Live As Nature Made You

The secret to balancing the whole mind-body system is to make your doshas happy. To respect your body type you have to trust that its needs are good for you. No one can be happy or healthy in an unbalanced state, because it is just not natural.

Like the doshas, your prakruti is double edged. You can see yourself as trapped by it, or you can learn from it and benefit from what your system is trying to tell you. A pitta nature may predispose you to hostility and a Vata nature to irritable bowels, but nothing forces you to embrace the stressful lifestyle that fans Pitta to a flame, or drives Vata to exhaustion, bringing out such problems. Living with your doshas is a perfect example of how to find freedom within your nature’s limits.

Because you were born with it, your body type does not change. On the other hand, the doshas are constantly in a flux. Every time your doshas shift with actions and thoughts. A person whose heart is pounding is having a strong Vata reaction, no matter what his basic nature is. Whatever your prakruti happens to be, try to live all three doshas fully. To be the best that can be derived from each of the doshas – that is what it means to be a complete person.

The positive psychological traits of each dosha include the following:

Vata: Imaginative, sensitive, spontaneous, resilient, exhilarated
Pitta: Intellectual, confident, enterprising, joyous
Kapha: Calm, sympathetic, courageous, forgiving, loving.

Whenever you meet someone who lives up to all of these qualities, naturally you are impressed. Such a person has accepted the greatest gift of nature – perfect balance. Rare as it is, perfect balance is not abnormal; it is possible for everyone to achieve. Everybody type contains a wide range of possibilities. Unfortunately we all have a tendency to compare ourselves to a norm, which generates feelings of inadequacy when we cannot live up to the standards we feel everyone must meet.