 Hey guys, so this is a very impromptu video. No story time. Just a casual conversation, kind of like we did a few months back about fevers and how fevers are necessary when it comes to the evolution of the body and especially the evolution of the soul and the spirit within the body. But today I have mentioned something a while back about oil baths and you'll have to forgive me because I have been in the world of traditional yoga and Ayurvedic medicine for a really long time. So sometimes I forget that the things that I talk about aren't common to a lot of people, especially people living in the Western world that are not familiar with these concepts. And I had somebody message me and ask me to explain what an oil bath actually is because I do understand that that is pretty misleading. A lot of people believe that it's just putting oil on a bathtub and like soaking and that's not that's not what an oil bath is. So I get that that's little misleading and so this is just going to be a quick video for me to explain to you guys how to take an oil bath. Oil baths in my opinion are one of the healthiest things that you can do for yourself. Oil baths can remove inflammation. They can also remove toxins that are caught up in your fascia and the fascia holds a lot of information. The fascia is like crazy packed full of stuff that we don't even we're not even really aware of how much our fascia actually holds. Oil baths are good for people who exercise a lot and need that muscles. They're muscles to kind of relax a little bit. They're also good for people who don't exercise that much and just need a chance to kind of chill out. But depending on where you are physically is going to kind of depend on how long you take an oil bath for. So for starters when taking an oil bath you do need to know what kind of oil to use. Now there are specific oils for specific doshas. We have talked about doshas on this channel before and if that's something you guys want me to do another in-depth look at for you. I will be glad to do that. I think I'd rather go back over doshas with a collaboration then than doing it by myself again. But anyway, so with doshas and with kind of the rule of RU Veda anyway, is that every single human being carries a certain pattern of disposition, a certain constitution. Now there are three constitutions in the dosha category. That's Vata, Pitta and Kappa. In a perfect world we would be equally all three, but we're not. I myself am a Vata Pitta. And so because I lead with the dosha Vata, which I won't get into what that is on this video, but because I lead with the dosha Vata, oils like coconut oil are horrific for me. So that's what I mean with the whole RU Vedic thing like not not every person is going to be able to follow the same diet or eat the same oils like here in the United States. We have this like weird idea that coconut oil is good for everyone. No, it's not. It's terrible, terrible for Vatas. You want to screw up a Vata's health, then cook with coconut oil or put coconut oil on their skin. Okay, so for me as a Vata, the oils that are best for me would be like sesame seed oil or almond oil. Now one time I made the mistake of getting the wrong kind of sesame seed oil, and I took an oil bath and I smelled like a PF Changs for about a week. So please be mindful when it comes to certain oils, what kind of oil you are buying. For those who are new to oil bathing, though, and actually the oil that I prefer to use the most is the oil that pretty much works across the board for all doshas, and that is castor oil. Now when I'm in India, I have to be careful about what kind of castor oil I buy because there are some castor oils that are actually poisonous, so you have to be really, really careful, although I do prefer getting castor oil from India because it's better quality. And so usually when I go to India, I come back with a lot of castor oil specifically for oil baths. Now here in the United States or in other modern Western countries, they might not even sell the poisonous castor oil. For example, if I go to Whole Foods, you know in Whole Foods they have that like yoga section, you can find castor oil specifically for oil baths, and it's really, really light. It's very clear. It's not the real potent, but that's pretty much what you're going to find here in America, and it works, especially if you're new to oil bathing. It's it's it'll still work. It's just not as potent as what you're going to get in India. So with oil bathing, there's two ways that you can take an oil bath. One is that you do it yourself, which is what I do when I'm here in the United States, and the other is to go to an aggravated clinic where they will administer the bath for you. When I am in India, I do go to the aggravated clinic and I allow them to administer the oil bath for me because it is more beneficial. It's about a two-hour experience. You can really relax while they're doing that. You end in like a steam room, which you can create in your house as well, which we're going to talk about. But here in the United States, I do administer it on myself. I could probably give somebody an oil bath at this point because I know how to do it, but I've never actually given anybody an oil bath before, just myself. So what I do with an oil bath, so in your bathroom, everybody's got like old towels and sheets that they don't mind getting messy because oil baths are pretty messy. So lay a bunch of towels down on your bathroom floor. Now, if you're new to oil bathing, and especially if you're someone who doesn't exercise and kind of lives a sedentary life, you might only want an oil bath for about 10 to 15 minutes. If you are not new to oil bathing, and if you have some good autonomy, if you understand your body, especially if you exercise a lot, you might be able to handle the full 60 to 90 minute experience of oil bathing. I do 60 to 90 minutes and it's intense, like it gets intense, which I'll explain why it gets intense. So what you're going to do is you're going to lay a bunch of towels on your bathroom floor, and if you are administering the oil bath to yourself, just know that you're going to be stuck in your bathroom for 15 minutes to 90 minutes. So plan accordingly. If you want to watch YouTube, you can bring your laptop in there with you. I would suggest setting up your player first before you administer the oil because your hands will be very oily, or you can light some candles, dim the light, and maybe listen to some chanting music, or go into meditation. Whatever floats your boat for this experience. So once you've got yourself set up and you're in your bathroom, you're going to take all of your clothes off. Yes, all of your clothes get naked. All right, and then you're going to take your castor oil. Now, I typically will heat my castor oil up on the stove before I administer it because I don't do cold very well, so I always want the castor oil to be a little bit warm when it goes on my skin. And I'll have my bowl of castor oil, and then I'll just basically lather my body up in castor oil. Now, the thing about your hair, if you are in India and someone is giving you the oil bath themselves, they are going to rub it into your scalp. So it is going to get into your hair. When I'm by myself, I just pull my hair back and I don't even touch my scalp because castor oil is a bitch to get out of your hair. Your hair is going to take forever to get that thing out of your hair. And I'm a little too vain to be walking around for a week with oil in my hair. So just know that going forward. If you are someone that can handle like coconut oil, if you're copper based and you can handle a coconut oil bath, and the coconut oil is good for the hair and it's easy to come out, but just be aware of that. So once your body is lathered up in a castor oil, you're going to start the massage process. So what I typically do is I start to rub into my own muscles and I try to get the castor oil to penetrate more into my fascia, into the muscles. Again, this is so the oil can get into the body and start to pull out toxins and also release some inflammation within the body. So again, if you are, if you struggle with autoimmune issues or if you're a really, you know, enthusiastic exerciser and you're sore, I mean, listen guys, I have been sore for 15 years. I kid you not, I've literally been sore for 15 years, so I get it. You're constantly wanting to kind of release those muscles. You know, you want to rub into the pectoral muscles. The neck, for me, the back of the neck is a big one. I tend to carry a lot of tension in the back of my neck and I do do a lot of foot behind the head postures, which can, over time, start to kind of tweak your neck a little bit. So I want to get those muscles to kind of relax with the castor oil in the back of my neck. If you have lower back issues, rubbing into the lower back, the glutes are a big muscle. You're going to want to work into the quadriceps and inner thighs are kind of, they're a potent zone. We carry a lot of anger and a lot of other uncomfortable emotions in our thighs and our inner thighs and on our quadriceps. And so you want to kind of really work the castor oil into that area as well. Your calves, the bottoms of your feet in between your toes. And so literally what I do for about 40 minutes of this experience is I am just massaging myself and I'm constantly reapplying more oil. After about 40 minutes, I then start to work into my face. Now you want to massage the face a little bit differently. I try to massage the brow line and like the stress where we carry stress is also, you know, you have an energy cycle here, a chakra here that you want to work into all along the jaw, especially if you get lock jaw. I get lock jaw sometimes. And so you want to kind of work into the jaw behind the ears, the front of the throat. About 10 minutes there. So we're at about the 50-minute mark at this point. So after that's done, usually you might start shivering a little bit. So if it is colder where you live, you might want to also bring in like a little heater, like room space heater, just to keep the, because you will start to shiver the more the castor oil starts to penetrate within your body. And so after that, I do a whole another layer of oil and then I'll wrap myself in towels and I'll just kind of lay there for 10 to 20 minutes. Depending on how I'm feeling. And then after that's over, you start the removal process, excuse me, of the castor oil. Now again, if you're buying castor oil in the United States, especially from like a chain like Whole Foods, and it's really It's not a thick color. It's very light color. Kind of looks like urine. It's very light color. That's gonna come off pretty easy in the shower. You can just get a regular soap or exfoliant soap and wash it off. However, if you've got a more potent castor oil, you're gonna have to use soap nut powder. Now I get all my soap nut powder from India and bring it home with me and soap nut powder is way more messy than the castor oil is. And you can do this one of two ways. You take the soap nut powder, you put it in a bowl, and you add water, and it literally looks like shit basically. So your neighbors might wonder what's going on in your bathroom if they walk in and see a bunch of soap nut powder everywhere. So you have to be very careful about slinging it. Now you can start the shower and apply it in the shower to get it off, or you can do what I do. And I usually take the soap nut powder before I even get in the shower, and I start to rub it, exfoliate it all over my body, and really just start to rub. And that'll start to pull out the castor oil because at this point the castor oil has been sitting on your skin and in your skin for over an hour if you're doing the full experience. Once you've got this soap nut powder all over you, get in a hot shower. Now we want to get the shower a bit steamy so your your skin will open up and again release some of these toxins that the castor oil has pulled out. Some people by this point are really tired because we're gonna talk about this in a minute. All this work the castor oil is doing is going to make you feel very sleepy. So some people actually sit in the shower and just let the shower kind of run on their body and wash off all the soap nut powder and the oil where some people will actually physically stand and take a shower. Now once you're all cleaned up and you're out of the shower, I would suggest then putting on some really comfortable clothes and climbing into bed and watching a movie or something because you are going to be very relaxed and very very sleepy. You will probably experience your nose running for a good 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how congested you actually are after the oil bath is over. It's because everything's been knocked loose from the castor oil. That's a good thing and so keep some tissue on you. Now traditionally in India the way we work our oil baths is we do our practice from Sunday to Friday. So it's six days a week of intense practice and then Saturday morning is the day that we observe rest. So in traditional yoga you legit observe the Sabbath as a day of rest. Now what traditionally you would do then is on Saturday morning you would take your oil bath in the morning. However, as I said, if you are like me and you want to actually do things on your day off like, you know, go to the park, see your friends, get out in nature, not a good idea to take the oil bath first thing in the morning. So for me what I do when I do do oil baths, we typically want to do them at least once a week here in the United States. I'm not as diligent as I am in India. What I typically do though is I do the oil bath on Friday night and I do it right before I go to bed because you will have the deepest sleep after you've taken your oil bath. For me, I'm not much of a sleeper. I'm Vata. We're not much of sleepers. I can go like six hours a night on sleep and be totally fine, no naps. But the last time I took an oil bath, for example, I slept straight for 13 hours after the oil bath. So it's going to bring you to a deep place of relaxation. And so that's why I suggest from my personal experience that you take the oil bath the night before your rest day. So you don't want to take it the night before you're due to have a really hard work out the next day or yoga practice the next day. You want to take it the night before you are going to be resting from physical activity from like going to the gym, whatever you do. You want to give your body that time to really just soak up the benefits of having that kind of purging from the castor oil. Now there is another thing you can do with oil baths, and those are called oil packs. And if you go to the Instagram, Ashtanga Yoga Atlanta, which I will link that down in the description box below, there is a video on that page. It's actually my knee that's being packed, a video that was put together to show people how to make an castor oil pack. So like for example, if you have a bum knee, knee issues are very very common and the knees, interestingly enough, are connected to the kidneys. The kidneys are representative of fear. So a lot of people who struggle with like knee issues, you're looking at, you're struggling with some like deep-rooted fear, which is a topic for another day, but just something interesting to know about yourself. So if you struggle with knee pain, you can do a castor oil pack, and some people will do this overnight while they sleep. I have a friend in the Ashtanga world that sleeps in a castor oil pack every single night. Because they're castor oil packs, they're not as intense as oil baths, and so it's not going to have the same effect on your energy levels as like a full-on oil bath would do on your energy levels. So with the castor oil pack, like let's say you have a bum knee, you're going to take a piece of cloth that isn't, again, you don't mind if it's going to get a little bit ruined, you're going to heat up your castor oil, and you're going to soak the cloth in castor oil, then you're going to wrap that cloth around the knee or the elbow or the shoulder or whatever, whatever joint is really bothering you, you're going to wrap it up. Then because it's wet and sticky from the castor oil, take some cellophane and wrap the cellophane around the pack. So if you want to sleep in the castor oil pack, no problem. It's going to be wrapped in cellophane, so you're not going to get any oil on your sheets, because that castor oil is really hard to come out, especially if you get the real potent kind of castor oil. And then the next morning you just wake up and you'll just take the pack off, wipe your knee down, and the inflammation in your knee should have subsided. All right, so I hope that explains what an oil bath is. Again, this is not you soaking in an actual bathtub with oil. I do typically take hot baths every single night. I take nights that I don't take an oil bath. When I take an oil bath, I shower that night, but every night I do take an epsom salt bath, hot bath, that I've done that for years now. I've kind of a little something about me in my, you know, personal life. I'm like a neat freak. I can't handle, like I'm not someone that's going to go the whole day, like for example, I'm not someone that's going to shower in the morning, which I do shower in the morning after our practice, and then go the whole day and then get in the bed that night and go to sleep. That grosses me out. No offense if you do that, but that like, I can't, I, I'm so paranoid about like sweat and like grossness, and so I've always taken a bath at night as well. So I'll put epsom salts in the bath at night and I'll soak for like 20-30 minutes. I usually read in the bath. That's kind of my time to myself, and I usually read like a good old fiction murder mystery. I'm not a, it's funny, you know, like I, I'm a big romantic, like in my real life. I love romance. I love, you know, all that good romantic stuff, but when I read books, I'm not really into like romantic books. I like my murder mysteries. So, so that's what I do at night. I fill an epsom salt hot bath up, and I get in and I read murder mysteries, and then I put my pajamas on and go to bed. Again, with the exception of when I take an oil bath. So, yeah, oil baths are different. They're not the epsom salt baths. You're not actually even in the bathtub. You're just sitting with oil on you and then showering the oil off. So, I would do a demonstration video for you guys, but unfortunately, I don't think you want to see me naked. So, so I won't be doing that. But I think you get my drift. And if you do live in an area that does have an aggravated clinic, sometimes they do offer that service. It might be a little bit different here in the United States because our regulations are different than in India. In India, when you go to the aggravated clinic to take an oil bath, they give you, if you're a female, then you'll have like two female people working with you. If you're a male, you'll have male people working with you, and you literally do get like butt naked on a table. That almost looks like a pool table. There's like a ridge around it that holds the oil, and they will literally work into your skin for about two hours with the hot oil, and they do dim the lights. They have candles lit, and they have like chanting music playing in the background. So it's the whole experience. It's just a whole vibe. So if you do live in an area, you can check with them and see what kind of services they offer in applying an Ayurvedic oil bath. Again, they'll probably have you wear a bathing suit or something because regulations are different here than in India. It's funny, the first time I ever, so my first trip to India, some of the apartments we rent from, they had just now started to like apply Western toilets into the apartments where we rent from in Mysore, and I'm definitely a Western toilet type girl. I don't like squatting. So I was super excited to have a Western toilet, but it wasn't working half the time. It was like, you know, a little iffy there, and when I had my first professional oil bath done at the Ayurvedic clinic, they had this like steam box in the room, and they put me in the steam box, and I was sitting there thinking, my toilet doesn't even work half the time, and here this damn steam box is working in this Ayurvedic clinic. So anyway, it was kind of comical, and you definitely, if you're going to an Ayurvedic clinic in India, you can't be shy because they're gonna get you naked. You're gonna be completely naked, but it's gonna be people of your same gender that are doing the service for you, so yeah, but you can't be shy about that because you're just gonna be completely on the table nude. Anyway guys, so that's oil bathing, and I hope that's clear. Again, sometimes I do talk about this Ayurvedic stuff, and I forget that it's not common knowledge to a lot of people who aren't familiar with this, this science. So if you have any other questions, if I mentioned something, just message me or leave a comment below, and I'll do a shoot another video to explain in more detail how to do these certain things. Again, oil bathing is one of the best things you can do for yourself. I truly, I love taking oil baths. It just makes you feel so good, and the next day you're just so freaking rested, so if you are really stressed out right now, because trust me, I think we all are really stressed out right now. If I'm gonna be honest with you guys, I like wanted to punch a wall the other day. I just am so fed up with everything that's going on. I'm ready for the plug to be pulled on this because it's enough is enough at this point. So I know we're all kind of feeling that sense of like frustration, and so unfortunately, there's not anything we can do. We're all stuck in our countries. We can't do anything if we don't have, you know, so you know, this might give you something to do, and it'll help you relax, and it's a new thing for people to understand and learn, and I do think that Ayurvedic medicine will be really important in the future because it is really based on the individual person, which is something that we absolutely need. It's not a one-size-fits-all when it comes to your health, and health, like your body, is a constantly moving, changing, and evolving thing. And Ayurvedic medicine is really good at recognizing that and trying to work with the natural changes of your body. So once again, if you need further explanation, just leave me a comment down below, and I'll try to help you go even deeper into our understanding oil baths, and somebody asked me about doing another Q&A. We haven't done one in a few months now. So if you want to do another Q&A, if you have any questions you want to ask me, go ahead and just ask them in the comment section below, and I'll collect them, and we can maybe do a Q&A later on. They can be any questions you want to ask. It can be regarding any of the topics we've covered on this channel, or yoga, or bar-e-vedic stuff, or just anything that you want to ask, you can ask, and we'll do that. We'll go through those questions. So anyway, guys, I hope that you're having a wonderful day, and tomorrow we'll be reading through the Yoga Sutras. Again, I will not be on David's channel today because David is out of town right now, so I will be back on the dark outpost next week. All right, guys. Have a wonderful day, and I will talk to you soon. Bye!