The Biggest Trouble Maker "Ama" | Actionable Ayurveda with Salila#6

Welcome to Actionable Ayurveda with Salila, your go-to podcast for diving deep into the timeless wisdom of Ayurveda. I am Salila Sukumaran, your host and guide on this transformative journey. With a lineage rooted in Ayurvedic practices, I am here to empower you to thrive and flourish through the ancient principles of Ayurveda. Today's topic is Ama, the biggest word in Ayurveda. If we got this clear, then this is adequate for us to stay healthy for the rest of our life. What is ama? The acharya says that ama is something that which obstructs. So something that which hinders, something that which blocks. What is the Agni-Rasa-Ama connection? Ama is formed from our first nutritive essence of food. So everything that we eat a byproduct is formed from that. In the ideal situation, our Agni should be optimal. It should neither be Manda, which is a Kapha-based Agni, it should neither be Tikshna, which is a Pitta-imbalanced Agni, or Vishama, which is an irregular Vata-imbalanced Agni. It should be optimal. The food that we eat should be fresh, well-cooked, and should be nutritious. As soon as this optimal Agni acts on the optimal food, such a wonderful, perfect world scenario, all of the nutritive essence get extracted and then it becomes the first dhatu, which is called as Rasa. Now this Rasa is foundational for all the dhatus. So all the remaining dhatus like Ttha, Mamsa, Madhya, Asthi, Shukra, all this is going to create, get tailored out of this first nutritive essence of Rasa. The blood, the bones, the marrow, nerves, fertility tissue, everything. However, what happens is we are humans, we live in an imperfect world, we have all kinds of environmental factors affecting our body, our mind. And this affects our Agni. Our Agni sometimes goes out of balance. Our body type affects our Agni. The food is less than perfect. Even in the most perfect times, we cannot have perfect food. Because of this, a byproduct is created which neither becomes the tissues nor turns into elimination like sweat, urination, feces. It doesn't turn into that. Instead, it turns into an intermediary tissue, which kind of confuses the body. The body does not know, is this tissue, is this elimination? So this tissue, this byproduct, has a particular quality that it can confuse the body into thinking it is either part of tissues or part of elimination. So sometimes the body is able to eliminate it. Sometimes the body is not able to eliminate it. Sometimes it becomes part of our body tissues, and then it is baked into our blood, our muscles, our bones, our marrow, fertility tissue. How can we manage ama? Obviously, the first step is to make sure that we eat when we are hungry. We eat when our digestion is optimal. We do Nidana Parivarjana, right? We are making sure that whatever is the root cause of creating ama, which was inefficient digestion and improper food, we are first making sure that we are eating at the right time. We are providing our body food according to our body type. So if we are Vata, We are cutting down on CRDS, cold, raw, dry, stale. If we are Pitta, we are taking a step back and evaluating whether our food is SOS, spicy, oily, sour, salty, in which fermented foods also come, the sour foods. If we are a Kapha person, then we are looking at our food and seeing, is this DNS, dense, Dairy, nuts, sugar heavy. If it is, then we are gonna cut back on that. That is the first step to doing Nidana Parivarjana. The second step we can manage our Ama is we make our Dhatus strong. Our Dhatus are made, we are making them nice and strong so that the Dhatus themselves will not get affected even if there is a little bit Ama in them. How do we do this? By following our daily rituals, by following our self-care rituals like Nasya, like eating on time, like making sure we are walking after we eat a meal. We are doing the Shatpadi, we are walking 100 steps. We are applying oil in our body. We are doing an Abhyanga. We are taking steam occasionally. We are applying oil in our nabi. We are applying oil on our head. We are doing Nasya. By doing all these self-care rituals, we are improving the strength of our Dhatus. And then the third pillar on which the management of Ama stands is Dosha Shamana. So because Ama is formed due to an imbalance of the Doshas, because the Doshas, if the Doshas were in balance, The Doshas are called Doshas because they are always in imbalance, which is why off the bat we call them a negative term. However, when the body has Satvik intelligence, when the body's intelligence is high, it is constantly applying balancing principles onto the Dosha. It is constantly making the Doshas pacified. It is constantly doing Shamana to the Dosha. This Ability of the body to balance the Doshas is no longer present in a body that has high amount of Ama, which is why such a body goes from Prakriti to Vikriti. Prakriti is the natural balanced body, and Vikriti is where now all kinds of chaos and disorders start accumulating on top of it. How? In a home situation, in a clinical situation, Healing is done through Dosha Shamana. So when we know that our Vata Dosha is high, how do we know that? We can catch it in the mind. If we are starting to get spaced out, anxious, we know our Vata Dosha is high. And we can apply a remedy immediately. We can go to a place where we are feeling loved. We can drink something nice and hot like this Kat Basti I'm drinking. We can If we are starting to feel very cold in our extremities, we can put on a sweater. These are all simple first aids. We can go take an Abhyangam bath, bring ourselves to balance. If we are a Pitta body type and we are feeling that Dosha going imbalanced in our mind, which is anger, shortness with other people, rage, we can immediately catch ourselves and know, say that, oh, oh, My dosha is starting to go out of balance. I better reel myself back in. We can go drink something cooling. We can switch on the AC. We can go out for a walk. We can do a little bit of pranayama. We can do an anuloma viloma. Bring our mind to balance. We can call up a friend who is calming, a kapha friend who's calming and nurturing. What if we are a kapha body type and we start to experience that negative feeling of I don't want to leave my house. I don't want to try doing this. No, I'm not going anywhere. I'm good in my pajamas. No, I'm not coming out of bed today. All these feelings are pointing to the dosha getting imbalanced in the mind. If we catch it in the mind, it doesn't have to come into the body. Immediately, what do we do? We go to the kitchen, we make ourselves a nice hot kad pesti with some good strong spices like taram, black cumin, black seeds, and we sip on that. We call up a friend who loves to go out. We ask a Vata friend to take us out. We recognize that, oh my God, my Dosha is in imbalance. If I'm going to continue staying in this imbalance, this is not going to be good for me mentally and physically. And then we go out, get some sunshine, move, get a sweat going. We are good. We come back, we feel very healthy. So this is Dosha Shamana. On a very basic home level, Ayurveda physicians will use therapies and remedies and medicines for Dosha Shamana. We are learning about how to be good Graha Vaidyas to ourselves. So when we do this, what happens? Our digestion becomes optimal. We make good food choices and we don't have the excess ama produced in our body on that particular day. And the ama which is already present in the body, our body will have more energy to digest that ama, as the body is constantly detoxing itself. What does this ama do to our body? This ama is created by suboptimal digestion. We, we know that, right? Now, you know that any foreign matter in the body is going to create a weakness of our dhatus, the weakness of our muscles, our blood, our bones, our fertility tissues, our asthi, our nervous tissues, these dhatus are not going to function well. The ama which got created by the weakness of the Jataragni, the digestive fire in the body, the suboptimal nutrition, will now go into all the dhatus and then will affect the cellular metabolism in those dhatus. So the muscles which are formed from there on will be weaker in quality, will be lesser, inferior in quality. Ama is supposed to be something that is extremely sticky, can be multicolored, has a smell, is slimy. If you, if you see it, it will, it will make a lot of strings. It's a lot like kapha, imbalanced kapha actually. So there could be ama which takes the shape of kapha., and then because it is extremely sticky, it stays in the body. One of such ama is created by heating honey. So when we have honey poured into a very hot drink, or when we cook honey, the ama that is created by that honey is one of the stickiest ama in the body. It's very difficult to remove it. When we have ama which is affected by vata qualities, created in a body that has imbalanced Vata, it is called Vishthambi. That word itself sounds like there's going to be a blockage. So that body will experience a lot of pain, a lot of constipation, lack of bowel movements, slower peristalsis. Ama, which is created in a body that is high in Pitta, that has an overabundance of Pitta, will be Veedvi, meaning there will be heat in the body. There'll be high thirst in the body. You really don't have a reason to be thirsty, but you're feeling very hot, thirsty. Your body is burning up. This is a condition where a Pitta kind of ama is getting created. Finally, ama is also known as ama visha. Ama in its benign form, it's understood that it's created on a daily basis, and as long as the body gets to it, cleans it up, it's okay. But when ama has accumulated and is not being flushed out by the body's natural cleaning mechanisms, detoxing mechanisms, we have ama upon ama deposited on a daily basis, and then it turns into a visha condition where now you need to apply cleansing procedures, need to apply detoxing procedures to get it out of the body. And that's when we start doing things like panchakarma cleansing, home-based cleansing, kitchari cleansing, monomial cleansing. We move into shodhana, which is purifying the body, langhana, which is fasting, so that we can remove this excess ama from the body. Now, there can be two stages of ama. One, where it is quietly sitting in the body, not harming the body. The body is already fooled into thinking that it's part of the body, it's part of the tissues. There will be another condition where the body realizes that, oh God, I was holding on to this, this is not part of my body, and the body will start to react very badly. This is usually the vidadha condition, which is a pitta inflammatory conditions, autoimmune disease conditions. When ama is in the vishtambhi condition where it is affected by Vata, the body goes into a degenerative condition where we have diseases where the cells of the body are breaking down. The body is losing its strength. The body is losing its form. The Veda Avastha is where the body is freaked out. We all know that there's a lot of conditions where you will be fine. There's absolutely no problem. Years upon years, everything is going well. You have no issues. Suddenly something changes. You move. From one country to another, or you move from one decade to another. From 30s you moved into 40s, 40s you moved into perimenopause, menopause. You've drastically switched up your diet, you decided to go on a health binge, or you are taken up a new job, you've been traveling and eating out quite a bit. Suddenly the body goes into veka avastha, trigger. Everything starts breaking loose in the body. During this Veda Avastha, we should take help of all healing modalities that we possibly can to bring our body back to balance. When we are having an active manifestation of ama-caused disease in the body, we should take help from Western medicines as well. When the body is in the Aavega Avastha of ama, when we know that the body has inflammation, It's been going on for a long time. We are just managing our health somehow. We are using these little diet interventions, gut-busting intervention, herbal interventions on our own. Things are not majorly breaking apart, things are not in the worst condition. That's when we should actually do Panchakarma. We should not do Panchakarma, Shodhana, Chikitsa, cleansing, purification, Chikitsa, When the body is in an active stage of eliminating that ama, the body freaking out in that point. What is the one thing we can do? Since this whole thing is about actionable Ayurveda and you're talking about how to take care of these different situations through food, through diet, through herbs, through spices, through drinks, through teas available for us in the kitchen or in our pantry. One is adding the Deepana Pachana herbs. Deepana is kindling the fire, making sure the fire is optimal. Pachana is whatever ama gets created at the end of the meal, at the end of the digestive processes, we are helping digest that as well. Which is why during our Indian traditional feasts, first we are given foods, small lickables, small quantities of things that improve our digestion. Ginger-based, turmeric-based pickles. We lick a little bit on that. We kindle our digestive fire. At the end of our meal, we eat something like Tambulam, which is betel nut, betel leaf with a little bit of areca nut, with a little bit of clove, with some aniseed, fennel, so that we are helping our body digest what we have eaten. From our kitchen, some deepana pachana herbs are turmeric. If we are eating adequate amount of turmeric on a daily basis, we are helping our body do deepana and pachana. The only caveat is we activate it with heat, either heat-producing spices or direct heat from the cooking stove. The Extract it in oil and then we eat it. That's how we've done it for thousands of generations. That's how it works for the human body. Another deepana herb is cinnamon. So cinnamon, you can make cinnamon tea. We can add cinnamon to our cup of chai. Cinnamon is a deepana pachana herb. A powerful deepana pachana herb is pippali. And if all of you wanted to start adding a deepana pachana herb mix to your daily diet, That would be trikatu. Put a large pinch of trikatu with your meal, whether it's on your rice, your grain, your whole grains, or in your soup, or in your lentils. Adding trikatu to your daily meals, especially when you know you have ama, which is you have— how do you know you have ama? You wake up fatigued, you wake up tired. Sleep is not adequate. You develop swelling here and there in the body. You're, you're constantly sleepy and tired. Your body starts to have higher odor. So you have body odor, mouth starts to smell a lot. Some of my clients will say, Salila, I'm eating so well, I'm taking such good care of myself, but I don't know why there is plaque in my teeth. So you see these little signs and symptoms, and you see that, hmm, that's strange with my body. Why is my body collecting this kind of stuff? All these little issues that have no explanation, it's usually Ama. So then we are adding Deepana Pachana herbs to combat that Ama. We are doing Shodhana. We do some— something like a— or a cleanse. And then we do fasting every 15 days. If we fast, we are helping our body take care of that ama which is getting collected. Body has extra digestive power to heal that ama, to process that ama. Because on a daily basis, what do we do? We all wake up with finite digestion points, finite energy points. And when we eat very heavy meals that are akhala, that are not on time, We do Atimatra, we eat too much, we graze. Ahitha, we eat foods that doesn't work for us. Remember the 3 acronyms I shared in the beginning? When we do that kind of things, we are taxing our body, we are improving, we are increasing the load of food on the body. The body has to go through a longer digestive process, a harder digestive process, so the body does not have extra energy at the end of the day to take care of the ama which got formed the day previous. So this is how we create more and more ama in the body. Now, those of you who are not able to go to India to do your panchakarma, I have developed a cleanse program, and it's a 21 to 24 day long program, and I teach you how to do cleansing in your own house. With the things you have available in your kitchen pantry, so that you don't have to wait for your body to start healing till you get to India. So if any of you are interested, reach out to me. I'll drop the link in our WhatsApp webinar group. And for those of you who are not able to budget in a one-on-one support, 21-day to 24-day cleanse with me, I'm coming up with a group program manner so that a lot of you can cleanse. I'm looking for 10 people to join me this June. So if that interests you, DM me and I will sign you up. I already have a waitlist for it and I am going to only take 10 people because even though a group healing, I still want to make sure that I'm supporting you as much as possible on a one-on-one basis. I've never released this as a group. Healing situation because the kind of Shodhana that I do is very close to a Panchakarma you would experience in a Panchakarma center. So we still have to be very closely connected so that we can do our best Shodhana to bring you back to health. Shalini is asking us, signs of imbalance in Dhatus, please. So Shalini, weakness is the first sign of imbalance. In the blood Dhatu, deficiencies. Again, before we have any deficiency, fatigue is what we experience. Fatigue and aches and pains, smell in the body, not able to wake up in the morning, not able to have energy. These are all the first signs of the body having weakness in any of the dhatus. Madhasti dhatu, bone dhatu. Again, brittle nails, brittle hair, hair that quickly breaks, hair that's no longer growing. Hair, you can see more scalp. These are all like the second stages. First stage is always tiredness, always weakness, fertility tissue irregularities in periods, pain, extra pain during periods, clotting, mood disorders, nausea, constant nausea. All that would be issues with the fertility tissue. For men, the issue would be lack of libido, lack of enthusiasm, not wanting to connect with the partner. All that would be irregularities in the fertility tissue of a man. Madanji is saying, this is very fascinating, but then I wonder how in a family that eats the same food, one person is more prone to disease and poor health conditions and other not so much. So we talked about how the ama stays hidden and managed by the body because the body either confuses it as an, as an eliminatory tissue or confuses it as part of the body, it bakes it into our dhatus. So one person may have an active lifestyle, one person may be born with a template of a more healthier body, the other person may be a higher Vata body or an imbalanced Pitta body or a Kapha body which is already going towards moving towards imbalance, or one person may be Growing up, becoming younger, healthier. The other person may be moving into 40s, 50s, 60s, becoming weaker. One person may have a lot of stress, the other person may not. So all these factors affect into how our body starts to, starts to react to the ama in our body. The cleanse is usually an application because first I have to see whether you fit the program, whether this program is good for you. There are people I refuse, there are people I send to India for it Panchakarma, especially if you're living in India, I say no, don't do this, go to a Panchakarma center. Who is this great for? This is great for moms, this is great for people who are not able to take leave and drop everything and go to India right now. This is great for people who are having chronic issues but they want to arrest the growth of that chronic issue before they get to India and do their Panchakarma. So these are the people that are perfect for this. What is trikatu? It's a mixture, mixture of different herbs, black pepper, long pepper, and dry ginger. Yeah, you can buy it off of online market or Ayurveda shop, and you can use that for your health on a daily basis. That'll help relieve some of the load from the ama. But if you are not slowing down, if you're not giving your body adequate rest, If you're not eating an optimal meal, and it's not rocket science, we just do our best. As long as the ama is in circulation and is eliminated, we are safe. Also, there is not a single point where there is not some ama in circulation in the body. The problem becomes when the ama crosses a certain threshold, and we have those signs and symptoms I talked about. Extreme fatigue, lack of enthusiasm, body odor, lack of, you know, good quality sleep, restlessness at night, weight gain, weight loss, pain in the joints. All these are signs that the ama is now crossing a threshold and we need an intervention, like either a cleansing or a fasting. So when I do the cleansing, I teach you how to do fasting properly. I teach you how to do vamana, which is therapeutic purgation, therapeutic vomiting. Therapeutic diary, and then I teach you how to do Vasti. So I also teach you how to manage your diet so that when we are doing this together in a group, we are supporting each other, we are learning from each other, we're keeping each other accountable.

Okay, so as I told you once, I mean, you talk to so many people, but I'm a Vata and Pitta. My Vata is aggravated, my Pitta works well. So it's very interesting I, I have every day the first thing is bowel movement. Nope. Sometimes, oh, it very rarely constipation, but then I still pass. I don't have any, I'm very strong person in, but of course my menopause, my body is changing a lot. It's very dry skin. But lately I've been waking up with lots of pain. I don't know if it's to do because I'm working out, but is a little too much, like my ankles and all, like my bones, I feel like cartilage feels stiffer. So when I step out of bed and everything, I used to have it on and off, then it went away. Now again, it started happening. And but I don't have a body odor. Like I smell like a perfume all the time. Like I'm very, you know, I'm very healthy. As I said, I don't eat no junk food, nothing. But what is happening then is how much ama could it be when I'm still passing bowel movements, sometimes twice a day, everything working out right now but that.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, like I said, right, the ama is baked into our tissues and every day we are producing it and it's not dangerous as long as the body is eliminating it. But when suddenly something shifts in our environment, like you're going through perimenopause, right? So there is an increase of Vata. Your Pitta is balanced. You're a strong body type. Everything that you were doing before, now you just need to add some cleansing rituals to your daily regimen, your monthly, your fortnightly, and then you will cruise along much better.

Okay. Okay, perfect. So I did send you a message and I look forward again for the next class, the seminar you're going to give. Great energy. Pleasure to be listening to you, that's for sure. I like that energy going. Thank you. Thank you.

Take good care.

Bye.