Digesting change

IMAGE: SAGE FRIEDMAN ON UNSPLASH

The ancient intelligence of Ayurveda offers simple, practical healing tools to care for yourself in the heat of change and adaptation.

by Dipika Delmenico

Ayurveda offers practical tools and home remedies support the inner fire in you where a tension or friction exists. You do not want to put this fire completely out. The task is to bolster it; make it strong and able to digest life; sweep it clean and nourish it.

As we emerge from Covid-19 a new currency is in circulation. It’s a currency of adaptability. We’ve been through, and will continue to live through, immense and constant change. To be well in the face of change (and life is constant change) we simply must possess the capacity to adapt efficiently. Adaptability to change is where it’s all at. It’s the currency you require to thrive in life. Being adaptable is the gold.

Ancient intelligence for thriving post COVID-19

Ayurveda gives us the capacity to not only remain grounded, adaptable and well in the face of extreme circumstances. It also gives the capability to recognise our own discord and realign ourselves. It’s like a compass to reorientate ourselves.

The fundamental creative purpose and potential of your digestive fire is to create a new impulse and expanded qualities of understanding and being. That means pacifying or bolstering, and creating healthy inner warmth, an inner environment conducive to meeting the outer environment and to be able to thrive.

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Good digestion = healthy metabolic processes = strong immunity

Digesting change is about bolstering your digestion – the ability to digest all you ingest in life. This cannot be overstated. When your digestion is strong, you are robust, enlivened, adaptable. Take care of your digestion as it’s the glue to being able to navigate change – the kind of change we’re living in right at this moment.

Robust digestion is the foundation for warmth. The right kind of warmth required for every organism in your being – the grossest to the most subtle, the invisible to the visible, each require this warmth.

Warmth is what keeps the organism well, able to orientate, create, renew, thrive, love and transmute. It’s always been vital for authentic, embodied wellness. Now more than ever, it’s necessary for your adaptability. It’s your currency to thrive, sustain, evolve and serve.

We live in a time where fear is the governing emotion of the masses. You could say we’ve been in a pandemic of fear for along time. Fear is cold, hard, contracted. The antidote to it is warmth. Warmth is love.

A few keys for the right kind of warmth include:

• Daily routine and regularity. It helps your biological rhythms. If you ain’t got rhythm… create it (it comes more effortlessly for some than others but just work with it).

• Being in the morning light outdoors. Whether exercising or simply sitting in it with a cuppa, it supports your metabolic warmth.

• Eating more cooked than raw foods… I know, controversial right. Well I’m speaking from an Ayurvedic perspective, and 5000 years plus of therapeutic wisdom tells us that cooked is easier to digest than raw.

• Do not eat unless you have robust appetite.

• Save space in your gut to process that which is sacred – to digest life and your relationship to it instead of filling it to the max with food.

• Start your day with inner hygiene practices before leaving home: meditation, prayer, mantra, reflection, contemplation, journalling.

• If you are living from your head, begin the day with one teaspoon of ghee in hot water to pacify the mental channels and support the flow of digestive processes.

• A willingness to surrender and let go. Of what? You will know. It may take cultivation of your deep listening.

• Creating an environment for regular silence to renew yourself.

Emergence – your path forward

As you emerge from this phase of planetary chaos, may you remain established in yourself. Anchored in your own presence and able to orientate.

Stay in your own lane, keep one eye turned inward, and ingest only what you have the capacity to digest. Whatever you do in life you have been required to pivot. You have been called to change the way you do things. That may be more significant in some ares of your living structure than others, such as your livelihood, finances, home, relationships, spiritual and whatever aspects of living make up the whole sum of YOU.

You may have experienced loss – physical loss, material loss, spatial loss, loss of a way of familiarity and comfort, unimaginable loss to life as you knew it. It’s your own experience and perception. Move gently and with kindness.

May robust digestion and warmth impart forces of strength that allow your golden adaptability. Established in your uniquely, individual authentic, embodied wellness on the path forward.

Dipika Delmenico is an Ayurvedic practitioner, anthroposophic naturopath, speaker and author. She’s the founder of Conscious Woman Rising and The Wisdom Circle, and author of The Ayurvedic Woman.

https://www. dipikadelmenico.com.

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