Ayurveda has this concept of Agni, which can be basically correlated with fire. It is usually used in the context of digestion, so Agni is often translated as digestive fire, but Agni is much more than just something responsible for digestion. A more accurate translation of Agni is ‘that which can transform something into potentially you’. This implies that Agni carries an intelligence in itself, it is capable of distinguishing what is beneficial to you and what is not.
Therefore, Agni is not only associated with digestion, it is also associated with absorption and assimilation, or any process of transformation of external things into potentially our body. Agni is most of the time talked regarding the eating process. However, not only food needs digestion. All our experiences need to be digested by our 5 senses, so Agni is also doing the role of digesting experiences.
But for this post, let’s just talk about Agni in regards to the digestion of food. Imagine a fireplace in the center of your body, where this fire is always burning. As long as the fire is burning, you are able to remain alive. Good health would equate keeping this fire burning consistently everyday, which is much harder than it sounds.
Why? Because this fire can be quite sensitive – for some more than others, and it is very much linked to our appetite and our eating habits, to our emotions, and to the environment too. You must have experienced losing your appetite before, which can happen due to sadness or stress. You must also have noticed how you become less hungry during the Summer, when it’s so warm that you take in a lot of liquids and end up losing your appetite.
So even before you try to figure if you have a vata, pitta or kapha imbalance, a very basic way of checking your own health situation, is to observe your Agni by paying attention to your hunger, or your appetite, because it can give you clue about the state of your Agni.
In Ayurveda, there is a saying that goes ‘a good Agni can transform poison in nectar. A bad Agni can transform nectar in poison.’ This tells you clearly why having a healthy Agni is important. We give too much importance to food, and too little to our digestive process. It is of no use to the body when we are always eating nourishing foods if we cannot digest them.
Qualities of Agni
Agni has qualities such as clear, light, hot, penetrating, and intense. If your Agni is messed up, you might feel the lack of one or more of these qualities. You might think of pitta when you think of Agni because they have very similar qualities, but pitta and Agni are different things. You can think of pitta as a medium for Agni to exercise its function.
4 states of Agni
There are 4 possible states in which our digestion, Agni, can find itself in. One is called sama agni, which is the ideal state. You have sama agni when you have regular appetite around the same time everyday, and you don’t feel any body discomfort after your meals, and you are able to evacuate regularly too. The other types of agni are called vishama, tikshna and manda agni.
Vishama agni is correlated to a vata imbalance, because it is the erratic type of Agni. It’s very unstable and unpredictable, it’s when you feel hungry one minute and the next minute the hunger seems to be gone. Tikshna agni is correlated to a pitta imbalance. It is when your have excessive heat in your digestive tract, which can create a burning sensation in you. It can also trigger a big sense of hunger, or you might feel the need to eat more often. Finally, manda Agni is correlated to a kapha imbalance. It is when your digestion becomes quite sluggish and it takes much longer than usual for you to digest things.
The types of Agni
According to Ayurveda, there are 13 types of Agni, being Jatharagni the most important one. Jatharagni’s role would be the closest associated with digestion as we know it in the western world. The other types of agni are: 5 Bhutagni (agni responsible for breaking down the 5 elements), and 7 Dhatvagni (agni linked to the 7 dhatus, or ‘tissues’). Bhutagni could be correlated to the second digestion, which is said to happen in the liver – modern medicine would agree with this. But Dhatvagni is something harder to correlate directly with in modern medicine.
The relationship between Agni and your poop
How often you have bowel movements is something that will greatly influence your state of Agni. If you do not empty your bowel movements everyday, you will notice that at some point you will start losing your appetite, you just won’t have any desire to eat anything anymore because for you to have appetite your Agni needs to be in the right place. However, if you have a lot of feces accumulated in your body, they will end up pushing your Agni upward, and you lose the sense of hunger. Agni needs to be in the right place for it to work correctly. If you have profuse diarrhea, it would be the other way around – Agni would end up losing its place and sinking, so you wouldn’t have much appetite either because the body feels weak.
The relationship between Agni and Ojas
Having a good Agni is very important because it is going to transform the food into you in an optimal way. You want to create good quality tissues in your body, obviously, and for that to happen you need to support your digestive process. When this process happens smoothly and consistently for a long period of time, you are able to accumulate ojas. Ojas is something that includes your immune system, but it’s broader than that – it’s the aura you give people about you, a hint on your vitality through the glow on your eyes, the glow on your skin, the strength of your body. You can tell if someone has good ojas just by looking at someone and his complexion and his posture.