 Greetings everyone! In the times that we're in today, there is such a great deal of pain, trauma, and anxiety that is really beginning to surface and show its face in society. Perhaps it's always been there, hiding under the radar, or perhaps the collective pressure we are under, and the stresses of our discordant lives are really starting to get the better of us, from the wars taking place, or the local violence we find so close to home. For this reason, we've partnered with Gaia today to share with you this exclusive episode about healing emotional struggles. In this video, we explore the practice of Ayurveda and how it offers a holistic approach to healing that not only addresses physical health, but also emotional well-being too. Now more than ever, it's important that we take the time to bring understanding and remedy to the challenges we are facing, both personally and on a societal level. If we do not, things will only get worse. Please enjoy this special video, and may it inspire each of us to do something good in the world each day. In the past, leading up to now, we saw diabetes, obesity, heart disease as the leading killers in Western society. And now they're predicting that anxiety, depression, and anger, the mental diseases are going to be causing a lot of illnesses and deaths. Being a physician, I really understand that many of the conditions that are prevalent in our society are stress-related. Stress is a huge component, and it's not something that modern medicine really has very efficient tools to work with. Contrast that with Ayurveda. Ayurveda understands this intimate connection between mind and body. It understands how emotions and emotional perception and the digestion of emotion has an impact on our ability to either ward off stress, to process it, digest it, and not have it affect us, or it will have an impact that is damaging and imbalancing. Collectively, we are experiencing a time of great stress, of environmental pollutions, of toxins, of energetic pollution. We have Wi-Fi around us all the time. We have toxins in our food. And Ayurveda provides so many tools for us to soothe, to calm, to come back into balance, and to not create barriers between us and others, us in the external world, but yet to maintain ourselves and to invite in harmony while still being in the world. We need to take into account, like, what are we watching? How are we taking in information through these beautiful five-cent organs? You know, this is Asatmya Indriyartha Sub-Yoga. This is one of the causes of disease, associations with negative things from the outside world, bringing them into the body. Things that are not beneficial to our beautiful mental state, such as bad sounds, sights, watching violent things in film or television. We want to make sure that all of the things we're bringing into our external environment are creating a beautiful place within ourselves. So we don't remove ourselves from the world, we thrive in the world where we are. Heart disease is so common. Why? Because of stress, eating habits, fast foods, processed foods, not eating in the rhythm of the nature, not getting good sleep, overly using your senses. All of these contribute to manifesting heart disease or cancer and emotional impressions that are deeply embedded, which we ignore. We have to address them and let them go. Our emotions are balanced when we are positive, when we are happy, and we look forward to life. If we have an imbalanced state of emotions, what is it? Either you're angry, you're hurt, or you've experienced some trauma. In Ayurveda, we have to process and sit with those emotions and actually go through them and analyze them. The use of talk therapy, the use of healthy diet that can help you change your thinking into positive and rational and the use of herbs that is recommended for whatever you're going through, there is a lot of support in getting your mental balance back through Ayurveda. Vitality in Ayurveda is called prana. So when we are depleted in our vitality, we just cannot function properly. We experience symptoms like fatigue, lack of energy, sleep, and just not motivated to do anything. Well, I do see you do have a lot of toxins in your large intestine. As an Ayurvedic doctor and a mental health counselor, I can tell you Ayurvedic psychology plays a very important role in how I approach mental health counseling in my private practice. Tell me about your sleep. My sleep? Yes. Well, it could probably be better. Ayurveda defines the imbalances of our mind and emotions, especially when we look at the water imbalance, it causing anxiety, and the pitta imbalance causing anger, and the kafa imbalance causing depression. We can talk about having physical ama, which will be undigested food in the digestive tract, and it creates chronic illness and chronic pain. Likewise, we can also have undigested emotion, and that will cause us a lot of pain as we repress those emotions, we don't deal with those emotions. We can have undigested stress, we can have undigested thought. So while we want to take measures to strengthen our physical digestion, we also want to take measures to strengthen emotional digestion and mental digestion. When we are digesting emotion, what comes out in the end is liveliness. When we're struggling with emotion, what comes out is stress. And so understanding digestion doesn't just apply to food. It applies to emotion, it applies to everything that we take in through the senses. All of life gets metabolized. And if we're able to do that efficiently, if we're able to do that thoroughly, then we have vibrancy. If not, then we have stress and stress-related disease. The way to boost our vitality or our prana, we can do that by getting the right amount of sleep every day, and by eating healthy foods and also by being in sync with nature. That's very important. Waking up early morning and meditating. In Ayurveda, we look at five different bodies. Physical body, the mental body, the emotional body and the spiritual body. And of course, the breath body. So if we hit all these bodies every day, we're going to feel really energized. Oftentimes, I have clients coming to me for weight loss in particular. Many people in the world are experiencing a lot of heaviness in their body. And one of the first things that I'll talk to them about is whether there's an emotional component to why their body is retaining weight. To stay grounded, to stay stable, to stay powerful. I could put them on any diet, and that weight usually won't go. Especially if you're eating when you're stressed. Your cortisol levels are very high in your body. And when you're stressed, you're eating, it causes what? Emotional eating. You're going to eat what kind of foods? More sugar, more carbs, and drink more caffeine to calm yourself down. And that is going to throw you off. And we do that mindlessly. And that is not good for our vitality. Really, we need to understand the emotional causes in that weight retention. So we need to look at when the weight began to accumulate, why it's there, and how that weight might be serving that individual. And then we need to create harmony so that there's no longer a reason for them to be retaining that weight, and then the weight goes so easily. I understand that these days we are very busy. And we have to optimize the time we have and how we eat. And the digestion starts in your mouth. The enzymes produce in your saliva. It is broken down and then the hydrochloric acid takes over and the food is digested. The food in the stomach can only stay for some time. So we have to make sure that when we eat, we have to pay attention and make sure that the food is completely digested. And no matter what, it's going to take its time. You cannot rush anything. If you are eating in a rushed, hurried way and just gobbling up your food and you are really not secreting the juices and giving it time to digest, the food is going to pass through without being digested properly. And it is going to form what we call ama in Ayurveda. That is toxins. And those toxins are going to be absorbed in our system and manifest in the form of discomfort or disease. That is why these days you see a lot of imbalances. Not mindful about these routines is making us more sick than ever. Just imagine that a cup of water, if you keep filling that cup of water and you drink it, it's empty. But then if you keep on filling that cup of water, it overflows. That overflowing of water is the imbalance in your doshas. As long as it is contained, then you are in balance. Say you are a water constitution person. You have a tendency to suffer with nervous disorders. And emotionally, you are prone to anxiety if you have a water imbalance. But if you are a peta constitution person, you are prone to metabolic disorders and the peta imbalance causing anger. And then if you are a kafa constitution, emotionally you are prone to depression. The Ayurvedic psychological modules of treatment are three-fold. The Daiva Vapashraya, the Yukti Vapashraya and the Satva Vajaya. The Daiva Vapashraya treatment relates to the divine interventions with prayers, mantras, yantras and tantra. Those are passive approaches. And the Yukti Vapashraya is with the use of herbs and other balancing lifestyle approaches. And the Satva Vajaya treatment is the counseling piece. For you, I would also recommend you doing sort of like an alternative nostril breathing. Yes. And it works beautifully with balancing their doshas and bringing them to a state where they can actually function normally. So if we think about that, how will that translate to the physiology and to the nervous system? For example, if there is a traumatic experience, each one of us react or respond to it differently. There are some people who are very sensitive and have less tolerance to trauma. And they are affected more. But then there are some people, it does not bother them. There is a trauma, yes, and what just happened is not good. There is empathy. But then that does not affect them to produce any psychosomatic diseases that they cannot function in this world. Some easy tips that you can do to help yourself when you're upset or when you're disturbed or when you're worried, you should just sit with yourself and breathe. Watch how you're breathing. You will notice when you're going through these type of emotions, your breath becomes shallow and the types of thoughts you're engaged in. Take a break, break the circuit, create that space between you and your thoughts and anchor yourself with your breath. When you do that every day for about even 10 minutes, there is a big difference. If you have to go to work, you cannot find time. Sit in your car in the parking lot and do it. You will be only with yourself there. Get into that quiet space first. Before you go, you're going to feel a whole lot better. So we're always looking at the relative state of imbalance in the body and trying to apply measures that will bring us into greater balance and greater harmony. What I found from someone who's experienced periods of depression, somebody who's experienced periods of anxiety, when I'm on my self-care practices, when I'm doing my meditation, when I'm being physical in my body, I'm not dropping into these anxiety states, into these states of depression. When I'm making really good choices about what I'm eating, when I'm eating it. Weight loss diets. Anything that is processed, anything that does not come naturally, is definitely not good for anybody. That's how we accumulate toxins. When we are unconscious and blind to just being attracted to the advertisements, that's how we lose connection with the source. If we start to listen to ourselves and listen to our body and actually take some time mindfully to even see what is in that food, that has been packaged so well and sold to you, even a few minutes will make a huge difference. When a client comes to me, all I have to do is look at them and their constitution and everything just opens up just like that. They don't even have to tell me everything. The same thing applies to our mental health also. When a person is suffering from anxiety, their air and space element is very high. They are spacey and their thought processes are running wild and they cannot focus. So what we need to do with those clients is to help them with more approaches that can calm them down, which involves the water and the earth element, which means grounding. Normally with anxiety, the sympathetic nervous system is hyperactive. In our body, we have a nervous system and the nervous system comprises of the sympathetic and parasympathetics. So the sympathetic nervous system is when we think a lot and we use our brain to do activities, to read, to study, to work and our parasympathetic nervous system is when we are in our body, when a blood circulation needs to go internally. So our food when we eat is digested properly and the enzymes are secreted properly for wholesome digestion. IRVEDA has several different levels on which it's able to work with stress. First on the level of meditation, which in IRVEDA terms is connecting directly to source. That deep connection is something that gives us strength, it gives us oges, the ability, that life force, the ability to resist the impact of stress. It is also something that allows us to release the egoic patterning that can serve as frequent triggers for stressful reactions. Meditation, really good for that ama, because what meditation does is it helps to constantly re-entrain the nervous system to a more parasympathetic state, into a state where we're not focused on stressors, where we're not allowing external influences to radically change the way in which we feel inside. A lot of ama or blockage in the flow begins energetically. So if we're fine-tuning with yogic and meditation techniques, if we're fine-tuning our inner core frequency, meaning our nervous system and the state of the mind, being able to shed and release emotions that are not beneficial for us, and then tune in with proper diet, these three things help to regulate ama production in the body and proper disposal of it. The state of bliss is a state of truth. It's not just an over-layering of false positivity or grasping of happiness. It's when experience and emotion and food is all metabolized and digested. And as you come more into tune with the natural rhythms of what your body needs and finding beautiful places inside of yourself, learning how to properly process your emotions and speak out what you need to speak to feel heard. This brings a lot of fulfillment in your life. And in that fulfillment, we can really embody our self and our duty in this world. Via Ayurveda, we don't separate ourselves from the world, we don't encapsulate ourselves in a little bubble to protect ourselves from environmental pollution. We instead strengthen ourselves, we strengthen our nervous system, we take measures to ground and soothe, and then we integrate into the world so we can thrive and blossom exactly where we are. If you enjoyed this video and want to watch the full series, please check out Thrive, self-healing with Ayurveda on Gaia, using the link in the description. Thank you so much, and God bless.