Ayurveda is an ancient Indian medical system that focuses on treating the whole person to achieve physical, mental, and spiritual harmony. It views health as a balance between the three doshas (biological humors) - vata, pitta, and kapha - which combine with the five elements. When doshas are imbalanced, disease occurs. Ayurveda uses herbal medicines, yoga, diet, and lifestyle changes tailored to each person's constitution to restore balance and support the evolution of consciousness. Its goal is to help people experience themselves and the world with joy by addressing physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.

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VERY BRIEF OVERVIEW OF AYURVEDA
by Matthew Remski
Ayurveda literally means the “science of life”, or “science of
longevity”. One Sanskritist I know translates the term as
“the science of optimal living”. It is a holistic medical
science developed by and through Vedic culture that has
survived and grown in its clinical experience and knowledge
of natural science for approximately 7000 years. As such, it
is the oldest continuously practiced medical system in
human culture.
It is native to ancient, and now modern Indian culture, and versions of it have
spread throughout Southeast Asia and into Tibet (which has preserved a very
complete form of it). Although in its homeland it has suffered many persecutions
(under Muslim rule in the late classical period, under British rule from the 18th
century, and under the thrall of Western allopathy even to present day), it is enjoying
a global resurgence that owes much of its energy to the surge of nationalistic pride
that rippled through Indian culture following Independence. Currently there are over
300, 000 Ayurvedic doctors practicing in India today.
Recent interest in Ayurveda in the West is being piqued by the rising
popularity of Hatha Yoga. This is entirely appropriate, since Ayurveda has always
served as the medical support to the Yogic tradition. Moreover, it is a welcome
development that Western Yoga practitioners learn to evaluate both physical and
mental health through the exacting lens that Ayurveda offers.
Ayurveda seeks to treat the whole person, insisting that fundamental harmony
on all levels of experience must be achieved in order for health to offer its beneficial
purpose: the evolution of consciousness away from the isolated, contracting, self-
concerned activity of egoism, and towards its natural and original state of expansive
union with the sublime. Towards this goal, it works to harmonize and purify units of
experience from the gross to the subtle, down through the material plane to the non-
material plane that is its source. It makes use of food and herbs to balance
biochemistry, exercise to balance the physical structure, breathing techniques to
nurture the life-force, and ethics, mantra and meditation to balance the mind.
Most importantly, Ayurveda proposes that all of these tools be applied
uniquely, according to the patient’s constitution and circumstance. In this sense, we
might say that Ayurveda is as universal a science as it is a personal one: it employs the
understanding of general law towards the sublimation of particular experience. In
Ayurvedic education, one first learns the qualities and properties of the elements;
then one may see those qualities at play within oneself, and gently guide them
towards their natural harmony.
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2. Ayurveda is a Vedic Science in the sense that it is considered an Upaveda to the
Arthava Veda: the fourth and final major collection of mantras that comprises Vedic
literature, and which makes mention of the healing properties of plants, and lists
many mantras claimed to have healing properties. Traditionally, its scriptures have
also been learned and passed on in the style of the Vedas – from teacher to student,
using memorization and recitation techniques.
More importantly, it is a Vedic Science insofar as it holds the same
fundamental world-view of Vedic culture. This world-view, which is shared by all
spiritual traditions that have arisen from India, can be briefly summarized as follows:
 All experience derives from a single, ineffable source that is referred to by
many terms: pure consciousness, the ground of awareness, the ground of
being, etc. This source is the natural home of consciousness, towards which
consciousness longs to return.
 The ability of consciousness to harmonize with its source is obstructed by its
tendency to indulge in self-centered thought that creates a failure of natural
wisdom: conventional human life is made possible through this devolution.
 Consciousness may return to its inherent bliss through the process of a
disciplined understanding of its nature, along with a gradual implementation
of techniques to purify the failures of wisdom and their subsequent
derangements of mental and physical faculties.
 The purpose of life is experience, and liberation from experience.
The main spiritual focus of Ayurveda is the liberation of both mind and body
from their characteristic imbalances so that consciousness is released to pursue its
evolutionary promise. It has been employed by many traditions, including the Yogic
system, to transform the body and mind away from obstructing personal liberation,
towards becoming useful tools in its accomplishment. Ayurveda also promotes the
goal of arogya – the state of physical and mental health (along with longevity) that is
required for spiritual life.
Without its cosmological background, Ayurveda would simply be a palliative
technique, which, like most other medical systems, would be limited to ameliorating
sickness. But when it is understood in the context of the full evolution of
consciousness, Ayurveda’s purpose becomes clear: to rectify elemental imbalance and
to promote harmony of gross and subtle levels of experience so that the indwelling
being may shed its sheathing of egotism and experience itself and its universe as
inherently joyful.
The focus of Ayurveda is the evolution of consciousness from gross matter to
subtle matter to its sublime nature. To track this evolutionary arc requires an
understanding of how consciousness devolves under the influence of rajas, tamas,
and the illusory nature of objective thought. This understanding is derived from the
tradition’s extensive cosmology. Once understood, the process of devolution of
which human sorrow is the result can begin to be reversed.
On a practical, day-to-day level, Ayurveda claims that the entire world of your
© Renaissance Yoga and Ayurveda  391 Ontario Street, T.O., M5A 2V8  416-920-4520  www.renaissanceyoga.ca

3. experience can be medicine along your journey towards self-fulfillment. Every food,
mental impression, and emotional event will either harmonize with your highest
aspirations, or it will drag you down into “just getting by”. Your task then, is to learn
how to choose the correct mind-body nourishment every day, by first learning about
your own unique composition and daily needs.
Ayurvedic method is based upon a comprehensive understanding of the how
the three vital forces (inertia, mobility, and clarity) combine with the five elements
(earth, water, fire, air, and space), to produce three categories of psycho/physical
persons: those who are governed primarily by the biological air humour (Vata), the
biological fire humour (Pitta), or the biological earth humour (Kapha). Discerning
your personal constitution with regard to these Doshas is the first step in learning
how to balance the physical and mental components of your experience, and to
harmonize your life with your circumstance, and with your aspirations.
When the Doshas accumulate into states of unbalance, they provoke disease
symptoms similar to their nature. Arthritis, anxiety and chronically dry skin can
afflict the Vata person. Pitta is liable to excess heat, which stirs anger, blemishes the
skin, and distresses the liver and heart. Kapha is vulnerable to coldness, depression,
and phlegmatic congestion. The goal of Ayurvedic living is to discover and respect
both the strengths and the liabilities of your constitutional makeup, so that you begin
to intuitively choose to take in only that which balances you.
Everyone knows the waif-like girl who forgets to eat as she dashes around
doing a million things, having brilliant creative insights and misplacing her house keys
– a classic Vata type. Ayurveda balances her with slowly-paced Asanas that calm her
nervous tendencies, sweet, warm, and nutritive soupy meals that ground her
consciousness, heavy massage oils in sesame base, nutritive herbs like ashwagandha
(“strength of a horse”) and shatavari (“she who has 100 husbands”).
At another end of the spectrum is the executive with great leadership skills,
who plays racquetball to relax, runs hot in temperament, with fair complexion and
losing hair, who speaks pointedly and loves passionately – classic Pitta. He’s calmed
through precisely-taught Asanas that unwind his driven body, cooling foods and
sandalwood oil massage in coconut base, and blood-purifying herbs like burdock and
manjistha.
Finally, there is the earth-mother type who keeps the warmest and most
generous hearth and home in the neighbourhood, is loyal to a fault, sentimental and
nurturing, but who may carry some more weight than she likes, or who may have a
hard time admitting that changes are necessary, because the couch is just too cozy –
classic Kapha. We hide the remote control, spice her food, give her vigorous sun
salutations to get her moving, and feed her formulae like trikatu (‘the three
pungents”) to burn through whatever excess phlegm is slowing down her metabolism
and general gumption.
If for some reason you wanted to create an experiment in which all three of
these biological humours where aggravated constantly and to excess, you would come
up with contemporary global culture. Today, Vata dosha spins out of control
through technological distraction, cell-phone and auto use, leaving our bodies
© Renaissance Yoga and Ayurveda  391 Ontario Street, T.O., M5A 2V8  416-920-4520  www.renaissanceyoga.ca

4. ungrounded and our creativity disjointed and dessicated. Whatever wholesome
passion we derive from the fire of Pitta dosha is diverted into the pursuit of
consumption, and drained by the ubiquitous fantasy of superficial sex. Finally, the
earthy qualities of Kapha dosha are made lethargic through the passivity of television,
political inertia, and artificial foods like refined sugars and grains that sedate us to the
higher purposes of life.
By contrast, if you wanted to seek out an image of complete doshic balance, in
which the most positive aspects of the sacred elements achieve their ultimate
expression in human form, you need look no farther than the North Pole. Santa
Claus is the tridoshic genius of our cultural heritage. He’s the salt of the earth,
rotund, and immovable – it’s hard to imagine him breaking a bone or having a fitful
sleep. This is Kapha in balance. Then there’s this luster to his complexion and
personality, a zest for life and zeal for accomplishment, allowing him to lead, make
decisions, and warm the hearts of the world: Pitta to perfection. And finally, he’s
able to do this mystically impossible thing – to lift innumerable gifts into the sky and
deliver them all in a single night. This is the mobility and penchant for achieving the
impossible that are hallmarks of Vata’s ethereal gift.
To be sure, we all contain parts of all qualities; hence, the doshic types are
caricatures that describe no-one exactly. But the gift of Ayurveda is that recognizing
such personal attributes, how they are categorized, and how they interact with your
environment, home, and diet, brings you towards a refined understanding of what
will balance you every day. By looking for balance through continuing self-study, you
become an epicurean of the natural world, and an artist of perception.
How different this is from our common approach today! Our culture seeks
crude answers in chemically generalized form, treating the body as inert and
mechanical, and the mind as if it where non-existent. We give over our power of
discernment to a philosophy that insists that health and disease is understandable
only through highly specialized language and instrumentation that virtually no-one
possesses, such is its expense and complexity. This mind-set renders us passive
towards the healing process. Life and death become mysteries in the hands of others
whose motives may be diluted and confused by money and bureaucracy.
By contrast, Ayurvedic therapy offers a systemic and dynamic view of
integrated forces and functions that cannot be reduced to biochemical statistics,
caloric intake, symptom management or avoidance, or any of the other
compartmentalized measures of allopathic modes, which inevitably distance us from
self-understanding. Because its view is integral, it places a premium on the
intelligence of the viewer. In other words, it is a system of self-empowerment
designed to place each person at the center of their journey towards wholeness.
This journey towards wholeness, to be sure, will never focus upon bits and
pieces. For example the anatomy is not seen by Ayurveda as a mechanical device
with independent parts that can be addressed separately, as in car repair. (“We
murder to dissect” wrote Alexander Pope.) Rather, Ayurvedic anatomy is an
unfolding flower of developing complexity, in which the most highly specialized
tissues are recognized to be higher and higher refinements of plasma, formed under
© Renaissance Yoga and Ayurveda  391 Ontario Street, T.O., M5A 2V8  416-920-4520  www.renaissanceyoga.ca

5. the direction of the innate intelligence of agni, the fiery principle of transformation.
The development of human anatomy thus becomes truly developmental, based upon
clear causality, and not simply something to be altered or redirected from the state in
which it is mysteriously found. Ayurvedic anatomy also presents a perfect vision of
elemental balance: earth provides structure, water provides adaptability, fire provides
transformation, air provides movement, and ether provides space. Anatomy is
therefore much more than the vehicle for biomechanical events; it is, rather, a
microcosm of universal structure.
Within this structure, a physiology emerges to resonate with it. The function
of the body in Ayurvedic terms mirrors its construction: synergistic and holistic.
Each physiological function is linked to every other through the pacification or
vitiation of the doshas, the biological humors. Thus the number of interrelationships
between tissues and disease conditions are literally infinite.
For instance, whereas allopathy would treat arthritis by looking at the mineral
content of bones and using steroids to locally deaden the nerves that are inflamed,
Ayurveda looks at the movement of Vata throughout the body, particularly in the
colon, as it is the site of Prana absorption or malabsorption. It then proceeds to treat
the condition at its root. To take another example, Ayurveda recognizes most skin
disorders as originating in the blood tissue, which means that blood-cleansing
treatments are known to be more effective than topical measures.
To summarize, Ayurvedic treatments of the body are ultimately concerned
with causes and sources, rather than what is superficially apparent. This approach
extends to considerations of the mind, as well.
The success of any medical system is a combination of how it improves
health, longevity and quality of life, along with how it uplifts the heart of culture and
aids in the unfolding of happiness. These goals are achievable, according to the
following Ayurvedic principles:
 The health of the body is co-dependent with the health of the spirit, and
neither should be considered or treated separately.
 Health care is a holistic process that extends before and beyond the treatment
of disease.
 The gift of health is given through a process of self-education. Initially this
requires guidance, but the nature of this guidance should always be directed
towards self-empowerment. One cannot improve one’s life passively.
 As nature tends towards balance and from this balance reaches gracefully
towards Spirit, human health and well-being is a natural occurrence, stemming
from the inherent desire for happy liberation.
To summarize, the integral healing approach of Ayurveda uses a system of
categorization of elements, levels of experience, and sheaths of manifestation to
carefully define and isolate the causes and conditions for both health and disease.
Defined and isolated, each potential imbalance can be addressed on its own terms,
generally through the idea of “the application of opposites”, or what Patanjali calls
© Renaissance Yoga and Ayurveda  391 Ontario Street, T.O., M5A 2V8  416-920-4520  www.renaissanceyoga.ca

6. pratipaksha bhavana. On the level of tissues, such applications consist of food, herbs,
medicated oils, and asanas. On the level of the energetic body, such applications
include breath training, aroma therapy, and colors and shapes. On the level of the
mind, such applications include the restructuring of the discursive mind through
mantra and various forms of meditation that serve to pacify mental fluctuations. On
the level of the spiritual being, such applications include meditations that nourish
correct self-perception through the dissolution of the ego.
It is important to note that the Ayurvedic treatment of the person as laid out
by the preceding system of layers is primarily pyramidal in structure. That is to say –
the balancing of coarse layers support and nourish the balancing of subtler layers. It
will not work to say “it’s all in my mind”, in other words, because this would ignore
the organic nature of mind, which needs to be supported and nourished from below.
This is not to say that the higher levels of experience do not influence or even
direct the lower levels. In fact, the heart of Ayurvedic therapy is educational, seeking
to bring the patient into a higher state of self-reflexive thought, so that the
imbalances of his or her experience can be made clear, and the corresponding
curatives will follow naturally. In a sense then Ayurvedic therapy depends upon an
intervention at the level of vijnanamaya kosha, or the intelligence sheath, the results of
which will radiate downwards through prana and into the elements, and upwards
through meditation into the bliss body and beyond.
To synthesize these two patterns, then, we could say that intelligence both
feeds and is fed by the stability and balance of the coarser forms of matter. The two
realms interpenetrate, thereby slowly and methodically raising each other towards the
highest aspirations of consciousness.
Ayurveda thus provides a vision of holistic personal evolution that omits no
mode of experience and utilizes every object of knowledge and every material subset
as both evidence for the possibility of transcendence, and a tool for achieving
transcendence.
On the deepest level, spiritual healing in Ayurveda is grounded in the hard-
won awareness that the true spirit of the human being (soul, purusha, atman...) needs no
healing at all, but exists as a wholly harmonious essence beyond the possibility of
disturbance, aging, sickness, death, comparison, judgment, and discursive thought
itself. Acknowledgement of this profound fact allows the human being to harmonize
the temporal elements of his experience (tissues, mind, emotions) within the context
of faith in a beneficent, responsive universe which is naturally inclined towards the
evolution of happiness.
This context of faith dissuades the person from becoming obsessed with the
manipulation of external realities towards an unattainable idea of complete material
satisfaction. Rather, it encourages the person to use external realities as signs proving
infinite interconnectedness and unity of all things, and of consciousness itself. With
such proof established, we are reminded of our true nature.
© Renaissance Yoga and Ayurveda  391 Ontario Street, T.O., M5A 2V8  416-920-4520  www.renaissanceyoga.ca