Back water boat tour with traditional teaching

Today we went on a boat tour on the beautiful Keralan backwaters. And it was a special boat tour: we were guided by two excellent Ayurveda teachers and all the junior doctors studying with Dr.Vijith at the moment. Dr. Ram Manohar was the visiting Ayurveda teacher and he taught a class - traditional style - to all of us, on a few slokas of one practical chapter in Ashtanga Hridayam.

Dr. Ram Manohar started the session with reciting the first few lines of Chapter 1 of Ashtanga Hridayam:

Ragadi rogan satatanu shaktan ashesha kaya prasritana sheshan

Autsukya moharati danjaghana yo’purva vaidhyaya namo’stu tasmai

Va. Su. 1

Just like Dr. Vijith always does with our AAS students. And then they all together recited the whole chapter, a part of which you will see in the little added movie in this blog:

Reciting from the Sanskrit texts has always been very important in this tradition. They actually discovered through MRI research that an even more profound effect on the brain takes place when one is reciting while reading the Devanagari text instead of transcription (Roman).

Dr. Ram Manohar also explained about the following aspects:

·      Reciting the text perfectly is very important – in the past no mistakes were allowed, which also safeguarded the texts

·      Singing and reciting needs to be comforting and inviting

·      The voice should be used wholeheartedly and there should be no inhibition

·      The listener should spontaneously go into meditation by hearing the recitation