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Skincare and Your Ayurvedic Dosha
Understanding your Ayurvedic Dosha is one more tool to use to improve and maintain life-long healthy skin.
Let’s delve deeper into Ayurvedic Doshas and its relation to skincare.
In this blog post, we are going to cover:
- What a Dosha is
- How to find out what your specific Dosha is
- How that ties into your better skin
This is a loose transcript of the original interview on Instagram. See below for the entire talk.
What is Ayurveda?
Ayurvedic medicine is am Eastern medicine that's been around for over 10,000 years. It's the oldest known medicine.
A huge part of the knowledge of Eastern medicine is preventative medicine. This means we focus on being able to know the body and the inner awareness to be able to externally prevent anything else that could occur down the line. Basically, Ayurvedic practice is just about a preventative lifestyle, and a part of that comes from being aware of what your Dosha is.
What is Your Dosha?
Your Dosha is the constitutional inner intelligence of your set body. You're born with this set Dosha that constitutes who you are. We each have all of the Doshas in us, but one or two will be most prevalent.
You can actually tell your Dosha based off of your nose features, skin features, the shape of your face, your body shape, the way you talk, the way that you deal with emotions, the way that you handle things.
What are the 3 Ayurvedic Doshas?
Tridoshas are the three humors or forces of the body, which bring health when in balance, and produce diseases when out of balance. The three Doshas are called Vata, Pitta and Kapha.
We're all made up of energy.
We are all energy. The elements that are in the air and that surround us in our lifestyle, they're living within us. And those elements, just like your plants in your house need to be fed water and nutrients, work at optimum levels when certain lifestyle practices are met.
Vata Type is run by air and space. Air and space means dryer, a little more spacey and 'airheaded'. Their frames are a little bit more lean and long. They have a harder time holding on to muscle mass and feel better running or doing endurance training or yoga. A bit more free spirited if you will.
Pitta Type is the average person in a sense. They have the average frame. They can gain muscle, they can lose muscle or gain fat or lose fat. Their personalities are kind of spitfire. They are made out of fire and water. They're quick to emotions, but then they're very drawn and secure in who they are. Sometimes, they'll have more structured frames. Sometimes, they'll have more dark hair or light hair. They're kind of in between the two, and they tend to be the people that are the leaders. They tend to be the more outspoken rulers.
Kapha Types are water and earth. They tend to be more more stout and have thicker muscles, thicker frames, more curvy. They tend to have more of the side of the darker features, thicker hair, darker eyebrows, darker hair. They tend to have the best skin complexion. Personality-wise, they are kind of calm, cool, collected and very easygoing.
Everybody has all three of these Doshas within them. You have to have them to have a full system that runs. The goal is to take all of these inner intelligences and find balance within them.
Doshas and Seasons
Vata controls transportation and channeling in the body. So think about air space. If we don't have air space around us, it wouldn't push things through us. Right? So if we don't have a channel of something, push gravity, then we wouldn't be able to have elimination. We wouldn't be able to have our blood flowing, all of those things. That's what Vata does in your body. It's your transportation and the channeling of everything going on.
Vata controls the end of fall and winter time because it's a dry time of the year. And we tend to get sicker because we tend to dry out with it. And so the Vata helps push everything through.
Pitta controls, transformation, metabolism, and digestion. It's huge for your gut, your digestive tract, your emotions, the way you digest people, the way you digest TV, the way you digest food. it's every type of digestion has to go through your Pitta system.
So Pitta is really important to keep your gut health happy because that will lead to any other disease. And if your body goes into disease, then all these other effects happen. So pitta is in control of that, which means if I have fire and water in my body, I don't wanna be too hot. I also don't want my insides to be too cold.
Pitta rules more of the summertime and end or in beginning of fall when it's like hot and then kind of starts to cool off. That's the Pitta season.
Kapha controls structure, lubrication and cohesion. Kapha is really in control of the structure of your body, your bones, your joints, the way your skin cells are made up. Kapha season is springtime and kapha season is one of the best times for your skin. Usually, when you transition into more springtime, because you've come out of the dryness and you're not into the hot yet, you're not too oily yet. Usually your skin and your body kind of finds this balance of a nice glow or wetness in a sense.
Doshas and Skincare
Springtime is when the detox starts to happen. And that's when most people will go on a cleanse. Think 'spring cleaning'.
Detoxing is key. We help detox our skin by drinking a lot of clean liquids, and resting and eating low on the food chain.
But with physical skincare you want to use gentle exfoliants, for example, the Jojoba Creme Scrub. It's a gentle exfoliant with perfectly spherical beads that will not scratch your skin. You want a really gentle scrub to help slough away all that the winter dullness. This is one of the tweaks we're going to do before moving into spring skin and Kapha season.
The other way to do that is using a leave-on chemical exfoliant. I use Clear Skin Serum and Radiance Reveal Exfoliant. I love them both. They're both plant-based leave-on exfoliants that will help dissolve the glue that holds on all the excess dead skin. Your skin will be more hydrated and it clears the pores. It allows the toxins to actually be released.
The other thing is a facial massage like the Abhyanga for the face. I use the Gua Sha with the Calm Down Facial Oil to help release the lymph and help to eliminate the residual toxins that have been building up over the winter and Vata season.
It can be overwhelming to think about, so don't let it overwhelm you. Just take it step by step.
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