01 Introduction to Ayurveda

Ayurveda is the oldest health and healing system in existence, it originates from India, and dates back more than five thousand years back

Ayurveda is a Sanskrit word, composed by two syllables: Ayur - life, veda- knowledge, wisdom

So Ayurveda means knowledge, wisdom of life

Ayurveda, is a health system based on consciousness, based on a deeper knowledge of oneself, of oneself as an individual and in relation to one's environment

It is a system that does not focus on the absence of disease, but rather on preserving health and sees health as balance of the multiple layers of our being

It is a system holistic, integrative And at the same time it is an individualized system because it recognizes that each person, has a unique constitution, body-mind

To understand a little bit more about Ayurveda, it is necessary to know in depth the layers of life

By the ninth century, master Adi Shankara, known as the great revitalizer of Vedic philosophy, he left us a graph that shows us in a visual way the layers of life and he called them, koshas or hedges

Kosha, cover, cloak

because, what it expresses is that these layers, cover the essence of our being

Adi Shankara called, three layers, which could be: the subtle body, the physical body and the causal body, or what we could also call: body, mind and soul

Inside the physical body, described three layers which are: the extended body, the environment, the individual body, y the energetic body

The body, according to Ayurveda, the environment is seen as our extended body, because we are in continuous interaction with our environment, although our senses lead us to believe that our body is well delimited and well separated from our environment, is really an artifact of our sensory perception, because we are continually exchanging energy and information with the environment and the most reliable proof of this is our breathing

We exchange millions of molecules continuously through of the breath

Then we have the individual body, with which we feel more identified and physical body, that Adi Shankara called, manomaya kosha, the cloak made of food, because our physical body continuously is renewing itself from the food that we ingest, Hence, the need to pay special attention to what we eat

Then we have the energetic body and the energetic body or also called prana, is this energy which circulates through our bodies and which animates cells into a vibrant being

That energy that helps us to differentiate a living body from a non-living body, is the force cheerleader, of life

Then we have the subtle body and inside the subtle body, we have three layers which are: the mind the intellect, and the ego

In the mind, within this framework is recognized as the repository of all our sensory perception, all the information we receive through of the senses

Then we have the intellect, which is in charge of classifying this information, of discerning

Finally, the ego, that the ego is the idea that we have about us themselves

Shankara, the definition of me Inside the causal body we have three other layers, which are: the soul individual, the collective soul And the universal soul

According to Adi Shankara, the individual soul, is

is a set of our deepest desires and of our memories and those wishes and memories, guide the course of our life

Then there is the collective consciousness, the collective soul, in which we share the myths, beliefs, stories

in which we identify with and interpret

different roles and stories

It's what is part of the collective consciousness and also of the soul collective, what we share within the community, within the society

And finally the soul universal, and that's when the universal soul is that part of us, which is in connection with everything, is that part in conjunction with all the existence, that progressively let's go through practices, such as meditation and we are moving from one state egoic, of knowledge about ourselves based on the past, based on the idea we have about ourselves towards a consciousness more expanding, where we begin to realize that union with everything, with all nature and with all existence

These layers give us a framework to understand ourselves

at different levels and as we get to know them and as we give them the place they have in our life, then we are also assigning meaning to them and it helps us then to see ourselves in a way more broadly

So I recommend that starting today, you begin to see yourself as a multidimensional being

in continuous expansion and integration of all your experiences, your environment and your being