FIVE STEPS TO NEW KARMA
1 – Abandon all reason. Strike out defiantly on a wild adventure that no one else will understand.
2 – Shed your prior identity. Go big.
3 – Lose everything. Fall hard.
4 – Remember your happiest moments, then retrace your steps.
5 – Use what you have learned to help others.
My name’s Ambika, and I’m the founder of DEVANE, my new luxury wellness company based on the timeless knowledge called Ayurveda. And yes, I’m here to tell you that your Karma may be repaired.
Ayurveda is the millennia-old system of guiding and developing every aspect of wellness, both inner and outer. Ayurveda, like Buddhism, finds its roots in India, which is also where I’m from. In fact, Ayurveda predates TCM or Traditional Chinese Medicine, including acupuncture, by many centuries, and so many of the core concepts are similar.
I grew up immersed in Ayurveda. I took it for granted, the way that kids take everything for granted. Then I made a radical break as a young woman. My skin and hair were lush and healthy, and I was young. I came to America, and everything changed.
Here’s where I want to talk about Karma. In its original usage, Karma is the opposite of chaos. Karma is order, the natural order of the cosmos, our universe.
It’s important to understand this relative to our hair, our selves! In the West, I often encounter a misunderstanding of Karma, as if it is written in stone. The Indian approach is far more fluid. Karma may be revised through meditation. It is not a fixed, rigid state of being, but rather it is the process of our becoming who we truly are intended to be. In America, we call this “living my best life!”
So, flashback to my arrival in the USA. My hair skimmed my knees. All my life I had cared for my hair, skin and body using all-natural botanical remedies that me and my sisters made at home using age-old recipes passed down from my great grandmothers. And of course true Ayurveda is not skin-deep! We also were immersed in a traditional Indian lifestyle, where a lifetime understanding of Ayurveda informs how we think, what and how we eat, how we relate to others, how we prepare for the future, how we consider our place in our community, in the cosmos, and so much more.
I cut my hair almost immediately—almost as soon as I unpacked my suitcase. Was it shocking? It was. I did it because I was a proverbial fish out of water, and I thought that maybe by making my appearance seem more modern, and more western, I would feel more at home.
Was this a mistake? Absolutely not. But it did set me on a long, often painful path of discovery.
THE BIG CHOP
Cutting my hair was only the beginning of the transformation that would lead me to where we are today. The haircut was symbolic of my entrance into a life that felt strange indeed. I was more than eight thousand miles from my home, my family, those familiar faces, the fragrance of the gardens, the spicy perfumes of the market and kitchen. I began to experience western-style stress, with very little support. And instead of relying upon the cultural practices that had formed me, shaped me,I tried harder than ever to connect with the American lifestyle.
Yes, I ate my first cheeseburger. I drank my first Diet Coke. I stayed up far later than I ever had, watching truly wretched TV shows. I commuted on the freeways, worried about my car, worried about finances. I learned that in America, everything had to be done at a moment’s notice, faster, bigger, better, more, so different from the Indian attitude which tends to take the long view. The pressure to consume and conform was unbelievable, and felt totally alien to me. These experiences gave me an immediate insight into why Americans look, sound and behave the way they do, as though they are in constant, low-level distress.
Because many are.
What happened next requires another telling, another day. I’ll simply tell you that the stress did not stop. My response? Hair-coloring, highlights, and a bad perm. Really bad—what women in the American South (remember that I’m now a Georgia Peach!) call “dyed, fried and laid to the side!” Life-events included getting a divorce, and the tragic loss of my beautiful son from a rare medical condition. My hair began falling out in chunks. I found myself feeling literally wounded, in body, mind and spirit.
Thankfully, I came to my senses and realized that the answers were not far away. In fact, everything I needed was right there in front of me. I only recently learned about Dorothy of Oz, tapping the heels of her ruby slippers together in order to return home to those who loved her. That’s exactly what I did, although I’d rather wear my rubies elsewhere!
I returned to India with vivid images in my brain of great clumps of my hair in the shower drain. I spent my time studying Ayurveda in earnest, this time with the soul of a chemist and formulator as well as a seeker of higher truth which led me to earn an accredited certification in Ayurvedic beauty care from National Institute of Ayurveda, which is also a prestigious university dedicated to the study of Ayurveda.
This period also was the beginning of my journey of patience, faith and trust. I resumed my daily yoga, rediscovered the botanicals I had known in childhood, and swerved away from the ultra-processed American diet.
And the next revelation was that I needed to share all that I had learned with the women of the west, who desperately needed to experience the holistic goodness of Ayurveda in easily accessible ways, starting with their hair. This was the genesis of the DEVANE brand which will reach shelves in summer, 2025. The initial products are dedicated to the wellness of the scalp, and the resulting beauty of the hair. In this sense, DEVANE is as much a skin care system as a hair care system, and we plan to launch a skin care collection next year.
HURRY-UP and MORE
If I were to isolate one specific problem I witness in Americans, it’s inflammation. It’s evident in many aspects of American life, including the huge market for OTC antacids. This runs parallel in some ways to the Ayurvedic concept of “Agni” or digestive fire. We believe, as do many health care professionals worldwide within other practices and disciplines, that one of the keys to health is fully absorbing nutrients from our food. This is not the case for many Americans, as the result of the depleted nature of the mostly-processed food itself, and the highly stressful American lifestyle.
For this reason, our first collection will be called Bountifull, and every product contains Aloe Vera for its soothing qualities. The Bountifull Collection has been developed to address common imbalances which affect the hair, tackling inflammation both internally and topically. And the collection contains Ayurvedic ingredients including turmeric root for clarifying the scalp, fenugreek for volumizing hair, and extract of licorice for nourishing the follicles.
Ambika and her husband, Aravind
Until you experience inner balance, topical products alone cannot deliver the results your clients want. Key to this collection is an oral supplement containing the extract of the evergreen shrub called Ashwagandha. The Latin name for the plant, Withania somnifera, references sleep, because it has been used as a mild sedative for thousands of years all over Asia and North Africa. But no worries, this is not a sleeping pill. Our Ashwagandha supplement is an OTC oral capsule to balm and calm stress, and a neurological coolant to ease the inflammation that leads to constricted scalp, congested sebum, and poor hair growth, among many other physical complaints.
Ashwagandha and Shatavari join forces in our oral supplement to support health scalp and hair growth. Both of these traditional Ayurvedic botanicals are now identified as adaptogens, meaning that they help promote and support homeostasis, or the internal equilibrium of your bodily functions. In particular, these two ingredients work together synergistically to suppress the production of cortisol, the “fight-or-flight” neurochemical that contributes to stress. These two ingredients also help the body offset changes in hormones, especially during pregnancy and menopause.
We’ve made two moves in formulating DEVANE which set us apart. The first is that we have gone beyond botanicals. Although I did indeed return to my roots, literally and figuratively, when I returned to India to study Ayurveda, I did so with the eyes of the future. I know that products which are purely botanical in their formulations fail in the west. With this knowledge, we engaged a formulations process that supercharges the effects of the roots, barks, seed and leaves which have been the backbone of Ayurveda for thousands of years. This is necessary because of the busy modern lives that we lead. With this in mind, we encapsulate our botanicals in a proprietary complex with proteins and peptides to amplify the potency and effectiveness of traditional ingredients for the modern (impatient) consumer, and to shorten the timeline of effectiveness.
DISCOVERING THE LUXURY OF TIME
But in the end, it gets back to the botanicals themselves, those same leaves, blossoms and buds that surrounded me as a young girl in southern India. After what seemed like a thousand iterations of the formulas, I realized that many of the ingredients had to be sourced and compounded in India, rather than in China or anywhere in the west. I don’t do this out of sentimentality, or nostalgia, or lack of industry knowledge. The fact is that, again, time is an element. Preparing the botanical elements of the formulae is labor-intensive, and is thus time-intensive.
There are mechanized extraction and blending methods available, but the end-product is different and cannot replace the traditional extraction process of Ayurveda that delivers high potency through its formulation. Only in India are the compounders willing to take the time to produce the ultimate formulation, and this is how we define “luxury”: the luxury of taking the most pure, rare, potent botanicals on earth, collecting and treating them in a respectful, indigenous way, and then optimizing the effectiveness of the formula for the west using the most sophisticated technologies available today to the beauty industry. That’s why we make our oils, deep conditioning mask and oral supplements in India to preserve the efficacy of the benefits.
Now, back to that bruised, battered Karma. It’s important to remind clients that hair represents a journey of sorts. The journey begins with the scalp, because the scalp is alive. As much as we all hate to say it, everything south of the scalp is dead. It was once alive, like wicker, wood or leather, but “health” as in healthy hair actually begins in the living follicles of the scalp.
Therefore, keeping the scalp clarified is key. We’re especially excited to share our products with people who rock African-origin hair, since protective hairstyles are elaborative, expensive, and require skilled care and maintenance, especially when it comes to keeping the scalp cleansed.
I also take a very personal interest in bringing this knowledge to women (and men) of the west since Ayurveda is not inscribed in stone, either. It is a moving, breathing, living system of knowledge that reflects changes in the times. For thousands of years, women have held an important role in the cultivation of Ayurveda. This does not negate the role of men and male teachers.
But today Ayurveda is in peril. The reasons are many, and are related.
AYRUVEDA AS RESCUE FOR THE MODERN WORLD
First, the climate is changing. Much of India is experiencing geological and meteorological change, and this affects the growing season of crops. Deforestation, for palm oil and other commodities, is another serious threat to the traditional way of life that has defined India and enriched Asia and much of the world through a deep knowledge of plants and their properties.
Also, the digital revolution has made the world so much smaller. It is not an exaggeration to say that virtually everybody in India has a cell phone. This is even true in rural areas where people may not have indoor plumbing. The digital world has changed the expectations of young people, who now know who Taylor Swift is (just one example!). Teens and young people in India generally are not interested in farming, handcrafts, etc. They want to see the world “out there” beyond India, and the calling of technology and all that it represents calls them to London, Shanghai, Paris, New York, Los Angeles.
Women in India, like women everywhere, have a long history with the soil, the sun, rainfall, seasons, planets, planting. Men have this connection as well, but women quite specifically have an indigenous bond with the flora of our vast region, and women are the keepers and guardians of this botanical knowledge. As our culture and society change, this bond is endangered. My brand is dedicated to honoring this history, and bringing the benefits of Ayurveda to modern consumers in relevant ways my ancestors could not have dreamed possible.
So, hairdressers everywhere: when a client comes to you in tears, because she’s chopped off her hair, or had a bad perm, or tried to blonde-balayage it herself…think of me. And remind your client of the DEVANE mantra: “Damage is Not Destiny ™.”
We’re all still on the journey.
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