The Tridoshic Theory

By Robin Voss, AP

What are the five elements of the doshas? 

The word dosha comes from the Sanskrit root dush, which is equivalent to the English word ‘dys’, as in dysfunction. Besides looking at dosha as an error, which it can create, Ayurveda looks at dosha first and foremost as a barrier between the microcosm and the macrocosm, governing any permutation and combination of the five great elements; ether, air, fire, water and earth. The three doshas, which are the following, vāta, pitta and kapha, are the body’s protective mechanism and are present everywhere in the body. The doshas protect our wellbeing and warn us with premonitory signs before causing actual disease. The combination of ether and air form vāta, fire and water form pitta and water and earth form kapha. In Ayurveda, the doshas are explained into five subtypes depending on their function and location. 

How to explain the doshas?

The three doshas, vāta, pitta and kapha, are biological organizers that manage our psychophysiological functioning and are thus permitting embodied life. They are invisible forces that can be shown in the body only by inference, but without them, no one can exist on this planet. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, elaborated on a similar concept called ‘humors’, as the waste products stemming from the five great elements and called them wind, bile and phlegm, highlighting their physical characteristics that indeed serve as containers of their non-physical essence. 

We are all born with a certain genetic blueprint of the ratio of the three doshas, mainly influenced by our parental and ancestral genetic information at the moment of conception. Well-being is a state of perfect balance between vata, pitta and kapha corresponding to that genetic code, which in Ayurveda is called prakruti. Usually one or two doshas are predominant at the time of fertilization and a unique individual is constituted. The doshas control and balance one another by their opposite qualities. Throughout the gestational period and throughout life our doshas are constantly bombarded by influences such as the cycles of time in the day and of the seasons, by age, the stages of digestion, the place we live in, by lifestyle and diet, relationships, emotions, and even changes of the luminaries; the planets and astral bodies have an effect on them. So when life happens, there is the inevitable permutation of prakruti, which is called vikruti – the currently altered state of the dosas that causes fluctuations in our health. 

Balancing the doshas

When the doshas are balanced, we have proper functioning bodily processes, powerful digestion and clear comprehension, well formed tissues and elimination, pleased and pure senses and a joyful mind that is well contained in awareness. There is clarity, happiness, joy, peace and love. When there is improper digestion, the body’s intelligence becomes affected and the three doshas are more likely to go out of balance by their excessive or decreased quality or quantity. When a dosa is decreased below the level represented in a person’s prakruti, it creates a serious, even life threatening situation requiring immediate attention. When the doshas increase, they start moving from their homesites within the gastrointestinal tract into circulation moving throughout the body affecting the functioning of bodily systems to eventually alter the structure of certain tissue, disturbing their equilibrium and giving rise to disease by lodging in a ‘weak space’. It is best to treat the dosas as soon as premonitory signs are showing up. Therefore we have to learn about our individual praktuti/vikruti paradigm in order to read ‘our own book’, so we can properly understand what is good for us.

The instinct of plants and animals keeps them in sync with the seasons and other cycles of time, but we humans, having evolved into more conscious sentience, must create these rhythms if we want to enhance our wellbeing. Seasonal cleansing is one of the tools we have to come into alignment with the rhythm of the cosmos and support the elimination of the dosas when they naturally and generally accumulate at times throughout the year within all breathing beings.