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Food is culture, someone has said, and if we believe Confucius, then food is everything, particularly since it is meant to be eaten. He once remarked: "Eating is the utmost important part of life." In India, selection of food and culinary wisdom is said to be centuries old and believed to have evolved from Vedas. What is very strange to note is that Vedas provides you with a common sense approach to your eating? Very easy to incorporate into your lives, it keeps healthy living as an aim while giving delightful tips on better cooking, and even better eating. Since India is a diverse country and the cultures seem to be changing as you move from one place to another, Ayurvedic guidelines on food befit all these different groups of people who dress differently, live in different habitats, believe in different religions, have different climates and speak different languages. What, however, binds them all, is the level of penetration food has attained into their lives and the reverent passion with which they select, cook or serve food. Owing to its Vedic influence, food, in a sense, attains a spiritual dimension here with the perfection of a sophisticated art. Beauty of Integrating Cooking into Spiritual and Daily Life Cooking is a personal affair in as much as it is a social act too. If you cook for yourself, you develop a sense of belonging for and with the food. If you cook for others in the family, friends or guests, you extend the belonging to all of them. There are some strains of love and compassion at work. As a cook, there are certain internal changes going on within you that you desire should be reflected in the food you cook, and someone else eats. Anything that involves love is spirituality. Such link is possibly missing when you go for a dinner at a fast food joint. The food prepared here has a commercial value and intent, and that is why it is fast. The food prepared at home has – and should have if it doesn't have – a spiritual value and intent. In the former case you try to satiate your metabolic hunger, in the later case you actually satiate your mind too, with or without your conscious knowledge. Spirituality does not necessarily require a lifestyle devoted to religious practices such as going to the church or temple, making offerings, saying prayers, and so on. Cooking offers an ideal, everyday and priceless opportunity to be spiritual. You satisfy both your personal and your social obligations. As someone who cooks for the family and friends, a sense of spirituality is bound to influence your daily activities. You begin a day with a spiritual outlook, which is derived from cooking, and whatever you do the rest of the day becomes an extension of a spiritual practice you started in the morning. The outlook lingers on till the next dawn and grows and continues day by day. Cooking demands the purity of mind, called sattva in the Ayurvedic parlance. Sattva infuses mindfulness, awareness and love in us, and helps us keep ourselves engrossed in cooking or whatever we do that has far-reaching social influences. If we are not present in what we do, then it is very difficult for us to be spiritually engaged, and cooking becomes like any other day-to-day mundane job in which we lack insight. It becomes a sensory impression driven in a compulsive way, and full of negative emotions. Negative emotions do not yield you a delightful and delicious meal, and thus deprive you and those you serve of attributes as happiness, harmony, mental and physical well-being, and transmission of the Vedic wisdom on food. The emotional factor is very crucial in the way in which you cook, how you feel during serving and how you feel after you have eaten the food. Emotions are certainly as fundamental as anything about us can be. There is also an undeniably powerful link between our biology and our emotions. When we deny the food that unique and exquisite emotional factor, we actually deprive food the very essence of spirituality, taste and healthful wisdom. Wisdom is derived from the ability to recognize when our emotional responses are appropriate. Food is worshipped and offered to God before it is consumed during a number of religious rituals and ceremonies in India. This article was originally published in issue 96, Feb 2004 of the popular UK-based alternative therapy magazine Positive Health, published and edited by Dr Sandra Goodman. Content © Positive Health Publications Ltd 1994 – 2005 … to be continued Wellness Wisdom Archive Author Interactive : Write to Sanjay Get Connected Promotional Support All Wellness Wisdom articles are copyrighted and reprint or distribution, electronic or otherwise, may please be done only after seeking the author's permission through the Reprint Request form below. |
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The world of ayurveda:
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| the origin of ayurveda |
| The ayurvedic concept of life |
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