When our capacity to metabolize our food, emotions, and experiences is low, we end up with Ama, something undigested. Physical, mental, and emotional Ama requires our immediate attention because Ayurvedic widsom teaches us that Ama is the groundfloor of all disease.

Ama From Unprocessed Experiences

Ava's anatomy and physiology teacher in massage school always said, "your issues are in your tissues." It is true that the body holds onto what it has not yet been given the proper space or time to metabolize. However, it's less about excavating a foreign object that doesn't belong. Ava Leben Ayurveda offers care that is about focusing on the metabolic health of a body so that it can finish working through the experiences that caused holding patterns int he first place.

 The body rearranges itself around its environment, which is, in and of itself, an event and cause for complex trauma. Our response to external information and experiences becomes our way of being. We take shape around what we have had to endure and what we have not forgotten but have yet to consciously process.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." -Carl Jung

Everything is recorded as a personal story within the cells, fascia, tissues, and systems of the body.

This pattern of holding becomes a problem when it begins to stand in the way of our embodiment. We cannot hear our body's needs when we are uncomfortable. When we aren't embodied, we begin living out of alignment with our Constitution. The problem isn't the body, rather the inability to metabolize the experiecnes that are keeping the body in a reactive state long after the situation it is arranged around has past.

As we say in Ayurveda, "you aren't what you eat, you are what you can digest."

Ama From Undigested Food in the GI Tract

The inability to metabolize our food sets the stage for imbalance and disease in the same way that the inability to metabolize our experiences does. Modern research is beginning to back up the Ayurvedic understanding that nearly all disease can be traced back to some dysfunction in the gut and the microbiome. Sometimes digestive issues begin due to mental and emotional stress and hyper-mobile nervous systems, and other times the problem truly resides in the gut itself.

Ayurveda excells at managing and maintaining digestive health.