Reading What We Cannot See
What Ayurveda's metaphors are actually doing
I was listening to an audiobook last week: How to Fight a Hydra by Josh Kaufman. It’s a short listen, about an hour and a half. A fictional story on the surface. But you know as you’re listening that it’s not really about the story, but rather what lives underneath it belongs to all of us. A lone hero sets out to fight a mythical hydra, a creature that grows back two heads for every one you cut down. A story, in the simplest terms, about someone choosing to do something hard and not giving up. And I think that’s exactly why it works. We can all relate to the hero because, on some level, we all want to be that hero. The whole book is a metaphor. And somehow, that makes it more alive, not less.
But that’s not what stopped me.
It was the author’s note at the end. Kaufman mentions he came to writing this book from years of research on productivity. And in that research, something kept nagging at him: procrastination and anxiety are universal problems, but permanent solutions are elusive. Why? That question eventually led him to a book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson called Metaphors We Live By. Their idea is actually pretty simple: the metaphors we use to think about everyday situations shape how we approach them. Change the metaphor, and suddenly different solutions become possible.
This thought rang a loud bell of resonance in me.
Because what he was pointing at, I think, is that the way we frame a problem determines what we can even imagine as an answer. Frame it as a malfunction, and you look for a fix. Frame it as an imbalance, and you start looking for something else entirely.
And I immediately thought of Ayurveda. Because you see, Ayurveda is no stranger to metaphor. The science is replete with them.
I used to think the metaphors in Ayurveda were poetic. Nice, but decorative. The body as a kingdom. Digestion as fire. The mind disturbed like wind moving across water. Beautiful imagery, I thought. A teaching device to make an ancient text more readable. And yes, some are purely poetic. But a lot of them are more than decoration. And that took me a while to see.
The more I study the science, the more I see that the metaphors aren’t decoration. They are the science. Ayurveda doesn’t describe the body using fire and wind and rivers because it couldn’t find better words. It uses them because that’s genuinely how it understands the body to work. Many of them aren’t illustrations at all. They are the map itself.
And when I first came to this realization, it felt like a different way of understanding its foundations and that begs you to go deeper.
The science is extremely comprehensive. But it starts somewhere really simple, actually. We are made of five elements. Ether, air, fire, water, earth. We eat from the earth. We drink water. We breathe air. Everything we are built from came from those elements. And when we die, the body decomposes back into them.
The logic, I think, is this: Each element carries the same qualities wherever it appears. Fire is always hot. Always transforming. Always hungry for fuel. Whether it is burning in a forest or working inside a digestive system, those qualities don’t change. It can burn too strong. Or it can die out completely. It doesn’t matter where it is. The element behaves the same way.
I noticed this after a really heavy lunch. You know that feeling after eating way too much? All you want to do is sit on the couch. No energy to move, no desire to go anywhere. Everything just... dampened. A fire with too much wood on it.
So when we observe fire in the world, when we see how it moves and what it needs and what puts it out, we are actually learning something about the fire inside us too. When we see how rivers flow, how they get blocked, how they dry up, we are learning something about how things move inside the body.
The outer world and the inner world share the same building blocks.
This is what Ayurveda calls loka purusha samya. The macrocosm and the microcosm. What is outside is also inside.
I feel this living in Bangkok. The midday heat doesn’t just sit outside. After a while it builds inside too, and before long it’s translating as irritability, a short fuse, or restlessness I can’t fully explain. And the monsoon! When the heavy rains come, the heaviness isn’t just in the air. It settles into how you move and how you think. Nothing you did. Just the season arriving.
Because we are made of the same elements as the world outside, its qualities naturally move into us. Heat outside finds the heat inside. Heaviness in the air finds the heaviness in the body.
Something this simple shouldn’t carry this much weight. And yet.
And then there is this.
The body already knows how to work. It always has.
A newborn just knows how to suck to get milk. Nobody teaches it. The body knows how to heal a cut. It just does. There is an intelligence underneath all of it, quietly insisting. We didn’t create it. We can’t even fully explain it. But it is there.
I think what Ayurveda does is give us a way back into that conversation. To understand the language the body is already speaking. And that language, it turns out, is the language of nature.
That’s what the metaphors actually are. A way to read what we cannot see.
What modern medicine has achieved is genuinely astonishing. X-rays, CT scans, MRIs. It solved a problem that stumped healers for thousands of years. How do you see inside a living body? What those tools show us is structure. What they don’t always stop to ask is why.
And I think that gap matters. When we zoom in so far on symptoms that we stop asking what actually created the conditions for them, we are already thinking inside a frame we never consciously adopted. The body as a machine. Something broke. Find it. Fix it.
A machine doesn’t heal itself. An ecosystem does.
And this isn’t just philosophy, by the way. Ayurveda actually has a system of treatment built on exactly this. If the earth-element structures of the body are disordered, the treatment draws from earth-element substances in the external world: shells, minerals, plant matter rooted in soil. The outer world, used to restore the inner world.
And if the body is more like an ecosystem than a machine, healing looks less like repair and more like restoration. Of balance. Of flow.
I’m still learning all of this. These are my thoughts in progress. But I find myself more and more convinced that the way we see the body changes what we think is even possible for it.
Ayurveda offers a frame that feels, somehow, closer to the truth.
I think that’s what draws me to it. We didn’t lose the knowledge of how our bodies work. We only lost the language to hear it.
The most profound things are not discovered. They are remembered.
Sources
How to Fight a Hydra — Josh Kaufman (2017)
Metaphors We Live By — George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (1980)
Charaka Samhita — classical Ayurvedic text
Pancha Mahabhutas (five elements and body constitution): Sharira Sthana, Chapter 5 (Purusha Vichaya Sharira), verses 3-5
Loka purusha samya (microcosm and macrocosm): Sharira Sthana, Chapter 5 (Purusha Vichaya Sharira), verses 3-5, 7
Panchabhautika chikitsa (treatment based on elemental correspondence): Sharira Sthana, Chapter 5 (Purusha Vichaya Sharira), applied section; cross-reference Sharira Sthana 4/12
Thank you for writing this, Taran. Restoration, balance, flow…the way you write about it all really made so much sense, and the reframing was the perfect way to look at things. I love learning all of this from you! 🙏💕🫶
The map shapes what's possible, agreed, and that's the precise insight. The question the article raises but doesn't answer: once you have a map that can see something, how do you develop the instrument that actually reads it? Ayurveda's map points at the body's intelligence, the newborn knowing how to feed, the cut that heals itself. But that intelligence isn't accessed through the map alone. It requires developing a different relationship with what the body is already signaling. Which makes the closing line worth examining: "the most profound things are not discovered, they are remembered." In the Vedantic tradition Ayurveda sits within, this capacity isn't remembered, it's realized. Memory implies something once known and forgotten. Realization is direct access to what was always present. That's a different kind of recovery entirely, and a more demanding one.