Body Type & Psychology of Ungrounded People - Getting Grounded With Ayurveda 2 of 20

People with certain bodily characteristics and psychology are likely to be more subtle in nature. For example, people who are more light and mobile. Remember that subtle is the opposite of a meat and potatoes kind of person. So we're gonna expect less solidity, less hardiness in a person with a subtle body type. So they're gonna be more light. They're gonna be more mobile, more sensitive, a more sensitive nervous system. They'll have softer features, slender bones, more thin skin, more thin hair, generally Vata body type characteristics and tending towards deficiency. Kate Moss is a celebrity who pioneered the waif look as a model. And though her personality wasn't always subtle, her body type was a very subtle body type. People who have a more subtle nature may be frequently anxious, easily startled, easily spooked, disturbed, or distracted. They might have even disassociation, episodes of disassociation when they're very unbalanced or get goosebumps frequently. And this is common in thin, frail, elderly people. I had a client, and this is not a picture of the client here but I had a female client about 70 years old with a Vata type constitution. She was living in a commune by herself, alone, very far away from anybody else in the woods. She had a ringing in her ear and her ears were extremely sensitive. And so that was why she wanted to live so far away from other people. And the main obstacle to changing her daily routine was caring for her cat. She was so attached to these cats that she wasn't really willing to make any changes to her diet or lifestyle in order to help herself be a little more grounded and stable. And she had no heat in her house. So she was really living in extreme circumstances in a Northern climate, but wasn't really able to do anything about it because of her anxieties and disturbances. So she was an example of a very extreme subtleness and she would be disassociated frequently. So subtle people tend to have a lot of similar psychological characteristics. One, their thoughts, emotions, and feelings may be fleeting. Now, this is not true for every subtle person. Some subtle people have one or more characteristics, but thoughts, emotions, and feelings may be very fleeting, that they come and go. They fall in love one day and breaking up the next. That's a sign that they're really living according to their emotions instead of having a more stable foundation. They might have few long-term friendships. People who have more subtle quality are more open-minded to new ideas. They learn quickly. They're adaptive and can change on a dime. And that can be good. Open-minded can be good, but also it's sometimes good to be stable and a little closed-minded. I think open-minded gets a really good rap and closed-minded gets a bad rap, but we really have to think through, is it always good to be open-minded? Is it always bad to be closed-minded? An empath, shown example of a person who might be an empath on this slide is constantly feeling what other people around them feel. So if a person explains some kind of tragedy, this person is going to feel very deeply that other person's suffering. And again, that could be good, but it's not good if it derails you or distracts you or kind of makes it impossible for you to keep a steady life. What we wanna do is be extremely helpful and supportive, but not ruffled all the time or having these intense emotions that can be exhausting. So another example of a subtle person is a person whose identity is constantly changing. Every few years, they're into some totally new thing and become a total different person as a result. So they have no real strong personality on their own, but more of like a shapeshifter kind of person. A person who's frequently inspired or living in an inspired state. Success is 99% labor and 1% inspiration, but some people are kind of addicted to being inspired and always in an imaginative state, always in a dreamer state, always an idealist, always in an intuitive state. And what we need is a balance of those things, not that we just always exist in potential. Sometimes we wanna actualize and realize some of our ideas and bring them to fruition instead of just having ideas. So people who with a more subtle nature tend to invest in ideas and concepts as opposed to nuts and bolts kind of things. They have hope, faith and belief in things unseen. And those are all great things, right? It's great to have hope. In fact, a person who's hopeless is a terrible thing or a person who is faithless can't trust anything, not necessarily a great thing, right? If they're doubting everything all the time. But philosophers and theologians tend to be more subtle individuals, people who have a very clear mind, although that could go either way. Some people are just clear and very solid. Other people by clear, I mean, sort of very kind of open. A person may be so expansive that they're hard to understand, like a creative genius in a sense, or the mad professor who sees all these connections between things. Priests and spiritual leaders in general have more of a subtle nature. Artists have more of a subtle nature. Musicians, painters, writers, and poets, they're contemplating and then bringing the beauty of what they've contemplated. People who consider themselves clairvoyant have a lot of subtleness. They even attempt to cultivate awareness of the body's subtleness or subtle cues, subtle behaviors. They try to see and understand hidden details or listen for deeper insights, looking for the essence of things. So examples of that might be a fortune teller or simply a brilliant psychologist or a prophet. Many practitioners, Ayurveda practitioners, are very open and receptive to their clients. They wanna perceive their client's nature on this deep level, and sometimes they can open themselves up too much. It's actually, if you're only working on intuition and don't have facts to back you up, it's hard to tell whether you're right or not, right? Your gut feeling is a feeling, and it's often really good to be in touch with your gut feelings, but if you're only operating on your gut feelings, then you may not have the data to back it up. My neighbor thinks he's clairvoyant, and he plays the lottery, and he always works on intuition, but he hasn't won the lottery yet, right? So we have to find a way of balancing intuition with fact-finding. Magical, a person who has a lot of magical interests. You know, very interested in the New Age spiritual movement. New Age spiritual movement is very subtle. It's actually the movement itself is trying to see the subtle cause and effect and connection between things. So also people who are mesmerizing or try to be mesmerizing or charming are people themselves who are probably easily influenced by other mesmerizing or charming people. People who are constantly inspired, I mentioned before, even interested in magic, might be more subtle. People who are curious about supernatural things or magical creatures, ghosts, angels, fairies, that kind of thing. People who are doing dream interpretation and who believe in dreams may be more subtle. Person who wants or has no possessions, that nothing really matters to them, no passion behind them, nothing really cherished, they may be a little more subtle too because of being a bit more disembodied. A person who's always moving or traveling may be more subtle. A person who has difficulty establishing hard boundaries and lines, who has difficulty making strong decisions. Subtle is actually, or a person with a subtle nature actually has a gift and their gift is the ability to integrate and connect things that other people think are different but they kind of find a way to see a connection and relationship between them. Now it's obvious, it's true that everything is connected to everything else. Everything can be a cause to some effect, right? There is relationships between all things, if nothing for the fact that we're all kind of made of the same basic matter, right? So subtle people tend to see connection where other people tend to see difference. And in the Ayurveda profession, this can actually be a frequent error because Ayurveda places so much importance on the relationship between things. New students tend to see connections between everything and they have trouble discerning and prioritizing what is most important. So for example, they'll see like every one of the body types or doshas in their constitution. And then they're like, am I Vata, Pitta or Kapha? Or they'll see every guna, oh, I have some light qualities, some heavy qualities, some hot qualities, some cold qualities. And so they have trouble putting one thing before the other. And they also see that, oh, health is influenced by weather, food, relationships, spiritual beliefs, cleanliness, stress levels, et cetera. So it becomes this dizzying array of things because they're seeing connections between everything. So what those students eventually learn is how to focus and prioritize on the primary causes and effects. The meat and potatoes cause and effects that are really gonna have a big impact on their client. And that's gonna keep their Ayurveda practice grounded and practical. As an example, I've heard teachers say things like, a swollen tongue means parasites. So they're kind of connecting a swollen tongue X with parasite Z. And they're saying, oh, if you have X, then you have Z. If you have a swollen tongue, then you have parasites. But what they're forgetting is that, actually, that heuristic in Ayurveda comes from the fact that parasites cause malnutrition. And malnutrition causes a swollen tongue, right? So there's this Y between the X and the Z. So if you have a swollen tongue, you might have malabsorption. And if you have malabsorption or if you have malnutrition, you might have parasites, right? But there is a whole host of things that can cause malnutrition. And there are other things that can make your tongue swell up as well. So we can't just draw this conclusion because sometimes it's true, it's always true. It's called a causal fallacy in logic, where the connections are so tenuous. Just because X implies Y and Y implies Z doesn't mean that X implies Z. That's a big mistake that many Ayurveda practitioners make. So I wanna just clarify that for everyone who's listening to this video. Here's a little subtle word bank that just gives a bunch of words here. You can pause the slides on this and read through these words yourself. I'm not gonna read through them all, but you see on here things like disembodied, exotic, boundaryless, inferring things. Yeah, things being very delicate. So there's some good words to check out there. And then in our next video, we'll talk about different functions of subtle.