Institute | WHOLE UNIVERSE

Ayurveda, the science of life, has brought true health and wellness to millions of individuals throughout the ages with simple changes in daily living practices. Incorporating just a few of these proven methods into your lifestyle can bring about radical changes in your life. This ancient art of healing has been practiced continuously for over 5,000 years. The principles of many natural healing systems now familiar in the West, such as Homeopathy and Polarity Therapy, have their roots in Ayurveda. Ayurvedic practices restore the balance and harmony of the individual, resulting in self-healing, good health and longevity.

Our Purpose

The Ayurvedic Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization that teaches the principles and practices of Ayurveda, the ancient science of life. We provide authentic education in a supportive environment that encourages the integration of Ayurveda by individuals into their daily living and by health care professionals into their clinical practices.

Educational Philosophy

Ayurveda is a healing art and a science. Descending from Charaka, Sushruta, and Vagbhata, it is one of apprenticeship in which the student learns from the teacher, who shares knowledge and experiences to assist the student in developing a conceptual framework and fundamental working knowledge.

The Ayurvedic Institute reflects the teaching traditions of ancient India. This tradition emphasizes the oral transmission of knowledge by being present with the teacher. It is taught, as the Vedic tradition emphasizes, with practical examples and stories, keeping the integral aspects of the body, mind, and spiritual components intact. It requires soul searching, faith, and trust without proof or guarantee. In its traditional form, the student is expected to trust the teacher to present the subjects in the manner the teacher feels are appropriate.

For each of us to develop as practitioners, experiencing this tradition and all its components helps to expand our inner awareness.

Goals

The integration of Ayurveda with modern medicine, yoga, Jyotish (Vedic astrology), other healing disciplines, and the individual Self to bring about total health, awareness, and harmony.
It is the dream of Vasant Lad and the goal of the Ayurvedic Institute to be able to offer a complete program of Ayurvedic study. This program would be similar in content to that taught in the traditional Ayurvedic colleges in India.

Organization

The Ayurvedic Institute was founded in 1984 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a 501(c)(3) educational, non-profit corporation. The Articles of Incorporation, By-Laws and Board meeting minutes are open to inspection by any interested person with sufficient advance notice. The Institute is governed by a Board of Directors and corporate officers, whose directives are carried out by Institute staff members.

Pacifica Graduate Institute is an accredited graduate school offering masters and doctoral degree programs framed in the traditions in depth psychology. The Institute has established an educational environment that nourishes respect for cultural diversity and individual differences, and an academic community that fosters a spirit of free and open inquiry. Students have access to an impressive array of education resources on Pacifica’s two campuses, both of which are located between the coastal foothills and the Pacific Ocean, a few miles south of Santa Barbara, California.

The mission of Pacifica Graduate Institute is to foster creative learning and research in the fields of psychology and mythological studies, framed in the traditions of depth psychology.

By creating an educational environment with a spirit of free and open inquiry, consistent with the recognized values of academic freedom, Pacifica is dedicated to cultivating and harvesting the gifts of the human imagination. So that these insights may influence the personal, cultural, and planetary concerns of our era, this dedication is contained in the motto: animae mundi colendae gratia – for the sake of tending soul in and of the world.

Origins & Orientation
Pacifica traces many of its central ideas to the heritage of ancient story tellers, dramatists, and philosophers from all lands who recorded the workings of the imagination. The legacies of these early men and women have evolved in multiple cultural contexts including the systematic explorations of the unconscious by Freud, Jung, and other theorists of the psychologies of this century.

The concepts of depth psychology result from this long development and are at the core of Pacifica’s orientation. These ideas—such as the importance of symbol and metaphor in personal and cultural imagery or the recognition of the dynamic interplay between the natural world and the world of the human psyche—are articulated in all of the Institute’s programs. Pacifica students and faculty contribute further to this rich body of knowledge through the intricacies of the human imagination.

Extending the concepts of psychology and mythological studies beyond the personal, beyond the consulting room, and beyond the classroom, we see psychological life as an evolutionary development within nature, alive in all the phenomena and systems of our world. In studying and working with these multidimensional exchanges, we facilitate contributions to the contemporary concerns of our world through dialogues between the psyche of the individual, the mythologies of the culture, the collective human imagination, and the living planet.