Julie: Would you talk a little about cancer from the Ayurvedic perspective?
Dr. Joshi: Cancer is an expression that the body is holding toxicity. The relevant metabolic processes stop functioning correctly, and that allows imbalances to manifest in the form of cancer.
From our perspective, the people who have a weak agni are always prone to have cancer.
Julie: The weak agni being in the cells, or agni in general?
Dr. Joshi: Agni in the cell, agni in the gut. In general because agni is everywhere. Agni’s job is transformation, and when agni is not doing the job that’s where things start getting clogged or accumulated, augmentation occurs and creates disease.
Julie: You usually get patients at a late stage of the disease, is that true?
Dr. Joshi: Yes, unfortunately true. There are six stages of manifestation. Once I get a stage five or stage six, there is not much we can do for them. Usually we get them with complications, when there is already secondary metastasis. You know how it is. For example, somebody has a cancer in the breast, they’ve got a lump. They do the investigations, they’ve found out there’s a cancer. Next thing – immediately mastectomy, chemotherapy, whatever it is they can do, they do it because they believe that this is something that can make the cancer get radically kicked out of the body. They go through this and later on they realize secondarily it has gone somewhere else. It has metastasized and stops responding to those treatments and patients get very high reactions to the chemos. Then the doctor says, ‘Hey, we can’t do anything because you’re not responding to the treatments.’ Next they turn around to us and it’s too late.
Julie: Detecting cancers earlier is a big push now.
Dr. Joshi: If they don’t change their diet, their lifestyle, there’s not going to be any change.
Julie: How about a vaccine, if that were possible?
Dr. Joshi: I don’t know. We see a vaccine for tuberculosis and now tuberculosis is coming back. We see a vaccine for polio and think it’s completely eradicated, but we see that polio is coming back now. Vaccines can be made to momentarily go over the hump, probably. But that is not the complete solution.
Julie: What is the solution?
Dr. Joshi: The complete solution is to go back to who you are.
Julie: That’s a big step.
Dr. Joshi: But believe me, if you started going there, it’s going to take care of you.
It’s also my clinical experience, and I have seen amazing results with people who can stand up against the cancer because they become close to themselves.
Julie: Please talk a little about your approach.
Dr. Joshi: We use panchakarma, diet, lifestyle, herbs and most importantly, sadhana (spiritual practice). There must be meditation and belief in yourself that you can get out of this situation. Quality of the mind can make a huge difference.
Sattwa, the central quality of the mind, is the strength. Charaka says that if you elevate your sattwa, you can practically cure any disease in your body. It is not my statement. It is a statement made by rishis thousands of years before. That’s the power of sattwa, enlightenment.
Julie: Is there any disease that is incurable?
Dr. Joshi: Cancer is incurable at the sixth stage or fifth stage, from my perspective as a doctor. But as I was saying, it is absolutely possible that there are exceptions. With a sixth stage case, I don’t know what I’m going to say to that person.
Julie: Give me a hint.
Dr. Joshi: Disconnection with your soul is the main thing that causes problems in the first place. Start getting connected and things can flow.
We need to go back again. If you know who you are but you realize that you are no longer who you are, that is the most frustrating part of our life. Everything comes directly from your consciousness: it has always been telling you, always been protecting you and it’s a guiding force telling you what is right and what is wrong.
Julie: Are you speaking of the soul?
Dr. Joshi: That is exactly right. Soul is nothing but self, which gives you information telling what is desirable for you and what is not good for you.
Julie: I first came to you as a patient 10 years ago. You prescribed not only herbs and dietary changes for my condition but also specific asanas and pranayama as part of my treatment program.
Dr. Joshi: Yes, my job is to balance your doshas. The key is that, dosha is an entity that makes you connect to yourself. If they [doshas] are close to who you are constitutionally, then you are immediately connected.
If you are disconnected with yourself, that is an imbalance of doshas. But if that starts moving toward constitutional balance, you are automatically connected to your source. Then dos and don’ts – I don’t need to tell you – your soul tells you.
Who knows the day when you don’t feel great? Who knows except you?
Julie: A lot of people don’t, they are used to feeling bad.
Dr. Joshi: That is why we need to help them. The fact is that, until you get some kind of sickness you don’t awake. You suffer and then you realize what’s wrong with you. That is one of the important things explained in Ayurveda: mistake of intellect.
Julie: What is that?
Dr. Joshi: Pragya aparadha1, one of the three causes of disease. It means: I know what I’m supposed to do, I’m aware of it, but I don’t do it.
Julie: We are responsible for our diseases?
Dr. Joshi: Absolutely. That is the truth and until you understand that, you won’t come out of it. When you understand, you come out of it. You don’t give responsibility to somebody else, ‘fix me.’ You fix yourself.
Julie: In the West we are bombarded with drugs, pills, so many things to take.
Dr. Joshi: That is not only in the West, that is everywhere. I tell you honestly. We are ready to take herbs, any treatment, any medications offered, but when it comes to doing it ourselves, it is just not possible for us.
That’s why a balance of doshas changes that. However, with a vaidya like me, when I’m seeing a client like you, my job is not to say, ‘You’re not taking responsibility, get the hell out of here.’
Julie: What do you say?
Dr. Joshi: ‘Ma’am or Sir, your doshas are out of balance. Let them get balanced. Let’s see what we can do for that.’ Once I start working with them, I see people shifting. That’s when they start realizing that they need to take responsibility. My job is not to put the blame on them. We are incapacitated sometimes.
Julie: So much is about the doshas.
Dr. Joshi: They are our functional intelligence, the guiding force, telling us what to do. It is the software programming this hardware. If you keep fixing hardware and don’t change commands, you don’t get anywhere.
Julie: Has it surprised you that you ended up practicing Ayurveda in the U.S.?
Dr. Joshi: Yes. I never thought I would be practicing Ayurveda in the United States. I never thought I would go to the United States; it was not even in my dreams! It just happened and I’ve been here now almost 17 years. It’s not a small journey.
Julie: Why did you decide to practice Ayurveda in the first place?
Dr. Joshi: To tell you the truth, I wanted to be a surgeon. That was the bottom line.
But my mom got sick with hepatitis. She was admitted to a medical hospital and I believed the doctor would fix her. Several days after, he said, ‘We don’t have a treatment for liver. Her liver is giving up. We don’t have a medicine for this and we can’t help. Sorry, take her home. We don’t know how many days she will live.’
My dad then took her away and to an Ayurvedic physician who said, ‘No, she’s not going to die.’ The physician gave her herbs, changed her diet and she came out of it. Today she is 74 and she is absolutely all right.
That changed me! It’s when I realized I didn’t want to practice a science that says ‘Oh, I can’t help you, sorry.’ I wanted to go into a science that said let me take you from here and let me help you out, and that took me to Ayurveda. That was in 1978.
Julie: Do you see an increase in the numbers of people studying Ayurveda?
Dr. Joshi: Yes. I think in my lifetime it won’t be number one, but in my daughter’s lifetime it will be.
Julie: Really!!
Dr. Joshi: I am encouraged. That’s what I dream about because it is a fantastic science.
“The complete solution is to go back to who you are. Believe me, if you started going there, it’s going to take care of you.”
Julie: You were also involved with the Chopra Center here. How did that work?
Dr. Joshi: At the time I was at Kripalu teaching on Ayurveda and I got a call from Deepak: ‘I have heard nothing but good things about you. You are in Kripalu and I am in Lancaster, is it possible, come and see me, I want to talk to you.’ He said, ‘Is it possible, can we work together, can you help me out?’ I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ He took my itinerary for when I was coming back and he invited me to California.
He introduced me to David Simon, who is a very brilliant man and a good friend of mine now, always testing and checking how much I know. I did workshops with Deepak and David Simon and then I helped them set up their panchakarma facility.
Julie: What about genetics?
Dr. Joshi: It is very clearly explained in Ayurveda that there are four types of disease management. There is the disease that you can easily cure, number one; number two, you can work very hard to treat it, you can cure it; three, no matter how hard you work you can prevent it not to further progress but you cannot cure it; number four, it is totally incurable. These are the categories we have for the disease process.
Genetics come under the third and fourth categories. As is explained in our texts, we are working with that awareness and giving that awareness to our patients.
Julie: What about karma in the disease process?
Dr. Joshi: What is your part? What can I do? In my consultations I have this triangle that says: 60% you help yourself; 30% I help you; 10% are left to karmas.
Julie: And that 10%, you can affect in your lifetime?
Dr. Joshi: I don’t think so, but I don’t say it that way. I say that sometimes you can change it, that it is your karmoksha; sometimes you have to hang out with it. So that’s why you need to understand that 10% of awareness is not you, or what is there, or whatever is creating is doing this. That is a strong belief that we follow. And that is why some people turn around.
In fact, we believe that is why some people come to Ayurveda. Already they have a good karma. Otherwise, sometimes they walk away.
I remember one time when I was flying to Portland, I met a man sitting next to me. He was just talking and he said he had multiple sclerosis. I said, ‘Why don’t you try alternative medicine?’ He said, ‘I don’t believe in that. Modern medicine is the only science.’ I just shut my mouth and didn’t say anything.
Three years afterward the same man came to see me in Salt Lake City. He was in a wheelchair and in very bad shape.
Julie: You recognized him?
Dr. Joshi: He didn’t recognize me, but I recognized him right away. At that time, he was crying, ‘Help me.’ He was on drugs and many treatments. And he said, ‘Can you help me out?’
I said, ‘I don’t know, Sir, if you remember or not, three-and-a-half years before I was going to suggest to you, some help.’
This is what karma is. So just accept it.
I had a third stage bone cancer patient and I suggested panchakarma, and he asked, ‘Can you give me a guarantee that it will work if I do it?’
I wouldn’t do it. And he went to a big anti-cancer institute in Bombay that was doing research with drugs, and they wanted a guinea pig, and they chose him and he accepted. And they fried him! Fried him completely! And they gave all this illusion to him.
At the end, he called me when he’d practically given up, his skin was peeling and he was on fire. He cried and said, ‘Can you help me?’
What can I do? This is called karma. I prayed for him.
Julie: We know that Westerners have a problem with panchakarma because it is a slow process. You have modified panchakarma to allow more people to participate.
Dr. Joshi: We did a lot of work on this. All this information is unfolding to me now and I have nothing but gratitude. The Charak Samhita is my bible; everything comes from there, that’s the source. I have been through that text several times, but every time I learn something new.
Julie: Yoga falls right into ahara and vihara,2 two of the three pillars of health according to Ayurveda, because of lifestyle. Would you comment on that, please?
Dr. Joshi: I really feel from the bottom of my heart, if anybody should join Ayurveda, it is the yoga community. It is not I saying this, it is Charaka saying that every yoga person should know Ayurveda, and every Ayurveda person should prescribe yoga with understanding of doshas.
Sitting Down With: Gerhardt Horstman & Dr. Joshi
Julie: How do you see Ayurveda progressing in this country?
Gerhardt: It’s becoming more mainstream, and we can go so far as to say it’s common. Our clientele many years ago were more alternative-minded people. You might go so far as to say they were living on the fringes. They were representative of a counter-culture crowd. Now we get a broad spectrum of clients; we get ranchers, we get doctors, we get lawyers, we get housewives, we get just normal everyday folks that have their imbalances and maybe they know somebody who has come to us before. Maybe they’ve read about it somewhere. I’ve seen a shift.
Julie: Is it because it’s New Mexico?
Gerhardt: No, we get that everywhere we go.
Dr. Joshi: The best thing that happens is if you come and you feel better, you bring another person.
Julie: What about schools and more people being trained?
Gerhardt: There are schools for giving the basics, but not a huge number of good practitioner training programs in this country. We’re relying on people like Dr. Joshi to come from India and bring Ayurveda here.
Julie: You two are a team of an Indian doctor and Anglo guy. Not the first time we’ve seen this here. What do you think?
Gerhardt: Not a trend yet. The excellent physicians in India are so busy, hundreds of people lining up every day, they don’t even have the time to come here, even if they wanted to come here. Their clients would be so mad at them; believe me, his clients get mad at him, too, except his wife is an Ayurvedic physician and she manages the hospital when he is here. And he is dedicated to spreading Ayurveda all over the world, not just here: to South America, Europe, South Africa, Costa Rica, all over the place, Russia. The really good older doctors don’t have an interest and the younger doctors don’t have the years of clinical practice yet.
Julie: How essential is it for a western student of Ayurveda to study in India?
Gerhardt: I don’t think you can create a total Ayurvedic climate in this country. In India, we can do that with our students.
Dr. Joshi: Again vihara and ahara. If you really want to learn that, then you go to India.
Julie: Do Ayurvedic doctors and practitioners need to work with the western medical community here?
Gerhardt: It would be nice, but I’m not sure the western doctors are ready to embrace alternative medicine. But in India, medicine is complementary. There is no ego, there are no turf wars.
Julie: Do you have relationships with allopathic doctors here?
Gerhardt: No, not so much here.
Dr. Joshi: They are not interested.
Julie: Do you refer patients to allopathic doctors and tell them, for example, ‘I would prefer that you have an MRI?’
Dr. Joshi: Yes, I will say that. There is nothing wrong to use the technology. It is not allopathy’s technology. Technology is everybody’s. What is wrong with using the technology to check what you are feeling in the pulse? I do recommend sometimes that patients have blood work, go have a checkup with your doctor and let me know if you are anemic. Sometimes that confirms to the person what I am saying.
Julie: Would you like to have a two-way relationship here with allopathic doctors?
Dr. Joshi: Why not? That would really solve a problem with a lot of people and make a big difference. It would be a breeze then.
vinayakaayurveda.com; Ph: (505) 296 - 6522; vac@vinayakayurveda.com
