R U Vedic?
The wellness philosophy of ancient India, Ayurveda takes hold in the West.
by Mike Gibson
Mary Roberson pulls a baking tin from the oven in a mittened hand, repositions two halves of a yellow squash that have been roasting on it for the last hour or so, and drizzles each with a viscid yellow liquid from a saucepan. “This is ghee–Ayurvedic butter,” she explains. “It’s very good for Vata and Pitta, but not so good for Kapha. Our guest has just been travelling, and that’s Vata-provoking, so her meal should be Vata-balancing.”
Roberson squeezes a dose of maple syrup on each of the halves, pausing in mid-dollop to add that, “It’s kind of a Kapha day, though, so I almost hesitated adding the ghee. The time you eat is just as important as the kind of food you eat. Food is medicine, and you need different medicines at different times.”
Such is the philosophy of cooking, Ayurveda-style, which Roberson does often in the kitchen of her Ayurveda Center for Natural Healthcare, a sort of combination Eastern-style health spa and Vedic community center located in an upscale suburban office complex on the ragged northern fringe of Oak Ridge. Today she’s preparing a healthy, Vata-balancing lunch for a client who traveled all the way from North Carolina for the ultra-pampering experience of a two-person Abhyanga synchronized massage, a Swedana herbal steam, and Shirodhara–a stream of warm sesame oil drizzled gently on the forehead for up to one hour. By all accounts, Shirodhara is the most profoundly relaxing experience a human being can have and still maintain any kind of sentience.
The cost of the three-pronged treatment–which Roberson calls the “Triple Bliss” in her Ayurveda Center brochure, a name that sounds vaguely like some sort of cherry-topped ice cream treat–is $300. And that’s reasonably cheap compared to what’s available at similar facilities in other states, where the same troika could easily run hundreds of dollars more.
All of which begs several questions, not the least of which is: What is Ayurveda? And what, exactly, is a Kapha kind of day? And why would any self-respecting and otherwise sane human being travel hundreds of miles and drop three large bills just to have his or her head soaked in grease?
The answers to the those last two questions follow inevitably from the answer to the first (See the accompanying story for further elucidation) which is as follows: a Sanskrit word that roughly translates as “science of life,” Ayurveda is the health system of ancient India, a lifestyle philosophy that stresses, among other things, self-awareness and sensitivity to nature.
“Ayurveda is a way of being in life,” says Joan Harrigan, a West Knoxville psychotherapist and Ayurvedic lifestyle consultant. “It encompasses our eating and sleeping patterns, our exercise habits, our relationships and our spirituality. It enables us to achieve harmony and balance in all that we do.”
And while Ayurveda’s Hindu roots and its constant, numbing references to its three “doshas” (fundamental aspects of being, Pitta Vata and Kapha) might seem like vayu (“wind”) to some people, remember that the ancient Indians were exceptionally sophisticated healers–skilled surgeons and inventors of the first smallpox innoculations–before dismissing some its unusual notions out of hand.
Ayurvedic principles first received a measure of mainstream Western recognition in the 1980s and '90s when Indian healthy-living guru Deepak Chopra presented them as the heart of his wellness philosophy. Now Ayurveda is enjoying a second surge of popularity in the West, perhaps buoyed by a resurgence back home. One recent survey estimated that 80 percent of India’s population practices some type of Ayurvedic medicine. Ayurvedic study programs are cropping up ever more frequently at Indian universities, and authentic homegrown Ayurvedic spas are fast becoming a linchpin of the country’s tourism industry.
Stateside, some 750,000 Americans have consulted an Ayurvedic practitioner at one time or another, according to the same study. And while the hotspots of activity in the U.S. are New Mexico, Florida, Chicago, and the Northeast, the Knoxville area boasts a small but very significant Ayurvedic community of its own. “I get calls from people from all over the South, wanting to visit the Ayurvedic Center for Natural Health,” Roberson says. “It (Ayurveda) still isn’t big enough yet in this area, in that most of us who practice it have to offer something other than just Ayurvedic services to keep ourselves afloat. But I can feel that starting to change.”
The feathery strains of a Ravi Shankar CD float in the ether of the main treatment room of Will Foster’s new office in West Knoxville, just across Gallaher View Road from Bearden High School. “I don’t actually play Indian music in here very often,” he mutters to a visitor, switching off the music. Like most Ayurvedic practitioners, he’s especially sensitive to all of the mystic, curry-and-sitar stereotypes that usually cling to any form of Indian culture in the West.
“I usually just play something soothing; anything, as long as it relaxes,” he says. “You don’t have to be Indian, or have an Indian name or eat Indian food to come here.”
Foster’s freshly opened Traditional Health Clinic is a first in Knoxville–an alternative health clinic that combines Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Ayurvedic practices with modern nutrition. A licensed acupuncturist and Doctor of Oriental Medicine, Foster also received a certification from the renowned Ayurvedic Institute in Albuquerque, N.M. in 1991, and he is currently working toward licensure in clinical nutrition.
A bearded former Detroiter, now in his 40s, Foster says he has always been a seeker; he developed a consuming interest in yoga and meditation while he was still a teenager. His passion for yoga led him inevitably to Ayurveda, which Foster describes as yoga’s “sister science,” descended from the same Indian Vedic traditions.
He eventually traveled to India for intensive study under Swami Chandrashekharananda Saraswati (who also mentored Joan Harrigan), a traditional Ayurvedic physician of some standing.
Steeped in Vedic lore* (he learned Sanskrit at his Swami’s behest, so he could read directly from the original Vedic texts that line the uppermost shelves of his office bookcase), Foster pulls from a treatment arsenal that includes acupuncture, lifestyle recommendations, herbal remedies, and procedures such as Shirodhara, for which he employs an oil-dispensing contraption of his own devising. One large closet in his office is designated the medicine room, with a stupefying array of herbal and mineral substances, traditional medicines for both Ayurveda and TCM.
Before he prescribes anything more potent than a cup of hot green tea, however, he spends at least two hours with each of his patients, learning habits, body types, temperaments, unraveling the secrets of each individual’s dosha mix. “I try to make people think about things that maybe they haven’t thought about too often,” he says. “What are their bowel movements like? What are the strengths and weaknesses of their personalities? What is the unique mix of factors that led them to the place where they are now? I try to give them enough information that they can eventually begin taking responsibility for their own health.”
And while Foster doesn’t discount the accomplishments of modern Western medicine, he believes that the principles of Ayurvedic living help his patients avoid the kinds of acute pathological conditions*–cancer, heart disease, et al.–for which it is often employed.
“Ayurveda is very preventive in nature,” Foster says. "In Western medicine, you generally have to be in a pathological state for a doctor to help you.
“People in our culture want a quick fix. But whatever physical condition you’re suffering from, it’s a cumulative mess, caused by things that have been going on in your body for a long time. Ayurveda is usually a slower process. It’s more about lifestyle changes.”
(Echoing Foster’s sentiments, one local Ayurvedic believer makes the point that “if we learn to listen to the little messages that come from inside us, then our bodies don’t have to start screaming.”)
By way of explaining, Foster shares a few of his success stories: a mother once brought her 12-year-old son to his previous practice in Albequerque, N. Mex., a sickly child suffering from a series of debilitating allergies as well as chronically obstructed bowels. “He was housebound, wearing a mask all the time,” Foster remembers. “But I could see were his problems lay; in ancient medicine, asthma and allergies are often directly related to digestive function.”
Foster’s treatments included oil-and-herb enemas, herbal remedies, and a high-fiber diet with a variety of recommended foods and food combinations.
“In six or eight months, he was fine,” Foster says. “That was a Vata problem; it had to do with the colon, and irregularity. Vata is related to wind, and wind is never steady. It’s about change.”
In another instance, a middle-aged woman suffering from a chronic, festering eczema came to his office after several frustrating experiences with traditional dermatologists. “It was the worst eczema I’d seen; she could hardly bend her limbs, covered head to toe,” Foster remembers. “Red, inflamed, weeping sores. A blatant Pitta aggravation. The fire was out of control.”
Her course of treatment consisted of acupuncture, herbal remedies, and a Pitta-balancing, “cooling” diet–fewer spices, no alcohol, no smoking. Foster saw her again a few months later: “It almost made me cry. Her skin was beautiful.”
And that kind of success isn’t unusual, says Foster. “Usually, when I have trouble with a treatment, it’s because of a lack of patient compliance,” he says. “That’s the single most significant factor in Ayurvedic medicine. You have to get people educated enough to be aware of their own health.”
That Ayurveda is increasingly popular the world over is evidenced by several measures–more websites, new centers, more Ayurvedic education programs both here and abroad.
In some ways, it is a late bloomer, its emergence delayed by Western hegemony. Foster notes that unlike Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda was quashed for more than a century, forced underground by European colonial rule suspicious of its Hindu origins. And while TCM was shrewdly standardized and packaged for marketing in the West by the late Chinese premiere Mao Tse-Tung, Ayurveda has remained a sort of Indian grassroots phenomenon, its sometimes disparate precepts chiefly the province of oral tradition and of the venerable sages and swamis who pass its secrets through generations. But all of that is finally starting to change.
“It’s catching up; Ayurveda is probably about where Chinese Medicine was 25 years ago,” Foster says. “Nowadays, the World Health Organization has given acupuncture its stamp of approval. I think we’ll eventually see the same thing for some Ayurvedic practices.”
“There are schools teaching Ayurveda now, and they’re finding ways to present it in a more systemized fashion,” Harrigan says. “The idea of teaching through a curriculum is a very Western concept. In India, the curriculum was based on the teacher, and on who came to his door. Now they’re learning to teach in ways more compatible with Western living.”
Though Mary Roberson says her clinical psychology practice is still her chief income, traffic at her Ayurvedic Center has increased enough that she moved into larger, more luxurious quarters in 2003, having occupied a much smaller room in the same complex since opening in 1998. The Center’s offerings have expanded to include yoga, Ayurvedic cooking courses, and holistic Ayurvedic lifestyle classes.
“Growth has been slow, incremental,” she says. Then she adds, almost mystically, “But very recently, the feeling is different. I believe there is a shift in consciousness going on.”
That shift is already manifest at more mainstream commercial outlets, such as health food stores, where Ayurvedic herbs and preparations are big sellers, or day spas, where Ayurvedic treatments like Shirodhara are increasingly prevalent.
“Our most popular therapy is the Himalayan Rejuvenation Treatment, which is our version of Pancha Karma,” says Tebah Dyer, spa director at Natural Alternatives Aveda Salon in Homberg. Traditional Pancha Karma therapy is an epic three-day session of massage, meditation, oil drips and enemas; the Natural Alternatives version lasts only a couple of hours*-enemas sold separately.
According to Dyer, the Aveda Corporation was launched in 1991–in the wake of the Chopra phenomenon–as a system of spas trafficking chiefly in treatments inspired by Ayurvedic therapies. She’s noticed a marked difference since the second wave of Vedic awareness hit the states around the turn of the millenium, necessitating a new treatment room addition in Homberg and the opening of a second Natural Alternatives location in West Town Mall.
“Our business is booming now, compared to what it was a couple of years ago,” Dyer says. “We’re seeing an influx of people who are more educated, more interested in wellness than in just getting a massage to relax.”
But popularity can be a corrupting influence. According to Foster, much of Western Ayurvedic practice is tantamount to pseudo-Ayurveda, banking on quick-fix herbal remedies and feel-good therapies rather than embracing a holistic wellness approach. “A lot of Ayurveda gets appropriated into the whole New Age thing, which disturbs me,” Foster says. “You hear the buzzwords-Vata, Pitta, Kapha -but you don’t find an understanding of the underlying principles. There’s lots of pseudo-Ayurveda in the spa industry, too. Some of them do relaxation treatments without any knowledge of the client, without asking ‘Who is this for?’ and ‘Why?.’”
But despite its ascendancy, Ayurveda is still far outside the mainstream of most Western wellness philosophies. It has plenty of critics who see limited value in Ayurvedic practices, regardless of their authenticity. In The Skeptic’s Dictionary (A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions), author Robert Todd Carroll writes off Ayurveda as “a testament to the failure of modern life and modern medicine to satisfy deep longings for simplicity, trust (and) something to counteract the fragmentation, alienation and isolation that many people feel… They want to believe in immortality, and ‘alternatives’ like Ayurveda fulfill this need.'”
Scientifically speaking, the jury is still out. Direct, causal studies of Ayurvedic practice have been scarce, though the few that have taken place have affirmed the value of certain of its herbal remedies.
Of more concern is a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association that as many as one in five Ayurvedic herbal treatments imported from Asia contain potentially harmful levels of lead, mercury, and arsenic. The report cites a medical literature search that turned up 55 cases of heavy metal poisoning related to Ayurvedic remedies over the last 35 years.
Serious practitioners like Roberson believe that such reports are cause for concern, but caution against knee-jerk, alarmist reactions. “Periodically, an article comes out about an herb that harms someone,” Roberson says. “Unfortunately, some of these treatments are appropriated and misused by Westerners. You can buy most of these ingredients in an Indian grocery store, but you still need to know what you’re doing before you make an herbal recommendation… Some things don’t mix well. If I don’t know about something, I don’t use it. I’ve also had people come in who are taking 10 different (standard Western) pharmaceutical drugs. I’m not about to give them any herbal medications on top of what they’re already taking.”
“You do have to spend time to see where some of these practitioners are coming from,” Foster warns. “There are lots of people who don’t have a good understanding of the underlying principles of Ayurveda. At worst, what they’re offering is extremely irresponsible health care.”
At best, though, Ayurvedic philosophy presents an approach to living that makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways–predicated as it is on self-awareness, spirituality, and a generally sensible set of lifestyle recommendations–regardless of whether you believe doshas and five-element theories are a product of Mahad (the Cosmic Intelligence) or just so much tejas vayu (hot air.)
Mary Roberson, for one, believes that the coming years will witness an ever more enlightened set of Western disciples embracing the virtues of Vedic living. “It’s borne out in the stars,” she says. “According to Vedic astrology, we are leaving behind an Age of Darkness. That means our ignorance has come to an end.”
http://www.metropulse.com/dir_zine/dir_2005/dir_1502/t_cover.html