Glowing health usually requires balance, moderation, and routine. But variety is the spice of life— travel enlivens the spirit and new adventures feed the soul! However, many travelers find it difficult to happily hop around the country (or the world) without feeling some common travel woes, like disturbed sleep, poor digestion , constipation , or mild anxiety . From the perspective of Ayurveda (yoga’s sister science), most travel discomforts are due to increased vata dosha, the energy governing all movement in the body-mind. Despite constitutional differences, everyone has vata dosha, which supports movement in the respiratory, circulatory, nervous, and digestive systems (and elsewhere). When vata is in a healthy state, these systems run smoothly—breath is fluid, elimination easy, thoughts well communicated, etc. But when the momentum of external travel increases the momentum of internal vata, the emotional result is feeling wound up, scattered, forgetful, or anxious, while the p...
Anxiety is basically what happens when we experience worry, doubt, dread, or fear regarding the future, and it can manifest in various ways. We’ve all probably felt at least a little anxiety before, so we won’t go into too many specifics about what it feels like in this article; but, we will say, that it can cause us to behave in ways we wouldn’t normally behave, think thoughts we wouldn’t otherwise think, and experience numbed or heightened sensations, shortness or heaviness of breath, and a general checked-out/frozen demeanor and/or a more frantic, manic demeanor. Needless to say, it manifests differently within each of us, and differently at different times for different reasons. We can feel anxious about significant things like, relationships, career/finances, politics, health, environmental issues; and we can also feel anxious about things we can’t fully explain, like when we feel anxious for no apparent reason. Ayurveda tells us that regardless of why, whenever we feel anxious, ...