Before the Tower Falls

Jenga provides a surprisingly good way to understand how Āyurveda views health and disease. While we often focus on the moment when the tower finally comes crashing down, Āyurveda tells a more interesting story through everything that happened before it.

At the start of the game, the tower is solid. You can remove a block without anything dramatic happening, which gives you every reason to remove another, and then another. Eventually there are gaps throughout the structure and perhaps a slight lean that wasn’t there before. Still, the tower continues to stand because it has an extraordinary ability to redistribute the load and adapt to what you are doing to it. But not without a cost.

Our bodies behave remarkably similarly.

We can eat poorly for a while, sleep too little, work too much, live under constant stress, exercise too much—or too little, ignore digestive changes, or continue any number of habits that aren't good for us. For some time, we get away with it. The body adapts and compensates, and because nothing has obviously gone wrong, we naturally assume that everything is fine.

Āyurveda has a word for these factors, nidāna, often translated as "cause." Diet can be a nidāna, but so can sleep, activity, stress, climate, season, environment, and the ordinary habits we repeat every day.

What makes this interesting is that a nidāna doesn't necessarily produce an immediate symptom. Like removing another Jenga block, the structure adapts around it.

Over time, however, Āyurveda describes a progression in which the doṣas accumulate and become aggravated, agni (our digestive fire) can change, and disturbances eventually begin to affect the tissues and areas of the body that are already vulnerable. This unfolding of the disease process is called samprāpti. It shows us that disease does not necessarily begin when symptoms appear, but can have a much longer history attached to it.

At some point, without our knowing, that final block is removed, and the tower falls.

Because that was the last thing that happened, we blame the block, and with our health we often play a similar blame game: the meal before digestive discomfort, the stressful week before high blood pressure, the unusually hot weather before skin eruptions, or the awkward movement before a back injury.

This distinction matters because putting the last block back isn't necessarily the same as rebuilding the tower, which is one reason Āyurveda tends to ask questions that may initially seem unrelated to the problem. We want to know about food, digestion, sleep, activity, age, environment, season, and habits because we're trying to understand how the body arrived at where it is now, rather than looking only at recent symptoms.

For me, this is also one of the more useful ways to understand prevention. We don't have to wait until something qualifies as disease before paying attention; we can notice the small changes while the body is still adapting and ask what might be causing a gradual shift.

The fact that the Jenga tower is still standing doesn't mean the structure hasn't changed, and perhaps our bodies deserve the same consideration.