The Reading List.
Novels and non-fiction read through an Ayurvedic lens —
what I discern about the doshas, gunas and the progression of disease,
as the classical texts describe, whilst I read.
Written by Dr. Arlini Singh.
An overworked heart.
Cyril Conroy, the father in Ann Patchett's The Dutch House, built, worked, smoked, and never spoke of his grief. An Ayurvedic doctor in Burlington, Ontario, reads his heart the way she reads a patient's, and explains why the thin, restless man is the one nobody watches.
Read the essay →Before the diagnosis. →
Ann Patchett's The Dutch House, read through kriyakala — the six-stage arc by which classical Ayurveda traces a disease backward to its quiet beginning.
"The staircase was not the cause. The staircase was the day the heart could simply not go on any further."
What's being read.
Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow — on the discipline of refusing despair, and what the classical texts call achara rasayana, the medicine that is conduct.
Wally Lamb's The River Is Waiting — on addiction, the daily keeping of a vow, and what classical Ayurveda calls sankalpa, the resolution that becomes a body's spine.