Eating

I think that most of us don't understand food and it's relationship to our bodies and minds. Who taught you to recognize when you where hungry? Who taught that person? Were they healthy? Do you feel healthy?

With so much access to knowledge from around the world, we are beginning to learn that there are many different ways to eat that are best for our individual bodies. It's not one size fits all anymore, and it may be time to reevaluate how we perceive food.

Since the beginning of this year, I have read an Ayurveda book which highlighted the concept that what most of us recognize as hunger is actually just normal processes of the body. Also, the emotions that go along with hunger don't have to rule whether or not we eat.

The book stated that the sensations we often think are hunger, an example being when people say they are so hungry that their stomachs are eating their spines, could be the sensation of kleshas, or seeds of karma, being burned off by the digestive fires. These seeds of karma are usually emotional aspects of our lives that don't serve our greater good. In my mind, the digestive fires are the burning sensations that I've recognized as hunger.

One of the tools the book suggested was to focus on our breathing while we felt the sensation of hunger. By breathing through the unpleasantness in our bellies, it's suppose to get rid of kleshas, which are negative energies that don't serve our greater good. I liked the idea of being able to cleanse myself through sitting and focusing on breathing while I waited for the discomfort to pass. The next time I felt hungry and knew that I didn't need to eat, I sat on my couch, and focused on calm breathing.

I kept sitting with the discomfort and I kept ignoring the urge to get up and do anything else. I was no stranger to discomfort, and I had enough trust to feel as though this experience would be beneficial--kind of like the pain of a deep tissue massage and relaxing your body around the points of discomfort because you know how good it will feel in the end. I think I sat there for an hour, because I kept zoning in-and-out. But, by the time I felt like getting up, the hunger sensations had disappeared.