Vata Pacifying Diet: Natural Ways to Balance the Vata Dosha

What can I do?” Restoring Balance The first step in staying healthy is developing awareness of the potential causes of disease so you can avoid them or deal with them intelligently. The second step is taking action to modify causes you can’t avoid or control (such as the weather). The next step is to restore balance once it begins to be lost. The main method for doing this is to apply the opposite quality or qualities.

If you’re cold, have some hot soup or take something warm to drink. If you’re agitated or upset (perhaps you watched that violent movie against your better judgment), sit down and do some meditation to calm your mind and emotions. If your pitta has been provoked and you’re feeling hot under the collar, take a swim or have some sweet cooling fruit. This principle seems so simple and makes such good sense that it is easy to overlook it in practical daily life.

But it is extremely powerful and effective. If you apply it, you will find that you can quickly and effortlessly restore balance to your mind and body. Techniques for Cleansing and Purification Now we have to consider still another level of self-healing. What if you haven’t taken the opportunity to develop awareness, to modify the cause, or to apply opposite qualities to restore balance, and you have begun to get sick?

What to do now? The principle of opposites is almost universally valid and helpful at any stage of disease. But once disease has begun to develop, it will not be sufficient. At this stage it becomes necessary to use techniques for cleansing and purifying your body of excess doshas and accumulated toxins.

As we have seen, when the doshas are aggravated because of poor diet, unhealthy lifestyle, negative emotions, or other factors, they first affect agni (the body’s biological fire, which governs digestion and assimilation). When agni becomes weakened or disturbed, food is not properly digested. The undigested, unabsorbed food particles accumulate in the gastrointestinal tract and turn into the toxic, sticky substance called ama. In the third (“spread”) stage of the disease process, ama clogs the intestines, overflows through other bodily channels such as the blood vessels, and infiltrates the bodily tissues, causing disease.