Where Does Disease Begin?

We are a culture of causes. Always looking for a reason a diagnosis, someone to blame for everything and anything that has ever occurred in our lives. Although some things are quite random in the case of many conditions we can trace them back to a primary cause. Take the following symptoms for example:

• Environmental allergies
• Sensitives to certain foods or smells
• Eczema or acne
• Anxiety and depression
• Gas, bloating and constipation

When you read that list, do you think that the root cause could be the same thing?

Most of us don’t think that way, but Ayurveda sees inter-connectivity of the body. It is like an ecological system a change in one factor like rainfall affects everything else, the number of plants that grow the amount of animals that eat those plants and so on and so forth. Even though the various symptoms above span from the skin, brain, belly and beyond they all have one root cause.  Your digestive system. You can treat the skin with creams and the mind with herbs and avoid the allergens, but treating the symptoms will never bring the level of resolution that you crave.

Sometimes we forget that what we experience on the outside is a manifestation of what is happening on the inside. Our gut is actually considered to be outside of us as it is continuous with the skin. Like the skin it is a barrier that determines what goes in and what goes out. Because it is in a dark place and we can’t see it directly we don’t usually know how healthy the barrier is until we get a warning sign in the form of the symptoms mentioned above.

This is where Ayurveda comes into play. Ayurveda’s primary focus is on digestion and so it can treat the root cause of disease and lead to long term relief and vitality. Let’s step back into the digestive system and look at why this barrier is so important. The small intestine in particular is the gatekeeper to the rest of your body. It is the one making the decisions about who gets inside and who doesn’t belong. But how does it do it?

Your food is broken down into nutrient rich building blocks in the mouth, esophagus, stomach, and by the enzymes secreted from the gallbladder and pancreas. These building blocks are then selectively sorted, and the small intestine determines what will be introduced into the body through the lymphatics and circulation. As you can probably guess, if the building blocks are not broken down fully, then they cause problems for the small intestine. This is tricky, because you are not actually what you eat, you are what your small intestine absorbs. So your health depends on the integrity of your small intestine more than the type of food that you choose. In the short term we feel the effects in the digestive system as gas and bloating, but over time this can cause hormone imbalances and disrupt mental health.

At Rhythm of Healing our focus in on finding the root cause of symptoms because we know that Band Aids just don’t work. Because the most typical cause of chronic disease is digestive disturbance we make it a top priority.  That is why we have created the Yoga and Ayurveda Cleanse to bring you back to health by repairing your gut. This cleanse is a wonderful way to get to the root and give you the tools you need to restore your gut health.

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