How Jedi Knights Should Eat
by Angela
AY:A2 begins our second year of daily practice. A few of you are starting to show signs of increased concentration and willpower. I didn’t expect that to happen so fast.
Daily practitioners do develop slightly freakish will power. But a strong will can make you stupid. In this practice, your will is only as good as your surrender.
I’ll use the topic of food to illustrate. Food and ashtanga are intertwined backwards and forwards. Not separate. A person can sort of ignore this, but eventually the ignoring gets boring.
It’s the consistent (I’d suggest daily) practice that really opens things up. If a person does that as a sort of meditation, three distinct empowerments come online with respect to eating. I’ll call them the Young Jedi Trifecta, YJT:
(1) an increase in self-control
(2) a decrease in the buy-in to stories and emotional patterns used to strengthen old habits (e.g. “I have to eat X because I am Z,†or “I can never eat Y because I am Wâ€)
(3) an increase in sensory clarity, yielding new information about the way the body relates with food.
The upshot is heroic discipline, even though one might be a sophomore with the spirituality stuff.
If you do not practice as a meditation (i.e., if you are not interested in clarifying the mind and relaxing its patterns), that is completely ok. Please note that if you’re not actively focusing your practice on self-study, the ego may seize the YJT and cash it in for goodies. Goodies! Have fun with that. Control, charisma, a nice ass, secret feelings of superiority, whatever. Zzzzzzzzz…..
In the Bhagavad Gita (7.16), Krishna tells Arjuna that four types of virtuous people practice yoga: people trying to reduce their suffering, people trying to accumulate knowledge, people seeking worldly goods in a selfish manner, and people who are already acting out of their in-born wisdom.
This winter in Mysore, Sharath said the following at least every other week: “Not all advanced asana students are big yogis.†I take this as to mean that many people he sees are Krishna’s third kind of student—what Chogyam Trungpa termed devotees of spiritual materialistm.
This is the thing. Heroic self-control can supersize the ego. No doubt. Let it happen where it happens. Because I want to note that in the passage above Krishna is not giving Arjuna ammo for some smug “what type is he?†ego-game. Rather, all four types of yogis are said to have virtue. We all contain multitudes – we understand all four types because we have been them. And I only bother to say any of this stuff because it’s obvious that all of you are predominantly of the fourth type. You are predominantly wise.
I’ve been the third kind of student for sure. In the second year of daily practice, I took the YJT and really cashed in. Those were the days. They looked like this: YJT + big self-transformation wishlist + tons of unconscious material = Oh Unholy Neuroses. Fun times. To mention just the consequences this had for my relationships with eating, I’ll note that I ignored the ways food connected me with friends, family and the environment. I was a “me first†eater willing to sniff at my parents’ cooking and simply not interested in the energetic feel, origin, and environmental costs of my nourishment. (I mostly stopped eating meat 17 years ago, but vegetarianism doesn’t equal ahimsa. At all.) This self-focus was useful for a while. I used it, plus the Jedi stuff, to experiment on my system like crazy.
I did several major cleanses, and played with a number of very (very) strict eating programs. When my friend Marichy, his first four incarnations (especially D), put me in direct contact with my liver and the things I’d done to it as a hard drinking teen, I abruptly quit alcohol for a seven year cycle. Some things are good to swear off like that, but most cleansing and strict diets can harm a person’s metabolism and (if they don’t have sufficient carbs or calories) make it hard to think. P.S., Here are the dark sides of some especially dogmatic eating styles. A dirty little secret of many under-eaters is that constant hunger can drain off energy and goodwill for loving relationships. People who don’t eat enough aren’t happy. A dirty little secret of the organ cleansing movement is that it has a sharp puritanical edge of concern with control, and some confusion between intestinal and moral cleanliness. A dirty little secret of the mythical “ancient” diets is that eating lots of flesh makes a person  rajasic – usually angry or anxious – and can deteriorate analytical and relationship skills (attributes of non-ancient humans) until they become a bit… Paleozoic.
In any case, those years of “research” and strict food rules did teach me a lot, and did render my digestive fire extremely strong and healthy. Luckily, I kept coming to my mat every day without a break, so gradually I started understanding surrender. Now that I’m more interested in radical acceptance of my own social, temporal, and environmental contexts, and of my own desires, it is easier to nest my eating habits not only my body’s energy economy, but also in the context of personal and environmental relationships.
Had I been more in contact with my own wisdom in those days, my relationship with food would have balanced discipline with contemplation. Turns out that the Ayurvedic approach to eating does just this. The way I’ve been learning it, Ayurveda is not a set of fixes or healing strategies. It’s a holographic map of the whole web of manifest reality. The Ayurvedic approach to eating isn’t an arcane prescription for fixing one’s doshas; it’s a set of practices for becoming conscious of the inner and outer webs of our being.
You don’t even have to study it. Just imagine. What if you showed up to your hunger, and your food, the way you show up to our yoga room and to your physical practice? So… you’d put time and awareness in to getting the conditions right. Do a gratitude ritual. Care about where the recipe and the ingredients come from. Practice in silence, and in excellent company. Breathe. Act with clear, loving attention. Regard strong thought and emotional patterns with a bit of cool skepticism. Take a long finishing sequence to absorb the benefits.
Quick fix? Yeah right. Not in ashtanga and not in eating. This practice teaches us that our bodies are vehicles for past and future choices. Love the rough spots into fluidity, day by day, and let the painful stuff get easier. Recognize that especially deep patterns got there as a result of grasping and repetition, and we don’t get out of them for free.
The yoga thing is about action and observation, and finding that these two are not separate. Action can be luminously conscious. Takes practice.
So that’s why I am not in to giving food advice. (1) I figure practice will work it out for you according to your own perfect timing. HOW you eat is probably more important than WHAT you eat. (2) Moreover, throwing a bunch of moral rules at you, instead of allowing them to arise from within you, will probably increase your experience of duality. This takes people away from yoga. Hathayogapradipika 101. (3) Heck if I know what you should eat.
Carisa recently did an elimination diet as part of her yoga practice. (More info about her experience in the document linked in the newsletter.) She loved it, and is starting to use the results to create some really enjoyable new habits. When I said that I don’t tell people what to eat, she noted that people have a right to know if the foods they’ve been eating all their lives have become toxic to them.
Good point, Lady.
So I’ll fess up a bit. Context is big for me. I eat as local as possible and take a lot of energy from food prepared for me with love. When I do that preparation myself, around here I eat as much as a pound of local, organic vegetables…. for breakfast. If it has more than five ingredients or is made by one of the companies owned by Monsanto or Coca-Cola (Kraft, Keebler, Nabisco, Kellogg, those guys), it’s not going in my body. Like many daily practitioners I like fat: nuts, oils, a bit of dairy. This morning I drank a green smoothie, then a few hours later made a two-egg omlette with spinach and goat cheese, and a slice of rye bread with ghee. In addition to the obvious inflammatory foods – alcohol, coffee, animals – there are a couple of other addictive items that I tend to avoid. Big surprise: they are sugar and wheat.
In daily life, I do eat a bit of sugar and wheat now and then, just to keep myself from getting rigid, or because that’s what’s served. Want to know how much? I’ll keep track on the document linked in the newsletter. If you want to use this document to keep track of anything yourself, there is space. But ONLY use it if you can bring as much radical, loving acceptance (abhyasa) as you do will-power (vairagya). There are some interesting articles linked on the document as well.
At the risk of sounding corny, eating feels spiritual to me. I don’t mean fairy dust and sunshine—spirituality is way stronger, grittier stuff than that. It’s simply that eating tends to be an intense direct experience of various layers of my self, my intra-connections in time and space, and all the drives in nature. From the most base to the most transcendent. It is a field of experience in which all sorts of separateness — me/it, attraction/repulsion, life/death, inside/outside — naturally, momentarily, collapse into one.
impecable timing. Thank you
honest and insightful, thanks!
Indeed. My big moment was many years ago rejecting food my Mother lovingly made because I was ‘macrobiotic’ at the time. Did way more harm than the eating of her lasagne would have any day of the week. Now, if someone offers me something made with love, I eat it and thank them. What I do in the privacy of my own home is a little more complicated, or simple, depending on how you view it, but yes. Vegetables. Lots of them.
Perfect timing indeed.
awesome
I love you
fil
[…] How Jedi Knights Should Eat : AY:A2. […]
This is perfect and REALLY good timing. I’m amused that you’re eating eggs. 😉 Now who is going to steal bites of mine off my plate when we finally get to visit?????
I really enjoyed this piece. Thank you :). I noticed in the ‘cake’ document that there is a cell entitled Salt is EVIL. This isnt the first time I have heard this in regard to Ashtanga/Ashtangis. I am not really sure why its evil? Sure, sodium from processed and packaged foods should be avoided where possible, but we SWEAT a lot of salt out and just drinking water is not going to replace electrolytes, in fact it will deplete even more.
In the feudal China of 300 B.C the average salt intake for women and men was 3,000 and 5,000mg respectively. I reckon they were working hard and needed it. Same goes for ancient Rome, salt was so highly prized that it was a currency.
Lack of salt can be bad for the adrenally fatigued in fact they are often prescribed salty water (with preferably Himalayan salt). In my athletic pursuits I also sweat a lot as well and if I havent had enough SA/MG/K etc then I get dizzy on standing, probably my adrenals complaining.I know now when my electrolytes are low as I begin to crave coconut water and it tastes like sweat. I am not advocating excessive salt use but I would think that SOME GOOD salt would be beneficial. I would love to hear why its being touted as not. 🙂
Since I am the author of the salt section, I feel like I should clarify couple of things in here.
First of all I am talking there about sodium chloride (the only compound of a table salt), not about other types of salts. The fact is that in a balanced diet we get really enough of sodium in natural products, there’s no need for extra salt to be added to anything. The other fact is that too high intake of sodium, especially combined with too low intake of potassium, are one of the major causes of hypertension (probably almost half of us will die from cancer and the other half from cardiovascular diseases, so this is a really big deal).
Referring to what you say about athletes/excessive exercising, I fully agree. But it is important to remember that keeping electrolytes balanced means that we need not only sodium, but also potassium, magnesium, calcium and chloride in proper amounts. You won’t find them in a table salt. All of those ions play important role in physiological processes in our bodies (mainly in nervous system, cardiac and muscle functions). We definitely need all of them. The dizziness after heavy workout comes from imbalanced ions, and this is mainly our nervous system, which reacts to it first. But the golden mean in terms of sodium demand in our regular daily lives is really low and the majority of us exceed it significantly and unconsciously. Moreover, for the majority of us table salt is hard to be considered any good. Also notice that isotonic liquids taken by athletes contain all of those ions in a very specific proportions and actually could be harmful if you are not dehydrated (so drinking them on a daily basis isn’t a good idea, unless you have some crazy training schedule).
I would still advocate for a low sodium diet, even if you don’t have any cardiovascular problems yet. And I was doing this way before I stared doing yoga.
And yes, I am a lover of a natural mineral water, which unfortunately is very expensive in US. So there’s no ridiculous hatred towards salts at all.
I suspect you might be already tired with my long response but I have one more point to make. According to what they thought me at school (it’s been a while ago so maybe there were some revisions on that knowledge that I’m not aware of), salt was so precious and expensive because the demand was tremendously exceeding the supply (think about inefficiency of ancient salt mines and technologies of salt retention from sea water). In the times of no refrigerators and chemical companies, salt was the very useful preservative, especially for meets. What’s interesting, spices and herbs were also very expensive. And they helped to kill the smell and flavor of a rotten meet….
Beautiful, Angela. Lots of love to you and all the Ann Arbor ashtangis.
Hi all. Great to hear from you.
Shelley, I don’t have much perspective on the salt thing, but offered what I’ve got on the group document.
Sonya knows my mostly-vegan past. I learned advanced series on kale salads, nuts, seeds and kombucha; and it was good. But I used to take a bite of her omlettes at Pain Quotidien in Brentwood.
Sonya, when I started teaching Mysore, that had to change. I was eating very light foods and not a whole lot of calories, and this left me very light energetically. My diet was almost all plants, nuts and oils with a few simple whole grains. Note that very few Michiganders are on that kind of a program. To resonate a bit better, I found myself eating more dense foods- thus the addition of some heavy breads (rye and sprouted grains), eggs on my moon cycle, some yogurt, a few beans and pulses, and goat cheese. I went from maybe 60% raw/fermented to more like 25% raw. No complaints at all. Feels right for now. As my students’ diets change in the coming years, it’s likely that I’ll migrate back to eating a bit more lightly. For now, I trust my attraction to more grounding, dense foods.
A sattvic diet is one that leads to equanimity of spirit and luminosity of mind. If Ayurveda is taken by the letter, then sattva = certain beans and pulses, milk, ghee, yogurt and spices in specific combinations at specific times. Outside the context of the Indian food supply, means of livelihood, gender dynamics, and seasons, I still think the principle of sattvic eating is really useful. But sometimes I’ve found myself making some pretty big adjustments in order to balance my energy levels and keep my mind relatively clear.
As I was about to write this comment, I saw a Tim Horton’s commercial about how their breakfast sandwiches (layers of reconstituted stuff, of course) are made fresh every morning. Kind of a hilarious idea — freshly made fake food.
In any case, thank you for this post. You know as well as anyone in my life how daily practice has helped me feel disconnected from some of what I have long eaten. I think for me, I had to find aversion before starting to discover what my body — and mind — need.
Hydration — a state that I started to examine more closely after a simple comment from you — has also been very helpful in my food journey. I think I have often been using food to fill what I thought was a void, when in reality it was my inability to properly read my level of dehydration.
Thanks so much for this wonderful post, just in time for spring and summer crops!
Taking off from what you, Rose, Kasia, and Shelley wrote, it seems like strong aversion/negative experiences (whether physical, emotional, or rational — not that those three are mutually exclusive!) have influenced our food and drink choices. There’s been some positive stuff too, but it seems like we’re all writing about learning from pain. 🙂 It’s been so interesting to read about everyone’s journeys.
As for my learning from pain — About a year and half ago, I tried a short-lived crazy regiment that this blog post gives language to describe: fantastically rajasic. Although this lasted only a few months, it’s taken me about until now — with the help of daily practice as an affective anchor — to recover a stable relationship with food. I eat now more similarly to how I ate a few years ago in California and my last year in college, which were some of my happiest times with food, and, actually (now that I look up these terms) kind of sattvic. Maybe I should have listened to that wisdom to begin with!
P.S. One day when I am an angstier, angrier, more talented person with the right connections, I will form a punk rock glam band called “fantastic rajasic”.
Why wait to start that punk rock glam band? 🙂
Do it! I would listen to you every morning. (Could a yoga shala have a house band?)
Rajas is *useful.* I actually need some in the mornings, as you know. Admittedly, meditation or chanting also prepare me for practice, and provide a more refined, subtly perceptive energy than does a 4am dance party. But lots of days, the best way to bring my mulabandha online is a heavy, driving baseline. This season in Mysore, the heavy rotation was The Weekend (Chopped and Screwed), Major Lazer, Gui Boratto, Tamil pop singles (Mr. Kandasamy, etc.), and, as always, classic White Stripes…
Also, I just ate a square of Theo, 70% cocoa, organic fair trade dark chocolate with almonds. Hello. It’s from Anna G. One square is sufficiently intense to satisfy any sugar cravings from here til Tuesday. Recommended if you’re finishing out your ladies’ holiday along with me today.
This concludes today’s transmission of corruptive influences.
Y, Fantastic Rajasic actually sounds like a good name for a dance hall reggae band as well. If you like, I can put you in touch with a group of punk/rockabillies that I met on another planet in my dreams on the full moon. They have really cool clothes, that change color with their mood, like fully body mood rings. Whilst I was there they were deep purple.
At practice this morning, three people reported you’re getting in to green smoothies. All I can say is… they kind of thrill me. I’m not saying kale loves getting liquified together with swiss chard and celery and lemon (ahimsa applies here too, I’d submit), but still it is wonderful to drink vegetables for breakfast. And, to be discreet about it, NOTHING could be better for your digestion experience…
On hydradion. In ayurveda, it is recommended to drink water BEFORE a meal if one wants to lose weight. And after if one wants to gain. It’s also recommended that only a portion (what portion sometimes depends on station in life and so on) of the belly be filled during a meal. One should still have some feeling of emptiness in the belly after eating.
Practicing being ok with a sense of slight emptiness in the belly after meals, or before bed, is an intense proposition for the emotional body. You all know that I don’t believe you need to change body size at all, even those of you who are working with your doctor to lose weight. From my perspective, I have no judgement of your body size other than that it is perfect. I don’t consume enough popular culture, and never have (there are advantages to growing up off the grid), to be able to reproduce the media’s sick messages about body size, especially not in our room– a place devoted to your growth / radical acceptance. I will support you if you have a healthy goal of weight loss, but I simply do not believe that you need to look any different than you do. I don’t have it in me to lie to you about that. So if that’s your program, you’ll have to find another, cleaner motivation than teacher disapproval. 🙂
That said, whether you want to lose weight or not, it is a VERY good idea to bring as much consciousness as possible to what happens in the emotional body, and what thought forms arise and try to define the situation, when there is the simple experience of emptiness in the belly. You are not your emotions. You are not your thoughts. And it is sometimes a good idea, for anyone on the pitta and kapha parts of the constitutional spectrum, to learn to go to bed somewhat empty *if* you are practicing ashtanga in the morning. Give your body a chance to switch over to cleaner fuel – prana is a very real alternative energy source. For a more vata constitution, or people with low blood sugar, eating some fast-burning fuel (like 1/3 a banana) before practice may be a good idea.
[…] learning more? I am too. You can start by following the Jangalikayamane blog and reading “How Jedi Knights Should Eat” from the AY:A2 blog. Here’s a juicy excerpt from that blog post, which several yogis I […]
WOW, I love this!
This is so similar to my experience. In the first two years of my practice I shunned everything I had once loved or found nourishing. I turned my nose up at excellent times with my family (and in the last years of my Mom’s life no less) and wouldn’t drink wine with the Dad whose wine shop I was helping run, the thing that brought us together.
Now? Well, let’s face it, there are still challenges. But if my Dad comes over I’m opening a Chateuneuf du Page and getting out a wheel of St. Andre. And if my husband requests my fabulous cherry pie with sugar and wheat for his birthday, I will join him in a warm gooey slice.
And which student am I? It shifts from time to time. I guess I don’t want to examine that too hard, but as long as I get on my mat every day and see what comes, maybe I’ll weather this life ok.
One person thought this post was about ‘eating disorders.’ I don’t even know what that term means, but I think it has to do with very serious, neurotic, self-monitoring and body hate. Not a term to use lightly.
Meanwhile, everybody who practices has got to venture into the minefield of food awareness eventually. Sorry folks. It’s an emotional, samskaric no-man’s land, but it’s definitely part of the territory of consciousness/unconsciousness.
The process I’m describing in this post happens, if at all, as a result of daily practice. As I said above, it’s simply that a person’s will-power becomes much stronger than normal, AND their body awareness increases, AND their non-attachment to old scripts and food addictons increases. At first it can be hard to know what to do with these Jedi powers, and I am strongly suggesting that they be balanced with radical acceptance. (People who do not really take tristhana seriously never have to go through this, incidentally, because their minds don’t necessarily quiet down. There are many lifetime asana practitioners whose minds are not clear, and may have been made even less clear through years of refusing to be Krishna’s fourth type of student.)
So there is this new conundrum: figuring out how much to dial up the radical acceptance, given a sharp increase in power of the will. Re-balancing abhyasa and vairagya.
To that situation, I am offering these questions as a kind of contemplative practice: HOW MUCH radical effing acceptance can I practice? HOW MUCH shall I merge with the time, and environment, and everyday life around me? I don’t know the answers, but I do assume they’re always changing.
So again, this process is only something that daily practitioners can really understand. My writing here is for people who practice consistently, and who do that the intention of deepening tristhana as a path of contemplation/transformation.
But you knew that. 🙂
Another part of this process is coming face to face with the past selves who made the choices that created the samskaras we are experiencing now – and experiencing more intensely as a result of the practice. These samskaras include: any painful emotional patterns, any hurtful self-talk, straight-up unconsciousness (avidya is said to have a force of its own), dumb stuff we did in relationship, and especially any almost-believable stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why. That’s all a kind of offering to us from our past selves. We are in relationship with our past selves.
What are you going to do with that offering? What are you going to say to the past self that gave it do you?
You suck? You were so stupid? I’m glad you’re dead?
Sorry. Like Laura, I don’t look at my less conscious previous self and judge her so harshly. It’s possible to have a little rueful sense of humor, and even love, for our more awkward past selves. If you re-read the description above, I’m not saying that my weird period of experimentation was evil or sick or bad or wrong. Just unconscious. Just immature.
When Sharath talks about people being REALLY attached to asana stuff, he sometimes says, “it’s cute.” Not condescending-cute. Puppy cute.
It would be easy to hate on my past self, and to use that judgement as fuel for some sort of reaction to her. That is actually the path of creating a new, reactive, not fully positive, somewhat unconscious samskara. It is a new story.
Compassion for past selves can be liberating.
Forgive those selves, whoever they were. Compassion for past selves enables real kindness NOW to others whose actions seem especially unconscious. It can make the path ahead even more wide open and clear than it already is.