Author: Adena Rose

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Removing your Obstacles to Healing

I traveled to Racine, Wisconsin recently to complete my professional level training in Maya Abdominal Therapy. Wisconsin was more exciting than it might sound – the training was held at Racine College campus, which is a 150 year old college built on the shore of Lake Michigan.  The sun rises early and bright!

I had not been sure who I would meet there – this training is not open only to massage therapists, but any ‘professional’ – midwives, nurses, obstetricians, psychiatrists, young women, older women, hippies?  And it was a beautiful blend of them all, and I felt that I was exactly in the right place at the right time, just like when I landed in school to study Ayurveda.

We spent the first night clearing our classroom and our sleeping spaces with burning copal, an incense from Belize, and a tree sap much like Frankincense.  We also set the fire alarm off, exciting the caretaker to our witch-y ways.

Copal

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Orthorexia Nervosa: Can we be TOO mindful about what we eat?

“Your seasoning is mostly self-satisfaction and your drink is mostly fear of all the other food lurking everywhere that is trying to kill you.” – The Terrible Tragedy of a Healthy Eater

Most of what I do is education.  Besides my actual courses in Ayurveda, even my 1-on-1 work is all about learning how body mind and spirit come together and rapping about this with my clients.  My goal is to encourage trust in our innate ability to heal, and though sometimes that’s a slow and subtle change,  it’s so much about learning how to get out of our own way.  Sometimes this means we need to surrender old attachments to what is ‘right’ or even what is ‘healthy’ from outdated or jaded teachings.

We are all individuals.  And this statement is not a cop out.  From my Ayurvedic lens, I can see that we are born with certain physiological tendencies, and then our life experiences exert their own effect on things.  Check out this sweet podcast from my teacher, Cate Stillman, on Ayurveda and Epigenetics – aka changing your genetic expression is possible through changes in diet and lifestyle – like, WHOA.)

These life experiences are going to influence the power of our digestion and our mental state, habits and patterns of reaction, too. So many of us have compromised digestion, and the signs are not always an obviously upset tummy or gas pain.  First disclaimer: *This is not another blog post telling you what’s good or bad to eat. You’re probably perfectly healthy, right now, so don’t worry.*  I want to comment on two things that are interesting to me as a person who is mindful about what I eat:

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Beware of Transformation

At the end of my seasonal week-long kitchari cleanse, and as is usual for me near the end of a cleanse, I felt a tangible shift in a positive direction.  I did embark on this cleanse earlier in the year than I usually do – late February – for a couple of reasons.  One is that my Spring gets very busy leading others through seasonal cleansing so it would get harder to take more time for myself, and the second is that I had been having some skin issues I’d never had before.  I needed to step back, take care of agni, get my dinacharya back in line, as well as directly asses this imbalance. (And I saw amazing results, by the way, which I will share with you soon.)

One night towards the end of my most recent cleanse, after teaching a yoga class, I experienced a moment of clarity.  It was a rare moment where I was catching transformation in the works.  Simply sitting and watching my students in savasana, which I have done hundreds of times before, I could sense my life was changing.  In that same instant, or immediately afterward, I felt something like fear, something like the expectation of grieving, as though in this transition I was losing something too.

What might I be losing? 

Something felt so right, yet something else inside yells “No!” at the same time, and I simply sit watching over my students, and wait.  Is it the ego feeling that it could be losing some of its influence, that is still shouting no to change?

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Are you coping or healing?

“Our bodies simply can not cope and heal at the same time.  It’s fight/flight or rest/digest – not both at the same time.” – Pamela Miles

I learned this concept of coping versus healing from my Reiki teacher, Jennifer Kerns, and it immediately clicked with me.  In the past I had been reserved in using the word healing in relation to my work with ayurveda because I felt it implied something magical as opposed to practical.  And though, there is nothing wrong with magic, the word seems to imply that something is happening separate of one’s self, as opposed to something one can be actively engaged in.  And in Ayurveda, one is ideally, cultivating awareness within body, mind and beyond.

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Sri Dhanvantari

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