Dinacharya: Daily Routine

Subtle is powerful and routine is transformative.

https://www.wellandgood.com/childs-pose-modification/

The power of subtlety never fails to impress me.  It is truly the things we do, or do not do, every day that have the biggest impact on our lives in the long run.  If we choose to sit all day, eat bad food and watch TV for hours, we become a very different person in body and mind, than if we exercise, eat healthy and put ourselves into meaningful tasks.  As overused as it is, I like the metaphor of the strength of gentle persistence as illustrated by water; it slowly but definitively can carve stone.  I tell my children, if you want things to happen for you, show up, every day.  As anyone who has ever accomplished a long term goal will tell you, its about plodding persistence, working in small daily steps. 

Dinacharya is the practice of showing up, every day, for yourself, and therefore, for the world.

If you had told me 10 years ago that I’d be waking up early to perform a simple morning routine, and that it would be life transforming, I would’ve laughed at you.  It still sounds inconsequential when I talk about it - too trite to be impactful. 

I was a self-proclaimed “non-morning person”, and proud of it.  Sleeping till noon was a sought after treat in my 20s. Rolling out of bed and slugging coffee on the way to work and/or school suited me just fine.  Until it didn’t.   After years of frantic last minute dashing my internal peace began to break up and float away.  I am the sort of person who loves to be on the go, working my goals, getting things done.  “Yeah its stress, but it’s the good kind of stress!”, that was me 100%.  It took a long sideways journey to demonstrate the need for regular, mindfully crafted periods of peace.  And a routine dictated by the planet I live on, not my own internal wacky compass.

Daily sameness creates peace, because the mind loves sameness.  It craves routine and familiarity.  This is the very reason people engage in repetitive self-damaging behaviors.  What is already known is safe.  When we feel safe, truly at peace - not the false "safe" provided by a cigarette or a valium -  physiology changes neurology, and therefore our most basic bodily functions. 

Where the mind goes, the body follows.  By changing our emotional chemistry, we can modify our disease potential (1).  Ayurveda states that all disease begins in the mind.  Not just the brain, but the mind which exists throughout the body.  The collective intelligence of biochemistry.  Western science is now beginning to recognize this.  When a person lives  for years in the toxic chemical milieu of stress and depression, they are much more likely to develop drug addictions, heart disease and cancer (1,2).

Ayurveda teaches a concept called dinacharya (3).  Basically, it is the concept of a body-mind supportive daily routine that is considered to be a core preventive of disease and promoter of long life.  Dinacharya is Sanskrit, and like all Sanskrit words it has a rose petal-like folded meaning:

din = day or daily

cha = to walk forward

acharya = the learned teacher, walking their students forwards towards knowledge

charya = practiced wisdom through routine

Put this together and it means something like: daily routine that teaches/imparts/walks one through wisdom.  If you Google or Pinterest “dinacharya” you’ll find a set of activities to perform, mostly in the morning.  Things like waking up early, drinking warm lemon water, practicing yoga/meditation, exercising, and bathing.  All of that is part of a dinacharya. However, true daily routine that binds you to your natural world, opens you to yourself and brings you healing and peace (the true, holisitic practice of yoga) is much deeper than this.  The intention of this essay is to break this concept down and convey that depth. 

Begin at the beginning.  We start in the morning.  This is indeed the most important time of the day and gets most of the attention in a dinacharya practice.  Why?  Because, psychospiritually, waking up is somewhat like a tiny rebirth.  We are reborn into a new day every day, which is rather amazing and powerful when you think about it.  And so it is the manner in which you begin your day that sets the tone for the rest of it.  Most people do not notice that cause and effect.  But its right there when you stop to think about it.  How does your day manifest when you hit the snooze button three times, rush out the door not feeling 100% put together and reach for the first and strongest stimulating drink and breakfast item you can find?  Or simply wake up to full blasting noon sunshine?  Compare how you feel to when you get to sleep well, awaken on your own, gently make your way through your morning, enjoying breakfast and your personal space.  In that simple comparison there was no fancy altar worship, or weird chanting meditations, not even exercise was mentioned.  Just timing and internal energy.  Starting the day off with room for focus on yourself, and finding things that are truly pleasurable to take in and experience, will feed your senses, your mind and your heart.  Most of my mornings looks something like this:

The morning begins the night before… but I’ll get to that.  I wake up around 6-6:30 am and watch the sun come up.  I use the bathroom and wash my face, brush my teeth and scrape my tongue.  Often, I oil pull which is the practice of swishing a mouth full of oil around the oral cavity (you spit this out).  This little oral hygiene routine removes oral bacteria, prevents bad breath and tooth and gum disease.  I drink water, sometimes warm and with lemon. Next, usually still in pajamas, I sit on the couch with some tea, or sometimes coffee, and read something spiritual, sweet and inspiring.  I stretch, do some yoga, sometimes take a walk or a quick jog and then shower.  About every other day I do an Ayurvedic practice called abhyanga – oil self-massage – prior to showering.  At this point its been about 2 hours since I’ve gotten up.  I am now ready for breakfast.  Very simple but let’s break this down a little more.

First, what’s going on physically?  Ayurveda really stresses regular detoxification practices.  We eliminate waste all the time and there are daily and seasonal practices for this.  There are certain recommended periods of life where we need to make space to rid ourselves of unnecessary accumulations, of toxins really, though that is a rather unspecific word.  Ayurveda has long recognized this concept and has its own word for toxins: ama.  So we employ certain practices to help the body rid itself of ama. 

The liver is the champion of the detoxification program, and works hard in our sleep to do our daily ama processing (if it is allowed to, see previous blog post: “You Are What and How You Eat”).  The body uses urine, feces, sweat, respiration and emotion as the final mode of ejection.  The act of consuming warm fluids, like that morning warm water with fresh lemon in it, has a metabolism boosting effect.  When our metabolism, called agni in Ayurveda, is working at peak, we become an well-oiled ama-ridding machine, maintain a healthy weight, a clear brain and rarely get ill.  So, dinacharya practice helps establish a daily routine for this process.  The liver has been working all night while you sleep.  Cleaning the mouth, excreting waste, moving the breath, stretching (which helps massage the lymphatic system) and getting a little bit of a sweat on are all gentle but powerful tools that aid in the daily ama removal process.  Which is best done upon waking.

Additionally, there is a deeper, more energetic, emotional and spiritual process that occurs when we intentionally sit with ourselves in literal peace and quiet.  We often culturally approach ‘self-care’ as an opportunity for making ourselves feel good through the avenue of distraction and indulgence.  This usually includes eating sugar, drinking alcohol and practicing avoidance by binge watching movies and TV shows, or even traveling far away from our homes and all our “problems”.  Most people have had the experience of coming home after some dreadfully stressful day, flipping on the TV, getting some ice cream and sitting down to forcibly put the whole thing out of mind.  While self-indulgence can definitely be an act of loving yourself, the uncomfortable truth is that the regular practice where we engage in harmful addictive behaviors is truly the opposite of care.  Real self-care involves being periodically, well, uncomfortable.  Making ourselves sweat, putting ourselves outside our comfort zones, forcing ourselves to review the awful day and examine our role in it. This is the true grit of dinacharya, what you are really trying to get at: the core of YOU.  What do you love? Why? What purpose do you fulfill in the world?  Why?  If your answer is “none”, then why? What brings you joy, peace, meaning outside of your inner world?  What is important today? Tomorrow? Next year? In ten years? What do you want to accomplish/be/feel in those time frames?  Why? When you establish a practice of sitting with yourself in an unabashedly honest way, you come to understand yourself and know yourself and this will change you.  You change yourself, then your life, and ultimately the world. The simple act of sitting with yourself is the most powerful tool anyone has to implement the changes they truly wish to see.  It only takes practice.

Morning rituals awaken us to ourselves, unite us with our purpose and help us keep our intentions in the forefront of the mind as we move throughout the day.  Imagine the difference in a day when you step out into the world with this level of energy, as opposed to rushed, half asleep, drugged with caffeine and avoidantly unconscious of why you are doing it all in the first place.

Evening rituals help us to let go of the day. I said a good dinacharya begins the night before.  In order to wake up naturally we need to go to bed early.  We are solar creatures and we have historically moved with the sun, rising and setting along side it.  Ending the day much as we started it, in stillness and silence is best.  Three to four hours prior going to bed you should no longer consume anything other than water or herbal tea.  Two hours prior to bed the lights in your home should be dim, the TV and other screen sources turned off.  Reading something calming, listening to music, meditating and easy conversation are all fantastic ways to close the day.  Even sitting and playing the events of the day backwards in the mind, letting each piece go, can be key to getting to sleep.  Much like waking is like being born again into the world, going to sleep is kind of like dying.  In order to fall asleep on your own, and stay asleep, we need to let go of all the worldly things that trouble us, that bind us to our physical environments.  The more we practice avoidance behaviors, like scrolling Facebook for an hour in bed in the dark, the more we pile on thoughts and emotions that will just need further processing.  Going to sleep with food in your stomach creates physical indigestion.  Going to sleep with a brain full of thought creates mental havoc.  This is otherwise called insomnia.

Establishing a conscious, healthy daily rhythm back-feeds into the deepest, most animalistic parts of the brain and rewires us for emotional stability, calm and level headed thinking.  It is the foundation of removing our tendencies to get “triggered”.  We can begin to address anxiety and depression by simply retraining our acts of “sameness” into something different than before.  I mean, after all, how did you get to where you are in the first place?  By practice, of course.

For a more structured detailed dinacharya regimen, see Dr. Lad’s article: https://www.ayurveda.com/resources/articles/the-daily-routine

References

1.       Suls, Jerry & Bunde, James. Anger, Anxiety, and Depression as Risk Factors for Cardiovascular Disease: The Problems and Implications of Overlapping Affective Dispositions. Psychological Bulletin, Vol 131(2), Mar 2005, 260-300

2.       Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, et al. Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. Am J Prev Med. 1998;14(4):245 -258. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8. © 1998 American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

3.       PATIL, Padmavati Mahaveer; BAGALKOTI, Anil K. DINACHARYA - HOLISTIC APPROACH TOWARDS HEATHY LIFE. Journal of Ayurveda and Integrated Medical Sciences (ISSN 2456-3110), http://www.jaims.in/index.php/jaims/pages/view/Citation, v. 3, n. 4, p. 140 - 143, sep. 2018. ISSN 2456-3110. Available at: <https://jaims.in/index.php/jaims/article/view/643>. Date accessed: 21 jan. 2020. doi: https://doi.org/10.21760/jaims.v3i4.13299.