What is A Dosha? The Keys to Optimal Health Through Ayurveda

Hi there, Andrea Hailey Shankaran here. Welcome to my channel. This is where I talk about all things Ayurveda. So if you love Ayurveda too, then go ahead and hit the subscribe button. Today we're talking about doshas because I get a lot of questions about doshas that aren't so simple to answer. And so today I want to give you a deeper understanding of the doshas. So what is a dosha? The word itself is surprisingly difficult to define. Commonly, you've heard your dosha referred to as your body type or your Ayurvedic constitution. In fact, you might already know what your dosha is. You might know it's vata, pitta, or kapha. Or maybe you have a dual dosha or your tridosha. It's great to know what your dosha is, but what does it really mean? And how does understanding your dosha help you to improve your health? My intention in this video series is to help you to go beyond simply identifying your dosha to you really being able to understand in your gut what your doshas are telling you about the state of your health. This is going to be incredibly helpful to you since knowing how to keep your dosha in balance is actually the key to optimal health. So let's take our first dosha deep dive into the topic, shall we? Today's topic is what is a dosha? The word dosha actually means fault, as in to fault or like a fault line. And in geology, this faulting refers to structural alterations, changes, deviations, drifting, movement, relocation, etc. Now it turns out that this is exactly how we talk about doshas in Ayurvedic medicine. So doshas aren't a static thing. They're constantly changing based on your thoughts and your emotions, even based on your actions or the external environment. Even the time of day is affecting your doshas. So when you become aware of how your doshas are being influenced by these powerful forces, you're better equipped to keep your internal balance. Remember I said that this idea of a fault also refers to the underlying tendency of the body to go out of balance and express uncomfortable symptoms and diseases when you aren't paying attention? Realizing that your dosha is a potential fault highlights the fact that you have to put in efforts to sustain your health. It's obvious that good health doesn't happen automatically. You can't not eat or even eat whatever you want, for example. There's cause and effect at play. Eat more and you'll become heavy. Eat less and you'll become lighter. So this heavy and light are both expressions of the doshas and an example of how they change based on your actions. So we've established that doshas change, but you might be wondering what exactly is changing? Well, the answer is everything. Everything internally is moving and changing and that's affecting the structural parts of you and the functional parts because the doshas are linked precisely to how your body functions as well as how it looks. So structural manifestations refer to your tissues like organs, muscles, and bones such as how much muscle do you have, how muscular are you, and how much bone density do you have, and what is the health of your liver tissue, what is the structure of it based on its qualities. And then functional refers to the basic functions of the tissues such as how your digestive system works, what your blood's chemical composition is, or how much cortisol you're producing and when or how hydrated is your skin. So in Ayurveda this structure and function is determined by the doshas and we talk about the doshas in terms of 20 basic qualities of nature that exist as a set of 10 pairs of opposites. And these qualities in Ayurveda are referred to as gunas, but we're going to just call them qualities. And the fact that these qualities are opposites is very interesting. So since hot and colds are opposite, for example, it means that when you're cold you can't also be hot. You ideally want to be somewhere in the middle with a comfortable neutral temperature and that's what we would call balance. It's the ideal. And so if you want to bring hot towards cold you would add cold and vice versa. And so this is the beauty of how the opposites work. This cold and hot, they're both examples of the qualities and then the heavy and light that we touched on earlier are also qualities. So this idea of the qualities is actually the most useful part of knowing your dosha. But where do the 20 qualities come from? Well they actually come from the five elements of nature. So this ether, air, water, fire, and earth are regarded as the basic building blocks of nature. And it's for this reason that the three main doshas of Ayurveda, the vata, pitta, and kapha, are often associated with the five elements. So you might already know this. You might have already heard that vata is ether and air, that pitta is fire and water, and that kapha is earth and water. So while these elements are really useful to know, what's even more useful to understand are the qualities of each dosha. Because this gives you a more granular detail with which to understand yourself. And so vata now becomes dry, rough, light, and mobile. And cold and subtle. And many of these qualities can be understood experientially. So think about what happens when you spend too much time in the wind, in the air, right? You feel dry. And when that dryness builds up, it actually feels rough, like rough on your skin. And air is also light, and it moves easily. So it's mobile. And then ether. Ether is like outer space. And when you think of outer space, you think of it being very cold and also remote. And so ether is cold and subtle. So I hope you get the idea. These qualities have their own unique ways of expressing and manifesting in your body, and also your mind and your spirit. So let's move on to pitta. Pitta now becomes hot, light, oily, sharp, and spreading from the fire, and fluid from the water. And as you can see, pitta is really dominated by the fire element. And it's the only dosha that contains fire. And so it needs water, however, to keep pitta cool and in check. Because without water, pitta would definitely self-destruct. And another way of seeing the water element for pitta is that pitta's primary functions are digestion, immunity, and enzyme process. And so each of these systems are characterized by these chemical processes that are carried out in liquids. So the liquid facilitates the transformative fire element in the body. It's pretty cool, right? Now what about kapha? Kapha is heavy, dull, and stable from the earth element, and cool, soft, cloudy, gooey, and oily from the water element. And earth is pretty easy to understand. We all know earth. But what about the water? So I ask you to just take a second to reflect on what qualities would be created if you combined earth with water. Well, the earth would probably muddy the water, right? And so that's how you get the soft, cloudy, gooey, and oily. And this kind of water could actually describe different types of mucus. Yeah, and mucus is a powerful kapha attribute. And it also describes fat, which is another kapha attribute. So by now, hopefully you've understood that your dosha is a collection of qualities that are ever-changing. And in fact, you can think of your dosha as a window into your health. And when you look through this window, you will see an intelligent kaleidoscope of interconnected physiochemical conditions that determine the unique expression of the structural and functional manifestations of your person. And this unique configuration of expressed qualities at a given time is your dosha. And the qualities that make up your individual dosha are interconnected. This is really important. So think about if a single quality goes out of balance, it can actually pull other qualities out of balance as well. And at the same time, actions that restore balance to a particular quality will have positive effects on connected qualities. So in this way, I hope you've understood that optimal health in Ayurveda is really about optimal balance of all the qualities that make up your dosha. So if you want to get to know yourself well, as well as possible, then you want to get to know the specific qualities of yours that are most at risk of imbalance, so that you know exactly which actions will help you to bring your balance back, and which actions will cause a fault. So which actions will cause a fault, and which actions will help you to maintain your balance. Now in the next video in this dosha deep dive series, I will talk about how you can learn your dosha, and what types of actions you can proactively take to improve your health, once you know what your dosha is. So I hope you enjoyed this video, and thank you for watching, and bye for now!