What is Ayurveda?
By Monica. Filed in Yoga Classes |
In our last retreat we had the opportunity to explore and talk about Ayurveda, and what it had to do with our health in terms of the food we ate and the type of lifestyle we had.
It was interesting for everyone at the retreat to find out what their archetype (called dosha in Ayurveda) is.
Ayurveda is a sister-science of Yoga that deals with health from a perspective of relationships – our relationship to the food we eat, in accordance with our relationship to the earth and the seasons, etc.
Read any article on Ayurveda and you are likely to see some mention of the three doshas, Vata, Pitta and Kapha.
What exactly are doshas and what do they have to do with our well-being?
According to ayurveda, the five fundamental elements that make up the universe are:
- 1. space (akasha)
2. air (vayu)
3. fire (agni)
4. water (apu), and
5. earth (prithvi)
These elements also make up the human physiology.
How do these elements work within us?
Look at the elements from the point of view of what they do in the physiology, rather than what they are — ayurveda describes three biological profiles/ constitutions/ or psychophysiological energies called doshas.
There are three doshas, called Vata, Pitta and Kapha, and each is mainly a combination of two elements:
- 1. Vata dosha – is made up of space and air
2. Pitta dosha – is a combination of fire and water
3. Kapha dosha – is made up of water and earth
The combination of the three doshas that you inherit at conception is called your prakriti or original or birth constitution. While it is not unheard of for people to have nearly equal proportions of the three doshas or just one very predominant dosha as their prakriti, most people have two doshas that are more or less equally dominant, with the remaining one less dominant
Thus, there are ten classic types of prakriti possible—
- Vata-Pitta-Kapha, Vata (where Vata is much more dominant than either of the two other doshas)
- Vata-Pitta-Kapha, Vata-Pitta (where Vata and Pitta are the two major doshas with Vata being slightly more dominant than Pitta)
- Pitta-Vata-Kapha, Pitta-Vata (where again Vata and Pitta are the two major doshas, but Pitta is slightly more dominant than Vata)
- Vata-Kapha-Pitta, Kapha
- Vata-Kapha
- Kapha-Vata
- Pitta-Vata-Kapha, Pitta
- Pitta-Kapha
- Kapha-Pitta
- Tri-doshic
Of course, each of us has a unique doshic thumbprint, and an ayurvedic healer performs an ayurvedic pulse assessment to discover that unique doshic make-up and the exact nature of imbalances in order to recommend a very individual program (diet & lifestyle) for restoring balance.
For good health and well-being to be maintained, the three doshas within you need to be in balance. That does not mean they need to be equal, unless you were born with equal doshas. It means that you need to maintain your original doshic make-up or prakriti through life as much as possible to maintain good health.
Unfortunately, factors such as the dietary choices you make, the lifestyle you lead, the climate where you live, levels of environmental pollution, the work you do, the nature of your relationships with people and even just the passage of time can cause one of more of the doshas in your prakriti to increase or decrease from its original level in your constitution, creating vikriti or imbalance. If this imbalance is not corrected, you eventually loose your good health. That’s why restoring balance is the central theme of the ayurvedic approach to health.
While it is ideal to follow a personal program of balance laid out by an ayurvedic healer after an ayurvedic pulse assessment and a question-answer session designed to discover your precise needs for balance at a given time, a well-designed questionnaire can help you assess for yourself if you need to balance one or more doshas, and diet and lifestyle tips and herbal formulas can help maintain or restore balance.
We applied these principles and answered a Dosha-Determining Questionnaire at our weekend retreat. After which, we had a look at what implications this had in terms of what type of foods we’ve been eating too much of which causes the imbalance and how we can respect our original birth constitution by gravitating towards other types of food. Similarly, we got to examine and assess our lifestyle choices.
This was a wonderful experience which I have personally found to have great impact on my personal food and lifestlye choices. If you are interested in this workshop, you can come and learn with us at our weekend yoga and meditation retreats.
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