Back to the Basics: Results

In terms of the ayurveda experiment, the results were meaningful to me:

1.      Ayuvedic Daily Routine.

(a)  While I have felt overall very healthy for quite some time, the morning rituals of Dr. Lad’s, including tongue viewing and scraping, kept me in touch with what I am eating and how that is affecting my body and equally important that I have a nutritional deficiency since there are some ridges on my tongue.  Whether ayurveda or the Chinese system, there is fundamental sense and insight from taking the eastern approach and spending time LOOKING at things like the tongue, eyes, ears, bowels, urine etc…

(b) The eye exercises brought energy and seemed to improve my eye sight given the amount of computer work I have been doing.   It was very noteworthy the degree to which these exercises felt refreshing and revitalizing.

(c) Both nasya, nose drops, and abhyanga, self message, were very soothing to the body.  Abhyanga also made me realize how much I missed having a chlorine filter in my shower as my skin started feeling particularly dry with the change in the season.  While the oil massage is great, it is also time to replace the filter, which I have been without for about 4 months.

2.      Food.

I have been surprised that substituting fruit for refined sugar has helped my cravings, brain and food habits.  Although I had some apprehension about eating fruit ‘alone’ per ayurvedic guidelines (as I thought it might be too much of a sugar rush), it has been for the most part fine.  My brain had energy to work, and I did not experience the tendency I have when eating refined sugar to want ‘more’ refined sugar.  There were some occasions when I felt tiredness later after taking fruit, but I have to experiment a little more since there may have been other things factoring in to the situation.

3.       Pranayama and Meditation Practices.

I ended up feeling too cooled by pitta-pacifying pranayama practices (shitali).  Since I loved the effects of bhramari in class, which is vata pacifying, I ended up practicing the Four Purifications and Bhramari, along with Dr. Lad’s Empty Bowl Meditation, in the mornings and dirgha rechak (long exhale) in the evenings.  It will be interesting to experience how this changes over time – or whether it will change over time and what the overall effects will be.

/by

Back to the Basics: Conclusion

Overall, the personal experiments in the YTTP provide the opportunity to isolate certain practices, apply these practices in day-to-day life, and track the experience to find out what happens, if anything.  The structure provides support to ‘stay conscious’ otherwise you can’t report on anything.  So, after some initial resistance, I have come to value the entire personal experiment process – even the paper.  And, I hope to make it a practice of creating manageable personal experiments on an ongoing basis.

/by

Ayurveda Offers Relief from Depression

Axis Yoga students have the opportunity to apply Ayurvedic principles to their lives through their second Teacher Training course experiment. This student writes about her life-long experience with depression and her new hope with Ayurvedic healing.

/by

Relief from Depression: Introduction

Choosing what specific aspect of my life I wished to address with Ayurvedic therapy was not hard.  From a very young age, depression has governed my life. While my depression racked my personal, private life I was still an ambitious person. I excelled in everything I did; it didn’t matter if it was school or music or sports I was hungry for knowledge and going out and doing things well made me feel like I was alive. Doing work made me forget about how much I hated myself and for 21 years I coped with my life’s ebb and flow. Then about a year and a half ago my very dependable depression changed radically.

I noticed eventually that I didn’t care about anything, and I mean that exactly how it was written. Nothing, not family, not school mattered anymore. I hated to do anything and I could barely get out of bed without breaking out into a hysterical flood of tears. I felt desperate to get back to my “normal” self-loathing depression. I tried getting through it myself. That didn’t work. I tried acupuncture, massage, and aromatherapy. They made me feel a bit better but were too expensive to continue with. I then turned to therapy and was put on a ridiculous amount of medication. They didn’t help. After a horrifying set of hallucinations caused by the cocktail of pills I was told to take, I stopped all medications. Then I turned to yoga, which got me through some of my darkest times. I am at a point now where I can manage my depression better but some days are still extremely rough.

/by

Relief from Depression: The Hypothesis and Initial Practice

I feel as if I have lost my fire for life, which is ironic since I am a Pitta-Kapha person and fire is what gives Pittas their zest. I realized that a lot of my symptoms were showing up as symptoms of too much Kapha. I hypothesized that my depression could be, in part, due to an excess of Kapha and that following Ayurvedic guidelines to pacify Kapha could alleviate some of my symptoms.

I decided that I would keep to a fairly Pitta diet to keep my Pitta pacified as I went after my Kapha with lifestyle changes. I decided to force myself to be active both in my mind and my body. I listened to upbeat music and surrounded myself with invigorating people. I have had a strong dislike of being social lately and being around people was hard, but ultimately rewarding. Making kicharee with Beth, surrounded by laughing and shared stories, made me feel loved. The next day however, that sinking feeling of depression was back, strong as ever.

Getting up before 6:00 am was not very fun and made me really irritable but working out and doing more vigorous asana made me feel amazing. As a Molecular Biologist I know that a good physical stimulation can release an amazing amount of serotonin, which is what all of my old medication was doing artificially. I tried to give my mind a good workout by not reading and studying in my house and instead reading out in public, surrounded by people. I reread the Bhagavad Gita and read the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika among other things. I forced myself to explore all the things being thrown at me. It worked but almost too well. I feel like I can’t get enough information now.

/by

Relief from Depression: Intensified Practice

Finally I decided to do two things I really didn’t want to do: vamana dhauti. The laughter yoga was initially ridiculous. I felt really REALLY stupid being surrounded by a bunch of people with wide-open eyes pretending to laugh. About halfway through I eventually dissolved into giggles, which made it hard to do some of the breathing and postures we were supposed to be doing. I ended up enjoying it and I think I’ll keep going back. A good belly laugh brightened my whole day and made coping with sadness easier. It’s still pretty silly though.

The vamana dhauti pracice, I was sure, wasn’t going to end up being as fun as the laughter yoga. Santosh had mentioned that vamana dhauti would help get rid of some kapha and I believe him now. I was very reserved about making myself forcefully vomit because I didn’t want to give myself a tool that could be used to hurt myself. I thought a lot about it and decided that I had enough strength to try the practice. It ended up being incredible and very funny to vomit in a group of laughing women. For days after the practice I felt amazing, like I was shining. It was the most effective practice at helping with my depression of this whole experiment. It will definitely become a bi-yearly ritual.

/by

Relief from Depression: Conclusion

After everything was said and done I think the few Ayurvedic therapies did improve my symptoms a bit.  Nothing worked like a miracle and kept me from feeling any sort of depression, but they helped enough that I noticed a difference. I think that Ayurveda might be the answer I’ve been looking for. I even have an upcoming appointment with Alakananda Ma to get more information and suggestions as to how to use Ayurveda to improve my mental (and physical) health.

/by

Testing Ayurveda’s Applications

Being a student at Axis Yoga Teacher Training provides a wide range of experiences. Through personal experiments, students embody certain yogic principles in order to gain a greater understanding of their meaning and application. This student chose to apply a few specific dietary and lifestyle recommendations for his Ayurveda experiment.

/by

Testing Ayurveda’s Applications: Introduction

I chose to remove dairy and wheat for the dietary portion of my Ayurveda experiment and remove the news media for a psychological component. I have chronic sinus issues that, while not debilitating have nevertheless been in my physical make-up most of my life, thus the Kapha dietary avoidance of dairy and wheat. The psychological component is Vata. Specifically, I have chronic muscle tightness, low backache, and sciatica. I have previously worked psychologically to detach myself emotionally from the media, thinking that I might not consciously get anxious or insecure after reading the news of the day. But does the anxiety manifest itself physically? This is why I chose avoiding the media completely for the second part of my experiment.

/by

Testing Ayurveda’s Applications: Findings

My journey started the night before the official “start” of the experiment when I went to the store to find some things to tide me over, so to speak. I worked to plan my breakfast and lunch menus since those are the occasions where I do most of the dairy and wheat consumption. Little did I know as I looked at ingredients labels how much wheat and dairy had infiltrated the World?

Early impressions of the dietary changes are that I have quickly developed an unsteady feeling in my body affecting my equilibrium including a few tremors in my legs. As to the media avoidance, I could not be happier after hearing about the death of OBL the night before I started my media fast, that I had a built in excuse not to be privy to the endless babble that would ensue for at least two weeks.

Four days in and I’m thinking that I might be dealing with some Hypoglycemia regarding the unsteady feeling I talked about previously. I have been keeping a regular eating schedule but I am still getting the light-headed feeling, dizziness, tremors in the legs, chronic fatigue, irritability that are listed in the Home Remedies section of the Ayurveda book. I’ve been eating some raisins or an apple, or drinking some fruit juice having a minimal effect. It is nothing incapacitating, but I don’t like the feeling. I was learning some new database concepts at work and found it harder to concentrate. One other measurable effect is the loss of 6 pounds. As for the media silence, I’m noticing a subtle shift in my increased awareness of things, whether it is tactile response or hearing and smelling. I’m noticing the pungent scent of the lilac bushes, the rough feeling of the dishrag, the rhythm of the clock ticking or the furnace running. There has also been a staggering amount of boredom. However, I have not yet noticed a difference physically regarding the muscle tightness, backache, and sciatica doing the Vata themed asana practice. My understanding is that the tempo of the asana is directed more at calming the mind than as a physical therapy.

I’m finding it to be annoying to family as I work to adjust to the apparent withdrawal from the dietary restrictions. I am verbalizing my inner thoughts and while that is usually something my wife wants to hear, that is not the case when I’m whining to have some chocolate cake when we were at a restaurant celebrating her birthday. I’m still distracted looking toward the end of the experiment and what I’m going to eat than what I’m experiencing in the moment.

Eight days in and I’m observing a feeling of isolation and loneliness with the dietary part of the experiment. I was sitting with my meditation group and one of the folks brought in some homemade cookies for the talk afterward. I was the only person not to have any because of the dairy and wheat in them. I’m feeling a lot more empathy for folks who through some medical condition have to change their diet and the resistance they encounter in society. The saturation of these products in food has been a real eye opener.

/by