A YOGI CHA BLOG

Are you BURNING UP?

Let’s look at the state of the world for a second. Ok, we can all agree on a clear YES to answer the question in the title. 

It would almost be surprising if we as individuals, weren’t burning up since everything around us seems to be. The planet is over heating, our computers and smart phones are always lit, the food we eat is so overly transformed that is literally is burning before we heat it. So why wouldn’t this reflect itself inside of us as well?

What we need to understand is that inflammation is HEAT. It is our body’s response to an intruder, it mobilises the defences of the organism and secures the area where it is. This is how we experience a heating sensation, swelling of the area and pain. The battle has begun.

When it’s an acute inflammation this is dealt with and then things go back to normal. But when this situation is turned into something chronic, the immune system releases the defences in the whole body, basically we are fighting to survive. The situation turns chronic when the defences haven’t been able to calm the infected area with anti-inflammatory mediators after the battle. That would happen if our overall internal environment is not favourable for the mediators. The reason they wouldn’t be is because we are not living very well. It’s as simple as having a healthy lifestyle, eating real foods and knowing how to deal with stress factors appropriately. 

You might wonder why that is, after all why would food for instance play a role in how your body deals with intruders. Well there are more than one answers to that but firstly, understand that there are certain things we have learned is food that actually isn’t. Sugar, for instance, will actually set off the inflammation alarm if combined with protein or fat in the blood. This is the reason that Ayurveda recommend to never mix fruit with your meal but to have it several hours later. But also, processed food contains a lot of sugar so that we like it. Even so, the more transformed the food is, the less it is actually nutritious.  So your digestive system will not know how to process it when it gets there. It will seem like an intruder that will set off the defences.   

The one thing that hit me about inflammation and weight gain was the number of people I have worked with who we struggling with their bodies. Many who have some information already about Ayurveda would have come to the misguided conclusion that they must be “too much” Kapha and therefore they need to heat up and move more. But that wasn’t working for them. Because in today’s society, I would say that those suffering with body image and not the couch potato kind of people. They usually are the first on the treadmill when the gym opens and they weigh their food and count their calories. So it’s not Kapha but Pitta that is out of whack. Pitta = fire. Heat. Inflammation.

The world and our organisms do not need to more stimulation. To find balance again, it needs to experience the opposite. To heal, we need to experience the opposite.

Inflammation is a hot topic (pun intended) but it is just a symptom of our time. Chronic inflammation is going on inside of most of us and that is the result of decades of wrong lifestyle choices, letting the corporate world dictate what you should be doing and when. It is also the result of an always greedier food industry that just wants to industrialise the products more so that they can earn more money. But there is no actual nutrition in what they serve and any human would reject it just by taste and smell but since they add in sugar, we become addicted to it instead. It is a result of more and more stimulation to our system so that we do not know how to protect ourselves from it and find peace inside. 

As soon as humans started to become urban, the Ayurvedic practitioners saw the problem it was causing. The natural elimination of waste and the harmony of the elements inside of our bodies was disturbed. So they created the practices that we call the Ayurvedic Lifestyle now, to help urban people to stay healthy. 

These are the practices we work with in my 8 week program : Nourish-Balance-Thrive.

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