In this audio clip from a lecture in 2017, I give a 1 minute explanation of how to understand Ayurvedic prakruti.
You may know that with the Ayurvedic body types, there is the concept of your original constitution (prakruti, the constitution from the moment of conception). From that moment, environmental factors, hereditary factors and imbalances from our parents, emotional factors, psychological factors start to build up.
So there’s what happens in the moment of conception – that’s your constitution – and then everything else is either contributing to good health because it’s in line with your constitution, or those factors are dragging your out of balance.
Basically, you can think about it like this: you have an original stamp of your constitution, prakruti, and everything that comes after contributing to your current state of balance or imbalance, or vikruti.
From physiology, you may know a concept called homeostasis. Thousands of years ago, Ayurveda outlined how to use the doshas medically to achieve this internal balance.
In the last audio clip, I gave an example of Pitta acting like a buffer against external heat, and I gave the example of sunbathing. When you sunbathe, instead of your body’s tissues getting immediately burned by the heat of the sun, the resident Pitta dosha in the skin absorbs the heat and increases. The resident Pitta in the liver absorbs the heat and increases.
Then your body has natural mechanisms to release that heat, through the urine, feces, sweat, breath, and menstruation.
Hopefully, meanwhile, you do things to reduce the heat and enhance those routes of elimination of heat, and avoid stopping that elimination. People with alot of pitta built up at the end of the summer might experience loose stools are triggered more easily with spicy, sour or even salty foods. You can enhance that by ingesting lots of apples when they come into season at the end of the summer. All along, you can take cooling things like aloe vera, pomegranate, and (non-spinach) leafy greens.
