5 Ways to Support a Healthy Mind with Vedic Wisdom

“You already have the precious mixture that will make you well. Use it.” ~ Rumi 

Are you ready to live happy, healthy, and free?

Ayurveda offers guidance through Vedic teachings to support the inner path of self-knowledge for self-healing, understanding your unique mind-body constitution and how to align your everyday choices to support your highest good and overall well-being.

At birth, we begin the journey of the ego and embodied self, trying to satiate the body and mind. We feel the primal urges to survive, caught up by our separation and sensory impulse. We become trapped by attachment, resistance, and appearance.

The mind’s action is to know, and it wants to create stories, ideas, and beliefs through its experience, convincing us it is there to guide and protect us. Yes, but as we all have experienced, the mind can lift us up and tear us down within minutes, lost in the mind chatter of pain, fear, and the unknown.

According to Vedic teachings, our capacity to adapt to each moment is a sign of our mental health. As we arrive at each moment, we filter it through a multitude of perspectives and previous understandings, influenced by our conditioning, beliefs, fears, and traumas that have us resisting or struggling with what has arrived.

We live in a tug-of-war between mental mind traps and our deep yearning to be free. One of my teachers shares, “to know is not yet to be.” How does the knowing turn into wisdom and then into the embodied being, always being, always becoming?

The mind is a beautiful instrument and should be tuned daily in order to foster a higher awareness of its power and its tendencies. Our mental health is foundational to living happy, healthy, and free. But we must connect to our higher mind, consciousness, and awareness to navigate the natural tendencies of the human mind that try to define and confine our everyday lives.

Thankfully, Ayurveda, yoga, and Vedic wisdom, along with many other brilliant traditions and modalities, offer ways to be with body, mind, and spirit, creating harmony and deep understanding of the path of liberation. Because the natural tendencies of the mind and human life are laced with chaos and delusion, it is foundational to practice, cultivate, and establish a deeper sense of peace and well-being that shines through our everyday life. This allows us to stay in the right relationship to our humanness, while tapping into higher awareness and soul-level understanding of our karmic journey.

Today’s collective and individual mental health is struggling. The level of fear, addiction, mental health issues, and isolation have risen to new levels, affecting the psyche, the soul of our humanity, and our divinity. We are lost in substances that alter our reality in order to cope with the deep devastation and chaos felt by most.

The latest technological advances and conveniences that have consumed us have us plugged into stimulus overload and external forces. We aim to please the mind’s constant chatter and the body’s constant cravings. This keeps us in cycles of suffering, known as samskara, “mental impressions, recollections, or psychological imprints.”

Vedic philosophy believes that we come into human form to heal these samskaras, healing our karma, and with that comes freeing our souls. Another teacher said that dying is the greatest ecstasy—when you are released from your human body and reunited with the infinite soul.

Who are you? When you look inside, what do you find? An eternal soul, energetic vibration, frequency, life pulsating, connected to everything, perfect, and whole?

We are here to be embodied. How do we live as awake, connected, whole, limitless love within form, as awareness. To reside in full acceptance of what is in every moment within all of existence, not rejecting reality, trusting that this moment contains everything. Staying aware of continuous movement of thoughts, sensations, voices, the many veils of deception, lying deep in the walls of the egoic structure, the judgements, the contractions within the collective psyche.

We are more afraid of our light than we are of our darkness.

Lifestyle Practices to Support a Healthy Mind:

1. Wake up with the sunrise

Waking up with the sun helps to cleanse and purify the body, mind, and spirit with each new day, aligning with the morning energy of purity and clarity. The morning is the perfect time to establish a healthy and positive inner connection before moving out into the world through daily self-care and spiritual practices.

2. Cultivate a daily routine

A daily routine is essential to provide a dynamic framework for harmonizing the body, mind, and spirit. It supports the biological rhythm, healthy digestion, strong immune system, deep sleep, and inner peace of the body. It also provides a foundation for calming the nervous system and quieting the mind.

By aligning with natural guiding principles, we tune our body’s daily rhythms into a higher governing intelligence. The daily rhythm focuses on when we wake up, when we eat, when we work, and when we sleep. The consistent timing of these daily routines provides a stable and harmonizing support for the entire body systems.

3. Understand the vitality of food

The vitality of our food choices is important and translates directly to the integrity of our tissues and emotional stability. There is prana, or life force/vitality in our food. The closer the food is to its original form, such as the case with fresh produce, the more vitality it has.

Try to eat fresh, organic, and seasonal whole foods, and avoid frozen, processed, packaged foods, and leftovers.

4. Practice daily meditation and pranayama

Meditation offers a time to be still and gain awareness of the mind and recurring thoughts, helping to destress and calm the mind and the nervous system. Pranayama, or breathwork, opens the pranic or energy pathways to help purify the mind and body.

By concentrating on the breath, the mind becomes still and the breath offers deep healing and transformation. Try 20 minutes of meditation in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening, starting with five to ten rounds of alternate nostril breathing.

5. Take walks in nature

Take time to connect with nature, breathing in the fresh air and being open to the magic of life. Walking on earth is grounding and offers a soothing rhythm for the nervous system, helping to nourish the body, mind, and soul. By immersing yourself in nature, peaceful qualities are cultivated, and you learn how to live in harmony with your inner and outer environments.

When we take responsibility for our lives, we realize that our thoughts, words, and actions become our reality and that we are at the core of our own suffering. When we ignite the inner light to guide our awareness, we can heal our karma and release the tethers, transforming the individual and collective consciousness to higher states of awareness and freedom.