Autumn comes with shorter days and cooler temperatures. While there are many pros of autumn, the transition can also be a challenge. Fewer hours of daylight and changing weather can be hard on both physical and mental health for some people (especially for the Byron locals after a spectacular Summer season!!). With that in mind, here are some of my top tips for an awesome Autumn.
Read MoreLiving Seasonally – Tune Into Autumn
As the bright, hot days of Summer are lulled into the cooler, shorter days of Autumn, we’re able to witness perhaps one of the best examples of a true seasonal transition. Each season holds a particular energy, and whilst Summer is the peak of extroverted ‘yang’, Autumn sees us moving deeper into a quieter, more contemplative state of ‘yin’.
Read MoreHOW TO NOURISH YOURSELF IN AUTUMN
Close your eyes briefly, take a deep belly breath and think about the feelings and qualities of the Autumn months. You may have thought of golden, orange and crunchy leaves forming a blanket over the grass or the perfect lightweight cardigan that gives just enough warmth for the cooling temperatures. On the other hand, your mind may have taken you straight to your local farmers market to explore the harvest of delicious produce specific to the March, April and May months. If so, you are the same kind of foodie as us!
Read MoreSPRING DETOX: A FRESH START
“Detoxification” means the removal of toxins from the body. Just like flowers, humans absorb toxins—preservatives, pesticides, stimulants, and heavy metals—through food, water, and air. Also, your own body produces toxins, called metabolic waste products, as a natural result of processes like digestion and respiration.
Read MoreA Beginner’s Guide to Ayurvedic Diet
If you’ve ever felt like you need a little more balance in your life, Ayurvedic practices might help. Ayurveda is an ancient and all-inclusive medical system rooted in prevention and achieving more balance mentally, physically, and spiritually. While there’s a lot that goes into Ayurvedic living, gaining a better understanding of the history, Ayurveda body types (aka, Doshas), and the Ayurvedic diet is a great place to start. Up ahead, we tap an Ayurvedic specialist to learn more about a beginner-friendly approach to Ayurveda, including what the different Dosha types are and how to follow an Ayurvedic diet.
Ayurveda is an ancient science and preventative healthcare tradition that originated in India 2,000-5,000 years ago. According to Silcox, the traditions were originally passed on orally, so it’s difficult to trace exactly when it was first practiced. And, like many Indigenous medical systems, Ayurveda is a combination of different cultural healthcare practices. “We have evidence that Ayurveda-practicing Indians were sharing insights with the Chinese, Greeks, Egyptians, and even Europeans,” Silcox explains. “So, in this light, we can think of Ayurveda as a global medicine and philosophy of life that enables us to connect with nature and the holistic system of our entire body, mind, and emotional complex,” she adds.
Silcox says that Ayurveda as a medical practice is different from conventional medicine practices we are familiar with in Western cultures because, “it sees the entire body, mind, and emotional experience as an intricate web of interdependency.” Additionally, Ayurvedic medicine is rooted in the understanding that, “all diseases have their origin in the digestive system and stress,” says Silcox. This means that sleep, diet, and energy maintenance are the primary forms of maintaining health in Ayurveda.
Another key facet of Ayurvedic medicine is spirituality, as Silcox says it’s considered a spiritual system. “The meaning of the word ‘health’ in Ayurveda is svastha, which means ‘being situated in your true self’ rather than the various personas and ego complexes that many of us live from,” Silcox explains.
WHAT ARE THE AYURVEDIC DOSHA TYPES?
In Ayurvedic medicine, people are divided up into three specific mind-body types that are ruled by certain elements called Doshas. The three Ayurvedic Doshas are Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. “We can understand Vata as the principle of air, or movement and degeneration in the body,” says Silcox. “Pitta is fire, or the metabolic processes in the body, and Kapha is earth and water, or the stabilizing and building functions in the body,” she adds. “In this way, every single cell in your body is made up of movement, metabolic activity, structure, and function.”
We are technically made up of all three Ayurvedic Doshas, however, Silcox says we all tend to express one specific type of Dosha over the other. “The importance of the Doshas cannot be underestimated,” says Silcox. “We not only want to understand our own mind and body type and the qualities that make us unique, but we can also [want to] understand the entire world through the lens of these Doshas,” she adds, noting how geography, seasons, time of day, and all life experiences have Dosha qualities, too.
To determine which Dosha you express the most, you can visit with an Ayurveda practitioner for an evaluation, or take an online Dosha quiz, which asks you questions about your bone structure, skin, favorite climate type, body temperature, sleep, mind, learning habits, and more.
VATA DOSHA
As Silcox mentioned, the Vata Dosha is connected to the air element. In fact, the word Vata means “wind” in Sanskrit. Some qualities of a Vata Dosha include cold, dry, and light. Those who express more Vata are typically active, creative, and have bubbly personalities with more slender body types. These are the types of people who are great at multi-tasking, quick learners, and kind-hearted.
KAPHA DOSHA
The Kapha Dosha is connected to earth and water and its characteristics include stability, softness, and cold. Those who express more Kapha typically have a body type that is strong and curvaceous, and they might have trouble with weight management. These are the types of people who are empathetic, wise, patient, caring, and a good support system for anyone and everyone in their lives.
PITTA DOSHA
The Pitta Dosha is all about the fire element and is connected to the summertime, as it’s a hot and sticky season—just like Pitta. Those who express more Pitta have a muscular body type and tend to be on the athletic side of the spectrum. They’re great at goal-setting, competitive, and determined, and they also tend to be quick learners, success-driven, and tenacious.
HOW TO EAT AN AYURVEDIC DIET FOR YOUR DOSHA TYPE
Ayurveda looks at all aspects of human life (down to oral care!) to optimize health. That means diet is a major part of Ayurvedic medicine. The Ayurveda diet is all about bringing balance to the body through foods that harness different types of energy to promote overall well-being—and the Doshas play a big part in the methodology. To follow the Ayurvedic diet, look at your specific body type —or your most expressed Dosha—to determine which types of foods will harmonize and balance your health. But, in addition to that, there are some overall general practices to consider, too.
“The best Ayurvedic diet is one that incorporates local and seasonal foods that are Indigenous to the land that you live on,” says Silcox. “Fresh fruits and vegetables, high-quality fats like ghee, olive and coconut oil, nuts, seeds, meats of high-quality, whole grains, and beans, as well as the appropriate spices and cooking methodologies to make food as digestible and easy on your body as possible are all important elements of eating Ayurvedically,” she adds.
Once you know what your Dosha type is, you can look at different foods through the Ayurvedic lens to determine what will balance your system. “We want to make sure that if we have a lot of air in our systems [aka, the Vata Dosha], we aren’t eating foods that exacerbate more air like dry toast, popcorn, raw foods, salads, or granola bars,” Silcox explains. In a similar light, if you express more Pitta with fire in your system, you want to “avoid foods that are inflammatory.” And, those with more Kapha or water and earth elements, want to make sure to avoid foods that are “heavy and damp like cheese, wheat, and meat.”
Some of the key benefits of the Ayurvedic diet include the promotion of eating whole foods, eating seasonally, and being mindful about the types of foods that make you feel less grounded or more sluggish, depending on your Dosha type. Additionally, the Ayurvedic diet focuses on digestion and cooking methods that are rooted in optimizing digestion.
THE TAKEAWAY
If you’re looking to adopt a healthy lifestyle that feels holistic and all-encompassing, incorporating Ayurvedic practices into your wellness routine may have some benefits. Because the natural system of medicine looks at all aspects of life to optimize health and includes many practices that are considered beneficial—such as eating whole foods and moving the body through meditative exercises like yoga—adopting Ayurvedic methods and principles can help you establish healthy practices in an effective and habitual way.
Changing up your yoga practice, lifestyle and props for Autumn
Whilst a regular daily routine is one of the keys to a more balanced, calm, productive and healthy lifestyle, we benefit from changing things up from season-to-season. We humans are animals, just like the birds and squirrels outside, and before we shifted to living domesticated indoor lives, we would have been deeply connected to the subtle changes from season-to-season, and adjusted our lives accordingly. Today however, we need to be a little more purposeful in living seasonally, and make more conscious decisions when it comes to changing how we live, what we eat, and the way we practice yoga throughout the year.
Think of your daily routine as your anchor point – perhaps you always drink a large glass of water when you wake up; maybe you always practice a few minutes of yoga in the morning. Maybe you always pause to eat lunch, or always take a moment to cultivate calmness when you arrive home with yoga nidra, or a few moments of meditation before bed. If you’ve found a daily routine that serves you well, keep that as your anchor, but allow the season to influence a change in how you go about your day. For the tips on changing up your yoga practice, props, lifestyle and foods as we move from Summer to Autumn, read on!
How to refresh your yoga practice
Summer and Autumn are two very different seasons in an energetic sense. Whilst summer is the peak of ‘yang’ energy in the year, Autumn sees us swiftly moving towards a distinctly more ‘yin’ feeling, and our practice benefits from mirroring this change. As Dallas Hartwig writes in the 4 Season Solution, Summer is very conducive to leading a ‘yang’ lifestyle, where we socialise more, stay up a little later, engage in lots of fun activities, and navigate the world in a more extroverted way. As you can imagine, living life in Summer mode can be tiring, so when Autumn arrives, it’s important to recognise this as a signal to slow down. Try changing your sun salutations to moon salutations, switch up one of your vigorous vinyasa flow classes for a slow and stretchy yin session, or give yourself more stillness by choosing meditation instead of a sweaty hot yoga class. Restorative yoga is one of the best choices we can make when choosing a yoga practice to support us through the ‘yin’ seasons of the year, and when we give ourselves this time to recover and restore, we’re more able to literally ‘spring’ back into action when the warmer months return.
How to make more mindful food choices
When we consume local, seasonal foods, we give our bodies the exact nutrients they need in that very moment. Take blackberries for example, which are ready to pick at the beginning of September; these delicious berries are full of antioxidants, which help our cells recover from the natural oxidative damage that happens when we’re exposed to lots of sunshine, stress or exercise during Summer. Blackberries are also very high in vitamin C, which helps boost the immune system in preparation for Autumn and Winter. As well as eating seasonally, we can turn to the wisdom of Ayurveda (yoga’s ‘sister science’ and an ancient health system) for guidance. Ayurveda reasons that Autumn is a season comprising more of the qualities of coldness, dryness in the form of drier air, irregularity in the changeable weather, and lightness in the way the plants and trees lose their leaves and pause their growth. When we’re exposed to too much of these cold, dry, irregular and light qualities, we can become imbalanced and unwell. Because of this, we benefit by bringing the opposite qualities of warmth, oiliness, heaviness and regularity into our lives. Try consuming more cooked foods, use coconut or sesame oil in cooking (and oil on your body too!), use ghee in recipes, enjoy warming spices like cinnamon and ginger, and ensure you’re eating regular meals at regular times – your digestive system will thank you!
How to upgrade your yoga props
Whilst Summer may have been all about grippy yoga mat towels, cork mats that work better the more you sweat, and eco yoga shorts, it’s time to introduce more cosiness to your practice as we head into Autumn, especially if you’re going to be practicing a different style of yoga such as yin or restorative. Try the Yogamatters Wellness Pilates mat, which is super cushiony at 8mm thick. For your restorative practice, use the Yogamatters Organic Relaxation Kit. To really relax your nervous system, a sandbag and lavender-scented eye pillow are wonderful additions, and well worth adding to your home yoga practice kit.
How to refresh your lifestyle and home décor
After the extroverted nature of Summer, Autumn invites us to rest and nest, and start living in a more introverted way that allows us to make deeper connections to friends and family. Instead of frolicking with acquaintances, Autumn is about strengthening the relationships we already have, and getting to know ourselves a little better. Is there a friend you haven’t seen in a while? A family member who would love you to call them? As opposed to the expansive energy of Summer, think of Autumn as a time to contract inwards a little more – wind up projects and resist making lots of new plans until the Spring. Focus on finishing tasks you’ve been working on throughout the year, and get yourself organised with The Positive Bullet Diary. A regular practice of journaling is a great way to allow your mind to process thoughts and emotions, and to wind down at the end of a long day, treat yourself to a bath with Epsom Salts.