I hope I cleared some things up for some of you last week. Now, lets get back to balancing the doshas. We have already talked about balancing the Vata. These are not rigid rules to be agonized over. Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to stay balanced, the doshas shift by the hour, by the day, by the minute. Like I said before, listen to your body, it already has the instincts to help you stay balanced.
Balancing your Pitta: Meditate twice a day to soothe the mind and relax the body. Meditation is very important for regaining inner calm. It reminds you to take time to wind down. Alternating rest and activity is the basic rhythm of life. Pittas have so much capacity for activity, they tend to ignore the rest aspect.
Eat a Pitta-pacifying diet. Dairy can be helpful in balancing the heat of Pitta, take milk, butter and ghee. Sour, fermented products such as yogurt, sour cream and cheese should be used sparingly as sour tastes aggravate Pitta.
The sweeter fruits such as grapes, melons, cherries, coconuts, avocados, mangoes, pomegranates, fully ripe pineapples, oranges, and plums are recommended. Reduce sour fruits such as grapefruits, apricots, and berries.
The vegetables to favor are asparagus, cucumbers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, green leafy vegetables, pumpkins, broccoli, cauliflower, celery okra, lettuce, green beans, and zucchini. Reduce tomatoes, hot peppers, carrots, beets, eggplant, onions, garlic, radishes, and spinach.
Exercise Pittas have more drive than endurance. They love an challenge, but they hate to lose; this motivates them more than the satisfaction of winning. If you chew yourself or anyone else out in any sport, walk away from it. Walking for a half hour a day will take the feistiness out of your system better than a competitive sport. Pittas who drive themselves at work all day find that a plunge in the pool after work cools them off and dissolves the day’s tensions. Pittas gain a large benefit from a leisurely stroll in the woods; it provides a change from their usual determined pace. The beauty of nature will sink deep into them.
Perform a daily oil massage using cooler oils such as coconut or olive. It seems little, but it really is very big.
As you can see, the four basics apply to all doshas, in order of importance: meditation, diet, exercise, oil massage. This does not mean you can pick one or two of the most important and leave the others alone, all four work together hand in hand. Because Ayurveda works at such a subtle level of our bodies, symptoms can be relieved that are often quite mysterious by western standards, including unexplainable pain, anxiety, depression, fatigue, and so on. Western medicine tends to say that these are psychosomatic problems, that is, that they originate in the patient’s head. In reality, they originate at the early stages of dosha imbalance.Nancy, Certified Thai Yoga Therapist
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