What if Your Anxiety Isn't Yours? On Constitution and Ancestral Karma.
An exploration of Prakriti (प्रकृति), ancestral karma, and how your Ayurvedic constitution holds the key to healing. A personal essay on Samkhya and the power of self-knowledge.
Prakriti (प्रकृति) is a fundamental phenomenon described by the Samkhya school of Indian philosophy. It refers to matter, nature, and includes all cognitive, moral, psychological, emotional, sensorial and physical aspects of reality. Prakriti is the original or natural form or condition of anything, original or primary substance.
Ayurveda, Indian medicine, takes the phenomenon and teaches that each person has a unique prakriti, translated as constitution, which crystallizes during the first years of life. Your individual prakriti is an epigenetic heritage; it is ancestral. You are gifted what your grandparents had to give, and life's own intelligence trickles down across generations. You may be predominantly Moveable, Fiery, or Stable. You are a combination of elemental aspects. Discovering your constitution is a quest for self-knowledge. Who am I? Who are You?
Why wasn't it explained to me as a child that I can learn who I am? That knowledge will help me live well, make decisions about daily life, figure out my needs, and find ease. I was never told the story of my ancestral karma. It turns out, if my inner life is chaotic, it is not only my fault. If I am susceptible to rage, it is the anger accumulated over generations of violence. If I am susceptible to addiction, it is the tendency acquired over ages. The state of my ancestors determines my prakriti.
I have learned so much about how I ought to behave, but Ayurveda explains how to be who I am, as I am. Sometimes I deny my prakriti, too. I find myself wishing I had been born different. More stable, less erratic. From another time, or another place. Steadier, with a regular rhythm. I’ve long wished I was someone else.
Prakriti forms through Earth's slow transformation in relationship with culture. The prakriti of anyone alive in the 21st century, of anyone reading these words, carries within it the stories of capital, of empire, of colonies.
My Prakriti accounts for how my Jewish ancestors were nomads without a home; it accounts for the cruelty of my European settler forebears. It is history, reality, plain and simple, the thing I am trying to accept.
If I can surrender to it, then I may learn to live at ease, expending no useless effort. I can slowly sort between the true and the false. Does this anger, this fear, come from myself, or from my grandparents, their habits, and the millenia of culture that I inherit?
Culture took me as a child and did what it could. The outcome is vikriti, ( विकृति ) my current state, subject to change. Vikriti is a formula. It is my prakriti, constitution, layered with all that accrued over the years.
Last Wednesday, I had a really stressful, painful day. I got up after a night of fitful sleep, was angry all through my Qigong class, felt heavy, resentful, and finally had to cancel evening plans. I sat down, felt the intense pain in my heart. Light dawned on some facets of my life I'd been repressing and refusing to look at, but the pain still felt unresolved when I went to bed. I learned the next morning that a friend in India had died on Wednesday.
Thursday morning, a mutual friend called me. We processed grief and I felt relieved to let go. I had been waiting for the news. I was not shocked or surprised. I felt it from across the planet 24 hours before an SMS delivered the facts, the time of death. My body had been holding and processing the loss of a loved one, the loss of a teacher. It knows what it felt, and I understood once my mind caught up with the news.
It's hard to sit with that loss. My impulse is to pull out my phone, turn off Airplane Mode, hope for a notification, and scroll the network for a quick hit of Current Affairs. But my friend's moved on. I won't hear his laugh again, I won't hold his hand again.
The systemic confusion, the abuse of prescription antibiotics, the ineffectual surgeries, the complete lack of personalized healthcare. The layers of life lived, years of toxic behavioural patterns learned as if they were the only way to live.
Sometimes, we're so far from our point of origin that we don't know who we are at all. I might think of myself as an angry, hyperactive person, but what if I'm just performing a vikriti that has been applied as a mask on top of my prakriti? How much pain have I perpetrated by unconsciously repeating patterns inscribed into my lineage?
We are a woven fabric. These technologies affect me and highlight the connection. Knowing about genocide has a direct impact on my mental, emotional, physiological state. But sometimes it's more subtle. My state is volatile and always changing. It depends on the state of the world.
If I am subconsciously affected by one death, what is the world doing to my state right now? The suffering of all beings registers with the faculty of the body to perceive its environment.
I depend on the Earth, and I am a product of the Earth. I am engaged in production and consumption. The food I eat comes from industries spread all over the planet. The metals and plastics that are part of my daily life are processed by a global supply chain. The electricity that powers my devices allows me to tap into the infinite information flow from all recorded history, and whatever is happening. Live. Subconsciously, energetically, my body knew already that my friend had died.
The cruelty enacted on people, on forests, on animals… it changes everything. It affects me, my mind, my mood, and my physiology. I am in this world, I am of this world. IF I am sick, the world is sick.
To return to the prakriti, all the accretion of vikriti has to be digested. The road is long, and it is simple. It starts when I accept that I am a certain way. Then, I can start deciphering what that is. The only way to heal is to heal the cosmos, to repair the fabric that weaves humans to each other and to the Earth.