by Om Swami
Ama is the white matter on your tongue; it’s the plaque on your teeth; it’s the fat that clogs your arteries. It causes heartburn, gastritis and reflux. Obesity is the result of ama, as is cancer. It can exist at the cellular level, in the tissues, the glands or the organs. Cellular ama could result in anything from simple skin problems to the more grave cancer. In pitta people, it can lead to body odour, indigestion, stomach ulcers, gastritis and almost all the other gastrointestinal disorders. In kapha people, it can cause bronchitis, diabetes and heart disease. In vata peope, it can cause migraine, severe headaches, respiratory problems, bad breath and fatigue.
The presence of ama leads to stupor, weakness, lethargy, loss of appetite, fever and pain in the body, irritability, lacklustre skin, dark rings around the eyes, unclear urine, mucus in the stools, hard stools, constipation, coughing, lack of taste for food, poor digestion, insomnia, sleep apnoea and difficulty in waking from sleep. People with higher levels of ama are more prone to allergies, and they tend to catch a cold several times a year.
The easiest way to reduce ama is to follow the principles outlined in the chapter titled ‘The Eating Sense’ (Chapter 8). In a nutshell, if you are eating alkaline foods that are mostly sattvic, and you are eating with discipline and in moderation, ama will no longer be your worry. Other methods to eliminate ama include physical cleansing (covered later in this book in Chapter 13).
INDIGESTION
The second most potent killer is indigestion. Imagine a tree laden with fruits, its boughs extend several feet; its leaves are a lush green; its trunk is solid and wide – all in all, it is a healthy tree. Then, a strange affliction grips the tree; its fruit is infested with worms and its leaves are riddled with holes. You cannot possibly treat every single leaf and fruit – you have to get to the root cause of what is affecting the tree. Treating leaves and fruits is exactly what modern allopathic medicine does. And this is where you ought to know Ayurveda’s view: ninety-five per cent of diseases have their roots in the digestive system. If you have good digestion, even ama is taken care of.
The only real disease in the physical body is poor digestion. A sensitive stomach is the primary cause of other physical ailments in the body. This is where the greatest toxins are produced. If your digestion is fine, you can almost be certain to live a long and a healthy life. If your digestion is in order, you can’t be obese; you can’t have stomach ulcers, asthma, heartburn, sleep apnoea and other sleeping disorders, headaches, migraine, pains in the joints, clogged arteries, mental and physical fatigue, phlegm, constipation, hard or irregular bowel movements and many other afflictions. None of these can affect you. Apart from your heart and brain, your stomach is the most important organ of your body.
I have known many patients – quite a few of whom were part of the clinical trials of our herbal drugs – suffering from cysts, fibroids, ulcers, tumours and cancers. All of the female patients had one thing in common: they all had sensitive stomachs and frequently suffered from indigestion or constipation. The common factor among both the male and the female patients was that their diets had a high acidic content. I must add, while I am at it, that these people were generally soft and sensitive types and not at all rough and ready. They worried more than the average person. So, without a doubt, their mental health played an important role in their physical disorders, but poor digestion was the common denominator among them.
When undigested food stays in your stomach, metabolic processes continue to work in an attempt to break it down. Gaseous toxins mix with your blood and are transported to all parts of the body. Blood oxygen levels drop, and that presents the perfect breeding ground for cancerous cells. Every human body has cancerous cells. These are extremely active and robust cells that can grow at a pace much faster than normal cells in the body. Cancerous cells or tumours have more potential to grow in areas where there is a congregation of nerves, because such plexuses of nerves suffer the most from a lack of oxygen. Breast cancer, brain tumours, ovarian cysts and fibroids are most common in women with poor digestion. A weak stomach for men may lead to prostate cancer and brain tumours.
Modern science mostly disagrees with the above analysis, but the yogic belief is quite straightforward: shallow breathing and poor digestion create a toxic environment in our bodies. It means greater retention of carbon dioxide and reduced oxygen supply. Lumps, cysts, tumours and cancerous cells thrive in such environments.
If pitta is vitiated on top of a weak digestion, it can lead to pancreatic cancer. Furthermore, cancerous cells and tumours (benign or malignant) are anaerobic: they do not need oxygen supply to grow. In fact, they are killed if oxygen is flushed through the body’s internal transport system. In the chapter ‘Physical Cleansing’ (Chapter 13), I discuss the methods of strengthening your digestion. For those with the tendency to have lumps and cysts, deep breathing alone can do miracles, because it is capable of supplying your blood with excess oxygen.
I have seen remarkable results from deep breathing with cancer patients. Deep breathing is highly detoxifying. This is covered in more detail in Chapter 15 on ‘Mental Detoxification’. For now, just understand this: if your digestion is poor, you need to attend to it now if you want to lead a healthy life. Hypertension (blood pressure), stiff joints and body aches – they all spring from poor digestion. A clean and healthy colon is the fountain of youth and vitality.
SUGAR
Even if your digestion is strong and there is little or no ama, excess sugar intake is bound to make you sick. Even five thousand years ago, sugar was a challenge for Ayurvedic physicians. The challenge then was much more manageable, though, because only handmade drinks and sweets contained added or excessive sugar. Most of the other ingredients in those times were purely natural and if they contained any sugar (carbohydrates), they contained good sugar – it had dietary fibre as well as other groups of nutrients. This is not the case today.
Today, you can consume carbohydrates with absolutely no nutritional value. For example, soft drinks, energy drinks, white flour and processed food have excessive carbohydrates and are practically devoid of nutrition. When I was an asthmatic child, my Ayurvedic physician gave me a long list of things not to eat. Potatoes, sugar, milk, chocolates, sweetmeats, soft drinks, white bread and white rice were banned from my diet. Every time I broke the rules, I paid the price – I ended up in the hospital that night. If you examine the list above, excepting milk, all these foods are rich in sugar with practically no other nutrition in them.
Almost all inflammatory diseases in the body are caused by sugar. They include, but are not limited to, asthma, allergies and sensitivities, bronchitis, oedema, eczema, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammation in the bladder or prostate, hay fever, periodontitis (inflammatory diseases affecting the gums and tissues that support the teeth), atherosclerosis (thickening of the arterial walls), inflammatory bowel diseases and many autoimmune diseases (arising from an inappropriate immune response from the body against substances and tissues present in the body). Obese people in particular have been noticed to have chronic inflammation due to raised levels of insulin, blood glucose and leptin (a protein that regulates how much fat is stored in the body), among other markers. Changes in blood glucose levels directly impact metabolic homeostasis. It vitiates the three doshas and impairs – even deludes – the immune system of the human body.
If you want to live longer and healthier, one of the first tangible steps to take is to cut down on your sugar intake. Almost all foods we consume contain sufficient natural sugar. You don’t need to consume additional sugar; it will only cause harm. All artificial sweeteners are little doses of poison. There are two key hormones you should know about – both are pancreatic hormones: insulin and glucagon. Insulin gets rid of the excess sugar and glucagon supplies it when it is needed. Between the two of them, they maintain a careful balance of blood sugar levels in your body.
This is how insulin works: any excess sugar in your blood is converte
d into glycogen in the liver and is supplied to the muscle and adipose tissue to reduce the blood sugar level. If you don’t burn this excess sugar supplied to your muscles and fat cells by exercising, it is eventually converted into body fat. When you have long gaps between your meals, your body starts to release glucagon to increase the blood sugar level to give you the necessary energy for survival. If you eat food while the blood sugar level is on the rise, suddenly your body ends up with excess sugar because there is sugar (carbohydrates) in the food too.
While the insulin is doing its work, the kidneys retain salt. To maintain the sodium levels, the kidneys dilute the salt by retaining more water. This results in more blood in the body that requires more pumping, which causes high blood pressure. Sugar also hardens the walls of the arteries and makes them narrow. Remember caramelized sugar or plain sugar candies? That’s how hard sugar can get. Narrower arteries require the heart to pump harder to circulate the blood.
All starchy foods, all sugary drinks and many processed and canned foods are full of sugar. White rice, white bread, white flour, breakfast cereals and cakes and muffins also have a lot of sugar in them. Fruits are full of sugar too; their intake should be regulated. But they are also packed with the goodness of vitamins and enzymes, so you should have them. But unless you burn the excess sugar, any type of carbohydrate will harm you. In olden times, lifestyles were not so sedentary: people ate everything and physical work burnt any excess carbohydrates, so they remained healthy. Our modern lifestyles are very different though.
STRESS
Our race was never designed to handle the self-created stresses of the contemporary world. Nature did not create the stock markets, world governments or political boundaries. It did not invent the concept of large corporations and ridiculous targets. It did not evolve to create socially isolated individuals glued to a screen. It only created giant mountains and green meadows, the blue sky, pristine rivers, the vast ocean, countless beautiful and fragrant flowers and millions of species. It created the perfect ecosystem to ensure the healthiest survival of all its creatures. There were really no diseases. Either you lived healthily or you fell victim to a predator or a calamity. To fulfil its goal of a flawless operating model – to ensure the survival of species – it created a standard response system to any life-threatening situation. It was fight, flight or freeze.
Whenever any event or situation threatened one’s existence, it created great stress in the brain that would trigger a whole heap of chemicals, hormones and adjustments in the body. It would hyper-activate the sympathetic nervous system. As a result, the heart would beat faster, blood flow to the skeletal muscles would rise, and the blood pressure and respiration rate would go up. To best prepare the body for a fight or flight response, the brain would reduce blood flow to the skin and gastrointestinal tract. Such an increase in the strength and agility of the limbs was compensated for by the slowing down of intestinal movement, directly affecting digestion and endocrinal secretions. The body would become tense, the heartbeat would rise – pumping more blood and oxygen in the legs – because the brain thought that digestion of food could be delayed, since the creature might need to run to save its life.
Whenever we perceived any threat, our brains began preparing our bodies for survival, completely disrupting and adversely affecting their normal functioning. The chemicals they released in the process were used to help us fight or flee. Not bad, but of much less use today.
Our stresses in the modern world are usually not real. They don’t require a release of chemicals. When a company is downsizing or when the markets are crashing, we are not expected to get up from our desks, run across the street and climb up trees. We are expected to sit there and drink more caffeine and absorb the situation. The problem is that we know this, but our brains don’t. They haven’t yet evolved enough to differentiate between real and fake stress signals. They don’t know that you wish to handle your corporate financial crisis by raising more capital, and not your heartbeat; by being calm and not distressed. Our mammalian brains continue to release chemicals at any stress signal, and when they are not used, they wreak havoc on our bodies – most notably on our digestion.
Stress is the greatest and deadliest of all diseases. If indigestion is the only physical disease, stress is the only mental disease. They fuel each other; stress almost instantly weakens your digestion. When you are stressed, your brain sends a signal to the pancreas and other glands to release additional sugar into your body. Obeying the command, your pancreatic and adrenal glands secrete glucagon and adrenaline respectively. Since it is a fake signal, insulin swings into action to get rid of the excess sugar, sending it to your muscle and fat cells. But they have no need for it either, and it may convert into body fat. This leads to high blood pressure; it is directly linked to heart disease and indigestion. Stress immediately vitiates the three doshas and is considered a tamasic (mode of ignorance) response.
This must be emphasized: stress is not a mental affliction but a response. You have no control over the stock markets, economy, governments, global problems, or a highway traffic jam, but you have control over the response you choose in any adverse or undesirable situation. Prolonged stress can, and often does, lead to depression. Most chronic ailments cannot develop in just a weak body alone; there must be an unsound mind too, because for any disease to be chronic, your body must consistently provide the environment for it to thrive.
Having chronic ailments means that the immune system isn’t strong enough; that your body is not able to heal itself. More often than not, this happens because an ailing mind impairs and obstructs the normal functioning of the body. When you are stressed, your body does not produce growth hormones because it is already flooded with adrenaline and cortisol (a type of hormone). This has a telling impact on your physical health. Sound sleep, without the aid of pills or intoxicants, is a distant dream for one who is mostly stressed. And a stressed person is also highly likely to suffer from indigestion.
Stress, being a response, often becomes a habit. Those who tend to get stressed can freak out at the smallest of incidents. They can get stressed about organizational changes, about traffic on a highway, about rising gold prices and falling markets – even if they have no investment in the markets. They could get stressed if their child comes home late or if their computer crashes. When stress becomes your coping mechanism for every unpredictable situation, you lose control of yourself and the situation. You can almost be certain that ailments like diabetes, hypertension and heart problems are waiting just around the corner.
In olden times, there was a community support structure; people lived in larger families. While this arrangement had its own challenges, it allowed people to cope better with stress. There was someone to talk to; there was an outlet. Research has shown repeatedly that social isolation magnifies stress.
A pertinent question is: can you lead a life free of stress? Well, things will continue to happen around you; there are always going to be worries. But, yes, you can choose to not let them stress you out. Feeling a momentary sense of stress is natural, even instinctive, and doesn’t do damage. But harbouring it is neither natural nor instinctive. It is a habit. In this, you need to remind yourself that the world does not end here and that your present response is doing you great harm.
Playing your favourite sport or engaging in an activity you love can be a great de-stressor. For example, playing a musical instrument, painting, meditation, dancing, playing sports and going to the temple or church can help you take your mind off worries and calm you down. To stop the adrenaline rush that comes from stress, your mind must return to a state of calm. Normally, distractions weaken your resolve and concentration, but in the case of stress, distractions can be real friends. Distract your mind or focus it elsewhere. There are additional methods you can adopt. I cover them in Chapter 15 on ‘Mental Detoxification’.
If you eat alkaline foods, regulate your sugar intake and learn to mana
ge stress, you can almost be assured of good health and longevity. This is the essence of all the classical and modern texts on health and wellness. You now understand the concept of constitution, the nature of food, the eating sense and the origin of diseases.
12
Mental Afflictions
Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we feel angry or upset? What creates fear in us, or more importantly, why do we react in a fearful manner?
Yogic and Vedic texts frequently use a term called vritti. There is no real equivalent word in the English language, but the words ‘tendency’ and ‘temperament’ come quite close. Vritti refers to the fact that each of us is born with certain tendencies. The literal meaning of vritti would be mode of life or mode of conduct. The vritti of a cow is to be gentle and quiet, of a tiger to pounce. The vritti of a snake is to attack in defence, and for a sparrow to fly away. Our vrittis make us behave a certain way.
More importantly, vritti is derived from the root element vri, meaning screen or veil. Hiding behind our vrittis is the real us: our true nature of love, compassion and eternal bliss. Since our vrittis make us behave a certain way, we start to label each other according to our feelings and tendencies. ‘She is an angry woman’, for example, or ‘he’s a jealous man’. The truth is that she is not angry and he’s not jealous by birth. These emotions are simply hiding who they really are. This is why the same person can be very loving or very angry. Vrittis are like the waves in the ocean – constant and kinetic.
Our vrittis propel us to lead our lives the way we do. They make us passionate about one pursuit and indifferent towards another. Out of the many vrittis, there are some that undermine our physical and mental health. These are the prajna-aparadha (intellectual transgressions) as elucidated earlier. It means there are certain responses we choose consciously that have a negative impact on us. These responses are called mental afflictions.
