Immunize the Resistance! Ten Ways to Protect Your Ojas
Wisdom for revolutionaries from Ayurveda
According to Ayurveda, the ancient healing tradition of India, ojas is the source of our vitality and endurance. Ojas is most nourished by love and honesty.
Ojas is the essence of immunity
Ojas, the subtle form of kapha dosha, is the essence of all of the body's tissues. Ojas is the end product of healthy digestion. It is the source of our immunity and vitality, supporting both physical and mental endurance.
Healthy ojas makes you cheerful, loving, compassionate, generous and resistant to both physical disease and more subtle negative influences. It supports your strength, stamina, equanimity, and clarity.
When ojas is healthy, we have enough “juice” to deal with life’s natural ups and downs.
When ojas is depleted, we can feel chronically malnourished, dry, disappointed, bitter, under attack, defensive, territorial, miserly, fragile, and unable to handle or digest circumstances. We can tire or give up after only moderate effort. Our ability to see things through or “surf” life’s difficulties is impaired. We are also more likely to fall ill.
Two types of ojas
Ayurvedic texts describe ojas as a superfine biological substance the color of ghee.
Apara ojas is distributed throughout the body and can be replenished or depleted depending on lifestyle, diet, and behavior. It also produces our aura, a protective, energetic field surrounding our bodies much like wei qi in Chinese medicine.
Para ojas is located in the heart and is a bridge to the experience of universal love and continuity with all. When we don’t (yet) love everyone, we are experiencing incomplete digestion and therefore lack of production of para ojas. We still feel separate.
Ojas for activists
Every morning, we wake to reports of intensified and new cruelties being perpetrated by the U.S. government on its own people and the people of the world.
We wake to an avalanche of lies.
We wake to experience the seeming glee with which our government is relinquishing any responsibility for caring for our planet: our home and the home of our children and those to come.
Intellect fails to grasp the scale of cruel-heartedness that has always been there, but has now been totally unleashed. Our hearts, our bodies, and all aspects of our immune system are directly registering this grand-scale assault on honesty and love.
What can we do to protect our ojas and sustain contact with our sense of our own and Nature’s innate value? How can we support our capacity to persist in opposing tyranny and not succumb to grief and fatalism?
Here are a few guidelines from the tradition of Ayurveda. Following them can enhance and conserve your ojas. And you’ll be strengthening the resistance, too!
Practice total honesty with yourself and others. This is the number one step you can take to support your immunity.
Follow impulses to be generous. Generosity nourishes ojas and is also the fruit of enjoying healthy ojas.
Cook food with loving attention to its ability to nourish you. Buy the healthiest, most visually appealing food you can find, and let yourself take the time to experience all of its qualities as you cook and eat.
Eat with people you love as frequently as possible.
Make your own ghee and enjoy some every day. Ghee is a living symbol of ojas.
Try to drink good quality spring or well water. If you can find untreated spring water, that is best. But at least drink filtered water. Good quality water has a magical sweet taste that nourishes our tissues and reminds us of the sweetness of life.
Be in nourishing relationships with others. It’s bad enough that we have to be in such an unnourishing relationship with our government. Don’t make it worse by hanging onto destructive personal and work relationships.
To whatever extent you can afford it, upgrade the beauty and freshness of your home and work environments. Now is a great time to hang out in spaces that remind your body, energy, and mind to relax and enjoy.
Take media breaks. Too much media unbalances mental fire (tejas) and this disrupts the production of ojas.
Spend more time in Nature, and treat Nature as a sumptuous meal you are digesting with all of your senses.
Conserving and building ojas is something we want to commit to for a lifetime. But it is especially important now when we so sorely need to maintain our energy and deepen our access to open-heartedness.
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
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Thank you for this! So timely and helpful. Some days, after sitting with clients whose suffering is exacerbated by systemic socioeconomic and political injustices, when it feels like I’m putting a bandaid on a gaping wound, it’s hard to not feel the bitter taste of scorching anger at this government pervade everything.
Thank you for this! So useful!