Jennifer Allen
Directed by Jeremy Frindel
Distributed by Zeitgiest Films
There’s something to be said when you watch the first few moments of this Documentary. The camera person and through him/her the viewers watch as a man casually walks along the slim side streets of a small town in India. He’s very slim yet has a confident stride to his step. He’s wearing a white shirt and light khaki trousers as he steps into the light and past many Indians sitting and standing outside the front door. He walks through the building to his office as a handful of interns watch from their chairs. He opens the inner gate to the front door, and soon after the patients outside start coming in to wait for his care.
This is a typical day for Dr. Vashant Lad when he comes to the free clinic he runs in Pune. The founder of Ayurvedic Healing is quite popular, as people from many surrounding villages come seeking his help for everything from a toothache to high blood pressure.
Most astonishingly, he can sense what is wrong with you in many cases with a simple touch to your wrist. Dr. Lad mentions that he can diagnose a person’s ailment by reading the 3 different types of beats in their pulse. The Kapha (building blocks), Vata (movement), and Pitta (transformation) can be felt in various ways to pinpoint what an individual has physically out of balance. It’s quite extraordinary to watch him sit there with a few fingers lightly touching a person’s wrist, his eyes slowly close for a few seconds, and when they finally open he softly speaks to the patient with one or more reasons why they could be out of sorts.
This method is the basis for the Ayurvedic Self Healing practice that Dr. Lad has been teaching since the 1960’s. It started with him becoming a teacher through his alma mater, Savitribai Phule Pune University. Soon one of his students was (surprisingly) an American named Dr. Robert Svoboda who along with American businessman Len Blank, helped him come to America and give seminars about Ayurveda in the late 70’s. Soon after he was inspired so much by a particular seminar in Sante Fe, new Mexico that the attendees asked him to stay and continue their education. A few years later the first ever Ayurvedic Institute in America was built in Albuquerque and is still open today. He now travels between America, Britain and India on a regular basis.
The documentary goes through much Dr. Lad’s upbringing from his youth in Pure, to his father being a follower of Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930’s , to how he met his wife and how they had to elope due to the strict customs of arranged marriages at the time.
Throughout the video you see him with students, admirers, and former patients as they walk with him. He is even celebrated during Guru Purnima in 2015 for his innovations in medicine. With his white shirts and almost gliding cadence you’d think he was almost like a deity, and the documentary’s stance seems to lean in that direction. Watching the Guru Purnima ceremony with him dressed in white robes does make him look very godlike on purpose.
These innovations include his knowledge of Herbalism, Sanskrit, and Yoga which are very prevalent in his work. Dr. Lad often prefers to use herbal remedies for medication and you can see some of his Yoga techniques as he diagnoses each patient. He’s also written many books on Ayurvedic Healing, but his first, Ayurvedic Self Healing is his most popular. If you can’t attend one of his seminars but do want to learn more about his methods, that book is a good start.
This Zeitgeist Documentary offers just a glimpse of this man’s work with many snippets placed into a 90 minute timeframe. It is well produced and gives good insight into Dr. Lad not only as a medicinal practitioner but also as a human being who simply wants to help heal the world one pulse touch at a time.
