Ayurveda
Ayurveda or Ayurvedic Medicine is an ancient indian system of healing an maintenance. Once you discover your main dosha (type), Vata, Pitta or Kapha, you discover the ideal foods, rhythms and lifestyle that is are most beneficial for you. For example Vata doshas do not like spicy foods. They may eat them anyway, due to peer pressure or similar, but will not really enjoy the experience. Kapha doshas shoud be careful not to oversleep. Pitta doshas do well to avoid becoming overheated.
I believe that discovering your dosha and following the Ayurvedic guidelines for you can greatly increase your beauty, health and exuberance.
Here is a slightly-edited article by Dr. Helen Thomas. While I would have hoped for more profound conclusions to the questions it raises, it does contain several ideas relevant to our theme here at Core Beauty.
Ayurveda The Effortless Approach To Beauty
What is Beauty? Why do we care about it? How do we realize we have it? These questions are at the heart of the Ayurvedic approach to beauty. The answers can have a profound effect on your life. Beauty is difficult to define, because, beauty standards vary from culture to culture and from era to era and even from year to year. Poets and philosophers have struggled in vain to conquer this beguiling subject. From plucked eyebrows and ruby-red lips, to spiked hair and pierced navels, from rolls of fat and ample thighs to the anorexic waif look, from elongated necks and skulls to scarification and tattoos, from corseted waist and buxom bosoms to bound feet too deformed to walk on - women/men have been striving and continue to strive to measure up.
Ayurveda does just the opposite - it expands the possibilities of beauty, helping you find and cultivate true beauty in yourself, in others, and in the world around you. In Ayurveda, beauty is neither a mask you hide behind, someone else's idea, nor the latest trend. It is the outer reflection of the inner you, so it is ultimately honest, individual and timeless.
As my patients have discovered, Ayurvedic tools and techniques used to cultivate beauty are effortless in the sense that their actions are going with the flow of nature - not against it. The practice involve discipline, but it is discipline with a great deal of pleasure. These practices are enjoyable themselves - eating good food, inhaling delicious aroma, enjoying oil massages, -- and more. Ayurveda's unique perspective helps you see yourself in a fresh, new light and provides you with the joy, and fulfillment of making a commitment to your self that exemplifies the love you feel for yourself and your body.
Why do we care about beauty? Why do so many of my patients come in with complaints not only about fatigue, digestive imbalances, insomnia but also about pimples, wrinkles, and stubborn pounds that are irritating to daily happiness. Are we being self indulgent or obsessive? No, definitely not. We humans have sought physical beauty and delighted in its blessing since the dawn of time. The urge to be thought beautiful and desirable, to groom and decorate and embellish ourselves to achieve that goal, stem from a deep primal need to be noticed, accepted, and loved.
Does health create beauty or beauty create health? The answer is both. Just as mind and body are so inextricably connected as to be one and the same thing, so are health and beauty intrinsically related. Effortless Beauty by Dr. Helen Thomas gives the complete ayurvedic approach to take for each body type.
