Nutrition and Gratitude

This morning at breakfast, my 19 month-old daughter looked with disdain at the strawberries she could not get enough of last week. At lunch, the left-over lentils and rice (my meal!) she would not touch two nights ago were in her belly in minutes.  

Anyone familiar with the care and feeding of a young child knows that their appetites shift quickly and unpredictably making mealtimes an adventure. Luckily, my daughter has been blessed with general good health and I trust that if I continue to provide good food choices, her (as yet!) unsullied instincts will serve her for now, and my example of choosing to eat lots of fresh fruit, vegetables and whole grains will serve her in the future. Regardless of the dietary choices she makes, the one thing about food and nutrition that I hope my daughter carries through her lifetime is gratitude and appreciation for those things which nourish her. 

 It is easy to forget just how lucky we are to have choices in the types of foods we eat. As health and environmentally conscious individuals, we sometimes fall into the habit of disdaining food that does not come from an organic farm, or from a certain supermarket, or is not prepared in a certain manner. "Well, if those carrots aren’t locally grown, organic, planted and harvested by monks chanting healing prayers, and sliced on a diagonal, then I just can't eat them!" Okay - maybe that's a little over the top, but I have heard statements along these lines - some of them emanating from my own mouth, I admit it! Imagine how we in the nutrition conscious baby-boomer and later generations must sometimes sound to our parents, or to those who must make weekly choices between buying nutritious food and paying rent. Certainly, it is right to strive for purity in what we put into our bodies, but if this attitude restricts our capacity for loving or grateful behavior, it does not have the purifying effect we wish. 

 In the material sense, food is energy. In the spiritual sense, food-energy is subject to the same laws as all other spiritual-energy and as such, is influenced by thoughts and emotion. The essence of food is transformation - from sunlight, to plant, [to animals], to our bodies. At any point in the cycle, there is a sacrifice (transformation) and the opportunity for acknowledgment of this, and change from the gross to the spiritual realm. Most of us do not live or work on a farm, so our opportunity comes at the time we select and prepare our food or when it is presented to at home or in a restaurant. What can we do at that time to change the food so that it is at its most pure level? Simply, we can offer a prayer in thanks and awareness of the sacrifice that has taken place for us to enjoy our meal. For a prayer to transform, we must go beyond the rote repetition of words we have learned in our childhood, to the heartfelt touching of gratitude within us for what we are about to receive.

 An attitude of reverence coupled with a few well chosen words can transform the most nutritionally incompatible dish to sattvic food. A rather gruesome story which illustrates this point (don’t try this at home!) can be found in a story from Swami Rama's Living With the Himalayan Masters. The young Swami Rama and a pandit encounter an aghori baba (a practitioner of solar science) who transforms a corpse into a favorite dish of the young seekers as they watched, trembling (1). By way of explanation, the Master said that "The law that governs matter and energy is one and the same. Beneath all names and forms there lies one unifying principle… (2)" 

 In the Bhagavad Gita there is a verse (4:24) that serves well as a blessing prayer before a meal to bring awareness to the mystical aspects of the digestive process: 

brahmarpanam brahma havir

brahmagnau brahmana hutam

brahmaiva tena gantavyam

brahma-karma-samadhina

“The act of offering is Brahma, the oblation is Brahma. By Brahma it is offered into the Fire of Brahma. Brahma is That which is to be attained by him who realizes Brahma in his works (3).”

Of course, a much simpler prayer from the heart will do just as well.  Just remember that as our food affects our state of mind, so our state of mind affects our food – so relax, give thanks and bon appétit!!

----------References…------------------------

1 Rama, Swami, 1999.   Living With the Himalayan Masters.  Honesdale, PA:  The Himalayan Institute Press.  Pp. 319-324

2 Ibid. P. 323.

3 http://www.aspiringindia.org/bhagavad_gita/chapter4/  Retrieved from www.aspiringindia.org on 7/5/2005.

---------… and Recommendations-----------

Emoto, Masaru, 2004.  The Hidden Messages in Water.  Hillsboro, Oregon: Beyond Words Publishing, Inc.  As seen by many in the film “What the Bleep Do We Know?!,” Masaru’s photographs of water crystals after being exposed to prayers, kind words and words of anger, graphically illustrate the connection between our words and our reality.