Farmacy
Eating and immunity
Food is a powerful medicine. What you eat either contributes to your overall vibrancy, well-being, and longevity, or it impairs your natural rejuvenation, accelerates aging, and compromises your immune system. It’s really very simple. Either the food you eat enhances and builds health, or it undermines it. Most people believe it’s what you eat that creates health or disease. It’s true, that certain foods have incredible healing compounds that create immense curative effects on the body. However, what you eat isn’t half as important as how well you digest it.
For instance, dairy is a celebrated part of a yoga diet. Milk, yogurt, cheese, and ghee condition and strengthen the system. In India, for instance, cows are worshiped because of this dietary gift. That said the baseline yogi rule on food is “don’t eat anything that you can’t digest in 18 hours”. So if you know you can’t digest dairy, it won’t help you no matter how many Ayurveda books insist its health and radiance attributes are unparalleled.
Healthy food, it’s preparation, the dues and don’ts, all are pretty hot news in the wellness scene, especially organic vegetables, gluten-free grains, and if you’re going to eat meat, grass fed beef, and other organic options. You can go raw, paleo, macrobiotic, whatever. Everyone is talking about “what’s good for you.” But if what you eat, doesn’t exit your system in 18 hours or less, it’s not working for your digestive metabolism. This and other ethical and energetic reasons are why the yogi food philosophy, including my own, favors vegetarianism and a plant-based diet. However, I am not preaching any dietary dogma in this segment, particularly.
It is important to know that we have choices. But if you can’t digest your food in 18 hours and you are fostering disease in your body. In these conditions, the system experiences a daily depression, because it is overworking to digest the lingering food in your stomach. This accumulated toxicity potentially lead to an of some sort or eventually illness. I need certainly is one of the big culprit of slow digestion, creating digestive buildup, and related issues.
Most men and women in the west, even children, across ethnic and economic backgrounds have digestive issues. This isn’t just a modern problem. Ancient people also experienced digestive difficulty. This is because digestion is one of the first places to experience a breakdown when the body, mind, emotional, energetic system is under stress. As such, Yoga/ Ayurveda as an ancient science of human maintenance and growth, developed many techniques to heal and rejuvenate the digestive process.
Many of these regular practices we’ve already learned, help reboot your digestive system. But if you need a little extra, here is where the fun stuff comes in: our recipes this week will be tonics for health and well being. Healing with food is such a powerful curative and medicinal tool for optimal health, and the results are very real and trackable. Also the process of deciding, shopping, and creating with food is a healing process onto itself. Check out the two elixirs for digestive cleansing that have particular amazing results.
Stomach and intestinal track cleanser
Green chili, anti-poison intestinal remedy
Food base pharmacy
Medicinal foods can be very simple and accessible. This is really one of my favorite areas of the yoga skill sets because it’s very alchemal. Intelligent use of food helps you to stay healthy. In addition to being delicious, the right food can detoxify your internal organs, feed your glandular system, regenerate your creative and sexual energy, stimulate your immune system, and help clean and rebuild brain function, as well as improve your entire nervous system. It’s really a sophisticated approach to medicine and it’s potently effective.
Healing with food and herbs is an elaborate art. Ayurvedic and Chinese medicinal texts are thousands of pages long. But to simplify something very complex, food based healing, works like this: plant and animal food products such as dairy, honey and meat are composed of active molecular, vitamin, mineral, and phytochemical configurations. These active molecules interact with the human body at a cellular DNA level to bolster, heal, and improve it, or the flipside, to destroy it.
The science is complex. It’s not just that vitamin C is good for you, although it’s been shown in test tubes that no virus can withstand a vitamin C, rich environment. It’s not that your nervous system needs sulfur to work, or that celery provides an easily metabolized dose of that sulfur, although both are true. It’s that the molecular, and I dare say energetic configuration of these foods supports the DNA in its integrity and in its improvement. And when the DNA is supported and unique and specific ways, and each food interacts with your DNA in a different way, the body can do all kinds of things, like fight internal fungi, bacteria, and viruses, it can rebuild artery walls in the heart and recondition all of your overtaxed organs. The body is an expert self healing mechanism. It just needs the support.
Seeking command over food-based healing could lead you down the rabbit hole of 11 years of Ayurvedic study like I’ve done, but it doesn’t have to. Being sensitive is really enough, because it is ultimately very intuitive. You know on some level what you need to heal. These foods and practices will help to open up your innate experience of that intuitive healing compass.
Because it’s such a total cure all, yoga, tea is one of our favorite medicinal recipes. It’s like a silver bullet, it is a true tonic to the whole system. Any illness or lingering virus you might be dealing with, Yogi tea in concert with a restorative mono diet will clear it up. The benefits of the tea can fill pages, here is the recipe.
