Sadhana Panchakam - Post 44

Injunction is not to deny food but to deny yearning or craving for food. When one desires for food, or when one continuously thinks of food or forcibly restrains one’s mind from desiring food, then the desire becomes transformed as craving for food. 

Even when one is not hungry or even when the food is not nutritious for physical health or for spiritual development, if one craves to possess, desiring to appropriate for oneself as one's and one's alone. 

Sri Sankara says there should be no craving for delicious food, for it goes against the very spirit of Tapas. He hopes that this rule will help people to maintain simplicity in food for the sake of good health.

Cravings & Aversions

The key point in this Step is to “avoid likes and dislikes” over food. Swami Sivananda offers a golden guideline: “Don’t eat only what you like, nor avoid everything that you dislike.” 

Elsewhere he says, “Everyday avoid at least one thing that you like; and everyday eat at least one thing that you dislike.” In this way, the great Master always alerted his disciples to the danger of likes and dislikes, the principle behind such rules.

Ask a Sadhaka living in a remote place where delicacies are not easily available, how disturbed he can get when he sees them coming to the Ashram!

Besides being a temptation to the senses, tasty foods have the added disadvantage of taking more time to prepare, and being invariably unhealthier. Since time and health are both precious, to render natural foods tastier by elaborate procedures is wasteful labour. This time can be made available for Sadhana.

Step 27 is meant to “keep the tongue in its place.” That is the spirit of the rule, but the intellect, as one may expect, finds a way to violate it.

Chandhogya Upanishad says that the only thing that should be sought is the self within the heart, for that assuredly is what one should understand. 

The mind which is overwhelmed by desire for food and things palatable to senses, rejects or suppresses all other thoughts. If instead one desires the self then that would stimulate the mind to desire and that which is spiritual. 

Craving diverts mind from the principal objective for which food is eaten of the food which is to nourish the body and invigorate the energies to fruitful enterprise. 

Otherwise the purpose having been fashioned wrongly the objective fails to its goal. 

 

20 GOLDEN INSTRUCTIONS BY SWAMI SIVANANDA

 

Nowhere, it is said that we need to follow all twenty all the time…Even if we can adopt a few and blend in sometimes with our detoxification routine, we will get the benefits of these golden food rules.

 

1)           Beware of false hunger, eat only when hungry

2)          Eat less and chew more

3)          Fast once a week

4)          Do not overload your stomach

5)          Include raw food in your diet

6)          Control that craving for variety in food 

7)         Identify the foods which match each other well from your experience and make more of such combinations

8)          Do not eat when you are angry

9)          Give up greed of eating more food

10)  Bad sensations in throat or stomach are signs towards cleansing fast

11)       Do not take meals late at night

12)      Skins of apples and carrots contain valuable minerals and vitamins, do not remove them

13)      Rice and Veggies taste best when steamed, try switching between polished and unpolished rice

14)      Take food at fixed hours

15)      Sitting in Vajrasana for ten minutes after a meal helps in digestion of food

16)      More simple and natural food, better it is

17)  Do not make sudden and drastic changes in your diet, introduce gradual changes

18)    Observe silence while taking food

19)  Do not engage in strenuous physical or mental work immediately after a meal

 

AND…,

 

20)  Thank God every time for your meal!

 

Love.