Spring and the Gunas
Spring is a-springing, bringing with it reminders of what came before (shorter days, cooler temperatures, cold winds) and tempting us with what is to come. And how does that make you feel? The promise and then the actual witnessing of new growth is usually quite life-affirming. Dead-looking branches sprout new growth, birds return and we are ushered outside. The inertia of winter gives way to the movement and creativity of Spring and the ‘sitting down, inside’ we have all perhaps been doing in winter becomes an urge to ‘walk about, outside’.
There’s a name for this ‘urge’ in yoga. It has to do with the gunas — tamas, rajas and sattva. These three universal elemental forces are in constant interplay, without us giving them a moment’s thought. We can spend so much time inside, on our seat that we forget we weren’t born into the earth but we all come from it. Connecting to the gunas is remembering our connection to the natural order of things. Once we start to remember, we can connect more fully to nature and each other, as simply different expressions of universal energy.
The lotus is a good example of the three gunas at work — tamas at the roots connected to the earth, rajas to be able to grow to the surface of the water and create a blossom, and the blossom itself pure perfection, reaching up to the space above, balanced and aware.
Tamas is the quality of inertia. Tamas represents darkness, heaviness, and resistance. It provides stability and grounding for us - I mean what would we do without sleep? Leaning into this energy too much, though can make us lazy, fixated and single-minded.
Rajas the quality of activity — think energy, passion, movement, and change. We need rajas for action and transformation. You can guess what too much rajas does — it creates agitation, stress and burnout.
Sattva: the quality of harmony — imagine a flower, a leaf, the structure of a tree, water underneath waves, a bird flying, a person standing upright in samasthiti and there you have sattva; balance, harmony, clarity, homeostasis. You can see why we all might want a bit more of that — being in a state that allows everything to function well and for you to see life clearly.
While the three gunas are present outside of the vessel we call our body, throughout each day we experience internal fluctuations of these three qualities. In a basic sense, sleep is tamasic, work and daily chores need rajas and we hope to have sattva close by helping us be consciously responding to life. A traditional yoga practice typically incorporates all three gunas to encourage this overall or close by sattvic state to enable being fully present in your life. Yet how does it achieve this when everyone arrives up the stairs with their own energetic predisposition on the day? As you will experience, each class is a balance of grounding, activating and pacifying elements. You might say a nice balance between effort and ease, between strength and flexibility – Sthirum Sukham Asanam – so that we might get more practiced in ‘taking our seat’ into an internal sattvic state.
Last month’s article asked us to reflect on Time like this - how conscious are we to the shift in all parts of nature – that of course doesn’t get its cues by chronological time, but instead by the feeling of the air, the feeling of the soil, the feeling of the light. Connecting to the gross natural elements via our senses is easy to do in Spring and is a nice way to notice our internal gunas - what we consciously see, hear, smell, feel and taste is a vital way to nourish our prana. Next time we practice together maybe notice something outside before you enter the building — the air temperature, a birdsong, a leaf or blossom, a puddle, a smile and remember that all of it is you.
Related articles: Olga Kabel on the Polyvagal Theory and the Gunas