Self Care and Self Love Along the Path: Snehana
The traditional medicine of India known as Ayurveda or the “Science of Life”, describes many types aspects to caring for the self. In our distracted and over-stimulated modern culture we often take very poor care of ourselves and postpone our personal cultivation and taking care of ourselves until it is too late and we are overcome with illness. Instead of breathing, nurturing, loving, caring, purifying and cultivating our potentials of body, speech and mind, we expend, deplete and pollute them with an unsatisfactory and thoughtless lifestyle focused on outer achievement. Is it any wonder that heart disease and cancer are the leading causes of death worldwide? It used to be that heart disease was the leading cause of death only in western countries, but now we have exported that and it has become world wide. This is emblematic of our lack of meaningful living. In the modern world success is seen as slathering the body with all kinds of expensive artificial products full of chemicals, living a home full of chemicals and artificial products, eating foods full of artifical products and chemicals, in a city full of pollution from all the chemicals and artificial products.
As a basic way of getting more in touch with ourselves, in this article I wanted to highlight the idea of Snehana which is a type of Ayurvedic self massage with oil. It is performed daily or once a week in a 60-90 minute ritual. Sneha means “to love” and Snehana means “loving your own body.”
If you have grown up in the West then you can understand what a radial concept this is! Our modern culture fills people with self loathing and disconnection from our actual embodiment. The practice of self massage is like a ritual pilgrimage of reconnection with our embodiment, vitality and lifeforce as it streams through the power points and channels of the body and connects us with the energies of universe at large and the whole of the manifest world. The marma points or acupuncture points are pools of energy along channels of energy flowing and streaming through the body. There are many layers and textures to the tissues of our bodies, from the organs, muscles, sinews, bones, neural tissue, skin and blood. Ancient mystical traditions like Ayurveda, Chinese Medicine, Tibetan Medicine, etc, give us maps and clues to more deeply unfolding life’s mystery and splendor and meaningfulness. In the illustrated book “Absolute Beauty” by Pratima Raichur gives a detailed guide to Ayurvedic lifestyle as well as the practice of Snehana. She has chapters on skincare, diet, cleansing, massage therapy, yoga, aromatherapy, color therapy, sound therapy, breathing therapy and meditation. In these ancient sciences there is an implicit understanding that we eat or ingest our experience of the world through our five senses. Taking in what is around us and making it part of us, we nourish ourselves with sense impressions of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell mediated by our five senses and the mind.