Your Body Already Knows: Nidhi Bhanshali Pandya's Ayurvedic Guide To Wellness

Caught up in modern stresses and lifestyles, most people have lost their connection to the natural rhythm of life, thus putting their health at risk. In Your Body Already Knows, Nidhi Bhanshali Pandya, a third-generation Ayurvedic practitioner, distills the ancient systems of Ayurveda into its essential principles, encouraging you to rebalance your body by tapping into nature's circadian rhythms, aligning yourself with the cycles of the world around you. All you need is 21 days of simple practices to transform your health.

Complete with self-evaluation tools and dosha guides, daily meditation techniques and schedules, meal plans and recipes, Your Body Already Knows is a fresh, user-friendly, 360-degree guide that will empower you to take control of your well-being so you feel more rejuvenated than you have ever felt before.

Here's an excerpt from Nidhi Bhanshali Pandya's Your Body Already Knows

Life thrives in the optimum Inner Climate®. Our job is to notice when we deviate from it and find our way back each time.

Climate change is as real inside the human body as it is on our planet. You don’t have to be a farmer to know that even the slightest change in climate can affect a crop’s life; that if, for example, it snows in spring, there’s a reason for this being labeled “freak weather.” Unpredictable climate patterns are premonitory signs of an imbalance in life on Earth. A supportive environment led our planet, and it alone, to become home to 8.7 million species in over 4.5 billion years. Can you imagine what systematic climate change is doing now to all its inhabitants?

Similarly, imagine your body as a vast universe that is home to trillions of bacteria, which form a powerhouse called the microbiome. Just like every species needs a particular environment or climate in which to thrive, so does this inner army. Your inner army is a mighty force that helps you to digest your food, regulate your immune system, protect against bacteria that cause disease, and produce vitamins, including the B vitamins cobalamin, thiamin, and riboflavin, as well as vitamin K, which is needed for blood coagulation. What is truly mind-blowing is that our microbiome actually provides more genes that contribute to human survival than the human genome itself (8 million as opposed to 22,000). Without a healthy inner army of bacteria, our chances of thriving significantly plummet. Our Inner Climate® needs a certain type of climate if it is to be healthy. To put it simply:

Inner Climate® suffers = our inner army suffers = our body suffers

Picture this: when the Inner Climate® of your body is disturbed, this directly impacts the life of your microbiome and, consequently, your own life. It’s a dynamic relationship that underscores the importance of nurturing this internal ecosystem for your overall well-being and vitality.

Just What Is the Inner Climate®? 

The ideal Inner Climate® inside the human body is warm and moist. This is the perfect state that allows life within us and thus our own life to thrive. Any deviation from this can lead to disease. Now, indulge me for a moment. Take your palms and cup them around your mouth; let out a large exhale till you can feel your breath in your palms. It will be warm and moist. As warm-blooded mammals, our blood is warm and moist, and so is our mother’s milk. So are our reproductive fluids and urine. If you were to urinate one day and your urine seemed hotter than usual, this would instantly draw your attention as being something out of the ordinary. No wonder the first sign of severe sickness for most people is a fever, when the body quickly declares an emergency, taking it away from a lovingly warm to an alarmingly hot state.

Let me elaborate a little by drawing an analogy between our microbiome, which contains microbiota, also known as gut flora, and the general categories of flora and fauna. Where do flora and fauna thrive? The answer is in any warm and moist place – like Florida, which is particularly rich in animal and plant life. Yet its ecosystem could quickly become a breeding ground for parasites and mold as well, if it were overly humid and hot, like the Amazon rainforest. Too hot and dry, and the chances of survival dwindle, as they do in a desert. Cold like the Antarctic– forget it. Our microbiome and indeed our life itself thrive in warm and moist conditions, inside and out. 

Now, let’s delve deeper. We instinctively gravitate toward warm people, having an unspoken understanding of their intrinsic warmth. In contrast, coldness creates distance and renders relationships stagnant; at the other extreme, hot-tempered people burn through their social circles in no time. Not only a state of connection but even a state of flow becomes possible when our minds can bask in conditions of warmth and moisture.

Think for a moment about how you like your home environment to feel. I’m guessing it’s neither too cold nor too hot. The fact is, no one much enjoys a sticky, humid room or a space that feels overly dry. Most of us prefer our surroundings to be comfortably warm and moist – just right, like our comfort foods, soups, and stews. Or like the comfort of a cozy blanket. 

Just as we seek moisture and warmth, so does our inner army of gut microbiota and the planet itself – where the moon’s moist and cool aspects balance the sun’s heating and drying qualities. It is where almost all life exists and where life itself continues to thrive. 

Our main job in Ayurveda is to return to and maintain an ideal Inner Climate®, to create an environment where life naturally thrives and sustains yet more life, and where our inner army is healthy enough to take on any battle and thus homeostasis becomes effortless. Once achieved, this means that we no longer have to dissect the needs of our body down to which micronutrients to consume or strive to achieve balance organ by organ, and system by system. We can finally liberate ourselves from the fear of disease and live in the freedom of good health. The yogis and Ayurvedic sages understood this truth, practiced it and used it to live in harmony with their bodies and minds for many long years.

I appreciate that it may seem more complicated to practice this concept than it is to understand it. If it’s new to you, take a while to let it sink into your mind before trying to use it to change your life. After all, most of us have strayed away from the ideal warm and moist Inner Climate®. Almost every day, I meet people who are either too hot and inflamed, dry from depletion and exertion, or just stagnant, heavy, and humid due to immobility and over-nourishment. However, within three to four weeks of systematically incorporating the three principles that we’ll be considering in these pages, they begin to heal and find their way back home in their bodies. 

Throughout this book, I will teach you how your Inner Climate® can be rebalanced and enhanced with the integration of the two additional principles. I will then take you through a systematic journey in Part 3 that will enable you to restore your warm and moist Inner Climate® in 21 days.

Extracted with permission from Nidhi Bhanshali Pandya's Your Body Already Knows; published by HarperCollins India.