Ayurveda – The Smart Way to Live

The smart ones live by expending the least amount of energy in living well and being healthy. That’s how nature works: with the law of least effort. Forget no pain no gain! There is a way to use less amount of effort and gather more strength and energy.

This tagline is also based on experience I’ve gathered over my years of practice with my students, clients and those on health coaching journeys. Having observed and practiced on myself, too, I can with confidence say that there is no cleverer or smarter way to live than by the diet and lifestyle designed by Mother Nature. It is the most successful way humans have ever lived, until very recently.

The smartest diet and lifestyle are based on following seasonal rhythms and on being timely with our activities. We have genetically defined biorhythms that have developed from the start of organic life to be in sync with the dark and light cycle and the changing of seasons. The smartest way to heal is to recognise non rhythmic behaviours and return to the natural patterns.

Once we get back to following nature’s rhythms we can expect a longer life, a healthy old age and death without pain.  That sounds like the right way to go and we need to be smart about it.

Here’s what ayurvedic living can provide

• Fastest, easiest and cheapest way to heal and prevent disease
• Diet provides exactly the nutrients we need in any specific time and place
• Food becomes medicine
• Stops us from counting calories and reading nutritional labels
• Allows us to eat to satisfaction, every time
• Helps to understand the power of healthy fasting
• Keeps the skin glowing
• No more gas and bloating
• What goes in also comes out in a healthy and satisfying form
• Enhances memory, focus and sense of contentment
• Helps the body, the most skilled doctor you’ll ever meet, to do its own healing
• Sets the brain and the body for a day of creative and productive activity
• You get the power to understand your imbalances and to correct them
• No one can tell you anymore “there’s nothing wrong with you”
• Easy to do anywhere, anytime and by anyone
• Excellently paired up with Western Medicine
• Environmentally best diet and sustainable lifestyle
• Everything becomes relative. There is no good or bad, all depends on the context of use and experience
• Builds up confidence in self
• Lifts life experience to a higher level
• Makes life meaningful, eventually showing you your purpose

Daily practice of Ayurveda can bring these results on relatively quickly, depending on commitment to daily and seasonal routines. Our bodyminds are wired to return to wellbeing and they will when we observe timing and seasonality and manage our stress levels. When we create conditions by removing the barriers and stressors out of the way, there’s no reason why we would not feel well or heal from disease. Or, at least manage an incurable condition better.

Ayurvedic living is a practice of right timing. It requires following routines every day and along the seasons. Once timely activities have become part of our unconscious awareness (like driving a car) the focus on productivity and creativity increase.

The routines become second us very quickly. This is because they are natural to us and the bodymind is still, under the bonnet trying always to get back to what is natural to it. Given the chance the return to normal biorhythms is fast. Getting direct experiences of the health benefits of the right rhythms increases motivation exponentially. Living with nature’s laws makes life effortless where correct diet and lifestyle choices become easy to execute.

Ayurvedic life requires commitment. Commitment to the cause of becoming the best you. Commitment is dependent on motivation. Motivation, as we know, fluctuates from moment to moment. This is one of the reasons to join our retreat in Dorset. In a residential environment when routines are observed to perfection, lack of motivation is not an obstacle anymore. Procrastination is left behind and results are achieved quicker.

Each of my clients have left the retreat with more than they had expected. When barriers from healing are removed, in other word stress in all its expressions, healing which is set in our genes, can start. When feelings of safety and comfort are achieved by right routines, daily massage therapies, yoga, breath work, meditation, herbal medicine, nature around us and beautiful tasty food, there’s no reason why the body should not return to being what it is entitled to feel: well and healthy. It does it with vigorous energy and exhorts its power to anything that needs fixing. I am the orchestrator but in the end I am merely watching from the sides and admire my clients healing themselves.

With ayurveda the bodymind gains intelligence of repairing whatever is broken. There is a powerful force that wants every cell in the body to thrive. Once given the chance to fix the process of coming back to balance can start.  

By being smart the way nature intended, we can achieve wellbeing that goes beyond “being happy”. Nature does not intend us to be happy. Being smart means becoming part of the evolutionary drive and being content with a meaningful life. Happiness is a momentary feeling that is part of it. Nature drives us to be flexible and adaptable, to have bouncebackability, understand the value of struggles and ability to allow sadness as part of our lives.

Ayurveda is the smartest way to live because it will help us to harness the most natural, practical and easiest way to manage our diet and lifestyle. Nature works with the law of the least effort. You might think Ayurveda is a major effort but, when you ride the patterns of rhythmic living, you’ll start living the easiest life and in fact, the smartest.