When many of us think of detox, our mind goes straight to the use of milk thistle, dandelion tea or burdock root. If you are an Ayurvedic physician you would consider guduchi, kutki, neem and bhringraj, among others.
These are all famous for detox, however, the problem in this day and age is that the liver is very hot and reactive, holding onto a lot of autoimmune toxins which we call ama visha and gar visha.
If you have been listening to any of my other videos you will already know about these two types of toxins. As a refresher, ama visha is made on the inside of the body whenever the food doesn’t properly digest which can happen if the food is too heavy and/or the digestion is weak.
Gar visha are toxins which are made outside the body and taken into the inside of the body. These are the 80,000 chemical toxins we have surrounded ourselves with, such as air pollution, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, skin care products, heavy metals and synthetic nutraceuticals.
The word visha means poison and these are highly aggressive inflammatory toxins which love to settle into the fat tissues and remain there forever. The fat tissues are the fat cells themselves, the brain, liver, kidneys, and bone marrow.
Here is how they enter our body: once we absorb them through the skin, or swallow them in the food, pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals, through injection as in vaccines and other medicines or breathe them in they go into the intestines. From there they are absorbed into each of the 7 tissues: the blood plasma, the blood, muscle, fat, bone, bone marrow and reproductive fluids.
Depending on which tissues the toxins get absorbed in will dictate what symptom or disease you will get. For example toxins in the blood can give skin reactions, however toxins in the muscle can cause fibromyalgia and even worse, if they reach the bone marrow they will give autoimmune diseases and cancer.
The best way to remove them is to start by pulling them out of the 7 tissues. The best way to accomplish this is to do a 20 minute oil massage using various forms of oils made just for this purpose. As the oil sits on the skin it softens the toxins in each of the 7 tissues. We typically leave the oil on about 20 or 21 minutes because the oil spends 3 minutes in one tissue before moving onto the next tissue, loosening the toxins so they can be removed.
We then have special formulas to move them into the intestines and then even more formulas to scrub them out of the intestines.
But this is a very important point: once we start pulling the toxins out they become even more dangerous because once they are released they have the ability to roam around and wreak havoc throughout the body.
So what to do? It is very important as you cleanse that you 1) bind the toxins and direct them into the bowel movement. We can accomplish this through the use of several foods such as taro root, okra, arrowroot starch, barley and tapioca, and 2) we must also escort the toxins into the urine.
This is where coriander seed comes in, the often overlooked humble spice sitting quietly in most of our pantries. Coriander seed has the ability to bind both ama visha and gar visha. It also has the power to escort these bound toxins and direct them away from the skin and into the urine. Many people get rashes when they cleanse since the toxins once released come out through the bowel movement, the urine and through the skin’s pores. Ama visha and gar visha are so hot they create rashes as they burn the skin on their way out. This is where coriander comes to the rescue as it directs them into the urine while at the same time keeping everything cool, unlike the herbs I mentioned above (milk thistle, dandelion, and so on).
This is why it is best that you contact an experienced Ayurvedic physician who is familiar with these very hot toxins that we are harboring in this modern era. The ancient doctors couldn’t have foreseen these types of toxins, because a few thousand years ago when the textbooks of Ayurveda were written, the main toxin they discussed back then was ama, which is the opposite of ama visha — it is cold and clogging. Ama visha and gar visha are much worse — they are hot and reactive.
The ancient doctors did say, however, that they would leave the textbooks of Ayurveda open so that the new doctors could write new chapters based on their findings, since the ancient doctors couldn’t foresee what would happen in the future.
That is why you will see many of the detox methods using hot spices and therapies designed to burn out and melt down the cold ama. Nowadays we have to use cooling herbs and spices to pull out the hot ama visha and gar visha to prevent damaging the physical channels as these toxins flow out into the bowel movement, urine and sweat. If you don’t have this correct information for this modern day and age and the types of hot toxins that we are harboring, you run the risk of rupturing these physical channels as the toxins come out. Then the toxins are free to roam throughout the body, making you very sick and there’s nothing you can do now to grab them.
This is why coriander seed is one of the many remedies we use. It is the most cooling spice and is decidedly the best to use for detox in this modern age. Coriander has the ability to safely and effectively remove toxins stuck in the first three tissues, the blood plasma, the blood and the muscle tissues, which is why it immediately clears our complexion once we start drinking a tea with coriander seed in it. But it also has the power to go very deep and retrieve toxins out of the bone marrow, helping you to prevent autoimmune diseases and cancer.
Don’t go overboard on the coriander tea once you learn about it. Don’t think that if a little is good then more must be better. With the dangerous toxins we are storing nowadays it is better to chip away at them slowly over a longer period of time than to spend a week or two doing intense fasting and detox and rip them out quickly, and haphazardly, creating a lot of damage to the channels as they come pouring out.
Always keep this in mind: it’s not hard to pull toxins out. The bigger problem is that it is very easy to pull them out. And the bigger question is what do you do now that you have pulled them out?
Again, I am not going into details here about the correct way to detox because it is complicated and you need to be instructed by an experienced doctor of Ayurveda — it involves a lot of preparation of the channels before hand, dietary changes and then an understanding of how to move the toxins out and what to do once they come out.
Here is an example of a very basic tea recipe using coriander seeds. We usually add other herbs which are specific to cleanse each of the 7 tissues which I will not mention here, but you can at least use this basic tea to start a very mild cleanse which will enhance your complexion as toxins are removed from the blood plasma, blood and muscle.
Boil 1 liter of water 5 minutes. Put it in a 1-liter stainless steel thermos. Add 1/4 tsp of whole coriander seed to the thermos and let it steep 20 minutes before you start sipping it.
Sip on it for four hours. After that the tea will lose its effectiveness, so throw out any unused portion. Do this for the next three months on a daily basis.
If you get any symptoms as the toxins come out, such as a rash or digestive upset, cut back on the amount of the coriander seed, even if it’s just a pinch of the seeds which is less than an eighth of a teaspoon. If you continue to get a rash or any other symptom just stop the tea and contact an Ayurvedic physician to design a specific detox program based on your own unique physiology.
So continue to use coriander in your cooking and try making this tea — it will all help to bind some toxins and remove them through the urinary system, gently cleansing the kidneys and bladder on their way out. The seeds even enhance absorption of nutrients through the intestines.
This is a wonderful spice, used not just for its unique flavor, but even more widely used as part of our vast arsenal of herbs, foods and spices used in Ayurvedic cleansing.
I hope this information helps you as you try to figure out the basics of detoxification, which should be an integral part of your healthcare system.
Thank you.