By Guest Blogger Aekta Bandodker
Please read A Series, Part One: Background. My Dosha Journey–A Personal Perspective on Ayurveda prior to How our Doshas Develop. It will give you the proper background for understanding doshas in the context of my personal history.
So what exactly does any of this have to do with Ayurveda and the doshas? If you haven’t noticed, I “caught” the patterns associated with a Vata dosha imbalance at a very young age. Too young. But that’s life. These patterns would be anxiety, being really skinny, being easily confused as well as the gastrointestinal issues I was already developing. In my previous post, I mentioned never being officially diagnosed as someone on the autism spectrum. I suspect that if I were to get diagnosed, the Vata dosha symptoms I struggled with would very easily overlap with many of the autism spectrum-related symptoms that a professional from a clinical, Western approach to health might take.
We don’t choose when the imbalances begin to affect our being. We don’t choose when they set us off on a particular life trajectory that most of us later unravel and undo by replacing them with a healthier pattern. This trajectory then reaches its end to basically confront its own death when the maladaptive patterns become so apparent that we’re forced to change them. Only then do we realize that we never wanted those patterns in the first place!
It’s not like I chose, as a little baby, to have the parents I had (coming with their own level of emotional intelligence that was not good enough for my easily shaken temperament), or the environment or culture or anything else I had in those early years until now. The little choices I made when I did have the agency to make them as I got older were the exception, not my norm. Most of the time I was walking around doing things under the heavy influence of my rather overbearing & critical parents, and nowhere did this show up more than it did in our kitchen and dining table. Which, of course, is the place we are supposed to eat and digest in peace for our bodies to actually retain and better utilize what we’re eating.
It seems that my body reacted to the stress by tensing up while eating my daily meals–three times a day, seven days a week–more than anyone should have to tense up. It’s like my body decided, “Hmm, where we eat is not a safe space. Let’s hurry up and try to finish this as soon as possible and go back to our room to enjoy an activity with our headphones.”
I was already a slow eater, which did not work in my favor in this scenario. To add to the unnecessary fussing about my food or eating habits, my parents repeatedly made fun of my slow eating and told me I didn’t know how to take jokes. They did not understand what they considered as “innocent fun” was really shaping my ideas and attitude towards food and how one “should” show up and eat at the table. This was down to very tiny details that took away the pleasure of eating a meal. This kept me on high-alert & trying to have “perfect eating etiquette” at the dinner table so that I could get the approval I longed for: to be seen as “good,” or considered worthy of praise. This was the only way my parents knew how to verbally express love.
Now, having said that I had no control over who my parents were, my heritage or the timeline of my exhaustion, there are some Gene Keys and Human Design enthusiasts and practitioners, and even some people in the yoga community who are steeped into the philosophies of re-incarnation, past lives, and karma we carry from one life to another. They might argue that I did choose everything that’s happened, is happening, or is about to happen in this life: that my “soul” chose to have these issues so I could live some kind of epic life and learn to resolve them. Basically so that my life wouldn’t be boring. Although that might sound somewhat reassuring through the perspective of grand meaning–making sense of this chaotic and unpredictable thing we call life–it’s not the purpose of this series.
Honestly, I’d like to just take you through the key events and circumstances in my life that shaped the development of my dominant Ayurvedic imbalance, or my dosha. If you recall, from the previous post in the series, a dosha is essentially an energy in the body which governs and regulates physical, mental and emotional characteristics.
Our doshas develop from the jumble of messages our subconscious minds internalize, misunderstand, or take too seriously. Our doshas are not who “we’re meant to be,” or “our true personality” or really anything along the lines of wearing it like some badge of honor. Our doshas do come with their strengths, but their purpose is to show us where we need to come back to balance. Or rather, what parts of us, what sets of qualities are out of balance and need to be kept in check so that we don’t lose ourselves or come to that rock-bottom moment I described in the beginning of the series.
Rock bottom is often the only way most of us will even take Ayurveda and its teachings, or any other nuggets of ancient wisdom seriously. At least this was my experience. And nuggets? Yes, we are going to be talking about food with more depth later.
Some terms quickly defined for those who might be new to Ayurveda:
- Prakruti- Our natural disposition, the one we’re born with and embody when we’re in our healthiest mental, emotional, & physical state.
- Vikruti– Our doshic state, the one we develop over the course of our lives as a result of the combination of messages we internalize from our environment. Our Vikruti can consist of more than one dosha, though most people have a dominant one.
- Vata– The qualities of air & space/ether that are associated with movement through all beings, creativity, flexibility, and healthy internal rhythms at its best and fear and anxiety when in excess.
- Pitta– The qualities of fire and water associated with passion, determination, strength, intelligence, and a healthy metabolism of energy at its best and hatred, jealousy, and anger at its worst.
- Kapha– The qualities of water and earth associated with stability, grounded-ness, compassion, kindness, patience, forgiveness, lubrication, gentleness, endurance and immunity at its best and depression, envy or extreme attachment at its worst.
For example, someone can have dominantly Vata dosha if they’re prone to anxiety (like I was). They can appear thin in their appearance, prone to dry skin, generally aloof or “airy,” speak fast or easily jump from one topic to another. These, and other qualities, are associated with the elements of air and wind.
The same person with a Vata-dominant dosha can also have a secondary dosha of Pitta or Kapha. This means that they’re also heavily influenced by the elemental qualities associated with their secondary dosha, but not to the same detriment as their primary, or dominant dosha.
In my case, I had a secondary Pitta-dosha, which meant that I was not only pretty scattered, but also very driven to succeed in whatever I was doing. It meant that I wanted to know all the steps involved in getting from point A to point B, opting for effectiveness and speed whenever it was possible to do so. My most ambitious goals also resulted from the Pitta fire in me, so having a secondary dosha of Pitta was not necessarily an entirely negative thing, it just hurt me when the fire burned too strongly without being balanced by the softer qualities associated with Kapha.
The main point is to understand how living through the combination of one or two doshas in overdrive without incorporating qualities of the third, can cause someone’s health to decline because something essential is missing or depleted.
At our healthiest state, we embody the qualities of all three doshas without any one or two of them becoming dominant over the others. There’s also a way of becoming depleted or out-of-whack with all three, rather than just one or two doshas.
Having all three in our daily disposition doesn’t necessarily mean that we are healthy within their composition; it simply means that we cycle through the potential imbalances found in all three more frequently than a truly balanced person might. Anything in excess or deprivation leads our bodies and minds to feel off and it takes conscious awareness and effort from our part to either not let this happen, or take actions to reverse whatever the imbalance might be.
This is essentially what the science of Ayurveda helps us do. It helps us identify and accept where we are in excess or deprivation of essential life-forces through the metaphors of the 5 elements (fire, air, earth, water, space/ether). It then helps us figure out what steps we can take to return to center, or Prakruti.
In other disciplines, this could be seen as connecting with our inner child or “coming home to ourselves.” There are many ways to talk about the subtle and transformative gifts that living an Ayurvedic lifestyle can bring us, and they all come down to returning to the purity of our beings before conditioning did what it did with us. How we return to this pure space and how we embody it will look slightly different for each person, since we are all unique individuals, even if we share really similar imbalances or Vikruti with other people we might know.
Ultimately, the journey is one we take alone with ourselves, perhaps with the support and guidance of others who are taking their own journeys. We must remain true to the nuances of our own path back to good health.
My subconscious mind had internalized many harmful messages along the lines of, “You’re too much. Your emotions are too much. Your honesty is too much. Your presence is a nuisance. You’re a burden because of your high levels of sensitivity to our ‘normal’ ways. You should change and be like us, and make sure you get it right!” etc… and etc…
How were all of these messages being interpreted by my developing brain, and what was my body doing as a way of coping with it?
Shrink. Yes, literally shrink. Become invisible. Become smaller. Be seen, not heard. And be seen like the ideal image of fitness-skinny, but not too skinny. “You need to eat more,” they would tell me. “Behave well.” “Please us.” This would allow me to receive love or be given any ounce of at least pseudo-loving attention, this “loving” attention being disguised in the form of praises and compliments about my behavior and appearance. This then led me to people-please in order to fill my need for loving attention.
It was never enough though. There was always something to improve, I gathered, whether that was due to a general attitude of self-improvement in the home, or just a lack of conversation that did not have anything to do with working more, doing what was “next on the list,” or correcting something. This correction could be changing a person’s behavior or just a task at home that needed more attention than simply being in each other’s company by spending quality time together.
All of this led me to become pretty isolated even in my own family, with the exception of spending time with my only brother, who at four years younger than me, became a life-saver in his own way. I’m not sure if I can imagine my childhood without my brother–us on each other’s sides, attending to each other’s emotional needs that we lacked receiving from our parents. I’m not blaming my parents or trying to play the victim here; they did the best they could with their own unhealed and traumatized histories, but I am stating my honest feedback of how I experienced their parenting.
Perhaps my body coped with this family dynamic by shrinking and my mental and emotional states also formed to ensure I remained small. This isolation, increased disconnection and feelings of alienation from my own body and its natural cues led me to become more and more intellectual about things. I learned how to understand the complex world of people. I became highly competent at reading and understanding the slightest nuances of people’s behaviors so that I could know what the “right” or “most appropriate” thing was to do or to say (or to not do or say) in almost any given situation. I kept learning to seek perfection in it all.
Yes, perfection. No mistakes allowed; they were too expensive and felt too life-threatening most of the time. My dad’s anger, and my mom’s snappy criticism just taught me to avoid conflict and no, I did not just become a sheep and give up my individuality or stop expressing opinions, especially for the ones that felt very dear to my sense of self at my core. But I learned to be highly selective of when I shared my views, preferences, or opinions and even masked my true thoughts and feelings about things if it seemed like they might cause too much of a disturbance to the status quo.
Often, I would blend in so well, I would feel exhausted later and forget who I was from the un-natural chameleon behavior that everyone else saw as “an outstanding child”, “so polite and well-mannered”, “so quiet, causing no fuss”, or “such a good listener, so obedient”. “We wish we all had a child like your daughter (and son). You must be great parents.”
It was all a facade. The message in translation was, “Don’t show your true self or be your true self except in private, or maybe with a few close people who you can trust to show your natural, unfiltered, unmasked self to.”
All of these frickin’ rules about how to live amongst other human beings!
And I was surrounded by them, so I did my best to fit in and learn “the way,” which I later discovered was not really “the way,” or the true way, but just “the way to survive and be accepted”. Shrinking might help me survive, thought my subconscious brain as it sent fast messages to my body about threats in my environment.
The Vata dosha or my Vikruti developed, and my natural, more Kapha Prakruti vanished rather quickly, only resurfacing as major depressive episodes when the imbalances of Vata, Pitta and Kapha went too far.
For more information on Ayurveda, here is a great place to start. For more information on Human Design, look no further than here. The final installment, The Happy Middle, will be released next week. The first installment, Background, can be read here.
Aekta Bandodker is a lover of knowledge and an artist through and through. She believes in the healing power of self-expression and story-telling and the liberation that it provides in transforming trauma. She loves to help people change their inner narratives so that they can take back ownership of their lives. Her favorite activities include spending time with close friends and family, listening to music, learning through audiobooks and podcasts, writing or creating art, and spending time in nature. Check out her website here!
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