by Om Swami
If you wish to strengthen your practice even further, you may also journalize each time you are able to come out of your negative state. Writing a journal and reviewing it later helps you to analyse, understand and shape yourself better.
If you do not lose a sense of the present moment – if you remain committed to your inner peace – nothing can provoke you. Most negative emotions are symptomatic. They are not just emotions but emotional responses. With practice and mindfulness, you are able to choose your response better. Steadily, as you understand yourself better and learn to tame your stray emotions, you start to live in a state of inner quietude that is healing and empowering.
The resistance in your subtle body – in your emotions and in your inner self – starts to disappear and the resulting peaceful emotional state has a significant, noticeable and therapeutic effect on your physical body. This is what yogic texts call living in the sentiment of goodness (sattvic bhava).
There is little more to your physical, mental and emotional well-being than what you already know from reading this book. If you understand your constitution and choose your food accordingly, if you eat your food mindfully, if you understand your mind and choose your thoughts accordingly, if you regularly detoxify your physical and mental bodies, you will never need to visit a physician.
16
In a Nutshell
Let me give you the golden principle, the primordial mantra to stay in the finest of your physical, mental and emotional health. If you adopt what I am going to tell you, you will become a powerful agent – a catalyst in your own transformation. At the root of most ailments, diseases and disorder is clutter. Clutter could exist in your physical, mental or emotional world. Generally speaking, clutter in any one world is a strong indication that it also exists in the other two worlds.
Most of us carry a clutter of thoughts – often painful thoughts – of the past. We walk around in a mess of negative emotions, carrying a bag of unfulfilled desires. These thoughts and emotions continue to pile up, making us feel heavier and heavier, until one day we can take it no more and break down. This point of breakdown starts to manifest in the form of ailments in our three bodies – physical, mental and emotional – long before it appears in tests and medical imaging. How do we clean the clutter in the physical world? We organize the necessary stuff and discard the useless. This leads me to the golden mantra: simplify your life. This is truly the yogic sense, the wellness sense.
If you simplify your life, you will feel light and nourished. The easiest way to start simplifying your life is to de-clutter it. Start by cleaning up your physical world. Look around your study, your bedroom, your kitchen, your fridge and your garage. Get rid of as much stuff as you can and organize the rest. Make it a regular practice. This physical de-cluttering has a subtle effect on your mental state. The more you simplify your outer world, the greater the simplicity in the inner world. Use mindfulness and meditation as your tools to clean up your mental and emotional world as well.
Think about things of the past that cause you grief today: people you can’t forgive, incidents you can’t forget, feelings you can’t let go of, thoughts you are holding on to and memories you are clinging to – all these and more that are adding to the emotional weight on you. It is time to discard them all. Write them down and shred the paper, letting go of them forever. Audit yourself minutely. These things are the real culprits; they are the agents of disease. They undermine the three doshas; it’s these demons that weaken the seven dhatus. You can only benefit from destroying them. Simplify your life, diet, eating habits, thinking and living, and watch the miracles of wellness and joy unfold before your very eyes.
Here are some guiding principles to sum up everything that entails food and the eating sense:
Eat wholesome foods as much as possible.
All processed and canned fruits damage your health, therefore avoid them.
Ideally, eighty per cent of your diet should consist of alkaline foods.
Squeeze a fresh lemon or a half lemon in your glass of water whenever you can. It is a great antioxidant, highly alkaline and good for the skin too.
Completely avoid fried foods.
Think of artificial sweeteners as doses of poison.
Chew your food well.
Eat in moderation.
Eat less than your stomach desires. Leave some room for air and water.
Try to eat at the same time every day.
Ideally, you should avoid eating after the sunset and in any case, your last meal of the day should be around four hours before you go to sleep.
Avoid stale foods. According to Ayurveda, if three hours have elapsed since the food was cooked, it has turned stale. In modern terms, such food is oxidized and damaging for your health. Yogically, such food is tamasic and promotes ailments in the body.
Eating a good diet is mostly a common-sense matter. You need not be obsessed with numbers. Such obsession complicates life and we don’t want that because, above all, it is simplification of life that yields the benefits of everything else.
Never go on a guilt trip. It is okay to break the rules of eating sense sometimes. If you are at a birthday party or a function and you are offered cake, rather than battling yourself to resist and dwelling on it, it’s better to have a small piece. Thereafter, if you feel guilty, the same piece of cake will cause a lot more damage. Don’t feel guilty; you have committed no crime. We are supposed to live and enjoy our lives, and food is one of the primary bases of our enjoyment. Treat yourself like an adult; treat yourself with care.
If you are mentally and emotionally positive and clear, and if you are free of stress, anomalies in diet can cause you practically no harm. Follow the principle of simplification in your decision making. No one needs to tell you what you should and shouldn’t be eating or doing. When you consume food that is not good for you, it will have some cost to your health, energy and time. If you are willing to pay that price, by all means go ahead and have that food. Ultimately, you are your own best friend and your own worst enemy. You are the best judge when it comes to your own life.
Another matter that requires your attention is sleep. Sleeping is a divine gift. Our cells are repaired when we are sleeping. Nature allows us to forget our negative emotions, our painful thoughts, our past, our present and our future as it goes to work on our healing and rejuvenation. In the ideal world, everyone would take a short afternoon nap. If you are unable to have a siesta due to your work commitments, at least sleep really well at night. The easiest way to improve your sleep is to ensure that you sleep at the same time every day. If you change your sleeping time, you will often end up waking up in the middle of the night, only to look at the alarm clock. When you sleep at the same time every day, your body falls into a perfect rhythm. It becomes more efficient at executing the repair and healing processes while you sleep. Plus, you won’t need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning – your body already has an ‘atomic clock’.
To optimize the quality of your sleep, you need to consider your sleeping position, and your optimal sleeping position depends on your dosha. It is best to sleep to your left if you are a kapha. When you sleep on the left side, the right nostril opens up for breathing. The right breath is called the solar breath. It generates heat in the body. If you are a pitta, you are best to sleep on your right side, because sleeping on the right activates your lunar breath from the left nostril, which maintains a sort of coolness in the body. A vata may sleep on either side. These are not set-in-stone rules: in all likelihood, you will change your position after falling asleep, anyway. If sometimes you can’t avoid having a late dinner and have to go to bed before it’s digested, it’s better to sleep to your left side, so it ignites the digestive fire.
This is the day and age of distractions – twenty-four- hour television channels, Internet, social media and cellphones – and this ultra-connectivity and activity rob you of
quality time. Whatever you do, moderation is worth practising. If we were to sum up Ayurveda in one word, it would probably be moderation. Balance is the key. Once in a while you may indulge, but if you let things come in the way of balanced living, they start to overtake your life. And one day, before you know it, those aspects are ruling your life; they are consuming you, rather than the other way round.
Finally, never fail to express your gratitude for all you have been blessed with. This is the easiest way of summoning nature – of becoming one with it. Every object on our planet and in our universe has an impact on our lives, however tiny it may be. Think about this: the moon, a celestial object devoid of any life, is more than 234,000 miles away, and yet it can cause massive tides in the oceans on earth. The strong gravitational pull of the earth cannot stop those tides. Can we reasonably assume that the full moon that is causing the oceans to swell is having no impact on us? I don’t think so. The effect might be subtle, but it does not mean it’s insignificant.
As we become more evolved, emotionally and spiritually, we become more sensitive; we notice and feel more. Astrological treatises assign various foods to various days. And they state that the fertility and sexual drive of a woman is directly linked to the moon, for example. My point is that we are more than the sum total of the three doshas and seven dhatus. We contain within ourselves an entire universe. The more natural our lives, the healthier we become. When our frequency matches that of nature’s, diseases can no longer exist in our bodies. If living physically close to nature is not possible, eating natural foods is the next best thing you can do. If you don’t forget that everything springs from energy, and there’s no true structural reality, you can remain eternally healthy. Such an understanding will lead you to the right thought and right action, and right consequences will follow.
Your health is in your hands. It starts and ends with you.
Appendices
Appendix 1
Acidic and Alkaline Foods
It’s not the pH level of the food itself but its effect on digestion that is most significant. In other words, it’s not just the taste (rasa) of the food that matters when it comes to acidity/alkalinity but the post-digestive state (vipaka) and overall effect (prabhava). The tables below factor all three.
Alkaline Foods
Highly Alkaline and Sattvic
Moderately Alkaline and Rajasic
Slightly Alkaline and Tamasic
Vegetables
Vegetables
Vegetables
Asparagus
Alfalfa
Fermented veggies
Bottle gourd
Artichokes
Garlic
Broccoli
Barley grass
Mushrooms
Brussels sprouts
Beetroot
Mustard greens
Cauliflower
Cabbage
Onions
Celery
Carrot
Parsnips
Cucumber
Ginger
Radish
Dandelions
Green beans and
Sea vegetables
Eggplant
soya bean
Spirulina
Kale
Kale
Turnip
Lemons
Mustard greens
Watercress
Lettuce
Okra
Potato
Peas
Pumpkin
Peppers
Spinach
Sprouts
Squashes
Wheat grass
Sweet potato
Green olives
Watercress
Fruits
Fruits
Fruits
Avocado
Apples
Grapefruit
Fresh Coconut
Banana
Grapes
Lime
Blackberries
Raspberries
Mango
Cherries
Rhubarb
Papaya
Peaches
Strawberries
Pears
Watermelon
Tomato
Others
Others
Others
Ghee from cow
All sprouts
Herbal teas
milk
Ghee from buffalo milk
Water from natural spring or RO system
Butter
Olive oil
Most spices
Note: Ideally, the majority of your diet should consist of alkaline foods.
Acidic Foods
Slightly Acidic and Sattvic
Moderately Acidic and Rajasic
Highly Acidic and Tamasic
Vegetables
Vegetables
Vegetables
Black olives
Black beans
Soybeans
Chickpeas
Corn
Spinach
Fruits
Apricots
Dates
Figs
Guava
Others
Others
Others
Brown rice
Black tea
Artificial sweeteners
Brown sugar
Bottled juices
Beef
Cow milk
Buffalo’s milk
Beer
Fresh juices
Cheese
Carbonated soft
Normal tap water
Coffee
drinks
Vegetable oil
Flavoured milk
Chicken
White rice
Ice creams
Cocoa
Wholewheat bread
Most dry fruits
Eggs
Wholewheat pasta
Peanuts
Jam
Red wine
Liquor
Sea salt
Mayonnaise
Table salt
Most fried foods
White bread
Most sauces
White pasta
Pork
White sugar
Seafood
White Wine
Turkey
Vinegar
Vodka
Whisky
Yeast
Notes: