Pankaj Seth, B.Sc., ND - Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine Pankaj Seth is a graduate of the 5000 hours ND program at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine (Toronto). His naturopathic medical practise of 10 years integrates Ayurveda, Chinese Medicine & Acupuncture, Eastern Bodywork, Yoga and meditation. Pankaj has taught clinician level courses as well as numerous workshops for laypersons on Eastern medicine and spirituality and has been featured on television, radio, print and web media. He can be reached through his website at www.lotus-medicine.com

Classical Indian Medicine

Health, Ayurveda and Yoga

The word "health" comes from the same root as the word "whole". In wholeness, there is a connection between the surface and the depth. The surface takes a proper measure of itself and finds that it is not the center, not the only thing seen in whole self-experience. The deep beckons the surface to join with it: Yoga. Care of the whole of what we are, the surface and the depth: Ayurveda.

Ayurveda creates strength of body, clarity of mind and forms the essential ground for Yoga and allied spiritual disciplines. Spiritual movement seeks to connect the surface to the depth, seeks to make conscious that which is hidden, seeks to transcend a naive knowledge of self and the world. For this, Yoga tells us that thought must take a back seat to other ways of holding one's mind, other ways to know... to know self and the world far beyond what they look like to the naive senses and to an untrained, conditioned and busy mind. This making whole is the task that Ayurveda and Yoga take on.

Ayurveda: The art & science of living

Ayurveda, translated as "the art and science of life and longevity" is a classical Indian approach to radical wholeness and the more mundane aspects of being healthy. Classical texts of Ayurveda go back 3000 years, though the oral tradition goes back some more. In these texts, there is a systematic approach and a detailed organization of the varieties of human suffering, or illnesses. Ailments of the body are deftly seen to be connected to the condition of one's environment, one's daily routine, diet, relationships, socio-economic circumstance and one's mind... its content, its self-concept and its ability to respond to stressors. An Ayurvedic dictum: He creates health who knows how to turn the bitter into the sweet.

Beyond a precise understanding of what causes what, leads to what type of illness in which type of person, these classical texts list the single and compounded use of several hundred medicinal substances, describe an elaborate retinue of physical therapies and give recourse to the discipline of Yoga. A quote from the Charaka Samhita, a 2500 year old Ayurvedic text: "To approach the bodily aspects of illness, we have many medicaments, both energic and physical, and to approach the mind with its agitation and unknowing, there need be fortitude, discipline, philosophy, meditation and the gaining of spiritual knowledge... Yoga."

Cure and Prevention

As well as offering help with chronic illness, Ayurveda also excels at disease prevention. It understands what health is, what it looks and feels like in minute detail... it knows what constitutes healthy function vis a vis digestive and intestinal patterns, urination patterns, menstrual cycles, the quality and texture of skin, nails and hair, the markings on the tongue, the predilections of the mind and much, much more. And in knowing this, it is possible to become aware of small shifts from healthy function, before there is suffering great enough that one might wish finally to fetch a doctor. There is sufficient sophistication in this knowledge that Ayurveda would pronounce 4 or 5 quantum leaps towards deteriorating health before modern technological medicine would have enough lab data to pronounce that a disease is at hand.

Individuality and Holism

Among other things, clinical Ayurveda offers two very important qualities. First, through its system of constitutional typing, it affords the entrance of individuality into the medical assessment. Ayurveda understands that to know what type of person has this particular disease is at least as important as knowing the particular disease that this person has... individuality.

Secondly, Ayurveda is holistic... it understands that things are connected. Though there may be several symptoms, they can and must be understood as signs of an underlying imbalance rather than as discrete entities to be treated in isolation from each other. Within Ayurveda there exist several elegant schemes of assessment which allow just this type of analysis so that the causes and the underlying imbalances are addressed which then lead to an abatement of related symptoms. It is the antithesis of Ayurveda to simply give a prescription which aims to subdue symptoms.

Spirit

Aligned with Yoga, Ayurveda is decidedly anti-reductionist and non-materialist and takes easily to the deepest mystical understandings of who and what we are and thus sees illness as a dynamic of body, mind and spirit. It is self-care and SELF-care, both.