I was extremely fortunate that in the early years of my Ayurvedic practice I had the great privilege of doing an extended 20-year internship with Vaidya Rama Kant Mishra. He was one of India’s brightest Ayurvedic physicians, a Raj Vaidya, which means that his 5,000-year-old family lineage known as Shaka Vansya Ayurveda were the physicians to the royalty of India. Their breadth of knowledge of the ancient texts and their precise interpretations were profoundly accurate, yielding wonderful benefits to the eager patients lined up outside their clinics every day waiting patiently to be seen by the family Vaidyas.
Vaidya Mishra was sent to America to develop award-winning formulas for one of the first Ayurvedic herbal companies, Maharishi Ayurvedic Products International. We sat together all those years and saw hundreds of patients together in my very busy clinic. As I sat there I witnessed history unfolding, as Vaidya Mishra systematically and intuitively made some very important changes to the way Ayurveda should be practiced in the modern era.
The ancient healers knew that change is the law of Nature, and also knew that corresponding adjustments would need to be made to accommodate the different types of imbalances that would ultimately arise. They knew that new challenges would test the Ayurvedic physicians and that these healers would have to delve deep into the silence of their souls to find new yet eternal methods of addressing humanity’s health and well-being in modern times.
This is why the ancient rishis left the textbooks of Ayurveda “open” for the future Vaidyas to come in and write the new chapters to address modern ailments and bring in protocols and adjustments to accommodate the new diseases, never straying from the eternal Ayurvedic principles and guidelines which were set forth in the cosmic manual, or the blue book of natural laws as Vaidya Mishra called it! The foundations of Ayurveda are based on these fundamental laws of nature which govern both the universe and the workings of our physiologies.
The ancient doctors couldn’t have foreseen that we would surround ourselves with over 80,000 environmental toxins in the food, air, water and soil. They didn’t know how our modern medicine techniques would use sometimes dangerous pharmaceuticals, which, while life-saving at times, could also potentially be very harmful, riddled with side effects and toxicity. And they couldn’t have foreseen how we would corrupt the diet to include fast food laced with dumb and dead nutrients and sprayed with chemical poisons.
Vaidya Mishra was shocked as he slowly found out early on that the patients he was seeing in the more “developed” countries here in the West were extremely toxic from the combination of their highly processed diets and the overuse of synthetic nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals. He saw in their pulse that the liver was overwhelmed from an overload of these very hot and dangerous toxins circulating through it.
In fact, these toxins made the liver so “hot and angry,” that when the food came into it to be processed it would automatically turn it into a very hot inflammatory toxin, known as ama-visha, which paves the way for autoimmune diseases and cancer.
So he clearly saw that a) the liver was so reactive that it could even turn the herbs into ama visha in much the same way it was processing the food incorrectly and b) many of the Ayurvedic herbs, such as guggulu, shilajit and ashwagandha (and many others) were too hot to be taken orally which would go directly into the liver, heating it up even more.
So he had to figure out how to get the herbs into the patients without adding more stress to the liver since most patients need numerous herbs to heal their health problems and even too many of the cooling ones can overwhelm the liver.
He was divinely inspired to make two types of formulations which would bypass the liver altogether. One way was to make the vibrational version of the herbs, where he cooked down organic yellow squash into a glyceride syrup and infused the prana or intelligence of the herbs into this liquid, along with specific essential oils to deliver the herbs through the oral mucosa immediately into the gaps and entire cellular system, bypassing the beleaguered liver.
He also made over 100 transdermal creams where the herbs could be delivered directly into the blood via the skin, also bypassing the liver.
In addition to changing the way the patients had to take their herbs, he also felt that he needed to modify their detoxification programs. After seeing so many people suffer some side effects after their traditional panchakarma treatments, he realized that he also needed to make changes to this very powerful detox system.
The problem he felt in this modern era was that these hot and reactive environmental toxins which had accumulated in the fat tissues were too dangerous to be taken out quickly as they could rupture the body’s physical channels on their way out into the bowel movement, urine and sweat. So he made several changes to panchakarma resulting in a detox protocol which is slower over a longer period of time. This systematic approach prepares the physical channels and the liver before initiating the cleanse and then carefully escorts the toxins out through the bowel movement and urine once they come out of the deeper tissues.
His family lineage also felt that the use of heavy metals such as mercury in the Ayurvedic formulas was highly contraindicated since mercury is so hot and piercing that the tiny nanoparticles derived after processing the mercury into a bhasma were dangerous as they could easily enter the bone marrow, brain and other fat cells throughout the body. Since mercury is so fast moving and can easily enter deep into the cells, even as deep as the DNA, it could drag whatever herb was put in the formula along with it. Many vaidyas took the easy route of allowing a quick response by using the mercury in this way, but Vaidya’s family lineage felt that the longer route of healing in a more natural way by focusing more on the flow of healing prana into the cells instead of using a dangerous poison was the safer way to allow healing to occur.
His family lineage incorporated two deeper levels of the pulse which identified 1) the mind (dhi, dhriti and smriti) where the knowledge is taken in, retrieved and reiterated and 2) the light of the soul including its 16 petal vibrational lotus surrounding it. These two levels are not typically taught in traditional pulse diagnosis training courses.
And finally, his lineage’s knowledge was based on the proper reception and flow of prana through the vibrational channels. They understood the fundamental levels of creation which flowed from the primordial vibration of Aum which ultimately blossomed into the Tritattwa or the 3 components of prana, which are agni from the sunlight, soma from the moonlight and marut or the etheric energy which circulates the prana through the body. They felt that all diseases could be traced back to a disruption in the flow of prana.
They described how agni once it comes into the body forms Pitta (fire and water), marut forms Vata (space and air) and soma forms both Kapha and Ojas. Therefore, they took the knowledge of Vata, Pitta and Kapha one step beyond what is commonly written in textbooks to include soma, agni and marut from nature infusing into the body and ultimately becoming Vata, Pitta and Kapha. Thus, soma, agni and marut are the cosmic radiations existing outside of our bodies and Vata, Pitta and Kapha are the energetic principles found inside of us. This is a distinction usually not recognized by most Vaidyas.
We are forever grateful for his contributions to Ayurveda and for bringing the knowledge up to date, incorporating the ancient principles and modifying them in light of the challenges of this modern era. By doing so, we now have a much easier time treating the more serious conditions, such as autoimmune diseases and cancer. And I personally will be forever grateful to all the wonderful lessons taught to me by such a distinguished Vedic master.