If you have heard of Ayurveda, you might know that it is tailored to each individual’s unique constitution. But how do you know what your body constitution or body type is?
Prakruti is a concept in Ayurveda which refers to an individual’s unique physical and mental constitution. It is determined by the proportion of three bioenergetic principles: Vata, Pitta, and Kapha in the body, and Sattva, Rajas and Tamas in the mind. Each person’s prakruti is believed to be a unique combination of these principles and gunas that were determined at the time of your conception.
Ayurveda in the West, became quite popular as a tool to help you identify with a certain body type – vata, pitta or kapha. People are naturally curious about knowing more about themselves, so a vata, pitta and kapha questionnaire became a trendy thing that you can do on your own to pacify your curiosity.
As Ayurveda is regaining popularity, there are several free quizzes and assessments available online that can help you get an idea of your body type by yourself. However, it’s important to note that these assessments are usually very simplified, so they won’t give you an accurate answer. You can use these test as an observation exercise, or just for fun. Even the name of these quizzes are often incorrect – they are generally called dosha quizzes, but actually the proper Sanskrit word to use would be prakruti. (Dosha means ‘disturbance’).
A more formal approach, if you would like to determine your prakruti, there are Ayurvedic practitioner that offer services to help you figure that out. They will typically give you a more elaborated questionnaire, or ask you a lot of things about your present self and your past self and your daily routine, your medical history, lifestyle habits, dietary preferences, among other questions, to figure out what your body type is. But how accurate or relevant is that really?
Another method to supposedly figure out your body constitution is through pulse diagnosis. There are claims that a very experienced Ayurvedic physician or vaidya will be able to tell you your prakriti from simply taking your pulse.
Is it really important to know your prakriti?
The truth is that it is very difficult to know someone’s prakriti based on these questionnaire alone. Apart from that, it is not as relevant as one might think, at least not in the Ayurvedic perspective from India. It is more of a thing from the Ayurveda from the West, maybe popularized by doctor Vasant Lad. (Nothing against Vasant Lad, I love his books and his lectures!)
But the West kind of got the idea that for someone to be healthy, they must try to get their current health back to match the prakriti, which is an erroneous idea. You don’t need to know your original body constitution to try to go back to that, you can focus on having good results that are markers of good health without needing to know your original constitution.
Understanding your current overall health condition in a way has more value than trying to know the one you were born with. There is another Sanskrit term that describes your current health condition and it is called Vikruti. Knowing your vikruti is enough to get an idea of what lifestyle changes and dietary choices you need to make to support your current condition and promote overall health and well-being.
Some ayurvedic practitioners also defend that you can know the prakriti of a person by the way he reacts to panchakarma, which is a thorough cleansing of one’s whole body, like a reset on someone’s body.