Please enjoy the following expert from our upcoming book!
The way we think and feel, the foods we eat, the way we live our lives, can protect us from disease, heal us when we become sick, and help us to attain new and higher levels of wellness. We can cultivate consciously a healthy life style and participate in the creation of our own health. The beauty of the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda is in completeness. Ayurveda prescribes a total program of health for the complete person. Health is a way of life. It is not a hobby according to the most recent lobbying outside authority. Problems will always arise if we focus only on a part and neglect the whole. If for example, our program for improving our health includes scientific cardiovascular exercise but ignores our needs to play, relax and laugh, or if we eat perfectly but don’t eliminate, exercise or sleep regularly we are not balancing the whole person. When we concentrate only on a part rather than the whole, disorder or disease due to imbalance will eventually appear. A major thrust of Ayurveda is its emphasis on preventive medicine that arises from re-structuring a natural and individualized complete health-style and diet.
Regulating our lives and re-structuring them with positive health producing habits is the way to prevent the chronic diseases that are today plaguing us more and more. These are the diseases for which our modern medical system has no real cure. Included are diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and arthritis. These are disease that often develop insidiously over the years. A daily routine practiced along with dietary guidelines based on the specific pharmacology of certain foods and prescribed according to individual differences is an important for preventive medicine.
Ojas – Fortifying Our Natural Immunity
The essence of our natural immunity is given the name ojas or life power in Ayurveda. Life power increases when we are happy and our lives are balanced, rhythmical and peaceful. Ojas or life power decreases when we remain frustrated, angered, resentful, depressed, stressed out, nervous, anxious or in any other way emotionally unstable or repressed. Our natural resistance forms at the interface between the physical and the metaphysical. In Ayurveda ojas is understood to be produced directly in three ways:
- First it develops naturally from positive thinking and wholesome balanced living.
- Secondly our natural immunity or ojas increases when we breath deeply and freely.
- And thirdly ojas increases from the efficient and complete digestion and metabolism of the foods we eat.
When one’s ojas level is very high, the body has an enormous ability to recover from and resist disease, and when the ojas level is low in the body, there is a lack of resistance to disease and the bodily easily loses its equilibrium and becomes sick.
By living a healthy life-style, health will naturally develop. The guidelines given are for an entirely individualized way of taking responsibility for our own health. The way of living is to comply with the natural laws of life. Disease is the result of disharmony, and harmony is the secret of health. The natural law that turns like wheels of change within each of us is the same natural law that governs the entire universe in harmony and with perfect order. The purpose of the Ayurvedic system is to enable an individual to tune into one’s Self and thus tune into the universe and live in harmony with its natural laws. The body is an instrument of God, created for experience and the realization of this higher presence. It is our duty to maintain the body as a temple for the Spirit. Harmony and balance are required for keeping this temple healthy and vital. Harmony is the most essential element of health and mental peace and balance are the most difficult aspects of life for anyone and everybody to sustain.
1/23/2024