Ayurvedic Insight

Issue #22, August, 2003

In this Issue

“An Ayurvedic Perspective on Anger Management” by Shannon Mooney
“Sitting Down With Dr. Robert E. Svoboda” by Julie Deife
Recipe: Cantaloupe Smoothie

An Ayurvedic Perspective on Anger Management

By Shannon Mooney

Emotions are a natural part of our physical existence. Everyone expresses emotions differently. We are unique individuals with multitudes of factors determining how and why we behave the way we do. When emotions are expressed in a destructive manner, it is easy to label them as negative or a hindrance to our growth. Anger, for example, when left untamed can seem like a raw, ravenous wildfire burning up everything in its path.

However, understanding emotion as simply energy that can be channeled through the body can support more creative and healthy expression. The ancient tradition of Ayurveda offers the tools of yoga, pranayama, and meditation to bring equanimity and peace to the mind. From this place of calm one can choose positive expression of even the most lethal of emotions.

Anger is an emotion particularly associated with pitta dosha. It possesses the hot, sharp, and light qualities of fire, one of the elements that govern pitta. Anger has many closely related emotions such as impatience, judgment, and criticism. This emotion manifests differently for each individual varying in intensity and duration of experience.

Some people raise their voices, break or throw things, drink or use drugs. Others find physical exertion helpful and are able to release emotions through lifting weights, kickboxing, running or swimming. Some people get red in the face looking as though smoke may start to stream from their ears as they explode. Others suppress their anger and hold it inside.

Trapping this powerful energy in the body is counter-productive to health and is probably the most destructive method of handling anger both for the individual and their environment. Repressed emotion may cause physiological disruptions in the body and promote untimely explosive reactions.

Whatever your personal expression of anger may be, do not judge it. There is no right or wrong way to express emotion. Instead, bringing mindfulness to your expression allows you to measure its destructive or creative capability. Be a witness to yourself as you throw a pillow across the room. Is that the best way to release that energy? How is it benefiting you? Is it benefiting those around you?

If you feel yourself with clenched fists and jaw like a hothead, visualizing the steam blowing out of your ears and nose can be humorous and may help release the anger. Transforming the energy of anger into joy takes tremendous skill but is an invaluable therapeutic resource. Simply bringing awareness to the action of expression through observation encourages dissipation of anger making it easier to manage. Witnessing not only creates a space to accept your present reality, but also gives you the option to make a change.

Yoga, whether practiced for physical fitness, maintaining health, or spiritual reasons, is a transformational tool. Restorative postures, coupled with full yogic breathing, are most effective for releasing blockages in the body and allowing emotions to flow freely. When blockages are removed on the physical level, shifts occur in the associated areas of the psyche.

Beginning your practice with Sivasana, or corpse pose, can help you develop your ability to feel or sense your body. Again, bring awareness to the body through observation. Notice any tension without judging. Here you can ask questions about the tension or pain. For example, who or what is that tension living in your hip? Is it benefiting you in some way? Is there a particular emotion attached to it?

Be gentle with yourself. Emotions tend to ebb and flow on their own time schedule. The best thing you can do is surrender to the breath. The more receptive your body is to the breath, the more free and easy it will be to allow emotion to flow through. This softness and flexibility are balanced qualities of pitta dosha. Regular practice cleanses the body and brings clarity to the mind, supporting our ability to stay afloat in the sea of our emotions, enhancing our relationship to the external environment.

Pranayama is a valuable tool in our hectic world not only for its revitalizing effect on the body, but also because of its versatility. It can be practiced while waiting in line at the grocery store or stuck at a red light. When pitta starts to flare, moving prana can help to harness that energy and move it out before it has a chance to wreak havoc.

Deep abdominal breathing is an easy way to dissipate intense feelings and raise the energy in the body. Shitali is one of the best types of pranayama to practice in the summer and to relieve excess pitta. The method involves rolling the sides of the tongue to form a tube and then sucking air in, filling the lungs completely. Hold the air for a moment or two before exhaling through the nostrils. Practiced anywhere from one to five minutes, this breathing exercise has an instant cooling effect on an overheated hothead. This breath also supports proper liver and spleen function while quenching the thirst.

The benefits of practicing pranayama are endless. Controlling the breath brings more awareness to the body, mind, and senses and restores a calm, cool center. If we are interacting in the world from a clear centered place, we enhance our ability to respond and react positively to all influences of life.

Moderate meditation can be invaluable in establishing equanimity of the mind and releasing anger. There are many chemical responses occurring in our bodies when we experience anger, including the rush of adrenaline during the classic flight-or-fight stress response. In your meditation practice, utilizing the metaphor of riding waves in the ocean can mirror what is happening physiologically in your body. Meditation allows us to peek into our subconscious mind where thoughts and emotions arise in energetic swells. Keeping the mind and heart open and as fluid as the breath allows you to sense the crescendos and ride the crests of emotional waves. Become familiar with how anger moves within your body and mind and soon you will be surfing the tsunamis of anger while maintaining a perfect state of grace. Meditation gives us the freedom to choose to bring a creative and beautiful expression to all energy we emote into the world.

The practices of yoga, pranayama, and meditation ultimately remove the obstacles caused by trapped or confused energy patterns and bring us back in touch with our true nature as divine beings. Remembering that light is one of the qualities of the fiery emotion, anger, can be helpful in transforming some of the sharpness and cutting qualities into pure consciousness. Strengthening our union with the divine allows us to be free-flowing vessels of light.

Please note: Because anger is an emotion associated with pitta dosha, following a pitta-soothing diet and taking pitta-pacifying herbs, such as Shatavari or Amalaki, can be an effective foundation for anger management.

“Sitting Down With Dr. Robert E. Svoboda”

By Julie Deife

– The following interview was reprinted with permission from LA Yoga Magazine.

Dr. Robert E. Svoboda, B.A.M.S., is the first Westerner to have completed a full education in an Indian Ayurvedic medical college. His love of travel and the exotic first took him to India, away from a planned future of becoming a Western physician, where he then lived for more than a decade. Dr. Svoboda has also mastered the esoteric and complicated elements of astrology (Jyotish), as have many Ayurvedic physicians, and he is conversant in Hindi, Gujarati,
Marathi and Sanskrit. Author of 11 books on Ayurveda, he is also known in India as one of the world’s foremost experts in Ayurveda. Julie Deife spoke with him in Palm Springs, CA, at the Southwest Yoga Conference.

Julie: Where did you begin this journey?

Dr. Svoboda: I was often sick as a child. I’m sure part of it had to do with having been born in what they called at that time, an oil camp. Let’s just say I’ve been around hydrocarbons for a long time. And so I had various physical challenges when I was younger.

Julie: You became interested in medicine because of not being well as a child?

Dr. Svoboda: Yes, finding out in what ways I was not well and how might I get better and just the whole question of the nature of wellness and ill health.

Julie: Was a doctor someone who you thought had control over your health condition?

Dr. Svoboda: I’m not sure that I ever projected onto a physician an aura of some sort. It was more the attitude of being able to on the one hand evaluate a situation, come to a quick and hopefully efficient conclusion about a diagnosis and a treatment plan and then put it into effect that interested me.

Julie: Are you still the only Westerner ever to have graduated from an Ayurvedic College in India?

Dr. Svoboda: No, there are two or three others, there’s, I think, a Spanish guy. There was a Japanese women, who I grant you was not a Westerner but still an alien. And then there is Kristofer Edlund from Sweden, who has just graduated from a college in Varanasi.

Julie: But it’s still that unusual, even though this was twenty years ago?

Dr. Svoboda: Yes, it’s still unusual, but it’s not so difficult anymore. Before, there was no provision for having foreigners around. Who knew what they might do, or would they study properly, or would they all go berserk at an inopportune moment and then create some problem for the institution.

Julie: Who do you consider your teachers to be?

Dr. Svoboda: Dr. Lad was a convenient person for them to shove me off onto because he spoke English and he had recently been made the residential medical officer at the hospital. So they introduced him to me in early February of 1974. But Dr. Lad and I both regard Vaidya Nanal as our teacher. Vaidya Nanal was the son of the doctor who had established this particular college in the first place, and for many years Vaidya Nanal was the most eminent Ayurvedic doctor in Pune.

Julie: Can you talk a little about studying Ayurveda in India at that time?

Dr. Svoboda: The mode of teaching was shifting from focusing on a more strictly guru/student disciple relationship to one that was more focused on, at least externally, replicating a British style of education. Therefore they had the college, the various classes and teachers teaching those classes according to what the syllabus said they should teach. There was another group in the college who focused on the more traditional approach and there was a general sort of sense of struggle between the two. What it boiled down to was whether Ayurveda should be preserved as a system of medicine, or new knowledge and techniques from allopathy, homeopathy, etc. imported into it. Or whether in fact ideas and techniques and substances from Ayurveda should be exported into other medical systems and everything sort of integrated into one system.

Julie: Isn’t that the same debate today? What do you think?

Dr. Svoboda: That is very much the same sort of debate today. You see, if there were something for Ayurveda to integrate into, if modern medicine was actually a system, instead of simply a group of therapies, then that would potentially, at least, offer the possibility of some sort of debate. But as far as I can see, there is no system of modern Western medicine. There is no clear idea of what causes health. There is no overall theory of how humans fit into the environment in which they live as there is in Ayurveda or Chinese medicine. Ayurveda and Chinese medicine are so much more than the sum of just their therapeutic parts.

Julie: Would Western medicine be more appropriately, embraced by Ayurveda?

Dr. Svoboda: Why not? It’s not like Ayurveda has not done that in the past. After all, surgery has been a part of Ayurveda from the beginning. It’s a well-known fact, even among plastic surgeons, that plastic surgery was invented in India. The first plastic surgical application still appears in surgery textbooks.

Julie: Does Western reductionist thinking hamper the ability of Westerners to understand Ayurveda?

Dr. Svoboda: While reductionist thinking may have been pioneered and perfected in the West, it’s certainly not anymore, if it ever was, limited to the West. Wherever people think in a reductionist manner, they will have the same sorts of problems of understanding the whole of a science like Ayurveda or yoga or whatever because they are not provided the context that is essential for encouraging all those parts to come together into one organic whole. So certainly reductionist thinking is something that is perhaps more widely practiced here and perhaps it is practiced more homogeneously here because you will not always have people and a culture as complex and detailed as India. You have people thinking in many different modes there, sometimes at the same time. Whereas over here, people try to simplify so that their thoughts are very linear. That makes it difficult to connect the various pieces of Ayurveda together for people who are studying it in a way that is not consistent with its traditional mode of being portrayed.

Julie: As Ayurveda is fairly new to Westerners seeking treatment, do Ayurvedic doctors here feel compelled to discuss the system of Ayurveda with their patients?

Dr. Svoboda:I don’t know. I think what is important is that the patient should get well. And I think that it is undeniably true that some patients do better with lots of information and some patients do better with none. So it’s quite possible that even though the tradition in India suggests that the doctor doesn’t really communicate a lot to the patient, there will certainly be conditions where it would be better if the doctor was communicating more with the patient. I think what the most important thing is – and this applies to Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, any kind of medical system – is that the physician should be trained, first of all, that there is a difference between disease and illness. Disease is what the physician sees objectively. Illness is what the patient sees and experiences subjectively. So a good doctor will always want to compare the disease with the illness. Find out where the disease/illness has come from. Find out what is a reasonable expectation of where the person might be able to go, whether there is a radical cure possible, is it only possible to manage or is it time for the person to consider exiting or whatever.

Julie: How would you suggest communicating this to the patient?

Dr. Svoboda: A doctor can create a narrative, something that’s also very important in astrology or any other kind of profession in which you are giving someone advice. The narrative explains to the person where they are today; how they got to where they are; where they are headed; whether headed in a good direction or not; what can be done about where they’ve headed to change the direction and the momentum
so that where they’ve headed at least be in a good direction; and the expectation that they might have of in proceeding in that good direction and to what end. And when you add all these things together, then coming out with a plan that the patient can follow. The hope is to actualize the potential that is present, that hopefully the physician has portrayed.

Julie: What would you recommend to those just starting to learn about Ayurveda and are told that Ayurveda says you can eat meat?

Dr. Svoboda: Personally I’m a vegetarian, but I do eat dairy and eggs occasionally and I’ve been a vegetarian for not quite 30 years. It has been okay for me. And I believe that there are many things to be said for vegetarianism. I believe that when it is possible for a person to be a vegetarian it is better for the body of the individual, it is better for the earth as a whole and it is certainly better for all of the animals that don’t need to be slaughtered. That being said, at least from what I’ve seen in my personal perspective, there are some people who do not do well on a diet of plants only, or plants and minerals only. I think that there probably are a certain substantial percentage of people who do better with some form of animal protein. Animal protein is also dairy and eggs.

Julie: How can those of us who choose to be vegetarian be assured that what we’re doing is good for our bodies?

Dr. Svoboda: The average person is quite unaware of whether the food they are eating is digesting well or not. And if not, in what ways is it not digesting well and how can they change that. And in fact, what kind of food does the body really want? So I think even before you start asking yourself a question of should I be vegetarian or should I not be vegetarian, I think that you need to be asking yourself the question of what is it that will nourish my body most efficiently. Ayurveda is very interested in longevity, and modern science has conclusively proven, that if you take the minimum amount of food, not insufficient to what you require, but the minimum amount of food that you require, you will definitely live longer. So I think people should be first asking themselves what is the minimum amount of food that I require. What should my baseline be for that amount of food? Once you have that quantity down, what is the minimum quality of the food that I require. How much fat do I actually need, how much protein do I actually need? Of that protein, what form is that protein going to be delivered to me most efficiently? And then, how can I combine the various different portions of my diet together and deliver it to myself and how frequently during the day, at what time, in what way so it can provide me what I require.

Julie: Do you have a professional or life plan now?

Dr. Svoboda: Yes, as a matter of fact, I have a definite plan. Five years from now I have every intention to be retired. Instead of traveling as much as I do now, I will go to one place and I will sit quietly and write and study. I have many things that I still want to study, the I Ching, (and) I want to learn more about homeopathy and Chinese medicine.

Julie: What closing thoughts would you like to share?

Dr. Svoboda: I believe that people in this country need to go out and see more of the world, because people over here know almost nothing about what’s going on in the rest of the world. They need to see how other people live, hear what other people think. It is too easy for us over here to believe the image of the world that the media feeds us, an image that too frequently does not have much to do with reality. And even before people go abroad, let them spend some time in solitude, preferably out in nature, the better to remember how to see and hear for yourself.

Dr. Svoboda is a world-renowned author and lecturer on Ayurveda. For a complete list of his works and upcoming speaking engagements visit http://www.drsvoboda.com. His recent book “Ayurveda for Women” along with his classic introduction to Ayurveda “Prakriti, Your Ayurvedic Constitution” are available here

LA YOGA is a FREE Bimonthly magazine serving the Southern California yoga community. Articles present aspects of yoga past and present; teacher profiles; interviews with masters; and workshop reports. Every issue includes: News, Astrology (Jyotish), Practice Pages, Meditation, Book Reviews, CD Reviews, Seva Report, Kids and Yoga, and of course, Ayurveda. Where to Yoga (directory of studios and teachers) and When to Yoga (calendar of events) help keep readers informed. For subscription information please visit http://www.layogamagazine.com/.