Did you know that violent crime tends to rise in the summertime? Ayurveda, yoga’s sister science, helps us understand how the environment outside affects the environment in our bodies. As the heat rises outside, so does the heat inside. That helps explain why anger, resentment, controlling behavior and insatiable, hypercritical perfectionism all tend to get worse in summer.
If you are born with a fire (pitta) constitution, these behaviors can creep up when you are out of balance. In balance, fire types have good metabolisms. They digest food as well as they digest information. They set goals and meet them. They are organized and on top of things, and they find much success in life through their drive.
But when fire gets too high, something fire types are prone to in the season of fire since they are born with fire already high, they can experience a myriad of problems, from loose stool to acne, skin rashes, ulcers and acid reflux. The good news is that Ayurveda and yoga give us solutions. Symptoms like these help us see more clearly what the root cause is. Once we know the root cause, we can pluck it out like a weed.
The hot stone
I once heard a Buddhist saying: anger is like holding a hot stone in your hand to throw at whoever you’re angry with, but you only end up burning yourself. Anger releases a cascade of the stress hormone cortisol. Elevated for long periods, it can affect not only our mood but our weight, nervous system, organs and endocrine system. Prolonged stress takes a real toll on the body. So it behooves us to deal with our anger from the inside out and the outside in.
Cool from the inside out
When you see these symptoms cropping up, a pitta-pacifying diet will do wonders. Look at what the environment gives us in summer: cooling cucumbers, refreshing watermelon, crisp lettuce, squashes and root vegetables, okra, sweet berries and fragrant blooms. These all pacify excess heat in the body. Someone with high heat should avoid acidic foods like nightshades, fermented foods and spicy foods, which only further increase their fire.
Everything is on loan
A person with high fire should also try their best not to ruminate in their anger. Sometimes anger crops up from a sense of entitlement: look at all the hard work I do, and that other person is slacking off. I deserve this, but I’m not getting it.
What yoga philosophy teaches us is that everything you have is a gift. Everything you know, someone else taught you. Everything you have, someone else took the time to toil over and make. The food you eat is a gift from the earth, as are the air you breathe and the water you drink. Even the people irritating you are a gift. It is all on loan.
We treat people and things as if they will last forever, but they won’t. The people in our lives and the possessions we have should be cherished. We should be tender and careful with them, like we would be with a borrowed sweater. If I borrow a sweater, I’m not going to roll around in the mud in it or run through thorny bushes. I’m going to be extra careful. That is the reality of living in the material world: everything is subject to death, decay and impermanence. So why do we act as if things will last forever? Let this be the guiding idea: everything is on loan to us from the universe.
When you feel the fire rising
It behooves you to reduce your fire, so you feel peaceful inside and can treat others with the love and care all beings deserve. When you feel agitated, take measures to cool down:
- Change your diet and be consistent about it. Choose pitta-pacifying recipes.
- Drink some cooling rose or lavender tea.
- Get to a calming yoga class to help shift your nervous system into a resting state.
- Practice taking no offense.
We are constantly interacting with a universal bank account that is often called karma. What you put in, you get back: the good deeds and the bad ones too. Let the universe sort it out. Let the universe take offense. You don’t need to be involved in every wild drama in life.
The beauty of this is that when something truly bad does happen, something we have to get involved with, we can see clearly and act with all our strength to right the wrong. Anger only weakens our systems and clouds our judgment.
