Yoga is the practice of paying attention, or of emptying the mind. An important aspect of yoga practice is the process of re-connecting with your body and feeling it, experiencing it, listening to it, nurturting it, and caring about it. It’s about no longer neglecting your body, and letting it know that you care deeply about it. Your body is an indispensable part of you, after all.
It is wonderful that yoga practice has gained such popularity, because as a society we have become so mental. Because of our drive to focus on the mental side of ourselves at the expense of our whole selves, we really cut ourselves off from fully experiencing ourselves. This fragmentation of our lives, focusing on the mental at the expense of our other parts, paradoxically ends up making our minds weaker, not stronger. On the other hand, however, if we connect all our pieces—the mental with the spiritual, the physical, emotional, social, and even financial, then each piece acts more powerfully. The pieces act in unison, supporting each other and allowing each to fulfill our souls more powerfully than any of them could do alone. So our aim should be to notice all the parts of ourselves, neglecting none and respecting all their needs. This brings us greater happiness and fulfillment.
So in a sense, yoga practice is not only a re-connection with our bodies, but a re-connection with our minds through our bodies—through our senses of sight, smell, touch, and hearing. And thus the mind becomes rejuvenated and powerful.
As we re-connect through the senses, we understand what we truly need, and what our whole selves need…not just the perceived needs of some fragmented part of ourselves, but the real needs that will nurture us and bring overall fulfillment. As we re-connect with our whole selves we will understand our needs from a better perspective, and we will find ourselves naturally making different choices than we did when we had a narrower perspective. Habit change becomes easier and more effective, not because we’re chasing it more, but because we’re more serene about change and we’re utilizing power from all parts of ourselves to make the changes.
And this is where the yoga of eating comes in. Nurturing our physical bodies through food is one of our foundational needs. Food is not just calories, nor is it just fuel to keep our muscles moving so we can make it through another day. Also, food is not something that our mouths alone experience. The whole body experiences food, from our hair to our toenails it’s what we’re made of. Food affects our emotions, our energy, our happiness, and our social lives.
We all yearn for food because it fulfills many of our needs, whether we fully understand this or not. Obviously, it keeps us moving, and it provides us with mental energy to keep thinking. But food is also our connection with the Earth. It grounds us in a way that we can’t fully appreciate until we pay attention to it.
Food also provides us with emotional energy. Eating is an emotional activity. We’ve all heard of emotional eating, which usually has a negative connotation. But we can and should make eating a positive emotional experience. As we learn to do this, the negative manifestation of emotional eating disappears, and we learn to eat the foods that nurture our whole selves and serve to fulfill what food can fulfill. At the same time we learn to recognize what food can’t fulfill, and we identify how to fulfill those needs in ways that really are fulfilling.
And this is all through the yoga of eating.
Too often we move to fulfill our needs without listening to our whole selves, and we end up eating what doesn’t fulfill us. We end up binging, or skipping meals, or eating mindlessly. We may feel guilty, or drowsy, or depressed… because what we eat isn’t fulfilling all parts of ourselves as we think it should. We eat the wrong kinds of foods at the wrong times, and our bodies react in pain, discomfort, and imbalance.
As we learn to listen to our bodies and our dynamic needs, we recognize what really fulfills us. We’ll be able to eat the foods that satisfy the tongue as well as the brain, the emotions, the stomach and our social selves. It’s not that hard to learn the yoga of eating. It just takes some practice, and it helps to have a “yoga” teacher who can teach you the techniques and the mindset.
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