The Yoga of Eating - Transcending Diets and Dogma to Nourish the Natural Self

When the experience of unconditional love and well-being has not been internalized, the soul seeks it externally-for example, from food. Food, an expression of Mother Nature's unconditional love and generosity, makes us feel nurtured and cared for. Food is the most primitive reminder that the world is good, that the world will provide.

The theory of karma says that you yourself will experience the consequences of all your thoughts, words, and actions, including the eating of food. Accordingly, religions with explicit teachings of karma often advise against eating meat. The idea is that by eating meat, you are "eating" the suffering of the slain animal, and will eventually experience the same degree of suffering yourself.

suppose you eat a banana from a South American plantation, located on destroyed rain forest land wrested violently from indigenous tribes, who now labor at the plantation at starvation wages, using pesticides that pollute the ecosystem, shipped thousands of miles using polluting oil-fueled ships, by a company that puts small independent growers out of business through corrupt practices. By eating that banana, you ever so slightly reinforce this state of affairs, and make it part of your reality and your experience. You are saying yes to such a world.

Or suppose you eat chicken from a battery-raised hen, who suffered her whole life in a tiny, crowded, filthy cage, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, painfully debeaked to prevent her from wounding her cellmates in her extreme stress ... raised, basically, in Hell. Each time you eat such a chicken, you affirm the hellish suffering that brought it to you. Incrementally, bit by bit, you invite that experience into your reality.

When our food production system throws nature out of balance, is it any wonder that our lives too spiral out of balance? When our food system is based on the prolonged suffering of humans, animals, plants, and soil, is it any wonder that so many of us experience terrible physical suffering in our lives through chronic debilitating diseases? When anonymous strangers grow, process, ship, and prepare our food, is it any wonder that we often feel consumed by loneliness, estranged from the world?

Like eating, breath can bring you face to face with things about yourself that might otherwise be inaccessible. It is true that you can calm the breath by calming the mind, but you can also calm the mind by calming the breath. The vehicle of breath can take you very, very deep.

Next time you have a meal, watch how everyone shovels in a new bite of food before the first is fully chewed and swallowed. We cut short the experience of each bite in order to move on to a new one. Shoveling more food into an already full mouth corresponds to taking in a new breath before the old one is fully exhaled.

Careful chewing should not be mechanical, but rather a consequence of the full, attentive enjoyment of food. This is great news. The Yoga of Eating calls for more eating pleasure, not less. If you adhere to a formula of chewing each bite X times, you'll chew some food far too long (like watermelon) and some, perhaps, not long enough. And without attention, you cannot access the subtle nutrients of flavor no matter how long you chew

Attentive eating uncovers unsuspected delights of flavor, unimagined subtleties of taste. You may find that foods you thought you liked don't really taste so good after all, while foods you thought bland harbor delicious subtle flavors you never noticed before.

Every day take one meal, perhaps breakfast, in silence, without the distraction

• At every meal, let the first bite you take from every dish be with perfect attentiveness.

During lulls in the conversation, or when someone else is dominating a conversation you're not interested in, take the chance to patiently experience the pleasure of each mouthful.

For the snacking office worker or student, the problem really isn't the snacking, the problem is engaging in work not in harmony with the soul's work. When you are absorbed in an exciting creative task you have no desire to escape it by snacking. Escapism, distraction from life, is also often at the root of overeating at meals. After the meal it's back to life, and if you don't want to get back to life, you might want to prolong your meal.

Yet it also presents a challenge, because the solution to overeating is not so simple as getting a grip on yourself or exercising self-discipline; rather it requires genuine change, perhaps in your work, your relationships, your beliefs, or your environment. Overeating is an indication that there might be something wrong with your life, not that there is something intrinsically wrong with you.

The Taoist adage, "Eat when you are hungry, drink when you are thirsty, sleep when you are tired," with its reverence for nature and the body, embodies the essence of the Yoga of Eating.

What is less well known is that we avoid the full experience of pleasure as well as pain. Fully experienced, even small pleasures can be very intense. Often celebration is an escape from this intensity, a moving on. Next time you feel that delicious pride of accomplishment, try just being with that. Very quickly the mind seeks to convert it into some new benefit, some new pleasure. Even in sexual intercourse, our culture emphasizes the orgasm, which is both the apex and the ending of pleasure. And in eating, we can hardly wait to move on to the next bite without really enjoying the first. Fully experiencing neither pain nor pleasure, we live fragmented, disconnected lives.

A conscious breath forges a reconnection among different fragments of our lives and selves. It brings one back to the here and now. During a meal, pausing for a breath breaks the habit of one-bite-after-another, activating witness consciousness. It weakens the enslaving hold of habit.

If it is a true, body-based appetite, then every time you deny it, it gets stronger. If it is a superficial craving, not serving a genuine need, then every time you resist it, it gets weaker.

Sometimes when you listen closely to your body, the message you hear is a call not for food, but for fasting. You may observe this in animals, which abstain from food when sick, and in young children, who sometimes go days eating hardly anything at all (much to the consternation of their parents!).

In fact, the greatest challenges and benefits of fasting are psychospiritual. Fasting has dimensions far beyond what we usually label the physical, and it cleanses more than just the body. Because eating is such a convenient distraction, fasting puts us face to face with ourselves. A day without food seems to stretch ahead forever as the mind squirms, twists, and turns looking for an escape. Fasting is a meditation of the body; conversely, in the Chuang-tze, Confucius calls meditation "mental fasting."

Decide that you will honor and appreciate your body no matter what your weight is. Know that your body's shape is its wise response to circumstances that are probably beyond your understanding. Really let it be okay to be as you are.

Stand naked in front of a mirror and just notice all the criticisms and self-judgments. Don't attempt to quell them. Just let them run on, observing them. Underneath the criticisms though, let there grow a warm and wonder-filled appreciation for your body, which has done its best, its heroic best, under the circumstances thrust upon it. Think of all your body has undergone. .. yet here she or he is still alive, breathing, adapting. Allow a sense of grateful awe to develop.

Of course there are people who thrive on a vegan diet most often people who are well-nourished in spirit, secure and generous, autonomous and nurturing of others. They do not take pride in their diet or derive self-esteem from it. They do not advertise it or urge it indiscriminately on others; they seldom even mention it. They are radiant people. But even these people usually do better with some amount of eggs, butter, milk, and cheese, unless they practice a very monastic lifestyle.

Sugar offers a hollow sweetness that one can easily detect through careful, attentive eating. If you slowly chew and taste an oversweetened food, you'll probably find it phony and dishonest. Indeed, refined sugar cheats the body, promising a bonanza of nutrition that is not there.

How close do you feel to the people who make your clothes, your house, your possessions? How intimately do you know the people you buy things from? Intimacy comes from openness and long association. Today we rarely have either. In our tribal and village past, we knew each other intimately, having spent our lives together, and a stranger was a rare sight. Few people dare to be open and trusting of strangers or even casual acquaintances, and perhaps with good reason. Intimacy has hardly a chance to grow.

Sugar is a shoddy counterfeit for the real sweetness of life. Often as children we were given "treats" as rewards, for being in some way "good." The word "dessert," in fact, means something that you deserve. When people try to limit sugar intake through willpower alone, they usually meet with some initial success. Feeling good about themselves, they are ready for their reward, for their dessert.

By the same token, sweets can be a way of telling yourself, "Yes, I am good, I do deserve!" Such a message is especially compelling to downtrodden people. Besides ignorance and poverty, perhaps this partly explains why poor people eat so much sweet junk food and suffer so much from obesity. People who affirm their deservingness of the good things in life through sweet foods are in fact using sugar as a kind of medicine. They are trying to make life hurt less. For a moment, at least, sweets make us feel less lonely. We are comforted.

If sugar is a counterfeit for spiritual sweetness, then artificial sweeteners such as saccharin and aspartame are a counterfeit of a counterfeit. They represent a lie to the body, and reinforce an experience of the world in which appearance is bereft of substance.

To quit the sugar habit, then, you must reclaim sweetness. Reclaim time in your life by reexamining the priorities that make you busy. Stop judging, measuring, criticizing, and comparing yourself, stop castigating yourself and wishing you were someone better, someone different. Instead, accept yourself as you are. The same goes for others: accept them, too, by looking for the goodness within. In all your interactions, try to penetrate to the human being behind the professional, behind the anonymous functionary. And perhaps most importantly, find ways to reconnect to nature. Even if it is for only half a minute, look at the clouds as if you had nothing else in the world to do. Touch a plant and feel its struggle in the poisonous air and tainted dirt of the city. Even small moments of intimacy can have a miraculous effect.

First, learn to identify your subtler levels of thirst. Tune in to your body and ask whether it would like water. Imagine the sensation of drinking. Picture the liquid going down your throat. Would it be a pleasure to drink? If so, then drink. If not, then wait. How could it be any simpler? Yet even such simplicity demands patience and trust. What a relief and a joy it is, never to coerce the body to drink, and to make every mouthful a refreshing pleasure!

Whether in sickness or in health, the body communicates its need for water. There are no rules to remember, no techniques to practice. Simply learn to understand the body's messages, and ease into joyful cooperation with your body.

It is instructive to learn that some traditional cultures rarely drank water. In China, for example, to this day you never see water served with mealsthe beverages are soup, tea, or a fermented beverage such as beer. Warm beverages are much gentler on the digestion than cold ones, while some soups and fermented beverages actually aid digestion.

Soy milk, rice milk, and the like are increasing in popularity, despite serious concerns among dissident nutritionists about their health effects. Both contain mineral blockers and enzyme inhibitors that make them difficult to digest, while soy also contains estrogen-mimicking chemicals that may disrupt endocrine function. These concerns are beyond the scope of this book, however. In any event, soy milk and rice milk are highly concentrated foods that, like fruit juice, should be drunk in tiny sips and small quantities.

An illuminating exercise is to drink some soda with full attention and sensing. For me it is hard to drink more than a couple sips before it begins to taste awful.

Beer, particularly unfiltered homebrew, is a generally healthful drink in moderate quantities. Like other fermented foods and drinks, it can actually be an aid to digestion. However, virtually all modern beer uses a fairly potent medicinal herb, hops, which is a sedative and sexual depressive not suited to some constitutions. Traditionally, there were dozens of herbs commonly used in beer, all with different tonic, flavoring, healing, or even psychotropic properties. The appreciation and exploration of the ways of fermentation is both an art and a yoga.

Wine is another potentially healthful beverage for its vitamins, antioxidants, and digestive stimulation. Again, home-fermented wine is probably the best, since most commercial wines have sulfite and pesticide residues.

Depending on one's individual psycho-physical makeup, the negative effects of tea's theobromine may be far outweighed on the physical level by its potent antioxidant content, and on the aesthetic level by its infinitely delicate nuances of flavor and aroma. The appreciation of fine tea is a tao and a yoga unto itself.

Unfortunately, because our society so demeans cooking, it is hard to approach it without some resentment, without some feeling that your time could be better spent, that you are above this. To make a yoga out of cooking, first realize that this mundane activity is very spiritual, not something to get out of the way, but to approach with sincerity and devotion. Express your caring by using the most nutritious ingredients according to your current understanding. Do not demand you be appreciated, but let your satisfaction be in the pleasure of others.

The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti said that change imposed upon oneself is not true change, because it comes from where one is right now. Authentic change requires not willpower and forcing, but surrender, acceptance, trust, and courage. It requires the willingness and courage to let change happen. It is a step into the unknown, a trusting of something beyond ourselves.

But vegetarianism existed before the days of factory farming, and it was inspired by a simple, primal conviction that killing is wrong. It is just plain wrong to take another animal's life unnecessarily, it is bloody, brutal, and barbaric.