As I recovered from my health crisis and hospitalization in 2016, I turned to Ayurveda for my philosophy of healing. The world of Ayurveda was bringing me more than health—it was also bringing me joy.
Ever since diagnosis with ulcerative colitis two years earlier, I’d been grieving the many things I used to do easily that I could no longer do. But the more I learned about Ayurveda, the more I was finding plenty of new things to eat, do, and enjoy. My grief was being replaced with a new, very welcome sense of abundance.
My husband Ron and I were slowly learning to cook Ayurvedic food. A recent edition of Yoga Journal included three Ayurvedic dal recipes, all quite different from each other. One from Southern India had a sweet coconut flavor, one tasted almost meaty from its combination of spices and ghee, and the other tasted like a wonderful lentil soup. I slightly adjusted them for my special diet needs, eliminating the hot spice from one and overcooking the vegetables in another to reduce the fiber.
We loved them all, even with my adjustments. I didn’t notice any worsening of my symptoms after eating them, although I was still on several drugs in the aftermath of my crisis. Because of the drugs, which were immunosuppressive and masked my gut symptoms, it was hard to tell for sure how these foods affected me.
But assuming I could still digest them once I got off the drugs, we decided we could get used to this way of eating!
It was a relief to find delicious foods I could eat, because Ayurveda was reinforcing the need to avoid foods I had craved all my life.
Since diagnosis, I’d struggled with no longer being able to eat most of my comfort foods, such as mac n’ cheese and dark chocolate. When I’d gotten into remission a year ago, I had sometimes reverted back to eating them, figuring this was my reward for all the hard work of healing my gut.
But Ayurveda was changing how I saw this. Anything that’s not digested well, and that harms the body, is considered poison in Ayurveda. Not food. Things only count as food if they’re digested well.
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” said the Roman philosopher Lucretius over two thousand years ago. Ayurveda is far more ancient than Lucretius, and it agrees.
So foods like mac n’ cheese and dark chocolate weren’t really foods for me at all. They might be foods to many other people, but they were poison to me now that I had colitis. Imagining a big, red “POISON” label on them made them much less appealing when I walked past them in the grocery store. That made it easier to let them go.
This idea, that a food can be good for one person and bad for another, is central to Ayurveda’s teaching. Different bodies are different. Each of us needs to learn how our own body can best move through the world.
For me, this way of thinking required a profound inner shift that related closely to the new mindfulness practices I’d begun. As someone with chronic anxiety and childhood trauma, I was slowly realizing that I often ignored my own bodily sensations. I habitually pushed hunger, pain, or fatigue aside in order to power through whatever task I was working on.
But Ayurveda and mindfulness both asked me to slow down, stop, and notice what my body was feeling.
A friend of my sister’s once asked an Ayurvedic doctor which diet would be most effective for her multiple sclerosis. “I was like, ‘Vegan or paleo?’” she said.
“Neither,” he replied. “No extremes. Just figure out what your body responds to best.”
This lack of rigidity is a whole different kind of instruction: not a list of ingredients, but an assignment to change how you think.
I had made a little progress before. Once, after several months on my previous macrobiotic diet, I had “cheated” by adding kefir and red meat, following a hunch that my body might need them even though macrobiotics was supposed to be vegan. Lo and behold, soon after adding kefir, I’d achieved my first remission. That experience had shown me that there is no one-size-fits-all “best” diet for ulcerative colitis, and that it’s necessary to pay attention to your body’s cravings and responses.
But now, with Ayurveda, I realized I had still more inner shifting to do. Even though I’d gotten past the idea of a one-size-fits-all diet, I’d still rigidly eaten the same (safe) meals over and over and paid little attention to what my body felt like consuming on a given day. I wasn’t used to noticing my variations in energy level or hunger and adjusting my meals accordingly. I also didn’t think about seasons and weather, as Ayurveda encouraged.
More and more, I was now finally slowing down and paying attention. The more I did, the more a world opened up for me as I experienced the wonder of becoming embodied. Small sensations I’d long ignored—twinges of hunger or thirst, hints of fatigue or stress—became cues to nurture and nourish myself. I felt as though I was now treating myself like a princess after a lifetime of treating myself like a laborer.
My road to recovery from my crisis would be long, but I was grateful for the lessons I was learning. Although my life was more limited than before diagnosis, Ayurveda was helping me feel more fully alive.
