Food Mind and Sacred Life - Ayurveda’s Amazing Mind Balancing Food Suggestions
According to Ayurveda, our mind is composed of three essential qualities known as “gunas.” These are the inherent vibrations, or qualities, of all material objects, including food.
1. Rajas, represents energy
2. Tamas, represent inertia
3. Sattwa, represents balance
Varying quantities of intelligence (sattva), energy (rajas), and mass (tamas), in varied groupings, act on one another, and through their mutual interaction and inter-dependence, a world of diversity and matter, from subtle (space) to gross (earth), is born.
In the human being, the three qualities are witnessed through the workings of the mind. From imagination to ideas to expression of complex beliefs and concepts — the mind expresses itself through the interplay of the three gunas. This point is further clarified in the descriptions below.
Sattva Guna: Sattva guna is expressed in the cosmos through the luminosity of light, power of reflection, harmony, balance, goodness, knowledge, and purity. When sattva emerges in our minds, we experience inner clarity, pleasure, purity of being, contentment, intrinsic peacefulness, and a desire to be noble, good, and godly and to share and to care for others.
Rajas Guna: Rajas guna is the principle of motion. When in excess, it produces pain, both physical and emotional. Restless activity, feverish effort, and nonstop stimulation are its manifestations. It is mobile and energizing. Rajas expresses itself in the bold strokes of passion, action, change, movement, activity and compulsion, not to mention agitation and turbulence.
Tamas Guna: In tamas, both light and movement are absent. Tamas literally means darkness; it is the principle of inertia. It produces apathy and indifference. Ignorance, sloth, confusion, bewilderment, passivity, and negativity are its results. Ambiguity, lack of initiative, incomprehension, and the inability to see through mental confusions and emerge from self-delusions (sometimes despite counseling, teaching, and handholding) are characteristics of a tamas dominant mind.
Ayurveda informs us that food provides much more than physical sustenance for the body. Since food (like everything else in the universe) is also made up of the three cosmic qualities (gunas), food shapes and shifts the mind, influencing our ability to think and to conceptualize. Therefore, we can choose our foods mindfully to reap a calmer mind.
Ayurveda emphasizes the importance of eating sattvic food to support a peaceful, elevated state of mind. For food to be sattvic, it must be eaten in the right measure, be balanced in its qualities, and always eaten fresh, meaning it must be recently harvested and recently cooked.
Sattvic foods: Sattvic foods: These foods make the mind relaxed and serene, are full of life force (prana), are cooked in ghee (clarified butter) mainly, and are light and easy to digest, yet they impart stability and strength to the body. Organic vegetables and ripe fruits are never eaten out of season, so seasonal awareness is important in constructing a sattvic diet. Enough fragrant spices are added to make the recipe optimum for digestion (how- ever, spices must not cause burning sensation or heartburn, so moderation is advised). Among salts, only rock salt, or what is also known as Himalayan pink salt, is considered sattvic. Rock salt should be used with care, since sattvic foods are generally on the low spectrum of saltiness, rather than the high end. Nuts and seeds also impart sattva and work as great sattvic snacks. Raw honey, sweet fruits, and all-natural (non- fermented) grains are also important ingredients of a sattvic meal plan. Cow’s milk is considered the most sattvic milk in Ayurveda (versus goat, sheep, or buffalo), especially if taken from cows raised in a peaceful environment. Cow milk– derived natural butter, cottage cheese, and yogurt (sweetened with natural sugar) are also considered sattvic.
Food can take on a sattvic energy when it is mindfully sourced and cooked peacefully with attention to freshness, hygiene, and personal spiritual vibration and consumed with gratitude and spiritual awareness, without speed or greed (and without waste). Since plant-based foods digest easily and do not clog the body’s bio-channels, they are considered more sattvic than eggs, meat, and fish. Naturally, simply cooked foods will be more sattvic than overly processed foods. Fruits and raw vegetables possess maximum sattva; however, digestibility is an issue, so light cooking (such as steaming or sautéing in ghee) makes food sparkle with sattva. Therefore, Ayurveda recommends cooked foods over an exclusively raw diet.
Rajasic foods: Rajasic foods overstimulate and irritate the body and mind because of inherent or added properties such as excessive pungency, sourness, or saltiness along with undue hotness, sharpness, and roughness (dryness), often overly stimulating the gastric enzymes. From this logic, garlic is a naturally occurring rajasic food, and adding chili sauce or wine to any recipe will add rajasic qualities. These spicy, alkaline, and salty foods include what we call processed foods, junk food, and fast food, as well as alcohol or caffeine, and even small amounts of marijuana or other drugs. A diet that is largely vegetarian, but nevertheless cooked with excessive salt and burning spices and consumed along with caffeine, alcohol, or soda, or in hurried manner, will be rajasic.
Tamasic foods: These are foods that lack prana (energy) and are harmful to mind and body. They include foods that are stale (lacking freshness), putrid (foul smelling), or excessively heavy due to being overly fatty. Eating meat is recommended in Ayurveda to improve physical strength, but a diet that is dominated by meat will increase tamasic qualities — this is especially true of old, canned, or frozen meats, versus organic meats that are cooked fresh and consumed in moderate or low quantity. All meat and egg recipes do impart some heaviness and even dullness in body and mind, especially when eaten in excess. Sometimes that can be a good thing, such as when we want the mind to slow down or we want to sleep.
Classifying all vegetarian foods as “sattvic” (and by that logic, all vegetarians as sattvic beings) and all spice and garlic eaters as rajasic, and all meats and meat eaters as tamasic is an extreme generalization, and Ayurveda has never made this crude mistake. People eat the foods they eat due to geographical-cultural reasons, and above all, based on what foods (plant or animal) were historically available in plenty.
Hence, Ayurveda makes no moral assumptions about vegetarianism being somehow superior. Rather, it is the way food (plant- or animal-based) is procured (ethically or not), cooked and consumed (mindfully or not) with other ingredients (old or fresh, and calming, exciting, or dulling), that has the most impact.
I like this approach; it elevates this concept beyond the meat-versus-vegetable debate (since Ayurveda says that both are sentient anyway). This is a mature ideology, in my opinion.
By this logic, a person who follows a sattvic diet will develop a sattvic frame of mind, and a person with a sattvic frame of mind will prefer the sattvic foods that increases the vital force, energy, strength, appetite, and health. This is true of rajas also: rajasic people prefer foods that are sour, salty, hot, and pungent and foods that cause pain, bitterness, ill health, and a temperamental mind. Tamasic people are naturally drawn to food that is old, stale, canned, dirty, or very heavy. It may be surprising to learn that foods have this kind of influence over your thoughts and state of mind, but it is true. It’s a fact. And I am witness to this fact day after day in my work.
I hope you will feel inspired to craft sattvic meals!
Enjoy,
Acharya Shunya
Excerpted from Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom: A Complete Prescription to Optimize Your Health, Prevent Disease, and Live with Vitality and Joy, by Acharya Shunya. Sounds True, February 2017. Reprinted with permission.
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About the Author
Author of Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom (Sounds True, 2017), Acharya Shunya is an internationally recognized spiritual teacher who awakens health and consciousness through Ayurveda lifestyle and Vedic spiritual teachings. She is the Founder of Vedika Global, a wisdom school and spiritual community, and is President of the California Association of Ayurvedic Medicine and Author of Bestselling Book Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom. In 2015, Shunya was recognized as one of the Top 100 teachers of Ayurveda and Yoga in America by Spirituality & Health Magazine. For more information, please visit her website and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.
