The Forgotten Medicine
Beauty, joy, and the gentle rise of sattva
When did you last let beauty touch you?
Not just notice it — but really receive it. Let it stretch your heart, slow your breath, widen your soul. Let it reach the quietest places in you.
We don’t always think of beauty or joy as medicine. Especially in times of stress or heaviness, we focus on what’s practical, what’s wrong, what needs fixing. But Ayurveda reminds us that true healing is not just about removing disease - it’s about restoring harmony. And one of the deepest harmonies we can invite back is sattva.
Sattva is the clear, luminous quality of mind and spirit. It’s the sparkle of the ocean in sunlight. The hush before dawn. The feeling of quiet joy that doesn’t need to prove anything.
We can invite sattva in through our senses:
golden morning light
jasmine, rose, or rain on warm earth
birdsong, bansuri flute, silence
honey, herbal tea, your favourite meal made with love
the coolness of water, soft petals, the sun on your skin
But here’s the paradox: sometimes when beauty reaches us, it also touches our sorrow. And that can feel confusing. How can we feel expanded by beauty and still so sad?
Perhaps because beauty is divine - and sadness is human. And when they meet, something sacred happens. A holy ache. A reminder that we are both of this earth and divine.
Yoga teaches us that suffering arises from attachment - not just to pleasure, but to pain. To the identity of being someone who suffers. And that attachment can create a veil, a heaviness, that keeps beauty from expanding us fully into bliss.
Ayurveda doesn’t bypass this. It meets it with compassion. It says: Let your sadness be there - but don’t become it.
Feed your senses something gentle. Return to nature. To ritual. To quiet joy. To sattva.
Because your spirit needs beauty.
Not to escape life — but to remember that even in your humanness, you are whole, you are held, you are divine.