I am on my annual retreat to a heritage Ayurveda centre in Kerala, India. I attended a session by the lead Doctor of this centre yesterday. She gave us new insights of how “Ayurveda” works on the human body.

According to Ayurveda, human beings have an in built immunity mechanism and it can tackle and manage all diseases and injuries to the body. However, over a period of time due to wrong intake of food, our habits of not having quality, quantity, time and type of food healthy for us, our immune system gets impacted.

According to the experts in Ayurveda, the head in the human body is like the root of a tree. Just like we water the root of a tree, when it grows up, we need to first treat the head with medicated oil and other methods before we move to the other parts. All issues in the human body spreads from the head to the other parts through the nervous system and the physiological systems.

They say that we assimilate toxins all through the day and month and do not have a way to eliminate them from the body. When we fall ill, we take medicines and they help us tackle the disease or illness ,without getting into the root cause of the disease.

According to Ayurveda, the root cause of most diseases ,is the health of our gut. What we eat, when we eat, how we eat and in what quality and quantity ,determines the health of our gut. This supplemented with good sleep at the right time and not going against nature is important. Physical exercise of our choice and cordial sexual relations with your partner ,will help us keep up physical and mental health.

If we maintain our intake and ensure that we excrete ,what is not good for the body ,on a regular basis, the chances of our falling ill is very minimal. The immune system of our body will be able to manage most of the diseases, prevalent in society.

The process they follow in a typical elevenday programme is that they use oil massage therapy with a combination of oral herbal medicines to help us excrete all the toxins accumulated in the body ,during the first eight days. Then they clear the remaining unwanted things in the body through enema ,in the last three days. This way they systematically cleanse our body and help us regain our health.

I would like to share some examples of how this could work. Firstly, it is about preventive health maintenance. It is like ,we maintain our cars and bikes ,through periodic preventive service in an authorised service station. Similarly, we need to maintain our health with proper intake of food and regular exercise supplemented by an annual preventive health maintenance ,at a centre of our choice – ayurvedic or anything else we like.

Secondly like we use the right fuel and oil in our automobiles, in the right quality, quantity and time, similarly, we need to intake food at the right time in the right quantity and quality, which will help us keep healthy.

Thirdly, like an automobile is maintained well, when it is kept running and not kept idle. Similarly, our body and mind has to have regular physical and mental exercise to keep it running.

Let our journey to good health begin today by syncing ourselves with nature – i.e. the Ayurveda way as documented in 3rd century BC in India.

S Ramesh Shankar

3rd Feb 2025