Central to health and vitality is agni, our digestive strength or power. When agni is robust and vital you are in a state of good health. When your agni is not up to par (most of us) then your energy is low. This is because agni produces prana, the vital life force that sustains us. So, it’s critically important that your agni is healthy because if it is not, disease is sure to follow. In this video, Dr. Bill Dean helps explain what Agni is.
Transcript of the video:
So, another fundamental key principal in Ayurveda is this concept of digestive power or digestive strength, it is called Agni. And, it is a terribly important concept because Ayurveda says: if you have great Agni, if you are so blessed in this lifetime to have good Agni, you will have excellent health. So, you can see that it is a very powerful concept, but, for the most part because of our lifestyle choices, because of our lack of understanding of this concept of Agni, which by the way is totally not understood in the west. In the Allopathic tradition, it is not understood but this concept of Agni gets under par, it is not up to par for most people. What is Agni? Agni is all of the enzymes systems for digestion from the mouth to the anus and from all the bacterial systems from the mouth to the anus. That is a big big party, isn’t it? Because it is a huge system, it is a huge system. but the key here is that Agni is central in the digestive system and will reflect the health of all the Agnis in all of the rest of the body from the cellular tissues such as muscle tissue, such as the reproductive tissue, nervous tissue, even down at the cellular level. So, if we have strong Agni,in the digestive system, it will ensure that we have good Agni throughout our entire body. What is the value of having good Agni? Well, first of all, the most important thing is that it gives us energy because anybody who has low Agni which is not up to par will have low energy. It totally translates and it is completely consistent with how we are feeling in our mind & body. The second thing is that it gives us mental clarity. Many people don’t know they have poor mental clarity until they look back and they see: oh, you know, I just was not really clear I was foggy, I was operating as some people say “in a brain fog”. But in reality, it was all about poor Agni. So, when you take care of your Agni, you start becoming aware of better mental clarity, better energy, sleeping better and digesting better. So, those are all gifts that Agni gives us. And it is a very slow process when our Agni starts to deteriorate, we don’t know it until it is too late.
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