88. The Three Gunas Explained—Yoga Philosophy You Can Actually Use

Right now, three tracks are playing inside you. One is heavy—the energy that makes you hit snooze. One is wired—the one drafting tomorrow's class at 2 AM. And one is clear—the energy that shows up when teaching just flows. Yoga philosophy has a name for this trio: the gunas.

In this episode, I walk through one of the most practical frameworks in all of yoga philosophy. Your students will grasp it in thirty seconds, you can use it to theme an entire class, and it will change how you understand your own energy as a teacher.

We dig into Chapter 28 of my new book with Alexandra DeSiato, Yoga Off the Mat. You'll learn how tamas, rajas, and sattva show up in your teaching, why "sattva begets sattva" is one of the most useful ideas in the tradition, and how to bring this language into your classroom without making it sound like a Sanskrit lecture.

If you've been looking for a way to teach yoga philosophy that actually lands with your students, this is the framework to start with.

Pre-order Yoga Off the Mat (out July 14), join The Zone (my free community for yoga teachers), and learn more about Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing—links below.

Join the waitlist for the July cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing: A Mentorship Membership (MMM): sagerountree.com/mentorship

Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Get in the Zone at Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you—let's chat there!

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Transcript

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Can I tell you something? Right now, this exact moment, there are three tracks playing inside you. Not songs exactly, but something close. Three frequencies. Three flavors of energy, and they're always on. One of them is heavy. It wants to sit down, pull the covers up, scroll for another hour, stay exactly where you are comfortable inert done for the day. One of them is wired. It's the one drafting your to-do list at 2:00 AM the one that can't stop checking your phone, the one that wants to sign up for another training before you finish the last one. Buzzing. Busy, never enough, and one of them is clear. Grounded present. It's the one that shows up when you're mid yoga class and everything just flows. The cues land, the room settles, and you're not performing or overthinking. You are just there. Three tracks always playing. The volume on each one shifts constantly. Hour to hour, day to day, season to season, and yoga Philosophy has a name for these tracks, the Gunas. Today we're talking about one of the most practical frameworks in all of yoga philosophy. One that your students will grasp immediately. One you can use to theme an entire class and one that might change how you understand your own energy as a teacher. It's from chapter 28 of my forthcoming book with Alexandra DeSiato, YOGA OFF THE MAT I'm Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential. The Gunas are three fundamental qualities of nature described in the Samkhya philosophy that underpins yoga. Every single thing in the material world. Your food, your mood, your Monday morning class, the weather, your planning process is a blend of these three qualities. They are always present. What changes is the proportion? Let me introduce them. Tamas is inertia, heaviness. Darkness resistance to change. tamas is the energy that makes you hit snooze for the third time. It's the fog after a big meal. It's the dullness that settles in when you've been teaching the same sequence for six months and can't muster the energy to change it. Tamas isn't inherently bad. It's the quality that lets you sleep. That gives weight and stability to things. But when tamas dominates, you stagnate, you stop growing you coast. Yoga teachers, I know you know this one, tamas, is the Sunday night when you look at tomorrow's class and think, I'll just teach what I taught last week, not because it was a great class, because you're too heavy to plan something new and you know, I applaud repetition. Rajas is activity, agitation, movement, passion. Rajas is the energy behind ambition, restlessness, and that particular brand of teacher anxiety that has you scrolling Instagram for teaching ideas at midnight. Rajas gets things done. It's the spark that made you sign up for yoga teacher training in the first place. But when Rajas dominates, you're spinning. You're busy without being productive. You're planning a peak pose class for every session because you think your students need novelty and you're burning out trying to deliver it. Rajas is the teacher who signs up for a new workshop every month who collects sequences like recipes they'll never cook, and who still feels like they're not enough. The more research you do, the more the creativity activates, which soon means uncertainty. That's Rajas feeding itself. Sattva is balance, clarity, harmony. Sattva is the quality of being present, of being discerning and of being at ease. Not because everything is easy, but because you are aligned. When Sattva is dominant, you walk into the room and you know what to teach. Not because you've memorized a script, but because you've done the preparation and you trust it. Your cues are clean. Your presence is steady. You adapt in real time without panic. Sattva is the teacher who has a clear, repeatable structure and who has the confidence to let it breathe. Now, here's the key teaching. The goal is not to eliminate tamas and Rajas. You can't. They are part of nature. A life of pure Safa isn't available to humans, and honestly, it would be boring. The goal is awareness. Can you notice which track is loudest right now? Can you make a choice from that awareness instead of being dragged by whichever Una has control of the ox cord or the volume knob. That's why I call it a playlist. You're not trying to delete any of the tracks. You're learning to be the DJ Here's where this gets really practical for yoga teachers. Think about the energy you bring to the front of the room. On a tamasic day, your teaching is flat. Your cues are rote. You're going through the motions, and your students can feel it, even if they can't name it. The class isn't bad exactly, but it's lifeless. And afterward you feel guilty, which compounds the tamas. On a rajasic day, you are over teaching. You've crammed too many poses into the sequence. You're talking too fast. You're queuing transitions before students have arrived in the pose. You're performing, not guiding. The class might feel energetic to a first timer, but you're experience students leave feeling like they were rushed, and you leave feeling wired and weirdly empty. On a sattvic day, there's a quality of presence that your students recognize immediately. You're not trying to impress anyone, you're not phoning it in. You are there fully serving whoever showed up. Those are the classes students come back for, and those are the classes that build a wait list. Now I want to be clear about something. I'm not saying just be sattvic. That's like saying, just be confident. It sounds great and it means nothing without a path to get there. But here's what I have learned in over 20 years of teaching. Sattva isn't a personality trait. It's a practice outcome. You don't will yourself into clarity. You create the conditions for it, and the conditions are shockingly mundane. What you eat when you sleep, how much screen time you allow before class, whether you planned your class or walked in, winging it, whether you gave yourself five minutes of silence before the students walked in. In yoga off the mat, Alexandra and I use the phrase sattva begets sattva. One. Clear balanced choice makes the next one easier. It compounds, it snowballs. When you eat well, you sleep better. When you sleep better, your planning is sharper. When your planning is sharper, your teaching is more present. When your teaching is more present, your students feel it. When your students feel it, your classes feel it's not magic, it's alignment. Let me also talk about the goas and food because this is one of the most tangible entry points, and it's something you can share with your students. The traditional categories say that tamasic food is heavy, stale, overly processed, the fast food drive-through the third cup of coffee that's been sitting on your desk since morning. Rajasic food is stimulating spicy caffeinated. The pre-class espresso, the energy bar you grabbed because you didn't have time for a real meal. Sattvic food is fresh, nourishing, prepared with care. A meal you actually sat down to eat. Now I am not prescribing a diet. I am pointing to awareness. The gunas aren't a judgment system. They're a noticing system. And once you start noticing you can't unnotice. You'll catch yourself reaching for that espresso and think, oh, rajas. And that moment of recognition is the practice. Okay, so now what? For you, the practitioner, here's the actions. Practice on the unas from the book, Yoga Off the Mat, and it's one of my favorites for one day. Check in with your Una state at three points. Morning, midday, and evening. You don't need to judge it, you're not gonna fix it. Just name it. Heavy wired or clear. That's it. Three check-ins, three words to choose from. After a week of this, you'll start to see patterns. Maybe you're temasek every morning until you move your body. Maybe Raja spikes right after you check your phone. Maybe Safa shows up most reliably right after you teach, which tells you something beautiful about what teaching does for you, not just for your students. Here's another practice before you walk into the class to teach, ask yourself, what's my guna state right now? If you're heavy, you know, you might need to generate a little energy before class. Take a brisk walk around the block, do a few sun salutations. Make a deliberate shift. If you're wired, you might need to slow yourself down, close your eyes, breathe, arrive before you try to hold space for anyone else. If you're clear, beautiful, trust it and go. This isn't about performing a state you're not in. It's about knowing what you're walking in with so that you can serve your students from honesty, not from autopilot. Now for you, the teacher, here's how you can bring the Unas into your classroom. The Gunas are one of the most versatile class theming frameworks in the entire yoga tradition, and you barely need any Sanskrit to teach them. Here is the simplest version. At the beginning of class, ask your students to notice their energy. You don't even need the word una. Just say, are you feeling heavy today? Are you feeling wired? Or are you somewhere in the middle? Present and clear. Pause, let them actually check in, then say, there's no wrong answer. We are just noticing that's the Gunas in 30 seconds. No lecture, no chalkboard or projector. Just an invitation to witness. Then from there, you can build the class around the insight. If the room feels collectively tomasek Monday morning, everyone dragging in from the weekend, you might start slow and gradually build. You're not forcing Rajas to fix tamas. You're coaxing. Sattva into the room with progressive, thoughtful structure. If the room feels IC Friday evening, everyone buzzing from the work week, you might hold poses longer, use more grounding cues. Let the silence do more work. You're not suppressing the energy, you're channeling it. You can also use the unas to help students recognize what's happening during the practice. You could say something like, as we hold the shape notice, is your mind heavy and checked out racing and planning dinner, or is it right here? No judgment. Just noticing that simple cue gives them a self-awareness tool. Your students can take off the mat. And here's a more advanced move you can use the Gunas to frame an entire series or workshop. This month we're exploring the three qualities of energy that yoga says are always running in the background. Week one, tamas, week two, rajas week three, Safa week four, integration. Becoming the DJ of your own playlist. Your students will eat this up because it gives them language for something they already feel. If you want to go deeper into building class themes from philosophy, creating sequences that aren't just a collection of poses, but that carry a clear, purposeful arc. That's the heart of the work we do in mastering the Art of Yoga sequencing. My mentorship membership. We practice building classes that your students don't just attend, but intentionally come back to week after week. Visit sage roundtree.com/mentorship to learn more and to join the wait list for the next cohort. Here's your takeaway. You have three tracks always playing heavy wired, clear. You can't delete any of them and you don't need to. What you can do is start noticing which one is loudest, and whether the volume is serving you or running you. The practice is simple. Notice name, choose. And when you bring this to your students, you're giving them one of the most accessible entry points into yoga philosophy. There is no Sanskrit is required. Just an honest question. How's your energy today? Safa begets Safa, one good choice compounds into the next. And that's true for your teaching, for your planning, for your presence in the room and for your life off the mat we go much deeper into this In Yoga Off the Mat. Chapter 28 unpacks the gunas fully and the action spots gives you a simple daily practice. You could start tonight! Pre-order links for the book, which publishes on July 14th, are in the show notes. You can get it wherever you get your. And if you're looking for a community of yoga teachers who take the craft of teaching seriously, who want to keep growing, keep refining, keep showing up as clear, capable, skillful guides. Come join us in the zone. It's a free community at comfortzoneyoga.com. If this episode was useful, please remember to rate and review the show. Share it with your yoga teacher training buddies. It really does help other teachers find us. Thank you so much for joining me today. This is Yoga Teacher Confidential. I'm Sage Rountree and I'll see you next time.