It would be a shame for ayurveda to die

It would be a shame for ayurveda to die

We were meant to be in India this December. The flights were booked. A loose plan was in place. But a few days before we were due to leave, my son became unwell. Not dramatically, just enough that travelling across continents no longer felt wise. So we cancelled the trip.

Instead, we chose something slower. We cleared our diaries and committed to a three-week Ayurvedic cleanse at home. Nothing extreme. Mostly focused on food, rhythm, sleep, and attention.

I didn’t expect much from it. I certainly didn’t expect what followed.

My sleep deepened. The low-grade brain fog I had quietly normalised through the intensity of being a mum while running a small business lifted. My focus and motivation returned. Not in a frantic, pushing way, but as a steadier sense of courage. Decisions that had felt effortful began to feel clearer.

I shared this experience with a friend who is also an Ayurvedic practitioner. He spoke candidly about a quieter reality. Ayurveda risks disappearing not through rejection, but through neglect and dilution. Reduced to wellness aesthetics or expensive retreats. Stripped of rigour because it does not scale neatly or generate the kinds of margins modern systems reward.

Around the same time, I came across a thoughtful essay titled Let Ayurveda Die, which explores this dynamic far more deeply than I can here.

What struck me was how familiar this pattern feels beyond Ayurveda.

You see it in music. Teaching. Care work. Craft. Professions that rely on judgement, presence, and apprenticeship often struggle not because they lack value, but because they do not optimise easily. Over time, they become work people do with sacrifice, rather than work systems are designed to support.

There is a leadership parallel here.

When pace, pressure, and cognitive load remain high for too long, decision quality quietly degrades. Not through incompetence, but through fatigue. Narrower thinking. Shorter horizons. Less capacity to sense what actually matters.

At Kholo, we spend a lot of time thinking about this tension. How organisations can remain human-centred and still perform. How leaders can design systems that support good decisions, not just fast ones. How judgement, care, and clarity can survive the pursuit of scale.

I am not saying Ayurveda has all the answers. But I am noticing how much better my own decisions became when my body was properly supported. When care was not an afterthought, but part of the system.

It would be a shame for Ayurveda to die.
Not because it is ancient, but because it is quietly useful.

If you would like to know more about the cleanse we did, feel free to comment.

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