. Perhaps these mystics, sages, and seers are known as baba because they are collectively regarded as India’s spiritual elders.

Baba was born in 1900 in northern India, into the family of a renowned Hindu saint and yogi with an uninterrupted lineage going back untold years. Baba overcame early childhood disease and went on to live ninety remarkably healthy years, impacting his community with his spiritual radiance, charismatic leadership, profound Vedic knowledge, and social service. In my formative years, I lived with my Baba and our extended family in our large ancestral home, built by Baba’s great-grandfather in the holy city of Ayodhya in northern India, renowned because King Ram, who was considered an avatar of Lord Vishnu, was born there, according to the ancient Hindu epic Ramayana. So it is a pilgrimage town for millions still today.

Over the years, Baba bestowed on me the spiritual wisdom of the Vedas and began my initiation into the transformative wisdom of the related Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, two of the most sacred Vedic texts expounding a rare, universal spiritual philosophy (known as Adwaita Vedanta) teaching self-actualization (dharma) as well as Self-realization (mukti), which is the same as God realization (moksha). His teachings of Ayurveda were truly classical, based on core texts, hands-on, practical yet poetic, and sublime at the same time. Baba’s fierce, unflinching belief in the living body’s inherent intelligence to heal itself (with the help of Mother Nature) became my core belief system too. To this day, I may look at a dying person, and instead of feeling dismayed, I connect with what is vital and amazing in that being, even in that terminal stage. And often enough, the so-called medical miracles begin to transpire too. Baba told me, Never lose hope, as hopelessness is the disease that precedes all symptoms.

Baba’s out-of-the-box personality, calm presence, continuous state of god consciousness, and profound teachings impacted my soul in deeper ways than I could have been aware of at that young age. My essential education happened through observation of a spiritually realized being. I watched how Baba faced the ups and downs of his own life — and how he chose to respond to them from a place of inner restfulness cultivated through a committed art of living inspired by Ayurveda. I listened to Baba’s wise words even before I could fully understand them. It has taken me the rest of my life to comprehend and integrate the impact of the valuable gift of the knowledge Baba imparted to my soul. My body and mind were those of a child, but my soul was apparently ready to receive this wisdom. As a result, my life today as an educator and leader in Ayurveda revolves around the paradigm-shifting conversations I had with my Baba.

I believe the direct teacher-student relationship is special and potentially superior to any academic, test- and degree-based system for spiritualized sciences, like Ayurveda, yoga, and Vedanta. This personalized process of training creates the meticulous transfer of knowledge, experience, and expertise — the central matters on which wisdom is founded — that cannot be imparted except through a kind of apprenticeship, face-to-face, knee-to-knee, as has been impressed on my soul by decades of learning from my guru, Baba.

This was the