4 of My Favorite Living Ayurveda Books

My Favorite Living Ayurveda Books

By Cate Stillman

For the past 9 years, I have led a group through the nine month journey to living Ayurveda in daily life. For the 10th year of the course I scrapped the Living Ayurveda Course curriculum. I opened the doors to the easiest way to embody the 50 centuries of Ayurvedic wisdom into simple practice daily living skills to enhance modern life.

Using collective leadership with students and course mentors we co-created the new curriculum. We scrapped our old book list and co-created the book list you see below. Here is the new Living Ayurveda Course booklist. If you’re interested in what we’ve chosen for dialing in deeper wisdom- read on.

Ayurveda: The Science of Self Healing: A Practical Guide

by Dr. Vasant Lad

We wanted a simple book for the basics. Ayurvedic practitioners refer to this timeless gem as Lad’s little maroon Ayurvedic book.

Lad’s first book clearly explains the principles and practical applications of Ayurveda, the oldest healing system in the world. He draws his own pictures to beautifully illustrated the text thoroughly, explaining the following: history & philosophy * basic principles, * diagnostic techniques * treatment * diet * medicinal usage of kitchen herbs & spices * first aid * first aid * food antidotes * and much more More than 50 concise charts, diagrams and tables are included, as well as a glossary and index in order to further clarify the text.

The Everyday Ayurveda Cookbook: A Seasonal Guide to Eating and Living Well

by Kate O’Donnell

When I first saw this an Amazon I didn’t buy it. I have enough cookbooks. But the LAC mentors brought this to my attention – that it’s simplicity in recipes and seasonal and daily rhythms reflect how our course runs. For this reason, we highlight this as the cookbook to get if you don’t have a good Ayurvedic cookbook.

So, i bought the book. Then I hosted a conversation with Kate for the podcast. She wrote the cookbook that needed to be written for the modern yogi to get what we need from Ayurveda in the kitchen.

Even the simplest Ayurveda practices complement Western medicine because of their focus on righting imbalance before it creates disease. Keeping digestion on track is the key to health in Ayurveda, and eating natural, homemade foods in accordance with personal constitution and changes in environment is often all that is needed to bring a body back into balance. The Everyday Ayurveda Cookbook inspires yogis and non-yogis alike to get into the kitchen and explore this time-honored system of seasonal eating for health and nourishment.

The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival

by Katrina Blair

While this isn’t an Ayurvedic book – i haven’t found an Ayurvedic book that connects us into our ecosystems around the planet as simply, deeply and eloquently as Katrina Blair’s book. The Ayurvedic sages of yore would be proud of Katrina’s work.

The Wild Wisdom of Weeds is the only book on foraging and edible weeds to focus on the thirteen weeds found all over the world, each of which represents a complete food source and extensive medical pharmacy and first-aid kit. More than just a field guide to wild edibles, it is a global plan for human survival.

Body Thrive: Uplevel Your Body and Your Life with 10 Habits from Ayurveda and Yoga

By Cate Stillman

In Living Ayurveda Course we break down the 10 habits of Body Thrive into one habit per month. All LAC students go through Body Thrive – the 10 week course. What we hear the most from Body Thrive graduates is that they then want to work on one habit per month. LAC is our testing ground to see how deep into the habits our members can go… and how great profound a shift in health evolution we can experience together.

Body Thrive applies the most essential teachings of Ayurveda into a modern life by decoding the teachings into habits. Ayurveda is the perennial body wisdom tradition that co-arose with yoga, the path of living awake. Here lies a simple body habits curriculum that every person can learn as a child, master as an adult, and refine as an elder for their body to thrive. Check out more at www.bodythrive.com