ayurveda dosha’s explained

I’d heard about dosha’s before but never really understood what that meant until I was training as a yoga teacher and it was fascinating!

so, what is Ayurveda?

The word translates to mean ‘knowledge of life’ and it is one of the world’s oldest forms of holistic medicine and still widely used today.

It’s a healing system that looks at a range of areas for wellbeing including the physical, emotions, psychological and spiritual aspects in the context of the universe.

Ayurveda states that a person’s dosha, determines and directly affects their personality and health. This energy like everything else can become unbalanced, too weak or too strong so by addressing and understanding your individual dosha you can achieve wellbeing in mind, body & soul.

I wasn’t completely sold on this idea at first but once I discovered my dosha (I’m a vata/pitta if you’re wondering) I couldn’t really argue with it. Like everything else I believe it’s a useful addition and tool of understanding to incorporate into holistic wellbeing but not the be all and end all solution or a one size fits all!

what is a dosha?

According to this idea, the universal life energy manifests as three different dominant energies, or doshas called vata, pitta, and kapha. And the dosha balance of the five elements of the world known as air, earth, space, water, and fire is essential to maintain well-being.

The idea is that we are all made up of a unique combination of these three forces of varying proportions. We all have some of each energy but most people tend to be dominant in one or maybe two doshas. The belief is that this unique combination that we all have is determined and constructed at the moment of conception and is like your own personal blueprint!

As you move through life, like all other energies within our system the amount of each of the three doshas is constantly changing and we may become more dominant in certain energies for periods of time. This can be affected by your diet, the season, climate, your age and even the time of day! This then can have an affect on your mood, health, energy levels and even things like motivation, temperament and productivity.

Fascinating, don’t you think? I’ll be breaking down each dosha in the next couple of posts and adding a quiz so you can discover what your dosha is!

bi-doshic

Bi-doshic simply means you share qualities with two dosha types (most of us do). So you could be vata-pitta, pitta-kapha or kapha-vata and under certain conditions one dosha will be more dominant than the other. This could be depending on the time of day, diet and lifestyle influences or even the time of year. 

tri-doshic

This is rare but it does occur, when you have equal amounts of each dosha. When you’re in balance this is a dream, you are strong, stable and highly adaptable to whatever life throws at you