Romancing Your Dosha

The secret to improving your relationship? Enhance your understanding of yourself and your partner.

- By Sahara Rose, Photography by Supersizer/Getty Images

IF YOU’RE FACING challenges in your relationship, there’s no shortage of advice out there for you. Friends, family, podcast hosts, best-selling book authors, and Instagram poets all have ideas about how you should think, feel, and act in order to better understand your partner and be understood by them. But there’s another resource you might want to consult about how to show up in your relationships: one of the world’s oldest health systems, Ayurveda.

Ayurveda is based on the mind-body connection and the concept of doshas, or energy archetypes. Each of us is born with a combination of the three doshas— vata (air and ether), pitta (fire and water), and kapha (earth and water)—in varying amounts, although there is typically a primary dosha that influences most of your decisions and interactions, including how you react when your relationship hits a rough patch. (To find out your unique blend, take the quiz at yogajournal.com/doshaquiz.)

Understanding your dominant dosha —and that of your romantic partner—can bring empathy as well as balance to your relationship. This in turn brings harmony to the everyday and helps you evolve as a couple, since a committed, long-term relationship needs some creativity and spontaneity (vata), passion and purpose (pitta), and stability and comfort (kapha).

IF YOUR PRIMARY DOSHA IS VATA ...

What you bring to relationships