Discover your Dosha, Heal your Body-Mind
Lots can be learned from understanding our constitutional element. It can help us realize what creates imbalances in our body-mind-soul, how we can prevent it and how we can bring about equilibrium. In Western medicine, we do not look at how emotional-energetic imbalances impact our psychosomatic health, but Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine have understood how knowing our constitutional element can help us understand how we make decisions, what prevents us from growing and moving forward, what nourishes our energy and what depletes it. From TCM and somatic theories, we also learn how the body keeps the score and emotions, memories and traumas can remain caged into the tissues of our bodies and learning to move mindfully can help us unleash these suppressed memories.
Learning about our constitutional elements can help us understand what our bodies need rather than what we think we need. I encourage you to approach these tests with an open mind. They are far from perfect, and, of course, the bias of simplification and generalization, trying to fit humanity into 3 or 5 categories. With this said, there is probably a bit of truth. If you find yourself rejecting or showing resistance to some of these ideas, pause, and ask yourself why such resistance. Maybe there is something that you do not want to accept, but deep down, you know that aspect is something you need to improve if you want to grow, and you are probably not ready yet to face it.
Find below a test I have put together merging the work of some leading researchers on the topic.
References
Stephens, Mark. Yoga Therapy: Foundations, Methods, and Practices for Common Ailments (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2017)
Frawley, David. Yoga and Ayurveda, Self-Healing and Self-Realisation (Lotus Press, 1999)
https://chopra.com/dosha-quiz
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