Learning the Language of Your Symptoms

So, one of the things that I find so empowering about getting to this root-cause medicine is that we are empowered to understand the language that our body speaks to us through symptoms quite early on, and then we can respond to that. It’s really about insourcing our healing rather than always feeling like we have to outsource to somebody who can interpret for us what’s going on in our body. What does this symptom mean? Through this, we can understand the energetics of what’s happening. For example, if we have anxiety, we can read that as, “Oh, I am feeling dysregulated right now.” It’s not the story that anxiety is telling me. My anxiety is telling me that my physiology is stressed right now. And I can understand — because I understand the energetics of what anxiety is — what I can do with that through my diet, my lifestyle, and the practices I can do at home, without needing to wait, without allowing that stress to progress any further, and without feeling dependent on other people to tend to us all the time. Not that we don’t need that at some point. But when symptoms are grouped together and diagnosed as a disease, that is further down the line than how we look at it in Ayurveda. In Ayurveda, we recognize there are six stages of disease. I’ll talk a bit about the doshas, but the doshas are the forces that carry out the physiological functions of the body. There are three of them. And these doshas can become aggravated through the food we eat and all the experiences we take in through our senses. When they first become aggravated, it often starts in digestion. It can start in other places, but digestion is usually the first. It will begin to accumulate in our system, and our body is so intelligent that it will work very hard to alleviate this. But over time, it can start to overflow, especially into places where we may have a genetic predisposition for weakness in our system. And then, once symptoms accumulate enough to group into an actual disease diagnosis, that’s usually around stage four in Western medicine. In Ayurveda, we look way before that. We start to recognize: I know what this initial symptom is indicating. If I start getting constipation or burning indigestion, this is something I’m going to address early on.