Ayurveda
To understand your patterns well enough to stay balanced before things go wrong
Ayurveda
To understand your patterns well enough to stay balanced before things go wrong
Philosophy & Practice
Ayurveda
Ayurveda gave me a language for patterns I had already noticed in myself. You could think of it as an ancient form of personalized medicine: the idea that what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. Understanding your constitution can help you make better choices around food, sleep, exercise and daily rhythm.
Rather than treating it as a rigid system or a set of rules, I approach Ayurveda as a framework for self-observation: one that invites curiosity about energy, appetite, temperament, and rhythm. And Like any framework, I hold it lightly. Useful when it clarifies, discarded when it doesn't.
The Dosha Lens
Learning about the doshas helped me make sense of tendencies that once felt contradictory. The dosha system (Vata, Pitta, Kapha) is a typology, very much like personality frameworks in psychology, but focused on physical and mental tendencies.
Seeing myself through this lens helped clarify things that had previously felt inconsistent: why I thrive on routine but resist it, why certain foods or environments drain me while others settle me. It offered a gentler way of responding to my own patterns, rather than trying to override them.
Skepticism & Usefulness
I find the framework useful even while remaining skeptical of some of its metaphysical claims. Many of the practical recommendations (eat warming foods if you run cold, avoid overstimulation if you’re already wired) often align with what modern research supports.
Rather than treating Ayurveda as dogma, I approach it as a tool for self-observation: a way to increase self-awareness, reduce unnecessary self-judgment, and support more aligned daily choices. I write and think about it in conversation with modern life, not in opposition to it.
Ayurveda
Ayurveda gave me a language for patterns I had already noticed in myself. You could think of it as an ancient form of personalized medicine: the idea that what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. Understanding your constitution can help you make better choices around food, sleep, exercise and daily rhythm.
Rather than treating it as a rigid system or a set of rules, I approach Ayurveda as a framework for self-observation: one that invites curiosity about energy, appetite, temperament, and rhythm. And Like any framework, I hold it lightly. Useful when it clarifies, discarded when it doesn't.
The Dosha Lens
Learning about the doshas helped me make sense of tendencies that once felt contradictory. The dosha system (Vata, Pitta, Kapha) is a typology, very much like personality frameworks in psychology, but focused on physical and mental tendencies.
Seeing myself through this lens helped clarify things that had previously felt inconsistent: why I thrive on routine but resist it, why certain foods or environments drain me while others settle me. It offered a gentler way of responding to my own patterns, rather than trying to override them.
Skepticism & Usefulness
I find the framework useful even while remaining skeptical of some of its metaphysical claims. Many of the practical recommendations (eat warming foods if you run cold, avoid overstimulation if you’re already wired) often align with what modern research supports.
Rather than treating Ayurveda as dogma, I approach it as a tool for self-observation: a way to increase self-awareness, reduce unnecessary self-judgment, and support more aligned daily choices. I write and think about it in conversation with modern life, not in opposition to it.
Writing
Finding My Dosha: 10 Tests, 30 Days, One Answer
A simple method for getting a stable answer from noisy quizzes
Ayurveda, at a high level, is a framework for understanding how different people move through the world: physically, mentally, emotionally. It describes three dominant patterns, called doshas, that shape things like digestion, energy, temperament, stress response, and even how you argue or recover.
Those patterns are:
Vata — airy, quick, variable, sensitive to change
Pitta — sharp, focused, hot, driven by transformation
Kapha — steady, grounded, slow, oriented toward stability
Most people aren’t “one dosha.” They’re mixtures. And that’s where things get complicated.
Because if you've ever tried to figure out your dosha, you know the problem immediately: there's no objective test. No blood work. No scan. Just observation, interpretation, and a lot of ambiguity. If you have access to an experienced Ayurvedic practitioner, that's the ideal path. I didn't, so I worked with what I had: online quizzes. And online quizzes are noisy—black-box questionnaires filtered through your own (possibly biased) self-perception."
As someone who works with data, I don’t trust single data points. Especially when the signal is subtle and the noise is high (and subjective). I trust patterns, repetition and aggregation. So instead of asking “Which dosha am I?” once and calling it truth, I decided to treat the question the way I’d treat any noisy system. I turned it into a method.
I assumed every dosha quiz was a weak instrument. So I did three things. I wasn’t looking for certainty. I was looking for stability.
First, I chose diversity. I found ten different online dosha tests from unrelated Ayurvedic sources. Each one emphasized slightly different things: physical traits, mental tendencies, emotional patterns. That mattered to me.
Second, I introduced time. I didn’t take them all at once. I took each test multiple times over about a month, on different days, in different moods. I didn’t want my digestion, stress level, or sleep debt to decide my identity.
Third, I aggregated. I collected the percentage outputs and averaged them, letting the outliers cancel each other out and here is the clear signal emerged:
Pitta: 75%
Vata: 15%
Kapha: 10%
Holding myself through that lens reframed a lot. It helped me understand why intensity is my default under pressure. Why hunger hits me fast and hard. Why I want resolution, clarity, movement. Why anger shows up before sadness or anxiety when I'm out of balance. Instead of treating these as flaws, I could see them as excess heat: something to regulate, definitely not suppress. Cooling, slowing, and softening are skills I have to practice deliberately.
You don't need a spreadsheet to benefit from Ayurveda. But if you're skeptical, analytical, or tired of being defined by a single quiz result, try something similar: multiple sources, repeated measures, less attachment to any one answer.
When a framework helps you see your patterns more clearly, understand yourself better, or suffer a little less, relate to yourself with a little more precision and kindness, it's useful. If it doesn't, you can let it go. I don't think these systems are meant to be believed. I think they're meant to be tried.
Finding My Dosha: 10 Tests, 30 Days, One Answer
A simple method for getting a stable answer from noisy quizzes
Ayurveda, at a high level, is a framework for understanding how different people move through the world: physically, mentally, emotionally. It describes three dominant patterns, called doshas, that shape things like digestion, energy, temperament, stress response, and even how you argue or recover.
Those patterns are:
Vata — airy, quick, variable, sensitive to change
Pitta — sharp, focused, hot, driven by transformation
Kapha — steady, grounded, slow, oriented toward stability
Most people aren’t “one dosha.” They’re mixtures. And that’s where things get complicated.
Because if you've ever tried to figure out your dosha, you know the problem immediately: there's no objective test. No blood work. No scan. Just observation, interpretation, and a lot of ambiguity. If you have access to an experienced Ayurvedic practitioner, that's the ideal path. I didn't, so I worked with what I had: online quizzes. And online quizzes are noisy—black-box questionnaires filtered through your own (possibly biased) self-perception."
As someone who works with data, I don’t trust single data points. Especially when the signal is subtle and the noise is high (and subjective). I trust patterns, repetition and aggregation. So instead of asking “Which dosha am I?” once and calling it truth, I decided to treat the question the way I’d treat any noisy system. I turned it into a method.
I assumed every dosha quiz was a weak instrument. So I did three things. I wasn’t looking for certainty. I was looking for stability.
First, I chose diversity. I found ten different online dosha tests from unrelated Ayurvedic sources. Each one emphasized slightly different things: physical traits, mental tendencies, emotional patterns. That mattered to me.
Second, I introduced time. I didn’t take them all at once. I took each test multiple times over about a month, on different days, in different moods. I didn’t want my digestion, stress level, or sleep debt to decide my identity.
Third, I aggregated. I collected the percentage outputs and averaged them, letting the outliers cancel each other out and here is the clear signal emerged:
Pitta: 75%
Vata: 15%
Kapha: 10%
Holding myself through that lens reframed a lot. It helped me understand why intensity is my default under pressure. Why hunger hits me fast and hard. Why I want resolution, clarity, movement. Why anger shows up before sadness or anxiety when I'm out of balance. Instead of treating these as flaws, I could see them as excess heat: something to regulate, definitely not suppress. Cooling, slowing, and softening are skills I have to practice deliberately.
You don't need a spreadsheet to benefit from Ayurveda. But if you're skeptical, analytical, or tired of being defined by a single quiz result, try something similar: multiple sources, repeated measures, less attachment to any one answer.
When a framework helps you see your patterns more clearly, understand yourself better, or suffer a little less, relate to yourself with a little more precision and kindness, it's useful. If it doesn't, you can let it go. I don't think these systems are meant to be believed. I think they're meant to be tried.
Why I Don't Eat Onions or Garlic
The Chemistry of Calm
People ask me why I avoid onion and garlic. It sounds dramatic until you look at what I'm actually optimizing for. I avoided them initially because I was told to, and I kept avoiding them because I noticed a difference. This piece starts with those two foods and widens into something deeper and, in my opinion, more interesting: how inputs shape inner stillness.
Ayurveda has a language for foods and habits that sharpen, agitate, dull, or clarify the mind. In that framework, onion and garlic are considered rajasic and tamasic: garlic overstimulates, onion dulls. Neither supports a sattvic state, which is the calm clarity meditation requires.
So this piece isn't really about onions and garlic. It's about what supports a still mind. The food is just the opening, and the destination is meditation.
Meditation looks simple from the outside. You sit. You breathe. You close your eyes. In practice, it's incredibly sensitive. I'm still learning this, but one thing has become clear: meditation is never an isolated activity. It's the downstream result of dozens of upstream choices. When the inputs are calm, meditation feels almost effortless. When they're not, no amount of discipline fixes it. And I've abandoned more sessions than I'd like to admit.
This piece organizes those inputs across three domains: bodily (what you eat, how you sleep, what substances you consume), environmental (screens, noise, lighting, timing), and mental-emotional (stress patterns, unprocessed feelings, cognitive load). Everything upstream echoes into the sit.
What I’m really sharing here is a small map of what I’ve noticed supports stillness, what tends to disturb it, and why something as ordinary as dinner can quietly shape the quality of your mind the next morning.
Why I Don't Eat Onions or Garlic
The Chemistry of Calm
People ask me why I avoid onion and garlic. It sounds dramatic until you look at what I'm actually optimizing for. I avoided them initially because I was told to, and I kept avoiding them because I noticed a difference. This piece starts with those two foods and widens into something deeper and, in my opinion, more interesting: how inputs shape inner stillness.
Ayurveda has a language for foods and habits that sharpen, agitate, dull, or clarify the mind. In that framework, onion and garlic are considered rajasic and tamasic: garlic overstimulates, onion dulls. Neither supports a sattvic state, which is the calm clarity meditation requires.
So this piece isn't really about onions and garlic. It's about what supports a still mind. The food is just the opening, and the destination is meditation.
Meditation looks simple from the outside. You sit. You breathe. You close your eyes. In practice, it's incredibly sensitive. I'm still learning this, but one thing has become clear: meditation is never an isolated activity. It's the downstream result of dozens of upstream choices. When the inputs are calm, meditation feels almost effortless. When they're not, no amount of discipline fixes it. And I've abandoned more sessions than I'd like to admit.
This piece organizes those inputs across three domains: bodily (what you eat, how you sleep, what substances you consume), environmental (screens, noise, lighting, timing), and mental-emotional (stress patterns, unprocessed feelings, cognitive load). Everything upstream echoes into the sit.
What I’m really sharing here is a small map of what I’ve noticed supports stillness, what tends to disturb it, and why something as ordinary as dinner can quietly shape the quality of your mind the next morning.
Training
Ayurveda Workshop, Dr. Marc Halpern
Integral Yoga Institute San Francisco, 12hrs (Sep 2025)
Yoga & Ayurveda Wellness Consultant
American Institute of Vedic Studies, 300 hrs (Dec 2025)
Ayurveda Workshop, Dr. Marc Halpern
Integral Yoga Institute San Francisco, 12hrs (Sep 2025)
Yoga & Ayurveda Wellness Consultant
American Institute of Vedic Studies, 300 hrs (Dec 2025)
