How Your Body Signals Dosha Imbalance Through Cravings and Aversions

At this stage the individual is still quite healthy, and when a dosha starts to build up, the body’s intelligence creates an aversion to the causal factor and a craving for opposite qualities, which can restore balance. For example, if you’ve eaten ice cream three days in a row and kapha is building up, the thought of more ice cream will not be appealing; rather, your body will crave cayenne pepper or other spicy food to burn up the kapha and counteract it. One should listen to this wisdom and not continue increasing the cause. AGGRAVATION The accumulated dosha continues to build up in its own site.

The stomach gets brimmed up with kapha, the intestines fill with pitta, or the colon overflows with vata. These accumulated doshas then try to move from their sites. Kapha tries to go up into the lungs, pitta tries to move into the stomach and gallbladder, and vata tries to move into the flanks. You can feel this stage, too.

For example, if you eat too much kapha food on Saturday night, you might feel full when you wake up on Sunday and think to yourself, “Maybe I should fast or eat very lightly today.” But then someone invites you out for Sunday brunch, and you eat heavily again. The next day you might get a cough or a feeling of congestion in the lungs as the kapha starts to move upward. Excess pitta in the second stage may cause heartburn or acid indigestion, even nausea. Vata rising up may cause pain in the flanks or midback, or even breathlessness.

According to Ayurvedic therapeutics, the disease process can be addressed at any stage, but specific treatments are needed for specific stages. In these first two stages, one can reverse the process by oneself, using common sense to apply the principle of opposite qualities, and taking some home remedies. Once the disease process has gone beyond the gastrointestinal tract and entered the third phase, it is no longer under one’s own control, and trained medical help is needed. (See sidebar on ama.) 3.

SPREAD The dosha begins to spread from its place of origin, overflowing into the bloodstream and the general circulation of the body, “looking” for a place to enter. Here the disease process has progressed to the point where eliminating the causal factor will not be enough. A panchakarma purification program (or a similar cleansing regimen) is needed in order to return the doshas to their respective sites in the gastrointestinal tract so they can be excreted from the body. Ama, Agni, and the Disease Process The body’s biological fire, which governs the transformation of matter into energy, is of thirteen major types.