The Gunas: Rajas

The Gunas are the ingredients in the meal of prakriti. The gunas are the components of all matter which means that everyone, everything, and every place is a mixture of all three of these gunas of which are tamas, rajas, and sattva. Tamas is dark and inert, rajas is active and passionate, and sattva is tranquil and clear. You can consider the gunas in the time of day, the season, the weather, the earth, the sun, the moon, your age, your thoughts, your feelings, types of food, and this list is literally everything. Usually one guna is dominant which is neither good nor bad, it just is, for example: the earth is tamasic in nature, the sun, rajasic, and the moon, sattvic. What can be helpful is to observe the gunas in all things so that we can be aware of them in our own selves and better manage them. At the end of the day, all the gunas are bondage, yet, if we can sprinkle in more sattva in our recipe, we have more opportunity to experience ourselves as the light of divinity.

Today we will investigate rajas. The light side of rajas qualities are described as being: active, passionate, energetic, driven, determined, and dynamic. The dark side of rajas can be described as: selfish, greedy, egoic, restless, compulsive, never satisfied, and attached to outcome. It seems to me that American society missed the boat on understanding this nature completely. We could consider childhood a rajasic period in our timeline, so rather than balance this with just a bit of tamasic/sattvic actviites, we slam an 8 hour school day on our children, comprised mainly of sitting, swallowing, and regurgitating, oh and don’t forget to sit down and do your homework. Children are molded and manipulated into adults who are taught that bigger is better, more is what will eventually get you to happy, and right now is not as important as 10 years from now. This sounds like a recipe for a society of rajas stew. And if everyone is all hopped up on rajas stew, we get an explosive excretion of narcissistic road ragers all on a trip to power and money. Call in Big Pharma to save the day (or so we are brainwashed to believe) to serve up some tamas dessert by way of pills and prescriptions.

Rather than continue to add to our recipe, yoga prescribes we can begin to strip away. Perhaps the type of rajas that would result in understanding less is more, would be the action of cleaning and decluttering. Or the rajas to combat bigger is not better, would be the effort involved in driving further to visit the local farmer, rather than contribute to the domination of Walmart. Yoga guides us to observe the state of our being after the action. If the action leads to an addiction to action, we must take note. For when we identify ourselves with only our action, we become lost to the dark side of rajas. Let us fuel our own rajasic fire with right and intentional action to burn away all impurities and reveal our real divine selves.

Dearest Reader,

Thank you for your time and interest. Understanding ourselves and the way we operate is essential to being responsible for our own well-being and therefor the well being of all.

So much love,

Andrea Dawn