Spring Has Sprung
Spring has sprung here in Phoenix. We have had a good amount of rain. The days are warming up filled with lots of buds and greens sprouting from the earth.
The ayurvedic health indicator that we will explore this month is hunger and what our hunger is trying to communicate to us. The state of our digestion is not only related to our meals but also our ability to digest our lives. Obvious digestion issues will arise from eating too frequently, too much, out of season or incompatible food combinations. On a deeper level our emotions, thoughts, feelings, and desires will also have a direct effect on the quality of our digestion.
It is important to pay attention to how we express hunger as it will reveal the current state of our digestion. Take a moment to think about how you experience hunger. Do you go for long periods without feeling hungry then eat only because the clock says it is time for food? Once you have eaten does the food feels like a brick sitting in your gut waiting to digest? Or, perhaps it is the other extreme where you experience “hanger”, hungry and angry simultaneously. This often leads to a sharpness in the digestion which will incinerate the food not allowing your body to assimilate the nutrition it needs. Maybe your hunger is variable? Meaning a type of imbalance where you are ravenous one day and then being too busy to think about food the next. All these types of hunger are clear indications of an imbalance in our digestion.
These different states of digestion are directly related to our digestive fire (agni) which digests both our food and our thoughts. Agni lives in the gastrointestinal tract. This is our metabolic fire that absorbs and assimilates the nutrients in our food. Agni also has the important job of transforming the food we consume into the energy required for a life filled with vim, vigor and vitality.
When we have balanced agni we will have a strong immune system, strong healthy tissues, a clear mind and balanced emotions. When we have learned how to eat combined with lifestyle practices to maintain balanced agni then, we will properly experience the feeling of hunger.
When the digestion is imbalanced, we can experience the rollercoaster spikes of hunger and the plunging into low energy or even feeling shaky. Weak agni will create poor absorption that can show itself as gas, loose stools, or large bulky stools.
Another sign of weak digestion is waking up hungry after eating a late dinner. When we eat a large meal late at night then go to bed, we are asking our body to digest a meal and try to rest. This is not possible; the body cannot multitask. If you wake up in the morning with the taste of the previous night’s meal in your mouth you have not yet finished digesting the meal.
It is always in our best interest to listen to our bodies and to know when we are hungry. If we are not hungry then wait to eat or even…gasp…skip a meal until we feel hungry. We need to learn the difference between real hunger and false or emotional hunger and habitual eating.
As we move into spring this is one of the optimal times to cleanse. I am teaching two workshops this month on Ayurvedic detoxing and cleansing. They are two completely different workshops with different content. On the 15th at Yoga Pura we will explore all the different ways that we detox, what we are detoxing from, intermittent fasting through an ayurvedic lens, the six stages of disease and several other aspects of detoxification.
On Sunday, March 22nd we will learn how to create an ayurvedic spring cleanse routine to do this year. We will also explore tongue and stool diagnoses to learn what our bodies are trying to tell us. The class includes a cooking class where we will make kitchari which is an ayurvedic cleansing superfood (that happens to be delicious).
I wish you a spring season filled with new beginnings.