ENERGETIC FOOD AWARENESS

How does food make you feel?

by Amadea Morningstar, author, The Ayurvedic Guide to Polarity Therapy

With respect to healing, it is prana, or chi, vital energy, which keeps the body and psyche alive, fluid, and functioning well. There are two places we can get this vital energy of prana: through breathing, and through food. Dr. Randolph Stone, the originator of Polarity Therapy, understood this well. When faced with illness, toxicity, and pain in his patients, he frequently suggested a change in diet, as well as energetic movement with active breathing.

The sorts of changes he suggested in food consumption often included the following: more fresh foods, less cooked oils, more simple food combinations, and the willingness to sit down, eat, and pay attention to one’s food as one did so. His purifying and health building diets did not include many items common in today’s supermarkets. Frozen, fried,  microwaved, canned, and reheated foods were not on his menu. As he said: “There are over fifteen hundred diseases, and only the transgression of Nature is the cause of most of them. Therefore, by removing the cause, a multitude of symptoms will disappear.” (Health Building: The Conscious Art of Living Well, p. 51)

If you look at your own food patterns with love, abstaining from the deep-rooted inclination to pick on yourself in various unhelpful ways, you will probably notice one or more regular tendencies: the comforting potato chips in front of the TV, the sweet snack mid-afternoon as your energy is flagging, the extra cup of caffeine when maybe you simply need to rest rather than push on relentlessly.

In Ayurveda, a field with which I’m actively involved, we look at these patterns a little differently than in Western nutrition. If a pattern is working for you, and not harming you in any apparent way, even though it is generally considered an unhealthy process, we would talk about it being an example of okasatmya. Okasatmya is becoming accustomed to that which would be poisonous to another.  We all can think of examples of this: the friend who eats salsa hot enough to kill anyone else, perfectly happily, or the skinny guy with low cholesterol who has four eggs almost every morning for breakfast. We each have our own little dietary quirks and foibles that another person, stumbling into our routine unwittingly, would find difficult or even harmful to their unique metabolism. If these are working for you, by all means, do not change them. However, if you are working with joint pain, depression, congestion, fatigue, or other difficulties, it may be time to consider what in Ayurveda we would call satmya. Satmya is becoming accustomed to that which is healing for oneself. Whether that is a fresh vegetable juice in the morning according to Dr. Stone’s specifications, trying a combination of herbs to enliven your metabolism, doing a “salt glow” first thing in the morning to clear away the debris and detritus of the night, or adding more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to your food choice, and less prepackaged high-salt snacks, this is satmya.

Dr. Stone came up with a great variety of common, down to earth healing practices that are easy to do on one’s own. Whether one is working with asthma, arthritis, a weak heart, constipation, or the common cold, Dr. Stone had remedies for them. One needs to be in that place of seeing the need for a change, and being ready to do it, to introduce satmya into one’s life. To explore Health Building and the healing world of Dr. Stone’s Polarity Therapy, one needs to be open to this fresh perspective.