Vata governs all movement in the mind and body. It controls blood flow, elimination of wastes, breathing and the movement of thoughts across the mind.

Since Pitta and Kapha cannot move without it, Vata is considered the leader of the three Ayurvedic Principles in the body. It's very important to keep Vata in good balance

Do you need to balance Vata?

Vata dosha governs flow and motion in the body. Answer these questions to see if you need to balance Vata.

1. Is your skin dry, rough, thin?
2. Are you underweight or does your weight yo-yo?
3. Is your mind contantsly in a whirl?
4. Do you worry incessantly?
5. Are you constantly restless or agitated?
6. Do you experience constipation, dry stools or straining?
7. Do you suffer from insomnia between 2-4am?
8. Do you suffer from vaginal dryness?
9. Do you have spells of forgetfulness?
10. Do you experence discomfort in the joints?
11. Are you easily fatigued?

If you answered yes to more than a few of these questions, you need to balance Vata.
The fall season naturally aggravates the vata dosha and vata health concerns often come to the forefront of clients minds at this time. Learning how to balance the energy of the fall is synonymous to balancing vata.

Narrative medicine boosts our bodies and souls

The year is 1973, the setting Stanford University School of Medicine. "Life is a relentless progression toward death, disease, and decay;" asserts a professor. "The physician's job is to slow the rate of decline." A student takes issue.

Perceiving a need for a parallel path to biomedicine, the young man finds a Cherokee healer with whom to study. He continues learning from indigenous elders as he makes his way through Stanford, the Psychological Studies Institute in Palo Alto, and Massey University in New Zealand. Today, Lewis Mehl- Madrona is a champion of narrative medicine, which asserts the importance of an individual's whole life story to the person's health - not just the medical history, but a story that includes ancestors and friends, interests and spiritual orientation.

As a doctor, Mehl-Madrona helps patients discover their own stories of illness and create ones of healing that pull them forward toward recovery. These stories help create hope and a path to wellness-features often lacking in the "story" that patients get from mainstream medicine based on statistics and life expectancy tables.

Mehl-Madrona's efforts to bring narrative medicine into mainstream practice seem to be making headway. This fall, Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons began offering a master's degree in narrative medicine. Mehl-Madrona is currently an associate professor of psychology at Argosy University in Hawaii.

In medical terms, lawmakers and policy makers have made the wrong diagnosis of what's wrong with the American health care system. The fundamental problem - worse than the stratospheric cost - is that the U.S. system doesn't help people become or stay healthy. Our health care system is really a disease management system. It's impossible to make this drug-intensive, technology-centric, and corrupt system affordable. Americans spent $8.4 billion on medicine in 1950, vs. an astonishing $2.3 trillion in 2007. Due to its very nature, the bloated structure of marginal-return tests, patent-protected drugs and "heroic" surgical interventions for virtually every health problem simply can't be made much cheaper.

Beyond that, we don't have much to show for our money: according to a 2000 World Health Organization rating of health care systems, the U.S. ranked near the bottom of the top 40 nations: below Columbia, Chile, Costa Rica and Dominica. High-tech medicine has a secure place in the diagnosis and treatment of serious disease, but our health care professionals are using it for everything, and the cost is going to break us. Instead, these approaches should be limited to cases in which they are clearly indicated: trauma, acute and critical conditions, disease involving vital organs, etc. Most cases of disease should be managed in more affordable ways, based on a new kind of medicine that relies on the human organism's innate capacity for healing and uses inexpensive, low-tech interventions to manage the most common forms of disease. That's what would put the health back into health care.