Gut Feelings

Applying Ayurvedic wisdom to your yoga practice can help relieve digestive problems.

By Barbara Kaplan Herring

The first time yoga made a profound difference in my life was in 1981, when I was 15 years old, 10,000 miles away from home, and doubled over with dysentery. I was a foreign-exchange student in Thailand. A Peace Corps volunteer administered antibiotics, and after the pain subsided, the only thing that gave me the least bit of relief was draping my back off the side of my curved wooden bed. This created a soothing space in my belly and provided giggling amusement to my host "sister."

I had begun practicing yoga a year earlier, yet I didn't understand why my recurrent stomach ailments (a by-product of the unfamiliar food) sometimes felt better in forward bends and at other times were only relieved by passive backbends. Little did I know that I was just beginning a long healing journey, as I explored yoga for good digestion.

Several years after my time in Thailand, I contracted dysentery again in both India and Nepal, and giardia in Yosemite. I found myself returning to yoga poses in order to soothe my abdominal distress, experienced as bloating or burning pains in my abdomen. The fact that asanas proved more beneficial than Western antibiotics, which the parasites inside my body eventually began to resist, led me to approach my healing from a new perspective. I began with a three-week detox at the Optimum Health Institute in San Diego. The intense cleanse, daily enemas, huge doses of wheat grass, and my daily yoga practice made me feel much better. Upon my return to the San Francisco Bay Area, I continued to cleanse my system with cooked and raw foods.

Throughout all of this, I was acutely aware that I was dealing with a third-chakra challenge. (As a teenager, I had become fascinated with the chakras and often practiced a meditation in which I channeled colorful lights through the seven energy centers; years later, I now teach workshops on "Yoga and the Chakras.")

The third chakra is located in the solar plexus and represents solar energy, or inner fire. Fire converts matter to energy in the form of light and heat. Physiologically, this refers to metabolism; psychologically, the transformational nature of fire relates to our expression of vitality, personal power, and will.

In my case, the psychological dimension of this challenge had to do with the fact that I wasn't feeling all that powerful. I imagine that I was undergoing a passage many of us experience: finding my voice, releasing suppressed anger, and learning to listen to my gut for intuitive answers. I could have freed an enormous amount of solar energy by letting go of some big attachments. Trying to control events around me, as opposed to paying attention to what was true, certainly depleted my power.

During that time, I explored different asanas to help my acidic, burning belly and found that backbends made it feel the best. But I didn't know why.

During my second trip to India, in 1995, I picked up a book on Ayurveda, the ancient medical science that originated in India thousands of years ago. The foundation of Ayurvedic medicine is one's constitution, or dosha. The three dosha types are vata, pitta, and kapha; most people are a mixture of dosha characteristics, with one dosha more predominant than another. Each of the dosha types flourishes under a specific diet, exercise plan, and lifestyle. Ayurveda also recognizes "fire in the belly." It's called agni, and one's degree of agni potency reveals one's digestive health.

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