therefore disturbances in the balance of pitta in the body. The body requires balanced pitta to be present for healthy transformation to happen.
When the eyes have too much sharpness, fire, and acidity, they are pitta-dominated. The result is poor quality of transformation. The heat of fire and the sharpness create, hot, dry eyes that burn and tingle as the oily tissues dry out. The dryness and burning lead to itching and inflammation with its signs of redness, swelling, pain, and heat. Ayurveda interpreted these signs and symptoms as a whole with the term pitta. In the eyes, it is called alochaka pitta.
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The wisemen that captured the ancient knowledge of Ayurveda had amazing perception and excellent sight. They were able to capture subtle properties of plants, animals, foods, and categorize them and predict what would happen if substances were combined. In their wisdom they knew that care of the eyes was dependent on renewal, regular cleansing and flushing, and remoistening.
A regular ritual of many yogis is to apply raw honey into their eyes once in three weeks, just before bedtime. Raw honey, known as madhura or maksika in Sanskrit, is astringent and sweet and has scraping properties according to ancient chemistry that are gentle and effective. It is drying and creates lightness by cleansing and promoting healing and digestion of toxins, perhaps due to the salivary enzymes of the bee, which are mixed with digested pollen.
The first time is the scariest so it is best to be guided by a seasoned user. Place one drop of clean honey on a clean finger pad, then guide the finger toward the eye. , Create a pocket opening from the eye
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In my emergency kit, I keep a glass bottle of mahatriphala ghrit. Ghrit is the Sanskrit term for ghee with medicinal herbs cooked into it. Maha-triphala is a combination of over a dozen herbs which calm the vata and pitta, or heat and dryness, of the eyes. For millenia, it has been used to cleanse the eyes, treat burning and itching, and to revive the eyes after illnesses, inflammation, infection, surgery, and chronic irritation. An ayurvedic physician can also prescribe it to be eaten, as it is simply edible herbs cooked into ghee, with triphala kwath (decoction). Contrary to conventional belief, the older the ghee, the more medicinal it becomes.
This is a dangerous compound not because of its efficacy or safety or toxicity, but simply because it is neither and therefore threatens the perception that eyes should only be treated by medical doctors. Mahatriphala ghrit is one of the compounds that underscores the problems of bias of conventional medical researchers against traditional medicines and self-care.
First, it is a polyherbal. Conventional doctors will ask which compound is the effective one because they are trained to believe that only one chemical can be the target drug in a scenario. They will ponder the quagmire of problems in a compound that has hundreds, indeed thousands, of unknown chemicals. It is difficult for them to conceive that the overall efficacy of a drug can be due to many interdependent factors that create a
Second, the compound is being put into the eyes. People are wary of anything eyebound and will wonder about toxicity to the eye. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people have used mahatriphala ghrit and reported improvements. It is legal to use under Indian Law, under Section 3a of the Drugs & Cosmetics Act, as a classical Ayurvedic medicine listed and described in detail in the classical Ayurvedic texts. But it is still reluctantly approached by doctors both in India as well as around the world.
Third, ghee has been villified, beginning with an article in The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, in September 1987. Using ghee not made by Ayurvedic standards, the authors made newswaves linking atherosclerosis with cholesterol oxides found in ghee. They created an impression of the dangers of ghee on people with risk factors for heart disease, with subsequent articles about ghee warning patients with diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. People today will talk of the excessive fat in ghee, indeed over 60% saturated fat and 8 mg of cholesterol per teaspoon, not acknowledging the good fat to bad fat ratio that differs in differently prepared ghee. Indeed, conventional medicine has also shown that the body needs
However, popular use often outsmarts all the concern that scientists have when they lack evidence. A huge upsurge of use began in 2005, when Divya
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