The Elements and Doshas

So let's talk about some of the basic building blocks of Ayurveda, of the whole Ayurveda world view. It's helpful in order to understand these building blocks in a way that you can relate to them with a lot of love and compassion by a beautiful, little mythological story that I'd like to tell for you. And I've take a little liberty with this. There are many versions of this original creation story. But the basic idea is that once upon a time, long, long ago there was this beautiful Shiva meditating on top of his, in his mountain cave.

And you can just imagine him there with these broad shoulders and his long, luscious hair flowing down and he is absorbed in pure, unadulterated, total bliss and consciousness, complete awareness, complete knowingness, total bliss, total connectivity and he's in that. So you can imagine that if you were in that state, you would be pretty content. The story goes that he is in this space where he's connected to all but there's just something that's missing. And his heart starts to flutter, a longing and a desire and from this longing he senses, I want to know what it feels like to be separate so that I can know what it feels like to look out and see something different than me and know love, really. And so from this initial longing, some say the heart, some say the third eye, this pulse, this desire, this longing to be connected to something that didn't feel like him burst forth like a blaze, like a dance out of his heart, this passion inside burst forth.

This beautiful goddess, we call her Shakti. She has many names. This force field of his longing burst forth this beautiful goddess and in front of him she just begins to dance, go wild, undulate and he is in the height of ecstatic passion and joy watching this beautiful woman pulse around him in all her glory. So, Shakti really is the essence of everything in the known world. She is master, mata, mother.

This mother force comes out of this divine, masculine force and she's created and she is everything. She is me, she is you, she is in all things. She is the individual entity made manifest out of this great big idea, this innate longing to love and be loved, to see and be witnessed and seen. She forms everything from this pulsation and from this pulsation burst forth these building blocks of Shakti's dance. This wildness that continuously never ceases to amaze Shiva and enrapture him and actually keep him drawn to her and entangled in her.

So the building blocks of this great love story are what we call in the Ayurveda the five principle elements of all life. They are both metaphorical and very real and material. The building blocks that Shakti uses in her expression are earth, water, fire, air, and space or ether. With these five things, she can mold them and use them in a way that can create all the differentiations of all things that exist. I want you to imagine from the most supple to the most dense, the mountain to something as ephemeral and fleeting as a thought.

All of those are within her creative building block bubble. So she has her materials. And she combines them and you can imagine that very real like earth, like mud and earth and water tend to mix really well together and when they mix together they form this substance that we call Kapha but we also call Ojas and I'll get to the difference between those two in a moment. When earth and water mix, they make this force of stability. We use mud and cement and all these things to build the structures of our buildings.

They create container around that is sturdy and strong. So you can think of Kapha as the principle of building blocks, strength, stability, solidity. Then you have fire and fire's interesting because it actually combines with a little bit of water and that may seem a little bit counter-intuitive but if you look at a candle flame you can see that candle will have a little bit of oiliness to it in order for the wick to light. The fire principle mixes it just a little bit of that oily, unctuous quality of water and you get what we call Pitta which is this principle of heat and change and transformation and transmutation. This principle of taking one thing and being able to convert it into something else like a metamorphosis like a metabolism force.

Lastly, you have air and space and they come together in this interesting way. You can think about the room that we're in right now has a certain amount of spaciousness, in fact, it's mostly that and that space is what allows wind to move through it. If we didn't have that it would be odd to have wind. This principle, space meeting air, we call Vata. And continuing with this metaphor of a room, when a wind or air moves through space we know that it is there because it is mobile.

The very nature of wind is mobility. It would be very strange to have wind without movement, in fact, it's impossible. We know that we're being touched by wind because it has moved through. This third round is Vata which is the principle of movement and dynamism and expansion. When these things are operating you can even just think about it in your own body.

When the principles of stability and metabolism and transformation and change are moving as they need to be for health and wellness in your body, we actually don't call them Hatha, Pitta, and Vatta which are the three famous Ayurveda doshas. We don't call them that, we call them something else. We call Hatha, Ojas. We call Pitta, Tejas. And we call Vata, Prana.

So I'll explain that. When things are moving as they need to move through your digestive system, through your nervous system, through your lymph, through your blood, through your thinking mind. When that moving as it needs to be moving this is just the flow of life force intelligently moving through you and that's called Prana, life force. And you feel great, you feel like you can adapt and move and change with your life. You're going to the bathroom every morning, that feels amazing, you're not like getting gunked down into one thought and fixating.

Thoughts calm, they go, they digest, you can let things go, you forgive people, you're not holding a grudge, you're in Prana. Prana is always moving you and evolving you. When that's not happening the way it needs to happen, Prana is like she rears her ugly heads. With Vata we can think of the evil stepsister of Prana but they're the same person. She begins to emerge and then you get the tell-tale signs of Vata imbalance which are air imbalances that dry us, that degenerate, is really the word, that degenerate us, that bring us in to the airy emotions of fear and anxiety and ungroundedness.

We have this in our language, we say, "oh, he's spacey," or "she's an airhead," these are all ways of expressing someone that's not rooted on earth. With Pitta, this principle of transformation was just happening the way it needs to happen. I love this, Tejas is the principle of glowing. You are a shining being. Everything is metabolizing inside of you the way it needs to metabolize but in a spiritual realm, it is so beautiful.

You are metabolizing and digesting your ego, your karmic tendencies. This is why you can meet a being in their 70s or 80s who has just continually surrendered their life. They've become a move radiant being and they have this gleam in their eye that makes you want to be around them. This Tejas, as my teacher says, the light and splendor of personality that draws and melts all hearts, it is the nature of charisma at its highest sense. And then you unfortunately see some elderly people that haven't done the work and they become more entrenched in their ideas and we can see them and they're kind of crotchety and angry and that is that light did not develop, unfortunately, over time and we would call this now an imbalance of Pitta.

Intensity, inflammation, anger, heat, criticism, all of these are examples of heat in the body. Looser stools, all these things are examples of that radiance that longs to melt her heart for the divine, that radiance got diverted and redirected in a way where she didn't melt. Fire is that I am willing to melt myself into the burning that life will undoubtedly give me. I am willing to be melted by life's hardship and difficulty rather than hardening up and being angry about my lot. And then the last realm is this beautiful realm of Ojas which is again that other side of Kapha.

Ojas is really what we all need the most. It's, "I feel safe, I feel contained, "I feel health in the physical body." This is my psycho and physiological immunity. I feel like I have the resiliency, is really the word for Ojas. I have the juice and the sap and the resiliency to be able to handle what life brings to me. Another way of thinking about Ojas is love.

This is the chemicals that are, literally, juiced out of us when we feel loved, when we feel seen, when we feel in love, whether it be a sexual love or a friendship. Actually now science is showing that when people get together and talk about their feelings, we get these same neurochemicals that make us feel contained and safe. Ojas really is again that wet-nurse of life and if you're a yogi, I can speak from personal experience, vitally important for your spiritual practice because yoga, and psychotherapy and any form of art and science that brings you in direct confrontation or direct awareness of your path's patterns it's hard. It's hard to do yoga, it's hard to look at your life. Nobody wants to do that.

It would be much easier to just eat donuts and lay on the couch but when you commit to becoming a yogi in any spiritual tradition, whether it be yoga or any mystical tradition, you're saying, "I'm going to place my ego "in the fire of this practice." So Mama, you better have a lot of resiliency. You better have a lot of self-love. You better have a great community around you that loves you. You better be eating the foods that are going to keep your body healthy. All of these nature, spending time in nature builds the Ojas.

We want to keep these things otherwise it can burn out. Or if we have an unhealthy relationship with the principle of stability which is Kapha we can add too much of it in a false way. I'll give an example of that. Eating sweet potatoes and farm-fresh veggies and yummy foods and hanging out with people that love you and being in nature and laying around like a fat tigress on your couch after a long day's work, all of these build Ojas. But when you're really unstable, maybe, one day, you go home and you eat, I've done this many, many, still, do sometimes, many times, I'll go home and I'll want to eat a bag of potato chips.

So what the soul is longing for is containment but eating potato chips and watching, I don't know, Netflix is going to give you this sense of being heavy and grounded but it's like this false lover. It's really a great way of describing it, it's a false lover. And so Ojas is the real lover that loves you and really wants you to feel the nuturance of what mother nature offers to us. I hope you enjoyed this little short intro into the doshas and into the elements. and I hope it will spark something in you that, at least, brings your curiosity into Ayurveda.

Thank you.