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Healing Your Sole
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Ayurveda’s Holistic Approach to Menopausal Wellness
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Looking for practical tips on how to keep vata in balance when it gets out of whack? Look no further.
Stay warm and stay calm. When you are relaxed, you also feel happy and well. It helps to have a warm, cozy place to be, a warm bed, and a hot water bath. Ayurveda also recommends applying oil and massaging the body as the best way to balance vata. You can have a traditional Ayurvedic body massage, called Abhyanga, or you can do a self-massage. Following that, various steam and heat treatments help to balance vata. You can use electric warming pads, hot stones, or a steam chamber. In ancient times, they would heat a large stone, and a person would lie down on the stone, which would take away the excess vata. So different types of steam and heat treatments are recommended according to the various types of vata imbalance.
Nourish yourself. Food is the major factor that influences vata. Cold food, frozen food, large beans, dried food and foods with bitter, astringent, and pungent flavors aggravate vata. However, sweet, sour, and salty flavors along with sweet dishes, oily foods and rich food help to balance vata. Foods with a heating effect balance vata, while foods with a cooling effect disturb vata. So it’s good to know how foods will affect your constitution.
On the balancing level, take food according to your constitution and what element is out of balance. Let’s say you are a pitta person with a vata imbalance, then it is good to follow a vata diet. However, there are certain foods that balance pitta but aggravate vata. So it’s important to understand food and its effects.
Find stability through meditation. Along with massage, which is the best method to balance vata, accompanied by steam and heat treatments, meditation helps calm vata. With these life-supporting habits, more or less, vata gets balanced, and small aches and pains disappear. These positive actions more or less balance vata.
Let’s say a part of the body is in pain. Massage, meditation, and heat treatments will help, as will warming food with sweet, sour, and salty. But when there are too many problems, such as continuously hurting joints, it requires further insight into which part is being affected.
The physical makeup is divided into seven substances: blood, muscular tissue, fat tissue, bones, bone marrow, lymph, and the reproductive fluids. Once we know which part is out of balance, then it is easy to balance the affected area. For example, is it affecting the nerves, the joints or the bones? Taken for some time, specific herbs help balance vata. One such herb that pacifies vata is turmeric, which also has anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties.
Use of Panchakarma
And when vata has grown too far out of balance, when it is beyond the control of modifications in food, lifestyle, massage, and herbal supplements, then we can use panchakarma. Panchakarma, which is an elimination therapy, removes the vitiated vata using various herbal decoctions and oil preparations in combination with specialized treatments to treat the root of vata imbalance. Before disease comes, we are able to correct it.