How do I know if it's helping?
What is health, and how do we know if we're working in harmony with it, or against its flourishing?
Last week, I was put in touch with a parent whose child is experiencing gradually more severe and complex autoimmune symptoms. They are using conventional medical interventions to reduce the pain and inflammation, but our mutual friend put them in touch with me so that I might share what alternative avenues to managing autoimmune disease are available to people living in Quebec.
They wanted to know: “How can I know if what I’m doing for my child’s health is helping, beyond the effects of the medication?”
A classic of Ayurveda dating to the time of Late Antiquity, the golden age of the Gupta Empire in India, describes health this way:
“One who knows health is one whose elemental forces, bodily tissues, appetite, and elimination are balanced; one whose mind, body, and spirit are filled with simple joy.” (Suśruta Samhita, sutrasthana (vol. 1), 15:10)
How do you know if what you’re doing is helping? Take stock of yourselves each day, and measure how close you are to the above statement. Insofar as you are experiencing various degrees of balance, you can learn to sense how your daily life, habits, consumption, medication, practices, and disease are faring.
In Ayurveda, the fundamental concepts for measuring your state of balance are termed prakriti and vikriti.
Your prakriti, constitution, is an epigenetic heritage. It is ancestral. You are gifted with what your forebears had to give, and life’s own intelligence moves through the generations. Ayurveda teaches that our prakriti is determined in the first years of life. You may be predominantly Moveable, Fiery, or Stable. You may be prone to anxiety, bloating, diarrhea, sluggishness. Discovering your constitution is a quest for self-knowledge. Prakriti is stable. It is set in early life, and then the lay of the terrain is set. You have to walk the territory and get oriented.
The present moment is defined by vikriti, your current state, which is subject to change.
Sometimes, you’re so far from your point of origin that you don’t know what you need at all. Why are you sick? Why is your body on fire? Why can’t you digest bread? Why are you bloated after every meal? Why are you anxiously insomniac? Why do you flare to rage at the drop of a hat?
Vikriti is a formula. It is your prakriti layered with everything that’s accumulated over your lifetime.
I might think of myself as an angry, hyperactive person, but what if I’m just performing a state that has been applied as a mask on top of my being? Culture took me as a child and did what it could. I’m left picking up the pieces and puzzling out the pattern.
How do you know if what you’re doing is helping?
Well, in theory, all of us have the same solution: follow a set of principles described by a system such as Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Integrative medicine, macrobiotics, intuitive eating, yoga, siddha medicine, naturopathy, bioenergetics, and on, and on, and on until your head spins. The theories are rife with contradictions, and they disagree between themselves, and anyway, maybe you don’t live in south India, or northern China, or Japan, or the Mediterranean.
In practice, our lives are different, and your actions will be uniquely yours. You live on a world that is changing every day, and the practices described in the ancient traditional texts on health and longevity may seem all well and good, but entirely inapplicable to your daily life.
You have your own unique path to attain your happiness. You cannot reach your desired goal through another’s path, even if it is a good path. What works for me won’t necessarily work for you. Your experience is a fresco; there’s no isolated stroke that explains the effect of the whole.
But you have to ask yourself what you’re actually looking for. Is it health? Is it safety? Power? Control?
The only way to answer any of these questions is to live true to your own self, unchangign and stable from birth. The path to wellness involves learning how to manage circumstances, always evolving with what is accruing over the years. The way to heal profoundly is to heal the cosmos, to repair the fabric that weaves humans to each other and to the earth.
So how do you know if what you’re doing is working?
Ask yourself, inside: are your elemental forces, bodily tissues, appetite, and elimination balanced? Is your mind, body, and spirit filled with simple joy?
What do you need in order to move towards each of those things?
That depends entirely, uniquely, on who you are.