Hey Baby, What's Your Dosha?

This weekend we learned about Ayurveda. It's a little frustrating, as it's a system that seems to dictate what you eat, when you sleep, and basically everything else about how you live, and yet every source is different. My body type (pitta, fire) isn't supposed to eat bananas, for instance- and then I see a recipe for pitta breakfast that's full of bananas (but it's okay because there's a spice in it that neutralizes the properties that disagree with pitta).

I know that this system isn't perfect- no system is. But I like this one, and I'll make an attempt to explain why.

There are three body types: vata (or wind), pitta, and kapha.

I'm a pitta. Pittas are a fire dosha (type), so if they eat too much spicy food they get heartburn (that's me). They often have red hair and spots on the skin. They have a temper that can flare up with almost no warning (yup). They have to be careful of the sun (I often feel like I look like Michael Jackson when I go outside). They are medium build and tend to maintain weight pretty easily. My secondary dosha is kapha (water/earth), and kaphas can be sweet if they're in balance, but if they're out of balance, they have a tendency to get sedentary. Obviously thousands-of-years-old documents didn't specify laying on the couch watching Tough Love and eating a carton of ice cream as a kapha behavior, but I feel that they would have if it'd been an option.

So in this system, all the negative things that I feel live I've dealt with since we got married (the temper) and my whole life (my tendency to not want to get off the couch) can be dealt with through diet, aromas, and colors. If I feel lazy, I eat a slice of lemon. If I'm about to blow my stack, I stick to yogurt. The thing that I like about it is that you just accept these things... and then deal with them. Rather than being embarrassed and not talking about my championship couch-sitting, I say in front of all the other teacher trainees "my kapha is out of balance. I don't want to do anything lately." And then I work on it, but I feel like the work comes as much from the inside as the outside food I'm eating.

There's also been this cool change, which is basically miraculous if you know how I've been about my body image my whole life: the other day I was walking back home from grocery shopping, and I saw this really skinny girl walking opposite me. My first reaction is to start beating myself up almost instantly... "why aren't YOU that skinny? Why can't YOU stop eating? Why don't YOU go to the gym twice a day?" ... which usually only results in me feeling terrible and going home and eating more ice cream (helloooo kapha). This time, I thought "I'm a pitta kapha, and that's how I'm supposed to be." And it was like this huge internal smile. I'll never be stick-skinny like a vata type, and that's okay. I can watch my weight without obsessing, I can be healthy without beating myself up for not weighing 115. It's like all of this suddenly makes sense to me, when it never has before. And it's also like I have this huge secret when I'm walking around, that I know that I'm a pitta, and that means that I'm a little more accepting of myself than I was before.