Ayurveda: A new perspective on sustainability

First a confession: Before I learned anything.
ayurveda, I had already decided that it was ridiculous. I admit that it is presumptuous to immediately ignore a thousand-year-old tradition, but Google We’ll take a DIY Ayurvedic quiz to help you “find your dosha.” buzzfeed It’s a combination of a quiz and a horoscope, and it got me more interested in my digestive tract than I expected. To this outsider, despite working for yogi tea — a company driven by Ayurvedic principles — I was ready to fire it.

What I discovered instead, after patient guidance from one of our in-house experts, was an enlightening way to see the world that perfectly resembles my work as a sustainability practitioner. I’m certainly no expert, and I fully admit that aspects of Ayurveda are unbelievable, but the interesting and different way Ayurveda sees the world is still worth exploring. In fact, I believe Ayurvedic insights are needed to drive sustainability today.

There is a whole universe in Ayurveda, but the basics are as follows. Ayurveda is a holistic health practice that utilizes diet, exercise (especially yoga), daily living, and medicinal plants to treat disease and maintain people’s health. He thinks there are five main elements. ether/space, air, fire,
water and earth – These combine to form three doshas called . vata,
pitta and Kapha. Vata relates to movement, Pitta relates to heat and metabolism, and Kapha embodies structure and solidity. The doshas combine anddosha prakriti” or the basic constitution. These online quizzes assess which combination of doshas makes up a person’s constitution.

Ayurveda uses the concept of doshas to express: The more your basic constitution matches your current state, the better you will feel. In Ayurvedic terminology, an idea brings about: Prakriti (basic constitution) to balance vikriti (current situation). It’s a smart idea with deep resonance.

The challenge is that vikriti is constantly changing. It depends on the time of day, the time of year, what you eat, your emotional state, and even other considerations. We intuitively know this to be true. For example, tension in the news translates into stress in the body. Unhealthy environmental conditions cause health problems for individuals. Ayurveda’s job is to find balance in constant change.

By clarifying the interplay between Prakriti and Vikriti, Ayurveda shows that an individual’s well-being is always connected to the world around him, making sustainability tangible. Being sensitive to the current situation means that your personal experience changes no matter what happens in the world. In other words, having an impact wherever you are is important wherever you are. For example, we should not have to see the environmental damage caused by industrial corn cultivation and continue to be affected by it. Cheap industrial corn secures cheap high fructose corn syrup, which creates cheap and appealing junk food, which creates health crises and alarming publicity about health crises. Compromising the health of your friends and family. Stories of desertification, peasant suicide rates, and loss of fertile topsoil heighten anxiety. Even if you don’t live in the corn belt, what happens there will sooner or later hit you.

Ayurveda’s holistic worldview, which connects the individual and the world, shows that there is no such thing as “not my business” when it comes to sustainability. Discussions about corporate sustainability treat sustainability as if it were an optional option whose implementation should depend on corporate strategy. Endless articles trying to prove what the ROI is, whether sustainability resonates with target audiences, and what value is created when sustainable changes are made. there is. In effect, sustainability is being discussed directly, urgently and powerfully, as if it doesn’t even matter. to we. Sustainability in business is about health, the physical and mental health of everyone, in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the world we create. It will be treated as if it were not associated. As if corporations and humans operate in completely different realms, as if a healthy balance sheet could somehow compensate for the declining health of the creatures that produce it. How else can we contextualize decisions made for business reasons that inevitably compromise the very health of those making the decisions? It exists within us and reminds us that the world is within us. Treating one with respect is important to both, and there is no way to separate one from the other.

Where does this leave us? At Yogi, Ayurvedic sustainability practices are reflected in our mission statement. It’s about making the world better because we’re in it. It is not to have a neutral impact on the world (which would be destructive in its current state of imbalance), but to heal a wounded world and promote balance. We cooperate with our competitors and support cooperative interventions from other companies.
Guatemala to Nepal — Understand that our sustainability success means nothing in isolation. Recognizing that finding balance in a damaged biosphere requires more than conservation, we promote regenerative agricultural practices and strengthen the relationship between our work and the world that makes it possible. Trying to find equilibrium. Our Ayurvedic tea blends are designed to bring balance to our communities, but only if the tea itself brings balance to the world we all share. You can

The conclusion is inevitable. Sustainability can only be achieved in holistic balance. Compostable packaging doesn’t mean much if you don’t have a composting program to send it to. It doesn’t matter if we collect recyclable materials, but too few recycling programs reuse the collected materials. Individual successes do not compensate for collective failures. Sustainability, like Ayurveda, strikes a balance between inputs and outputs, resources and consumption, means and materials. Sustainability initiatives do not and will not succeed in isolation from their broader context. We are truly in this together.

Seen through the lens of Ayurveda, sustainability is a state of balance between the dynamic forces with which we are intimately intertwined. Just as Ayurveda finds balance between the doshas, ​​sustainability finds balance between giving and receiving. As humans of the 21st century, we have inherited a certain prakriti. But our vikriti remains dangerously out of balance. This imbalance causes widespread fear and anxiety, disease and misery of all kinds, and constitutes a kind of collective disease that requires balance to be alleviated. It takes all of us to understand our destiny as a community, to understand our work as a collective effort, and to align our current situation with what the natural world makes possible.