– Charaka, the father of Indian medicine, c. 300 BCE
When you travel to India, the plane flies through the night and over the Indian Ocean.
On this night, there is so much turbulence that the red safety belt sign never turns off. No food or drinks can be served, and the toilets are closed for hours. Luckily, I’ve learned to bring food with me. Little cherry tomatoes, almonds and protein bars become my salvation when the food trolley is chained down all through the shaky trip.
We land in Mumbai early in the morning. I see an older woman in a sari leaning on her son’s arm. She looks pale and worn out from the trip. We all desperately want to use the bathroom. But I’m continuing on and take the bus to the domestic terminal. It’s been a few years since I was last here. The development has been rapid.
What was then like a sea of walking people now consists more and more of people on motor scooters, often carrying two or three people. Young women dressed in saris sit behind the men in their white shirts and black gabardine trousers. The women sit sideways, sidesaddle, with a tight grip on the waist of the person in front; they travel at high speed on the road between terminals. Through the bus window I watch this bustling city pass by.
India has everything, extra everything, of everything.
More colours and more joy, but also more pain and a vaguely menacing feeling. The poverty hits you like a blow to the gut. We pass slum districts where little children play among piles of rubbish and puddles of brown water. But beyond the poverty, there are many other aspects to India.
India has one of the world’s most sophisticated and cohesive systems of integrative medicine. It’s called Ayur-Veda in Sanskrit, the ancient Indic language that was spoken by India’s conquerors around 2000 BCE and is distantly related to all the languages of Europe, even our Nordic ones. Veda is basically the same as our word for wisdom, and ayur means life, youth and health. When I was working in India, people explained this to me as the eternal and genuine knowing.
I’ve been invited to a course especially for women. It’s a leadership course, but Ayurveda treatments are also included. Might I find more knowledge there?
I’m going to head to one of India’s most advanced health spas for Ayurveda, outside Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of the state of Kerala. The name of this city is almost unpronounceable. I just have to cross my fingers and hope that I’ve booked a flight to the right place.
When I arrive, I get to meet a doctor.
An Ayurvedic doctor is not like a medical school doctor, like the ones we are used to in Europe. She does take my blood pressure and measure my pulse. She is also professional, with a white jacket over an exquisite sari in blood red and gold. She asks me about any apparent diseases and ongoing medication, after having first asked about my medical history and past surgeries.
But that’s where the similarities end.
I get a questionnaire with forty questions. What kind of food do I like the most? What kind of exercise do I do? Which smells and sounds do I react to? Digestive habits are extensively handled, as are sex drive, sleep rhythm and the colour and intensity of my dreams. The doctor looks through the questionnaire and makes some remarks to her assistant.
‘Sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.’ She nods meaningfully.
The doctor creeps closer to me and suddenly peers up my nose at very close quarters. She listens to my voice and my way of talking. She takes my pulse for a long time and gently rotates my hand on my wrist.
Then the last question.
‘You like bitter tastes?’ she asks again.
‘Yes, I do,’ I say, thinking of my favourites: tea, Campari and rocket.
‘Vata-pitta,’ she tells her assistant.
Both of them nod solemnly. A decoding of this follows.
Ayurveda describes the human being as consisting of three basic elements, or doshas in Sanskrit. Vata is the creative and innovative aspect of a person. Pitta is the organised and structured leader aspect. Kapha is the warm and integrating element in all of us. We have all three of these aspects in us, but in different amounts – partly based on our innate constitution but also varying by season, climate and during different phases of life.
If you have stronger vata-pitta, like I do, it means that these elements are more prominent. It also implies that you more easily succumb to illnesses that are linked to these so-called doshas when in a condition of imbalance and stress.
For vata, it’s the stomach that easily goes on strike, or the nerves. For pitta, it’s often the skin or the heart and lungs that are sensitive, and too much pitta stress results in increased aggression and perfectionism. For kapha, it can be weight gain, lethargy or depression.
A simple and quick test of which dosha is dominant is to imagine that you’re sitting in a traffic jam on the way to a meeting, and you’re late. The traffic is moving at a snail’s pace.
If you become anxious and think the client you’re going to meet will cancel your contract, the vatta element is dominant.
If you get angry, think that all the people around you are driving stupidly and are idiots, and you start giving the finger to people in other cars, you are a pitta.
Do you sit there calmly listening to the radio and figure that there’s no point in getting stressed out? You’re the kapha type.
Another categorisation is by basic body type. Vattas are naturally slim and have a hard time building up muscle, pitta is the natural athlete, and kapha is the one who gains weight the most easily and builds muscle mass.
Ayurveda is a life art that describes both health and sickness, my doctor tells me. It was born from the observations made by tens of thousands of Ayurvedic doctors over thousands of years, all over India, which used to consist of a number of independent kingdoms governed by a long series of maharajas and nawabs. All of these hundreds of thousands of observations about how the body and soul of human beings worked were put together into a larger system.
The interesting thing about Ayurveda is that disease is described as something that takes place in several systems simultaneously, when too much total stress gathers. (Again, the idea that stress triggers inflammation.) I wonder if this might be the first system in the world that actually describes how low-degree systemic inflammation affects people’s health. Perhaps a person who is seriously studying human health intuitively gets a feeling for inflammation and anti-inflammation?
That’s why I’m curious about Ayurveda, and during this week in sunny Kerala, my plan is not just to attend a leadership course but also to carry out some private studies and to investigate this ancient healing art more deeply.
When we in the West reach the stage where we begin to treat an illness, Ayurveda considers that it’s already too late. Illness must be met at the gate, early, before it’s had time to develop into a full-blown disease, by actively counteracting the stressors that make disease develop. But there are many differences between the two ways of looking at health.
‘The greatest difference is that we see that people are different. You in the West think that all people should have the same type of treatment,’ my Ayurvedic doctor tells me.
Instead of standard treatments based on the same criteria for everyone, and standard doses, they believe in individual treatment based on the needs that a person manifests through their vata, pitta or kapha type.
Could Ayurveda