Know your constitution

Three thousand years ago in India, physicians began writing down a system of medicine built on a single insight: people are not the same, and the same food, routine or season affects different bodies differently. The system is Ayurveda, the knowledge of life, and its classical texts, the Charaka and Sushruta, are among the oldest medical writings on earth.

Its central idea is constitution. Every person is a mix of three tendencies, vata, pitta and kapha, roughly air, fire and earth, and one or two dominate. Vata types are quick, light, creative, prone to anxiety and irregularity. Pitta types are sharp, driven, warm, prone to anger and inflammation. Kapha types are steady, strong, calm, prone to heaviness and inertia. The practice is to know your type and live in a way that balances it: routine for vata, cooling for pitta, movement for kapha.

I'll say what we keep and what we don't. The medical claims, the herbs and treatments, are a physician's domain, and some Ayurvedic preparations have had real safety problems; nothing in this letter is medical advice. What we keep is the question, which Western medicine took two thousand years to ask: what kind of body is this, and what does this kind need?

That's an Awareness key. Most people live by a general prescription, eat this, do that, sleep then, and wonder why it works for their friend and not for them. Ayurveda says: notice what you're like. The person who wakes at five bursting with energy and the person who needs nine hours and a slow morning are both healthy. They're different constitutions.

Eighty days of a log has given you more data on your own constitution than most people ever gather. Ayurveda is the oldest framework for reading it.