Hello everyone!  Yesterday I talked about how I'm turning to ayurveda, at least in part, to help me kick the habit of smoking.  I know that my body is out of balance, specifically my doshas in ayurvedic terms, and I want to aid the return of balance to my body by balancing my doshas.  Before I can go into the ways to do that though, I need to spend some time explaining what a dosha is and give you just a brief overview of the ayurvedic medical system.  Following that, I will provide links to several quizzes to determine your dosha type (I find the quizzes to be a lot of fun and pretty darn accurate)!  Tomorrow I will go into more specifics about the traits of the dosha types.

Ayurveda is an Indian system of medicine that dates back over 5000 years. The term ayurveda translates roughly to "Science of Life".  Each individual has a specific constitutional type which is made up of some combination of three doshas: Vata, Pitta and Kapha.  It's the proportion of each dosha type that you, as an individual, carry that determines your type and ultimately the path for healing for you based on YOUR body.  Each dosha type has unique personality traits, energies and metabolic rates.  Some people have an overwhelming majority of one Dosha type, and therefore would be considered simply a Vata, Pitta or a Kapha.  However many people have two dosha types running neck in neck with the third running quite a bit behind, so they would have a dual dosha type such as Vata-Pitta, Vata-Kapha or Pitta-Kapha.  Still others have all three equally and would be a tri-dosha type Vata-Pitta-Kapha.  So, now for the fun part, determining your dosha type!  Here are links to a few different quizzes (and there are many more on the internet.  Just be wary of really short quizzes, because I don't think they are detailed enough to give you a true picture.  There is also a detailed quiz in the Deepak Chopra book I recommended yesterday "Perfect Health: The Complete Mind Body Guide".  You take one or all of the quizzes here, here and here.  Write down what your type is after you take the quiz and I'll break down what all this means tomorrow!  Have a great evening!