Ayurvedic Detox
According to Ayurveda, Ama is a toxic disease causing substance. It builds from having impaired Agni (digestive fire). There are many words for ama in English; candida overgrowth, arterial plaque, excess mucus and phlegm, psycho-emotional toxicity and many more. Ayurveda has so eloquently grouped all of this together into one simple phrase; ama.
Ama forms in the gut, and is quite easy to clear if it is contained there, however when ama begins to spread to the other tissues of the body (dhatus), things get a little more tricky. As ama builds it can clog the channels of the body and interrupt our capacity to absorb nutrients and to eliminate properly.
Here are 10 signs that you have a build up of ama in your body:
You wake up with a coating on your tongue
Bad breath
Sticky stools
Brain fog
Bloating, gas, or constipation
Joint pain
Fatigue and/or feelings of heaviness
Feeling unclean
Indigestion
Causes of ama are poor diet (too much cold food, fried food, incorrect food pairing, over eating, emotional eating, processed food, or too much of the sweet, sour, or salty tastes, and irregular eating habits), lack of exercise, repressed emotions, stress, and poor sleep.
It’s no wonder that the majority of us will have some ama in our bodies. So let’s do a full body temple sweep and clear it out:
Scrape your tongue first thing in the morning
Before you even drink any water, get your butt up and scrape your tongue. Overnight your body will push up ama through the tongue which will usually appear as a white coating. Copper tongue scrapers are now widely available at all health food stores. Copper is ideal as it is antimicrobial. Alternatively you can use a spoon. Lightly scrape from the back to front of your tongue 5-10 times to remove the coating.
2. Drink a cup of warm lemon water upon waking
Start your morning this way to get the GI tract ripe and ready for the day and help to kindle agni. What burns ama up best is having a strong digestive capacity.
3. Sweat every day - exercise, steam bath, or sauna
Whatever your flavour - just get sweating. We have a wide selection of vinyasa and pilates practices on the platform designed for this purpose.
4. Dry brush your body
Take a dry brush and run long strokes toward your heart. Especially paying attention to the parts of your body that you tend to ignore.
5. Sunlight - give yourself 10 minutes a day of direct sunlight.
Obviously, be clever about this. If you have light pigmentation and are super sensitive to sunlight just go a few minutes. Be sun safe and use a good natural zinc oxide based sunscreen outside of this window.
6. Introduce more bitter, astringent, and pungent foods and herbs to your diet
Refer to the “6 tastes” PDF in the membership for examples.
7. Read the labels
We want to make sure we are consuming minimally processed foods. Locally grown and organic if possible. Read the labels on your food items. If there are words you can’t pronounce or numbers on the label, you probably don’t want to put that in your body. The same goes for skincare and cleaning products. I’m even vigilant about only buying clothing with natural fibres as we absorb so much through our skin - polyethylene terephthalate and crude oil (what most yoga pants are made from) is not something I want on my body.
8. Seasonal kitchari cleansing
Kitchari is a simple rice and lentil dish which is used often in ayurveda as a cleansing meal. Perhaps in the same way that your mum gave you chicken soup when you were sick as a child, kitchari has the same place in Indian homes. Essentially in a kitchari cleanse, we will strip the diet right back to a mono diet for 3 or more days to give the body the space to cleanse itself of ama. You can actually use any simple and clean food for this; congee or chicken soup will work well. For a deeper cleanse, there are many Ayurvedic cleansing centres (pancha karma) around the world where you can deeply cleanse under the guidance of an ayurvedic doctor.
All my love,
Cat xx