Dr. Shailendra Chaubey, Ayurvedic Practitioner and Vitality Expert, will address the Club on ‘Vitality,’ your new identity
Namaste and pranam to everyone present here.
Ayurveda is made from two Sanskrit root words: Ayush and Veda. Ayush means life, and Veda or Vedas means the study of life. I would like to take the first half, Ayush.
Friends, if I may refer to all of you as that – life. Would we all not agree that another synonym for life could be challenges? I’m reminded of a legend which says that when Buddha was born, he took seven steps, and on the eighth step, Buddha declared in Hindi – Jeevan dukh hai – life is suffering. I don’t want to use that word because it is a very strong one, but I do want to use the idea that whatever life brings at every turn, every path, it definitely confronts us with some or the other challenge.
Now, if you reflect on your own life and look at the numerous challenges you have been confronted with, my question is: what is that one thing that helps you navigate through those challenges in that given moment? What is that one thing most needed when you are not just confronted with a challenge, but a crisis?
My answer is that your state of being in that moment decides how you navigate through that challenge. Your state of being determines whether you will be able to move through the challenge or succumb to it. It decides the outcome – whether you move forward or fall into a deeper crisis. But the real question is: what decides our state of being?
A simple answer to that is – your vitality.
Today, I decided to speak on this topic closest to my heart, and also the very essence of Ayurveda – vitality. In Sanskrit, the word is ojas. However, it is not really understood because Ayurveda, unlike other sciences, is not only a medicinal or healing science. Ayurveda is not just for healing. The other word in Sanskrit is rog (disease). Instead of Ayurveda, they could have simply used Rogveda, but that was not the purpose. Ayurveda wants one to attend to life from a much deeper space of understanding.
Vitality – the meaning of this word is as profound and personal as other words like love, compassion, or kindness. If we ask everyone here to define love or kindness, each one would have their own definition, and they might not necessarily match. Similarly, vitality is a broad and deeply individual concept.
I realised it’s easier to understand vitality through its inverse – its absence. What happens when vitality is absent? Depletion. How about the word fatigue? When we feel fatigued – physically, mentally, emotionally, or even spiritually – that is the absence of vitality.
Vitality is not just stamina. It is the liveliness and energy you exhibit through your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual presence. The absence of vitality leads to symptoms or feelings we generally understand as fatigue, and in its extreme form, it leads to burnout.
Personally, I believe that more than Corona or COVID, burnout is a larger epidemic. Most of us know how we are constantly managing so many things in life. Only you can truly assess the extent of fatigue or burnout you carry. This shows that our vitality is not up to the mark; it is not at its optimum.
There is a very big reason for this. Before coming here, I was thinking about what I should share. I felt it would be easy for all of you to get information about Ayurveda’s medicinal approach, its processes and its science. So I chose another perspective – another way to look at vitality.
To go deeper into the secrets of vitality, we must understand that the key to it lies in our own awareness. It should not belong to any doctor, including me, or to any healing expert. The key to vitality is deeply personal because true empowerment lies there.
To understand vitality better, I have a question. Is it possible to describe, in one English word, what every person on this planet is continuously doing? Everyone must be doing something or the other all the time – but what is that one word that explains it?
The word I would like to use is interacting.
Whatever anyone on this planet is doing, can we say each one is continuously interacting? Even while breathing, we are interacting with air; while eating, with food; while drinking, with fluids. Right now, even as I speak and all of you listen, you are interacting. At times, we interact with situations, circumstances, or people. Even when we’re not doing anything, we are interacting with ourselves. Remember, only the dead do not interact.
Now, in every interaction, what do you give? You invest two things that belong to you – your time and your energy.
Many of you may belong to the School of Finance and Commerce, and you might recall that the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad says that every investment has one of two outcomes – it either becomes a liability or an asset. Think about this in terms of interaction. Each interaction in your life has one of two outcomes – it will either uplift you or deplete you. That determines your vitality.
So, the key idea here is that whatever we are doing, there is no escape from interacting. And if our interactions determine our vitality or burnout, how conscious are we of them?
Remember, our vitality has not yet become the pillar of our identity. I have created a matrix to understand psyches and realised that, till now, there are four pillars through which we identify ourselves: our repute, our revenue (money), our relationships (interpersonal dynamics), and our health.
If any one of these core pillars faces an anticipated threat, we feel shaken. But vitality is not yet considered part of our identity – something that represents us. Yet, it is the deepest pillar holding us, the very foundation of our existence.
So, if we are saying that vitality is decided by our interactions, is there a way to assess our interactions?
I have created a map of interactions. It’s quite easy to visualise. Imagine placing all the interactions we have in our lives within three concentric rings — the inner ring, the intermediate ring, and the outermost ring. Let’s number these: the innermost ring is Ring One (or Circle One), the intermediate is Ring Two, and the outermost is Ring Three.
There is a way to place all our interactions within these three rings. I place the interactions that decide the quality of our living in the outermost ring — Ring Three. This ring holds the components that determine the quality of our living.
Now, what are those components? There are four:
1. Your work, your material growth (money)
2. Your relationships
3. Your entertainment and
4. Your travel
Now analyse — how much attention do we pay to these four? How much of our interaction is taking place only at Ring Three — our work, our family or relationships, our entertainment, and our travel? Park that thought for now, don’t judge it.
Let’s now look at the components placed in Ring Two. To me, these decide the quality of your life. There is a huge difference between quality of life and quality of living. Most of us are under the notion that our quality of living is the same as our quality of life. Rather, the better expression would be the quality of our life force.
What is the life force that you carry? The quality of your life force is decided by five components:
1. The quality of your food
2. The quality of your fluids
3. The quality of your breath
4. The quality of your movement
5. The quality of your sleep
Please ask yourself — what is your attention to these five components? What is your personal understanding of quality food, quality fluid, quality breath, quality movement, and quality sleep?
Just the other day, I was speaking about sleep and sharing how we have almost reached a point where we have left the sleep dimension to take care of itself — as if the onus is on sleep. We continue to stay active, on our phones or television, wanting to remain awake, almost believing it is the responsibility of the mind to fall asleep on its own. There is hardly any deliberate or conscious attention given to this.
The innermost ring, Ring One, to me, contains components that decide the quality of the self. Attention to these, in a balanced way, determines the quality of our vitality.
Of all these components, there is one I would like all of us to go deeper into today — because I feel it is the most immediate and important. Many of us are becoming more mindful about our food and movement. We are becoming more conscious about staying hydrated and drinking fluids, though our understanding may not be as refined as it should be.
We were taught that our body is made up of 72% water — that is partially right but largely wrong. Our body is made up of 72% fluids. There are two types of fluids: aqua-based and emollient-based. Our body has many different fluid compartments, and it is not right to treat our body as a gutter by drinking only water. We must become more mindful of the right kinds of fluids — those found largely in vegetables and other natural sources — not just plain water.
However, I feel we must look at something even more immediate and vital when it comes to the component that decides our vitality. Across all levels — physiological, whether it’s a health condition, metabolic problem, inflammation, or skin issue, and even psychosomatic levels, whether mental, emotional, or spiritual — that component is breath.
Bring your awareness to how you are breathing. How deep is your breath? How deep should it be?
In Ayurveda, the origin of breath is described beautifully in a shlok. The word for breath in Ayurveda is prana, not shwas. Shwas is the anatomy — the physical process — but the essence, the soul of breath, is prana. Ayurveda refers to prana as the life energy carried within breath. The spirit or energy of it is what gives us life. Hence the word pranayama, which means the expansion of the spirit or the expansion of that realm.
How deep should our breath be? The shlok says:
नाभिस्थः प्राणपवनः स्पृष्ट्वा हत्कमलान्तरम्।
कण्ठाद्बहिश्चरन् भूय आयाति स्पन्दयन् गतिम्॥ — meaning, the prana seated at your navel flows out, touches your heart, moves outward, touches the feet of Vishnu, collects ambar (which means amrit), and returns back.
All they are trying to convey is that our optimum breath should originate from the navel. This is extremely important when it comes to our aliveness, metabolism, and healing from inflammation.
Now, each one of us is aware of the most critical thing that happens when a child is born. What is it that everyone waits for at that moment? The cry. It’s not the first inhale, but the first breath — an exhale.
Our conditioning teaches us only to take, which is why we tend to think in terms of receiving rather than giving. Yet, life begins with an exhale.
Let’s recall what we learnt in the classroom: until the child is in the mother’s womb, the mother breathes for the baby. The umbilical cord provides all the oxygenated blood to the foetus. For the first time, when the baby is out and the umbilical cord is clamped and cut, there is no outlet for carbon dioxide. In the womb, the baby is surrounded by water and does not breathe air. So, for the first time, all the carbon dioxide saturates in the lungs and comes out as an intense cry — also a cry of shock.
Think about how we breathe when we cry. Crying is essentially an exhale. Physiologically and scientifically, we feel lighter after crying because there is a release of stagnant or “dead force” energy.
If oxygen is the life force, then carbon dioxide represents the death force. Have you ever wondered how much of that we carry within us? How much do we truly exhale? Even when we try to practise conscious breathing, we often focus only on inhalation. Try inhaling continuously for more than ten minutes — you’ll struggle, because the body already holds a lot of residual breath, which is carbon dioxide.
So, before we move to questions and answers, the first awareness I want to bring is this: deep breathing is important, but exhaling longer is even more important.
In this vitality session today, let’s try a simple Japanese process for two minutes. The Japanese have done extensive work on connecting with their life force centre, which they call hara. Many of us may have heard the term hara-kiri, which means suicide. The Japanese understood that hara is the centre of life — if it is punctured, life is released.
If our breath originates deeply from the hara, we can tap into our vitality space. That space is also our gut — our centre. As we discussed earlier, the state of our being determines how we navigate challenges, and our centring determines that state.
So, how about experiencing an optimal breath right now? My teacher once told me, “Shailendra, there are two kinds of people who achieve the least in life.” In Hindi, he said, “Zindagi mein do tarah ke logon ko kuch bhi haasil nahi hota – ek jo mar gaya hai, aur doosre jo aadhmara hai.” (Two types of people achieve nothing in life – those who are dead, and those who are half-dead.)
If we look at how we breathe, most of us are not breathing like truly alive people.
So, may I invite all of you to try this one-minute breathing process?
Your breath carries the promise of releasing not just physical pain, but also deep-seated emotional and mental pain. If you submit to it, the process is very simple. Please close your eyes and sit with a relaxed body — it will not take more than a minute.
Close your eyes, turn your attention inwards, and relax your body. Be light and loose, deeply relaxed. When you breathe in, breathe into your belly — like a child. Allow your belly to inflate. When you breathe out, exhale through your mouth, as if you are releasing all the carbon dioxide you’ve been storing for ages. Take a deep breath in — don’t hold — and clear out that dead force energy.
This is an opportunity to be totally alive. Check with yourself: how alive can you be? Take two more deep rounds of breathing. Release all that deep-seated pain. Open your belly once again, breathe like the child you once were. One last time, breathe in deeply, inflating your belly to the fullest, and breathe out completely.
Now, keeping your eyes closed, continue breathing deeply into your belly. Bring a feeling of smile into your heart. The other death force is seriousness. In your breath, bring a smile to yourself — feel as if your heart is smiling. With smiling faces, open your eyes, celebrating your own self today at this event.
Continue to breathe deeply and stay in touch with yourself. With this, friends, I would like to rest my words and thank all of you so much for your time. Continue to stay connected with yourself. Thank you.
ROTARIANS ASK
Is there a book or some tutorial you recommend?
There are many books — one of the most famous is Breath. But even without going there, if we simply understand or follow basic pranayama, it helps immensely. In pranayama, we tend to focus more on the technique and less on the space. Breathing is not a scientific phenomenon; it is the most natural phenomenon. The only guidance needed is to be more receptive. The space for right breathing is your belly.
Even if you dedicate ten minutes a day to deep breathing, stay mindful of where you are breathing from. Often, we feel stiffness in our neck or shoulders — but check how stiff you are in your belly. Most of us keep our bellies tight, and that’s why we’ve lost touch with our intuitions or gut feelings. The belly is the space where we receive. It’s not just the source of belly laughter — it’s the source of belly life.
So, keep your belly relaxed and open. Breathe in life — the prana — from there, and exhale from there. Integrate this with your breathing techniques or pranayama and you will find an amazing energy shift.
What is the difference between normal and box breathing, physiologically?
Speaker: In the breath space, the difference is similar to that between running, swimming, yoga, or weight training — they all belong to exercise, but each connects differently depending on the person. Connection is key. Different breathing techniques serve different kinds of minds. Box breathing, for instance, is meant more for a calculative mind, because our minds like to anchor themselves to something.
So, when the mind follows a certain pathway, it feels more comfortable and is able to develop a routine. As you correctly said, deeper breathing has a direct impact on our nervous system — both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the central nervous system.
All health-related problems are triggered when the sympathetic nervous system is activated — in fear or fight mode. When you are deeply relaxed, the parasympathetic system is engaged. Relaxation, particularly belly breathing, activates the body’s natural healing intelligence at both the physical and emotional levels.
Box breathing is effective, but equally important is the space in which it occurs. This space regulates the pace of breath, which is crucial because we are often in a state of constant chase and haste. Controlling the pace of breath helps to regulate our overall rhythm.