Ojas and Agni: Essentials For Lasting Health
Ojas is a concept in Ayurveda that refers to the purest essence of each of the tissues of the body. For those not familiar with Ayurveda, ojas is perhaps most relatable as expressed by the immune system and our body’s ability to resist and illness and recover from it when it manifests. More broadly, ojas is that aspect of each tissue that supports that tissue metabolically on the cellular level, enabling each of our cells and our tissue as a whole to resist the effects of stress and to maintain integrity and resilience.
Ojas supports our health by helping to support healthy agni. Agni means “fire” and is the word we use in Ayurveda to refer to our digestive fire or our digestive power and intelligence. Having a well functioning agni means that our ability to digest and assimilate our food is sound. We all know the expression “you are what you eat,” and in a certain sense this is literally true. The food we eat becomes the tissue that forms our body, but for this to happen our agni needs to be functioning well, and for a well functioning agni we need healthy ojas.
The feeling of having good ojas is easily relatable. When our ojas is good we feel strong, we feel well, our digestion works and our sleep is good. When ojas is insufficient our sleep can suffer, our digestion will have issues and we’ll feel vulnerable. The fact is, we ARE vulnerable when ojas is low, and it is important that we take steps to increase it or risk further depletion and possibly illness.
Maintaining healthy ojas can be done in several ways. First, we must keep our digestion working well. Ojas is manufactured in our bodies through the digestive process. It is the very refined end product of tissue production and thus not only does ojas support our agni and our digestive health, but our agni and digestive health also support our ojas. This symbiotic relationship between ojas and agni points to the fact that our primary means of maintaining good ojas is by seeing to it that our digestive system works well.
Of course to maintain healthy digestion, the right diet is important. I won’t be going into detail on diet in this post, but what I will say is that with diet, we need to learn to recognize how we respond to different foods and to use this recognition to make better choices. Too many people these days try to seek health through addition rather that subtraction. “I feel depleted so I’ll take supplements or eat more meat.” My experience is that its often better to start with “what can I eliminate?” Eliminating foods we don’t digest well or don’t respond well to takes pressure off our digestive system and helps our agni ignite. This in turn helps improve our ability to break down and assimilate our food, forming healthy tissue and making healthy ojas.
A second key to keeping our ojas at a a level sufficient for good health is making lifestyle choices that don’t deplete us. Avoiding depletion requires that we recognize the activities, thoughts and habits that lower our ojas and eliminate or reduce them whenever possible. For example exercise is generally a good thing and most of us need to do more of it, but like anything, there’s enough and there’s too much. Over exercising is a sure way to deplete ojas and invite illness and even chronic disease in very serious cases.
How do I know if I’m over exercising? This is just a matter of paying attention. While it’s not always easy to pay attention to the messages our bodies send us, learning to pay attention to our bodies is an important ability to cultivate. Yoga can be a powerful tool in this case as yoga, in its essence, is training the mind to be aware. Through yoga we develop the awareness and sensitivity to notice the signs that something we are doing is depleting us. Yoga provides us with asana (postures), pranayama (breath work) and ethical principles that help us to see ourselves more clearly, understand our tendencies and make the necessary changes to address them.
This brings us to the third way we can help maintain healthy ojas – awareness of our thoughts and managing mental and/or emotional stress. Stress is a big factor in lowering ojas. Without learning effective ways of managing stress we will struggle to maintain good ojas and good health. Again, yoga can be a big help with stress management as it trains us to keep things in perspective and cultivate a healthy perspective on life. Many people use mediation practice for stress management. I tend to lump mediation in with yoga because yoga is essentially a preparation for and cultivation of a meditative state, as are the many meditation techniques that are currently popular.
Considering ojas and forming an understanding and experience of it is a powerful way of dialing in our diet and lifestyle choices to best suit our constitution so that we may maintain resilience and optimal health on an ongoing basis. Understanding agni and learning to keep it in good working order is essential for building ojas. When we maintain healthy agni we begin to experience the positive effects of ojas and sense of well being it fosters. Whether it be through yoga or some other awareness based practice, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to develop the necessary skills and sensitivity to recognize when our agni and our ojas are compromised and to take steps to restore them.