Prakriti, Our Deep Nature

There is a question we rarely ask: who am I, in my body, before anything life has asked me to become? What is the difference between Prakriti, our deep nature, and our state in the moment?

Prakriti shapes how our body functions, but also, to a large extent, how our mind functions. It carries our strengths, our talents, our own way of operating. When we are aligned with it, life flows well: we live out our nature, it brings us joy, it brings us to our strengths, and it lets us express ourselves authentically.

Today, many unfavorable factors easily throw us off balance: stress, environmental toxins, food that has lost its quality. Our physical strength suffers, we feel less vital, less comfortable in our own skin, and this affects us psychologically too. We see it clearly with stress: Vata and Pitta rise, the nervous system becomes overwhelmed and tired, and excess acidity builds up in the body as Pitta increases. This does not only leave us physically uncomfortable; it also brings, psychologically, more fear on the Vata side, and more impatience, frustration, even anger on the Pitta side.

Discovering your own constitution helps you understand your individuality, your unique energy, and accept it rather than constantly comparing yourself to others and wanting to be different. You come to understand more clearly that nature carries within it this intelligence of expressing itself through the energies that surround us, and this connects us to a kind of unity we learn to appreciate more, to see as a miracle of nature. You let go more easily of the temptation to become someone else, even when that is what your surroundings or society seem to expect.

How do you use your Prakriti as a resource, without locking yourself into a label, without telling yourself "that's just how I am, full stop"? It helps to keep in mind that the different combinations of Prakriti described by Ayurveda remain a general framework, passed down by Ayurvedic masters and physicians. You can lean on it to understand yourself, but you also need to observe yourself, observe nature, and know that every combination is unique. Prakriti describes broad general patterns; individual expression, meanwhile, is infinitely more detailed and different from one person to the next. Everyone expresses their own combination of the three doshas in their own way: it is a foundation to build on, not a problem to fix.