Jayarajan Kodikannath - The Parents Complete Guide to Ayurveda: Principles, Practices, and Recipes for Happy, Healthy Kids

FROM THE MOMENT a child is born, there is a tender openness that will grow and flourish in direct harmony with the ways they are supported and the spirit with which they are nurtured.

Ayurveda underscores childhood as being the most essential period for shaping and developing a healthy, balanced human being in a persons lifetime, which extraordinarily mirrors the same unconscious, instinctive view of care every parent desires to give their child in support of their physical, mental, and emotional development. Parents intuitively know these are not separate aspects of development, and many are in search of an integrated wellness blueprint that backs them in being fully conscious parents. The principles of Ayurveda are thus more relevant today than ever before.

The Parents Complete Guide to Ayurveda provides parents with daily lifestyle tools and routines that empower a practical approach to the wellness of their childs body, mind, and spirit. Renowned and beloved scholar of Ayurvedic medicine Dr. Jayarajan Kodikannath explains the step-by-step lifestyle routines and benefits of Ayurveda, allowing the modern-day family to share in individually tailored wellness practices. Dr. J, as he is affectionately known, sets up this first complete guidebook to Ayurveda for children in a most graspable and adaptable way, drawing from decades of clinical experience and earnestly representing a lineage of Ayurvedic practitioners from Kerala, IndiaAyurvedas motherland.

Todays parents have the unique ability to endlessly amass informationwhich often results in feeling overwhelmed and uncertain at times when it comes to making simple lifestyle choices for their families. Dr. J undertakes this unique, collective dilemma of the modern age and addresses parents everyday questions as well as Ayurvedic perspectives on the critical pandemics of childhood illness in the twenty-first century that parents face today such as ADHD, anxiety, diabetes, and obesity.

So what is Ayurveda? Ayurveda is a natural, holistic life science from ancient India spanning more than five thousand years of history built on natural principles and a philosophy that identifies whole beings and nature as one. Ayurveda considers all aspects of existence including the physical, or structural; the energetic, or functional; and the spiritual, or consciousnessthe life within every being. Mind falls under the functional, or energetic, layer of our existence. The Sanskrit term Ayurveda comes from two smaller words: Ayur meaning life and Veda meaning wisdom or science, marking Ayurveda as the science of life and beautifully encompassing the idea of this life as a period of time in which our physical bodies, sense organs, mind, and soul join together for a journey that is perfectly facilitated by nature.

The ancient Ayurvedic texts define this natural, scientific healing system in eight clinical branches: Kayacikitsa (general medicine), Salya Tantra (surgery), Shalakya Tantra (ear, nose, throat, and eye diseases), Kaumarabhritya (pediatrics), Agada Tantra (toxicology), Bhuta Vidya (psychiatry), Rasayana Tantra (the science of rejuvenation), and Vajikarana (reproductive medicine).

Kaumarabhritya, Sanskrit for pediatrics, is considered the most important branch and is devoted to supporting the rapid period of growth and development in early childhood that constitutes the building blocks of every childs future as well as an uninterrupted transition to healthy adulthood. The principles of Kaumarabhritya illuminate the ways parents can nurture and maintain positive health for their child both in the present and for the future to ensure a harmonious life whose unique purpose can be fully accomplished. The Parents Complete Guide to Ayurveda clearly explains these principles wholly extracted from the root texts and offers parents guidelines that are both preventive and corrective in nature, focused on children three to sixteen years old.

As Ayurveda gains popularity around the globe, more and more parents are recognizing different ways the guidance and principles resonate with their own inner wisdom, making it a true and valuable companion for every parents journey regardless of age, race, or circumstance. Much like parenting, the science of Ayurveda is intuitive and profoundly considers the physical, mental, and emotional development of a child as on par with one another. Ayurveda looks carefully at both a childs exposures to external influences and how those inputs are metabolized and expressed for a true view of the whole child. Perfectly in-step with the demands of the modern world, Ayurveda recognizes inputs beyond just diet and lifestyle practices, weighing various sensory stimuli and what is happening on a day-to-day basis in a childs environment as instrumental in influencing their physical, mental, behavioral, and social health and well-being.

Most modern health sciences today focus on the singular dimension of a persons physical body to assess health, whereas Ayurveda honors the uniqueness of every individuals body, mind, and spirit and de-emphasizes the one-size-fits-all approach to wellness. It is the same when it comes to supporting and caring for children. Ayurveda considers the whole child and all the parameters that affect health and development, both directly and indirectly, along with various factors including age, a childs unique nature, and how a child is expressing in the moment to help them grow and develop into their best possible self. The purpose of this book is to guide parents through a series of easy-to-follow tools and markers that allow them to customize diet and lifestyle routines tailored to their childs individual nature as expressed in the mind-body types known as