Ayurveda & The Mind

Yesterday, I was at a lecture with Janesh Vaidya. He is an Indian ayurvedic physician practicing in Stockholm. I have several friends who go to him, and some of them have had remarkable healings. He had a lecture at Yogayama in Stockholm in spring this year, and it was very inspiring. So naturally I went to his second lecture there yesterday, equally inspiring! I would like to share my notes. They are a bit fragmented, but I hope you can get something from them anyway.
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Adopt ayurveda to your life and culture. Don´t swallow everthing, and don´t try to change everthing at once. Do it little by little.
The base for good health is:

AHAR/ food
VIHAR/ lifestyle
VIJAR/ thoughts

AHAR/ FOOD
Food is my medicine, sleep is my therapy.
When you shop for food, know before what is good for you, and don´t buy it just becuse it´s a good offer. Get to know your dosha, and what your current imbalance is, and eat accordingly. Preparation; your kitchen is a pharmacy, respect your kitchen and make it a pleasant place. Cook with love and attention. Steamcooking is a good way of cooking, since it keeps most of the nutrition. Never reheat food, always eat fresh. Quality is a lot more important than quantity. Don´t eat too much. The amount that you can fit in your cuped hands is enough. When you eat too much, your body gets deprived of energy, since the body requires a lot of energyto digest food. Don´t eat out too often. The cooks at the restaurants don´t know what you need, and you´ll end up eating what is not good for you. Important to eat with focus (important to do everything in life with focus). He called it Ahar Dhyana- food meditiation. Also important to chew well to be able to absorb the nutrition (especially carbohydrates- my note).

VIHAR/ LIFESTYLE
Have a lifestyle that is good for YOU. Not one that is imposed on you by society, family, media or whatever. YOU have a choice. Your day is divided into 8h sleep, 8h work and 8h personal time. Use it well.
Sleep is extremely important. If you do not sleep well for a longer time, you will get sick. Go to bed at the same time every day, and wake up at the same time, Even if you do not fall asleep at once, keep to it, and in 21 days you will see that it has changed. Remember- sleep is therapy. In Indian culture, a mans lifetime is said to be 120 years. When you are 60 years old, life begins. Then you have struggled and learned what you need, and you can finally settle down and start living! Sounds very nice I think! In the west, many people think life ends at 60! Don´t focus too much on your body. The body grows old, but the mind doesn´t! The mind grows and expands continually!
Work: Choose a profession you love to do. If you are not satisfied, change! Change is part of life_-embrace it! Be bold, take risks! Beleive 100% , and you will get it. See failure as something positive, something you learn from.
Personal life: Spend a lot of time with family and friends. Communication is the base of any good relationship. Our family is our base, a place to come home to.
Get to know yourself. Selfstudy. Often when we feel that life is missing something, although we seem to have everything, we are missing the spiritual. And spirituality is knowing yourself.

VIJAR/ THOUGHTS
Happiness is what you think, not what you have.

You can see the mind like a computer. The brain is like a hard drive, your thoughts are the software. This means you can program the mind with positive or negative "programs".
Your thoughts, positive or negative, drop down like seeds into your heart/ stomach and create feelings. These feelings in turn drop down into your gut/ reproductive area and create emotions, which is the base of your energy level. This is a system that energizes itself. The more negative thoughts you have, the more negative emotions you will have, and they in turn create more negative thoughts, and the circle reinforces itself. But the same is true of positive thoughts, so work to reinfiorce those instead. Imagine that you have a filter (he drew a picture of a filter in the throat, I´m not sure if you were to imagine a filter there, or if it was just an image). If you have positive thoughts, imagine a filter like a convex lens. It will focus and sharpen the positive. If you have negative thoughts, see the filter like a concave lens. It will disperse the negative. Learn how to "spit out" the negative thoughts. This filter is your conciousness. Observe, classify and receive or reject. Don´t criticise, don´t judge- just analyse.

Finally some words on life energy.
Know how to use it. Focus your energy, don´t disperse it by doing too many things.
Important to have a vision in life. This vision will give you a goal. When you know your goal, you will find a way. He gave an example from his own life: his vision was to help people, his goal became to be an ayurvedic physician, the way was to study and then practice the profession. This gives meaning to his life, and makes it bigger than just waking up in the morning, going to work and so on, you know, the treadwheel of life. The one we all fear...

WHAT IS YOUR VISION?