Esterhealing

哈囉~
對養生有興趣的朋友們，08/12 我會辦一個線上講座
題目: 現代阿育吠陀養生的三大基礎支柱 (ahara/ nidra / mala)
(聽起來很複雜但就是養生該注意的主要三方面。我寫"現代"因為其中有一方面是跟傳統阿育吠陀不一樣)

若有興趣請報名: 😄

阿育吠陀 線上講座 @esterhealing 哈囉~ 我是Ester。我是一位阿育吠陀健康諮商師。(Ayurveda Health Coach) 我從2018年開始對自然療法有興趣，一開始是對西方草藥感興趣，後來興趣又慢慢移到中醫和阿育吠陀。 你如果對養生有興趣，歡迎參加我的阿育吠陀線上講座。...

Generally, it’s a good idea to keep your feet warm and to keep your head cool.

When the feet are warm, you can bring some relief to your vata. But the head is different, the head is heat sensitive. If we imagine our body as a reflection of nature, heat tends to rise up and accumulate in the top while cool air tends to sink and accumulate in the bottom.

Too much heat on the head can make us more irritated, angry, trigger headaches… and also damage our hair. Hair doesn’t like too much heat either.

So when you are washing your hair, use lukewarm water. When you go to a sauna, wrap your head with a cool towel. If you go out in a hot day under a strong sun, consider wearing a hat.

This concept has to do with following what Ayurveda calls 'ṛtu' ऋतु in Sanskrit, but this is of course not an Ayurvedic truth. Your grandparents probably have lived like this. You don’t even need to have heard of Ayurveda to notice this or follow this. If you live in a place with almost no electricity, you will find yourself tuning in quite easily with nature’s rhythms.

Anyone who lives in countryside is very likely following nature’s rhythm and they can live quite long and relatively healthier lives simply for following nature’s rhythm.

Ayurveda is considered to be a natural healing method not only because of its use of herbs and other natural remedies. A big reason why Ayurveda is considered a natural healing method is because it recognizes the existence of a cosmic order which influences all life, and it manifests itself as the rhythm of nature.

So if you are struggling to remain healthy, the easiest and most effortless thing you can do for your health is simply to follow nature’s rhythm. Go to bed not that long after sunset, wake up around or before sunrise. Modify your diet according to the weather and change of seasons. 🌿

“In its cosmic aspect, it is due to ṛta that the sun travels, the sky and the earth are firm, dawns arise, waters flow, cows yield milk. Simply, everything is what it is and how it is due to the working of ṛta.”

The concept of ṛta is very similar to the concept of the Tao (sometimes spelled Dao.) 🙂 This concept is also present in other cultures, and basically affirms the existence of a natural order that is responsible for coordinating the operation of everything in the universe.
✨

Prana in a way is vitality. How is your vitality nowadays? We eat so much frozen foods, junk food, refrigerated food, stale food, that most of us are lacking vitality and need to push ourselves to do things instead of being able to do things with ease.

I know it’s hard to always only eat food that has been freshly cooked, I struggle with that as well, but it’s good that we slowly increase the number of meals that involve fresh food so that we can at least have a chance to absorb more prana into our body. Another thing you can do is to add more fruits in your diet since they are rich in prana. (But you also need to be mindful and pick a good time to eat fruits 😛)

Attention: having excessive amount of prana in your system is also not always a good thing. If you do practices that increase the amount of prana in your body, you also need to take care that you have enough Agni to convert that prana into something your body can use, otherwise it is just going to lead to a vata aggravation.

Another Ayurveda Talk for people in Taiwan:

歡迎來參加阿育吠陀的講座

阿育吠陀到底是什麼 ?
阿育吠陀為什麼屬於自然療法?
食物怎麼幫助身心靈得到平衡?
怎麼透過阿育吠陀更了解自己?
這個講座是要來簡單介紹一下阿育吠陀看世界的角度。阿育吠陀有很多有趣的原則，懂了它們之後，你就能更有深度的看待一切!

時間: 5月6日 早上11:15～12:30
地點： 動房 （高雄市苓雅區四維四路2號9-1）
費用: 自由捐 🙏

有興趣的朋友請dm 我!
#阿育吠陀

Was talking about spirituality with and this quote from Rumi came up “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” It expresses beautifully how I feel about our essence. When we are able to identify ourselves with the ocean and not with the drop, suddenly, the problems we face in life seem to become smaller.

阿育吠陀是什麼？ 阿育吠陀基本食療原則怎麼運用？ 你有聽過阿育吠陀的六味嗎？味道不只是為了讓食物好吃，它是有功效的喔！

這個講座只是大概介紹一下阿育吠陀對食療的看法。阿育吠陀還有包括很多養生概念，是個很完整的知識系統。歡迎大家來聽聽怎麼用食物來平衡自己！

#阿育吠陀 #身心靈平衡 #身心靈療癒

Love the books by Robin Wall Kimmerer , it’s poetry in prose form, with a deep understanding of nature.

A bear will eat berries and still be a bear. When we eat the same berries we are still human. It’s the same food but it obeys certain laws from nature and the body of who eats it. Still, we tend to be so obsessed with the nutritional value of foods, trying to measure all we can even though everyone might metabolize it differently. The focus should not be entirely on the food, you should also focus on your digestion - there are parameters that matter more than the nutritional value of the food - how is your emotional state when you are eating? How much attention are you paying to your meal? How thankful are you for the food in front of you? How receptive are you to that food at the moment?
How fresh is the food you are eating?

The point is just to get you to detach from questions like “what is the most nutritive fruit on Earth?”

How is your oral health? Have you considered how your saliva is related to your oral health? Is your saliva perhaps too acidic? Is it rich in enzymes or is it lacking in enzymes? Do you feel the food melting in your mouth? We don’t give enough attention to our saliva but we rely on it for taste and digestion. Does food taste delicious because the chef is competent or is it because you have a healthy saliva? 😉 Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, well, delicious food is in the saliva of the eater!

Our lives follows a specific sequence of kapha, pitta and vata, where first we go through a stage of being “soaked” in water (kapha), then we go through a stage of heat (pitta), and lastly we go through a drying stage (vata).

This order can be seen in a person’s lifetime, with the kapha stage corresponding to childhood and teen years, the pitta stage corresponding to late teen years and adulthood, and the vata stage corresponding to old age.

This order can also be seen repeating twice a day, with morning being kapha, roughly noon time being pitta, and afternoon being vata. And again in the evening and early night being kapha, around midnight being pitta and dawn being vata.

And it is like that with our digestion too. The first stage of the digestive process the food is kind of soaked in fluid in the stomach, then it gets broken down further in the small intestine releasing heat in the process, then it goes through a drying process in the large intestine.

Knowing this sequence, we can take advantage of it by acting in ways that go with this flow. For example, replenishing our body with sour things or sweet things during the vata period of the day especially if we are feeling “too vata”.

Was reading the book “The subtle art of not giving a f*ck”. In it, the author says:
“The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies - that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: “truths such as ‘your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things’ and ‘the vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.’ This vegetable course will taste bad at first. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive.”

I just find it interesting how he correlates this idea of eating veggies with something not so pleasant. Well, it’s understandable because a lot of veggies will have some bitter taste in it, and our modern society just doesn’t really want bitter on a day-to-day basis.

The bitter taste, or rasa, in Ayurveda is not related only to the taste of food. Many cultures use the word bitter to describe unpleasant experiences too, which I find curious. Being it a flavor or an experience, we just don’t consume enough of bitter things anymore. We all prefer sweet over bitterness… why would you want something unpleasant?

But the bitter is there for a purpose. It is there so that we don’t overindulge, it’s there to put an ending to things, it’s there to cleanse our potentially corrupted selves, it’s there to keep us in check.

Ayurveda needs to stay relevant to current times ! Some people will preach that a valid Ayurveda is based on the old, classical texts that don’t change… but Ayurveda for me should evolve with time and that is the beauty of it in my opinion.

The 3 pillars of health in contemporary society for me are: Agni, nidra and Malas. Agni relates to the digestive fire, which is of course not too far from the original concept of Ahara, but calling it Agni emphasizes on the idea of good digestion and not just good quality foods. Nidra is and will always be a very important component of health - because we all need good, restorative rest and sleep to remain well-balanced and healthy. Lastly, the concept of Malas came in here because we need to be able to get rid of what doesn’t serve us, or else we keep reabsorbing the toxic waste that we didn’t throw out and that can end up poisoning the body.

A mantra for Dhanvantari and a reminder to myself to stay humble because the divine is the one that heals. 🙏

How many did you get ? 😉🙊

Being a traveler and learning about plants and their names in different countries:

I have been drinking 決明子 (Jue Ming Zi) tea for a few years now and I know it’s good for the eyes and TCM uses it for clearing liver heat and to aid in weight loss, and as mild laxative.

Recently I learned this plant is actually very common in Brazil and considered as invasive! It is called Tora Tora in Brazil because its botanical name is Cassia tora…

In Ayurveda the seeds are often used for skin disorders such as ringworm. Its name in Sanskrit is Chakramarda. It’s such a joy when I can connect a plant I know from TCM to Ayurveda and another joy when I find it is common in Brazil too!

It actually tastes very nice, reminds me of coffee a little bit. The name in English is sicklepod and sometimes it is called coffee pod.

Have you tried Cassia tora seed tea?
#決明子

To know intellectually that we always see things through a lens, and to actually experience a mind-blowing unpredictable change of lens that shakes you to that realization, is a totally different thing. 👀

When you have that experience, it is as if something inside you is set free. I mean, it may sound obvious that we see through a lens, that information always arrive filtered to us, but then we always get so caught up on what we see that we take the appearance of the world as something objective and fixed.

Ok, I admit that what set my eyes free temporary were psychedelics, and it totally shook me at the time. It really opened up my mind.

But the point of this post is not to talk about psychedelics, it’s just to bring your attention to the lenses you are using to view the world right now. How aware are you of your own lenses?

Unless we become aware of the lenses we are looking through, of our conditionings, we are essentially living in a life that is bound to be repetitive, that makes us react always the same way, behave in a certain pattern, because we are living in an automatic mode and we are too used to seeing things a certain way, so we unknowingly shrink the world to only be the way we see it at the moment.

The lens is there to serve a purpose, and we can tune it in a way to lessen our blind spots, but for that we have to acknowledge the point of views from other people sometimes and check if our lens is not distorted in that particular area. The more we do that, the more we are able to move away from our conditionings and act in a wiser way.

Activity and inactivity are opposites yet they complement each other! Both are important, but both need to be done in moderation.

One thing that helps in the process of self-development is being clear about your wording. The more clear you define words, the more clear will be your reasoning.

Mind and awareness are two different things!

“When you hear someone say, ‘My mind wanders all over the place,” you know now that this is an incorrect statement. It is incorrect because your mind does not wander. What wanders? Awareness!”

(From the book The Power of Unwavering Focus by Dandapani)

https://youtu.be/sMPpl6gYkv8

原來做杏仁奶這麼簡單~ It is so easy to make almond milk! 阿育吠陀愛超愛杏仁，稱它們具有抗老作用、非常營養。 它們是維生素 E、錳、鎂、磷、蛋白質、抗氧化劑的來源……！ 杏仁還可以滋養神經系統、骨髓和生殖系統，這是其他許多食物無法同時滋養的。Ayurveda loves almonds! They hel...

Cumin ~ Cuminum cyminum L., one of my first friends in Ayurveda 😛. It is called jirakah or jarana in Sanskrit. I specially started using cumin a lot in cooking this year, I use cumin in almost every meal I prepare. I still find the taste surprising every time though 😂. The seeds have this pungent taste that kind of wakes you, in between the food it makes it presence very known “hey, I am cumin, I’m here!”. But the powdered cumin is more subtle and blends in nicely.

Cumin is mostly said to have a heating potency (virya) although some people will say it is cooling and that it has similar properties to coriander seeds. It is beneficial to use cumin if you have a weakened digestion, diarrhea, malabsorption, it can serve as appetizing (dipana) or digestive (pachana). Anyway, if you want to improve your digestion, cumin will help you!

Do you ever use cumin when cooking?

How much courage does a tree have to let go of its leaves? Courage and trust. To let go of your leaves is because you know they will grow back. 🍂

Following nature, autumn is a good time to direct your energy inward 😌. We need to be thoughtful of where we spend our energy.

Ayurveda looks at how we are influenced by nature. The sun and the moon have a very big influence on our lives, we may not notice it on a day to day basis, but we see it clearly in a yearly basis, with the changing seasons.

Have you noticed how your energy levels changes during each season, and how your dietary preferences may change too?

Self-knowledge for me is a starting point for inner exploration. You start becoming more aware of your emotions, of your actions, of your thought process, of how you make decisions, of your desires, of how your body works, of how you are influenced by the external world, til the ultimate realization that you are one with the whole world. The more aware you are of what goes within you, the more clarity you will have about life and how to handle the situations life throws at you.

When you are able to go deep within yourself, you also come to experience life in a deeper way, you get to notice subtleties that other people might not notice.

So I’d say the “goal” of self-knowledge is to slowly develop awareness and a curiosity about life that will lead you to experience life more intensely, deeply, and with clarity, and as a consequence, to become free from our compulsiveness and subconscious habits. When we are free from all these repetitive thoughts and habits we gathered from the past, we finally can be with creation in the present moment.

A lot of women think they have their period while taking birth control pills… but the bleeding you experience is different from a true period because a true period happens after ovulation, but if you are taking birth control you are not ovulating… a withdrawal bleeding happens just because of the withdrawal of the hormones.

If a doctor is telling you to use birth control pills to regulate your cycle you are being fooled. 😳

If you pay attention to your cycle, and you happen to have one dosha more prominent, you’ll notice it has a few characteristics that may repeat themselves depending on how you take care of yourself each month.

If your cycle happens to be more vata, you can balance it with more warm and nourishing foods, more self-love, bringing in more regularity and stability to your everyday life.

If your cycle is more pitta, you can balance it with cooling foods or anti-inflammatory foods, cooling breath work, more relaxing activities.

If your cycle is more kapha, also balance it with warming foods, but lighter meals (that are easier to digest), and more physical activities and movement around the non-menstrual time of the month.

How is your menstrual cycle like? Do you identify with any of these?
**es

We are a minute creature in the universe, and we are influenced by every single change that happens in the entire universe.

To keep the body in balance might be a constant effort. And Ayurveda helps us with that.

Ayurveda offers knowledge of Svasthavritta (health preserving measures). It tells you about the ideal way of living one day on Earth (dinacarya - daily routine), then it tells you how to live ideally one year on Earth, according to the seasons (Ritucarya), it talks about how to eat healthily and how to have a healthy lifestyle and how to counteract the aging process, how to have healthy offspring. All these … not so that you can survive in this world, surviving is not enough. The goal is that you thrive, that you grow vigorously and flourish and be able to evolve in your spiritual journey. ✨

When deciding what to eat everyday, it is smart to take the season or more specifically, the current weather into consideration because the external world has a great influence on our inner body climate.

So a practical way to think about it is: 50% of what to eat next is based on the current weather, while the other 50% is based on your current situation (level of hunger, how much activity you did or will do that day, vikriti…)

I am currently in Berlin, and as the weather gets drier and colder, I really feel the need of a vata pacifying diet, with more good oils and warm foods.

How is the weather for you now and do you ever think about the weather when you choose your food?