A reading that accompanies us
Sattva — The Ayurvedic Way to Live Well
Eminé & Paul Rushton
The word we cherish — sattva — turned into a daily art of living: cultivating clarity, lightness and harmony, through the hours and the seasons.
Eminé Rushton is a British author and Ayurvedic therapist, long a wellness editor at major magazines before devoting herself to Ayurveda. With Paul Rushton, whose photographs bathe the book in light, she wrote Sattva — a work that takes the very word we cherish and turns it into an art of living. Where our chapter “The Sattvic State” describes that state of clarity and quiet joy, she unfolds its how-to, through the hours and the seasons.
Sattva — far more than a quality of food
We often meet sattva at the table, in the clear food that lightens the body and brightens the mind. Eminé Rushton widens the word to the whole day: morning light, breath, movement, sleep, right speech, even the harmony of the place we live in. Sattva becomes a way of inhabiting our hours — unity, purity, serenity. It is the natural extension of our chapter: food opens the door, the rest of life walks through it.
A clear doorway into Ayurveda
The book lays out Ayurveda's great grids with clarity: the three doshas — vata, pitta, kapha — that shape our temperaments, and the three gunas — tamas the heaviness, rajas the agitation, sattva the luminous balance that reconciles them. It is exactly the compass we follow here, and one of the finest introductions for anyone discovering this science of the living.
Living with the seasons — and the plants that support
A large part of the book tunes daily life to rhythms: rising with the light, taking the main meal when the digestive fire is high, slowing as the day falls, matching the table to the season — down to the health of a woman's cycle. It gathers the great adaptogenic plants: ashwagandha, brahmi, tulsi, shatavari — the very ones we bring together in our Three Treasures. Two paths, one intelligence: attuning the body to the cycles rather than imposing a cadence on it.