Everyday Ayurveda: Daily Habits That Can Change Your Life in a Day by Bhattacharya Bhaswati

Author:Bhattacharya, Bhaswati [Bhattacharya, Bhaswati]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Published: 2015-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

To keep the voice healthy, medicated herbs needed to be introduced into the throat periodically. Lozenges, teas and gargling work, but they touch deep into the throat for just moments. Āyurveda spent considerable time developing delivery forms for its medicines, addressing the concerns of ease of use, pleasant taste, stability in final form, ease of transport, schedule for consumption, delivery to the site in the body needed and adherence by the patient.

To deliver herbs to the deep throat, the wise men of Āyurveda sought a form that would deliver particles to a highway of constant movement of air from birth until death, where fingers do not easily reach. They watched nature and how nature delivered things from one place to another.

It is not difficult to suppose that a wise man found someone coughing after inhaling ashes and smoke from a cooking fire. From this, the pharmaceutical delivery of medicines via dhoompana was born. Medicinal smoking is not new to man. Many cultures ritually smoke plants, lighting leaves, herbs and powders on fire, to inhale the smoke. Dhoompana is a systematic prescription of particular elements that will moisturize and clean the throat and vocal cords, remove dryness, and roughness, and replace phlegm with clean mucous provoked from the throat’s rejuvenating mechanisms. The ancient shastras say that vitiated kapha in the head is eliminated most quickly by dhoompana , the drinking of smoke.

There are many varieties of dhoompana : for soothing coughs, for drawing up and out toxins, for moisturizing the dry throat and for eliminating waste. A typical routine in Āyurveda is the smoking of a clove in dhoompana in the winter months to soothe a sore throat and melt mucous.

The method for medicinal smoking is also precise. Smoke is first drawn in through the nose and then the mouth, but it is always exhaled through the mouth, as the toxins should never come through the nose, where it can travel to the space near the eyes. One should always smear some ghee or oil on the end and ignite it, so that the dhoompana is not completely dry and full of ash, and one should use an instrument to hold the herb. Sometimes, the smoke is drawn through a water vessel, called a hookah , so that the smoke is moistened. At times, the herbs are crushed and made into herbal cigarettes for ease of transport and storage.

The best times for dhoompana are just after bathing, eating, scraping the tongue, after brushing the teeth, after sneezing and after applying oils to the face (for example, after nasya or collyrium) and just after sleep. Common herbs include kanchnar guggul , a great scraping (lekhaniya ) herb for all things kapha , especially in the neck and throat, which I use at the end of a common cold, for thyroid conditions, enlarged lymph nodes in the neck and throat, as well as in the case of formations of tumours in the neck and throat. Licorice (yashtimadhu ) is a demulcent for those thick mucous coughs at the end of a bout of bronchitis or a bad cold.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.