Essentials of a Daily Routine [video]

 

Vasant Lad is a renowned Ayurvedic physician and founder of the Ayurvedic Institute. Learn more about his live webinar series and online education at AyurPrana.

 

Every day is a new day. This day will never come again. So how we can live fully, completely, and totally in harmony with this moment and with this day?

The answer is dinacharya. Dinacharya means “daily routine” or “daily regimen.” Dina means “day” and charya means “behavior,” “response,” and “facial expression.”  

Dinacharya is the ancient Ayurvedic art of unfolding the inner balance of the body, mind, and consciousness, and inner balance of observer, observation, and the thing to be observed.

You have a circadian rhythm—an inner invisible clock within your medulla oblongata, within your hypothalamus. This is your biological clock, and dina is a chronological time. Chronos means “time.” Sunrise, sunset. This is chronos. Chronological time and biological time should go hand in hand.

Therefore, within one day, we have early morning (kapha), midday (pitta), and evening (vata). Later, we have the evening after sunset (kapha), then, midnight (pitta), and early dawn (vata).

Dawn and dusk are vata times of day. Midday and midnight are pitta. Early morning and early evening are kapha. So, dinacharya is the art of balancing kapha dosha during kapha time, pitta dosha during pitta time, and vata dosha during vata time.

Really, people don't know how to live in harmony with nature. They just become prey to their wrong habits and confused addictions, and therefore they lay waste to their life and time. They are confused, and this confusion is the root cause of suffering.

Through dinacharya, we are bringing harmony into our life and into our daily relationships with one another. That's why dinacharya is a great secret that ancient Ayurvedic science talks a great deal about.

Living in Rhythm

Dinacharya is when you wake up, brush your teeth, scrape your tongue, and drink warm water. You sit in a cross-legged posture facing east or north to do pranayama, meditation, and yoga asana. Then, you take a little oil to practice abhyanga (self-massage with oil) and take a shower. Every action is done with awareness.

We must have daily routines so that we take breakfast at a proper time, lunch at a proper time, and dinner at a proper time. That way, you are creating balance, so that your biological and chronological clock can go together.

This is the harmony: ether, air, fire, water, earth (the five elements), atma (the consciousness), and time.

Time is great. Thought is time. Prana (the breath) is the time. The ingestion and digestion of food is time. We all are bound by time, and time is a movement, and any action is a movement that is bound by time. So dinacharya will show you how to utilize proper time in a proper way, and every action in a proper time.

That is why time is a great healer. We always say, “give some time and we will heal.” Exactly! Dinacharya is utilizing your daily time: morning, afternoon, evening, midnight, and going to bed.

By learning about dinacharya, we will live in harmony with nature and with the cosmos, and that will unfold the inner secret of healing the body, the mind, and consciousness.