Adena Rose – Page 5 – Adena Rose Ayurveda

Posted on May 21, 2015May 21, 2015 by Adena Rose

The Deal with Leftovers | Does Prana really Matter?

I always have a hard time with the “leftovers” discussion with my Healing Diet students.

It is my not-so-secret agenda to get people back in the kitchen and cooking for themselves. In fact, I think it’s a HUGENORMOUS part of our health epidemics, and one of the most important, and empowering parts of natural healing, and self-healing.

It can also be one of the biggest obstacles. Our lives are so full. Busy is our mantra. In the past generation or three (perhaps especially for women) spending your time out of the kitchen and in the world working was liberation. Being able to pay someone else to cook and perhaps even clean for you has become more desirable and even enjoyable. And it seems now, there is less and less choice – we don’t have or feel we have the time to cook for ourselves and family, even if we want to – and many of us also don’t know how to cook (!) because perhaps our parent’s did not, either, and could not teach us or lead by example.

Though, when we leave our food preparation up to others, even our ingredient choices up to others, we’re literally putting our life in their hands.

Am I being too dramatic?

When my students do begin cooking for themselves, so often they’re thinking big – “If I can make time to cook a whole bunch on Sunday, I’ll have meals for the rest of the week, right?”

Right. Sort of. How would that meal taste by Friday? Do you want to keep eating it? Will it go to waste? Will it be satisfying? These questions are important in Ayurvedic medicine. Our food is our medicine. Medicine expires. Its effectiveness diminishes over time. Fresh ingredients offer their nutrients, their prana and life force, up to us readily, which also means it goes out just as quickly.

How to encourage them to keep going, without getting too nit-picky? How to introduce this idea of Prana without sounding woo-woo or disconnected? Without making Ayurveda seem impossible?

Simple tips, and learning from experience.

Leftovers are considered to be less optimal, because the Prana in the food dissipates as time goes on. Most of my teachers share a 24-hour rule. Basically, food is ideally composted after 24 hours, because the quality becomes tamasic, rather than sattvic. Or to use other words, it becomes dull and lifeless, promoting those qualities rather than brightness, energy and clarity.

We are what we eat. Down to our cells, from our emotions and enthusiasm for life. Do we want the energy of day old pizza? Or of wild dandelion greens? Do we want the energy of grandma’s lasagna, or an angry chef’s cacciatore? There are, of course, multiple layers to this – we are all individuals, and we are quite complex beings.

Though which did you lean towards, and why? The subtle does matter. Over time, the subtle becomes not so subtle. It permeates our being.

Prana is often translated as life force energy. It is sort of the direction, the intention, the intelligence contained within something. Maya Tiwari says that Prana “is the ‘Soul within the Body’…the cosmic breath of the Essential Self.” Subtle, but vital.

It’s Spring here in Vermont, and everyone’s getting excited about foraging for wild foods. For one, finding ‘free food’ can be financially liberating. Though, as you can imagine, the excitement is beyond that.

My husband was given one stalk of wild asaparagus by our neighbor yesterday. Plucked right from the ground, he munched in it. When he came home, he told me about his experience, saying, “Why do we even cook asaparagus? It was so tender, so fresh…” He was high on that one piece of asaparagus, on the Prana, so pulsing, so alive, so ready to commune with his being.

This might sound cheesy, but haven’t you experienced this? Eating something picked so fresh, it’s still living?

Most of the food in our grocery stores has been plucked days, if not weeks before we buy it, bring it home, and ingest it. That life force energy is diminishing the longer something is detached from its source of energy. I think we can all get behind that.

It’s the reason we shop at farmer’s markets, among many others. That produce is not only grown and nurtured by our neighbors, but it is also closer to the source. It is allowed to ripen in the soil or ‘on the vine’ and come to maturation and full flavor. It is perhaps hours or days from growing, so more of that life stuff is preserved.

Fresh produce, as we know, will wilt and start to actually rot if we do not use it in time. Tis the nature of nature, everything dies and returns to the soil. When something is cooked, some of that prana (since we’re looking at this from an energetic perspective) becomes more immediately available for your assimilation. That also means that it dissipates more quickly – cooked food is going to go off long before the raw ingredients when left un-refrigerated.

And even if you pop it in the fridge, a bag of greens properly stored, say, will hold on to its life force longer than cooked, which might get slimy or moldy within a day or two.

And when you’re healing – which is to ay, all the time – which do you want feeding your cells? Regardless of the energy/calories, which ‘energy’ do you want to become you?

Cooked vs Raw in Short

This might get you thinking – well, then why cook that produce at all? This comes back to Ayurvedic principles of Agni, the power of your digestion, and the gunas, or qualities. This is how we make food choices for healing. Anything can be medicine or poison, depending on how it affects our digestive capacity – because in Ayurveda, is is NOT just the what, but they how that may be equally or more important.

Sometimes raw food is completely appropriate, and even preferred. At other times, your digestive abilities, or agni, may not be optimal and you’re unable to assimilate that beautiful prana from the raw foods – and light cooking can help. The addition of external fire helps the internal fire of digestion assimilate the prana. This is another, and important discussion that we’ll save for The Healing Diet. (Feel free to check out this past post as well for more of Agni.)

Simplicity is Healing

When we are used to eating out, we’re used to eating big, complex flavors and dishes. We may even feel like we’re not ‘getting enough’ if we don’t eat like that at home. Cooking and eating this way, for certain, takes a lot of time, and it is expensive – this can be really discouraging when you’re trying to start cooking for yourself more at home. It does not need to be this way.

Once you learn how to use what to have on hand, and get a little routine around it, it can be super simple to cook healthily at home. And then you can more easily start experimenting with more ingredients and bigger flavors. (See references!)

HOW-TO TIPS to COOK for YOURSELF more OFTEN:

One tip that I share with my students is to start your mornings, each day, or every other day, with turning on a pot of grains or legumes to use as a base for some of your meals for that day.
This said, head to the bulk department of your grocery store this weekend and buy a pound or so of grains and legumes you think you can cook easily to stock your pantry. I recommend red lentils, puy lentils, adzuki beans, chickpeas, basmati rice, mung beans, millet, or brown rice.
For a truly, simple, Ayurvedic cook book that is not going to make you go out and buy 7 zillion spices and exotic ingredients, I recommend Myra Lewin’s, Simple Ayurvedic Recipes
Allow yourself to buy something you’re excited about – whether you see a sign for a farmer’s market and stop in, or are just running into your health food store – grab something seasonal and fresh or interesting, even if it’s not on your usual radar.
Use food blogs for inspiration – try these: 101cookbooks.com, vidyacleanse.com, ashleyneese.com, mynewroots.com

I’d love to hear from you – what has helped you with cooking more at home? What would make it easier for you?

Love,

Posted on May 4, 2015May 5, 2015 by Adena Rose — 1 Comment

Simple Herbalism | Spring Blood Cleanse

Spring Medicine

As soon as Spring arrives, I start looking for the familiar spiked dandelion leaves in my lawn. It’s finally time for me to make a simple Spring medicine – dandelion root decoction. Though I study Ayurveda, and mostly use Indian herbs in my practice, even Ayurveda says that the closest medicine is always the best medicine. And how much closer can you get than right out the front door?

Using herbs does not have to be complicated – though, I will say, it pays to work with an expert for most. There are some key weeds though, that are easy to use and pretty much completely safe for anyone and everyone. I am in love with Guido Mase’s book, The Wild Medicine Solution, in which he outlines those herbs, or families or herbs, which are safe and useful to all. Dandelion is included in here.

I use dandelion root as a decoction. This is like making a very strong tea. When using herbs in this way, as a freshly made, water-based solution, it’s most helpful to do so regularly over a certain period of time, so the blood, the body, becomes saturated with the subtle medicine. So that the system is constantly bathed with the energetics of the substance. This takes some attention, and for me in the Spring, becomes like a daily intention or ritual.

Energetics of Dandelion

The late Spring, according to the Ayurvedic calendar and rtucharya, is an overlapping of Kapha and Pitta gunas (qualities). Kapha qualities of late Winter and Spring like wet, cold, and heaviness fluctuate with the increasing Pitta qualities in the environment, like heat and sharpness. (Sharp is an interesting quality to consider in your environment – I relate to this right now as the bright Spring sunlight finally comes into contact with my winter white skin and delicate eyesight…)

The taste that bring balance to all of these qualities is bitter, or tikta. Remembering that the tastes contain the elements, and that the elements are what make up the doshas. And also remembering that like increases like in Ayurveda, so when looking to balance out the powerful external influences, the season, on our physiology, we choose foods and medicines with opposite qualities.

Kapha is made up of the water and earth elements, and Pitta is made up of fire and water. Bitter taste is said to contain mostly space and air. The space and air elements bring the quality or dry, light, and clear, which balance the qualities found in our environment at this time of year. Dandelion roots, as well as leaves, are a lovely, palatable bitter food/herb. So this makes dandelion the perfect Spring medicine according to Ayurvedic principles – though you may not call in an ‘Ayurvedic herb.’ Whatever that means 🙂

Something I love about Spring dandelions is that they are not all bitter. Use your tongue – there is most certainly a softness and a sweetness to the brew. I believe this makes the Spring tonic less aggravating for Vatas and Vata imbalances.

Why do it?

These doshas can affect us differently, of course, depending on our own constitution. But things that are considered ‘normal abnormalities’ in late Spring include allergies, hives, eczema, skin rashes or itching, red eyes, and irregular digestive stuff going on (whether slow or sluggish, or fluctuating between constipation and loose.) These symptoms can be connected to the doshas mixed with ama, a toxin that is created when our digestion is out of wack. And if digestion is out of wack, as in the case of the examples above, more toxins can be created. This toxin can easily become absorbed into the blood stream, causing skin eruptions, or worsening allergy symptoms.

Dandelion, and most bitters, are considered to benefit the liver and galbladder, which is the organ that cleanses the blood, and aids in digestion through the production of bile – in Ayurveda, blood is referred to as rakta dhatu. The liver has numerous, numerous functions – another one being, as it filters the blood, it aids in the breaking own of hormones. The gallbladder helps us digest our food properly by releasing digestive enzymes. In Ayurveda, we would translate this as agni, part of our digestive capacity.

So, dandelion can benefit us in many ways. The bitter quality of dandelion cools and blood, and aids in proper functionality of the liver, leading to less inflammation, inside and outside. And by improving the flow of bile, we may digest our food better. And when we digest our food better, we create less toxins to begin with, as well as have less daily discomfort. And we all know that digestion is the crux of health and healing in Ayurvedic medicine.

Did you do a cleanse this Spring?

Some of you have already done your Spring cleansing ritual. And some of you joined my Ayurvedic Cleanse a couple of weeks ago. Making a dandelion decoction is a way to extend the benefits and continue to slowly metabolize toxins, and get a jump on Summer Pitta flare ups.

Here’s how I do it:

As soon as I see the dandelion greens pop up in my garden, I go out with the shovel and dig up one of two. Be sure to get deeper than you think, and come up with your tool underneath the plant. Shake away the dirt from the root (and earthworms!) and bring them inside with you.

Wash the whole plant under cool water. Fill a pot full with fresh water. Don’t worry about the exact ratio – but I use a smaller pot, adding about 3-4 cups of water.

Chop the roots roughly, and add roots and leaves to the water. Both parts of the plant have medicinal qualities – the leaves tend to be more of a diuretic, working on the kidneys, and the root, the liver and blood. Both get more and more bitter as the season progresses.

Alternately, you may save the leaves (wash them well!) for a simple bitter salad.

Simmer this concoction over medium low heat until the water is reduced by half. This concentration ratio is considered a decoction, and is much stronger than a tea. Strain and drink, or you may also cool this before drinking – it’s a great room temperature tea.

The next morning, dig up another root or two, and repeat. Leave the previously boiled root and leaf in their for a day or two, then strain and compost.

Feel free to drink up to 2 cups per day. About what you’ll probably yield.

*Be sure that where you are harvesting your dandelions they are NOT SPRAYED or treated with chemical fertilizers!

If you have pitta imbalances in the Summer time, like hay fever, hives, heat rashes, acne, boils, loose stools, hormonal imbalances, heavy menstrual bleeding, or a lot of irritability, start using this medicine now, and see how your season will change.

If you want to learn more about using food as medicine this Summer, join my ECourse for Pitta dosha, which begins on June 5th. Registrations just opened. Many of you have asked for more introductory courses in Ayurveda, and I’m answering!

Love,

Posted on April 28, 2015May 28, 2015 by Adena Rose

Ayurveda is Awareness | Your Menstrual Cycle

Ayurveda is awareness, awareness starts self healing…

We’re into week 8 of The Healing Diet – this is the second round of the 10 week program I started last Fall. I am amazed at what the students are taking away – amazed because whatever words I am saying are somehow actually working as a catalyst for this stuff. They are getting it. They are getting the real stuff – the real deal of Ayurveda. Yes, they are learning the structure of this wonderful science, but behind that, in just 10 weeks, they are getting it that it all comes down to the individual, cultivating awareness through your own body, and then gathering experiences to work from.

Here are a few anonymous thoughts shared from The Healing Diet forum – Ah hah moments, if you will:

“For me, Ayurveda is about noticing what’s happening and how I feel, and then making intentional decisions about what to do next. That feels authentic to me. One thing I’ve heard Adena say is that V-P-K is not reality but rather a way of describing reality. To me, Ayurveda is about becoming aware of a kind of ancestral wisdom–the stuff that I already know about myself but that I might not really KNOW that I know.”

“It is definitely easier said than done but I’m trying to tap into the voice deep within. I find myself plagued by indecision and am trying to slow down, quiet the chatter in my head, and create space to hear what my intuition is really saying is right for me here and now. Sometimes there is no answer and I feel a little lost. Ayurveda is definitely offering many avenues to new ideas, thoughts, patterns, and lifestyle changes that I think in time will really help cultivate this understanding of what and who I am. A loose framework to evolve within.”

This is self healing. It can seem like a cheesy phrase – but my faith has become stronger seeing people step onto their own healing path. As you know, it takes accountability, it takes inspiration and commitment to make the changes you want to see in yourself and you health. This is why Ayurveda is not for everyone – well, let me rephrase that – why not everyone is ready for Ayurveda. (Are you ready?)

Awareness is the key

I work with women who are ready to step onto this path of self-healing, and who are looking for a guide – whether that’s me, or really Ayurveda just working through me. We all need guidance from the inner guru, and also, especially at first, guidance from someone outside of ourselves to give us the love, and help us wade through the muck. I go to other healers regularly, too.

The women I work with are looking to heal from stubborn digestive complaints, like IBS and constipation, or they are experiencing painful menstrual cycles (often both go hand in hand.)

When I work one on one with any of these clients, we have a long first visit where I take a full health history, asking about bowel habits, menstrual cycle frequency, type of pain, color of blood, etc. Even asking these questions brings more attention to the matter, and helps the person realize the healing does start with the details of the symptoms.

Your body’s natural rhythms

Many of my clients are looking to go off of birth control, because it just doesn’t feel right to them. I went off for the same reason about 7 years ago. Birth control has a place, and the choice to use it in itself can feel very powerful and liberating. Then there is the next step, when your mature enough, and ready to hold space for the body’s natural rhythms – we can observe this powerful force within our body and start to see the signs. See the signs of imbalance and balance, and see the signs of our fertility, or lack thereof.

When I started doing yoga seriously, feeling cleaner and better in my body led to changing my diet, my habits, and then wanting to align with the deeper forces of nature. This led me to Ayurveda. It also led me to go off of birth control. I felt I was having a ‘fake’ and controlled cycle, and my body was ready to return to its natural state – whatever that might look like. I didn’t even know!

Some of you have read my story of healing painful periods – and finding Maya Abdominal Therapy.

The next step was learning how to chart my fertility signs, so I’d know when I could get pregnant, and when I couldn’t. I learn the Fertility Awareness Method, and there was no turning back. I successfully stayed ‘unpregnant’ for years, until I was ready to undertake the journey (READY?!?!) and then we conceived on our first try, me knowing when I was fertile.

Self empowerment

If you’re a menstruating woman, who is interested in learning more about your cycles, aligning your cycles with the moon, healing from painful or irregular cycles, looking to learn about a natural and effective form of birth control, and want to get pregnant one day, I can not recommend learning about Fertility Awareness ENOUGH!

Birth control may feel very empowering for a while, but there is nothing like knowing your own body.

I help my clients chart their cycles, and understand their fertile times – though I have yet to teach a group workshop. On Sunday May 10th, I am inviting an expert in (and my acupuncturist) Leilani Wong Navar, to teach a special 2 hour online (accessible from anywhere) course in Fertility Awareness.

Awareness is Ayurveda. In this one of a kind workshop you’ll learn more about your anatomy, why your cycles might be painful or irregular, how to see signs of fertility, even if your cycle is irregular – and you’ll get to ask Leilani questions when you come live.

Find all the details, and how to register here.

Share this with other women – it’s one of the most empowering things you will learn about your own body.

Love,

Posted on April 23, 2015April 23, 2015 by Adena Rose

Ayurveda and the Mind: One of the hardest things about cleansing

I feel really blessed to be writing today. It has been a while since I have been able to sit down and share my musings on Ayurveda and life from an inspired place.

I have been creating and running my online programs – things I have been so happy to invite you into and share with you, but between all that sharing, I haven’t been able to create much new content. Plus, I am 6 months pregnant, and my self care got very much pushed aside with all this work. And it was taking it’s toll, and then, I was able to return to what I needed…dropping a lot of things along the way. I also look forward to sharing more about these experiences as my vitality returns.

So today, as I am fielding a lot of comments from my lovely Spring Cleansers, I write again about cleansing. About what really comes up during a cleanse, the deeper challenges. The emotional stuff that tends to come up when we deliberately change our habits and our diet. The experience of the real and deep shifts that come along when we step onto the path of self healing.

We are complex beings. A cleanse is much more than just what you eat..or don’t.

We are in day 6 of our 7 day Ayurvedic Cleanse, (congrats my loves!) though I started thinking about this writing on just day 3. Day 3 is only the second day of eating our mono-diet, our ‘fast’ of kitchari. And much of the group were feeling big shifts already this early on – and many in an uncomfortable direction.

How can this be, after changing your diet and habits for only a day or two? This brings up some questions I like to explore around our relationship with food, and the process of self-healing and transformation.

We have such busy lives. I love that I can reach out to people interested in Ayurveda, around the world, something I would not be able to do without the internet. And the online courses I offer can easily be signed up for, and joined from the comfort of home. Certainly, part of the transformative process, part of the healing , begins upon registration. But the monetary exchange – that’s actually the easy part. Changing our lifestyle, our diet, and stepping onto our healing path is often uncomfortable. Whether we remember it or not, it’s what we wanted – the mind and body do not like to be uncomfortable, though the uncomfortable moments are the moments of true transformation.

The vibrations I am feeling from the cleanse group feel like frustration, with waves of calm and understanding, and then perhaps even resignation. Then up again as the energies continue to change.

Questions that come up for me are:

1. Is food really this powerful?

Well, let’s explore yes. That’s what we’re here to talk about right? How food is actually so powerful, it is medicinal – the choices we make can bring us closer to homeostasis, mentally and physically and energetically, or further from it. In fact, this is what first drew me to learn more about ayurveda (and I am sure most of you, too) – especially the idea that the food we eat affects our state of consciousness. And for it to do this, it’s an obvious connection that what we eat influences our thought patterns, our emotions. Because it is the emotions and thoughts which make up our mind.

Removing certain foods and sensory stimulations is perhaps even more difficult than adding something new. The nature of the mind, according to Dr. David Frawley in his great book, Ayurveda and the Mind, is dualistic. Meaning it has a tendency to understand things in pairs of opposites: love/hate, yes/no, good/bad etc. It is prone to extremes. He suggests that in order to balance the mind, we must not try to force the mind in any particular direction, nor train it with negativity, but to seek to calm it from any extremes. (Side note: This is one reason that in my programs, I try to stay away from saying anything is good or bad. By understanding the energetics of things, we can simply make a judgment as to whether it will bring us towards or away from homeostasis.)

Let’s come back and get grounded in the physical body. Foods have different energies and strengths. Like, for a strong example, think of a cup of chamomile tea vs. a cup of whiskey. Okay. Of course these things are going to affect the body (and inevitably due to the real mind/body connection, our mind) in different ways. Comparing a bowl of kitchari to a bowl of kickin’ buffalo wings – which is more like the tea, which is more like the whiskey? For those of us who are used to whiskey, it might be the chamomile tea that feels more disturbing in the body at first.

I work with quite a few clients with powerful coffee addictions who expect to be ‘drinking chamomile tea for a week,’ if you’ll continue on the metaphor with me. These are often the clients who get physically ill during the process, perhaps intense migraines and nausea or vomiting. So many of us like to blame it on the kitchari, on the new thing we invited in. Though really it’s allowing/forcing us to look at what our current state of homeostasis really is, or was. The caffeine was affecting the body that deeply, it was keeping them in a false state of homeostasis. They are just now finding out their true state of energy, that the reliance on substance was hiding.

‘Impure foods’ (I dare to use this terminology, before I dive into the Ayurvedic categories of Sattva, Rajas and Tamas) that pull us from homeostasis come in many forms. If we are stuck in a loop of needing certain sensory stimulations, we are not in control of our own body and mind. Food, again, exerting much power. The more we learn to release our emotions that come up around food, which can be done through periods, or a slow change in cutting out foods with these sorts of energies, the more we can feel more in balance, find our homeostasis, in all aspects of our lives. When we do this as individuals, the selfishness and fear in communities can lessen, and this is the real healing.

2. Is this safe?

Before a cleanse, I field some important questions around it’s safety. There may certainly be times when a kitchari fast is not appropriate – say, extremely low blood sugar, pregnancy (1 or 2 days may be okay for certain individuals), or extreme depletion. Most of us are NOT in these categories. I do lead people through deeper home cleansing, and there are more cautions with this, because there are purgative practices to be endured, before rebuilding.

And this said, human beings are incredibly resilient. I believe that many of us get lost in the perspective of our culture – not having seen or experienced the levels of mental and physical stress that many in other parts of the world (or simply other socio-economic status’s) must endure. This is not to lay any blame or cause guilt. For one, I want us to connect with and trust our bodies more – to trust the signals we receive from them. Two, a little discipline can gain us a lot of perspective.

For those concerned, kitchari does offer daily protein, and the added vegetables of your choices provide plenty of other easily accessible nutrients. There is never a limited amount you must eat or not eat. And important to remember that you are always in control and can go back to your old habits whenever you so choose – if you choose to.

3. Is it all in our mind?

I have done a seasonal cleanse for years – and the hardest part each season is picking a start date. We all have busy lives. There is rarely a perfect time to set aside. Sacrifices are always made – and again, this is all part of it. The sacrifices, whether sensory, social, or otherwise, are part of the practice of letting go. Part of the practice for the mind to be content with what is, whatever that may be, that allows for deper mindfulness and fulfillment throughout our whole lives.

Yes, the body ‘knows’ there are some changes upcoming before a cleanse. Though mostly, for the body, it’s getting the good end of the deal – rest, oil massage, a break for digestion, etc. It is really the mind that knows we’re undertaking an adventure that will disrupt its habits/patterns, and so it resist until day one – and then once the cleanse we begins, each time it becomes easier to surrender, and I am just in it.

Ayurveda and the Mind

There so many gems in this book I mentioned by Dr. David Frawley. Three important terms used to discuss Ayurvedic psychology are known as Sattva, Rajas and Tamas. I am sure many of you are familiar with these from yoga, or from Ayurvedic reading. Foods can be talked about the have Sattvic, Rajasic, or Tamasic influences, which is how we look at how they affect the mind, on another level than the elements/gunas, and how they affect the doshas and our physical body.

Transformation often involves going from Tamas towards Sattva. Dullness and ignorance towards peace and calm. It is rajasic energy that is the catalyst for transformation and change. Both Tamas and Sattva are still, though one is in darkness, the other in light and clarity. It is inevitable that we must move through discomfort, frustration, action, to move from one to the other.

Dr. Frawley describes healing in three stages. First, personal healing, which really is about moving from Tamas to Rajas.

“Fire is necessary. We must wake up, act, and begin to change. Deep-seated patterns of attachment, stagnation, and depression must be released.” As a part of this, he explains that we must recognize our suffering and our pain, and learn from it, and that creating a new sense of who we are and what we do is required. And Rajas, or Action is indicated. A seasonal cleanse may from the outside, seem benign, but anyone who is in it, knows this is certainly a powerful transformative action!

For now, let’s stay focused on our self-healing through this cleansing action. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. Know it’s not designed to be easy. And that this action and transformation is something you’re fully, humanly, capable of, and perhaps even here for.

I’d love to hear more of your thoughts and experiences. Leave your comments below.

Love,