The Ayurveda Experience Blog
Old school vs. Avant Garde. Living foods vs. cooked foods.
Which side of the fence are you on, or are you straddled?
There is an evolution gaining momentum in the Ayurvedic community.
It’s called Living Foods Ayurveda.
Most schools aren’t teaching it yet. Most practitioners aren’t practicing it yet. The leaders in the community are Dr. Gabriel Cousens and Shantree Kacera. It’s all living foods – enzymes intact – pranically intact, not dead food.
When I went to Ayurveda school I never heard mention of it.
That’s not entirely true. I heard mention of how the raw diet would render your Vata dosha out of the cosmos. I heard tales of IBS and colon disease due to Vata prakruti peeps going a little too far with their sprouted grain based diets.
That was the ’90’s.
When India came to the US it came from a culture that had adopted a cooked foods diet.
The US has a cooked foods diet, though our yoga culture is changing that.
And our yoga culture is informing our Ayurvedic culture.
This is rad.
It’s rad because it’s how Ayurveda survives to be our oldest living holistic system of knowledge. She is build to grow with us. She always informs us from the inside out – and that is why it’s the western yoga revolution that is leading the way. That same western yogic culture which is really hot about tantra over classical yoga philosophy.
Hmmm – now it all makes so much sense, those full-picture-always expanding-you’r-not-going -to-tell-me-the-rules-rebel-yogis leading the way to the Ayurvedic Living Foods over Dead Foods revolution. (I’m always fascinated by the forces that actually turn the wheel).
Each year my Ayurvedic Living Course reflects this change.
I’ve added both Cousens and Kacera to our text list. Of course we’re sticking with Dr. Lad for our fundamentals, the poetic discourses that deepen our presence with each dissection, and his in-and-out-of-the-galaxy drawings.
It sounds like you feel raw food is benficial to everyone all the time. How about for a vata with a vata imbalance in the winter? In my understanding, one reason Ayurveda has lasted so long because there is no one size fits all recommendation. Always consider for who, what, when. For pittas, in the summer, I absolutely agree with you. But for people with weak digestion, raw foods prana is not bio-available to those with difficulty assimilating. Raw foods are great for a cleanse for some people for a short time, and shared with cooked food for some people some times. But I find your and other raw foodies assertion that cooked food is organically dead across the board to be dangerous to some who cannot digest much else.
I’m curious as to your assertion that cooked foods are “pranically dead.” Since the texts recommend cooked foods over raw foods and outline the lakshanas seen with raw food consumption as a hetu, it would seem that the original understanding was that cooked foods do indeed contain prana in a form that is easily assimilated.