Introduction:
Yoga as a Guide for
Living and Eating Well
Nine o’clock a.m. Amanda is late for therapy. I hear the overtones of exasperation in her voicemail. She recounts her frustration later on in the session. The planning she put into being on time. Her anger when traffic foiled her plans. The pervasiveness of anger in the rest of her life. This is concerning and bewildering to her since she says she has never felt anger before, even in the face of her mother’s cruel and unpredictable rages.
Amanda is thirty years old, with two young children, a husband, financial problems, and a lot of anxiety. She arrives neatly dressed, with her long brown hair pulled back in a tight braid that nicely frames her round, pleasant face. She looks professional, put together, albeit carrying more weight than she would like for her 5-foot-4 frame. Her voice is resonant with feeling and her words are elegantly articulated as she recounts further frustration with plans that have gone awry. “My husband called yesterday and suggested that we go out to celebrate my birthday that night rather than Thursday. I thought, ‘Why not? I’d been good all day.’ And the day had gone really well. I’m feeling better at my job. Nobody yelled at me today, and that’s a good day. We went to the Outback Steak House.” She went on to describe the meal laden with carbohydrates and fat. “First they brought out a big plate of potato skins, then bread and salad with ranch dressing. Then the steak with fries. And then, because it was my birthday, they brought a cake!” She looks defeated as she expresses her bewilderment at her lack of resolve, the collapse of her good day and mood as she left the restaurant with her little girls and husband, and a body that felt heavy and bloated.
Let’s pause here for a moment and sweep this very ordinary scene with an inquisitive eye. Perhaps you recognize yourself in both Amanda’s good intentions and impending demoralization. Perhaps you often ask yourself why it is that despite your best intentions, you too repeatedly become derailed at the dinner table. By probing beneath the surface of this brief, seemingly inconsequential scene from Amanda’s life, you just might come to understand how it is that amidst the immediate stressors and background dramas that populate our day-to-day lives, the dinner table can take on so much magnitude. It not only wields the power to warp precious moments of your life with indigestion and bloat, it can contribute to heart disease, diabetes, and premature death, which we all know may lurk ever so silently in the background.
In my work as a therapist, I hear stories. These stories are often stories about the body and chronicle the frustrations and anguish plaguing even the most privileged bodies on our planet. One of the themes that continually replays in my office is the heartache and demoralization felt by women and men of all ages and circumstances who struggle with their weight and their relationship to food. This is far more than a petty cosmetic problem. This is a problem that encapsulates one of our main challenges as modern human beings—learning how to live well in our bodies. This includes our ability to manage our hungers, to balance pleasure with restraint and good sense, and to regulate our energies so that we are able to face the challenges of daily life without collapse. How we feel day to day, our general health and energy levels, and our overall sense of safety and peace in our own flesh have an enormous impact on how we feel about ourselves and our capacity to function effectively in the world. So many of us, particularly women, are at war with our bodies. This internal rift pervades everything and compromises our sense of self and our presence with others. Our culture’s obsession with dieting, combined with the health crisis obesity presents, is a pressing societal problem. It is most obviously a health issue. It is also a psychological issue due to the emotional suffering food and weight problems create. Fundamentally, it is a quality of life issue due to the enormous impact our nutritional habits have on our ability to live well.
The word yoga literally means “to yoke or unite.” In yoga practice, we are often told that we are bringing together the mind with the breath or the body with the mind. The yoga of food means uniting the purpose of eating, nourishing the body and soul, with the practice and act of eating. Currently, there is a woeful discord between the actual purpose of eating—nourishment—and the act of eating, which for many of us can be negligent and, at times, even abusive toward the body. We may know in our heads that it is important to eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, high-quality protein, unsaturated fat, and so on, yet many of us continue to have a damnable time uniting this knowledge with actual changes in our eating habits. We are like Amanda, feeling pretty good and then sideswiped by a plate of food that leaves us speechless and uncomfortable in its wake. The good news is that you can approach this problem, which is both very personal, but also cultural, in a new way that will facilitate growth on many levels. You cannot and really should not do this work alone. We can extend the meaning of the word “yoga” to include an imperative to bring people and communities together to address the problem of our current nutritional habits and health status. We can and, I would argue, must unite in an effort to compassionately and tenaciously reconfigure our current culturally sanctioned self-care habits into saner and more sustainable nourishment for body, mind, and soul. Yoga provides a means to do this and this book will show you how, starting with you, the individual.
This book is less about the physical practice of yoga and more about its principles, introducing you to yoga philosophy with the intention of demonstrating how you can use this ancient discipline to facilitate changes in your patterns of eating and self-care. Yoga is uniquely designed to help you with these issues because its philosophical system, at least as it has evolved here in the West, is based on reverence for the physical body. In modern yogic philosophy, the body is envisaged as a reflection of universal intelligence. In order to become more responsive to this intelligence, you must practice shifting your awareness from the outside—measured by pounds and inches, to the inside, where an ocean of vitality and wisdom awaits your discovery.
This book is intended to be interactive, so I suggest that you purchase a journal and prepare yourself to be an active participant as you read. A lot of information here is intended for the beginning yoga student, and at the end of each chapter there are many opportunities for self-reflection. I am hoping that the information offered is accessible and understandable, even though much of it has esoteric origins. In spite of the esoteric nature of its roots, the ideas from yoga are astoundingly relevant to the human condition throughout the ages. It is my hope that the self-reflective exercises will help you to absorb and integrate the information so that it becomes knowledge, something that you know at the level of your experience, rather than merely interesting ideas that remain unrelated to your life.
The book is divided into three main sections. Part One describes your everyday sense of self that it is uninformed by a yogic perspective. Part Two introduces the yogic perspective on your body with the intention to help you relate to your physical, energetic, and mental bodies with a new appreciation. Part Three discusses the yogic perspective on your mind and shows how you can harness the power of your mind to enhance the change process. I pull heavily from B.K.S. Iyengar’s book Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace and Ultimate Freedom. Following his lead, I use Sanskrit
terminology throughout the text, but hopefully with enough explanation and context that the terms will not seem so foreign that you cannot relate them to your own experience. In all, this book is intended to be highly relatable to your life and a means to help you move beyond nonproductive and self-destructive habits, particularly as they manifest with food.
How I Came to Write This Book
I am the perfect person to write a book about the yoga of food. The reason has something to do with my education as a psychologist, but nothing to do with my “enviable” health or physique. The reason is not because I eat mindfully and gracefully—mind and body a synchronized symphony of reason melded with pleasure. No, sadly, more often than not I have been the gal sucking on a chicken bone while standing at the counter, ravenous and stressed, belching pitifully after having overeaten for the umpteenth time, carried away by hunger, greed, or just plain mindlessness. Throughout my life, I have followed many of the “rules” of good nutrition, however, the tide of untamed impulse and emotion beneath the rules will quickly hijack a life of good intentions and create enormous pain and dis-ease. I’ve lived it firsthand and seen it in those that I love.
Having benefited enormously from both the physical practice and the philosophical perspective of yoga, I am firmly entrenched on the healing path of yoga. I know that it is a practice that can help others who share similar difficulties living in their bodies and navigating our current culinary landscape. I originally aimed this book toward people with eating disorders, however, I have reconfigured the book toward a more general audience who, like me, are suffering from the seemingly benign guidelines of the Standard American Diet (SAD). I have come to believe that this way of eating is engineered to create sadness on many levels, mind, body, and soul. When coupled with a frantic lifestyle and a fixation upon the girth of the body, or numbers on the scale, it is a recipe for disaster. It is only when we stop seeing this way of eating and living as normal and desirable, believing that something is wrong with us because we just can’t get it right, that we will begin to experience some freedom in our minds and bodies.
Yoga philosophy is geared toward freeing ourselves from our personal conditioning, as well as from the shared pitfalls of the human condition. There has been a blanket assumption in our culture that yoga practice, the poses, are inextricably linked to yoga philosophy. Recently, there has been a dawning awareness that that is just plain not true. Yoga philosophy, which is a technology of mind, is indeed thousands of years old. The physical practice that we know today is a modern invention from India, created in the early twentieth century. In her book Yoga Ph.D., Carol Horton argues that this fact makes yoga no less meaningful or relevant for our current individual and collective needs. Rather, she asserts that it is the flexibility of yoga to morph and reshape itself to conform to the current demands and exigencies of our cultural milieu that gives yoga so much power. So while yoga philosophy and the physical practice are highly compatible, they do not necessarily need to come as a package deal. In this book, I do pull them together and attempt to show how they can create a synergistic power in your healing process.
My profession as a psychologist has been extremely helpful and pertinent in my endeavor to write this book. First of all, I am deeply beholden to the clients who have shared their personal stories with me. It is an honor to be entrusted with such raw, at times enormously painful, disclosures. I have been in the field of psychology, either learning or practicing, for over twenty-five years. Throughout these years, I have observed some consistent themes in human suffering, as well as in the change process. First of all, the realities of our current condition feel permanent. As much as we may know in our heads that change is possible, probable, indeed inevitable, it takes tremendous faith and courage to unhook from our current reality and engage in an intentional change process. Every time I receive a new client phone call, I know that it is someone who has reached a limit of suffering and, heart in throat, has picked up the phone and reached out. It is a precious moment charged with both pain and hope. And throughout the change process, hope and despair do a little dance. Enter hope, providing a light of possibility, a new perspective, a way to realign things so that we may be relieved of suffering. Then, unannounced and unsolicited, the siren call of old habits and former pleasures sounds and we are led off the path of change. We regress. We despair. We suffer. Then we remember the light of possibility briefly glimpsed and emboldened; we tentatively continue on the path of change. Back and forth, up and down, losing our way and staying the course. Over time, the regressions are less severe and predictable and faith in the process begins to take a stronger hold. Many of us fall off the path, however, and it is often a long time before the weight of suffering creates enough pressure to reengage with hope. This is always a good thing, but the longer we wait and the longer we engage in old habits, the more damages have accrued and the longer it takes to dig out. Meaning, we have to have ever more faith to stay the course the second, third, or fourth time around. I am hoping that outlining this dialectic around the process of changing eating and self-care habits will help feed your faith and courage as you navigate your own personal dialectic of hope and despair.
Along with being a psychologist, I have been a yoga practitioner and student for the past eleven years. In 2008, I attended a ten-month teacher training in Integrative Yoga Therapy. I was granted the luxury of spending a weekend a month in the charming town of Petaluma, California, where I was steeped in yoga theory and practice with a group of like-minded people. I have always been drawn to the wisdom of Eastern philosophy and my yoga training solidified my sense that Eastern traditions have a great deal to offer us in the West. As a psychotherapist, my emphasis has been on the psyche and the curative power of bringing language and stories to experience. And yet, behind all the stories is the unarticulated, and often unarticulatable (yes, I know that is not a word, though perhaps that underlines my point) realm of the body. Here, in this private world we all inhabit, we are subjected to alternating discomfort and satisfaction, pleasures and pains both large and small. These oscillations are governed by the rhythms of ongoing contraction and release that regulate all plant and animal life on the planet. Yoga theory is an affirmation of this hidden domain of the body and its interwoven layers of matter, energy, and thought. The yoga of food embraces the likeness our bodies share with the matter and energy of food and helps us utilize food’s matter and energy to better nourish our bodies. According to yoga theory, we are more alike than different. And we have more in common with ladybugs, elephants, and apples, let alone with each other, than we might care to admit. This can actually be good news as we avail ourselves of an intelligence that is greater than our own and join with others with whom we are more alike than different. And perhaps this is the greatest takeaway that modern yoga has to offer us—we are not alone. We are connected to one another, the earth, and the stars, and we can take comfort and find guidance in this presence. And here is where yoga practice comes in—a pose is just a pose, but when the position of the body is guided by the focus of the mind, the inspiration of the breath, and the shared language of the sequences, it elevates to a beautiful medium through which to experience and explore our shared human Being. The connection generated by participating in this shared practice that is sweeping through our towns and suburbs affirms our shared humanity and can fuel our efforts to rise above our personal suffering and join a movement toward greater individual, and eventually global, health. The yoga of food seeks to bring this celebration of life beyond the mat to the dinner table in the humble process of together relearning to feed ourselves well.