PART ONE
1
WHAT DOES IT mean to be a fully conscious parent—aware not only of your child’s body, but of their mind and spirit? Many of you may have explored self-care through different wellness modalities like mindfulness, meditation, or yoga—perhaps also including Ayurveda—and you may have come to see the power of the mind-body-spirit connection in your own life and experienced firsthand the many benefits of embracing a more conscious lifestyle. Now that you’re a parent seeking to extend that same awareness to your children and adopt wellness routines into your everyday parenting practices, you may be left looking for respected sources of information and ways to confidently implement these techniques to fully support the development of your children. Let’s look at how to identify the mind-body connection in both you and your children.
Mind-Body Connection in Daily Life
Parenthood affords us many opportunities to consider the power of the mind-body health connection. Your children give you the gift of consistently bringing your attention back to the present moment from today’s fast-paced world, allowing you to slow down and become mindful of the here and now. When this happens, you relax. Maybe you feel your shoulders soften, notice your breath slow and deepen, or even sense the tension in your facial muscles loosen. Suddenly you’re smiling and feeling calm. Think about the time you spend putting your kids to bed. Speaking softly, reading a bedtime story, and simply slowing down in this evening routine may give you the feeling you have more to offer your children in those moments than you did all day. At times like these, it’s easy to notice the tremendous influence your mind has over your physical body and how the positive effects of implementing mindfulness techniques to become present and calm the mind and body can improve the quality of your life and health.
Some days, it’s easier to recognize the mind-body connection on the opposite extreme when it’s triggered by stress. Even for parents who juggle childcare and after-school schedules with work and family life successfully most of the time, feelings of stress can creep in, leaving you overwhelmed and longing for more hours in the day to meet the demands of modern-day parenting. These feelings can derail your best efforts to maintain daily rhythms and a harmonious home or even lead to unhealthy changes in your sleep patterns, energy levels, or eating habits. With life sliding in and out of balance, it’s easy to see the effects your mind and emotions have on your body and physical health.
Let’s take a look at what happens. Maybe you had an interrupted night’s sleep because you had to wake up multiple times and tend to a child, and the next day your patience wears thin when trying to finish a work assignment. Or a family member suddenly demands your attention, breaking your focus, and you feel your muscles seize or your heart race. This might cause you to lose your appetite or reach for something unhealthy to eat or lie awake worrying about the time you lost that day, setting yourself up for more fatigue. The interplay between mind and body is easy to recognize within yourself and obvious to you as examples of the mind-body connection. The same thing happens with your children—only they don’t have the same awareness of it yet, and that’s where you come in with Ayurvedic practices to support their developing mind-body system.
Ayurveda presents a body of knowledge on the role of this powerful connection for you to explore across different stages of your child’s development and its influence on emotional health through thoughts and behaviors. This framework can help you cultivate a consistent, mindful approach to parenting that will promote vibrant and lasting health in your children.
Parenting Mindfully with Ayurveda
Striving to be a more conscious parent can sometimes seem a lofty ambition. Parenting more mindfully often means developing a keen awareness of the multitude of influencing factors that can impact your child’s physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being on a daily basis. This can lead many parents to wonder how they can possibly find time to implement mindfulness techniques in their parenting practices without adding more stress to a life already at max capacity. Let’s explore how.
Ayurveda provides parents a simple, multidimensional approach to balancing your child’s body, mind, and spirit using natural and cost-effective practices. The application of Ayurveda in daily life is inviting and flexible and something every parent can bring into their home to establish and maintain wellness practices for the whole family. Throughout this book, we will explore daily routines, lifestyle tools, and everyday practices for your child, and later, discuss common childhood diseases and management of mind- and body-related disorders. One of the joys for parents discovering Ayurveda is that it never loses sight of the whole child—much like you—even while focusing on the separate components of body, mind, and soul.
ayurveda in the digital age
Parenting in the millennial age means perceiving and defining health differently than past generations and, for many individuals, expecting more from their health care. Many parents today are driven by a more proactive, preventive view of health and in search of a bridge between traditional and modern medicine that complements that perspective: something that closely resembles the multidimensional, individualized, and collaborative approach your child’s doctor might take if he were both shaman and pediatrician. Perhaps that is how you came to read this book, searching out the best of both worlds, motivated by your own independent research online, reading books, and comparing notes with your circle of friends on the different resources available to help navigate your parenting journey. As you may have discovered, it’s not always a simple path.
As parents can attest to better than anyone, life in the digital age often means being engulfed by information and feeling pulled in many directions at once. Simply researching a children’s health remedy, for example, generates a stream of data and information from every corner of the globe—often causing more confusion. What starts out as a straightfor-ward search query for a parenting tool can unwittingly turn into a never-ending quest to ensure your child’s holistic development maps with the best advice every nation has to offer. This can compel parents to adopt more and more wellness routines in an effort to do the absolute best for their children, leading to even more uncertainty and not knowing where to turn. Maybe you’ve come to this through your own experience seeking natural healing remedies and alternatives, while longing to find the converging point for all these paths. The comprehensive science of Ayurveda helps parents both streamline and personalize their family’s wellness plan as a complement to family health care, downsizing the information overload and setting children on a path to thrive. Let’s look at how that works.
ayurveda and your child
When exploring the role the mind-body connection plays in children’s health, parents can wonder: With the impacts of the brain-body connection so profound in a fully grown adult, how are they affecting a developing child? And what will the effects be specifically on my developing child? Finally comes the million-dollar question—what can I do to promote positive development? A lot.
The collective knowledge and ancient wisdom of Ayurveda comprehensively answers these questions and forges a deeper understanding of the mind-body-spirit connection so you can live more consciously across all the aspects of your life. This offers you a gateway to create and maintain positive health, one family member at a time. In contrast to conventional medicine, Ayurveda assumes that we are actually not all identical on the inside or the outside and asserts the highest level of respect for each person’s uniqueness. This belief strongly emphasizes that one size does not fit all when it comes to approaching health and well-being. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Strikingly different from other systems of medicine, Ayurveda empowers the individual to know themselves and act from there. You are considered the healer, and Ayurveda, the science that supports you. This science is fully comprehensive and considers all aspects of a person’s life—each no less important than the others. When creating individual wellness protocols, for example, Ayurveda takes a multidimensional view that reflects all the levels of an individual including the spiritual, physical, emotional, intellectual, behavioral, familial, environmental, and universal. Everyday health programs are then tailored around each of these components and to a person’s unique body type and makeup—or prakriti—for a complete wellness plan.
This individualized approach to promoting health and managing disease offers parents the opportunity to apply the same fundamental techniques and guidelines to each of their children and simply fine-tune them according to each child’s respective nature. Observing your children through this truly holistic lens encourages you to celebrate their uniqueness and true natures. It also invites you to view your whole child and the dynamic effects of the mind-body connection and how those may be manifesting across all of the different systems of your child’s body.
One of the guiding principles at the helm of this holistic science—which we will explore shortly—is Ayurveda’s health triad, which explains that mind, body, and soul are inseparable from their components, functioning together for better or worse—much like you and your children. When you view this triad as Ayurveda does—as inextricably connected from the very threshold of consciousness (before birth) and throughout a person’s lifetime—you can clearly see the profound effects the mind-body-spirit relationship has on every stage of your child’s development.
Ultimately, this framework offers you more ways to know your children and expands your parenting toolbox to include wisdom and strategies that may not have been passed down to you from earlier generations. Ayurveda brings that generations-old wisdom into your home and gives you the comfort and confidence of having another support in place to meet your children’s ever-shifting needs throughout every stage of childhood.
Ayurvedic Physiology
You may be wondering exactly how these influences can directly impact the functions of a child’s body. This brings us to Ayurvedic physiology, a fascinating science that describes physiological function in terms of holistic health or a person’s whole being. Whereas Western medicine primarily focuses on the structures of the physical body, Ayurveda centers around the energies behind the structures of the physical body and their ability to regulate and maintain each other in a whole is greater than the sum of its parts type of way. This synergy defines how these biophysical energy principles—or “functional energies” as they are termed—can enhance or diminish the functions of your child’s body based on everyday experiences.
In this way, Ayurveda extends the reach of conventional Western medicine and offers a holistic perspective on physiological function to help you understand the ways you have more control over your child’s health—and your own—than you might think. Once you have the context to better understand what is happening inside your child’s body, this steers a more thorough examination of your lifestyle choices, some of which you may even currently regard as superficial. The more insight you gain from learning about the impacts and energetic reflections your child’s environment and habits have on their various body systems, the more instinctive your choices will become.
Ayurveda’s approach to health and physiology provides a steppingstone to a higher state of wellness and integrates a system of proven science and ancient wisdom with modern medicine. It is important to note the two are perfectly compatible, and practicing one in no way excludes you from practicing the other. In fact, Ayurveda embraces the advances of modern science, working alongside Western medicine to provide individuals the most integrated, comprehensive care possible.
One of the greatest joys of adopting the principles of Kaumarabhritya, Ayurveda’s branch of pediatrics, is the opportunity it provides parents to discover new dimensions to their children. For many parents, getting the green light to view and cultivate the physical health and mind of their child developing in sync opens up a great body of knowledge to reflect upon and emerge from with a pocketful of credible, holistic tools that can support your children’s vitality and well-being.
Ayurveda’s Health Triad: Body, Mind, Soul
The evolution of America’s alternative and nonconventional medicine practices has catapulted quite a bit of ancient wisdom into mainstream health today. For many of you on a journey to embrace a more wellness-conscious lifestyle, it’s no surprise to hear that you are not the body and you are not the mind, but instead a perfect union of body, mind, and soul.
For individuals and parents seeking a more balanced and natural way of living that promotes whole health, the concept of body, mind, and spirit being intimately entwined in a cosmic dance has become more familiar than extraordinary. In fact, you may already have an understanding of this paradigm from your own investigations into the mind-body connection as one continually suffused with impressions that will eventually materialize from consciousness into matter. In other words, all of your perceptions and inputs will at some point in time manifest physically or mentally in your mind or body. Perhaps that resonates with you on some level, but the nuances are hard to grasp. You may have simply settled for knowing the mind-body connection has the power to heal everything from your child’s eczema to your own feelings of stress and anxiety—or sleeplessness, as one prominent example—and continued on with your wellness routines.
Ultimately, what you want to understand is how you can directly apply this knowledge of the mind-body connection in real time—across all the aspects of your daily life and the lives of your children. Exactly how does all this work morning, noon, and night? Enter Ayurveda.
As part science and part art of balanced daily living, what Ayurveda gives you—in addition to practical guidance—is routine and spirituality you can follow in your day-to-day life. The purpose of Ayurveda is to provide you the tools to achieve, maintain, and preserve health so you can live a long and happy life. Ayurveda emphasizes prevention of the imbalances that lead to disease as the most important way to achieve this goal and recognizes these imbalances can emanate from both the mind and the body. According to Ayurveda, prevention by definition is creating balance and functions as a science unto itself that sets forth guidelines and tools for resisting disharmony both internally and externally to maintain a state of health. Following Ayurvedic routines can help you establish rhythms in your child’s daily life that align with these basic principles and connect us to nature to stay strong, harmonious, and balanced.
The first step on your journey toward whole family health is knowing that you are the primary healer. Ayurveda empowers everyone to take complete authority over their health and well-being. As a parent, you’re operating from this threshold already—making Ayurveda your perfect counterpart. Once you learn a couple of foundational philosophies, what you will find is that these teachings, ancient as they may be, are actually quite intuitive. For example, now that you are familiar with the health triad, you understand that every individual is considered indivisible in mind, body, and spirit. When you view this oneness rising into existence from the moment of conception, you can see how your lifestyle patterns and choices have the ability to affect your child’s development both inside and outside of the womb. Let’s take a look at how it all begins.
the birth of mind, body, and spirit
Ayurveda views these three layers of the health triad as seamless and inseparable from conception, and their unbreakable union constitutes a human being. According to Ayurveda, human life begins at the single cell in the mother’s womb that contains the entire seed potential to develop into a full-blown adult with a body, mind, and spirit. It’s a concept you’re already familiar with—how many times have you said yourself or heard someone say they can see the potential in someone or something? Just because it hasn’t manifested yet doesn’t mean it’s not there. A whole tree is already there in the seed; it just hasn’t emerged yet. It’s the same with the seed potential of a cell—in this case, the zygote. The cell, just like the seed of a tree, simply needs to be nurtured and supported for a child to emerge. It is fascinating to recognize that the oneness of body, mind, and spirit is fixed from the moment of creation. Finally, when the conditions are optimal, the zygote is nurtured and a child is born. This is how Ayurveda comes to understands a child’s body and mind as developing in tandem.
These layers of body, mind, and spirit support and hold each other together in a truly synergistic and magnetic way and cannot ever be separated—even if sometimes you’d like them to be—like when you lose your cool or someone hurts your child’s feelings. The chain reaction across each of these layers of existence simply cannot be stopped. Comprehending the deep intelligence and mutual feeling integral to this paradigm helps parents understand that what underlies a child’s state of health and well-being is the harmony of this triad. The key to unveiling your child’s greatest potential—and the goal of healthy living—is preserving this balance. In the coming chapters we will explore different ways to identify and restore imbalances as they arise. First, though, let’s look at why Ayurveda is so important in the lives of children.
Kaumarabhritya
Ayurveda’s branch of pediatrics, Kaumarabhritya, explains early childhood as the most open, ready to nourish, ready to nurture stage of a human being’s life. This is the period you can most effectively support every milestone of your children’s development and, at the same time, help them to express their highest human potential throughout their lives.
What is the one thing in life you want most for your children? It is a universal truth that above all else, parents want their children to be healthy and happy and will do everything in their power to help them succeed. Often, it can be as simple as sharing your own happiness with them. How many times have you relayed a funny story to your child at the end of the day just to make them laugh and see them smile or shown them a picture of something that made you smile? It’s instinctive to share the things that bring you joy with your children.
In the same way, it’s instinctive to want to include your children in some of your daily wellness practices and lifestyle routines, like meditation or yoga—or even introduce them to various healing foods or herbs you may be exploring in your kitchen or garden. Perhaps you picked up this book to learn some new natural remedies and routines you could use at home or because of a growing concern you have over a particular condition affecting your child and are searching out additional resources. The teachings of Kaumarabhritya offer parents guidance on the prevention and management of various pediatric health conditions not based on physical symptoms alone, but according to the specific age and mind-body type of your child. You will learn how to identify your child’s unique nature and determine their prakriti in the next chapter using a simple assessment chart and quiz that will serve as the basis of your Ayurvedic wellness protocols.
early childhood
The mind-body system in early childhood is like a sponge, absorbing every exposure as a direct download across all its receptors. What you may intuitively think happens is exactly what occurs: based on a multitude of exposures—which we will define in detail in coming chapters—and what is being absorbed, the mind-body system at some point starts reflecting these aspects back like a mirror. This is the way Ayurvedic science views our existence—as part of the cosmic existence. The human body is considered a mirror of our physical surroundings. In this way, everything external becomes internal. The everyday effects of different environments on your child’s mind and body along with the inputs they receive in early childhood will influence their entire life. Their behavior, strengths, and even responses to stimuli like stress later in life will be based on how they were nurtured during the early childhood period.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could cherry-pick the best inputs of the day for your children to absorb? As a parent, it’s difficult not to worry about the occurrences of incidents in your child’s life that you may not have chosen and would remove if you could. As your children get older, or as you may already know if you have adolescents, spending more time away from home becomes the norm, and means you have even less control over what your child is exposed to day to day. Just as Ayurveda provides tools to optimize health, it also offers tools to minimize the negative effects of unwanted environmental or lifestyle exposures. Regardless of life’s circumstances, there is much you can achieve using tailored, everyday Ayurvedic lifestyle tools to foster strength and vibrant health in your children, regardless of age.
Raising a child is a time in life when parents need a lot of support. There are so many aspects of their life to keep track of that it can sometimes be easy to lose sight of the big picture when managing the minutiae of issue after issue one at a time. The guidelines of Kaumarabhritya offer parents a way to effectively deal with the dynamic role of coordinating family health without ever inadvertently isolating any one part of your child. Take illness, for example. How many times have you treated your child’s fever, then spent the rest of the day comforting them with your presence and providing them the emotional reassurances they needed to feel better? Physical remedies on their own are simply not enough. You can attest to this from your own experiences taking care of yourself as well. The nature and science of Ayurveda help you extend that same level of inner peace you feel when you know you are able to support your physical, mental, and spiritual needs to your children. It’s bolstering to know they can benefit from this same harmony not only for their immediate growth and development but also for the future goal of transitioning to a healthy and happy adulthood.
Despite the day-to-day insanity that underlies raising young children—and the frequent, silent longings for a moment’s peace in the bathroom—ultimately, there’s nothing parents want more than to express their unconditional love to their children. Practicing Ayurveda with your children perfectly expresses that love and brings abundant joy and presence to your relationship. Ayurveda recognizes the “healthier your child, the happier they are” credo, making it the perfect companion for parents at every stage of childhood and, just as important, at every stage of parenthood.
ayurveda’s invitation to parents: come as you are
When parents first encounter natural healing systems like Ayurveda, they often feel guilty or even more stressed seeing all the ways they could have done better for their child. Becoming acquainted with the bright myriad of our mistakes is always humbling—and there is some burden that stems from all of this holistic learning!
It’s natural to feel some anxiety when you come face-to-face with the profound influences the mind-body connection has on your child and the effects of certain lifestyle choices you may have made up to this point. However, one of the many things that makes Ayurveda so special is its perfect design to meet everyone who shows up exactly where they are; it is truly an open invitation to come as you are. If you have done the best you can for your child—which most parents are always doing based on the knowledge and awareness available to them at that point in time—there’s no room for any regret or certainly any guilt. All that matters is what you’re doing now, in the present moment. What you may come to find is that taking a more mindful approach to your parenting style will actually quiet a lot of self-doubt and bring with it a presence that is deeply connective and mutually nourishing for both you and your children. The guidelines and routines from the time-tested system of Ayurveda will not only be a comfort in the coming chapters but will also make you a more confident parent and your journey more fulfilling.
Assessing the Whole Child
What’s the first thing your doctor assesses at a wellness visit? Is it your well-being? How about your mood or new tendencies and lifestyle patterns? Most likely they dive right into the physical symptoms assembly-line style to get you moving through the door where the remaining nine patients of the hour are waiting to be seen. If you’re lucky, you will have established some modicum of personal connection with your doctor over the course of your relationship that doesn’t leave you feeling in some way neglected or compelled to go home and begin searching online for more information. Modern-day medical appointments can sometimes feel both too clinical and too rushed.
Millions of parents today are embracing the use of natural remedies and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) for the benefit of their children. The out-of-pocket spending alone of $1.9 billion a year on children ages four to seventeen—none of it covered by insurance—tells the story that conventional Western medicine is missing something. For many of today’s health-conscious parents, holistic support for both mind and body, along with a patient-focused, collaborative health care experience, is not something they’re willing to compromise on—especially when it comes to their children. Ayurveda fills in the gaps.
the fabulous four: components of the whole child
While modern health care systems essentially look at physical parameters to assess the health and development of an individual, Ayurveda explores the whole person—or whole child in this case—aligning with your own view of your children. These include the fabulous four: the physical, functional, mental, and emotional aspects of your child.
Let’s look first at the physical, which we’re all familiar with. Ayurveda considers the physical body as a carriage that supports the journey of the soul. Unique to Ayurveda is the interpretation of the term body to include both the physical and functional energies you just learned about in Ayurvedic physiology. The key is that Ayurveda assigns more importance to these functional aspects, whereas modern medicine focuses on the physical structures of the body alone.
According to Ayurveda, all of the functions of the physical body are carried out by functional energies—blood flowing through blood vessels, food transforming into nutrients, tissues forming from nutrients, etc. These energies are responsible for regulating all of the body’s growth and development and even a person’s vibrancy and energy levels. Think of these energies as the electricity that illuminates a bulb. Without that electrical energy, the bulb doesn’t do anything. Similarly, an organ without functional energies does not fulfill its functions in the physical body.
Let’s take a look at how this works. The cells and tissues in our structural body are constantly degenerating due to wear and tear and completion of their life cycles while at the same time being newly constructed through cellular nutrition. One hundred twenty days is the optimal life of a red blood cell in the body. Childhood, however, is a different story because this is a period when the building of new tissue needs to be carried out faster than the wear and tear and other degenerative processes naturally occurring in the body. In this stage of life, the required ratio of tissue building over degeneration is not the same as for adults, and a greater skew toward building is essential for the optimal development of various organ systems and growth of a child. This is where functional energies come in. When one of the functional energies becomes imbalanced—due to lifestyle or environment, let’s say—it can compromise the function of one or more of the body’s systems and affect a child’s development.
In the same way you have come to understand the oneness of body and mind, you can also grasp the relationship between the physical body and functional energies: they are similarly intertwined and supportive of each other. Every physical structure of the body is designed to accomplish a function, and at the same time, every healthy structure is the outcome of a functional process. In other words, healthy function is what maintains an organ or body system. When the functions of the body are negatively affected, it can result in the structural alteration of that organ or system. For example, increased blood pressure often causes enlargement of the heart chambers or damage to the kidney cells. The goal of Ayurveda is to keep the energies responsible for the functions of the physical body in balance.
Understanding these energies at work in your child on a physical, functional, mental, and emotional level can help you support them throughout this all-important age of development. Ayurveda explains that body and mind are always working together as a single unit, and any ripple in the mind influences the body and vice versa. Because of this, assessing and understanding a child’s mental and emotional status helps in the personalization of guidance based on the unique nature and needs of the child.
The Three Functional Energies
What makes a clock tick or a bulb illuminate? We obviously know it’s not the clock or the bulb itself. In the same way, you can understand that the basis of Ayurvedic physiology rests on the functional energies behind the physical body—and not with the physical body. Knowing these energies govern all of the body systems and can enhance or diminish function according to their state of equilibrium can help you see just how much influence you have over your child’s health.
On its own, modern medicine leaves the impression that beyond basics like staying hydrated or taking a daily regimen of supplements (more on that later), individuals have almost no control over the physiological systems and functions of their bodies. This perception alone can create feelings of vulnerability and helplessness that often exacerbate any health conditions you might be dealing with or that may arise. This can be especially defeating for parents facing an illness or disorder of any magnitude impacting their child. Discovering the ways functional energies can influence specific physiologic processes of the body along with the different ways you can help keep them in balance offers you many ways to support your children’s health and well-being.
Ayurveda invites you to discover the definition of health and immunity from a new framework. According to the Vedic texts, health expands far beyond the absence of illness and infirmity and is best be looked at from the perspective of living a fulfilling and blissful life.
Ayurveda defines health as the balanced state of the functional principles (dosha), digestion and metabolism (agni), optimally nourished tissues (dhatu), and elimination (malakriya) with a pleasant and vibrant soul, the senses, and the mind. This harmony on the inside helps resist disharmony on the outside to prevent disease—Ayurveda’s definition of immunity. There are three types of functional energies that govern all of the functions of the body, and it is their balanced union that maintains health. On the flip side, any imbalance in these functional energies—whether excess or deficiency—can lead to a state of disease, thereby causing qualitative changes in physiological functions. You may already be somewhat familiar with these doshas, as the term has become popular in wellness circles. Let’s look at them a little more closely.
the doshas
The energy that governs the age of childhood is kapha, the glue energy that holds everything together. This energy principle supports the integrity of tissues, nourishment, and stability of a child. A deficiency of kapha leads to lack of nourishment or thinness, whereas an excess can cause weight gain and congestion. The second energy principle is pitta, the fire energy that cooks. Pitta facilitates transformation, digestion, metabolism, and warmth. The depletion of pitta can slow down digestion and metabolism, causing lethargy, whereas too much pitta can lead to excessive heat in the body that expresses as anger or a fever, for example. The master principle energy responsible for all flow, movement, and activity is vata, the energy of vibration. A deficiency of vata can slow down flow, enthusiasm, and activity, whereas the excess may lead to restlessness, dryness, and inconsistencies in body functions.
As we continue to explore the doshas in the following chapters, you will become familiar with the specific ways these shifting energies can affect your child’s entire system and the importance of keeping them in harmony. While the doshas each have their own independent qualities that continually influence the mind-body system, they also work together as a group to carry out different functions of the body’s various systems.
Sometimes they work in pairs, and at others all three operate together—either supporting the key principle of one dosha or a single body function as a group. For example, vata dosha governs the principle of movement and is independently responsible for the functions of inhalation, exhalation, and the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the respiratory system. In this case, kapha supports vata by providing the moistness and mucous lining essential for the smooth functioning of breathing. In the case of digestion, the doshas work all together: Vata transports all of the body’s digestive secretions to the stomach and carries out movement of the gut. Pitta facilitates the production of digestive acids and transformation of food into nutrients. And kapha provides the protective lining of the stomach, which holds everything in its proper place.
You might be wondering how you can possibly keep all of these energies in balance all of the time. First, Ayurveda gives you a viewfinder of sorts to bring the doshas clearly into focus. Once these energies become visible, you can then assess the state of your child’s doshas and choose from many different techniques to restore balance as needed by integrating the natural principles of Ayurvedic diet, lifestyle, and routine we will discuss. Over time, you will find that balancing the doshas will become quite intuitive. Often it’s as simple as listening to your body—like putting on a sweater if you’re chilly, for example, or making a trip to the bathroom when you first feel the urge to eliminate.
The doshas are not only present inside us, but in everything around us, and this reveals the many ways Ayurveda connects us to nature. In the next chapter, we will continue to explore the effects of the doshas on the different cycles and rhythms of life. This will help you create daily and seasonal routines for your family that harmonize with the natural cycles of these energies.
Your Child’s Mind and Body Are One
The next time your child walks in the room, try and picture their mind and body strolling toward you hand in hand. Ayurveda views your child much like you do—whole, not separated in mind or body.
Now picture your child having a temper tantrum or some other form of emotional meltdown. Does the saying “out of one’s mind” sound fitting? In those moments, this is literally true for your child. They are not present, and both mind and body are on another planet, so to speak—but they are still together, illustrating again how they cannot be separated. Just as they leave together, they come back together. Maybe you’ve noticed this yourself in the moments following an outburst. As you begin to bring your child’s body back into balance by giving them a hug or rubbing their back, for example, the mind follows. Similarly, when you start to bring the mind back into balance by singing a favorite song or playing some gentle music, the body follows. Your children express the tremendous role and influence the mind and body have over their lives moment to moment.
your child‘s mind
According to Ayurveda, the mind is considered the sense beyond the senses. This means it is the sense that first perceives happiness or sadness; feelings of being relaxed or restless, content or longing; and so on. When you consider that the mind is responsible for all of your child’s emotions and perceptions of the world around them, it’s easy to see why Ayurveda teaches that “mind care is life care.”
A balanced state of mind not only reflects peace and tranquility but also leads your child to respond to all stimuli in a stable manner. In turn, this supports proper function across all of the systems of the body. A balanced mind has the ability to focus, perceive, and register information gathered and also to retain and recollect that information when associated within context. It is important to note that when it comes to learning, every child has a different level of ability—for both retaining and processing. This simply makes them unique. The modern world’s one standard for all approach to learning construes these diversified abilities as deficiencies or problems. However, supporting every child’s unique approach and ability to learn fuels their esteem, and that is when they perform much beyond expectations.
Conversely, when your child’s mind is out of balance, almost anything happening around them can bring on negative emotions. How many times have you seen your child morph into a monster and respond with anger, frustration, or jealousy to seemingly nothing in a totally unexpected way? We often watch our children behave in strange ways when they are emotionally affected by something—not showing their usual interests when returning home from school, turning down their favorite meals, and other outputs of that nature. Those can all be taken as signs that the mind is out of balance. We will explore the different ways you can take care of your child’s five senses to support clear perception and a balanced mind later in the book.
mind-body influence
As hard as it is to imagine the countless times a day this happens, the mind and body influence each other each and every time they encounter various stimuli. Every time. Understanding how changes in the physical body influence the mind and how emotional influences impact the physical body is key to maintaining your child’s health. For instance, a child showing no interest in eating their favorite meal or getting easily frustrated over something small will most likely express physically that same day with constipation or some other ailment. Think about the effects on your child’s mind and behavior when they get hurt and sustain a physical injury, after excessive exertion, or even when the weather changes or they feel hungry. These common expressions unquestionably confirm the unceasing influences of mind and body.
Dr. J has seen many children in his practice with chronic eczema, for example, who express increased irritability and moodiness and have frequent tantrums. The way they respond even during a consultation reflects the effects of their skin irritation on their mind. There is simply no separating conditions of the mind and body; they are one and the same.
Another common example of children expressing imbalances pivots around nutrition. Parents often come to Dr. J with nutritional concerns: either their children aren’t eating enough, or despite eating plenty, they may still be underweight or show other signs of poor growth. We will explore this subject in depth in part two of this book, but for now you can understand this as an expression of disharmony or imbalance in the functional energies. Even though you may give your child an adequate quantity of food that represents an ideal ratio of nutrients and calories, that doesn’t guarantee proper digestion and absorption. And—most surprising to some—neither do high-quality organic ingredients. What is essential then for a child’s nourishment? Mind care. The quality of care and time you spend with your child and the patience you show them along the way with your supportive and encouraging responses play a role equal to food when it comes to nutrition.
Considering the mutual influence of the body and mind gives parents an essential framework for understanding their children and allows them to approach their health and well-being in a comprehensive way, even at times when the connection is not so obvious. For example, you may not think your ability to avoid conflicts with your children and with others in front of them matters outside of protecting their emotional health and vibrancy, but the reality is this also supports their balanced digestion and nourishment. That, in turn, will not only support the physical strength they need but also the mental strength—and both contribute to a healthy immune system that will help them sustain high stressors in their life to come.
The core strength of a child’s whole life is developed through proper management of the mind-body system in childhood. While Ayurveda clearly sets forth and defines a multitude of tools available to support the balanced development of a child including diet, lifestyle, herbs, and natural remedies that we will explore in detail throughout this book, it is essential to remember that if you are focused on body only, or mind only, a complete state of health cannot be attained.
As we move on now to explore the doshas and identify your child’s constitution, remember that Ayurveda is not a prescription, rather it is designed to reveal how important it is to enjoy life and remind you of all the ways you are already in the flow of nature. Dr. J can assure you based on years of experience guiding parents that simply sharing these insights with your children and spending time relaxing and enjoying life’s moments with them will naturally bring you both the best life has to offer.