While yoga continues to gain popularity in the mainstream culture, Ayurveda, its “sister science” is often less well known, although it can be equally transformative and valuable. In this blog, we’ll be offering an intro to Ayurveda and we’ll explore some of the ways it can work with yoga practice for optimum health and wellbeing.

Ayurveda: history and origins

Ayurveda is an ancient medical system that comes from India. The word is blend of 2 sanskrit words/concepts: ayur (life), and veda (knowledge). It is the science or knowledge of life. If you have some yoga philosophy background, you might recognize the word veda as it also refers to the most ancient texts of yoga. No matter what style or lineage of yoga you practice, it is rooted in the Vedas.

As yoga’s complimentary science, ayurveda offers a great compliment to traditional yoga philosophy and practice. Where yoga is concerned with meditation, awakening, and consciousness, ayurveda is concerned with things like daily rhythms, diet, sleep habits, and digestive health. It revolves around an ancient intuitive approach to digestion, health and the body that’s based on the elements of nature and their dynamic balance.

elements and doshas

The ancients divided up the known material world into 5 elements: earth, water, fire, air, and space/ether. They then took those 5 elements and grouped them into 3 doshas (energies that circulate in the body). The doshas are also known as “that which tends to go out of balance”. The 3 doshas and their corresponding elements are:

Kapha-earth and water
Pitta- fire and water
Vata- air and ether

There are many resources that dive deeper into the various qualities and aspects of the doshas, but we’ll keep it simple here. For example, when you think of Earth, consider what qualities or words come to mind. Maybe words like stable, static or dense. Heavy, damp, or solid? How about Air? Words like light, subtle, and mobile might come to mind, among others. This the basic underpinning of Ayurvedic doctrine: that each element has a set of qualities that encompass their essence, and that we are a combination of those qualities working in dynamic balance.

ayurveda applied

Ayurveda operates on the basic principle that ALL people, materials, foods, and activities have their dominant dosha qualities. In the case of people, we each have our own unique blend of all 3 doshas that make up our baseline constitution. Based on our dietary habits and daily rhythms, we can support this baseline constitution towards its best expression of health, or we might contribute to an imbalance of the doshas, which will create different physical and mental symptoms over time.

To work towards health, our goal is to reestablish and maintain our own innate constitutional balance of the doshas. This often means recognizing which qualities are out of balance, and promoting opposing qualities to help rebalance what is needed.

Let’s look at an example to clarify this a bit further. Imagine you are feeling cold and it’s Winter. You might enjoy a hot cup of tea to warm you up. When feeling overheated and cranky in summer, would you eat a hot bowl of spicy soup, or might you prefer a fruit smoothie? To put it simply “like increases like, and opposites balance”. We balance excess cold with warmth, and excess heat with cool. We can apply this principle to any constitutional imbalance through dietary choices as well as exercise, rest, and other daily practices.

yoga and ayurveda

Because yoga is an embodied practice, and ayurveda works to balance and support overall body health, the two pair very well together and support each other. Yoga practitioners may find that despite their dedicated practice, they continue to suffer from ongoing physical discomforts. If these are more rooted in diet or other daily habits, applying ayurvedic principles may be more effective than the most diligent asana practice. By balancing our doshas, we establish a more easy flow of energy and digestion and we create the conditions for deeper meditation, more equanimity, or more access to states of compassion and kindness.

The doshas are also affected by the seasons and weather, which brings us to the importance and value of cyclical living. What is good for us in Summer is not necessarily good in Winter, and visa versa. These principles can be applied to yoga as well, by prioritizing certain asanas or practices during different seasons to help balance the doshas. In Summer, we may choose practices to support cooling to balance excess Pitta (fire). In Winter, we may practice more stillness, and also prioritize our warmth to help balance the cold and mobile qualities of excess Vata (air). By blending yoga and ayurvedic principles, we can more effectively access states of ease, joy, and contentment as we move through everyday life.

Hopefully this has provided enough of an introduction to spark your curiosity into this vast and ancient tradition. At Yoga Luna, we organize our events and schedule around the doshas’ seasonal and daily rhythms, so you can always come to a class knowing you are dropping into cyclical living and giving yourself the gift of nurturing balance at every level of being.

Namaste.