I aim to introduce and provide opportunities to apply core principles of Ayurveda: 1) Health can come from balance, 2) Imbalance can lead to disease, 3) The 3 Pillars for Health: Food, Sleep, Energy = opportunities for intervention, 4) The Ayurvedic path to balance is parallel to yoga: self-{re)discovery [observation, adaptation, and regulation].

To do this in a meaningful/accessible way, I will offer her access to two Self-Discovery Tools: 1) Ayurvedic assessment of their doshas, 2) a week-long diary activity to track eating/physical activity/stress/self-assessed health. Achieving the goal might look/sound like: the client identifying a sustainable habit to adapt based on data and dosha.

She is 45 year young householder, working full-time outside and inside of the home. The past year+ has brought physical and mental weight and she is ready to find a way back to a lighter version of herself. The client seeks to refill her cup and develop a sustainable set of practices to keep it full. Mother of 2, wife, engaged daughter and global citizen, she is eager to bring balance to her life and knows that without change, her physical and mental health are vulnerable.

I planned the session to have 3 parts:
1) Background: What is Ayurveda? What is a constitution? How can knowing our Constitution & making dosha informed choices help us maintain/regain balance?
2) Review doshas/data from the Self-Discovery Tools & discuss her habit tracking experience.
3) Review doshas & data, now from the perspective of identifying what is in-balance & what is out-of-balance & choosing a starting point: a single behavior that we might adapt to begin to restore balance

To meet the client where she is [a clever, creative person frequently favoring mind over body] I began w/adapted Raja Yoga courtesy Jen Sincero: “I think, therefore, I can create awesomeness. Or horrendousness. But the bottom line is that it’s through our thoughts that we create our realities.” Knowing how important choice is to this client, I suspected that hearing this prior to learning her Constitution would empower her to see that she still has room for choice. By discovering it & understanding it, she can choose among many possible ways to honor it.
Using her understanding of Hatha Yoga as a bridge, I connected her understanding of balancing effort with ease to the approach she might take in Ayurveda to balance her energies [e.g., hot w/cold]. Further, the client will be integrating familiar Hatha postures (e.g., Sun Salutations, joint freeing movements) into her week.

Client completed the Ayurveda Mind Body Type Test (Chopra, 1991, p. 38-44) & Energy Diary (M-S, 2003) prior to Session 1. Some client-side interruptions [she was pulled in multiple directions during our session due to family arriving home earlier than planned] meant we ended up dividing our session into two parts. Session One consisted of parts 1 & 2 of the original plan [Intro to Ayurveda, Revealing and discussing her Constitution Assessment results, Beginning to discuss her Energy Diary]. Session Two was a more focused review & reflection of how living with a Vata dominant constitution offers opportunities for change [tying again to the Raja teaching that WE have the power to create our realities]. We reviewed her Energy Diary. On 5 of 7 days, she reported no physical activity [PA]. After some discussion, we decided this might be a place to start. Client set a PA goal of 30 min/day.

Honoring Vata’s natural tendency toward variability, we aimed to balance with structure & identify multiple “windows of physical activity opportunity in a typical day” both at home and at her office. To increase the likelihood of success, we cut the doable goal of 30 minutes in half & aimed to find two 15-minute increments of opportunity per day. This way, at least 15 minutes would happen each day & possibly more.
Honoring Vata’s appreciation for creativity & change, after brainstorming some potential activities together [e.g., Sun Salutations, dancing, walking outside], I challenged the client to send me a list of physical activities she enjoys and promised if she did, I would supplement the list & build her a Physical Activity Bingo Card. She sent me a list, & I built her two cards: one for home & one for the office.

Yes. When we began, my client was in her kitchen. When asked whether she might want to move to a more private location she cheerfully reported her husband & daughter were at soccer & her teenage son was in his fortress of solitude, so she’d be perfectly comfortable emptying the dishwasher, preparing for dinner. Within 30 min. her son emerged w/urgent questions, & 40 min. in, her husband & daughter “got home early.” Despite this wonderful illustration of why the client seeks balance, we managed to have a solid initial conversation. Her insights that began Session 2 [now private] assured me that while pulled in seven directions, she understood & digested what was offered in Session 1.
As she emerged from Session 2 w/a dosha & data informed plan to allocate time to take care of herself I believe the goal was achieved. One week later, she's managing close to 30 minutes of activity/day.

I absolutely had to adapt. My own comfort with this material is nowhere near as strong as some other areas. As I was sharing, I found myself leaning into some shared language that seemed to work well for this particular client. I used multiple analogies from cooking, Harry Potter, and Personality Psychology to help illustrate the relationships among the doshas and how those specific combinations inform each & every one of us.
If ever I am faced with a client standing her kitchen trying to take care of everyone but herself during a session she referred to as “self-care”, I will hold true to my gut instinct which was to reschedule. She was so excited and enthusiastic and as I know her well, so stretched thin, that I was as eager as she to make it work. In a way, it was a blessing for us both. To try to accomplish all I had planned in one session was preposterous.

Two sessions turned out to be solid and gave her time to process and generate questions in between.
Offering the assessments online and in advance worked well and I would certainly do that again. The Energy Diary is something I have used in my teaching Health Psychology for 20 years to help folks begin to see relationships between what/when they eat, whether they move, and how they feel. I have never had a student *not* use the chart and in this case, again, served as a nice validation of her Vata dominant constitution.
All in all, I am grateful that after the Basics of Ayurveda TT, I took the time to read the books Perfect Health and Practical Ayurveda. They helped me piece together my understanding in a way that I could begin make use of Ayurveda in my own life and begin to share some of the practical elements with others.