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Know Your Prakriti

by Alex Duncan

Namaskar! In my previous article, I introduced the concepts of prakriti (your ayurvedic constitution, or birth nature) and vikriti (disease, or deviation from nature). In this article I would like to develop the idea of prakriti, its role in ayurveda, and how to diagnose your own prakriti at home.

Recall that you are made of and animated by three fundamental, intelligent life-principles, the doshas—vata, pitta and kapha—that work round the clock to keep you alive and all your systems working properly. What you see today in terms of physical development, digestive nature, mental behaviour, everything in fact, is nothing other than a reflection of you doshic activity. The result of this doshic activity is either a state of health or disease; both or which are dynamic, always changing, evolving. Our aim in ayurveda is encourage a healthy doshic function and thus we need understand what is behind this activity and how to control it.

Let’s have a quick revision of the three doshas and their qualities:-

Vata is like the wind, it governs matter in a gaseous state, literally ‘that which moves’. It is cold, dry, light, erratic, quick, moving, hard and rough. In the body, it relates mainly to nervous function.

Pitta is like fire, it governs matter in a state of transformation, it the principle of metabolism, literally, ‘that which burns’. It is hot, a bit oily, light, spreading (like fire spreads as it burns through a house), fairly quick, soft and smooth. In the body, it relates mainly to chemical processes, especially metabolism.

Kapha is like water, it governs matter in a liquid state, it is the principle of cohesion that gives us structure and support, literally ‘that which binds’. It is cold, wet, heavy, sticky, slow, static, soft, smooth and cloudy. In the body, it relates to the majority of flesh and bone, but in particular, the liquid, lubricating aspects.

Prakriti is your unique nature as depicted in terms of the three doshas. The idea is that one or two (or rarely, three) of the doshas will appear to ‘dominate’ in your makeup. Single-type’s are the easiest to understand, since one dosha stands out clearly above the rest. A pure vata type would be mainly ‘airy’, like the wind, with ‘fiery’ and ‘watery’ traits as secondary characteristics.

Think of your prakriti as your way of responding to life! For example, consider arthritis. You begin to accumulate toxins in your joints due to a sedentary lifestyle and poor diet. If you were vata dominant (we say ‘a vata type’) your body would use its drying, reducing, dispersing energy as a protective response, hence you would manifest a dry, degenerative kind of arthritis with sharp, erratic pain as vata tries to ‘blow dry’ the problem away. If you were pitta dominant, your body would respond with fire, trying to burn away the problem, hence resulting in an inflammatory kind of arthritis with burning pain. Kapha would try to protect the joint by accumulating water, producing a kind of arthritis characterised by a dull aching pain and water retention around the joints.

Looking at how you manifest disease can help point out your dominant dosha, i.e. your prakriti. Now let’s consider a psychological example. How do you break down when under stress? Do you get scattered, nervy, dispersed? This is the wind of vata at work. Perhaps you get quickly frustrated and angry, and find yourself critical of life and entering into conflict with others. This is pitta burning high. Or perhaps you bury your problems into your heart, keeping your problems a secret, scared of confronting the problem in case you rock the boat of your comfortable (yet perhaps less than ideal) complacency. This is the heavy watery kapha.

Knowing your prakriti not only shows you how you react to life, it allows you to take responsibility for your health by helping you choose an appropriate diet and lifestyle, among other things.

The best way to determine your prakriti is to start tuning into you! To keep things simple, assume that your mental and physical nature is governed by a single dominant dosha, and that this is reflected in your lifelong (i.e. long-term) characteristics. How does your metabolism work (or not work!), what is your skeletal and muscular development like? What is your mental nature? What is your disease tendency? These sort of questions need to be asked, and the best place to start is by simply observing yourself in terms of doshic attributes. I.e. Vata is dry, cold, light, rough etc. Determining your prakriti can be simply a question of assigning a dominant dosha to a number of observations about yourself, then totalling the result, then bingo! The doshas that scores the most is your prakriti. This is how all DIY prakriti tests work. They offer a list of questions with three possible answers for each one, Vata, Pitta or Kapha. There are plenty of dosha test available, most ayurveda books or good website offer them. My favourite is by Dr Robert Svoboda in his book ‘Prakriti – Your Ayurvedic Constitution’. Dig one out and give it a go.

The key is honest, non-judgemental self observation of your traits. Rather than focussing on many points, let’s take one and let you go away and experiment (on yourself and your nearest and dearest). Consider the structure and form of your tongue, one of the most reliable signs of prakriti. Get a mirror, open your mouth and extend you tongue. Don’t force the tongue to its maximum extension, just extend it to a comfortable stretch. There are two main things to note: the shape of the tongue, and its thickness. Vata tends to make things pointed and narrow, since it is quick and moves out to the tip of things quickly. So a Vata dominant tongue will be narrow and long, typically narrower than the space between the teeth. A Vata tongue will also be relatively thin. For this you need to see several tongues to get a reference point. A Kapha tongue tends to be wide, with a blunt or round tip, and be quite thick. It will splay out wider than the space between the teeth. A Pitta tongue will be between Vata and Kapha, i.e medium shape, about the same width as the space between the teeth, and of medium thickness. Additional points are that a Kapha tongue is often quite inflexible, due to the static quality of Kapha. There are other things about the tongue but most of them refer to a state of disease rather than a sign of prakriti. So, from now until the next instalment, try a new chat up line ‘what’s your dosha? don’t know? let’s see yer tongue then!’

Alex Duncan, Ayurvedic Educator, lives in the South of France where he runs Gardoussel Retreat www.gardoussel.com offering Ayurvedic consultations and various Ayurveda & yoga workshops and retreats. Contact Alex on (France): +33 (0) 4 66 60 16 78.