If we look at the different people in the world around us, we observe that all of us are not simply alike. Each one of us is different in many ways, both physically and mentally. Each person possesses a unique constitution different from that of any other person. The shapes & sizes, temperaments and characters of people have enormous variations that must affect our health and happiness.
About the Doshas – Three Major Constitutional types
We must understand our own nature for our own happiness and well-being in life. Similarly, we must understand the nature of others, which may be different than our own, for harmonious social interaction.
Without understanding our particular constitution, we are vulnerable to fall into poor health and diseases. No standardised medicine can adequately deal with all our individual variations. Only a system that can discern our different constitutional types has this capacity.
Ayurveda contains such a well-developed science of individual types as its core wisdom. One of the great beauties of Ayurveda is that it so clearly helps us understand all our individual variations, special abilities and idiosyncrasies. However human constitutional patterns fall into general categories and do not occur at random. While these have variations, they occur in well-defined groups, mirroring the great forces of Nature.
Three major constitutional types exist. These are called Vata, Pitta and Kapha in Sanskrit, which correspond to the three great elements of air, fire and water as they function in the mind-body complex.
