Ayurveda: A Healing Paradigm For Ulcerative Colitis

In the fall of 2016, as I was recovering from a major health crisis, people kept telling me to try Ayurveda. This healing system was first developed in ancient India and is still widely practiced there, and I was told that it might help my ulcerative colitis, too. I did try it, and I quickly came to love it.

Ayurveda isn’t the first thing I’d recommend to someone in a severe colitis flare. In a bad flare, I’d first go to my doctor and would also simplify my diet and experiment with my microbiome. And Ayurveda isn’t particularly scientific, although there are practitioners who “cross over”—John Douillard has excellent resources explaining Ayurvedic precepts in scientific terms.

But Ayurveda is, for me personally, the best paradigm I’ve found that inspires me to maintain my health when I have it. It helps me structure my life in a healthy way. I think of its teachings as metaphors: I don’t necessarily believe in them literally, but when I think in their terms, I tend to treat my body better.

Ayurveda’s strength lies in fostering the prevention of illness and the maintenance of health. Since first hearing of it in 2016, I’ve continued to loosely follow its precepts, and they help not only my colitis but also my general sense of physical and emotional wellbeing.

Ayurveda teaches that each of us is influenced by three forces, or doshas. These three doshas combine to make up each person’s physical and emotional constitution:

• Vata is airy and light,
• Pitta is fiery and energetic,
• Kapha (prounounced “KAH-pah”) is heavy and slow.

The doshas are said to affect both our bodies and our personalities. Different people have different proportions of each. My sister had been told she was mainly vata, the air dosha, because she was slender, lighthearted, and somewhat anxious—all vata characteristics. She suspected I was mainly pitta, the fire dosha, because I was driven and ambitious. A close friend of ours was more kapha than us, because she was more full-bodied and also more prone to contentment than either my sister or me.

Looking at our trio through this lens, Ayurveda seemed to explain why the three of us got along so well as a group: we balanced each other out. I joked that we three sounded like a sorority: Kapha Vata Pitta.

In terms of diet, Ayurveda recommends something quite similar to macrobiotics, the vegan diet that had tended to work best for my colitis in my first couple years with it. Like macrobiotics, Ayurveda emphasizes whole grains, legumes, and vegetables, with most food cooked and not raw in order to ease digestion. Also like macrobiotics, it recommends fresh, organic ingredients and cooking meals from scratch to maximize nutritional value, rather than eating canned, frozen, reheated, or processed food.

All of that met my approval. This was a diet that I knew would be healthy for my body.

But the Ayurvedic diet is less restrictive and more richly flavored than macrobiotic food. Macrobiotics advocates little salt or spice, so that your palate adjusts to enjoying the natural, subtle flavors of the vegetables and other ingredients themselves. In contrast, Ayurveda holds that spices stimulate the appetite and thus aid digestion—if we’re excited about our food, we salivate more, which helps break down the food.

Ayurvedic recipes are full of healthy Indian spices such as cumin, turmeric, ginger, and black pepper. Ayurveda also differs from macrobiotics in that it allows small amounts of dairy, meat, and even sugar, provided the individual’s body benefits from them. I liked this, too. I couldn’t do sugar, but I had found that red meat and kefir were both beneficial to me, even though neither is macrobiotic.

A key feature of Ayurveda is the way its recommendations change for each individual. Variations of the diet are recommended based on each person’s constitution—i.e., their dosha combination—and current situation. If my sister and I were indeed different body (and personality) types, we’d be instructed to eat some different foods from each other.

The goal is balance: you want to eat in a way that balances your natural tendencies. For my fiery pitta, I should eat fewer fiery spices, which would aggravate my fire. For my sister’s airy vata, she should avoid gassy foods like popcorn, which would, in theory, aggravate her airiness.

And seasonality is emphasized in Ayurveda, too, with different veggies and spices recommended at different times of the year. This is not only for freshness, but due to a belief that the body’s needs change with the seasons in the same way that plants’ and animals’ needs change. Here, too, the goal is balancing the energy the season is bringing into our lives. Summer is hot, so more cool, light foods are recommended then. In cold winter months, Ayurveda recommends warmer and heavier foods, like nourishing soups and sweet potatoes.

I love the earthiness of that idea, and the way this philosophy fosters an awareness of goings-on in the natural world.

Along with diet, Ayurvedic literature talks about lifestyle practices to calm and balance the body’s systems. Like macrobiotics, it encourages the creation of a nurturing, simple home environment.

But what Ayurveda really emphasizes is daily routine. The body should be kept on a fairly consistent schedule, eating meals and exercising at the same times each day (including weekends), which is said to calm the nervous system.

There’s also a lengthy list of dinacharya practices, or morning ablutions, that cleanse you and prepare you for the day. Some of these are familiar to Westerners, such as brushing the teeth and washing the face. But others are less typical, like scraping bacteria from the tongue with a tongue scraper, rinsing the nasal passages with a neti pot, and drinking a glass of warm water to stimulate a bowel movement.

The practice that sounded most enjoyable was one I couldn’t do yet at first, because it isn’t recommended for people during illness or frailty: a self-massage with warm oil, followed by a bath. It sounded amazing. I vowed to try it when I was healthier.

I was intrigued enough to give Ayurveda a try. The more I read about it, the more it seemed right up my alley: a philosophy that addressed both digestive health and the need to calm my chronic anxiety. I ordered a neti pot and tongue scraper, and strategized about how to rearrange my mornings and afternoons somewhat in order to put Ayurvedic practices into place. I’d need a little more time in the morning for dinacharya, and I’d need to carve out a specific, consistent time each afternoon to go for my daily walk.

As I read about Ayurveda, the pictures forming in my mind were of bounty, color, and sensuality. I pictured colorful clothing, luscious spreads of fruits and vegetables, and bright, tropical flowers with strong scents.

These images contrasted with my impression of macrobiotics, which felt more even-keel and tranquil, like a still pond or a pile of Zen stones. That tranquility was important for my healing, too. But I was excited to find, in Ayurveda, a healing system that seemed to embrace sensuality rather than self-denial. It seemed like this system could help me stay in touch with my body in a way macrobiotics might not.

One prominent (and excellent) Ayurvedic website is that of Banyan Botanicals, which not only sells Ayurvedic herbs but has a ton of free resources for getting started with Ayurveda. Their online dosha quiz told me, to my surprise, that I was not a pure pitta as my sister had thought. I was a vata-pitta: a combination of both airy and fiery. This would need to be confirmed by an Ayurvedic practitioner, and it later would be. But it already made sense to me: my body was slender like my sister’s vata body, but I had a more fiery personality than hers.

When I read the description of my vata-pitta constitution after taking the quiz, I was astounded at the description’s accuracy. In describing the typical vata-pitta physique, it read:

You probably have a rather slight skeletal frame and you may have long limbs, narrower shoulders and hips, and somewhat prominent joints. Your musculature is lean and may be wiry. Your weight is generally steady, and if anything, you may tend to be a bit underweight. Your face may be long, heart-shaped, or a combination of the two, with facial features that are sharp and angular, and eyes that are small to medium in size. Your skin is probably rather thin and transparent and may tend toward being either a bit dry or a bit oily.

In describing my personality, the description was similarly dead on. I was described as a visionary, a lover of learning, an avid traveler; and also driven, productive, and potentially workaholic.

“There’s no doubt about it,” says the website, “when you have a vision, you are a go-getter, and you know how to get things done. In part due to these character traits, you may find that you often over-extend or over-commit yourself, which can leave you feeling stressed, anxious, high-strung, or depleted.”

Relaxation and rejuvenation were thus essential for me, possibly even more than for other dosha types.

It was incredibly affirming to find my own body and personality type described in this way. The description was written without negative connotations, and with the implication that this was my natural constitution—that I was therefore okay.

I had encountered a similar message in the past when taking personality tests, which tend to be supportive and affirming no matter what personality type you are. But I’d never heard of a system that connected the personality to the body, and then validated both your personality and your body in one fell swoop!

I felt enormous relief when I read that my skinniness was natural, the natural byproduct of my constitutional makeup from birth. I loved hearing that it wasn’t necessarily something to be fixed, as so many doctors, nurses, and others had implied all my life. Since diagnosis, I had sometimes wondered whether I would have even gotten colitis if so many people hadn’t told me to bulk up over the years, maybe even eat more ice cream and hamburgers and drink more milk. In any case, the Western mentality that every body’s goals ought to be the same hadn’t been good for me.

And my fiery nature was also natural. My “fire” had often made me self-conscious and ashamed, as assertive women are so often made to feel. But reading about it in the Ayurvedic light, I felt a sense of deep-down relief.

I thought of Kali, the Hindu goddess associated with death and violence and also motherly love and feminine energy. I knew very little about Hinduism, but the reverence for Kali seemed to indicate that in India, to be fiery might not be a mark of shame for a woman. Perhaps by coincidence (or perhaps not?), kali is also a Swahili word that means spicy, hot-tempered, and fierce. It’s used to describe both food and people, especially women.

As I read about pitta in Ayurveda, I realized that fieryness wasn’t seen as a negative, but just as a part of one’s nature—and therefore beautiful.

I also loved the idea that my personality might be connected to my body type, but not in the degrading way that personality and appearance are often connected in American pop culture. Ayurveda doesn’t see slender women as high-strung like Harry Potter’s Aunt Petunia, and it doesn’t see larger women in a negative light either. Kaphas, for example, are seen as natural leaders, because their physical and emotional sturdiness makes them more resilient and able to endure challenges that would be more stressful for others.

In Ayurveda, body does relate to personality, but with many variations, and all the types are treated as having inherent strengths and beauties. All types also have potential weaknesses, which are to be safeguarded through nurturing.

Along with my constitutional makeup, the online quiz pointed to imbalances I might currently have.

It had been hard to answer some of the quiz’ questions about my recent health. Had I been having “loose stools” lately? Um, yes—but was that a dosha imbalance, or just my colitis?

Gradually, I came to see that Ayurveda views all inflammation as a dosha imbalance, even if that imbalance is caused by a chronic illness. In a colitis flare, I had “overactive pitta”: too much fire in the body. The goal was to bring my doshas into the natural doshic balance I’d been born with, in which I should feel energized and happy and also calm and content.

Some pitta was natural for me, but even for me, I currently had too much of it.

Within days of beginning to learn about Ayurveda, a whole world opened up to me. This system seemed to be the worldview I didn’t know I’d been missing. It saw thoughts, emotions, and the body as an integrated whole. It integrated food and lifestyle as important aspects of healing. And it connected our bodies and lives to the wider world of nature. Its holistic perspective made so much sense.