The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility. Heather Grzych

I realized that I’d been dragging this body around with me my whole life and knew very little about how it worked.

      We aren’t given a manual on how our bodies work when we are born. Even trained medical professionals don’t always fully integrate their learning on the body, because intellectual knowledge, helping other people, and our own embodiment are completely different things. When I started studying my own body, I noticed how complex it was — how so much is going on all the time in all its nooks and crannies. I felt overwhelmed by how much there was to learn, and it seemed it would take forever to truly understand it. I wondered: Is there a way to learn about health that is instead really simple and won’t feel daunting to tackle? Ayurveda was my answer.

      Ayurveda gives insight into the very beginnings of disease by studying seemingly benign symptoms that most people simply discount because they can oftentimes take some over-the-counter medicine for them, but they are a big deal if they persist. All disease conditions — minor or major — have their roots in these small health issues. To prevent and reverse disease, you want to catch it as early as possible, because it’s more and more difficult to address it as time goes on. The good news, which I will explain in subsequent chapters, is that imbalance follows very specific patterns, so if you pay attention, you will be able to detect and rebalance issues.

      My goal is to introduce you to a few helpful concepts from Ayurvedic medicine so that you can discover how you can be your healthiest self. In introducing Ayurveda to you, I fear I will convey only a fraction of the brilliance of this medicine, because it is so very vast and wise. Nevertheless, I will try. In some cases I will use transliterated Sanskrit terms because there is no meaningful English equivalent to express certain concepts.

      Definition of Health

       A person with [a] uniformly healthy digestion, and whose bodily humours are in a state of equilibrium, and in whom the fundamental vital fluids course in their normal state and quantity, accompanied by the normal processes of secretion, organic function, and intellection, is said to be a healthy person.

       — SUSHRUTA-SAMHITA

      Ayurveda teaches us that a healthy person is healthy in mind, body, and senses. We factor in what enters the body and how it is processed, utilized, and ultimately excreted. We evaluate actual food intake and anything else that comes in contact with the sense organs, such as sound, light, smells, and so on. Anything perceived by the senses is food.

      We cannot deny that the mind and body are interconnected. When we feel physical pain, there are often mental symptoms that accompany this pain. When we feel stress, anxiety, anger, or sadness, we feel physical symptoms, too, because feelings trigger energy and fluids to travel differently through the body and can even cause muscle contractions or spasms.

      A blood test can give us a view of how the various organs of the body are functioning in a moment of time. What a blood test cannot do is tell us how we feel, how hungry we are, or what thoughts we have. A blood test cannot teach us about the actual disease processes behind a snapshot in time. Ayurveda factors in all these things, because how we think, feel, and behave is certainly connected with how the body is operating. Health is really about ensuring that energy and fluids are flowing properly; the physical flow depends on mental and emotional flow, and vice versa. We must give importance to mental states, emotions, and the physical condition of the body equally.

      Most people don’t think too much about their health unless they’ve identified some sort of problem or discomfort in themselves. We also tend to think about our own health when a family member has a medical issue — we start to wonder if we will suffer the same fate due to genes, a similar diet, or a lifestyle that we have in common. Learning how to read the body on a day-to-day basis, and ultimately moment to moment, will actually help prevent health issues — even those we are predisposed to — because the cause of our imbalances can be determined sooner. This is why it’s important to observe the condition of our physical attributes and physiological functioning on a regular basis, including:

      •Body form and composition

      •Skin, including scalp

      •Tongue

      •Eyes

      •Nails

      •Voice

      •Urine

      •Feces

      •Bodily secretions (including reproductive-organ fluids and menstruation)

      Physical forms change according to the volume, frequency, and type of energy they receive. Identifying issues with skin, digestion, or periods early is very important, because these can signal the first stages of imbalance and the start of a disease process. However, every woman has to get to know her body type at its best to understand what a balanced state feels like. For example, what is normal digestion? When I ask clients to tell me about their bowel movements, they oftentimes respond by saying they are normal or that they don’t really look at them. This area of discussion is a bit embarrassing for a lot of people. In truth, “normal” is simply what a person is used to. It may or may not be a healthy state. Knowledge of Ayurveda helps a person identify the healthy state.

      The Five Elements

      To create anything, you need to know what materials you have at your fingertips.

      Space, or akasha, is the first of the five elements Ayurveda uses to describe the matter we see in our bodies, in food, and in nature around us. Space provides a container for everything else, and even though we cannot see it — we know it’s there because we can see what’s in it. Our planet, the stars, and the sun are all in space. We can hear because sound travels through space. The body is essentially a collection of different types of channels (arteries, veins, organs, digestive tract, reproductive tract, bones, and so forth), and in each channel, there is a space for something to happen inside. Space exists in junction points, such as in the synapses between neurons and in joints. With too little space, congestion or inflammation happens, and with too much, things dry out or communications get dropped. Adequate space is a key to transmission — of information, nutrients, and energy. When a space suddenly opens up, a vacuum of receptivity is created. When a space is closed, transmission is blocked.

      You can observe nature and see the same phenomena playing out in your own body. Sometimes just looking at a flower for a moment will tell you everything you need to know about how you feel right now. It may even help you solve a problem you’ve been working on. The space around us teaches us what is within us. This is because the atoms that make up the stars, the plants, and the ocean are the same atoms we have in our bodies. Creation, after all, is a reshuffling of matter and energy, and somewhere along the way, a new person like you or me comes into being.

      Movement and change is created by air, or vayu. Like space, air is impossible to see, but we can see what it moves. We get our sense of touch from the air element, such as when we can feel the hairs on our arms move in the wind. A deficiency of air renders an organism inert, and excess can cause chaos and erosion. Air is necessary for respiration, for the wavelike movements of digestion (peristalsis), and for bodily and mental movements in general. We can have too much or too little air. Too little is lifeless; too much is degenerative.

       Your Body’s Wind Currents

      After watching a meteorologist present weather patterns two or three times, you can see that some wind currents are common on our planet. Your body has some wind-current patterns as well. These are called the five vayus. Air travels in five general directions in a human body:

      1.In and out with the breath — prana vayu

      2.From the gut to the head to facilitate thinking and communication — udana vayu

      3.In a linear fashion to balance pressure and deliver energy and nutrients across membranes — samana vayu

      4.Downward with gravity and out through the digestive, reproductive, and urinary tracts — apana vayu

      5.From the heart, through the blood vessels, to