How to Strengthen Digestion

6 Simple Practices to Strengthen Agni: Our Digestive Fire

Balanced digestion is the key to long-term health and immunity in life. Our digestive fire, or agni in Ayurveda, refers to our ability to transform not just food, but everything we intake through all of our senses into consciousness. It is our ability to process, integrate and grow from our life experience. 

On a physical level, agni is present in every cell of our body, not just the digestive tract. It is constantly working to transform our experience on the physical, mental, and emotional levels into integrated growth and expansion.

Our ability to digest food is related to our ability to digest life, and and vice versa. Emotional indigestion can create physical indigestion, and vice versa. 

When agni is balanced and strong, we experience vibrant energy levels, clarity, confidence, restful sleep, strong immunity, and a symptom free state of health. 

When digestion is weak, it can create both physical and emotional symptoms such as exhaustion, fatigue, bloating, PMS, gas, imbalanced elimination, and eventually other, more serious health symptoms if not reversed. Symptoms are signals from your body that something needs to change, not a problem with your body itself.

These practices are general guidelines and tips for strengthening agni--not strict rules you have to enforce on yourself. Self-healing is about cultivating a deeper connection to your body’s intuitive wisdom, not restricting or punishing yourself. ❤

1. Pause and breathe—your emotional state plays a powerful role in your physical digestion.
The energy you bring to to the table is just as important, if not more important, than the physical energy of the food itself.  How you feel about what you’re eating has a physiological effect on the digestive process. If you eat with presence, pleasure and gratitude, you take that emotional experience into your body and optimize your ability to digest. If you eating with stress, fear, guilt or distraction, it will be more challenging for your body to receive the nourishment from the food, and process those emotions at the same time.

Indulgence is a part of being a human, and whatever you consume can nourish your body and spirit if you eat it with pleasure and love. 

Notice how you feel after you eat—Have you ever eaten something really healthy, but whilst rushing, or in a stressful conversation, and then felt sluggish, tired, or unsettled after?

Practice taking a moment to pause and breathe deeply, before and while eating. This centers and grounds your body into the present moment, so you can open up to receive full nourishment from the food. 

2. Remember the source of food as a gift from nature and connected to all of life.
The life in food is what gives us life. We can bring a sense of nourishment and connection to eating when we remember food as an offering from nature to replenish our bodies, spirits and minds. We can recognize the energy it took from the earth and our community to create this experience for us, and offer gratitude for what we are receiving. This energy of gratitude allows our nervous system to relax and open, so we can fully receive the highest level of nourishment from the food.

3. Focus on warm-cooked, nourishing foods that are alive as possible.
Digestion is the fire element of transformation--you can stoke and support your digestive fire by consuming foods and drink that are served warm. Cold food and drinks take extra energy to digest, energy that could otherwise be directed to deeper healing, processing and creating. Cooking is how we start the digestive process from the outside in, waking up the nutrients in the food and making them more easily accessible to us. When our digestion is strong and balanced, we can eat certain quantities of raw fruits and veggies and successfully assimilate the nutrients available to us. However, if digestion is weak or needing extra support, it is best to favor foods that are lightly cooked and served warm. 

4. Allow full digestive cycles when possible—more regular meal times, less snacking throughout the day.
Our bodies do best when we cultivate rhythm through routine that mirrors the natural cycles of the day. When we eat at regular meal times, we cultivate digestive strength that builds momentum and cultivates balance over time. To optimize digestion, you can try waiting four to six hours between meals to eat, to let your body fully absorb the nutrients and go through a complete digestive cycle before starting a new one. When we constantly snack throughout the day, our bodies have to initiate new cycles of digestion before the first one is complete. As a metaphor, imagine if halfway through a laundry load, you threw in a new batch of dirty socks. When digestive cycles are layered, agni’s energy is spread out and less effective. This can deplete agni and make it challenging to assimilate nutrients, even if what we are eating is full of life and nourishing. Remember these guidelines are information and not rules. Try it out and notice how you feel for yourself, through your own experience.

5. Engage all your senses, breathe and chew. 
To boost digestion, we can be aware that we actually digest our food through all of our sense—admire the colors with your eyes, listen to the pops and sizzles while cooking, smell the scent before your first bite and as you chew—all of this creates a physiological response in your body, signaling internally how to create the digestive enzymes necessary to assimilate the food. Taking a deep breath before eating connects our minds to our bodies, opening ourselves to receive nourishment on a deeper level. Chewing is also a critical aspect of the digestive process. As we chew, our bodies create digestive enzymes to prepare the food for the digestive tract. The nutrients are most easily accessible to us when we chew our food thoroughly so that what we swallow is already basically  liquid.

6. Balance the elements through the six tastes, and heavy and light foods.
Ideally after we eat, we feel satiated and full in our bodies and our minds. A contributing aspect to this is the balance of the elements in the meals, which are present through the 6 tastes - sour, salty, sweet, bitter, pungent, and astringent. These tastes are the building blocks of food, ideally we have a balanced blend of all 6. If you are craving one particular taste more than the others, there is valuable information for your physical and emotional health. 

It is also important to have a balance of heavier and lighter foods that bring sustenance--notice how after only eating a salad, smoothie, or other lighter foods, you may not feel as grounded after. Notice if you eat an excess of heavy foods altogether at once, you may feel heavy or sluggish after eating. The most important thing is to pay attention to your direct experience and how your choices relate to how you feel. 

Balance and self-awareness are the keys to self-healing through Ayurveda. Over time if symptoms arise, you’ll be able to draw a clear line between cause and effect to know what caused it, and what you can do to move back toward balance in the moment.

SELF REFLECTION JOURNAL PROMPTS:
What aspects of these practices can you incorporate into your daily life to cultivate balance? 
What aspects of these practices are new to you, and what are you already practicing?
What is your outlook and relationship to food?
What experiences in your life shaped this relationship?

Leave yours thoughts and reflections in the comments below ❤