How the 3 Gunas work (Part 1)

If you’re constantly feeling low, bored or sad, Hinduism might have an answer to why.

See, just like you have personal qualities like kindness or stubbornness, Prakriti (i.e. nature) is made up of three qualities, too.

We call them the three gunas - Tamas, Rajas & Sattva. We all have all 3 of them & they’re like 3 strings that keep your soul connected to your body.

Tamas is the friend in college who asks you to bunk class & chill in the park doing nothing. If you have a lot of tamas, you’ll feel lethargic, bored, uninterested in anything, and sleepy all the time. Oddly enough, Tamas is not all bad - in small quantities, it helps you get the sleep & rest you deserve, otherwise, you’ll burn out.

Rajas is the friend in college who convinces you to start a business. If you have rajas, you’ll be motivated, ambitious & full of motion or action. Interestingly, a lot of Rajas lead to anxiety, jitteriness & disappointment after failure.

That’s why you have Sattva - the sober guy who encourages you to focus in class & studies with you. Sattva helps you be calm, level-headed & wise in the long term.

By hanging out with more sattva, your soul gets to climb up faster but as Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, at some point, you also need to leave sattva behind, along with all the other strings holding you back, to reach him.

Now the food you eat does affect the levels of these 3 gunas in your body.