How Knowing My Dosha Bodytype Has Helped My Life

About a year ago I started working wpitith an Ayurvedic Practitioner.  As I was training in Ayurveda myself, I wanted the practical experience of seeing what it was like to be treated Ayurvedically.  I also had some mild yet annoying symptoms that I thought were connected with food but was unsure of the exact nature of the problem and how to proceed.  In knowing my Prakriti Dosha or Constitutional Bodytype I was able to understand my symptoms in terms of my unique needs of my body system.  And from that understanding, I learned how to make changes in my diet and my life to not only ease the symptoms but to correct the underlying imbalance.

I admit that I am a person that likes to see the big picture.  I don’t just want something to work, I need to know why it works.  I think this understanding then helps me carry out the self-care action more effectively.  Because if I understand why something works, I am more likely to do it!

By learning what my constitutional nature is, so many pieces of my behavior and habits made sense in a whole new way.  Knowing my nature allowed me to quit fighting some of my inherent tendencies and instead focus on making those tendencies balanced.  Let me give you an example.

There are three Doshas or life-forces – Vata, Pitta, Kapha- and a person can be dominant in one, have two in close balance, or even be balanced among all three though this is less common.  Each life force has certain physical and mental characteristics.  I am what is called in Ayurveda a Pitta-Kapha.  Pitta is dominated by the fire element and has a lot to do with digestion not only of food but also of ideas.  As a result, Pittas tend to be good analyzers and processors as well as goal oriented.  That sums up a large part of my nature and is a part of myself I value.  But that fire energy that allows me to get so much done can also burn me out if unbalanced.  Knowing that this is a strong part of who I am, I can work with my fire energy and at the same time make sure I am allowing cooling down and quiet time so that I don’t over-do and wipe myself out.

My Kapha nature shows up more in my physical body.  In my case, I created an excess of this energy through my eating patterns over a period of some twenty plus years.  Because not only do our bodies have these life-forces but so do foods and even climates and weather.  For me, the beginning of an imbalance began when I became a vegetarian and started to eat more and more carbohydrates, specifically wheat oriented carbohydrates like pastas, crackers, and breads.  I also had a strong sweet tooth and ate baked goods which combined wheat, dairy and sugar all of which are Kaphic in energy. 

Over the course of many years I unconsciously filled my body with an excess of Kapha which led to symptomssuch as mucous in my sinuses and throat, a heaviness in my body which sometimes permeated over into my life, off and on high levels of fatigue, and bloating.   All of these are signs, I later learned, of excess Kapha.  At the time, I attributed the issue to a sensitivity to dairy.  While this was partly correct, I was only seeing a small piece of the picture and thus my attempts to reduce my symptoms by not eating dairy didn’t solve my problem.

Once I learned about the Doshas and identified my bodytype,I was able to see the whole big picture of how my eating habits had led to my symptoms and by reducing the foods which had more Kapha in them for a period of time, I have been able to get rid of the symptoms and rarely have issues unless I eat too much of certain foods.  No longer am I a helpless victim wondering why I have symptoms.  Now I am empowered to do what the causative factors are in my symptoms AND I know how to make better choices for myself!

And the real silver lining in all of this for meis that as I have eaten more for my bodytype, I no longer have food cravings – specifically sugar cravings.  Those foods which I initially struggled to stop eating because I knew they weren’t healthy for me and had in fact led to my current imbalance, I simply no longer desire.  No, this doesn’t mean I never eat wheat, dairy or sugar because I do.  But I am quite content with small amounts infrequently.  And it’s easy to not eat them – there is no effort.  And I like this effortless aspect in life!

Knowing more about myself and my needs helped me make conscious choices at a whole new level.  And those daily choices in alignment with my core, create a healthy, happy me.

Everyday Choices

Every day you make choices.  And it is those choices that decide whether you are contributing to being in a state of health and balance or whether you are adding to your load of imbalance and heading towards a crisis point.  It isn’t a matter of always making the good, healthy choices 100% of the time that is important.  Rather, what leads to the crisis points of pain, disease and unhappiness is making the imbalanced choices habitually without awareness and without proper counter measures to reduce the impact. 

The first step in being healthy in body and mind is to become aware of what effect your choices create and examining why you make those choices.  Because underneath the choice, even if it isn’t one that serves you, there is usually a legitimate need you are trying to meet.  And once you can identify the underlying need, you can begin to explore other ways of meeting it that doesn’t have a negative impact.   To do this, it is ideal to step outside of the critic and judge and simply try to understand from a neutral perspective what you need.

I had a client who recently went through this process.  My client, Jill (named changed), has been trying to lose weight without success.  In looking at her eating patterns, the time that she has the greatest challenge is at night after a long day of work.  Her habit is to snack in the evening, often fluctuating between sweet and salty foods.  She saw the snacking as the problem and was trying to cut out the snacking without success and then feeling like a failure for not being able to be strong enough.  The effect of this habitual choice was that she was continuing to gain weight and this was not desirable for her.

For Jill, the first new awareness was that snacking was the outlet but not the need.  To change the pattern, she first needed to identify what she was trying to give herself with the food.  As we went below the surface with a few simple questions, she realized that she ate as a stress outlet, as a way of letting go from her detail-oriented job, as a way of rewarding herself for getting through another day.  These were all legitimate needs and taking away the outlet to fulfill them without using something else was not working.

Once you understand the real reason you are making certain choices, you can find healthier ways to satisfy your legitimate needs.  This is step two.  For Jill, she began experimenting with other ways to let go and reward herself.  One was to have a regularly weekly date with her spouse, usually on Friday after the long week.  Another was to read which relaxed her and didn’t have a snacking habit associated with it.  The list of possibilities is unlimited and she’s trying out several to see which give her the greatest satisfaction.

Now let’s talk countermeasures.   A countermeasure is an action or series of steps that helps counter the imbalanced action or less-than-desirable side effect from your choice.  Sometimes even knowing a certain action isn’t the healthiest way to meet your need, you still choose it.  And as long as you do this consciously and know how to diffuse the negative impact with countermeasures, occasional choices are okay and won’t lead to crisis points. 

I’ll use an example of mine from just last night.  I don’t drink alcohol because even small amounts make my body feel bad.  Maybe it’s a reaction to sugar.  I’m not sure of the why but I am very clear on what it does!  I also don’t have a need to use alcohol to feel comfortable in social settings or need to do it just because others are.  Therefore, I am perfectly content not drinking.

But every once in awhile I make a choice to have a drink and last night while listening to Irish music with my family at Trinity Pub in Milwaukee I chose to have a Nutty Irishman Coffee (decaf of course since I also don’t drink coffee and with my high energy definitely don’t need the caffeine).  Knowing my body’s reactions to alcohol, I took the proper preventative steps such as eating first and drinking several glasses of water to counter the dehydrating aspects of the drink.  Upon reaching home, I even took some Ayurvedic herbs that help digest sugars and chewed some fennel seeds to settle my stomach.  All of that helped – yet my stomach was still upset, I had a slight headache, and didn’t sleep well.  So this morning I followed up with a nice bowl of immune boosting hot cereal, a clementine, and cup of chamomile green tea. 

I am feeling better.  My countermeasures helped decrease the severity of what I would have felt.  But the drink only gave me a slight amount of satisfaction because I discovered what I really had been craving was the creaminess of coffee with cream and not the sweet of the alcohol.  And the side effects and amount of effort to counteract them weren’t worth the level of satisfaction I got from that choice. 

Armed with my latest knowledge, next time I’ll know to just choose the coffee with whipped cream and skip the alcohol.  This is step four: use each experience whether good or bad to help your future choices.

Whatever choices you make each day, making them with greater awareness and building on the experiences that come out of the choices will help you make choices more consistently that do serve you.  And if you have any stories of you journey with choices, feel free to share.

Enough

As a self-described “compulsive doer”, I reach a point of enoughin my activities or current action that I need to listen to in order to stay in my space of health and harmony.  How do I know what that point of “enough” is?  My bodymind kindly tells me, of course, and here are some of the ways it shows up.

Enough is when…

• I feel grumpy
• My kids become whiny and restless
• I dip into a martyr attitude
• Complications and problems keep popping up
• My eyes burn
• It doesn’t feel fun and joyful
• I’m having to work at it
• I  feel annoyed with my husband
• I notice that I’m yelling at my children
• Some part of my body hurts
• I feel out of balance or off-center
• My ears tingle and buzz
• My forearms are screaming for a break
• I want to eat just to eat and what I eat doesn’t satisfy me

What are your cues that something needs to stop or shift?

Finding my “Best” With Waking Up

I have been exploring my balance with when to wake up for the past year.  This may sound like a no-brainer…wake up when the body says to or when one has to get up.  However, ever since I did my yoga teacher training in which the expectation was set out that not only is it ideal to wake up 1-2 hours before sunrise, but that it’s also ideal to do a specified 2.5 hours of yoga and meditation, I have been exploring my truth in waking.

During my teacher training, I pretty much adhered to the yogic ideal for waking early though I did not hold strictly to the 2.5 hours of the Aquarian yoga set…and felt good starting my day in such a fashion.  However, I also noticed that I was stressed about this waking process, so much so that I would have restless sleep, disturbed dreams, and a conscious level of resistance.  In the past year I have been exploring what this resistance is about.  I let go of the expectation to get up at a specified time and allowed myself to do my yoga whenever it felt right during the day.  I recognized that with my ongoing output of energy for my business expansion, my expectation for yoga was becoming another “to do” item on my list rather than a joyful celebration and self connection.

In releasing myself from the yogic expectation, my stress level around yoga and waking did go down.  However, not only did I find myself doing less consistent yoga, but I also noticed that I have been slipping into a pattern of over-sleeping which has me feeling groggy and lethargic.  It’s almost as if I’ve gone too far in the opposite direction in reaction to the initial expectation..  I feel like a child flaunting my independence -  rebelling with behaviors that don’t really serve me but send a message that I’m in charge.  And I now have a message when my body naturally wakes me around 4:30-5:30 that I don’t want to get up and don’t have to.  I have slipped into resistance as a habit!

To try to bring myself back to a neutral ground, I have decided to do another experiment.  For the next 40 days (I started this morning), I’m going to get up daily at 5 am or whenever my body wakes naturally around that time.  This is to try to re-set my timing back to it’s natural state and play with the ideal yogic time.  Yet, I’m going to honor myself each day in the moment I am by listening to what I want to do once I wake up.  Rather than having a specific expectation of doing X amount of yoga and meditation and exercise, I’m going to listen to my BodyMind and see what I need.  I’m going to practice being the neutral observer and simply notice what’s happening for me. 

No surprise but last night I dreamt about getting up and woke several times.  I finally got up 15 minutes before my alarm was set to go off.  I rode my bike for 20 minutes being mindful that I was sore in strange places from my 3.5 hours of yard work yesterday.  I did a lovely yoga set at half time, also listening to my lower levels of energy.  And now I’m peacefully doing a couple things on the computer before I go to do some cooking to support myself for the day.  I feel good. If I set aside the mental stumbling block I’ve unintentionally created, I welcome the idea of waking early and being able to enjoy these peaceful moments before the kids wake and the busy day starts.

For today, I am trying to hold the AND of these energies…the guideline for waking early for ideal health with honoring my best in each moment as I listen to what I need and am capable of.  For today, I’m liking it!