CHAPTER
19

Cosmic Forces and Universal Qualities

In This Chapter

You’re well versed on the three Doshas—Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. You know the five elements they’re comprised of, the foods they’re related to, and how they affect your seven bodily tissues. Now I’m going to show you why you need to seek balance in the first place. The purpose of balance is to tap into your inner bliss.

What makes Ayurveda so unique is that it is a spiritual science. It connects the seen and the unseen, the physical and the metaphysical. In this chapter, we move into the subtler side of Ayurveda and the effects of your diet and lifestyle on your spirit. We explore the three cosmic forces of Ayurveda—ojas, tejas, and prana, which are subtle forces of Kapha, Pitta, and Vata. I also discuss the three universal qualities that can be used to describe all things—sattva (light), rajas (movement), and tamas (darkness).

The Three Cosmic Forces

Just like there are three Doshas—Vata, Pitta, and Kapha—there are three cosmic forces—ojas, tejas, and prana, which are the subtler forms of each Dosha. By “subtler form,” I mean how it affects you on a more spiritual level.

Ojas is connected to the Kapha Dosha, tejas is connected to the Pitta Dosha, and Prana is connected to the Vata Dosha. Ojas is expressed as vitality, endurance, fertility, and patience, all qualities of Kapha. Tejas is expressed as courage, intellect, drive, and radiance, all qualities of Pitta. Prana is expressed as creativity, lightness, enthusiasm, and intuition, all qualities of Vata. You have (and need) all three vital essences within you.

Definition

Ojas is the subtle essence related to health and well-being. It makes you peaceful and patient. Tejas is the essence related to radiance and glow. It makes you intelligent and courageous. Prana is the essence related to vital life force and breath. It makes you flexible and creative. You require all three vital essences to be balanced.

Let’s explore each cosmic force, study the signs of their balance and imbalance, and learn what to do if yours is depleted.

Ojas is vital life force; tejas is courageous drive; prana is intuitive light.

Ojas: The Luster of Life

Have you ever seen a person who just radiated with life? They seemed to glow from within, shining out like golden light. That’s ojas.

Ojas is the subtle essence related to health, vitality, immunity, and well-being. It results from proper digestion and forms your bodily tissues, organs, skin, and cells. That’s why digestion is so important in Ayurveda. The better your digestion, the more ojas you have.

Healthy Ojas

Signs of healthy ojas include glowing skin, peaceful energy, high stress tolerance, and strong immune system.

Ojas is stored in the heart, and people high in ojas are heart-centered people who can easily connect with themselves and others around them. They are giving, charitable, and patient. People are naturally drawn to those with healthy ojas because just being in their presence feels warming and delightful. I like to compare ojas to the sun—radiant, vibrant, and always shining no matter the weather. People high in ojas are stable and centered, able to easily deal with stress and disturbances.

Wisdom of the Ages

Ojas gives you a radiant glow that naturally attracts people to your peaceful energy.

Low Ojas

How does ojas get weak? There are a number of ways, and they all relate to digestion, both of food and emotions:

  • Over-, under-, binge, or emotional eating
  • Consuming processed foods, meat, sugar, and cheese
  • Eating stale, canned, or frozen meals
  • Physical trauma
  • Chronic illness or pain
  • Excess travel
  • Lack of sleep
  • Aging
  • Alcohol, smoking, drugs
  • Jealousy, anger, hatred, fear
  • Stress/overwork
  • Emotional trauma

As you can see, it’s just as important for your thoughts to be as healthy as your diet because they both can deplete ojas. If you eat too much, too little, the wrong foods, or toxins, your body suffers. If you compare yourself to others, hold grudges, or live in a constant state of worry, your mind suffers. Eventually, an imbalance in one affects the other.

Signs of weak ojas include dull skin, lethargy, depression, anxiety, constant illness, eating disorders, and emaciation. If this sounds like you, it’s very important that you regain ojas to feel alive again.

How to Regain Ojas

To return your ojas to balance, the number-one thing you have to do is heal your digestion. Avoid processed, frozen, and canned foods; refined sugar and carbs; meat; and other ingredients that will throw off your balance. Instead, consume more sattvic foods, which are simple, plant-based ingredients like grains, cooked vegetables, fresh fruit, nuts, and seeds. Include the six tastes in your diet as well, and eat mindfully. Take care of your body, and practice meditation.

The following foods help increase your ojas:

  • Avocados
  • Coconut products
  • Dates
  • Fresh fruit
  • Ghee and raw milk
  • Grains
  • Healthy oils
  • Nuts and seeds
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Turmeric

Much of ojas is emotional. To bring back your life force, do more of the things you love, such as:

  • Take a walk in nature.
  • Attend a dance class.
  • Spend time with animals and children.
  • Practice yoga, pranayama, or tai chi.
  • Create art.
  • Write in a journal.
  • Cook a delicious meal.
  • Meditate.
  • Oil your body.
  • Take a warm bath.
  • Read a book.
  • Redecorate your house.
  • Make a vision board.

Release thoughts that are no longer serving you. Let go of any anger or attachment you have to the past. Allow yourself to surrender to the present moment. Make your home your sanctuary so you truly love where you live. All these little things help you rebuild your ojas.

Ojas-Enhancing Tonic

Creamy almonds pair with sweet cardamom, cinnamon, rose and saffron in this warming recipe that rejuvenates your ojas, replenishing your vital life force. This recipe is similar to a make your own almond milk except you don’t need a nut milk bag.

10 almonds

2 cups water

1⁄2 tsp. cardamom

1⁄2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1 TB. rose petals

1 pinch saffron

 1. Soak almonds in water overnight.

 2. Drain almonds and peel off skin. They’ll come right off once soaked.

 3. Add almonds to a blender with two cups water and blend until smooth. Add cardamom, cinnamon, rose petals and saffron and blend again.

 4. Pour beverage into a small saucepan over medium high heat and cover until starting to bubble but not boiling. Enjoy as a nightly tonic.

This recipe will give you a healthy glow, improve your immune system, and prevent aging and disease by replenishing your ojas. You’ll also feel a sense of calmness by having this drink. It’s best for Vatas and Pittas, as it increases Kapha.

Tejas: The Spark of Radiance

Whereas ojas promotes a peaceful energy, tejas ignites the fire underneath it all. You’ve probably met a person who’s just on fire—they’re confident, powerful, and radiant from within. There is a certain twinkle in their eyes that shows their inner light. They seem to glow, and people naturally tend to follow them. That’s tejas.

Tejas is the subtle essence related to strength, longevity, intelligence, luster, and color. It gives you bright and shiny eyes, luminous skin, and a brilliant mind. It’s the potential energy of fire and light.

Healthy Tejas

Signs of healthy tejas include a radiant personality, bright eyes, sharp mind, decisiveness, strong leadership abilities, and bravery.

Tejas is related to your digestive fire and metabolism. Those with too much tejas may have Pitta imbalance symptoms such as hyperacidity and heartburn. Those with too little may have weak digestion and sluggish metabolism.

Low Tejas

How does tejas weaken? Anything that causes burnout weakens your tejas:

  • Overexertion
  • Overheating
  • Overexercise
  • Physical and emotional trauma
  • Stress
  • Anger
  • Alcohol, smoking, drugs

Anything that imbalances Pitta also imbalances tejas because they are both related to the fire element. It’s important to kindle your flame without exhausting it to keep your tejas balanced.

Signs of weak tejas include a lackluster mind; indecisiveness; fear; dull eyes and skin; lack of passion, purpose, or creativity; trouble learning new things; poor leadership skills; inability to concentrate; and stubbornness. If this sounds like you, you must regain your tejas to reclaim your radiance.

How to Regain Tejas

To bring your tejas back into balance, you’ll have to stimulate your internal fire to bring heat to your subtle body:

  • Practice breath of fire: short, quick, and firm inhales and exhales through your nose.
  • Solar pranayama: slowly breathe in through your right nostril and out through your left nostril for 5 minutes.
  • Increase spices in your diet, especially ginger, cumin, and chile peppers.
  • Exercise more rigorously to get your body moving and your blood flow going.
  • Set goals for yourself such as finishing a book or completing a project.
  • Gaze into a candle flame to increase your fire energy.

Tejas-Boosting Tonic

Need a kick to power through your day? This tejas-boosting tonic is packed with pungent ginger and cayenne, balanced with sour lemon and sweet honey, bringing your passionate and purpose-driven Pitta energy up.

2 cups water

1 (1-in.) piece ginger, peeled and grated (1 TB.)

1⁄2 tsp. cayenne

Juice of 1⁄2 lemon

1 tsp. raw honey or maple syrup

 1. In a small pan over medium high heat, bring water to a boil.

 2. Add ginger and cayenne, and steep for at least 10 minutes.

 3. Add lemon juice and raw honey or maple syrup, and enjoy as a stimulating beverage to stoke your internal tejas flame.

This tonic is useful for days when you feel like you need an extra energy boost to get you through the day or your digestion feels weak and slow. It also stimulates the metabolism and is most recommended for Kapha types, though Vatas can also benefit as long as it’s not too spicy.

Prana: The Vital Life Force

If you’ve ever practiced yoga, you may have heard the term prana. Prana is the breath of life, comprised of the air element. It is responsible for movement, respiration, circulation, and oxygenation and governs all things related to your mind, thoughts, and emotions. Although you cannot see it, you always feel it. If you’ve ever felt a sense of stillness while chanting “Om” or had a sudden rush of butterflies when life just seemed to be falling into place, that’s prana moving through you.

Prana is felt most in your breath. When you still your mind, you can tune in to the more subtle layers of your body, tapping into the endless source of inspiration that exists within you.

Healthy Prana

Signs of healthy prana include enthusiasm, life force, creativity, adaptability, energy, and motivation.

Prana is located in your brain’s hypothalamus. It sends out signals to your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system as well as your intercostal muscles and diaphragm. This is why your breath is so connected to your emotions.

When you take in a breath, your intercostal muscles contract and your diaphragm moves downward. This increases space in your chest cavity, causing your lungs to expand. When you breathe out, your diaphragm relaxes and moves upward, causing your intercostal muscles to relax, making the space in your chest cavity smaller. You aren’t consciously thinking about this movement, but your brain is constantly signaling your lungs to inhale and exhale, keeping you alive. This is all thanks to prana.

Wisdom of the Ages

According to Ayurveda, your soul, or atman, is reflected in your breath. The deeper your breathing, the more you can connect to your true nature. The space of absolute stillness between your inhales and exhales is meditation. (More on breathing during meditation later in this chapter.)

Prana governs your emotions, which are also held in your lungs. Notice how your breath changes when you’re angry and stressed versus when you’re calm and peaceful. When you are in a state of distress, you take short, shallow breaths. This triggers your parasympathetic nervous system’s fight-or-flight response, and your brain immediately gets the signal that there’s a threat and releases cortisol, the stress hormone. This is prana at work. Your breath indicates to your nervous system, which indicates to your brain that things are not safe. Your entire being feels restless.

When you are peaceful, your breathing slows down. You take deeper and slower breaths, pausing between each inhale and exhale. Your parasympathetic nervous system decides there’s no need to worry and goes into a state of rest. As a result, your mind releases serotonin, the happiness hormone.

Many studies, such as one published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, confirm that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) “offers protection against relapse/recurrence on a par with that of maintenance antidepressant pharmacotherapy.” Simply the effect of becoming more mindful of your breath in any situation shifts your attention away from the stressful situation, reducing your risk of depression.

Wisdom of the Ages

Prana allows circulation of energy by utilizing the subtle power of your own breath.

Low Prana

How does prana become weak? When your emotions are negative:

  • Stressful situations
  • Emotional or physical trauma
  • Longing for the past
  • Jealous, anger, comparison
  • Hatred, fear, anxiety
  • Chronic illness
  • Excess caffeine
  • Poor breathing

Notice that everything comes back to your breath. Any situation that causes you to take short, shallow breaths depletes your prana.

Signs of low prana include shortness of breath, low energy, constriction in the body, coldness or numbness in the extremities, excess worrying or anxiety, and energy depletion. If this sounds like you, it’s very important to recover your prana to find happiness again.

How to Regain Prana

If you can breathe, you can enhance your prana. All it takes is reclaiming your breath, which is the key to life. Meditation is one of the best ways to get back in touch with your breathing. Meditation is an approach to training your mind to be still. Just like you have to exercise your muscles to become fit, you must practice meditation to increase your awareness.

Meditation does not mean you have to sit quietly and think of nothing. In fact, the more you tell yourself not to think about anything, the more your mind will race. The easiest way to meditate is just to focus on your breath. That way, you have something to concentrate on to prevent your mind from wandering.

Here’s one of my favorite meditation practices. You can use it to increase your pranic life force:

 1. Sit comfortably in a chair or cross-legged on the floor, however you’re comfortable. (I don’t recommend lying down because you could fall asleep.)

 2. Close your eyes and take a deep inhale in and then an audible exhale out. Repeat, letting all the stagnant air exit your lungs.

 3. When you feel like you’ve released tension, bring your attention to your breath. Notice how you breathe naturally. Don’t try to change your breath. Simply observe it.

 4. Notice the movement of your body as you breathe in. Feel how your rib cage expands as your lungs fill with air and how your chest and shoulders collapse as you breathe out.

 5. Continue paying attention to your breath. You may notice that your breathing has slowed down. Continue breathing, totally breathing out all the air in your lungs before taking a new breath in.

 6. As you continue breathing, gradually try to increase the space of stillness between your inhales and your exhales.

Congratulations! You just meditated.

As you can see, meditation doesn’t have to be an elaborate practice. You don’t need to be a meditation master to benefit from simple breathing practices. All it takes is a few minutes of connecting with your breath every day to reap the immense benefits of meditation.

Wisdom of the Ages

For 5 minutes every morning and 5 minutes every night, practice meditation to transition between a sleeping and waking state. You’ll notice immediately how much more clear your mind is for the rest of the day when you wake up and meditate instead of checking your email. You’ll also sleep much better when you’ve taken a few moments to silence your mind instead of staring into the blue light of your cellphone screen. See if you can add an extra minute to your meditation practice every week.

The Three Universal Qualities

Mother Nature is a magnificent, multifaceted, and moody mama. Sometimes she amazes us with her tranquility and stillness, more beautiful than the most talented artist’s creation. At other times, she is rough and wild, stirring up hurricanes and earthquakes. Then there are times when she is dense and heavy, such as on rainy days or during snow storms.

Ayurveda classifies the three qualities of nature as sattva, rajas, and tamas. Sattva is pure, like a picture-perfect sunny day. Rajas is intense, like an approaching tornado. Tamas is dark, like a never-ending storm. These three qualities exist not only in nature, but in all things and people as well. These qualities are called the gunas and are based on the circle of life. All things are born, live, and die. Sattva represents creation, rajas represents maintenance and motion, and tamas represents death and destruction.

In modern Ayurveda, the gunas are used to describe the nature of foods, medicines, and behaviors. They help us understand how a certain ingredient or experience will make us feel. Let’s delve deeper into the three gunas and what each represents.

Sattva is related to purity; rajas is related to movement and tamas is related to inertia.

Sattva: The Light of Consciousness

Sattva represents all things good and pure in the world. It evokes qualities of clarity, love, compassion, alertness, and cooperativeness. Sattva is the feeling of waking up in the morning with the energy to take on the day. We all have sattva inside of us and should actively try to seek more. Sattva evokes intelligence, good health, focus, creativity, and lightness in the mind and body. It’s similar to the Vata Dosha, but actually all Doshas in balance are sattvic—complete and whole.

Sattvic people are loving, compassionate, honest, energized, generous, spiritually connected, and humble. They are naturally peaceful, creative, and in touch with themselves. They are respectful to others, animals, and nature.

Sattvic foods give your body energy without taxing it. Think of the feeling you have after a good, healthy meal—grounded, energized, and satisfied. That’s sattva in action. Mindful eating is considered sattvic.

Examples of sattvic foods include fresh vegetables, juicy fruits, mung beans, certain grains, raw nuts, fresh and raw dairy products, turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, fennel, and cardamom. The sattvic tastes are fresh, light, nourishing, sweet, and juicy. An example of a Sattvic meal is brown rice with steamed seasonal vegetables. You should aim to make most of your meals sattvic because these foods are the foundation to higher states of consciousness.

Rajas: Kinetic Energy

Rajas represents movement, power, action, pleasure, and pain. It is restless, dominating, and aggressive in energy. You can compare rajas to the Pitta Dosha because it creates transformation, but any Dosha can become rajasic when pushed to the extreme.

Rajasic people are charismatic and skillful speakers and entrepreneurs. However, when they’re out of balance, they can be impatient, self-centered, egotistic, and controlling. They are passionate and hard-working but can be jealous and competitive, too. Rajasic people deeply fear failure.

Rajasic foods have a stimulating effect on your mind and body. They include all Pitta-related foods: coffee, caffeinated tea, fermented foods, certain grains and legumes, garlic, onions, nightshades, sour fruit, spicy or salty foods, meat, and eggs. The rajasic tastes are hot, bitter, sour, dry, or salty. Eating in a rush is considered rajasic as well.

Certain rajasic foods can be valuable to the Vata and Kapha Dosha, who may benefit from extra movement and fire in their body. However, Pitta types should avoid rajasic ingredients because they can throw them off balance.

Definition

Rajas is invigorating and stimulating, representing movement, passion, and energy. It fills you with power, but excess can lead to aggression. Stimulants, nonvegetarian foods, and pungent tastes are considered rajasic.

Tamas: Inertia

Tamas represents darkness and inactivity. If sattva is sunrise and rajas is the daytime, tamas is the night. In a balanced amount, tamas brings rest and rejuvenation, but in excess, it can make you lazy, tired, and lack self-control.

Everyone has tamas built into their DNA. It provides support and density in the way that Kapha is the building Dosha. If you were always moving and creating, you would not be balanced. However, you have to be sure you are not dominated by tamasic energy or you’ll become fatigued, self-indulgent, possessive, and depressed.

Tamasic foods have a sedative effect on the mind and body. Natural foods considered tamasic are onions, garlic, and mushrooms because they’re so grounding. Tamasic foods numb pain and were recommended in times of war and distress. They make us more Kapha and grounded, particularly recommended for airy Vata types.

Wisdom of the Ages

Onions and garlic are both tamasic and rajasic in energy because they are both stimulating as well as deadening. Garlic is a natural aphrodisiac and is recommended for those with a loss of sex drive, particularly Vatas. Ayurveda recommends moderate amounts of onions and garlic for the Vata Dosha who can benefit from the invigorating and grounding qualities. Kaphas can have small amounts, and Pittas should avoid them. Garlic and onions increase immunity, boost white blood cell count, are antibacterial, and cleanse yeast from the system. However, they also are overly stimulating and can cause agitation, aggression, and dullness for those with excess heat or earth.

Unhealthy tamasic foods include processed foods, frozen or microwaved meals, meat, alcohol, refined sugar, blue cheese, fertilized eggs, tobacco, breads, and pastries. These foods make you feel heavy after consumption and should be totally avoided. Overeating and consuming leftover food is considered tamasic as well.