Do you find it difficult to concentrate, battle with your will power, suffer from indecisiveness, or feel ill at ease?  Maybe you are even plagued by thoughts of anxiety, attachment, jealousy, anger, or selfishness.  Most of us are, from time to time.  But, most us are also reaching and searching for that magic space that takes us beyond these limitations and unfolds focus, mental strength, clarity, and peace.  We are searching for sattva.

Sattva is clarity, intelligence, luminosity, patience, love, and peace, and is associated with a balanced pitta mind.  Rajas is desire, fluctuation, reactivity, and movement and associated with imbalanced vata.  Tamas is cloudiness, dullness, depression, and inertia and associated with imbalanced kapha.  We are all born with our unique proportion of these mental doshas — our manas prakruti — which is subject to change, and becomes manas vikruti, as we think, feel, act, and react in the world.

Breath work, meditation, discipline in our minds, and love in hearts are all ways to sattva, but let’s not forget about something much simpler, something that we have to do daily anyway for our survival – eat.  Our food has sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic qualities that unfold these qualities in our minds or our mental dosha and directly affect how we think and feel.  In Ayurveda, the end-product of properly digested food is pure consciousness, so it makes sense that we eat to nourish not just our physical bodies, but our minds, and ultimately our consciousness.  In every sense of the phrase, we really are what we eat!

The straightest way to sattva is double-arrowed attention, where we observe our thoughts, feelings, and emotions as fluctuations or waves on the surface of the ocean, whose darkest depth is calm like the stillness of our souls.  To quote my teacher, “emotion is nothing more than our present reaction to past experience.”  So, if we keep the image of our still soul in our minds and our minds in the present, we may bask in the brilliance of sattva.

Though developing this double-arrowed attention is conceptually simple, as most truths are, it takes constant practice and is much easier said than done.  We can definitely, however, make our path easier by choosing foods with sattvic qualities.  Here are a few simple guidelines:

  1. Eat fresh, and don’t overeat.  Light, fresh food is full of prana and will yield sattvic qualities in the mind.  Processed food and leftovers have little prana and are tamasic.
  2. Mind the key pitta aggravators.  Sour, fermented, and spicy foods are rajasic.
  3. Most fresh, sweet, fruit is considered sattvic.
  4. Nightshades (such as potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplant) are considered rajasic, while mushrooms, garlic, and onion are tamasic.
  5. Raw milk, soft cheese, and ghee are sattvic.  Aged cheese is tamasic.
  6. The darker a legume or seed, the more tamasic, for example. yellow split mung beans vs. urad dal.
  7. The heavier a grain the more tamasic.  For example, whole wheat and brown rice are more tamasic than white basmati rice or quinoa.
  8. Raw honey and raw sugar are sattvic, artificial and processed sweetner is rajasic, and molasses is tamasic.
  9. Herbal tea is sattvic, coffee or caffeinated tea rajasic, and alcohol and drugs tamasic.
  10. Fish and chicken are rajasic and darker meats tamasic. No meat is considered sattvic.

In addition to these general guidelines, it is important to be mindful of how food is grown, harvested and prepared.  The degree of sattva, rajas, and tamas in our food is greatly influenced by the energetics of these processes.  A vegetable harvested from our own garden, grown with love and tenderness, is full of sattva — and we can taste it!

So, besides mental discipline, we now have another means to change our mental state.  We need not be victims of our thinking.  We are empowered to affect our mental dosha by choosing foods that reflect the qualities we want to manifest in our minds.

But, before we go sattva crazy (seriously, there is such a thing as too much sattva), I should mention the merits of rajas and tamas.  They get a bad rap but they are truly necessary to daily living.  Rajas motivates us to action, without which we wouldn’t have any desire to get up from padmasana and do anything.  Tamas calms us for the evening and allows us to get a good night’s rest so that we can rejuvenate our bodies and minds.  And so we come back to the idea of balance: in addition to balanced vata, pitta, and kapha, we need to nurture balanced sattva, rajas, and tamas.

An imbalanced vata constitution that can’t sleep at night, chatters a mile a minute, and forgets what they were saying 6 times in that minute has too much rajas.  Such a person needs some tamas so that they can even approach sattva.  There is a good type of tamas found in a heavy, oily, slimy, grounding avocado (all kapha qualities), a heavier grain and darker legume that would be medicine for this vata elevation.  Likewise, a depressed, lethargic kapha imbalance needs some rajas, like some green tea, so that they are motivated to turn off the TV, live their life, and reach for sattva.

Those with pitta natures are blessed with the focus, comprehension, and patience that lends itself well to a sattvic state.  However, pitta aggravation can turn sattva into judgement and righteous indignation.  Their hot temper and sharp tongue may need to be cooled and dulled with something like a nice cool, fleshy young coconut.

So remember, sattva is not an end in itself to be pursued single-pointedly.  It relies on a balance achieved between rajas and tamas, in which we create space for sattva to unfold.  It’s important to recognize where we are right now, know that we have the tools to get where we want to be, and medicate appropriately with the correct doses of sattva, rajas, and tamas.  Food can be that medicine, and now you know a little more about how to use it.

– Nisha Khanna, M.D.

 

© 2013 Nisha Khanna.  All rights reserved.  Please note that this content is intended for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.