Healthy Digestion
Healthy digestion is life giving, life sustaining and is the cornerstone of health. Agni, the Sanskrit term for your digestive fire, is responsible not only for the nourishment of your tissues and organs but also for clarity of mind, strength and vitality. If your agni is low, food will not be digested properly. Poorly digested food creates toxins or sticky, metabolic wastes that clog the internal channels of the body. The toxins accumulate and weaken the immune system, making us vulnerable to disease. When your digestion is robust and healthy, you have wonderful energy, you feel light in the body and calm in your mind. Ayurveda places great emphasis on healthy digestion with proper elimination and views our bowel activity as indicators of health. Yet how many of us talk about it? Our doctors will discuss it with us if we initiate the subject, and certainly it’s more common to discuss in one’s later years, but in truth, they too rarely breach the subject. As a society, it is basically taboo. As we learn to understand and recognize what healthy bowel activity looks like, and what needs to be done to get there, our bodies have a remarkable ability to self-correct and heal. Ayurveda teaches us that the choices we make every day either sustain us and keep us healthy or create imbalances which lead to poor health and disease.
Do you see yourself in the examples below?
Do you suffer from constipation and irregular bowel movements? Are your stools hard, dry and difficult to eliminate? Are you looking for relief from gas, bloating and oddly, perhaps mild headaches? Ayurveda teaches us that constipation is the result of excess dryness in the colon which decreases the volume of stool and slows down the natural rate of peristalsis. By reducing the cold, dry qualities in our food and lifestyle choices, we can restore the balance of nourishment to the body and restore the natural flow of elimination.
Do you suffer from loose stools? Do you have to run to the bathroom after eating? Do you have 3, 4 or more bowel movements per day where it strikes you as just too much? Do you get hangry? Ayurveda teaches us that loose stools and unrelenting appetite are examples of excessive hot, sharp qualities in the GI tract. This can lead to leaky gut, poor assimilation of nutrients and poor absorption. By reducing the hot, sharp qualities in our food and lifestyle choices, we can restore proper assimilation to better nourish the blood, the tissues, our bodies.
Do you suffer from slow, sluggish bowels? Do you suffer from feelings of heaviness in the body and incomplete elimination? Do you experience slow, sticky stools that sink and stick to the surface of the toilet bowl? What is your appetite like? Do you find yourself eating because the clock says it’s time to eat, but in truth, there’s little to no true appetite? Ayurveda teaches us that sluggish bowels and suppressed appetite are the result of excess heaviness in our food and lifestyle choices. By restoring balance, the body feels light, extra weight drops off and you have abundant energy.