Is Āyurveda the Science of OCD?

If you spend enough time studying Āyurveda, you begin to notice something: it can be incredibly particular. As someone whose long-standing nickname is “Particular Brian,” this clearly explains my attraction to Āyurveda.

In an almost obsessive manner, we ask question after question. When should you wake up? When should you eat? When should you sleep? What should you eat in summer as opposed to winter? When should you exercise, and how much?

There seems to be an order to almost everything.

Which got me thinking: is Āyurveda, in its own peculiar way, the science of OCD?

I'm using OCD playfully here, of course. What interests me is Āyurveda's almost obsessive attention to order, cycles, and timing.

At first, some of this can seem unnecessarily rigid. Why should it matter whether you eat at noon or 3 pm? Why might something appropriate in January be less so in July?

Perhaps because Āyurveda isn't really obsessed with routine. It's obsessed with rhythm.

Look around, and almost everything flows. Day becomes night. Seasons arrive and recede. Plants flower, fruit, and become dormant. Animals change their behavior.

Our bodies are no different.

We wake and sleep. Hunger rises and falls. Our energy levels change throughout the day. We grow, mature, and age.

Āyurveda calls our attention to kāla, or time. But kāla isn't simply the hour on a clock. It includes the movement of the day, the seasons, and even the stages of our lives.

And within all of this, there is gati, the character of movement itself.

Gati is the dynamic pulse and character of movement, whether observed in the beating of a heart, the rhythm of a dance, or the grand cycles of the cosmos.

Rhythm isn't simply repetition. Something is moving, and the character of that movement tells us something.

The seasons have a gati. Our lives have a gati. Within the body, movement has its own patterns and qualities. In Āyurveda, we can sometimes even learn to feel them.

Perhaps this is why Āyurveda can be reluctant to give us the simple answers we want.

Is this food good for me?

Well, for whom? When? How much? In what season?

The answer changes because the conditions change.

There is order, but there also has to be adaptation.

Āyurveda isn't asking us to control every detail of life. It is asking us to pay enough attention to notice when something has changed, and then respond appropriately.

So, is Āyurveda really the science of OCD?

Probably not.

But for a several-thousand-year-old system to care so much about when you eat lunch, there must be something behind it.

Life has rhythm. It has movement. It has gati.

Āyurveda simply asks us to notice it.