Ayurveda Initiative For Global Health

*9. Go To The Most Beautiful Place* Only if there is alertness and presence of mind can your life improve. For this, you need to cultivate the habit of listening. Most of us are not good listeners. When you are listening to somebody, the speaker's very first sentence triggers some conversation within you.  You are constantly agreeing or disagreeing with the speaker. Have you ever wondered whether you can listen without any thoughts or pre-conceived notions? To cultivate the habit of listening, you have go to a place where everything is beautiful. Where is the place? That most beautiful place is within you.  When you come to this place, then any place is beautiful. Then, wherever you go, you add beauty there. Learning something about our breath is very important. Our breath has a great lesson to teach us, for every rhythm in the mind, there is a corresponding rhythm in the breath, for every rhythm in the breath, there is a corresponding emotion.  So, when you c...

Struggle for Existence and Survival of Fittest-18 Evolution within Angiosperms-1       The evolution within Angiosperms can be traced easily if we, for the time being, follow a classificatory system. The system of classification I would like to follow is that proposed by George Bentham and Joseph Dalton Hooker (1862- 1883), two great taxonomists of all times, in their book “Genera Plantarum”. The preference to this system may be because it is a convenient system of classification of flowering plants and can easily be followed for field studies and that in India we use it in our curriculum. If we keep away the Gymnosperms from the middle, the classificatory scheme, especially that of Dicots, is more or less broadly similar to those proposed by Cronquist (1967) and Takhtajan (1980). Here we take most of the groups in the same sequence as in Genera Plantarum and evaluate what are the evolutionary strategies found in them one by one. But some of the ...

Ixora coccinea (Jungle geranium) -  Rubiaceae, a common flowering shrub native to Southern India. It has become one of the most popular flowering shrub. It is also the National Flower of Suriname. Commercially important medicinal plant used in Ayurveda. Bangalore,  Surendra Parihar 

Bridelia retusa , Spinous Kino Tree , kaji, Khaja, kassi, asana  Phyllanthaceae. A tree distributed throughout India, in hotter parts along the base of the Himalayas. Spinous Kino Tree is identified by rigid leathery leaves with straight parallel lateral veins and strong spines on the bark of young stems. The plant is pungent, bitter, heating, useful in lumbago, hemiplegia; bark is good for the removal of urinary concretions (Ayurveda). Root and bark are valuable astringents. The bark is used as a liniment with gingelly oil in rheumatism.  Surendra Parihar 

Withania somnifera ( popularly known as Ashwagandha)   Solanaceae, is a subtropical undershrub commonly used in Indian traditional medicines for more than 3000 years and has been categorized as Rasayana in Ayurveda, which is reported to elevate defense system against diseases, arrest aging, revitalize the body, increase resistance against adverse environmental conditions to create a sense of mental well-being.  Surendra Parihar