Table Of ContentTo my guru, my grandfather, my Baba, For transmitting to me his lived wisdom
with such grace and compassion.
Baba planted the spiritual seed of who I am today.
To my mentors, my mother and father,
Due to their trust in my inherent capacities and calling, My seed blossomed into
who I am today.
To my companion, my husband,
Through him, I understood the purpose of soul collaborations.
My seed strengthened into who I am today.
To my shishyas, my beautiful students,
Through their dedicated living of my teachings, The seed of my knowledge shall
live on tomorrow.
This book is for you.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Dr. David Frawley
Preface
INTRODUCTION The Art of Ayurveda Lifestyle
CHAPTER 1 The Science and Spirituality of Ayurveda
CHAPTER 2 Celebrating an Awakened Sky
CHAPTER 3 The Importance of Elimination
CHAPTER 4 The Art of Naturally Sparkling Smiles
CHAPTER 5 The Delight of Oiling, Bathing, Sense Care, and Beauty Rituals
CHAPTER 6 Crafting Sacred and Seasonal Meals
CHAPTER 7 Sleep, Sex, and Exercise
A FINAL WORD Releasing Healing Intentions into the Universe
Acknowledgments
APPENDIX 1 List of Recipes
APPENDIX 2 Healthy Elimination Resource Guide
APPENDIX 3 Oral Health Resource Guide
APPENDIX 4 The Ayurvedic Diet Resource Guide
APPENDIX 5 Glossary of Sanskrit Words
Notes
Index
About the Author
About Sounds True
Copyright
Praise for Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom
FOREWORD BY DR. DAVID FRAWLEY
Acharya Shunya is a dynamic and original teacher in the Vedic tradition, well
trained on many levels of study with great traditional teachers and her own
extensive personal practice. I have watched her teaching and healing center
develop and flower over the years according to her consistent attention,
dedicated efforts, and long-term vision.
Acharya Shunya’s motivating ideal is of a global Vedic education, arising
from a firm foundation of right living according to Ayurveda, which she is
developing in Vedika Global, her organization and school. She shares this
Ayurvedic basis for developing our higher potentials in life in her book,
Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom.
Ayurveda is not just another system of disease treatment, but rests upon a
profound inner science of positive health and natural living. It shows us how to
harmonize ourselves with the greater universe within and around us, with all its
secret powers and divine blessings. Ayurveda’s concern is not simply with the
treatment of disease but with optimal well-being for body, mind, and
consciousness extending from every cell of our body into the Infinite.
We can compare the modern medical doctor with the fireman who puts out a
fire in a house, namely the fire of disease in the house of the body. An
Ayurvedic practitioner does not merely take such a defensive role; he or she
teaches you how to build a fireproof house in the beginning and maintain it over
the full course of your life. This constructive and creative lifestyle foundation of
Ayurveda is both protective and transformational.
Ayurveda teaches us how to promote and nourish optimal well-being, not
simply how to destroy pathogens. It helps us awaken our own inspiration to
higher living, not simply offering us drugs to sedate us. Acharya Shunya shows
us this detailed Ayurvedic blueprint to build a healthy, creative, and conscious
way of life, from right diet and exercise to right thinking and meditation.
Acharya Shunya teaches us how to determine our unique Ayurveda lifestyle
and align it with the forces of nature as they are specially arrayed and
rhythmically changing within us. Ayurveda’s view of the three doshic types is
unique, powerful, and without parallel in the main medical systems available
today.
Ayurveda’s system of right living and behavioral medicine is vast,
multileveled, and encompasses not just our physical reality but our subtle energy
system and deeper thought patterns. Ayurveda is a medicine of the universal life
which is enduring, not simply a passing fad or a temporary phase in the
development of medical science. It represents both the wisdom of the past and
the future evolution of consciousness for our species in our perennial quest for
lasting happiness and truth. Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom clearly and consistently
guides us in this direction.
In my own work with Ayurveda, I have emphasized Ayurveda relative to the
mind, our behavior, and our daily activity. I think this is the most important
aspect of Ayurveda, though its ability to treat specific diseases, particularly of a
severe nature, has its compelling value as well.
Ayurveda increases both physical and psychological immunity, promoting
longevity for both the body as a whole and for the mind, brain, and nervous
system. As we realize that well-being is a function of how we live, we will come
to better appreciate Ayurveda’s great contribution to world health.
Ayurveda takes the wisdom of yoga and its philosophy of the unity of
existence and unfolds it relative to both physical and psychological health and
disease. It is the medical side of yogic thought and healing that many are seeking
today. As such, it naturally leads us to the practice of yoga and meditation such
as Shunya explores.
Acharya Shunya is one of the pioneers in the growing field of Ayurveda in
the West. Her book fills an important place in our appreciation and application
of Ayurveda in our daily lives, providing many simple prescriptions to help us
take control of our own health and happiness.
Ayurveda helps us reclaim our lives and shows us how to live our lives as a
great adventure in consciousness open to the flow of divine grace. Acharya
Shunya provides important guidance and practical tools to do this. I welcome her
addition to the growing literature on Ayurveda and look forward to her future
contributions.
PREFACE
Every book accomplishes its own spiritual journey before being born, and this
one is no different. Join me in an inspiring transformative voyage to abiding
health.
This book has the potential to change your state of health for the better —
permanently. Health is not just a possibility that you might achieve. It is a
reality, an underlying natural state of being. Health will manifest once you
begin to live in alignment with Nature’s intelligence. This is the promise of
Ayurveda, India’s five-thousand-year-old system of health and healing.
When I was growing up in India, I witnessed a spiritual master, my
grandfather, whom I addressed as Baba, remind the diseased and the suffering of
their abidingly healthy nature. He taught them simple ways to align with Nature
on a daily basis, and enigmatically, this ignited powerful healing of body, mind,
and soul. While there wasn’t a focus on the symptoms of disease per se, I saw
cancers disappear, ulcers heal, and chronic depressions lift.
I think I had rationalized that these “miracles” were possible because my
teacher was a spiritually realized being. Clearly, my guru’s spiritual presence
was undeniable. But as I grew up and observed more, I recognized that Baba’s
skills in transmitting a highly rational science of Ayurveda lifestyle were also a
key factor. I am so glad that my teacher imparted to me his spiritual conviction
along with his scientific knowledge, which includes Ayurveda’s lifestyle
wisdom. His teachings and his blessings have taken the form of this book so that
more and more people can discover the truth of health for themselves.
Reading and implementing the lessons in this book can be a rite of transition,
from a life lived routinely or unmindfully, to masterful living, encompassing the
freedom that comes from embracing health consciousness, self-determination,
and Nature’s blessings to proactively influence the course of your health and
well-being. Health alone will completely undo the paradigm of disease
permanently.
Ayurveda proposes two methodologies toward approaching health. The first
is preventive and promotive. It proposes protecting and enhancing health with a
set of lifestyle practices. This is the “wisdom” approach of evoking inner health,
known as swasthya-raksha in Sanskrit. It incorporates at every step lessons from
the spiritual sister sciences of yoga and Vedanta.
The second methodology is “restorative.” It includes disease management
using herbal drugs, body treatments, and even surgery (though surgery is no
longer an active modality in Ayurveda today). This methodology is known as
vikara prashamana in Sanskrit. Both approaches are equally valid, at appropriate
junctures.
However, we must not quit evoking health at any point of time. If disease
management via drugs is taken up without a parallel investment in a healthy
lifestyle, the body becomes a battleground all too quickly. There is a wellspring
of power within us, a spiritual truth, that we must honor; and we never give
away our power to any disease, just because we have a scary-sounding condition
with a grim prognosis. In fact, it is now more than ever that we must activate our
latent health response through a scientific lifestyle that is in sync with Nature’s
laws. If you are consuming Eastern or Western drugs, a healthy Ayurveda-
inspired lifestyle in conjunction will expedite recovery and additionally facilitate
well-being.
Your body is remarkably wise and possesses self-repair mechanisms. “Trust
it some more, and help it heal itself,” Baba explained to me. Besides, Ayurveda
lifestyle is often enough in and of itself to activate the dormant “health
response.”
And at the least, lifestyle is like evocative art; it suffuses our consciousness
with all-new possibilities of being and becoming. A lifestyle that makes us feel
fulfilled and optimistic at some level will positively impact our beliefs and
feelings about our universe and ourselves. Sometimes you will find that you are
smiling through the day, and for no particular reason.
When we examine Ayurveda’s source literature, spanning from the Vedas
(4500 BCE) all the way to the sixteenth century (that is, texts progressing from
the remote past onward), it was lifestyle wisdom that occupied the central stage.
Disease management gained increasing priority in the later texts. In fact, this is
how the sages who gave us the ancient Vedas and original spiritual sciences of
Ayurveda, yoga, Vedanta, meditation, sacred art, architecture, music, and dance
lived! They boldly cultivated radiant health day by day as an expression of their
god consciousness. They were not living in constant fear of disease. They
thought health, lived health, and enjoyed health. It is no wonder that their ancient
teachings offer original wisdom that holds the potential of making our entire
planet healthy today. Even if disease came to the wise seers (as decay is part of
the natural order), they would heal it (or accept it) with grace and beauty,
without collapsing their entire consciousness into a “broken-shattered” mode.
Unfortunately, many Ayurveda practitioners today choose to “fix” disease
and eschew time-consuming patient education on lifestyle. At times, the
practitioners possess academic knowledge of lifestyle principles but not a lived
knowledge borne from personal experience, and hence, they are very much
bound in “disease consciousness” themselves, often harboring negative outcome
beliefs, which invariably reduce the chances of recovery. They are also quick to
prescribe herbal drugs. For example, instead of elucidating the lifestyle wisdom
pertaining to healthy sleep, far too often the endangered herb Nardostachys
jatamansi is prescribed for insomnia. I call this a “prescriptive” model of
Ayurveda, very similar to the Western medical approach that matches drugs with
symptoms but does not care to address the underlying life (style) issue. It
encourages dependency on drugs, not self-reliance through leading a balanced
life, which is greater than any drug. I personally stay away from this mode of
Ayurveda.
This book, instead, restores the wisdom teachings on lifestyle to their rightful
place and shines the light on health. This book will thereby empower ordinary
people, you and me, because lifestyle sets us free to craft our own health, in our
own homes, on our own terms.
My Experiments with Evoking the Health Response
My guru imprinted my soul with a spiritual seed of relentless conviction in the
self-healing and self-repairing mechanisms of the living body. My entire life and
message as a spiritual teacher revolve around this power, which is inherently
spiritual. My own journey with a genetic disorder that confines many people to
wheelchairs (yet, has spared me) and my ability to cheerfully withstand the
severe aftermath of a traumatic neck injury — without painkillers or surgery,
with hope to heal fully one day and courage to continue undeterred with my life
mission, in spite of everything — has strengthened my belief that deliberate and
unhurried self-loving lifestyle practices synced with Nature awaken health as
well as personal power and courage.
The same idea has been confirmed again and again, not only in my personal
life and private practice, but on a larger scale through public teachings,
community education, and wellness initiatives undertaken in California since
2007 through my not-for-profit Vedika Global, a foundation for the living
wisdom of Ayurveda, yoga, and Vedanta.
To confirm my learned belief that a health response can be evoked through
lifestyle implementation alone, I experimented for over a decade by creating
several drug-free lifestyle courses (taught by my well-trained graduates and
myself) and lifestyle clinics in California overseen by my school’s graduates. In
both, I deliberately bypass the paradigm of disease management and, instead,
focus on evoking health of body and mind through lifestyle teachings plus
personal empowerment through connecting with a disease-free, ageless higher
Self as the underlying reality.
Anyone, of any age and any constitution, whether healthy or sick, was
welcome to sign up. Participants were as young as ten years old and also as old
as eighty! And what did I find? They all got better! Within a matter of weeks,
both course and clinic participants started reporting increased well-being. Some
even shared their latest blood test results or other clinical findings — unsolicited
by us — to rejoice in their newfound health parameters.
Many of them were shocked, too. What was going on? How was health
sneaking up on them so quickly, merely through education in a health-evoking
lifestyle and healthy beliefs, in spite of years of ill health and after their doctors
had given up on them, or worse, when they had given up on themselves?
While their actual results were based on length and commitment of
engagement with lifestyle practices, there was not a single participant who
reported a deterioration of health.
Countless individuals with beginning, chronic, or advanced disorders were
reclaiming health and well-being, simply by implementing lifestyle changes
impacting core personal areas of food (ahara), rest and sleep (nidra), and sexual
and behavioral self-regulation (brahmacharya and sadvritta) in the overall
context of prescribed daily regimen (dinacharya) and seasonal regimen
(ritucharya). Lifestyle practices even improved the well-being of people with
terminal diseases, and some reported outliving their prognosis or at least feeling
more at peace until the last day. It was uncanny and incredible.
By shining the light on health and consciousness, the miracles I witnessed
with my guru Baba, in his lifetime, had now begun to accrue around my
initiatives with health versus disease. This was a powerful reinforcement of my
own belief systems.
I was convinced that I was onto something and that perhaps a scalable
clinical as well as educational self-help model could be crafted from my
spiritually anchored lifestyle teachings that evoke the health response. Perhaps it
was time to simply stop overly focusing on disease anyway. Is counteracting
disease with herbs (versus synthetically designed drugs) still battling it anyway,
keeping us locked in disease consciousness? Are we merely changing our
doctors from Western medicine to Eastern medicine providers, but each time
getting locked up all over again in disease-combating dogmatic belief systems,
prescriptions, and protocols? Are we scaring ourselves again and again (with
disease), forgetful of our natural inheritance, which is health?
Are we panicking and creating more work for ourselves in medicine instead
of simply realigning the quality of our lives with lifestyle adjustments? Have we
generated a tremendous number of myths around disease, and its heavy-duty
management, instead of evoking the sweet song of health from the truth and light
sourced within?
I am all for modem medical intervention, when necessary. I also advocate no
single approach, as a judicious integration is the wisest way. However, I do
wonder if we need a greater, or at least parallel, focus on a healthy lifestyle,
