#174 The Three Guṇas: Understanding the Energies That Shape Our Lives

The ancient Yogic teachings describe three fundamental qualities that shape our experience of life: tamas (inertia), rajas(activity), and sattva (clarity).

In this short contemplation, we explore the guṇas not as labels or personality types, but as ever-changing movements within the mind and body. As we learn to recognise these patterns, we can respond with greater wisdom, balance, and presence.

If you'd like to dive deeper into this topic, I've created a longer companion video  on Substack, where we continue exploring the guṇas through the lens of Jñāna Yoga, meditation, and everyday life. I'd also love to hear your thoughts over there. If this is a topic you'd like me to unpack further, leave a comment and let's keep the conversation going.

Listen/watch the longer video on Substack:
https://yogaheartmind.substack.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hey everyone. So today I would love for us to explore in yoga what is called the three gunas. Now we're gonna kind of just dip our toes in it for our podcast listeners. And for those of you that are picking up what I'm putting down and you want to dig even deeper, you can then continue on for the full episode over on Substack with us. But for those of you tuning in on the podcast, you'll get a little, you'll plant some seeds, you'll get a taste of what I'm talking about. And again, if you want to dig deeper, just click on the link below and come join us over on Substack. So the three gunas you can think of as in yoga, in yoga we've got this dance between Purusha, pure awareness, and pakriti, form, matter. And the three gunas is a part of pakriti, the three qualities that make up form. Okay. Metaphorically, you can think of them as three strands that make up an integral, workable, robust rope. So one of those strands is Rajas. Think of Rajas as vitality, as willpower, as passion, it's movement. The polarity to Rajas is tamas. Tamaz being at its unregulated state, it is inertia. It is inertia, it is fatigue, it is this stymied, sluggish, flat energy. Okay. When tamas is regulated and healthy, it is grounded. Yeah, grounded. But when it's unregulated, it is heavy. Heavy, thick, unmoving. The third strand is satva or spelt sattva, but often pronounced satva. Now sattva is calm, light, equanimity. Not quite Purusha, it's still pakriti, it's still a guna, it's still form, it's still the three gunas. But it is heading towards a calm, a feeling of lightness, a feeling of enlightenment. Yeah. So what is very, very common in the human experience is for us to yo-yo from Rajas to tamas. Okay, so many of us in modern day living, we're out of the balance, we're out of the Tao, we're out of the flow, and we're always, it seems, pushing towards Rajas. So just check this out for a moment. The classic scenario of getting up and going straight for a coffee. That is our attempt, and it's pretty effective actually, to go from tamas, which is sleepy, stagnant, inert, to rajas, which is energized. So we wake up, naturally, we are in a tamassic state. And we will be drawn to something to shake loose that tamas. So coffee is effective. But once again, we are very, very good at becoming imbalanced. So a lot of this comes down to timing. And a lot of modern-day science is backing that if you can just hold off that caffeine intake until you've had a more natural cortisol spike with the sunrise and morning sunlight exposure. That naturally gets our healthy cortisol spike flowing. But if we get ahead of ourself and spike it with premature intake of caffeine, it can throw us into an imbalanced spiral. And that's what leads us to just cortisol spike after cortisol spike. Many people are going from coffee in one hand, vape or cigarettes in the other hand, while chewing nicotine, while on various amphetamines and ambion, and while over stimulating ourselves with technology, and it's just rajas, rajas, rajas, rajas, rajas. And we're starting to hear a lot about this with modern day science of showing that we're we're addicted to these constant streams of dopamine pits. So actually, we can bring in healthy tamas to balance out all of that Rajas. And if we don't do it mindfully, intentionally, nature will do it for us. Which was the case for me, as it's to be the case for many of you. For me, I have always pushed Rajas to the limit. Always, my whole life, just going hard. Then nature, the gunas, pakriti, balanced me out fiercely with burnout after burnout, injury after injury, illness as well, which forces us into tamas, hopefully into sattva as well, relaxation, calm. Yeah. But if we push Rajas too hard, we will burn out. Tamas, we will hit the wall, depression, all of that is excessive tamas. So this is actually a really helpful map, an energetic map to help us dance with the gunas. And yes, if you've you've dipped your toes in Ayurveda, there there are some parallels between the doshas, pitta, bata, tuffa, and the gunas. Just a few parallels, and they actually do complement one another nicely. Which, if you go back to my previous a few episodes back with my episode with Dr. Harsh, we talk quite a bit about that. And while I'm talking about Dr. Harsh, we're bringing him over from India this October for a bunch of workshops at Centerspace. So check that out. That's all online now. If you're digging this conversation of balancing our energy, Ayurveda is all about that. Yoga is all about that. And for whatever reason, we just haven't had that awareness in the West. We've been very, very good at just going hard, guns blazing, coffee blazing, and then we to equal even if we look at our drug and alcohol habits in our culture, naturally, if we are going rudious all day long. So alcohol, for example, is a depressant. It's not a stimulant, it's a depressant. It is tammusic. Yeah. You might initially feel a bit giddy and a bit, you know, what it's like to get tipsy and then drunk, but that is a tamassick. So it brings us back down. I'm not saying it's a good thing. I gotta really be discerning with my alcohol intake. And yeah, if I have too much, even just more than one, it throws me off. I'm just too sensitive to it these days. I'm just saying objectively, no, it's no wonder why alcohol is so prevalent in our culture. If we are caffeine, nicotine, amphetamine all day long, we're probably gonna want to reach for something to bring in the tamas. Yeah. Maybe have a little glimpse of sattva if we're doing it well, you know, if it's good quality alcohol and you haven't taken it too far. Maybe, maybe there's an uplifted state of equanimity, which, yeah, I'm not poo-pooing alcohol. I think some people can do it well. If we look at some cultures, you know, in some parts of Europe and some parts of Asia, some of these blue zones, a lot of these thriving, happy, healthy, elderly people, they have had a drink or two every day. But again, timing and set and setting. A lot of them are doing it in social settings, a lot of them are doing it out in the sunshine. You know what I'm saying? So, timing, yeah. So we can even feel that in our nutrition. We can feel that in our nutrition. So as we become more and more sophisticated with our awareness of the gunas, we can actually be more wise and discerning with what we feed the body. So naturally, if we're anxious, stressed, going hard with Rajas, because unhealthy Rajas, imbalanced Rajas is anxiety. It's anxiety. Healthy Rajas, that's healthy passion, healthy motivation. So when Rajas is running hot, running imbalanced, we gotta watch our tendency to actually exacerbate that. Again, too much coffee, too much sugar, too much spicy food, and we will be drawn to things that push it, push it, push it. Similarly, with tamas, with folks that are excessive in tamas and they're obese and they have trouble getting off the couch, they have trouble getting moving, there very well may be an unconscious pull to tamasic foods. So, you know, deep fried potato chips, fries in canola oil doesn't get much more tamasic, just ooh. And it doesn't actually fill us up, so we just keep eating it. This deep fried carps, tammus, tam us, tammus, and it's very hard, as we see in our culture, to shake that loose. To shake that loose into healthy rajas, healthy sattva. So when we go to somewhere like the ashrams, the ashram I go to, they have a real emphasis. Okay, so I'll just stop this here for our podcast listeners. If if you're digging this and you want to dig deeper, click the link down below, join me on Substack. But for those of you here with me on Substack, let's keep digging in deeper into this, and then we'll do a meditation in a moment. So the