PranaBeing blog: The Great River

The goal of Ayurveda is to support human beings in living a healthy, peaceful, harmonious, and long life. Ayurveda mentions the normal human life span at more than 100 years. Longevity is as much about quality as length of life.

The image used to help us understand longevity is that of a river.

The river begins high in the mountains, fed by snows and springs. As it descends, it gathers water and gains speed…trickling, gurgling, rushing… eventually roaring. Where the banks are narrow and the bed is shallow, the water forms a torrent, tumbling toward its inexorable destiny, at last discharging into an even larger river.

These Great Mothers, the lifelines of the Earth, guide all the smaller rivers to their ultimate merger in the sea. Roiling whitewater is thrilling to behold. Yet the silent power of a Great River is awe-inspiring. The banks are wide; the bed carved deep. An unfathomable amount of water is moving in that channel, sliding almost soundlessly. I experienced this on the banks of the Columbia. Camping near Castledale, British Columbia, I was enthralled by her palpable presence: the embodiment of gravity in motion, a stunning magnitude of energy. I’ve experienced several other powerful rivers, but the sheer volume and depth of the Columbia at this place was mesmerizing. I’ve never seen so much water, moving so quickly and silently.

Ayurveda teaches that longevity is like this Great River.

At the beginning, the river’s inputs are greater than the output. As it grows into a dynamic stream, smashing against narrow banks, its output is greater than input. When the river becomes a Great River, its capacity to receive is balanced by the energy it flows out, and this balance creates exponentially more power and strength.

True, lasting health and longevity have to do with balancing our inputs and outputs and expanding our capacity to allow life to flow through us.

As a highly trained over-achiever, I’ve found this concept to be challenging to consider. Yet I have lived long enough now to see the tendency toward a raging torrent in myself, and to understand the consequences of time spent where outputs > inputs.

My opinion is that we stand to benefit tremendously by considering a paradigm that empowers us to become conscious of the quality and balance of both inputs and outputs. I’d love to see this replace the obsolete norm our world is suffering from, where inputs are largely ignored, outputs are denied and justified, disease is expected—written off as “normal aging”—and we continue to look outside ourselves for a solution.

Let’s come back to the deeper wisdom throbbing in our blood and all the sacred waters of our body: the song of the Great River and her dance of dynamic balance.