Ayurveda: Breaking the Rules Without Breaking the Principles
A Clinical Approach to Lifestyle Medicine
Before we start, I would like you to ask yourself a question: Why are you here? What drives you to gain an understanding of Ayurveda in the first place? Your reasons are as unique as the subject of this question: you.
Too many of us forget to consider ourselves when seeking health. We look for external solutions and wonder why the results don't come. Ayurveda offers a way to bring body, mind and spirit back into balance, and the key to that healing is knowing ourselves.
Patients and students often ask me how a medicine written in India thousands of years ago can apply to someone living in Arizona today. This book is my answer. The classical texts were never meant to be followed as a fixed set of rules. They teach principles, and they instruct the practitioner to apply those principles according to the person, the place and the time.
When the rules are held too tightly, Ayurveda becomes a list of foods to avoid and herbs that are hard to find, and people give up on it. When the principles are understood, the practice can adapt to a different climate, a different pantry and a different life without losing what makes it work. The book returns again and again to desha-kala, attention to time and place, and to the place of Ayurveda alongside modern diagnostics.
The book is written for three readers at once: patients who want to understand their own care, practitioners who want to apply the tradition faithfully outside India, and health care providers who want a clear, practical introduction to how Ayurveda thinks about the person in front of them.