The #1 rule of eating.
It's not what you think.
Here’s some food for thought, in the form of thought for food.
This week, I found myself getting lost in the myriad minutia of the rules and guidelines of Ayurveda, many of which I’m still acclimating to, after several years of practicing mostly Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Ayurveda is mostly centered on optimizing digestion, which is the central process that underlies almost all other bodily functions, so there’s lots of nuance around how to eat, when to eat, what to eat, and what to avoid doing after you eat.
I’ve followed some pretty extreme regimens in the past, but still sometimes find myself overwhelmed by all of the rules.
For example, yogurt is generally to be avoided, except when combined with water to make lassi, which should be taken daily as a probiotic digestive supplement, and fruit should never be combined with other foods, except for mango, which can be taken with yogurt and water—er, lassi.
It can really complicate your day if you let it.
I found myself reminded of a summer night in June of 2019, when I was at an intimate birthday dinner in Berlin for an artist I used to work with…
It was a beautiful, upscale restaurant, and at the end of the meal, decadent chocolate cake was passed around.
I refused the cake, and when questioned, started explaining all the reasons why I avoid sugar and grains.
My business partner interjected “oh just eat the cake!”
And he was right.
I was so wrapped up in the minutia and details of my diet that I forgot to enjoy myself.
And that’s kind of the point—why else do we do all this?
At its core, Ayurveda is a consciousness-based health system.
The Veda, from which we get Yoga and Vedic Meditation, as well as Ayurveda, is the umbrella body of ancient knowledge of the immutable laws of nature which govern all of creation.
Ayurveda, meaning science of life in Sanskrit, is the branch of the Vedas which informs us how we can live in harmony with nature for optimum health, vitality and longevity.
According to the Vedas, consciousness conceives, constructs, governs and becomes the body.
Naturally then, the #1 rule of Ayurveda is you that must meditate.
That’s because raw foods and rules aside, the most important dietary principle of Ayurveda is the consciousness state of the consumer, and the second-most important principle is the consciousness state of the chef.
Ayurveda knows that beyond the realm of macro- or micro- nutrients, the state of mind we’re in when we eat has the biggest effect on how well we digest and assimilate those nutrients into useful energy.
Vedic lore tells of the ‘Rice Krispie yogi’ who was in such a high state of consciousness that his body was able to turn anything he ate into pure prana, or life force energy—so naturally, he ate his favorite meal of Rice Krispies with milk and sugar every day, morning, noon, and night.
My own teacher, whose podcast episode here [link] offers a fantastic exploration of the revival of Ayurveda, favors mostly toasted bread soaked with ghee.
This way of thinking is not mystical—quantum physics has long since demonstrated that everything which appears to be matter is really 99.9999% energy, and even the Western medical establishment now acknowledges the importance of positive thinking to combat terminal illnesses like cancer.
“An atom is not a solid entity at all; it is a hierarchy of states of information and energy in a void of all possible states of information and energy,” explains Deepak Chopra, an Ayurvedic Vaidya and also an Internal Medicine M.D., in one of his innumberable books.
“The thought is the seed,” as my Vaidya, or Ayurvedic doctor, likes to say.
My TCM practitioner, another wonderful healer who first educated me about this idea in 2018, recently told me of the story of Norman Cousins [link], who beat the odds against an irreversible illness using laughter, proving just how powerful the mind is.
“Laughter is the best medicine,” as my TCM practitioner likes to say.
So we’re all in agreement then?
Good.
Consider then, that if we’re feeling sad or stressed when we eat an otherwise healthy meal, this energy will interfere with digestion and our ability to turn that food into fuel, in simple terms. But if we’re feeling love and joy, those energies will help us extract the maximum nutritional value, even from a Big Mac.
This may sound blasphemous, especially to stressed out LA people running around with cold-pressed juices and grain-free pancakes, but it’s based in thousands of years of Ayurvedic science, and has been proven in some pretty incredible ways.
My Vaidya’s family, for example, has 14 documented cases of growing new uteruses or vaginas for women born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) Syndrome, a rare congenital disorder causing women to be born without them. At least one of those women, who is a meditator in our community, has since given birth to a healthy child.
Read that again.
Before we go off the deep end, let’s be clear—most of us are not in a high enough state of consciousness to eat Rice Krispies 24/7, and these Vaidyas are very special, world-class doctors who have been training since they could walk, in a lineage of Vaidyas going back at least 7 generations.
So, YES, it’s important to be disciplined in what we put into our bodies and how we spend our time.
NO, we can’t just eat cake all the time.
BUT, above all else, we must strive to balance that discipline with a sense of levity and playfulness, lest we undermine our efforts by putting an otherwise healthy meal into a highly stressed physiology—the dietary equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
How do we know what balance looks like?
Do your research [link] into what works for you.
I had temporarily lost my balance, getting drawn into the daily details and following my Vaidya’s advice to a tee, that I had forgotten something even more important he said to me recently, in a very serious tone:
“Whatever you do, you must enjoy. Even having a fight with someone, enjoy it.”
So the other day, when I was having dinner with my TCM practitioner, and the chef sent a slice of fried cheesecake with chocolate sauce to our table, we thanked him, and I enjoyed every bite, with no second thought—and felt great afterwards.
Let’s discuss these and other ideas in Collective Effervescence, our online group meditation series, at its new time(!) this Sunday August 6 at 9AM LA / 12PM MIA / 6PM EU. Drop in for meditation only (first 30 min) or stay for discussion + Q&A on this and other life topics from the Vedic perspective.
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Music today from CAKE, a favorite I was involuntarily exposed to from the radio in my mom’s Volvo station wagon in the late 90s, which has incidentally become vogue for underground techno DJs to end their sets with at 7AM recently. So I’ve heard.