Ayurveda evolved in ancient India more than 5000 years ago and is recognized as the oldest system for healing and maintaining health and well being known to human kind. Greatly simplified, it’s a system that covers all aspects of lifestyle with a focus on building and maintaining balance. One of the great beauties of Ayurveda is that you don’t have to be an experienced, highly trained practitioner to benefit from the concepts Ayurveda offers.
As a Family Herbalist of any level, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of the doshas, or constitutional types, Ayurveda defines. They are essentially archetypes we herbalists can use to make the best choices for ourselves and our families, to understand the effects of herbs and foods are likely to have, and to effectively narrow our herbal choices when illness crops up.
Most Westerners don’t fit neatly into just one of the doshas, although there are folks who do. In ancient times, it was far more common for families to follow the patterns of just one dosha in part because families tended to marry into other families who were constitutionally similar.
In modern America as in many other modern western cultures, we’ve followed more of a mixing-bowl approach to life that’s created a lot of mixed-dosha constitutions. For us mixing-bowl folk, it’s helpful to determine which doshas seem most dominant in your physicality, such as pitta and vata, and adjust your choices to accommodate both as makes sense. You may find that one or the other are better supported by your environment or lifestyle, in which case the other may be the one you’ll tend to emphasize when making your choices. In rare cases, all three doshas seem to weigh equally.
Vata, Ayurveda’s Air
A simple way to think of the doshas is that they align with the primary elements of ancient philosophy. Vata aligns with the element of air. People for whom vata is dominant tend toward feeling cold and have more energy. Often they’ll have active, quite possibly intellectual minds with a lighter frame and a tendency to lose weight or have trouble gaining and maintaining an appropriate weight.
Pitta, Ayurveda’s Fire
Pitta aligns with the element of fire. People for whom pitta is dominant tend toward feeling hot or overheated and often have bursts of energy that may or may not be well sustained. Often, they are categorized as the athletic types who have a strong sense of physicality with the fire to support an active lifestyle. They are likely to gain and lose weight easily.
Kapha, Ayurveda’s Earth and Water
Kapha aligns with the elements of earth and water. People for whom kapha is dominant tend toward feeling warm while not necessarily overheated and often have great endurance. They gain weight, including building muscle mass, quite easily but have a harder time losing it. They often struggle with becoming sedentary, more likely than the other constitutional types to become couch potatoes, but when motivated are able to continue a moderate level of activity seemingly indefinitely.
Which Dosha or Constitution am I?
You can get a rough idea of which constitutional type best fits you by determining whether you prefer hot or cold and wet or dry. Be aware that this is truly only a very rough way to determine which dosha tends to factor more for you; an accurate picture of your constitution requires a much more extensive evaluation, most often performed by someone who has a lot of experience and training in Ayurvedic practice. For home herbal practice, though, simplicity is often good enough.
Vata
Folks with dominant Vata are more likely to enjoy warm weather and be more aggravated by cold weather. They’re more likely to find humidity tolerable than dry weather, but the temperature may influence their tolerance; cold humid weather is likely to be much harder to endure than cold dry weather, for instance.
Pitta
People who are pitta dominant are likely to be more comfortable in cold weather than in hot. They may find that dry conditions are more comfortable than damp, but they could easily find damp more comfortable than dry depending on how strongly vata and kapha weigh in balance with their pitta nature.
Kapha
Kapha dominant folks often gravitate toward dry conditions as opposed to damp ones with less emphasis on the temperature, although they’re more likely to find themselves better motivated to be active when the weather is temperate rather than extreme in either temperature direction.
Use Ayurveda’s Dosha’s at Home
As a home herbalist, the doshas offer an easy short-hand way to categorize your own needs when you’re matching herbs to intended uses. If, for instance, you want to boost your immune system during flu and cold season, you’ll want to consider how the potential herbs you might use are likely to affect your constitution. If your constitution is more pitta dominant, for instance, you are likely to find Fire Cider, filled with fiery herbs like garlic, horseradish, chili peppers, and ginger, to be highly aggravating to your system, which will ultimately weaken your immune system rather than strengthen it. You’ll probably do better with a daily dose of nutritive herbal teas containing herbs like oats, nettle, and alfalfa which don’t aggravate pitta. If, however, your more kapha dominant, the fire cider is likely to give your immune system a boost made even more effective with the addition of one or two nutritive herbs like nettle or oatstraw. Vata dominant folks are likely to find that Fire Cider just as it is is a perfect tonic to boost they systems and may well be more weighed down by the heaviness of the strongly nutritive teas that benefit the kapha types.
Beyond working with prevention and general health, understanding your own constitutional type can make the choices you face when you’re trying to ease illness easier. Honey is recommended in many herbals for a sore throat as is elecampane, and marshmallow. Marshmallow will boost kapha, which is appropriate when you’ve got a dry sore throat, but can create unbalance in a kapha constitution in general and particularly when a lot of mucus is running. Those folks might want to pair marshmallow with a little honey or elecampane, which is drying, to balance the demulcent aspect of marshmallow. A vata dominant person may want to try the marshmallow with a little chili pepper or ginger to stoke their fire but pass on the honey and elecampane even if they’ve got a lot of mucus. A pitta dominant person may be better served by some lemon with either elecampane or marshmallow depending on whether the sore throat is leaning toward dry or damp.
We are fortunate to have a lot of good references for learning more about Ayurveda and constitutional types as well as how to apply that knowledge available to us. Here are a few of my favorites for beginners:
- The Complete Book of Ayurvedic Home Remedies: Based on the Timeless Wisdom of India’s 5,000-Year-Old Medical System
- Ayurvedic Remedies for the Whole Family
For a focus on hot/cold, dry/damp and how to match those qualities to foods and herbs, Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients into Foods and Remedies That Heal by Rosalee de la Foret is a terrific starting point.
