|
Greetings friends
A lot of you have sent me private messages requesting more information about Holistic Health Therapies, what it is and how it can be apllied in everyday life, so .....thanks to my friends Marilyn, Nan, Peggy, Georgios and many more, I am finally sitting down to write this article and tell you more about the concept of Holistic Living.
Holistic Health is, essentially based, on a more natural and balanced way of living. It works on the principles of the human being as the sum of the parts, ie. mind, body and soul .... and therefore, for all of them to be functioning properly, they need to be in unison, in harmony and evenly balanced out ....
You've heard the saying ... (Corpus san is Mentes san is).... which translates from Latin into to “A healthy body is a healthy mind” ... and we can add to that......(et labores is) "and a healthy business"!!!
As long as you feel healthy, your mind is positively set and you are at peace with your inner being, anything is possible.
I am sure you all get days where you wake up full of the joys of spring ready to tackle the world and other when you ever have that feeling of being sluggish, not being as productive as you would like to have been just because you slept bad, or because you ate something, or because you had an argument with someone.
Well Holistic Health Therapies advocates and promotes that "full of the joys of spring feeling" all year round ... not just when the sun is shining.
In Holistic tradition ... prevention is better than cure ...
There are lots of different types of Holistic Therapies around and, slowly but surely, I will try to explain each in simple, comprehensible terms, so that you may decide which is best for you, or how you may apply one, or more, to your everyday life in order to be healthier and happier.
Ayurveda, derives from the ancient Vedic scriptures of India;
Ayurveda believes that people belong to a particular body type, Vata, Kapha or Pitta, which are known as the three Doshas. Although, individuals seem to appertain more closely to one rather than another, naturally, all doshas are contained with the singular individual and need to be well balanced for health to be mantained.
According to Ayurvedic tradition, everything we eat, drink, think, feel, see, hear, experience at all, in any way, affects the way we are, how are body is, how we think, react, our state of being and our physical health.
Health and disease are both explained on the basis of a constant interplay of constituent elements within the body, our routines, our environment, our daily diet regime and the influences of time and season, which are considered the natural cyclic rhythms in life and within the cosmos.
The word Ayurveda (in Sanskrit Ayu means life and Veda means to know), therefore it can be literally translated as the knowledge of life or the knowledge by which nature of life is understood and thus life prolonged.
A little history …
According to Hindu mythology, Brahma is considered the creator of all things; he is the fountain of all knowledge, he is the first teacher of the universe. The original Ayurvedic texts were said to consist of 100,000 hymns, divided into one thousand chapters. Brahma realised that this would be incomprehensible to man, so he set forth and abridged it; dividing it into eight parts, having medicine (Kayachikitsa), and surgery (Shalya Tantra) as the main subjects.
Once Brahma had finished compiling this documentation of science, he propagated his knowledge through Daksha Prajapati, who taught this science to the legendary Ashwini Kumars, the celestial physicians to the gods, who also appear in the sacred scriptures of the Vedas under the names of Dasra and Nasatya. Please note, that these and many other names of the Vedic gods appear in the documents found in the excavation in Boghaz Koyi in Cappadocia, northwest Mesopotamia. It is, therefore, believed that the Mitanian kings used to worship the Vedic gods as early as 1600 B.C.
The Ashwins imparted the science of medicine to Indra, who is considered the chief of all the Gods in heaven and, also, reputably the first God to share this knowledge with mortals.
According to the popular school of medicine represented by Charaka, the first mortal who received this science from god Indra was Bharadwaja. He passed it down to Atreya and other great sages, until it reached Agnivesha, who seems to have been the first to compose the Ayurveda. Charaka text in true Atreyan tradition.
However, according to the old Dhanvantari School of Surgery, represented by the celebrated surgeon Sushruta, Indra favoured Dhanvantari with the entire knowledge of Ayurveda. Dhanvantari, who warded off death, disease and decay from the celestials, appeared in the form of Divodasa, the king of Kashi (modern Benares or Varanasi). It is believed that a group of suffering sages, among whom Sushruta, approached Dhanvantari, for healing, he agreed to help them and, during their time with him Sushruta recorded word for word the teachings of Dhanvantari.
In more southern parts of India, Agastya is credited with the dissemination of Ayurvedic teachings and although the original text is no longer available to us, there are texts written by Charaka, Sushruta and Samhitas that dates back to roughly 1000 BC.
Charaka, in his writings, took the role of moralist, philosopher and above all a physician; whereas, Sushruta has tried to cast off whatever shackles of priestly domination remained at his time, and created an atmosphere of independent thinking and investigations, which later characterized the Gr eek medicine. It is believed that Shukruta was responsible for turning the art of surgery into a practical science. One of his disciples, Nagarjuna, following in his master’s footsteps, then developed Sushruta Samhita which still prevails today.
The Science of medicine received the greatest support and stimulus in India during the Buddhist era. The Buddha (563-477 B.B.), himself, was an advocate of medicine and regularly attended on the sick disciples in his camp. When the Buddha declared that: "to be born is to suffer, to die is to suffer, and to fall sick is to suffer", his followers started the tradition of tending to the sick as part of their religious obligations.
The famous Bower Manuscript found in a Buddhist stupa in Kashgar, written in Indian Gupta script, by an unknown travelling Hindu scholar-physician about 450 BC, has several references to the Buddha as Bhagava and Tathagata. The later Mahayana Buddhists even raised, Bhaishajyaguru, one of the Bodhisattva Mahasattvas to the status of a god of medicine, whom is known in China and Tibet as "Bhuguru" and in Japan is still worshipped today as Yakusha Niyorai. Unfortunately, the original Sanskrit texts, translated into the Tibetan language, such as: the Rgvud Bzhi (Four Tantras), was lost during the Chinese occupation of this territory.
None the less, by this time Ayurveda teachings had spread tremendously throughout the Asian regions and monasteries dedicated to this art of science were being set up everywhere, especially in Mongolia, which influenced Russia.
The most renowned Mongolian medical college was at the Yung-Ho-Kung monastery, famous during the era of the great Peking empire. It was where almost all Mongal and Tibetan students studied the science of healing. One of the most famous, modern day, physicians to emerge from this monastery, was N.N. Badmaev, a Siberian, who practiced Ayurveda successfully in Leningrad and had among his patients, some of the prominent Communist leaders, Bukhrin and Rykov, the famous writer Alexei Tolstoy, and even Joseph Stalin (Lokesh Chandra).
During the second century BC, Elder Vagbhatta of Sind wrote an addtion to the existing texts of the Sushruta and Charaka, which, in unison, became known as the “Triad of ancients”: Long before Islam was established in the Middle East and due to the influence of migrating travellers, Ayurveda spread into the Arabic world thanks to several courts who received such travellers. The most famous was the court of Baghdad and the second Abbasid Khalifa al-Mansoor, who extended his patronage to the Hindu scholars from Sind, including Pandits who presented his host with two Indian books on astronomy, which were later translated into Arabic by al-Fazari, and Yaqub ibn Tariq.
The last revival of the orthodox school of Ayurveda was in the sixteenth century, mainly due to Bhava Mishra, a physisician who practised and taught medicine in Kashi (modern Benares, Varanasi). He wrote the famous text Bhava Prakasha (1558-59), which is the first text to ever mention syphilis (Firanga roga, meaning the Portuguese disease, since it was the Portuguese who first introduced it into India). In the text he discusses in detail its various stages and treatment.
The Arabs had contacts with India much before the birth of Islam, since the Indian products trekked along the trade routes passing through the Arabian countries. During the spread of Buddhism into Northwestern Asia, the Indian scholars travelled through Persia and Arab countires, which brought them still closer to Indain culture. Many words of Indain origin like kafoor (karapura in Sanskrit; comphor) and Zanjabil (Shringavera in Sanskrit; ginger) appear in the Koran.
There is so much more that could be said about the history of Ayurveda but the main bulk of it is here. Next issue, I will tell you about the “Three Dosha concept”.
|