Where Illness Comes From

Ayurveda asks a question a little different from the one Western medicine usually asks. Where we often ask, what are you suffering from, Ayurveda asks instead, what have you failed to digest? Because we can fail to digest a food, but also an emotion or an experience.

At its philosophical root, this idea comes from Samkhya philosophy: human beings are said to have forgotten who they truly are. But once this forgetting is woven into humanity, people can fall ill, according to Ayurveda, because of an imbalance between their three doshas and their Prakriti, their original nature. This combination of the three doshas, once thrown off balance, has a name: Vikriti.

Digestion, according to Ayurveda, is the foundation of all health. But when it is disturbed, it is also the origin of all illness. This means that if you are unwell, you need to look at how digestion is malfunctioning, even if this seems invisible at first glance. Ayurveda distinguishes thirteen kinds of metabolism. Beyond the main digestion, Agni, which digests our food, there are other metabolic functions, and therefore other possible dysfunctions, which can create illness.

When Agni fails to transform everything, a residue remains: Ayurveda calls it Ama, literally "the undigested." It is a sticky, heavy substance that gradually builds up in the tissues, clogs the body's channels, and clouds the mind in the same way it clogs the body. Almost every illness, according to Ayurveda, carries the trace of Ama somewhere.

If the three doshas are disturbed, for example by outside factors like an extreme climate or repeated unfavorable circumstances, this can also disturb Agni. Agni and the three doshas are interdependent: whenever one is out of balance, it is always, in some way, the cause of the other's disturbance. Even so, digestion remains, for Ayurveda, the essential key to health.

Illness, in this tradition, is almost never a sudden event: it is a path, a slow progression that the ancient texts describe in six stages. An imbalance begins quietly, accumulates, spreads, settles somewhere in the body, before finally becoming visible as a symptom. What modern medicine often notices late, Ayurveda invites us to feel much earlier, in faint signals.

What small signals should make us pay attention? A regularly recurring disturbance is a sign of imbalance among the three doshas. It can show up, for example, as a small, recurring digestive trouble, a coated tongue, chronic low energy, sleep that no longer restores us. Sometimes life brings things back into balance on its own without our fully understanding why: perhaps it was only a seasonal issue, an extremely hot summer that disturbed Pitta during a stressful period, and the following summer, cooler, with the work stress having eased, the body finds its balance again by itself.

But if the small imbalance persists, the body can no longer manage it alone, on its own, without our understanding it. Then it is time to observe and understand: this is the work of the Ayurvedic doctor or therapist, who seeks to remove the causes of the imbalance, to strengthen the digestive fire, and to put in place the measures that reinforce the stability of the three doshas. This is exactly what the next article goes on to develop.