What Disorders Make You Ungrounded? - Getting Grounded With Ayurveda 4 of 20

Let's go through the physical conditions that will make a person more sensitive, and we'll do this going step-by-step through the main systems of the body. We'll start with the system that manages your energy levels called pranavas rotis in Ayurveda. And in pranavas rotis, we see the heart and the lungs, which are responsible for oxygenation of the blood and circulation of the blood. Conditions in this category include heart palpitations. If you have heart palpitations, you'll have undue awareness of your heart in your chest, and that will be very distracting to your nervous system and will make you more sensitive. Tachycardia literally means fast heartbeat. And if you have tachycardia, you're going to be more sensitive also. Irregular breathing. In Ayurveda, we understand the relationship between your breathing and tension in your nervous system and in your muscles. So smooth, regular breathing is going to be more stable and grounding, and irregular, tense breathing is going to make you more sensitive and more tense. Hyperventilation could make you lightheaded, and that is an example of subtle guna or making a person more sensitive. How about the food management system called anavas rotis in Ayurveda? In anavas rotis, if you are fasting, fasting is going to have many subtle ramifications, and it's going to make you sensitive. Fasting means that when you are restricting your food intake in some way, really challenging your desire to eat. And so one of the most subtle effects of fasting is detachment. You're detaching yourself from your desire to eat, which is a survival instinct. So you can see how that might be destabilizing. Not that all detachment is bad. Opening the mind and becoming detached can give you perspective, and that's really important. Also, that's why people who are spiritual do fasting regularly. But there's a fine line between overdoing it and getting the benefits and overdoing it. So fasting increases vata dosha in the body. It can create lightness in the body. And lightness in the body makes a person more sensitive. In general, just weight loss makes a person more sensitive. Weight gain makes a person more stable. It's kind of stubborn and grounded. And fasting makes a person very sensitive, open, and easily influenced. Generally speaking, not for everyone, just generally here, fasting can even make you lightheaded, which is a very sort of subtle effect. Eating disorders have subtle causes as well as subtle effects. The causes of eating disorders are very complex psychologically. And in terms of effects, they can cause degeneration in your digestive system for life. In the food management system, continuing here, we also see parasites, imbalanced microbiome, or bacterial overgrowth in the gut. All those things are going to have subtle effects on the entire body, both because they're creating toxins or ama in your system, as well as creating lots of gas and bloating, which is distracting. And then parasites themselves can damage your body. And you may not even know you have them. So very subtle there. Leaky gut. Leaky gut is almost, I would say, a quintessential physical condition that is subtle or makes a person sensitive. In leaky gut, your gut becomes permeable. And chemicals in the food enter or permeate through the digestive lining and come into direct contact with your bloodstream or may even go into your bloodstream. And that will make you feel very off kilter. So anything that kind of permeates into your body and distorts your blood chemistry has a very subtle effect on your system. So leaky gut is a big one there. How about in your water management system and lymphatic management system called Ambu Vahasrotas and Rasa Vahasrotas? Well, in your water management system, dehydration is going to make a person very sensitive. Electrolyte imbalances or any kind of blood chemistry imbalance at all, which I put in both the lymph and the water management system. These are all going to have strong effects on your nervous system, energy levels, and your mood. In the lymphatic system, again, blood plasma or blood chemistry. If you have Ama or toxins in your blood, if your blood sugar levels are off, if your hormones are imbalanced, if you have exposure to chemicals, exposure to allergens, exposure to pharmaceuticals, or the effects of things that you ate, all that's going to show up in your blood and affect your blood chemistry. And so that is going to have a subtle effect in your entire body systemically. Emaciation or depletion of your body is going to create more subtleness. As a person loses more and more weight, they become more and more subtle. Infection is going to have a very subtle effect on your body. How about your blood management system or ructivas rotas? Here we're looking at conditions like anemia, making you more cold, detached, tired, or bilirubin in your blood, which is when you have problems in the liver. Here we see a yellow eyeball, a classic sign of a person having some liver issues. And that can make a person very irritable. It could also make a person graceful too. A person being very graceful because they are so hypersensitive of how they appear to others. So being graceful is, of course, a nice outcome of that. But the cause could be pathological. Autoimmune conditions, genetic defects are also subtle because the cause is frequently unknown. And so they make you behave in a different way or feel bad or feel unhealthy or off kilter, but you don't even know where it's coming from. Your muscle management system, mumps of ructus, any kind of muscle wasting. And you see the theme here, that if you're losing muscle mass or losing fat tissue, you're going to be more sensitive. But if you have more bulky muscles, more fat, you're going to be more stable and grounded. Just generally speaking, not for every individual. So pain also is going to affect your whole nervous system. You may be grumpy, irritated, or feel hopeless or just distracted. Fibromyalgia is very subtle. Some of these things have subtle causes and some of these things make a person more sensitive. Fibromyalgia does both. And I really want to differentiate between those two categories. Because yes, we'll trace subtle causes for a condition that has a subtle cause, but that doesn't always mean that that condition is making us more subtle or making us more sensitive. So just keep those dividing lines clear in your mind. MARMA points. MARMA points are specific points in Ayurveda that have a big effect on your body. And there are points that we use naturally. If a person's thinking, they'll often touch their forehead, and there's a kind of MARMA point right there, or their temples. And all of those have effects on your nervous system. And it's a fascinating study to study. Those are kind of acupressure points. Chinese medicine looks at them as well. Acupressure points and MARMA points are very similar in how Ayurveda approaches them to how Chinese medicine approaches them. So they can be used to even cure conditions in Ayurveda. And if you press on them and you see one is really painful, then probably there are some problems that are showing up in that point, which can indicate a condition in your deeper tissues. Your fat management system, called meda vas rotas. Low body weight. Talked about it already. Adrenal fatigue is another one. People who tend to be overweight are more likely to have adrenal fatigue. And that could be why they're overweight, right? They're not producing enough stimulating stress hormones to keep moving. So their kidneys are a little bit weakened, and that causes a kapha condition. And also we see some acute adrenal fatigue here. Sometimes people have puffiness that goes further down and is more like bags under your eyes, right? That is more kidney related and more your water management system related. But a slight puffiness directly on the eyelid itself usually means a bad night's sleep and perhaps some adrenal fatigue. How about the nerve management system? Maja vas rotas. And here we're differentiating the nerves from the mind, right? We'll talk about the mind in just a little bit. All nervous system disorders, especially things that affect the brain, make a person, in general, increase subtle quality or have subtle effects. They all change the nature of the person. Especially things like anxiety, insomnia, or a person who's easily spooked has a lot of subtleness in their body, or it gets goosebumps easily, their hair standing up on end. Degenerative brain disorders are seen as subtle in Ayurveda. Any endocrine system disorders. And we talked about hormonal imbalances when we talked about the lymphatic system. But I'll just mention them here again, just because Ayurveda doesn't pull out this system as a different system altogether. So I'm kind of lumping it in two places here. Recreational drug use are going to affect your nerve system and have very subtle effects. Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, nicotine, caffeine, sugar. How about your reproductive management system? Called shukra or arthava vas rotas. Shukra for the male, arthava for the female. And here I want to just start off by talking about sexual relationships in general are very subtle. Just think about how you would answer these following questions. Has a relationship with another person ever changed the way you think about things, right? And here by relationship, I'm talking about particularly sexual relationships here, which tend to be a little more intense than just a friendship. Friends can change the way you think too. But has a sexual relationship ever changed the way you think about things? Have you ever broken someone's heart after creating too much closeness with them in the relationship? Have you ever had your heart broken? So it's just a fact many people are stuck in relationships that they don't want and that they may not have really wanted in the beginning. But somehow because of sexuality got entangled in there in that relationship and now feel stuck in it. Happens all the time. Intimate relationships, very close, intense, physical or emotional intimacy does have a subtle effect in your heart and your nature and your way of thinking and can really have lasting long-term effects. Sexuality is a huge part of our identity. It affects our whole being, especially in the area of our lifestyle choices, right? People make a lot of choices in their life on the basis of what kind of relationship and intimate relationship they want. So it's always very useful to ask when you're getting into a relationship, not just, hey, do I want this relationship? But two, how will this relationship change you as a person? Actually, there was, and if you're looking for a lifelong partner, someone that you're going to create a family with, another great question is, would you trust this person to raise your children if you died? Or if your children turned out exactly like that person, would you be happy, right? I think those are some important kind of grounding questions to ask when you're approaching a sexual relationship, whether short-term or lifelong sexual relationship. So we just got to take a serious look at things that affect our sexuality and affect our relationships because we often have a huge investment in them, and they often have big effects on us as well. So again, heart is a very subtle organ. It's not just an organ for circulating, but it's an organ for loving, for affection, for attachment, and it gets attached. So after a bad breakup, your heart may never fully recover. You may never fully trust, or you may trust the opposite sex again, or you may never come to be as free with your love or emotions after that. And so some care can be very important there. And I always find it astounding that there's so much mystery surrounding what is a healthy relationship because weather forecasters can predict the weather. Astrologers can claim to predict people's future on the subtle basis of where Mars is in the sky. We can send a person to the moon, right? And even in my clinic, my clients are eager to know the subtle differences between eating basmati rice versus eating jasmine rice. And this just seems to me that many clients, and many practitioners, and many psychologists really gloss over sexual choices as a causative factor in pathology. And they refuse to examine poor sexual habits with the client because it's such a sensitive topic, really hard to broach that topic with your clients. And so it's very difficult for them to support a client in establishing healthy rules for themselves. A lot of people don't even believe that there should be any rules regarding a person's sexual choices. As long as consent is involved, well, it's healthy, right? But I think that attitude glosses over the tremendous effect that our relationship choices have in our life. So maybe the topic really is baffling. Maybe it's just too scary to talk about because it triggers so much shame. But it is a touchy, but nevertheless, extremely important topic. So what should a practitioner do? And should you broach that topic or not as a lifestyle consultant for your clients? Well, a full, thorough discussion of that is outside of the scope of an Ayurvedic health counselor scope of practice. But again, remember, extremely important. Why is it so difficult topic? Why are we made to get sex wrong so often? Well, because we have such a powerful desire for it. And why do we have a powerful desire for it? Why is our biology designed that way? Because sex is life-giving, right? Through sex, we can reproduce. And so from a biological point of view, wow, there's a huge imperative there. And so because the desire is extremely strong, it's easy to delude oneself about what is healthy regarding our sexuality. Here's another thing. In the area of the reproductive management system, birth control, birth control hormones, here I'm specifically, I think all birth control has subtle effects in the way that we make relationship choices, but especially hormones because it is affecting our body directly physically, right? So sex hormones don't simply change your fertility or prevent fertility or contraceptive fertility. They actually change your whole body. Why? Because the pill works by making your body think it is pregnant, right? And anyone, you know, as a married man, you know, with five kids, when my wife is pregnant, she's very different. You know, it has a huge emotional effect. So a person taking a pill that makes them feel like or makes their body think it's pregnant is also going to be different emotionally. The pill, being estrogen-based, is very building and kappa aggravating. So it will cause weight gain. It will cause increased breast size. It will cause increased risk of fibroids and tumors of any kind, and especially breast cancer, especially if you smoke. Also, birth control changes your sexual preferences as well as your libido. It actually suppresses your libido, and also it changes the kind of person that you're attracted to, right? So women on birth control tend to prefer more effeminate men, and women who are not on birth control can, you know, be more attracted to men with classically masculine behavior. So that's just very interesting to think about taking a hormone that is going to affect something so basic as your sexuality. In general, contraception, even beyond hormonal birth control, has had a tremendous change in human sexual behavior. Just look at the difference between sex in the 1900s and sex in the 2000s. You know, we've gone from, you know, Britney Spears is just putting out a very different sexual vibe than you would have gotten from a popular female singer in the, you know, turn-of-the-century 1900s. Of course, sexuality has always been there, but people do make different sexual choices when using birth control than if birth control were not an option. You know, does that make birth control a liberation from our natural body? Our natural biology regarding sexuality? Or is it a distortion of our natural biology? These are important deeper questions for the individual to answer. What is authentic human sexuality if we are taking a hormone to alter it in some way? And another question, how would your life be different without birth control, I think is a really interesting question. And there's, you know, I find this fascinating here. Here's the, from the CDC, Center for Disease Control. They have relative effectiveness of different contraceptive methods. And you can see here that permanent sterilization has the, and IUDs are, and implants are the most effective. But let's take a look here at the pill. The pill has a 9% failure rate per year. So if you, so that means after five years, your odds are about 50-50 whether you will get pregnant or not using birth control, hormonal birth control. And then condoms themselves result in a pregnancy 18% per year. So you have an 18% chance of getting pregnant per year if you're having sex with a condom. Those are pretty high rates, right? So that means basically, you know, given a few years, you should expect a pregnancy. Sweat management. Let's go turn our attention from sexual and reproductive management systems to sweat management system. And that's called sveta vahasrotas. And specifically here, I'm talking about breaking out into a cold sweat, a hot sweat, normal, you're exercising, breaking out into a cold sweat often means that, you know, you just had a flood of stress hormones or something is very off kilter in your blood. I've broken out into a cold sweat several times, and it was like having an out-of-body experience. I mean, it was kind of a little intense feeling, very off kilter, very jittery, very lightheaded, kind of fainty kind of feeling. And in each case, for me, it was due to either some toxicity or sudden fear, like almost got into a car accident, something like that, where my vata was extremely high. Even after making a long presentation, I remember feeling just very nervous, very high vata once and started to have some of those symptoms. So the urine management system or mucha vahasrotas, again, dehydration, anything that is making you urinate a lot. Urine retention, which includes suppressing the urge to urinate, right? We have anal retentive, urine retentive. And so if you're suppressing the urge to go to the bathroom and doing the pee-pee dance, which is what kids do all the time, that's going to have an effect on your nervous system. And suppressing urges in general overstimulates the nervous system. Same thing then with feces management or bowel management, your perisha vahasrotas, anal retentiveness. It's going to make you anxious, constipated. And if you have constipation, gas, and bloating in general, that's going to lead to lots of ama or toxicity in your body. Diarrhea, on the other hand, can lead to emaciation, dehydration, and electrolyte imbalance. Now we'll turn to mano vahasrotas or the mind management system. Your upbringing itself has very subtle effects on how you live your life. So all the psychological factors, any kind of form of neurosis, any mental disorder, any kind of anxiety, especially neuroses and anxieties, which have a lot of fear at their basis, panic attacks, hypochondriacs, et cetera, all make a person very sensitive, very subtle. Stress also has a big subtle effect on our body. I'll talk about this more in the next video. Addictions, and we'll talk more about addictions in the mano vahasrotas presentation. Desires and aversions in general can kind of knock you around, right? When we talk about human freedom and a definition of human freedom, if we say human freedom means doing whatever I want, well, there's some problems with that definition, because sometimes our desires and our wants lead us in a direction that is not really good for us, right? That's not really reasonable. So wanting something and then just doing it is not always an expression of freedom. In fact, oftentimes we're our own worst enemy, right? So having desires and having aversions can push us even against our reason or against our higher knowing. And so what is an authentic definition of human freedom? It means the freedom to make happy choices in an unhindered manner. So if you have a strong desire that's making you or pushing you to make an unhappy choice, that's not really freedom, right? So desires and aversions can kind of put us in a jail and restrict our ability to make choices. Other examples of this might be actions that have hidden motives are very subtle. Yeah, and I have some examples here of desires and aversions. Suppressing natural urges. I've already talked about suppression of urine, suppression of poop, even suppression of gas, and then suppression of yawning, suppression of sleeping, suppression of eating. Any kind of suppression of a natural urge is going to stimulate your nervous system. And again, that doesn't mean that we should just act out any urge that can have bad ramifications too. But suppression of those urges also has subtle effects. All right, let's wrap this up. When a person is highly sensitive, due to any one of those factors we mentioned, it's going to be harder for them to maintain their boundaries, harder for them to make free will choices that are truly aligned with what they want. They'll feel affected by everything around them. They'll lose a sense of themselves. They'll be easily influenced by other people. Even very sensitive people can be overly empathetic to feel what other people feel too much instead of staying grounded in themselves, which all of that can lead to inconsistency and instability. So that could create a sense of chaos in their life with unpredictable outcomes. Long-term effects that are hard to anticipate can create roughness in your life and that eventually can reduce your resiliency to disease. Thank you, everybody.