When to Eat
#1 Wait for Two Minutes Before You Eat
Not eating when you feel like eating is one part of sadhana, so that you take away compulsiveness for food, or for anything for that matter. Food is a very fundamental thing. Based on this, many other aspects of life become compulsive.
Many of you might have suffered this torture when you come to the ashram: it is the meal time, you are really hungry and you come to the dining area. There is food in front of you, you want to gobble it up. But people are closing their eyes and folding their hands for the invocation. The idea is that you are very hungry but you wait for two more minutes. Try to do this with everything that you are compulsive about – just wait for two minutes. It will not kill you. It will leave you very strong.
Gautama the Buddha went to the extent of saying, “When you are very hungry and you are badly in need of food, if you give away your food to someone else, you will become stronger.” I am not going that far. I am saying, “Just wait two minutes” – it will definitely leave you stronger.
Taking away that compulsiveness in the body is crucial. Your body and mind are a composition. All kinds of past imprints have formed tendencies and those are compulsive. If you go by that, it means you have decided not to evolve. You have decided that you do not mind living in the pattern. You do not want to break the pattern and explore new possibilities.
Food is something very basic and simple but still, how you handle this aspect makes a lot of difference. This is a journey to a more conscious way of functioning by slowly distancing yourself from the information that is already there within you, which is ruling you from within. Bondage is on many different levels, but the foundation of all your bondage is your body, so that is why you work with the body.
#2 Digestion Matters – Eat According to Your Age and Activity
What you call as your body and your mind is a certain accumulation of memory. It is because of this memory – or you can call it information – that this body has taken its shape. The food we eat transforms into the body depending on this memory. Let’s say I eat a mango. The mango gets into me and becomes a man. If a woman eats a mango, the same mango will go into her and become a woman. If a cow eats the mango, it goes inside a cow and becomes a cow. Why does this mango go into me and become a man and not a woman or a cow? It is essentially because of memory, a specific kind of memory that is there in my system.
Why is it that if I eat a mango, one part of it becomes my skin and it comes to the same skin tone? You do not suddenly find one mango-colored patch on the hand. Because there is such a strong memory structure, whatever I put in, the memory will make sure it becomes this person, not some other person.
As you age, this ability of the body to integrate food starts to reduce because your genetic memory and evolutionary memory become less capable of transforming whatever you consume. You may be healthy and capable of digesting what you eat, but the body will not be able to transform the mango into a human being with the same vigor. Digestion happens but transformation of one life into another will not happen as well because the memory is becoming weak.
If you are over thirty-five years of age – unless you are an extremely physically active person or have some medical issue – two meals a day would definitely be healthier for you. The body will adjust itself to this slowing down, but if you are conscious about how you eat and what you eat, you can adjust it more sensibly. If you are eating more, you are burdening the system unnecessarily. You no longer need that much food because your vertical growth is completely over. If you feel a little hungry or tired, a fruit in between should take care of you. If you can maintain this, you will live very well. It is economical, eco-friendly, and you will be healthy.
#3 Two Meals a Day and No Snacking in Between!
When the digestive process is happening in the stomach bag, the purification of the body on the cellular level almost shuts down. So if you keep eating through the day, the cells retain impurities for a longer period, which creates various problems over a period of time. Even the excretory process from the intestines does not happen efficiently because the waste material will keep coming to the colon at different times instead of at once.
If the colon is not clean, you are asking for problems. In Yoga, we say that an unclean colon and psychological disturbances are directly connected. If the colon is not clean, you cannot keep your mind stable.
In Indian traditional medical systems such as Ayurveda and Siddha, it does not matter what a patient’s ailment is, the first thing they will want to do is purge your digestive system because most of your problems may be due to an unclean colon. The way people are eating today, keeping the colon clean is going to be a big challenge for them.
But suppose you eat just two big meals a day and nothing in between (like we normally do in the ashram), or if you are too active you may eat a fruit in between, then your colon will always remain clean. In the Yogic system, we say there must be a minimum of six to eight hours between one meal and the next. If that is not possible, at least a five-hour gap is a must. Less than that means you are causing trouble to yourself.
#4 Mind and Body Function Best on an Empty Stomach
You may think that eating something through the day will help you be more active. But if you look at how your body feels when there is food in the stomach and how the body feels when the stomach is empty, you will see your body and brain work best when your stomach is empty. If food is constantly being processed in your digestive system, a certain amount of energy is naturally allocated towards that, so both your brain and body will not function at their best.
If you want to function at your full potential, be conscious and eat that kind of food where within 1.5-2.5 hours, your stomach bag becomes empty and the food material moves to the intestine. The body does not consume so much energy from that point. And within twelve to eighteen hours, the food must be completely out of the system. This is what Yoga always insists. If you maintain this simple awareness, you will experience much more energy, agility and alertness. These are the ingredients of a successful life irrespective of what you have chosen to do.
One level of what the spiritual process means is that you bring a certain sense of integrity to your body and mind. By integrity, I mean when your system is not consolidated in a certain way, if it is loose, it becomes incapable of experiencing anything. Even if the greatest things happen, you will miss it. The reason why Yogis or those who are in sadhana eat only once or twice a day and nothing in between is because they do not want to open the body for anything. No outside elements except air and water should enter the system too often because it will loosen the integrity of the system in terms of sensitivity. Sensation is the outermost layer of who you are. If you want to keep yourself very sensitive, it is important you do not open your body to anything and everything that comes your way. You must eat well, but you should not be eating many times.
#5 Dinner Time and Bed Time
There must be three hours after the evening meal, before you go to bed. If this includes at least 20 to 30 minutes of light physical activity – such as simple walking – your system will largely be healthy. If you go to bed with food still inside the stomach, it generates a certain level of inertia in the system. Physiologically, this inertia is like an acceleration towards death. Death is ultimate inertia.
Another dimension is that if you go to bed with a full stomach, it puts pressure on other organs in the abdomen. This will also lead to various kinds of health issues. For that reason too, it is very important that before you go to bed, the food you have eaten has moved out of the stomach. As you sleep in different postures, the stomach should not put pressure on other organs at any point.
#6 Fasting on Ekadashi
It is good to fast once in a way, but if you forcefully go without food, this may cause damage to the system. If you want to fast, you have to prepare psychologically and physiologically, so that you can effortlessly go without food. We have identified certain days of the lunar month when digestion is not at its best. On these two days in the month, known as Ekadashi, which is the eleventh day after the full and new moons, it is best to have only light food or to fast entirely. Ekadashi was built into your system. If you can fast, please do. If that is not possible for you, go on a fruit diet.
What to EatWe It’s time to roll out your yoga mat and discovers the combinations of physically and mentally exercises be that for thousand of years have hooked yoga practitioner around the globe. The beauty of Yoga is for everyone is thats you to be don’t have to be a yogi or yogis yoga to reap the benefits.Whether you are young or old, overweight or fit, yoga has the power to calm the mind and strengthen the body. Don’t be intimidated by yoga terminology, fancy yoga studio & complicated pose.
Even the Take Back Yoga campaign has become the topic of academic study — some 65 academics articles cite it, including the Harvard the Business School which branding of yoga covers it rather positively in a units on the. Others are criticals of the campaign’s relinking of yoga to most Hinduism with a range of hypotheses that often misrepresent the intent and arguments made by TBY or misinterpret them. Most of the scholars who are critical of TBY have never bothered to actually interview or ask directly about our intentions or interpretations, which to me
“Being in the process of Yoga means putting your life on fast -forward.”Sadhguru
The main purpose of exercise is to increase circulation and the intake of oxygen. This can be achieved by simple movement of the best spine and various joints of the body, with deep breathing, and without violent movement of the muscles.
Proper exercise points of yoga
Proper exercise act as a lubricating mechanism for the joints, muscle, ligament, tendon, and other parts of the body, by increasing circulation and flexibility.The fundamental difference between the ancient wisdom of Yoga into 5 basic principles that physical exercise emphasizes the violent movements of the muscles, while Yogic exercises promote slow and conscious movements of the body.
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