The Five Elements
We traveled to the Malabar Coast in the north of Kerala to spend a few weeks at an Ayurvedic school and treatment center. We went there to take a cooking and nutrition class and to experience panchakarma, a set of Ayurvedic cleansing and rejuvenating treatments. The school is located in the blink-and-you-missed it town of Azhiyur, just south of the formerly-French territory of Mahé. From the school, a ten minute walk through a quiet residential neighborhood leads to a broad, palm-lined beach and the Arabian Sea.
After our time in cities and in the mountains, it felt nourishing to be beside the sea once again. One of the things I love about beaches is their similarity to one another. Watching the waves steadily breaking against the sand, I am connected to the same scene taking place on beaches all over the world, whether they are in Cape Cod, California, Mexico, or some far-flung shore I will never lay eyes upon.
In Ayurveda, health is defined holistically, as a balanced state of the different tissues, systems, and energies of the body, mind, and spirit. There is a strong emphasis on healthy lifestyle and disease prevention. Because diet and digestion are central in maintaining a balanced state of health, our cooking and nutrition class included theory sessions that covered Ayurveda’s foundations.
We studied the doshas, the three vital energies in the body: vata, pitta, and kapha. Imbalances of the doshas manifest themselves as different states of disease. We studied the pancha mahabhuta, the five great elements: prithvi (earth), jala (water), agni (fire), vayu (air), and akasha (space). Each of the three doshas is made up of a different combination of the five great elements.
Everything in the world — everything we can perceive, think, believe, or feel — is constituted of the five great elements. This includes the food we eat; our physical bodies; our senses, mind, and intelligence; and our vital life energy. It includes all other living things; the earth, sun, moon, and stars; and the forces of nature that rule them.
The five great elements help us understand the connections between our food, our bodies, and our health. Chemistry and biology have come a long way in the few thousand years since the pancha mahabhuta represented state-of-the-art scientific knowledge, but modern scientific concepts, while more precise, are also more reductionist. The five great elements can help us feel the connections between our health and our food and bodies intuitively. They can also help us make more holistic connections, including links between our health and our minds, emotions, and spirits.
Ayurveda recognizes the importance of these connections, and practitioners support their patients’ healing by caring for their whole beings. When we visited the renowned Ayurvedic doctor Vasant Lad at his clinic in Pune, he exemplified this. His clinic is very busy: he provides care to the local community on a by-donation basis, and he doesn’t have a lot of time to spend with each patient. But every moment that you are in the examining room with him you feel the presence of his warm, humble, loving care. He gets to know you as a person, offers words of praise and support. He ends the visit with a prayer of Om, recognizing the importance of the divine in the healing process.
Our doctors in Kerala also showed this kind of warmth and love in their care. They looked into our eyes with tenderness when they asked us how we were doing. They didn’t shy away from the closeness of putting a hand on our arm, or an arm on our shoulder. Everyone at the school — the doctors, the cooks, the housekeepers, the pharmacy staff — exuded this sweetness and care.
Our sweet-natured and affectionate cooking teacher, Asha, was no exception. Over the course of two weeks cooking together, our class coalesced into a family with her at its center. She taught us how to crack open and grate coconuts; how to turn simple rice and dal into iddiyappam, dosas, puttu and pathiri; and how to perfectly temper each curry with just the right mix of spices. The love and care she showed us throughout helped us see that food is medicine for the heart and soul as well as the mind and body.
At the same time that our cooking and nutrition class was teaching us the principles of Ayurveda, the healthy meals served at the school, our regular daily routine, and our panchakarma treatments were helping us feel those principles at work in our bodies. A week or two into our stay at the school, I was feeling a deeper and more intuitive connection between my body and the food that I was eating than I had before.
Our panchakarma treatments definitely contributed to this intuitive connection. The name panchakarma (‘five actions’) refers to five cleansing procedures, some combination of which will be prescribed depending on one’s constitution and condition. While the cleansing procedures themselves are not entirely pleasant, they make up only a small part of the full course of treatment, which takes place over two to three weeks and involves daily massages and other hands-on treatments.
Most mornings while we were there, I taught a small, informal yoga class on the beach. The class finished just as the sun rose above the palm trees that lined the beach and began to shine on us directly, leaving us enough time for a swim in the sea and a quick shower before breakfast.
In the final moments of the class, as we sat in mediation paying attention to our breath, feeling the warmth of the sun, and hearing the sound of the waves, I felt connected to and at one with the raw beauty of the natural world all around me. At the heart of this connection were the pancha mahabhuta, the five great elements.
Much like the esoteric anatomy of the chakras (energy centers in the body) can help make an intuitive connection with the felt experience of being in our bodies, the five elements can help make an intuitive connection with the felt experience of being alive and in the world. The five great elements helped me connect to a sense of self that was ancient, that predated modern scientific understanding. Through the eyes of this self, the world was more mysterious, more vibrant, more majestic, and more whole. I felt the five great elements in my body and in the world around me, and I felt that my body and the world around me were part of one greater whole.
EARTH (Prithvi) is the foundation. It is the sand underneath me. It gives things their mass and their solidity. It is found in bones, teeth, nails, and hair. I think of John O’Donohue speaking of our clay bodies:
Your body is your clay home; your body is the only home that you have in this universe. It is in and through your body that your soul becomes visible and real for you. Your body is the home of your soul on earth.
WATER (Jala) is the origin. It is the waves crashing against the shore just behind me. It makes things cool, soft, and wet. It is the glue that holds our tissues together. It is found in blood, sweat, semen, and the fluid that surrounds us in the womb. A few hundred million years ago, our ancestors emerged from the sea, and the sea remains in our bodies. I think of an excerpt from Etel Adnan’s Sea and Fog:
The forest is shaking terribly. Waves howl and break in jets of water. What beauty, this fury! Sea: It is because she is that we are, and when she disappears we’ll cease to be. It’s only in relation to her that we find some worth to our existence.
FIRE (Agni) is heat and light. It is the warmth of the sun on my face, the light shining through my eyelids. It fuels digestion and metabolism. Through its light, it gives us vision and intelligence. I think of B.K.S. Iyengar explaining how we have to learn to shine the light of intelligence throughout the body:
We think of intelligence and perception as taking place exclusively in our brains, but yoga teaches us that awareness and intelligence must permeate the body. Each part of the body literally has to be engulfed by the intelligence. We must create a marriage between the awareness of the body and that of the mind.
AIR (Vayu) is motion. It is the wind against my skin. It gives movement to our limbs and expression to our face. It is the breath that guides the mind to the deeper levels of our being, that always flows pure, even if the senses, thoughts, or actions turn to things that they should not. I think of a prayer my father would say before his sermons during my childhood:
Come, O Holy Spirit, come.
Come as the wind and cleanse;
come as the fire and burn;
convert and consecrate our lives
to our great good and your great glory.
SPACE (Akasha) is all-pervading. It is the space inside my chest, and it is the space all around me. It is found in the hollow places inside our bodies. It is the home of the divine reality that is infinitely greater than us and yet is identical to our individual soul. I think of a passage in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad where the sage Yajnavalkya is asked to describe the indescribable: the divine reality of which Akasha is woven.
It is unseen but is the seer, is unheard but is the hearer, is unthinkable but is the thinker, is unknown but is the knower. There is no seer but it, there is no hearer but it, there is no thinker but it, there is no knower but it.
Through these encounters with the five great elements, I came to a deeper appreciation of what John O’Donohue meant when he said “it is in and through your body that your soul becomes visible and real for you.” I came to a deeper appreciation of how B.K.S. Iyengar’s teachings use the vehicle of the body to bring our awareness to the soul; and I came to a deeper appreciation of how the breath can cleanse like the wind and how the soul can reach out through the ether and connect us to everything in the universe, like the sea connecting so many far-flung shores.
This is one of a series of posts written during our travels. You can find the first post here, and you can find the next post here. You can sign up for email alerts about future posts here.
