How Ayurvedic detoxification – Pancha karma improves your Immunity
What is detox
Detox is to remove the toxins from your body. Toxins can be anything in the body that is not in sync with the natural balance of your body. It can be physical or emotional. It can be a form of metabolic waste as well.
How are toxins formed?
There are different reasons why toxins are formed inside the body. It can happen due to climate change, due to the consumption of unhealthy or junk food, spoilt food, sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy habits like drinking, smoking etc. Even though we are keeping healthy habits, toxins can come into the body because what we are consuming today is not as pure as it used to be. Quality of air, soil and water has changed a lot. You must have heard about the need of taking antioxidants. Why are they required? They are required to remove the free radicals forming in our body which is not good for the body. Free radicals are same as toxins. They are formed due to some chemical changes inside the body, excessive body strain, stress, UV lights, some medicines etc.
Emotional toxins include stress, anger, fear etc. All these negative emotions will affect the natural balance of your physical functioning. Emotional toxins after sometime precipitate as physical issues. So ultimately some or the other form of toxins are there inside our body.
Most of the time our body can deal with these situations and it will not show any issues. Our body will automatically try to remove toxins as much as possible. Our organs like liver and kidneys are working on eliminating the toxins all the time. Toxins will accumulate when the body is not able to cope up with the amount of toxins present in the body as the intake is sometimes too much for the organs to eliminate completely.
Like our house requires deep cleaning once in a while, our body also require some external help once in a while to eliminate these toxins. It is good to do cleansing with each season change. If that is not possible every time, at least once in a year is a good option.Most of the time, even with modern research we do not know the exact reason for many lifestyle diseases like diabetes, hyper tension, cancer etc. So the only thing we can do is to prevent accumulation of toxins as much as possible.
In detox we are helping our own body in the healing process.
What is Panchakarma?
Pancha means five and karma means activities. Pancha karma includes 5 cleansing processes to eliminate toxins from our body. They are Vamana (therapeutic vomiting), Virechana (therapeutic purgation), Vasti (enema), Nasya(nasal medication) and Raktha mokshana (blood letting). These are the five main procedures. But all procedures are not required for everyone. These procedures help in eliminating the toxins from our body through excretory paths. Which pancha karma process should be followed depends on the condition of the body. There are some preparatory procedures also involved in Pancha karma. The first one is called Snehana. It makes the body ready for panchkarma. As per Ayurvedic texts, the same way we cannot take juice from an unripened mango, detox will not happen directly from our body as it is deep routed. So preparatory procedures like Snehana and Swedana are performed first to bring the toxins to gut. Snehana will lubricate the channels. The second step is called swedana (sweating). This is performed after oil application on body using steam box. Swedana therapy will dilate the channel. Hence Snehana and Swedana together will bring the deep rooted toxins to the gut so that they are easy to eliminate.
This type of full fledged panchakarma is required in disease conditions. To maintain a healthy lifestyle and for preventive measures, just mild cleansing or koshta sodhana (gut cleansing) is enough.
Benefits of Detoxification
There are a lot of benefits to detox through Ayurveda. After the detox process you will immediately feel light, you can see a glow on your face and skin. Other than these external things there are long term benefits. Your digestion power will improve. So the absorption of food will be good. And of course absorption of nutrients will improve. All these will improve the general immunity of body.
At Swastha Life we are providing DIY cleansing kit with online consultation and clear instruction videos.