DRISTI - YOGIC DIET
YES, YOGIS EAT And the food we eat, becomes us. BY DANIEL AARON
Fruits are more nutritious when eaten raw.
Unless the yogi has gone so far into the radical spiritual realm they have dropped the whole food thing and become breatharian, yogis eat. So the questions then: What? How? And what difference does it make? Of all the over-the-top healing adventures I’ve experienced (therapy, fasting, sweat lodges, rolfing, psychics, catharsis, silence, meditation, hypnosis, laughter yoga, and that’s the short list), what’s been most important to me on this journey? Three lessons: 1. Stand up straight. This can be a massive metaphor. Or just the simple thing my mother nagged me with as a kid: posture. And, on some level, this is the central point of yoga.
What food serves me to become who I want to be?
2. Breathe. Breath is so obvious it’s easily hidden from awareness. Also a key aspect of yoga teaching (pranayama and all that), though breathing and breath-therapy (breathwork) goes far beyond that. Breathing is not ‘the measure of life’ for nothing. 3. How and what to eat. Wow, again it’s so fundamental we’d think it was obvious, though my education in this arena came late, and it only came when I went out of my way to find it. Viktoras Kulvinskas, co-founder of Hippocrates Health Institute and author of “Survival Into the Twenty First Century,” said we have 21 opportunities a day to choose what we put in our mouth (speaking just of food or drink). Each time it’s a choice. A vote. An opportunity to invest in one direction or another. Each of those votes counts, and each opportunity adds up in a cumulative way to who we become. Like in yoga, posture (asana) deals with the physical body to affect the mental, emotional and spiritual parts of ourselves, choosing what we put into ourselves (food and drink) also affects us on various levels. The creation of our life largely comes down to the question “who do we want to be?” And then, moment by moment, choice by choice,
36
NAMASKAR
word, action, thought - they add up to the answer. Yogis do things consciously. That’s our aim. Including food. There is no right or wrong about food. Eating french fries from McDonalds is no more or less spiritual than drinking a shot of wheat grass: they simply have different effects. The real question around food, the one that underlies all the others? What food serves me to become who I want to be? What (and how, when, why) do I eat to feel how I would like to feel. Or, perhaps, which food choices help me to be of the greatest service to others. There is so much great info out there about nutrition, and, unfortunately, a lot of bunk too. We are all different, and we all have different food proclivities and challenges (the fancy name is Biochemical Diversity). Info is great and helpful. And trial and success is equally important. It’s worth finding out and trying out. Vegetarianism is often associated with yoga for various reasons. One is that a plant-based diet tends to make the body more supple, cleaner, lighter, and more flexible. A more fundamental reason though, gleaned from Patanjali, creator of the Yoga Sutras, has to do with how we treat others. Patanjali’s first real action-oriented advice to those who wish to feel good (reach Samadhi) is ahimsa. Do as little harm as possible. Or, create as much kindness as possible. Ahimsa relates to how we treat other beings. Patanjali’s suggests the kinder we are to others, the more we avoid doing harm, the more likely we are to reach liberation. Ahimsa elicits respect for life, allowing all beings the chance to live as well as possible and even prioritizing that over our own sensual, gustatory pleasure, choosing ways of satisfying our own nutritional needs without killing animals. While the other being - the one that gets to live and pursue happiness themself - surely benefits from our ahimsa practice, the primary benefit of ahimsa is for the one who practices it.