The practice
A five-thousand-year-old system of self-knowledge
Ayurveda — ayus (life) and veda (knowledge) — arose in the Vedic period of India. Its premise is simple: everything in nature, including you, is made of five elements — ether, air, fire, water and earth. How those elements gather in you creates your constitution, and health is the state in which they remain in their natural proportion.
The three doshas
The elements pair into three functional forces. Vata (air and ether) moves. Pitta (fire and water) transforms. Kapha (earth and water) holds. Every person carries all three; only the proportion differs.
Prakriti and Vikriti
Prakriti is your constitution at conception — fixed for life, visible in your skeletal frame, your natural eye size, your lifelong dental health. Vikriti is your current state: recent shifts, chronic complaints, today's imbalance. Healing is simply the distance between them. A naturally heavy, calm Kapha frame currently living with anxiety, dry skin and insomnia is not becoming Vata — it is showing a Vata imbalance to be corrected.
Why assessment comes first
The same food, herb or practice heals one constitution and aggravates another. Chilli kindles a slow Kapha fire and inflames a Pitta one. Nothing in Ayurveda is universally good — it is only ever good for someone. So we begin by looking, touching and asking.
Vata
Air + Ether
Movement, creativity, quickness
Snake-like — rapid, thin, irregular
Pitta
Fire + Water
Transformation, focus, intensity
Frog-like — sharp, bounding, jumping
Kapha
Earth + Water
Structure, steadiness, nourishment
Swan-like — slow, broad, steady
Ayurveda & Menopause
The Second Spring
Classical Ayurveda understood the menopausal transition as a doshic shift rather than a malfunction. Vata rises — bringing dryness, restlessness and disturbed sleep. Pitta accumulates — producing heat, irritability and hot flushes. Kapha, once protective, may become heavy and resistant to change. The Second Spring traces these patterns to their roots and offers the dietary adjustments, herbal supports, and daily-rhythm practices that classical tradition developed specifically for this stage of life — not as a remedy for what is lost, but as a framework for what is beginning.
The book also holds medical honesty alongside classical wisdom: which symptoms deserve attention from a doctor, what hormone therapy can and cannot offer, and how to build a life in the wisdom years that supports the body's actual constitution rather than fighting the transition.
Ayurveda & Andropause
The Second Summer
The gradual decline in male vitality and testosterone is a transition that receives far less open discussion than it deserves. Classical Ayurveda addressed it two thousand years ago through a dedicated clinical branch called Vajikarana — one of Ashtanga Ayurveda's eight specialties, devoted to reproductive vitality, sexual health, and the strength associated with it as men age.
The Second Summer applies everything the main book established — the doshas, Agni, the daily and seasonal rhythms of the body — to this specific stage of life, alongside an honest look at the herbs Vajikarana tradition relied on and current medical guidance on andropause, late-onset hypogonadism, and testosterone replacement therapy. It treats this transition with the same seriousness the trilogy already extended to menopause: worth naming accurately, worth investigating properly, and worth meeting with both classical wisdom and current medical evidence — rather than silence or resignation.