Detox on the Equinox

5 Ayurvedic Ways to Improve Balance in Your Body and Mind

By Angie Parris-Raney

Spring is a time of renewal and rebirth. As nature emerges, there is a wellspring of life filled with hope and inspiration. For some, however, it can mean a heavy and damp season associated with colds, congestion, and allergies. Thankfully, ayurveda—one of the world’s oldest holistic healing systems—offers a guideline to counter these characteristics with diet and lifestyle routines to strengthen a healthy immune system as we shift into the new season.

According to ayurveda, spring is kapha season, which reflects the qualities of water and cohesion. Kapha characteristics include words like cold, heavy, dull, cloudy, slow, or dense. Over the winter months, we may have accumulated even more of these attributes. Ayurveda recognizes that “like increases like.” To counter this type
of imbalance, we look to diet and lifestyle routines to invite a sense of lightness, warmth, dryness, and sharpness to support our physiology as it aligns with the changes of nature.

Just as spring is a great time to clean out our closets and drawers, it’s also a good time to clean up our diet and daily routines. Here are five tips to kick-start your ayurvedic detox this season.

1. PURIFY THE MIND WITH MEDITATION

Our beliefs, thoughts, and emotions directly affect the chemical reactions that take place
in every cell in our body. Because of that, it’s important to observe our thoughts and feelings so we have an opportunity to respond to events in a healthier way. Meditation is a practice that settles the mind into silence, connecting the self to its inner wisdom. In silence, we access joy, peace, harmony, love, and compassion. As a result of meditation, we bring these qualities back into our life, and we become more consciously aware to make healthier choices.

Age is a State of Mind

Baby Boomers Combat Aging with Bodywork

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, preventing disease and injury is critical to reducing the expected growth of health-care costs headed our way, as more than 70 million U.S. baby boomers cross the 60-year-old threshold. Moreover, disease prevention is critical to, well, your health!

Whether you’re a boomer who is running a marathon or running after your grandchildren, you know that growing older doesn’t mean growing old. If you’re wondering how to stave off the effects of aging, the preventative and restorative nature of massage and bodywork might be just what the body ordered.