Maya Tiwari discusses Ayurveda

What follows is an edited version of Maya Tiwari’s Bodhi Tree Bookstore presentation.

Maya Tiwari: The very first thing given to us in manifestation is the cosmic sound, and all living things originate from it. The five elements are born of sound, called Brahma Supta. Even a grain of sand is conceived from the five elements and those five elements came from primordial sound before it even became audible. That is why we repeat the sound of a mantra, because it brings such wellness to us.

Ayurveda came from the timeless and bountiful memories of the reverent sages of ancient times. They gathered their knowledge of universal existence, and individual existence within it, by what they saw in nature and the world around them. The ancients understood far more than we might ever know. The wisdom of Ayurveda is timeless, and we will learn from that wisdom forever.

The basic core of the Vedas still applies today. There is truly a miracle in that because they have been assimilated, refined, and transformed through the passage of time. For example they tell us that the sun was born approximately 120 billion years ago, and then the earth was formed later. Our modern scientists only discovered this recently. We were sure of it once, but we lost that knowledge in our constant reforming.

Every one of us in this room has been here before in some way. We are as old as manifestation itself. The same energies and memory which existed 120 billion years ago are here now, but in different shapes and forms.

Sometime during the past few centuries, humanity married itself to the mind and because of that, we lost sight of the boundless and immutable joy that is our inner divinity. That's the basis or substratum of health Ñ not only human health, but the health of the universe. It's easy to reclaim wellness, but we've failed so far, because we are using our minds to figure out how to reach it.

I am not saying that the mind does not have a sound purpose in life. We must use our minds to discover and research the things that affect us. Our minds have a function. We us them to assimilate the experiences that become memories over time, which shape our lives.

Have you ever noticed how it is hard sometimes to remember things that happened last year, a month ago Ñ sometimes just yesterday? That is because the memory of an experience forms organically, and over time. We are not forming memories just for use in this lifetime. After millions and millions of years and over many lives, we develop a cognitive base of memories, which is our karma.

The Vedas say (and so does Joseph Campbell), that human birth is very difficult to accomplish. It takes great courage to be born a human because we are given something called buddhi “intelligence” which is the power to self-reflect. No other species has this capacity. It gives us a greater responsibility than all other species. It is our cognition.

Cognition has never changed and neither has consciousness. It could not. But the shell of it has changed. Imagine consciousness as the well and the body as the shell. The shell changes all the time. Every so often, we shuffle it off and go on to another birth, but our substratum or cognition remains completely unchanged.

To what do we owe this great state of forgetfulness? We've been too busy to allow awareness to seep in. It is no more than that.

Ayurveda is a blueprint for living, and we live it through the beautiful way of sadhana. The sages say that sadhana is given to us to refine our cognition, so that we can remember our karma and live in awareness of it. In the physiology of Ayurveda, we are told of the seven dhatus which physicians would describe as physiological aspects of the body. Sanskrit defines each dhatu as follows:

Rasa, the first dhatu that forms our body, is generally known as plasma but the Ayurvedic meaning is joy. Within our very bodies, there is something called "joy tissue". And when we forget to replenish ourselves within nature, that joy tissue becomes unhappy.

The plasma feeds rakta, which the physicians call blood tissue. Rakta really means invigoration. If we lack joy in the first phase of the cycle, our invigoration is compromised, and we become angry instead.

Rakta is nourishment. Not like food as we understand it, but the memories of food planted into the tissues of the body blend with the memories already stored there. This is what becomes joy and invigoration.

If there is enough invigoration, we create mamsa, or muscle. This is our buffering system, our tissue of discernment. And when we lack muscle, we come confused and disoriented.

If mamsa is well fed, it produces medha. Medha is the fat tissue and is called love in Ayurveda. It's a tragedy that we try so hard to avoid it. We bend over backwards to diminish our birthright. In India the kapha (or water) types have more love, and are envied by the vata, or air types! Vata contributes to eighty percent of diseases in birth when the capacity to have that much love is diminished. So when you see vata-type people, run up and hug them. Share your love with them.

There isn't a single concept in Ayurveda that we do not profoundly understand in some way today, but we have not received it in a cohesive form. For instance, what do we call the predominantly air-type people in our culture? Air-headed. We know these types. But they are only air-headed because the air is in a state of disorder.

And what do we call the fire-type people in our culture? Hot-headed! Burnt-out. And what about the water-type people? Oh, they're wishy-washy. They're generally couch potatoes!

But these are states of disorder. We cannot usually call a person a definitive type because generally, the permutation of one or two types predominate. Remember, life is constantly dynamic and changing.

For example, if we look at the subtle body or the breath body, we find that our breath is pervaded by all five elements at all times. When the breath is most subtle, the space element, called akasha pervades. It races because of the fire element and it is affected by water and earth when it is sluggish and short. We can balance our breathing by cognition of breath.

Firstly, we can practice the observance of the breath, through the flow of the day. In the Vedas, our life is not defined by the number of our years on earth, but by the number of breaths that each soul is given for its specific journey. Breathing is more than a matter of life and death.

It is up to you to make a life of thirty years or three hundred years, depending how you use your breathing. It's a wonderful thing to know because the cosmic sound produces breath. If we do our mantras the healing power of the five elements are borne from and to us. "Om" is the most cosmic of all sounds. I believe "Om" was the first sound given to the universe.

All the same, nothing lives forever. When Deepak Chopra talks about ageless and timeless memories he's talking about cognition only. But we can stretch our lives out as long as we'd like, within a certain reason.

What we are doing tonight is part of oral (and auditory) transmission. Probably you would get more if I sat here and chanted the entire time because cosmic sound brings alive its symbiosis in you. That's how transmission works.

Sadhana is more than holistic activity, unless we understand that by holistic activity we include our complete presence. There must be presence of mind in all that we do. There's nothing wrong with shopping at health food stores and going to lectures and holy places. But if we are not available at every moment, we cannot embrace our cognition. There is a difference between pursuing and transcending the mind into cognition, and that is what makes all the difference to healing.

Our problem is that what we treat holistic things as a pursuit and that's not the way it needs to be understood. This is really the crux of what I share. We can't put something in some glossy cover and call it holistic for it to be healthful. Ayurveda is far more profound than that.

We cannot live without sound, breath or food. There are mantras in all sound. If you hear no mantras, listen to the ocean waves, or rain, or any natural sounds of nature, be they turbulent or quiet, because that is what heals us. What we have inside of us is only energy which is born every day. And the energy inside us was born from the sound of the universe. Sound heals sound, so tune in to your wellness.

The key is to be aware in every moment. If I am racing, I pull myself back and make sure my breath is constant, rhythmical and I am inhaling and exhaling with awareness, and slowly. If my breath is sluggish, I sit in my self for a while and practice alternate breathing to bring it up, most often by activating the right breath.

When these sadhanas are observed, we can guarantee that the first tissue, joy, is going to be formed and that joy will form invigoration and invigoration will form discernment and discernment will fuel love. When these tissues are formed, we feel gratified. And that gratification reflects from us, and heals our environment.

We have sadhana in every moment of every day. We are able to walk, so we can walk in the breath. Cognition is much like the seed under the earth. It trusts the universe that it's time will come, and when it does, it blooms. And when it is time it returns to the earth. That is simply a reflection of our own cognition, which works like a seed. It also works like a willow tree that is firmly rooted in its stasis within the earth. It is firm. It doesn't get up and hop around because cognition is stable.

Cognition cannot be inspired by the mind, but only through sadhana. As we begin to live in sadhana, our memory is reinvigorated. When sadhana comes back into the light, our memories begin to shine once again. We begin to understand that all of breath, all of motion and all the food we receive here on earth is sadhana. It's very simple and beautiful.

In the Edwyka Makaranda, a very old Vedic text, it says; "A hum a va sa com nanya . . ." which means, "I cannot show love towards you and you cannot show love towards me for I am love. Love is not a relationship between us, but the core basis of our divinity." Our love is in full bloom at all times and it's simply a matter of the shell (or our physical self and our mind) embracing or being observant of it so that we can receive it.

The aura produces immunity after all the tissues are fed through sadhana, breath, motion and food. The aura is our biggest protection against disease. They say that the Buddha could heal people from a million miles, simply by projecting his aura. Every human being can embody the Buddha's intelligence in the same way and with the same power. But first we must find that intelligence through self-reflection.

:My book is not just another food book. It talks about what is essential to living. Whatever life we have chosen is simply a shell unless we can bring sadhana to it.

It's interesting to see how Ayurveda has come to the West, and how people have rediscovered it in the East as well. Perhaps it has come back to help us. This resurgence is going to be translated in many different ways, and we need to be careful of each adaptation. If we can understand it as a means to bring living back into our lives in a humble, simple and beautiful way, then we are closer to what the sages have given us. If we understand it as a prescriptive form of living, then we have lost it and have something else. Ayurveda was not created by physicians; it was brought to us by the wise through their reverence for nature, their understanding that the five elements are within us-- and without us--forever.

Hopefully we will rediscover community again whereby some people have farming karma, so we can all eat good food and some people have yoga karma so we can stretch our limbs intelligently and we will all learn how to walk with sadhana. By the way, look at an elephant! Elephants do not rush to yoga classes every Saturday and yet they have the most beautiful gait, because they walk in sadhana. If you mimic an elephant you will discover the most sensual, most exquisite walk. And all of a sudden you might begin to remember your soul, especially if you are a woman. The elephant's walk is the most fertile of walks. It's a wonderful way to encourage the birth of babies.

According to Ayurveda, disease is simply forgetfulness, whereby our tissues have forgotten their essential nature. Every time disease knocks us down, it's simply an opportunity for re-examination of the self. I've heard all sorts of claims of, "I've cured my cancer with foods," or "I went away for six months and I wept myself to wellness." That's not what happened. Disease has to do with the tissues speaking to us. They're aching for attention. And in our agony, we become more alive to the cognition, to the basis of our self. By the way, disease rarely takes a hold in the tissue in the full-bloom of a season. So learn to flow with the seasons again.

The nose activates the ears, the sounds, the sights, the tastes, the touch. This is how we receive and refine our elements and when we are in harmony with these elements, we can live to refine them. Then the joy tissue remains joyous, the invigoration tissue remains invigorated, the love tissue remains well-loved and so on.

Our breathing, our eating, our listening can all be sadhana. Intelligence can come through the thinking mind, but it has to be a mindful mind before it becomes sadhana. We've developed mind in modern times at the expense of our cognition. Imagine yourself in simpler, ancient times. Imagine yourself pounding grains, grinding spices. You will never see someone using a mortar and pestle and angry at the same time, because it doesn't happen. As we pound, we pound with the rhythm of the heart, refining our energy. As the pounding continues, our hearts becomes stronger. As we thresh the golden field, and hear the ssshhh-ssshhh-ssshhh-ssshhh of all that magnificent grain, we see the sun in spousal union with it and that instills joy into our tissue. That is sadhana. That is love. We know it.

The great Vedic poet, Kalidasa said, "How the fragment of a melody or the fragrance of a flower can bring back forgotten memories as though leaping over the spirits from a faraway time."

We never run to toxic radiation dumps for the weekend to refill ourselves, do we? We know that nature can not fill us from there. The happiness we're constantly looking for is in sadhana. That complete pleasure that no relationship is ever able to give is there in sadhana. And it will always be there.

And yet every time we plug something in the wall, we're giving away our access to that cognition. Every time we hear the drills, the traffic, the sirens in the city, we're depleting our aura and our defenses, drifting away from the core of our divinity. Voltaire said, "The physician is here to abuse the patient while nature cures the disease." That hasn't changed. By the same token, "It's all well and good in practice, but will it work in theory?" That's such a modern notion. That's only the mind talking.