By Dr. Bhaswati Bhattacharya
As the summers get hotter, and increasing numbers of innocent people suffer from the heat created by perpetrators of energy wastage, we can either depend upon modern options and support inventions and new technologies for cooling, or we can turn toward the frontiers of the past. Those who lived before us had immense creativity and resources for creating comfortable and cool environments during the heat of summer. We are taught that previous humans were primitive, backward, and unable without considering the intelligent lifestyles they created.
The natural intelligence of our ancestors has been degraded and suppressed mainly to support conquests by power-hungry and greedy people who glorify piracy and the stealing of resources from other lands. Using political and commercial agendas, ancient wisdom is suppressed in favor of solutions that benefit the suppliers of new technologies that do not support the environment.
Rather than focusing on high energy expenditure processes, our ancestors throughout the ages gravitated naturally toward sustainable and Green Economy options, as they had great regard for nature. They planted trees for birthdays, rather than choosing bio-unfriendly candles to put on a margarine-frosting cake, made with refined flour and artificial sugars, packed in a cardboard box. They covered their windows and doors with breathable cooling grasses such as vetiver and khus that cooled the wind as it entered a room. They drank coriander water, which cooled the body and took out the heat through accelerated urination.
Summer, known as Greshama in Sanskṛt, was not just understood as a season of hot weather. The term for summer actually focuses on the effect of the sun’s heat on the human body. Greeshma-kaala (kaala means period or season) is characterized by heat that dehydrates the body, and its debilitation from lack of flow of oxygen and water through the muscles and blood to let out the heat. This happens because dried-out muscles do not function well. Greesma (gṛs, to grab, S.) refers to the property of the sun grabbing our strength by drying out our moisture. The ten aspects of the sun include radiance, which spreads light; radiation, which spreads ions that can both heal but also damage the human body; and heat, which we feel in the air, on the water, but also on our bodies. Modern science knows about the temperature receptors, known as thermoreceptors that sense the world around us, but is still discovering how those receptors transform the moisture relationships in the body.
Ayurveda understands the summer season as the time when the air turns from warm to hot, evaporating the moisture and drying the earth. When the heat remains captured in the cells of the body, troubles begin. Heat creates evaporation of the fluid parts of the body, resulting in dryness and roughness of the tissues that remain, which then results in hardness due to the lack of flow that moisture provided.
Vata dosha – which governs flow and movement – gets completely aggravated both in the world and in the human body due to the dry roughness that is induced by excess heat. Vata is the summary of all structure and function of movement in the world, characterized by dry-rough, light, cooling, and mobility, just as the wind creates. People who have too much wind in the body enjoy the heat of summer for its temperature but remain unaware that the heat makes their bodies more depleted unless they counter the dry-rough, light, and mobile nature that is created inside the body. People who have a lot of heat already in the body become angry and intolerant of the extra heat. People who have a heavy, oily nature like the heat are disturbed by the sweat and the exhaustion of losing so much oil as it melts through the summer.
Ayurveda understood these different factors as vata-pitta-kapha and advised keeping the digestive power high so that metabolism was supported through one big meal and one small meal daily. Resting more and being in nature were recommended so that the heat did not debilitate. Staying indoors from 10 am to 4 pm was supported. Early morning sunrise and late sunset walk allowed the body to benefit from the infrared orange-red rays of the sun as it entered and exited the sky at severe angles. Herbs and foods that cool the body were prescribed.
Dr. Bhaswati Bhattacharya
