Imagine someone, just by touching your palm at a few places, telling you about your food and sleep habits, your stress / anxiety / depression levels, your chronic ailments, your personality, in short a whole lot about your physical and overall wellness situation and how to improve it!
Sounds like magic? Well, it is just traditional Vedic Healing Science in action.
During Feb 7-9 2019, fifty B.Sc integral psychology students of MIT School of Vedic Sciences Pune got hands-on training in such techniques not only to diagnose but also to help themselves and others for stress, indigestion, obesity and even craving and addiction.
The instructor is Smt. Chandrika Asomayajula, an integrative therapist from Bangalore who has successfully treated hundreds of physical and psychological ailments using five types of interventions – (i) Ayurvedic diet, (ii) Yoga mudras, (iii) Asanas and Pranayama, (iv) traditional Indian version of Acupressure, and (v) counseling grounded in Indic wisdom.
MIT SVS’ B.Sc Integral Psychology curriculum includes training in practical therapy skills based on Vedic scientific wisdom in addition to mainstream conceptual learning. Vedic Therapy is a skill-based training course for all the psychology students, which is a novel and unique introduction in this field. The students were excited and deeply engaged throughout as was evident from their interactions with the instructor.
The objective of the Vedic Therapy course are the following:
- To understand the factors behind human well-being, balanced living, and causes of its disturbance.
- To practice diagnosis of selected common ailments and their treatment based on four principles – Ayurveda, Yoga mudras & Asanas and traditional Indian diet. The ailments covered are Stress, Anxiety and Depression, Back pain, and Obesity. These have been selected due to their epidemic nature among Indian population today and being the underlying cause of numerous other health issues.
The students got the following outcomes from the course:
- Appreciation for the significance of diet and lifestyle in psychological and physical well-being.
- Awareness of observable factors leading to ailments.
- Skills to assist holistic health practitioners.
- Skills for self-diagnosis and self-treatment of common ailments.
- A taste of the therapeutic effect of music and how to prescribe it for ailments.
Earlier during the week, Dr. Rama Jayasundar, a renowned Nuclear Physicist and Professor at AIIMS Delhi and also a certified Ayurvedic doctor, gave a 3-day tutorial on Ayurveda as a complete science and how it compares with allopathy.
Overall, the students got a taste of the Vedic science of wellness, both in its conceptual basis as well as application for addressing real-world wellness issues – personal, family and societal. They also got to appreciate the scientific basis of Indian diet, Ayurvedic understanding of delinquent behavior, and its recommendations for healthy living and their rationale.
