Use Ayurveda To Cleanse Your Face

August 6, 2009 by meerawatts  
Filed under Ayurveda

You can have an extensive control over the texture, clarity and health of your facial skin. This is based on how you cleanse your skin. Irrespective of the gender and age, you can follow a cleansing routing for your skin and thereby ensure that the suppleness and health of your skin is maintained over a period of time. Cleansing is undoubtedly the most important component of your skin care regime. If you are able to cleanse your skin in a proper manner, then you have almost made it.

The most proper method of cleansing ensures that the old surface skin, dirt particles, make-up and bacteria is removed easily and also ensures that there is no clogging of dirt and oil in the pores of the skin. This helps the skin to breathe easily and hence, the skin is good and healthy. A proper cleansing method also ensures that there is proper circulation of blood and also prepares the skin to receive the nutrients and lipids that are applied topically. You can use some of the methods that are a part of the age-old tradition named Ayurveda.

You should cleanse your skin twice a day. If you have exposed your skin to excessive amounts of dust, grime and pollution, then it is obvious that you need to cleanse your skin more than once. Cleansing your skin removes the natural oils from your skin but at the same time, not cleansing it regularly can cause problems like acne and breakouts. It is essential that you select a cleanser that suits your skin type. Often, soaps are very harmful for your facial skin and damage it over a period of time. If your cleanser is too oily, then it can cause clogging of the skin pores whereas if it is too dry, your skin can get irritated and dry up badly. So it is best to use ayurvedic cleansers or your facial skin. Often these cleansers are ultra-gentle, non-irritating and also include herbs that do not cause any damage to your skin.

The usual ayurvedic cleansers consist of natural ingredients like oats, lentils, turmeric, milk, yogurt, honey, citrus water and many more such things. These ingredients not only clean your skin but also enable healing of the already exposed and damaged skin. The traditional ayurvedic cleansers are based for vata, pitta and kapha type of skins. You should always wash your face with tepid water. This is because hot water causes excessive drying up of the skin and cold water does not dissolve the dirt and grime in your skin and hence does not really cleanse your facial skin. Ayurveda also comprises little but important things like the use of sponges, washcloths to cleanse the skin, washing the face with clean hands, splashing water on the face to start the cleansing process and the like. Ayurveda cannot only get rid of the various illnesses but also take care of simple things like cleansing your face and much more. Use ayurvedic ingredients and you will have a very nice and fresh life.

What Are The Six Tastes of Ayurveda?

August 6, 2009 by meerawatts  
Filed under Ayurveda

What is a balanced diet? It should encompass food items from different food groups that have proper nutrient values and of course, you should understand the requirement on a daily basis of these nutrients. If you keep eating an unbalanced diet continuously, then over a period of time, you will suffer from ill health that may be due to the deficiency or may be the overdose of some nutrients. But it is very unlikely that all of us are aware of the dietary requirements of our body. In such a case, you should resort to Ayurveda, the age old treatment therapy gaining immense popularity across the world today. Ayurveda entails a complex dietary requirement for the people who adopt it. However, the people who came up with all of this also came up with a simple dietary program that all of us can understand easily. This is referred to as the Six Tastes of Ayurveda. According to this program, we need a set of nutrients for the healthy well-being of our body. These could be fats, proteins, minerals, carbohydrates etc. And all of this is contained in meal that comprises the six tastes. The six tastes are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, astringent and pungent.

Most of the food items have more than one taste. Gooseberry found in India has all the tastes except salty. Something like turmeric contains three tastes – pungent, bitter and astringent. Ayurveda entails that the best meal should comprise all the six tastes. Each of the six tastes has a balancing effect and provides wholesome nutrition. They also help to minimize cravings and balance the appetite as well as the digestion. People in the west tend to include too much of sweet, sour and salty in their meals and tend to ignore the other three tastes. In the process, they end up having a very unbalanced diet. This is the cause for all the illnesses they suffer like heart problems, obesity and the like.

Though the broad principle in Ayurveda is to include all the six tastes in every meal that you eat, you have the option of customizing it as per the doshas that you are trying to balance at that point of time. There are three types of dosha – pitta, vata and kapha. Suppose you need to keep your pitta dosha in balance, then you should choose the food items that are sweet, bitter and astringent in taste and avoid excess of the rest. If you want to keep your vata balanced, you need to choose from more sweet, sour and salty food items rather than bitter, pungent or astringent. To your kapha balanced, you need to include more of buitter, pungent or astringent tastes in your meal. Ayurveda comprises following the six tastes to avoid diseases even before they occur.

Why is Ayurveda Gaining Popularity?

August 6, 2009 by meerawatts  
Filed under Ayurveda

Ayurveda is a holistic method of complementary treatment that has been designed to ensure that people are able to live long in a healthy and well-balanced manner. Ayurveda is derived from the Sanskrit words ayus (which means lifespan) and veda (which means knowledge). It started in ancient India some 5000 years ago and is now popular in the western countries as well. The very basis of using Ayurveda is to treat all sorts of illnesses by maintaining a much-needed balance of the body, mind and soul by consuming a proper diet, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and of course, using herbal remedies to cure the illnesses.

There are essentially two types of Ayurveda – Traditional and Maharishi. Traditional, as the name implies is the actual and original Ayurveda that came into existence in ancient India over the years. Maharishi, on the other hand, is a more modern form of the traditional form of Ayurveda. This is based on the translations that have been done from the original classical texts by a person named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. This focuses on the role of having supreme consciousness to maintain good and healthy body and mind. In fact, it also suggests the adoption of a meditation therapy named Transcendental Meditation. This helps you to experience the pure consciousness present in the universe. This method also stresses on the need to exude positive feelings in everything that you do and also to attune your life to the natural rhythms of your body. However, there are also some common factors between the two types of Ayurveda. Both prescribe herbs, say that the diseases are a result of the imbalance in the doshas (three basic energy types in the human body) and also adopt the same treatment methods for most of the diseases.

Ayurveda promises the longevity of your life as well inner peace. In fact, the ancient Hindu science of Ayurveda is rapidly becoming popular in the west. Be it athletes, Hollywood actors or the common man, all sorts of people are resorting to Ayurveda. All the spas and health centres now offer Ayurveda as a part of their menu these days. It ensures the physical, emotional and spiritual well-being of the human being. In the West, it is now known for its therapeutic as well as rejuvenative properties. Most of the people not only use Ayurveda to cure the illnesses they suffer from but also focus on helping their friends, family members and people around them to maintain a lifestyle of balance and harmony.

Good health entails harmony of the mind and body. However, disharmony means there is the presence of a disease in the human body. And where there is disease, there is the need for Ayurveda. This is the message that forms the foundation of Ayurveda as a method of treatment.