Kindling The Digestive Fire: An Ayurvedic Approach To Digestive Health

Welcome to the course! This first session gives you an introduction to Ayurveda and the concept of the 'digestive fire', and we begin the course with a short meditation for you to connect with your digestive fire.

The doshas are the three biological forces that govern our bodies and our minds. In this session, you'll learn what the doshas are and why their proper functioning is so important for our digestive health, and you'll also learn about the 'five great elements' and how they form the doshas in our bodies. We finish with a meditation where you'll explore the potential effects of the different elements on your digestive fire.

There are four main ways that the digestive fire can be burning: it can be balanced/normal, too high, too low, or variable. In this session, you'll learn about the causes of an imbalanced digestive fire and how these are related to the doshas, and you'll learn to identify symptoms that arise with each of the different states.

The digestive fire follows a cycle in alignment with the passage of the sun over the day. In this session, we'll be exploring this cycle that the agni moves through and you'll learn the best things to eat at the different times of the day for optimum digestion of the food. You'll also learn a simple technique to help remove toxins that have formed from poor digestion.

We often place a lot of focus on the foods that we're putting into our bodies, but Ayurveda teaches us that the most important thing is how we eat them. This session begins with a meditation exploring the effect of eating in different environments and situations, and then we'll look at some of the Ayurvedic guidelines around the best way to eat for optimum digestion.

At the core of Ayurvedic theory is the concept of opposite qualities - conditions are treated with the opposite quality to that which caused it, eg. hot conditions are treated with coldness. In this session, we explore the effect that different qualities of food have on the digestive fire. We'll look at the qualities of foods that help to maintain a balanced agni and the qualities of foods that help to restore balance when the agni isn't burning properly.

Spices are considered to be a hugely important food group and medicine in Ayurveda. They have a close relationship to the digestive system and can help to balance the digestive fire and maintain good digestive health. In this session, we look at the best spices to use to treat the different states of Agni, and you'll learn a simple tea recipe that can be drunk at any time.

Congratulations on reaching the end of the course! There has been a lot of information included in the last seven sessions, so in this final session we'll look at how to make a successful change to your diet or eating routine and we'll do a reflection exercise and meditation to help you to clarify which change you are ready to make first.