Finding Your Dharma as a Path to Yogic Healing, Part 2

Yoga and Ayurveda can help bring your students to a balanced place from which they can apprehend their life mission and bring it into being.

By Timothy McCall, M.D.

In Part 1, we discussed the connection between not knowing your dharma, or failing to live your life in accordance with it, and ill health. In this column, we'll cover in more detail how to help your students figure out their life's purpose and bring that vision into reality.

Getting Balanced

One caveat in trying to help your students access their inner intuition about their dharma is that a state of imbalance, viewed from an Ayurvedic perspective (see Ayurveda and Yoga Therapy), can lead them to inaccurately assess what's good for them. Someone who is stressed-out and vata-deranged, for example, may be drawn to things that tend to put their vata further out of balance, whether that's the food they eat, the style of yoga they practice, or the work they do. Get yourself in balance, however, and choices that tend to keep you in balance, and which better reflect your true nature, become more attractive.

A basic understanding of Ayurveda can help yoga therapists design practices that can move their students toward greater balance. If it's vata that's out of whack, the practice might include Sun Salutations to burn off nervous energy, standing poses to increase grounding, and twists and forward bends to calm the nervous system, followed by a long Savasana (Corpse Pose). In addition to cultivating calmness via yoga practice, Ayurveda would suggest various lifestyle choices involving diet and other habits to foster balance. Imbalances in kapha or pitta would similarly call for specific yogic and lifestyle recommendations. If you don't have this expertise yourself, you may be able to refer your student to a colleague who does.

Dharma in the Real World

Keep in mind that at the present moment, your student may not have enough information or pertinent life experience to accurately ascertain their dharma. Finding your dharma can be an ongoing process, and sometimes what's right at one phase of life is not appropriate at another. You often can't know what you're supposed to do until you try a few things. Especially if you're thinking about entering a field that requires years of study, it's advisable to talk to people who are already doing it, and perhaps arrange to spend some time with them on the job, to see if your ideas match reality. You'd hate to invest years and tens of thousands of dollars in education only to find out when you finally arrive that the field wasn't what you were looking for at all.

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