Ṛtucarya: Seasonal Living in a Season-Less World

Ancient seasonal regimens meeting climate-controlled modern life

How ṛtucarya (seasonal regimens) offers wisdom for reconnecting with natural cycles in an artificially regulated world.

The Season That Never Arrived

In June of 2023, an IT project manager in Bengaluru named Ananya Rao noticed she was tired all the time. She was thirty-four. She ate well. She slept eight hours. She exercised three times a week. Her office was cooled to twenty-two degrees Celsius year-round. Her grocery store carried the same strawberries in January that it carried in June. Her life, measured by the metrics she cared about, was going fine. But her body was telling her something was off.

Her family doctor ran the usual tests. Thyroid normal. B12 normal. Blood sugar normal. CBC clean. He shrugged and suggested she try yoga.

Instead, she went to see Dr. Venugopal Kurup, a Kerala-trained Ayurvedic physician whose clinic sat above a medical shop on a narrow lane off MG Road. Dr. Kurup asked her one question her family doctor had not asked. He asked her what she had eaten for the last three days. Then he asked her what the weather had been like. Then he told her something she had never heard from any physician before.

"Your body," he said, "thinks it is still spring. But your stomach thinks it is winter. And your mind does not know what season it is at all."

What Dr. Kurup was diagnosing was not a disease her blood tests could detect. It was a condition that Indian medicine has a name for, and that modern life makes almost universal. Her body had lost its sense of time.

Ṛtucaryā: Conduct According to Season

The Sanskrit word is ṛtucaryā. Ṛtu means season. Caryā means conduct, regimen, the way one carries oneself. Ṛtucaryā is the system of adjustments, in diet, sleep, exercise, and daily ritual, that keep the body aligned with the cycle of the year.