Ojas - Step 1: Hang On!
The first step to more ojas is not what we think...
Dearest Readers,
It’s great to have you back. Last week, we discussed how, among the vital essences, Āyurveda has a favourite, and that favourite is ojas!
Then I promised to share about how to build more ojas, the vital protective essence of the body that supports our immunity, resilience, strength, endurance, and patience. And here we are :)
There are two parts to managing our Ojas resource:
Maintain the ojas you already have! It turns out that rebuilding this vital essence takes time (40 days) and dedication (every day)… so hanging onto the ojas you already have is immensely useful.
Build more ojas - step by step, and every. single. day!
Today, we discuss the first part: maintaining the ojas we have.
To maintain the strength, immunity, endurance, and resilience that we have, it’s useful to know what uses up our ojas. As we discuss the factors that use up (or eat) our ojas, it’s important (and realistic) to recognize that there are some things we can change, and other things we cannot change. The idea is to change what we can, and when there are factors we cannot change, well, that’s why we’re always working to build more ojas (step 2 - more details next week!).
Let’s get to it - What uses up our Ojas?
Stress: The biggest ojas-eater is stress. When your system is under stress - whether physical, energetic, emotional, mental, spiritual, or otherwise - like a super-hero, ojas leaps between you and the stressor to reduce the effects of stress on your system. The more stress you experience, the more ojas is used.
The idea is to reduce and eliminate any stressors that you can, and from there, work on managing the stress that you cannot alleviate. And when we go through a very stressful time, then our ojas management needs to be stepped up a notch!
One could argue that all the other items below fall under this first category of stress… They would not be wrong!
Inadequate Nutrition: From the Āyurvedic perspective, ojas builds as the end product of digestion and tissue metabolism (which refers to building our tissues, organs, and other necessary biological components like hormones and neurotransmitters). When we lack nutrition, our ojas buffers the nutritional deficiencies as long as it can. This creates internal stress and strain in our system.
It begs the question, why might we lack nutrition? There are a lot of possible reasons, including dieting, fasting, calorie restriction (making it challenging for your body to maintain itself), a lack of availability of nutrition/food, or socio-economic reasons. There are a lot of reasons why nutrition might not be available for the body, and if it isn’t, we use our ojas to keep things going until we run out. This factor is also key for building more ojas, so it acts either as a double-hoorah or as a double-whammy in our ojas management process.
Inappropriate Lifestyle: As with everything we’ve talked about so far, this is unique to each individual. An inappropriate lifestyle pushes us too hard, asks too much of us, and leaves our ojas tank on empty. For sure, this will happen sometimes; however, it is not sustainable for it to be our lifestyle (meaning it happens most of the time).
Another way to think about it is that an appropriate lifestyle honours all three pillars of health:
Adequate quantity and quality of nutrition, and the agni to digest it.
Appropriate amount of sleep for your level of activity and personal needs (physically, energetically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually).
Resource management is about having resources (like ojas) to support our health and well-being. And we’ll talk more over the next few weeks about ways to support this pillar.
Thus, our three pillars not only support each other, they support our ojas, and help us to recognize when something is amiss and could be using up our precious ojas!
Big Emotions: Āyurveda has always recognized the power of our feelings and emotions. These very human and natural feelings and emotions can build us up and support us, or they can use up a ton of our ojas and be extremely depleting.
The Āyurvedic classical texts speak of four emotions in particular that, when allowed to run wild, tend to cause us resource challenges. These are fear, anger, worry, and grief.
My observation is that these four tend to be emotions that ‘churn’ within us. As an emotion churns and keeps the mind spinning, the more ojas we need to bring a sense of stability to the heart-mind. I suspect that many of our emotions can spin like these do, and if our heart-mind is spinning, we are using up ojas.
We could discuss more things that eat our ojas; however, this is a solid start to the conversation.
This week, consider where you use most of your ojas - your patience, strength, endurance, stability, and resilience. Is there anything that you might be able to change or adjust to keep more of your precious ojas?
From your stress-busting+food+sleep+cat+PacMac lovin’ Āyurvedi,
Love the way you write about Āyurveda. So much fun and joy.