Health Revolution

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‘Vata-pitta,’ she tells her assistant.

Both of them nod solemnly. A decoding of this follows.

Ayurveda describes the human being as consisting of three basic elements, or doshas in Sanskrit. Vata is the creative and innovative aspect of a person. Pitta is the organised and structured leader aspect. Kapha is the warm and integrating element in all of us. We have all three of these aspects in us, but in different amounts – partly based on our innate constitution but also varying by season, climate and during different phases of life.

If you have stronger vata-pitta, like I do, it means that these elements are more prominent. It also implies that you more easily succumb to illnesses that are linked to these so-called doshas when in a condition of imbalance and stress.

For vata, it’s the stomach that easily goes on strike, or the nerves. For pitta, it’s often the skin or the heart and lungs that are sensitive, and too much pitta stress results in increased aggression and perfectionism. For kapha, it can be weight gain, lethargy or depression.

A simple and quick test of which dosha is dominant is to imagine that you’re sitting in a traffic jam on the way to a meeting, and you’re late. The traffic is moving at a snail’s pace.

If you become anxious and think the client you’re going to meet will cancel your contract, the vatta element is dominant.

If you get angry, think that all the people around you are driving stupidly and are idiots, and you start giving the finger to people in other cars, you are a pitta.

Do you sit there calmly listening to the radio and figure that there’s no point in getting stressed out? You’re the kapha type.

Another categorisation is by basic body type. Vattas are naturally slim and have a hard time building up muscle, pitta is the natural athlete, and kapha is the one who gains weight the most easily and builds muscle mass.

Ayurveda is a life art that describes both health and sickness, my doctor tells me. It was born from the observations made by tens of thousands of Ayurvedic doctors over thousands of years, all over India, which used to consist of a number of independent kingdoms governed by a long series of maharajas and nawabs. All of these hundreds of thousands of observations about how the body and soul of human beings worked were put together into a larger system.

The interesting thing about Ayurveda is that disease is described as something that takes place in several systems simultaneously, when too much total stress gathers. (Again, the idea that stress triggers inflammation.) I wonder if this might be the first system in the world that actually describes how low-degree systemic inflammation affects people’s health. Perhaps a person who is seriously studying human health intuitively gets a feeling for inflammation and anti-inflammation?

That’s why I’m curious about Ayurveda, and during this week in sunny Kerala, my plan is not just to attend a leadership course but also to carry out some private studies and to investigate this ancient healing art more deeply.

When we in the West reach the stage where we begin to treat an illness, Ayurveda considers that it’s already too late. Illness must be met at the gate, early, before it’s had time to develop into a full-blown disease, by actively counteracting the stressors that make disease develop. But there are many differences between the two ways of looking at health.

‘The greatest difference is that we see that people are different. You in the West think that all people should have the same type of treatment,’ my Ayurvedic doctor tells me.

Instead of standard treatments based on the same criteria for everyone, and standard doses, they believe in individual treatment based on the needs that a person manifests through their vata, pitta or kapha type.

Could Ayurveda possibly be describing the very thing that modern medicine is now beginning to investigate: the idea that low-grade inflammation can lie simmering in the body and contribute to making a variety of diseases surface – and that the specific illness is determined by the type of innate vulnerability the individual has? Today medical researchers are beginning to talk about the need for individually tailored treatments, and all doctors know that people respond differently to different medicines. But Ayurveda has always held that point of view.

‘We also believe that food is medicine,’ says the doctor.

‘How do you know that?’

‘From observation,’ she says. ‘If you look at enough people and see the same things over and over again, you can see a pattern.’

In Ayurveda, food is even considered to be the most important medication, more important than everything else, simply because we humans eat so often and take in numerous nutrients through our food. These nutritional elements, my doctor says, have the full capacity to either build, protect and heal the body or create stress and disease.

This way of looking at the connection between food and health in many ways resembles the conclusions that conventional medical science is now beginning to draw. The difference is that most doctors who are educated in academic medicine and practice in Europe and the United States barely talk about this with their patients.

At the end of my first Ayurvedic medical visit, I receive my personal treatment schedule.

In addition, we’ll be attending the course for several hours each day, and we’re given a number of different tasks to do during the week of the course, in groups or individually; we also need time to try to illuminate deeper sides of ourselves, or what our course leaders call our ‘shadow sides’, to find out how they affect our ability to work. All of this in one week.

That’s a lot to do, I think as I move into my simple bungalow, which is situated close to other little bungalows. You might describe them as an Indian kind of little cabin, in the middle of a semi-jungle of vegetation with abundant, large green leaves. For some reason, there are three ominous ravens watching over my patio. There is a plastic table and two aluminium chairs, and along the side, a washing line sways in the wind. The ravens come flapping in with their powerful beaks as soon as I’ve had breakfast the next day. They eat everything, even the paper label of the tea bag. I see a few monkeys climbing around a little farther away.

Here wild herbs grow everywhere you go, because the health resort grows all the plants that are used in treatment and food preparation. The next day I look at the elegant handwritten signs that have been stuck into the ground, to see if anything looks familiar. Abutilon indicum? Some kind of mallow-like herb? Acacia catechu seems to grow into a mighty tree. There’s a thin shrub with stubby little leaves that I don’t recognise at all. I ask a passing doctor in a white coat about the plant.

‘Ah, that’s a guggulu. Very good for haemorrhoids.’

People are sitting in a long line on the veranda of the treatment house, waiting. Women, men, Indians, Europeans, Asians, old and young. Doctors in white coats bustle around a large table on which a bunch of papers with scrawled notes are spread out. It’s time for the female head doctor to assign the therapists who work at the centre to those of us who have just arrived.

There are rows of Indian therapists sitting on the veranda. Almost all of them are women, dressed in yellow treatment clothes, a tunic and trousers – sweet, soft women with gentle smiles. The only therapist who’s standing is a completely different type of person. She stands with her feet widely planted and arms crossed over her chest. She has an eagle nose, a Clint Eastwood gaze – though with brown eyes – and she looks like she would take no prisoners. I hope I don’t get her, I think sulkily, like a schoolchild who doesn’t want to end up with the strict teacher.