Explore our tips for living an Ayurvedic lifestyle, from improving your sleeping habits, to nutrition and beauty.
Lifestyle
1. Schedule a walk with a friend or co-worker
Ayurveda considers walking a tridoshic exercise: it balances all three doshas without putting excessive strain on your body. It calms the mind and nourishes the senses.
2. Sit down and close your eyes
Take a "just-for-me" break right now, right here. Disconnect from the outer world and tune in to your own self. Even if you do this for a minute, you will feel healed. Practitioners of Transcendental Meditation® say their daily 20-minute sadhana helps conquer stress and increase positive energy and a sense of well-being.
3. Call a friend
People whose company makes us feel happy and loved are like medicine: they heal and restore us. Keeping in touch with such people nurtures our own hearts.
4. Breathe deep
Mindful breathing improves the flow of oxygen and other vital nutrients to the tiniest channels of the body, giving you an instant sense of well-being.
5. Go to bed early
Ayurvedic physicians emphasize and re-emphasize the value of good sleep, simply because rest is the basis of dynamic activity.
6. Rise with the sun
This will be easy to do if you go to bed before 10:00 p.m. Waking up early gives you time to concentrate on your morning ablutions, and to prepare a good, nourishing breakfast. In addition, it gives you time to enjoy the early morning calm of nature.
7. Bond with nature
When you spend time with flowers, butterflies, and trees, you connect in the most intimate way with the earth, of which ayurveda believes we are all an integral part. This sense of connection is tremendously soothing, particularly for those of us who are under stress.
8. See a vaidya
At any given time, most of us do have small or big imbalances in our physiology. Even small imbalances can lead to discomfort and malaise. A vaidya will help you understand and correct your imbalances. See one even if you are not feeling particularly unwell.
Nutrition and digestion
9. Create a fresh lunch
Foods that are processed, canned, frozen or packaged are harder to digest, and thus create ama, or toxins. Also, because they are old, denatured by processing, or include harmful ingredients such as chemical preservatives, they no longer contain nature's intelligence. Rather, they create ama and block nature's intelligence from reaching the cells. Just for today, make the effort to eat a fresh, warm lunch. Eat in a settled, quiet atmosphere and focus on your food when you eat.
10. Drink a glass of water
Water flushes out accumulated ama, and keeps the digestion smooth. Sipped throughout the day, water is an excellent healer.
11. Drink a glass of milk
At the end of a tiring day, when you cannot seem to close your eyes, don't be frustrated: drink a glass of warm milk. Milk should be organic and free of additives, and boiled with a pinch of cardamom before it is drunk in order to make it easier to digest. Drink it alone, away from meals, to avoid indigestion.
12. Sip herb tea
All-natural, caffeine-free teas prepared from nature's healing herbs are a perfect way to relax and recharge: choose from among Maharishi AyurVeda's wide range of gourmet beverages to pick the flavor and blend that suits your unique dosha type and your needs.
13. Have a good breakfast
Skipping breakfast particularly irritates Sadhaka Pitta, a subdosha of Pitta. An imbalanced Sadhaka Pitta can result in irritability and unsettled emotions. Some suggestions for breakfast: cooked apples, eaten first thing in the morning, help to create ojas—the final and most refined by-product of digestion. Ojas contributes to enhanced vitality, strength, immunity, and overall well-being.
Sweet juicy fruits are excellent cleansers—they help to eliminate impurities from the body. According to ayurveda, it is recommended that fruits be eaten first thing in the morning, 30 minutes before other breakfast items such as hot cereal.
14. From time to time, follow an ama-reducing diet
Periodic internal cleansing with a Maharishi Ayurveda detox formulation such as Elim-Tox or Elim-Tox-O also helps flush the ama out and prevent more from building up.
15. Decorate your dining table
Make each meal a celebration. A pleasant table, set with sparkling cutlery, crisp clean napkins, and appetizing colors whets the appetite and promotes good digestion.
16. Boost your immunity with Amrit
Amrit epitomizes the ayurvedic principles of Sanyog—precise combination; and sanskar—meticulous processing. Thirty-eight rare whole herbs and fruits are combined in precise proportions in this powerful formula to create synergy—a whole that is more powerful than the sum of its parts.
17. Spice up your dinner plate
Turmeric, cumin, coriander, fennel, cardamom—these and other spices used in ayurvedic cooking add not only aroma and flavor, but also healing goodness to your food. Turmeric is an antiseptic, cumin aids digestion, coriander cleanses the system, fennel settles the stomach and cardamom cools the system.
Discover the health benefits of spices: start with Maharishi Ayurveda's Churnas—precisely-blended spices that calm the doshas. Spices add good flavor and have a yogavahi property, which means that they support digestion and make the nutrients easily available to the body.
Beauty and body
18. Massage your body
The skin thirsts for your touch and attention. When warm herbalized oil is rubbed gently all over the skin, your body and your mind feel pampered and relaxed. Treat your skin to the magic of self-massage (abhyanga) today.
19. Make your own skin pack
Ayurvedic healers recommend using totally natural products on your skin: preferably those ingredients that are also safe to eat. Choose from among foods like honey, Organic Rose Water, cucumber, oatmeal, ground blanched almonds, milk, and yogurt to prepare packs that will exfoliate, cleanse, and moisturize your skin.
At Maharishi AyurVeda, we take the definition of "all-natural" even a step further. All-natural actually relates to the ability to protect nature's own intelligence in a product. Not only do we use completely natural ingredients, but we make sure that the techniques used to process those ingredients are such that they do not destroy the natural benefits.
20. Care for your hair
When your locks are limp and lifeless, your whole approach to life can turn pessimistic. Counter the problem by paying attention to what you put inside your body. Build small changes into your daily menu. Instead of popcorn, eat fresh fruit. Don't snack on candy—eat soaked blanched almonds instead. See Maharishi Ayurveda's recipes section for hundreds of ideas on fresh ways to cook with fruits, vegetables and spices.
Take our Dosha Quiz to learn your unique mind-body type.
