What is Health?
According to the World Health Organization, “health” is a complete physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease and infirmity.
What is Holistic Health?
Although there are different beliefs, most professionals agree that holistic health is preventative medicine. It is achieved by first identifying the root cause of the disease, removing it, and then using conventional and alternative avenues to purify and remove toxins before introducing a treatment program, which includes lifestyle practices, diet and nutrition, and herbology to achieve body, mind, and spirit health and balance.
What is Ayurveda?
Ayurveda means the knowledge of life (Ayus: life, Veda: knowledge). India's original healing system is considered the mother of all medicines, including allopathic, holistic, and surgical.
Ayurveda is based on the premise that the universe comprises five elements: Ether, Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. In humans, these elements comprise the three Doshas (biological energies): Vata, Pita, and Kapha. Vata comprises Air and Ether; Pitta combines Fire and Water; and Kapha is Water and Earth.
The “Gunas define these elements,” which are the qualities surrounding us: hot/cold, wet/dry, heavy/light, and mobile/stable. These extremes are reflected in the doshas and help us understand our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual natures. Vata is cold, dry, light, and mobile; Pitta is hot, wet, light, and mobile; and Kapha is cold, damp, heavy, and stable.
One’s natural balance of the doshas is established at conception and is known as “Prakriti,” or constitution. However, seasonal changes, changes to our physical environments/locations, food choices, and emotional disharmonies can disrupt this unique balance.
Balance is restored by applying opposites. For instance, a Vata-dominant person benefits from decreasing the qualities that dominate their nature—cold, dry, light, and mobile—and adding warm, wet, heavy, and stable qualities.
The first step in restoring balance is understanding one’s constitution (Prakriti) and determining one's current state of health (Vikruti). Then, imbalances are addressed using the five sense therapies, which include Sight (fire element), Hearing (ether element), Smell (earth element), Taste (water element), and Touch (air element).
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