Learn to understand the consequences of your intake on the different sheaths of your system and how you influence others.
We nourish ourselves, or imbalance ourselves, with every thought and deed.
Life Style habits are the number one factor determining your health. Good changes in life style can benefit health and even change your life. Food is the primary physical factor to facilitate building the body substance. Food is medicine. Food is significant to balance your daily life challenges. This is equally true for the body and the mind. Food not only builds, fuels, and repairs every cell in the body, it also fuels and heals our emotions.
According to Ayurveda no food is intrinsically good or bad, but each person depending upon the constitution reacts differently to it.
‘What is food to one, is to others bitter poison.’
Ayurveda identifies six tastes: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter and astringent. Every meal should contain all six tastes in its proper proportion for your constitution. Having the full range of tastes in every meal completely satisfies the senses.
The metabolic processes start with the act of chewing and ends with all the nutrients being absorbed and assimilated by the body tissue and cells through a transformational process. Each stage of metabolism produces a biochemical effect on your physiology. Every food creates a hot, cooling, drying or lubricating effect that is partly influenced how the food has been stored, cooked, or prepared.
1-Food for the Soul Expanding the nature of food beyond the chemistry of proteins, amino acids, minerals, vitamins etc. and including the concept of subtle energies. In essence all human experience is food. The world around is digested by the five senses; ideas are digested by the mind and intellect; feelings and foodstuffs are digested by the body. All of this energy – all of this food – transforms our biochemistry, and ultimately becomes the stuff of our tissues and cells.
All this food is transformed and the gross part becomes excrement. The middle part is the extracted nutrients that build and repair tissues. The subtle part is the taste of it – the hidden intelligence – that literally feeds the qualities of our mind and emotions.
Now you may recognise why we are what we eat. The impact happens – if you notice it consciously or subconsciously.
2-Mood Food Thoughts themselves have a subtle vibratory effect on the physical world. An impulse of energy – of consciousness – sending a ripple of influence through the universe. We nourish ourselves and others through our own thoughts. Your state of mind as you eat is the most crucial ingredient of your diet. In fact, Ayurveda teaches that right attitude ultimately outweighs right tastes as the primary factor in good nutrition, since even a perfect meal becomes toxic in the body when our emotions are discordant.
3-The secrets of good digestion Clearly, right diet is necessary for healthy tissue and beautiful skin. The purest food in the world is worth little to your health if the body cannot digest and assimilate the nutrients in it. The key factor is the strength of the digestive fire. Whatever is not digested or excreted through normal channels accumulates as toxins in the weak areas of your body. All disease is due to the accumulation of toxins. However only when the digestive fire is disturbed the result is an imbalance. Good digestion, absorption and elimination are crucial.
A physical fast with KHICHADI (split mung dal with white rice)
and a mental fast are recommended.
4-Ayurvedic Etiquette
Cleanse the body and the mind before you begin to cook or eat
Do not eat when you are upset
Begin your meal with a blessing
Chew your food well and savor the flavor
Eat silently or have a good conversation
Eat a modest portion
In every circumstance, be natural!
When we are totally balanced in body, breath, mind, and spirit, psychological hunger which is at the root of all eating problems, is not an issue. Balance is a state of total satisfaction – it is the ultimate gratification. We ‘think’ we have cravings, in truth, it is not a taste we crave at all. It is wholeness itself.
Book Recommendation: Absolute Beauty. Radiant skin and inner harmony through the ancient secrets of Ayurveda by Pratima Raichur
