[00:00:00] Foreign. [00:00:11] Welcome to Deep in your yoga practice. I am Lauren Leduc, the owner and founder of True Love Yoga in Kansas City, Missouri. And today we're exploring one of my favorite concepts in yoga philosophy. Because it's practical, insightful and surprisingly modern. We, we are talking about the gunas. So this episode is the gunas, understanding your inner weather. A yogic framework for energy, mood, motivation and balance. The gunas are often described as the three qualities of nature or the three forces that shape experience. [00:00:44] But I like to think of them as your inner weather. Just as the weather outside changes from day to day, the qualities moving through your body, mind, emotions and energy also change. Sometimes we feel clear and grounded, sometimes we are restless and scattered, and sometimes we're heavy and foggy and stuck. The gunas help us understand those shifts, not so that we can judge them, but so that we can work with them more skillfully. So where did the gunas come from? The gunas emerged in the Samkhya karika around the 4th century CE. [00:01:19] And Samkhya is one of the oldest philosophical systems in India and it deeply influenced yoga, especially Patanjali's yoga Sutras. Samkhya philosophy has some big questions. It addresses one being, why do humans suffer? Also, what creates experience itself? And how does consciousness become entangled within the world? So Samkhya has some ideas or answers for this in that it describes reality as consisting of two things, one, Purusha and two, prakriti. Purusha is pure awareness. [00:01:55] It is the witness of all experiences. And it's what we would call consciousness itself, maybe cosmic consciousness, pure consciousness. And then Prakriti is nature, it's matter. So anything that is physical and it's everything that changes. So reality is made up of these two forces, this pure awareness versus nature or spirit and matter, Purusha and Prakriti. So again, Prakriti is nature, matter, anything that changes. And then the gunas are the fundamental qualities of this. They're the fundamental qualities of Prakriti. Everything in nature, everything that changes, everything that is, consists of the gunas. So that means everything, including our bodies, our thoughts, our emotions, our habits, our relationships, our societies. And the gunas embody these different qualities within matter. We're not trying to eliminate or demonize necessarily any of these gunas. They're all necessary and we learn to recognize them and discern them and know maybe which situation calls for each one and understand more about ourselves as we study these qualities. So what are the three gunas? We'll go into the first which is Sattva. This is clarity and balance and harmony. Sattva is this quality of sweetness, of lightness, of ease. It's clarity, wisdom, balance, harmony, steadiness. Sattva feels like waking up feeling rested and your mind is clear, when you can respond rather than react, when you feel very connected and present and grounded. So in practice, sattva can show up as, as easeful concentration, as curiosity, as the scent of contentment, as insight. So in your daily life, this might look or feel like being fully present with your pet or your child, maybe taking a mindful walk. Perhaps it's having a meaningful conversation with someone that really fills your soul. Maybe it's being in meditation, maybe it's finding a flow state through your work or your hobbies. Sometimes sattva is mistaken for happiness, but it's not really that it can coexist alongside grief, alongside challenge, alongside uncertainty. The difference is that we just feel clarity even while experiencing these other things. So the different practices that can cultivate Sattva are meditation, pranayama, maybe balanced asana, practice, maybe it's time in nature, meaningful connection, adequate sleep. It allows us to meet difficulty with Clari, preparedness, with groundedness, with health. The next quality or guna is called rajas. And this is more fiery. This is movement, this is drive. Sometimes this is agitation or rage. So rajas is activity and movement. It's ambition, it's desire, it's stimulation, it's that forward momentum you can feel into rajas within your own being. When you're feeling energized, when you're feeling motivated, maybe driven and creative and productive. So while rajas might have a bad rep sometimes, without it nothing would really happen, no goals would be pursued, there wouldn't be much growth that occurs. Rajas is what's needed to get out of bed. We can think of rajas as maybe the sympathetic nervous system, maybe cortisol, maybe it's that cup of coffee in the morning. But like all things, rajas can also show up in excess. And our modern world is practically designed to increase and agitate rajas. [00:05:50] So this might be through things like constant notifications and social media, productivity, culture and capitalism, endless news cycles, maybe this need to multitask. So we might have a bit of excess rajas in our beings. When we're feeling anxiety, irritability, restlessness, rage, maybe this inability to relax, maybe we're doom scrolling, overworking, over controlling. When we talk about rajas, we're talking about, you know, motivation and drive and desire, things that aren't necessarily bad. But we shouldn't mistake them for sick. And while it's needed, this constant activation of Rajas isn't something that is sustainable. It's something that needs to be balanced. So when rajas is excessive, we might need to take longer exhales, we might need to slow our movement. Maybe we need restorative yoga or nature, maybe simplifying our commitments. Maybe we need some time to process and journal, maybe to cry, maybe to have important conversations. So rajas isn't bad. It's just fire. [00:07:02] And the question is whether you're using the fire or are you being consumed by it. So balance is key. The last guna is Tamas. Tamas is stability and inertia and stuckness. It's an earthy, thick quality. It's heaviness, stability, density, rest and inertia. A healthy Tamas is very important. We can, especially in this culture, demonize or villainize Thomas, but without it, we wouldn't be able to sleep, we wouldn't be able to heal, we couldn't recover. So healthy Thomas looks like the ability to sleep deeply, to find recovery to ground and to find stillness as well. But when Tamas is in excess, this can show up as brain fog, as avoidance, numbness, maybe stagnation, procrastination, disconnection. You can think of it as couch rotting. So this might be binge watching shows when you're exhausted or withdrawing from life, maybe feeling a sense of stuckness without an ability to move. So if, of course, we need Tamas, but when it shows up in excess like this, we need things like movement and sunlight, we need community, we need dynamic practice, maybe breath work. We might need a little more Rajas in our life, definitely more satva in our life. And I'll say we don't need to judge Tamas when we're feeling it in excess either. Sometimes when we feel laziness, it's actually this sense of burnout or a depletion. So when we work with the Gunas, it invites us to get curious before we get judgmental about how we're feeling and how we're responding to things. Know that while I was describing Sattva rajas, Thomas, you might identify with one more than the other, but know that they're not really personality types. You might think you're a Rajasic person or Tamasic or sattvic, but the gunas are not identities. They're actually these conditions, their patterns. They're like internal weather systems. So it's important to know that with this internal weather that we aren't the storm, we aren't even the sunshine, we're not the fog, we are actually the awareness observing it. So in Samkhya philosophy it would be the purusha observing the prakriti which is made up of these gunas that are ever shifting, ever turning. So as we practice yoga, asanas, meditation, pranayama, it helps us identify more with this witness self more with the soul, more with that which does not change. And then we can observe these changing of qualities and weather, maybe with compassion as well. So you might relate to the gunas in your everyday life. What guna is feeling strongest right now? If rajas is dominating, maybe you need fewer inputs, maybe you need a slower pace and more grounding. If tamas dominates, maybe you need movement, maybe you need sunlight, light, challenge, maybe connection. And as satva is present, can we take a moment to appreciate it? Can we take time to nurture it as well? So you don't necessarily have to ask when something feels off, what is wrong with me? But you could ask what qualities are present right now? We can become aware of this. We can meet them with compassion rather than judgment. And then we can make choices that are empowering and intentional and healing in our lives. The gunas help us replace self judgment with self understanding. I think the gunas absolutely matter in modern times. Sometimes modern culture gives us these two options. To optimize everything in our lives or to collapse. And it doesn't feel like there's much in between. But the gunas offer something that's more nuanced. They help explain burnout, anxiety, lethargy, focus, creativity and balance. They're not medical diagnoses, but they are lenses, they're maps, they are ways of understanding experience. [00:11:13] And as we're observing these, we don't have to find perfection or this permanent feeling of sattva, but we can cultivate awareness and understanding. The gunas remind us that our inner experience is constantly changing, that some days will be clear and some will be fiery, some will be foggy. And none of those states are who we are. The practice is not controlling the weather, but it's lear to love on it, to relate to it wisely, and to become more intentional, more present and more conscious in our everyday life. So instead of asking what is wrong with me, you might start asking what qualities are moving through me today? And this small shift might change everything. So thank you so much for listening to this episode today. If you'd like to learn more about yogic philosophy, I am happy to go into so many other subjects with you. I hope you have a great, beautiful week full of Sattva. Om Shanti, Om. Peace.