The Beginner's Guide to Ayurvedic Home Remedies: Ancient Healing for Modern Life

Accessible. Easy to read. Beautifully illustrated. Wellness info you won't get from mainstream medicine in the U.S. Very glad to find a different approach to digestive problems and other health problems as well as healthy living! Thank you!

The Beginner's Guide to Ayurvedic Home Remedies starts with an attractive cover, and dives right into the ayurvedic approach with a brief history and a dosha quiz to help you determine your lifelong state of being, or Prakruti, which may or may not be the same as the way you feel right now, or Vikruti. I scored Vata almost across the board, and I am grateful there is no quiz on these terms because I will never remember them. (The nice thing about a reference book is that memorization is never required; as long as I can remember where I put the book, I can look up everything.) Chapters are devoted to topics like Sleep, Respiratory System, Digestion, and Skin -- and include suggestions for keeping everything at optimal levels (with breathing exercises, for example) as well as remedies for fixing anything that goes awry -- I am ready to try the Breathe Free Soup even if no one in my house needs it. There's a whole chapter devoted to pain. And at the end, a resource guide, with recommendations for everything from underwear to skin products, to books (top of that list: James Nestor's Breath, a book I've recommended to many people). Last weekend at a memorial service I had a long conversation with a cousin who had traveled to India after a serious injury, spent over a year there getting cured, and then started his own successful skincare company based on Indian healing traditions. I was so taken by his experience that I doubled down on trying out the remedies in this book. Then today I read a recently-published study: 800,000 people/year in the US die or suffer permanent disabilities because of medical misdiagnoses. My takeaway: you are your first and best line of defense when it comes to optimizing your health care. This book will help you maximize the value of self-care efforts.

This book is an excellent introduction to Ayurveda. I’ve known the word and been around practitioners of it for a while now, and I wanted to learn more. The author calls Ayurveda a calling; she embraced it, lost weight, and became healthy by starting with a 21-day retreat. She recognized that not everyone can do that, and this offers us her general knowledge and wisdom. I read the first three chapters and then chose areas I was interested in. She says the book can be used as a prevention workbook and a manual for healthy living. She starts with a quick assessment to identify your dosha type. This challenged me because I fit into multiple doshas with tied scores. Sometimes the advice seemed very common sense and repeated itself, and then interesting facts were thrown in, or a new tidbit was added. For example, for sleep apnea, showing a study that those who play the didgeridoo might be a cure for sleep apnea. As with all things like this, please do your due diligence first. What may work for someone else may not be for you. I would recommend getting a physical copy of the book. It is a physically beautiful book, the graphics and artwork.

This is a well-made, well written book. The pages are thick with a nice feel. Colors on the pages are very calming. I was expecting a book on herbs and essential oils to help with different ailments or injuries. There is some of that in this book but it’s more about nurturing, using what is available in nature. To me it spoke more about changing how you do things to heal the body and calm the soul. It is very much a beginners guide on healing from India’s culture and way of life. When reading the author’s section on getting oneself ready for bed, I became very relaxed just by reading it. If just reading that section calmed me so much I can’t imagine what will happen when I put this to practice. There are recipes for different things to help with your healing journey. I gave it to my husband to skim through and he found some things on sleep apnea that he wants to try. I also have new insight on why I don’t sleep as well as I should. Some of this I already knew, but a lot was new. In the end, I enjoyed the read very much and I enjoyed learning about Ayurvedic (something I had never heard of before). This is a book that I will add to my homeopathic and natural healing books and refer to from time to time. I’m glad I picked this one out.

I got this book because my aunt got me interested in more natural and alterative type healing after a resent health issue that she's dealing with. This book goes into such detail and is written in a way that isn't hard to understand and is easy to follow along with. The colors on each page is very pretty and makes everything pop as you turn each page. While it does say a lot that we are told; eat right, sleep properly, and exercise, it does have a lot more that builds atop all that. It's laid out in chapters that you can turn to, to find what you need. Like if you have pain, turn to that chapter... or if you have sleep or digestive issues go to those chapters. I can't wait to try some of the things in here since for some of my issues modern stuff hasn't helped at all.

O livro é maravilhoso porém veio todo amassado. Parece que estava guardado em alguma prateleira de forma mal conservada e caiu no chão. Uma pena, pois é um livro lindo, mas custou caro e fiquei decepcionada com a aparência de um livro usado.