Shirodhara temperature and duration

Two numbers define a session: the temperature of the oil and how long the stream runs. Both are adjusted to the presentation.

Temperature

The target is comfortably above body temperature, not hot. The classical instruction is that the oil should be sukhoshna, pleasantly warm, and that is as far as the Samhitas go: the degree figures below are contemporary clinical convention, not a classical protocol. Treated as working ranges rather than as thresholds, they are what practice has settled on:

Presentation	Working range	Character
Vata-predominant	38 to 40 °C	Warm, grounding
Pitta-predominant	36 to 38 °C	Barely above body heat, cooling in effect
Kapha-predominant	40 to 42 °C	Distinctly warm, mobilising

Test on the inner wrist, not the fingertips. Oil that reads as sharp or stinging is too hot, and the forehead is more sensitive than the hand.

The practical difficulty is that oil cools while it runs. Over a 40-minute session an unheated vessel will drop several degrees. Traditional practice handles this by working with an assistant who reheats and swaps oil; modern practice handles it either the same way, with a warmed pot, or with a heated reservoir.

Duration

Session lengths in common practice:

Presentation	Typical pour	Notes
Vata-predominant	40 to 45 minutes	The longest, to allow the state to settle
Pitta-predominant	30 to 40 minutes	Moderate
Kapha-predominant	25 to 30 minutes	Shortest, to avoid heaviness

Courses are usually run as a series rather than a single session, commonly 7 to 14 consecutive days in a clinical Panchakarma setting, or weekly in a spa context.

Why the stream must stay unbroken

The continuity is the point. An intermittent stream produces a startle response each time it resumes, which works against the settling the practice is aiming at. This is the single hardest part to maintain and the main reason the traditional setup uses a suspended vessel with a controlled orifice rather than pouring by hand.

Volume

A session uses considerably more oil than people expect, because the oil is recirculated rather than consumed. How much depends on the apparatus, and the two numbers in circulation are often quoted as though they were one.

A traditional dhara patra, filled and refilled by hand, runs on roughly half a litre to a litre. A vessel built to run a whole session without a refill holds more by design: the Surya Shirodhara takes about 1.5 litres per session, three 500 ml bottles, in a two litre vessel.

Either way almost all of it is recovered. The loss per session is what soaks into hair, cloth and the catch basin, not what is poured.