Subtleness of Disease - Getting Grounded With Ayurveda 6 of 20

Disease is never obvious. Illness comes from a blind spot. It comes from a poor choice or by surprise. People generally seek happiness and satisfaction, not sadness and disease. So, on some level, all disease is an accident. It sneaks up on you. That's why the western symbol of medicine has a picture of a snake on it. Look at that. The snake around the staff, around a pole. So snakes are subtle, like disease, and that's why you need a practitioner. Someone that can help you find the hidden cause of the disease. Snakes are a good symbol because you often don't see them on the path. You could step on a snake or not see one hanging from a tree. And then they could bite you. So it's easy to protect yourself from things that are obvious. And if disease shouted like a lion and announced itself, you would just avoid it. Look at all of the effort done to avoid coronavirus. Some people are still getting it. Why do they get it? Because you can't see the disease. Virus, bacteria, parasite eggs, they're all too small to see. But if you could see coronavirus, you would just swat it away like a mosquito. Well, I guess even mosquitoes are hard to see, and that's why they sometimes bite you and you don't notice. Radiation is invisible. You can't see that either. But it does affect you. Another thing that's really subtle is false cravings. Now, some things trick your body and trick your sense organs. Let's think about something that tastes really good that you can easily overeat, like chocolate cake. I love to use that as an example because it's so good and you get to enjoy it. But then later on, it can make you feel bad if you eat too much of it. So it happens at times that something feels good to you right now, but leads to problems later. Sometimes years later, like smoking cigarettes, or too much sugar, or never exercising, etc. And when the effect is something that develops over years, it's really hard to feel that cause-effect relationship on an instinctual level. And a lot of times, we're doing things on the level of instincts. We should always be engaging our reason, always engaging our free will, and making free will choices. But then there's that distracting chocolate cake. And the chocolate cake is here now, whereas discipline brings fruits later. And do we have control over the future? I don't know. Better eat the chocolate cake now. Live for the moment. And that kind of thinking process can undermine your health. And the root of that is that it's just really hard to feel the cause-effect relationship on an instinct level. So time, in general, is a cause of things being subtle, because what you do now has the effect later. On some level, all of Ayurveda attempts to deal with the subtleness of disease. And even doshas themselves are subtle. People are like, what are those? What is a dosha? They don't even quite understand it, because it's a little bit subtle. And in general, in the clinic, your job is to find the subtle thing that the client missed. Then even if you recognize the cause of the disease, the means to change the behavior is also kind of subtle. There are many subtle blocks in the psyche that prevent us from actually implementing the change. I see this all the time with our amateur Ayurveda clinicians. They meet with a mom who has a bad routine, not eating healthfully, maybe a little scattered, taking care of kids. And the amateur clinician will say to that mom, oh, you just need to have more self-care. Well, the client probably already knows that. If you tell a mom to have more self-care, she'll probably agree with you. But then when her baby's crying, she's probably going to prioritize the baby over the self-care. A mom's whole nervous system is wired to take care of that baby. Same thing with telling a kapha person to stop eating ice cream. That's the amateur Ayurveda clinician who says that to the kapha clients. Why? The kapha client already knows they're not supposed to be eating ice cream. They already know that they're not supposed to eat those foods if they're trying to lose weight. In fact, most of the time your clients have figured out what the immediate cause of their disease is. But what's subtle is the feelings, emotions, and priorities that lead them to the bad habit. What could the mom do that would create a paradigm shift? Is there a way to get the baby to stop crying so that they can do more self-care to satisfy the baby in some way? Or could it be just reading a parenting book that would educate that mother on some more efficient techniques that would free up some more time for self-care? Or what is the reason why the kapha person is drawn to the ice cream? What are they trying to get from it? Is it an energy hit? Is it belly satisfaction? Is it reward for a hard day at work? Is it to suppress stress? Etc. We need to go another level deeper to affect the change because that's where things get a little mysterious for the client. I can't tell my Italian grandpa to not eat spaghetti with meat sauce because it has wheat and nightshades in it. It's a cultural American-Italian tradition to have spaghetti with meat sauce on Sundays, often with a glass of Coca-Cola on the side. That's not a great food combination in Ayurveda, but it is a part of his heritage. So how am I going to deal with that? A lot of my clients come to a consultation with me and they say things like, I knew you were going to tell me not to drink coffee and that I would have to stop. So this morning I had three cups of coffee to say goodbye. Do we see how there's that fight between the will and the reason? A very common cause of disease is lack of compliance. If you focused your whole clinical career on compliance alone, you would have a huge impact on your client's health outcomes. There's some reason that prevents the client from following the rules or even wanting to follow the rules. Because they have to want to follow the rules to follow them. And sometimes even wanting is not enough if there's an external thing that blocks them from doing the health routine they want. Sometimes it's just rebellion itself that the client insists on living in an unnatural way. But why would a person live in an unnatural way? Well, perhaps something about their comprehension of human nature is a little distorted. And even for most of us, when we say we should live naturally, most people think, oh, that means eat organic food and use herbs instead of pharmaceuticals. But it's not that we need to impose this condition of eating natural things. It's more like, when I say living naturally, what I mean is living according to our human nature and design. How you are really made. I can think of some natural scenarios like living at the South Pole without proper insulation in the walls or something like that. That would go against human design but would be natural, living in the natural world. So we don't want to get confused in our Ayurveda career by just having this artificial dogma around doing things that are in nature. What we want to do is do things that are in line with our human nature. And you see here the two definitions of nature and that's what gets people confused. The first one means eating organic food and avoiding chemicals. And the second is fulfilling who you were made to be. So definition number one of natural. Existing in or caused by nature, not made or caused by humankind. That's one definition of natural. And the second definition of natural is in agreement with the character or makeup or circumstances surrounding someone or something. So in this sense natural is what fulfills who you were made to be. It doesn't simply mean not made by humans, right? So fulfillment according to how you were made as opposed to distorted ideas about what will make you happy. That is a very subtle conversation. It means not forcing yourself into an inhuman work schedule to satisfy ambitions, right? Sometimes it's actually healthier to live in something man-made or to take a man-made drug or even a pharmaceutical. Sometimes it's better to live in a comfortable home than in the woods, right? So some things made by humans are actually more in alignment with our human nature. And there's a condition called orthorexia where a person is so concerned with eating a natural, organic, pure diet that they are malnourished and living out of alignment with their human nature. Now I live in Asheville and Asheville is known for being alternative like Portland, the city of Portland. And you can drive around town here and you'll see a motto that says different is good. Or another bumper sticker that says keep Asheville weird. But then there's another bumper sticker in Asheville that says oh no, not another learning experience, right? Well clearly the person had some curiosity and they did something new which could turn out well but then sometimes and oftentimes it turned out not so well. So what about that motto? Is different good? Or should we avoid another costly learning experience? Is different natural or unnatural? Is different always good or just sometimes good? Is new always better than old? Or as the saying goes, does curiosity sometimes kill the cat? So we need a healthy balance there, right? We don't want to think of different as good or bad. We want to look at the individual circumstances and the thing itself and use our reason to determine whether the new thing is actually better. Is it just change or progress that's good? The Chinese Communist Party was all about new, right? They were all about destroying the four olds, traditions and things like that. But now the Chinese Communist Party has been around for 90 years. Maybe they're old now, right? So the difference between change and progress is evidence of improved quality of life. We can live according to ideologies but does that mean our quality of life is better? The proof is always in the pudding. So my curiosity in Ayurveda did lead me to greater health and vitality. It did help me to become a better person. But my curiosity in other areas hurt me. For example, I was overconfident while traveling internationally. I was in a number of dangerous situations. But what ended up causing irreparable damage to my digestive tract was eating too much street food. Wow, it was delicious! And I really did get to enjoy that street food for several months. And 20 years later I'm still feeling the effects of that. So you decide whether that was worth it or not, right? We all make mistakes though. And so, you know, that was mine. Alright, here's another thing about our instincts. And you see this meme put out there often with regard to animals being natural, right? Like a horse running in a field or horses living in nature or something. It's like that's natural, right? Or animals are somehow natural because they live by their instincts. And that is true, right? Whatever is the nature of a horse and whatever the horse does is in total alignment with a horse's nature. Because horses don't have free will. They're not conscious beings who can sit and consider and do something that goes against their nature. Anything a horse does is aligned with a horse's nature. But that's not true for humans. Sometimes our instincts are not in our own good. And sometimes we ignore our instincts because our mind directs us in another direction. So for humans, our human nature and our choices aren't always in perfect alignment. Our instincts might tell us to eat the chocolate cake, but the chocolate cake might have an unnatural quantity of sugar. So did it fulfill our human nature? Well, the instinct may have felt natural. And you see this with regard to sexuality too, right? Like being natural sort of means, you know, give in to a fun night making out because it feels good, right? But then it could turn into a bad long-term relationship. And so that's the trouble with instincts. It's that sometimes something that feels natural turns out to not fulfill our human nature. It doesn't lead to our own stable happiness, but undermines it. And all of these things are really subtle issues. We don't have complete knowledge of ourselves. We don't have complete knowledge of our own humanity. We don't have complete knowledge of the future. And we can do unnatural things by accident. We can make mistakes that cost us big. And our senses don't always pull us in reasonable directions. So we have to challenge them sometimes. These unnatural activities, if we give in to them, if we give in and do something that's against our own interest, it creates complexity. And has many, many subtle ramifications that twist and bend us out of shape. And especially bends our instincts out of shape. Ayurveda says that when you're in balance, your instincts and cravings are generally healthy. When you're balanced, then you want the right things. If you're balanced when you're tired, you'll crave sleep. If you're balanced when you're cold, you'll grab a blanket. But when you're out of balance, cravings can become unhealthy. So you might be stressed out and suppressing and procrastinating on something by going to bed. And sleeping just so that you can avoid what it is you have to do. Or another example is that if you're tired, you could crave coffee or ice cream instead of taking a nap. So anytime our body is in an imbalanced state, anytime it's in an unnatural state, that's going to affect your decision making. So what does this mean? It means that any imbalance in our body, including an imbalance in any of the gunas, has a subtle effect at every stage of disease. So anytime there's an imbalance of heavy, light, sharp, dull, hot, cold, oily, dry, slimy, rough, dense, liquid, soft, hard, mobile, stable, subtle, gross, or clear or cloudy. Anytime there's an imbalance in any of those gunas or qualities, it's going to affect your spirit. It's going to affect your body. It's going to affect your decisions. It's going to affect your nervous system. And it's going to have a subtle effect on your system. And this is especially true after the third stage of disease, which is called the prasara or spreading stage. In that stage, in the third stage of imbalance, the imbalance enters the blood. There's a difference between your hand being cold and your whole body starting to shiver and feel like you are cold in the core of your being. So when the guna moves from being local to affecting you systemically, it enters the blood, and then your whole nervous system is in that new reality. Your mind is in that new reality. And that's where it starts to deform your nature, distort your nature. So in the first three stages of disease, a person generally has true cravings. And after the third stage of disease, cravings get distorted, and the nature of the person gets distorted. Alright, I've talked a lot about the subtle nature of disease, and how all diseases come as a surprise. And in a sense, all diseases are an accident. There's something that we didn't notice, some cause-effect relationship that we didn't notice, or some bacteria that we couldn't see, a mosquito that eluded our detection, and then it caused a problem for us, right? There are other subtle causes, like how about new technologies? Technology has had a huge effect on our community, a huge effect on our personal identity. The ramifications of these inventions are still being sorted out. Just look at all of the social unrest in the United States in 2020. Rioting all summer, riots at the Capitol, people angry with each other, all to make social media companies a bigger profit, right? Because people get addicted to controversy. So we're still sorting out the effects of these innovations. But not just social media, right? Social media is a big one. For the first time ever, a third party can access all your private social interactions. Even if it's just an artificial intelligence computer, it's watching all your social interactions. And that third party can control what you see and don't see, what is and what isn't reality. And use of social media has been highly correlated with depression and suicide. And that couldn't have been anticipated. I remember when Mark Zuckerberg was an intern of mine at Harvard University. I was responsible for reviewing his code, I was a software architect. Doing some consulting work for a department at Harvard when he was a student there. And he showed me a prototype of Facebook. And I remember, and I'm quite proud of this, but I told him that the idea was a terrible idea. That I totally disagreed with it. And I also said it would never work. And I guess that last statement was wishful thinking on my part. Because it did work, and it did become very popular. But the effects have not always been great. So what about some other technology innovations? How about a car? How does that change things? People are moving big distances on a daily basis. And that has enabled big box stores. And access to more goods. More travel. More commuting. But less local community. How about telephone? What does that enable for business relationships? I can talk to someone in Bombay and arrange a trade agreement. My company will purchase this many Ayurvedic herbs and that company will sell it. We can do business with people on the other side of the world very efficiently. Especially now with video conferencing. You can stay connected with your family even if you live far away from them. How about birth control? Huge effect on the culture of sex. Culture of marriage and divorce. Starting with a condom in the 1930s. With a birth control pill in the 60s and 70s. And so we've seen a huge sexual revolution. Even just sitting in front of a screen and getting blue light from computers. Make sure you're turning off your blue light on your computers and phones. Because that's disrupting sleep and mental health for many people. Processed foods also. And the list goes on and on and on. Alright, in the next video we'll talk about lifestyle habits that have a subtle effect. This talk has been on the subtleness of disease. Subtle causes of disease. And that difficulty of understanding cause and effect. So that disease sneaks up on you. And that's why all diseases on some level are an accident.