It is so easy to pollute anything, even good things! Recently I prescribed yoga practice to a patient. However, she came back to me with weird queries like which yoga tracks and yoga mats are the best.
So, today, yoga has become a market. There is nothing wrong with this approach as it has helped yoga to become famous and accessible. However, it will be regrettable if the true spirit of yoga is lost amongst the marketing hustle bustle.
According to me, you need only a good Guru for learning yoga and nothing else. The essence of yoga is possessionlessness. This is the reason why yoga is excellent not only for physical health but also for mental health. It sets you free!
There are complications everywhere, anti-skid yoga mat, travel yoga mat, home yoga mat, and so on. You would be buying a pack of 5-6 yoga mats for each different situation. I will tell you one thing – you would genuinely excel in yogic balance if you do not have an anti-skid yoga mat, so please do not buy that at all!
Ayurvedic Minimalism will help you to live an organic life and prevent all kinds of disorders. It is critical to realize that we do not have to do different things to prevent different diseases. We just have to preserve the health of our body, and no disorders can find the weak link inside it.
If you are mentally and physically strong, you can Ace almost all kinds of diseases. At the same time, if you can maintain a tremendous digestive capacity in spite of your illness, your body will be able to burn away most of the disorders.
Minimalist Ayurvedic Life is all about how to live healthy with less. And when we are in deep contact with nature, we have everything that we need to live a healthy and fruitful life.
Medical treatment is a huge yet indispensable cost for all, even the minimalists. And it is a basic need that cannot be ignored. This need and helplessness of the sick feeds the monster of present pharmaceutical business.
Unfortunately, in recent times, Ayurvedic medicine has become a fad and a great market opportunity. I am surprised that I authentic Ayurvedic preparations and medicinal herbs have become so ridiculously expensive.
Therefore I turned to nature for all the disorders that I had to cure. And surprisingly; the best, the fastest, and permanent treatments like intermittent fasting, water therapy, sun gazing and many more are not cheap; it is free!
Minimalist Ayurvedic medicine is a series aimed to provide authentic preventive and curative Ayurvedic treatment that everyone can easily follow. It is cheap, simple and self-implementable.
99% diseases can be treated by the five elements that are present around each one of us just like the hand of mother nature – akash (space), vayu (air), agni (fire), jal (water), prithvi (earth). All these elements are free and abundantly available to all of us; we just need to discover how to use them for our benefit.
Ayurvedic minimalist medicine will help you to cure most of your current health problems naturally. According to Ayurveda, there are some fundamental factors which are common in all disorders, for example, body strength or digestion.
I will start with the preventive Ayurvedic lifestyle and gradually move to more serious disorders like hypertension, diabetes etc. However, I am confident that if you follow healthy food and lifestyle practices, 80% of your diseases can be self-cured.
Earlier, the market was a part of the community. Now, it appears that the community is a section of the market. Every day we are bombarded with a massive blast of advertising telling us how we should dress, eat, sleep, live, or breathe. It appears that our lives have no more essence than a factor that fuels the growing market.
We earn and spend and earn again, and it never seems to end. It feels like as a Whirlpool of requirements. And still, there is no spark of joy, no peace, and no contentment. The requirements are like fire. The more you fulfill them, the more they grow in size, and intensity.
A few years back, I had a very fortunate experience of extreme frustration. I wanted to get out of this endless cycle of earning and spending. I wanted to give up my MNC job because it made me feel sick. Life looked meaningless.
I felt that my company uses human beings as honey bees. We deceive them with a promise of happiness, safety, and peace and take away their hard earned money. This thought is especially true in the case of pharmaceutical companies.
The Trap
Trap 1
I wanted to get out of this system. But it is a great trap. My job had a great package, excellent salary, and other perks. What will everyone say? my relatives and acquaintances will think that I am a loser. But after few months, I felt that these people do not matter that much. Why should I live my life for them, and not for me?
Trap 2
I told myself that I would not be able to live a good lifestyle if I leave this job. But, after a few months, I felt that I would rather have a simpler lifestyle than stay stuck in a sickening job.
Trap 3
Then I told myself that I might not be able to maintain even a mediocre lifestyle. What if there is some accident or other kind of financial problems? I told myself that I might not be able to provide for my family and me, if some unforeseen calamity were to strike me, so probably I should continue the job for some more time. I was so scared that I thought about the possibility of eating raw herbs (which is a very healthy practice, according to Ayurveda).
After few months, I started exploring cheaper alternatives to everything. And to my great surprise. I found that cheaper things are essentials. And you can have a much simpler and meaningful life when you align yourself with the essentials.
Trap 4
In the end, I even reflected on the possibility of even dying of starvation. However, after a few months, I thought that I would rather die of starvation then work here. And this reflection was a spring of Liberation for me.
Liberation
Once you are ready for the most dreaded; you can take up any task, make any change in your world. The initial frustration was like a gestation pain that helped me to be born in the world of minimalism.
So I left my job and frantically started exploring other earning options. This experience taught me one thing – when you are frantic, then nothing comes to you! And because nothing came to me, I looked inwards and focused on minimizing my expenditure instead of trying to earn more.
The light of wisdom dawns on you when you are ready. Or, from another perspective, you can see the dawn that has been there all along once you develop the vision for it.
I saw a documentary on minimalism, which actually changed my life. It helped me to see that what I am trying to do is not unreasonable or impractical. Lots of people around the world are already deep into what I am trying to achieve. And it made me very confident about my approach.
After that, I experimented with Ayurvedic minimalism and found that all our needs can be met without any expense at all. And I want to share my experience so that we together can stop the menace of industry giants trying to control our lives.
In this series, I am aiming to provide information on two fronts –
Minimalist Ayurvedic Lifestyle
Minimalist Ayurvedic Treatment
I will keep adding more information to make them a comprehensive user manual for everyone who wants to live a healthy and medicine-free minimalist life.
In the above video, Daaji, my meditation teacher, talks about different layers of existence. According to ancient yogic science, we have five layers of existence. And energy feeds all of these layers differently. We all know about hybrid cars. Hybrid cars can run on liquid fuel and electricity. Also, there can be multiple options of energy – coal, solar energy, wind energy etc.
Here is an interesting thing – any liquid fuel (petrol or diesel) produces energy through combustion. Combustion releases some power, but more amount of heat and worse – poisonous gases. This is similar to the way our bodies process the food.
Annamaya Kosha
The first layer is called annamaya kosha. This layer absorbs the energy from food and passes it to other layers. Most of us live on the basis of gross energy absorbed by annamaya kosha. And therefore, people dependent solely on food for survival, live out their lives stuck in this kosha. This kosha is like a diesel or petrol car. It takes in material fuel and gives out smoke. Compared to other kosha, this is the most basic and most primitive mode of survival. However, dependency on this kosha is only the first step towards a subtler life.
Pranamaya kosha
The second layer is called Pranamaya kosha. This is the subtle energy of the body governed by prana vayu or the air. This is also called Chi in Chinese spiritual tradition. In primitive stages of spiritual development, this kosha receives its energy from the lower kosha – annamaya kosha. However, in a more developed state, pranamaya kosha can sustain life without food and even water! This state is like an electric car, that is directly connected to the pure source of energy.
In the Daoist tradition as mentioned earlier, bigu is the art of surviving only on air and yes, it is possible! This concept is called Breatherianism and many people are actively following, it across the world. In the Vedic tradition, it is mentioned as the stage of pranayama. This is a stage when a person can survive only on the air. So, in the stage of pranayama we are supposed to master the art of living on the air and establish our existence in our energy body.
Here is another person has survived on air for 60 years – Prahlad Jani
Still another way to charge up your body without eating anything is sun gazing. And no wonder, all of the ancient civilizations worshipped the sun. Probably, it was more of a subtle scientific mode of feeding than anything religious. For more information on sun gazing, please watch the following video. Besides, there is a lot more information available on –
The third is the manomaya kosha. This is the mental layer that governs the functioning of the mind, the sensory organs and the dreams. This layer is the basis of the our interconnectedness. The miracles of telepathy, prophetic visions and super-natural sensory powers emerge from this layer.
This layer is more powerful than both annamaya and pranamaya kosha. Vedic literature mentions sages who stopped breathing as a part of their penance. It is believed that Guru Nanak stayed under water for 3 days and came out of the river – alive! I hope that some day we are able to experiment on this concept. If this is true, leave apart food, and water, you might not even need air to survive.
However, powers of manomaya kosha can turn against us if not managed properly! In an under-developed state, this layer can get affected by the negative vibrations. According to Ayurveda, there are two fields of diseases – mana (mind) and sharir (body). And the mana or the mind is the primary factor for getting sick. And therefore, it is important to preserve manomaya kosha against wrong or negative thoughts.
The disease might start in the body and reach to the mind (psoriasis leading to depression) or start with the mind and reach the mind(skin allergy triggered by stress). If you have a weak body but a strong mind, you will not fall sick. But if you have a weak mind, then even a strong body, good nutrition and loads of health supplements will not be able to help you.
According to my understanding, when the mind is affected, its negativity spirals down to reflect in the form of a metabolic loophole. This metabolic loophole invites and incubates various disease causing factors. And that is why a depressed, tensed, angry or anxious person has all the doors open for diseases. This helps me to understand why those happy and content little slum children don’t fall sick!
So basically, annamaya, pranamaya and manomaya kosha are subject to imbalance. But they can be healed by the higher absolute sources.
Vigyanamaya Kosha
The fourth kosha vigyanamaya kosha or the wisdom body is the seat of intellect or Buddhi. This is the kosha responsible for personal entity, and therefore ego. It is beyond mana or the emotional mind. It is beyond beliefs, thoughts, emotions, prejudices and all the mental fog created by them. Vigyanamaya kosha is the layer of discretion, where imagination dissolves and we come face to face with reality.
As far as I understand, this is the seat of pure energy. So, if you are stable in this kosha, you are beyond a car, you are electricity itself!
All the supernatural healing powers descend from this kosha.
Rice experiment
Water has memory II – Prof. Bernd Kroeplin Water research Germany
WATER, Thank you, I hate you, Your stupid, and Ignore
Anandamaya Kosha
Writing anything about this kosha will be dishonest as only an experienced person should elaborate on this topic. I hope to know more about it. As of now, I have this information that this is the seat of complete bliss.
I am writing all this not because I have any spiritual experiences. However, I am floating these thoughts so that someone who really knows might get back to me :). May we all grow together through sharing!
Ritucharya 