Ayurveda
I am sitting across the table from Dr. Sharon Juraszek for dinner on a recent weekday evening. She’s glowing with a calm happy presence, having just returned from a trip to India for a Panchakarma treatment. Pancha means five and karma is procedures. It’s a very specialized Ayurvedic treatment to cleanse the gastrointestinal system, respiratory tract, and sinuses, performed under the care of a highly trained Ayurvedic practitioner.
Juraszek is a doctor of Ayurvedic medicine, a discipline based on the belief that each individual is made up of five elements: ether, air, fire, water, and earth. Combinations of these elements are called doshas; when they are imbalanced, disease occurs.
We begin our meal with a glass of wine and salads. Juraszek holds up her salad plate and says, “This is nature.” She holds up her wine glass and says, “It’s nature that nourishes, not processed garbage,” pointing out that the sun, the earth, and the rain created this bounty before us. “Food is medicine.”
She takes three intentional breathes before picking up a fork to enjoy our dinner. It’s a ritual she practices before each meal to settle her body into a parasympathetic state—relaxing the body’s nervous system so that it can perform life-sustaining functions such as digestion, which otherwise cannot properly occur when the body is in the fight-or-flight state that many of us are in for most of our days.
Simply taking a few breathes before each meal prepares the body to digest food sufficiently. “It’s making a conscious connection to our food.” I look at the plates of vegetables and wine from an entirely different perspective. With a moment to observe, you can see the miraculous beauty of the food that nature created for us. As an aside, while Juraszek enjoys an occasional glass of wine with food, she says it is not a regular practice, but one she’ll indulge in on seldom occasions.
The last time Juraszek and I got together we talked about her line of fermented foods, Fermentlicious, made with the intention to promote gut health. Studying to achieve her doctorate degree in Ayurvedic medicine was a natural progression of her career path. It was the next step to learn more information about gut health, believing that all disease begins with digestion. “I understood [that] to get to know the gut deeper, this is what I needed to do next.”
Juraszek explains the Ayurvedic practice is about diet, lifestyle, and herbal medicine. Under the diet category, she explains, it’s not just food we are consuming. We are consuming news on the television, music, and social media scrolling through images and videos on phones or tablets during mealtimes. That information we are taking in holds an energy that cannot be digested. It’s toxic to the body. “That saying ‘you are what you eat’ has many layers of meaning.”
She recalls a scenario shared by her professor One person is eating a bag of fast food in a peaceful state surrounded by nature and fresh air. Another person sits down to a home-cooked meal made with organic ingredients in front of a television with the news on, spewing words and drama through the speakers. The person eating the fast food has had a much healthier mealtime experience and is better off healthwise than the person with the nutritious home-cooked meal. The entire environment and experience is what we are consuming when we eat.
Juraszek takes a different approach to her Ayurvedic practice. While some practitioners begin with foods and herbs, she starts each patient with a simple diet of kitchari consumed for all three meals for anywhere from three to seven days. Kitchari is made from specific rice and beans, mineral salt, ghee, optional vegetables, and spices like cumin, ginger, turmeric, etc. She adjusts the spices to the individual’s doshas, which translates from Sanskrit to mean faults or diseases. There are three doshas: Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. Each is a combination of the five elements of Ayurvedic medicine which are ether (aakash), water (jala), earth (prithvi), fire (teja), and air (vayu). When a person’s doshas are unbalanced, symptoms including bloating, trouble sleeping, poor circulation, weight gain, sluggishness, poor concentration, and mood swings can occur, she says. She helps patients determine their dosha to achieve optimal health. Often, that one dietary change eliminates unfavorable symptoms. Once you clear digestion, you are able to address deeper issues with herbs and treatments, she says. Juraszek emphasizes that the food has to be organic. Eating food contaminated with pesticides defeats its beneficial properties. From there, each patient takes on a different regime specifically for their needs that continues throughout the treatment to achieve optimal health.
Juraszek explains her Ayurvedic practice like so: “In a time when everyone is speaking of ‘self-care,’ when we eat we choose ‘self-care.’ Consuming a healthy diet is the epitome of self-care. If you pay attention, your body is providing you feedback every time you eat. When we choose to eat with the intention of nourishing body and mind, we feel differently, we move through our day with more ease and joy.”
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