Blog 2 for Tokyo Center – 1 July, 2025
Diet and the Three Gunas
I just had lunch at an Indian restaurant here in Tokyo near our Sivananda yoga center. The food was OK for taste, and they had some vegetarian options, but the overall quality of the food was relatively low compared to the simple vegetarian diet we follow in the yoga community. It is somewhat difficult to find good quality vegetarian food in Tokyo as we have to travel far and pay a lot, or, as we normally do here in the center, cook for ourselves. I think that we can do Tokyo and all of Japan a great service through the yoga teaching, part of which is about what is the best diet for health and peace.
The classical yoga practice makes us aware of the importance of a light, healthful, vegetarian diet, without foods that dull or overstimulate our minds. How can this be? How can practicing yoga postures, etc., make us want to eat vegetarian? It is not known in this modern world that people choose their foods based on the three gunas or qualities of nature, namely tamas (darkness, ignorance), rajas (passion) and sattva (purity). These qualities determine our place in life as a dull (tamasic), driven (rajasic) or peaceful (sattvic) person.
Tamasic people may have to do low-paying jobs, as they lack the ambition (rajas) to drive themselves to achieve more education and work with determination to succeed. Rajasic people are ready to focus to achieve a goal and impose on themselves discipline for personal gain. Sattvic people have realized the highest purpose of human existence and work for the good of all. Yogis view life as a progression from tamas to rajas to sattva, which yoga helps to accelerate.
Regular yoga practice automatically creates more sattva in our minds, bringing us clarity and harmony. This new-found treasure of health and happiness overrides our past negative habits and cravings for unsuitable items and especially wrong food choices. We find more success, both monetary and personal. We want to eat a pure diet, one that gives us strength and energy, but does not cloud (tamasic food) or drive (rajasic food) the mind. In the next blog, I will continue this topic to provide guidelines for a sattvic diet however I do encourage you to take up the other yoga practices of postures and breathing exercises (hatha yoga) as this will make changes in diet much easier and long-lasting.
Om Shanti,
Swami Pranava
Author: Swami_Pranavananda
Swami Pranavananda, hails from the USA, and has been a Yoga and Meditation teacher since 1995 in the US and abroad. He teaches mainly the Hatha Yoga and Anatomy sections for the TTC courses. He was the director of the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers in Los Angeles, CA and San Francisco, CA for a few years. Currently he is serving in Vietnam and Japan teaching in the Hochiminh center and Tokyo center. He enjoys taking classes to learn Vietnamese.
