Diet / Time of Eating: inSelf Yoga™

Diet and time of eating are of vital concern in the inSelf Yoga process. What you eat and when you eat affects everything which you are involved in. After from breath infusion, there must be a concern about what is eaten and about when it is eaten.

Of concern as well is where you live, as to the climate. For instance, if you live in the northern hemisphere you have to deal with cold weather because the human body does not grow fur for winter. It does not store blubber to insulate from intense cold. In comparison to animals like seals and polar bears, the human body just does not have the equipment to store fat for insulating the vital organs. The result of this is that primitive human beings built shelters and wore animal hides to protect the body from freezing to death.

I heard some students complaining about other students and about people who were not students but who do yoga or claim to do it but that is not my concern. I am not interesting in making human society into one vegan or vegetarian community. My concern is that the individual should take his or her diet in hand according to how that would benefit his or her practice. This must develop through the intuition of the student not by moral or community enforcement.

If you are living with people in whose association you find yourself eating foods which are counterproductive to yoga, then my advice is for you to move from that place and go where you can adopt dietary habits and times which help your practice.

If for one reason or the other, if fate does not allow you to move, then my advice is to bear with the negative environment and its effects, until providence can give you an escape even if it means to wait until death of the body. Of course there is no guarantee that death will free any of us from any bad association. The idea that our problems with material existence will terminate at death is a fool’s view only. It does not take into consideration that there is a psychic side to material nature which it enforces on the astral planes just the same. Thus transferring to that level may not result in any substantial change.

Still, one should be on the lookout for escapes from bad association, from pull-downs, even when such associating comes from fellow seekers or people who claim to be wanting to advanced when they are not really prepared to make the adjustments required and when they will fight tooth and nail once they are pressured or asked to change certain undesirable habits which stagnate yoga practice.

What are you eating?

This is not a question which you need to answer for my satisfaction or for the satisfaction of those self-righteous people who consider themselves to be yogis. This question is one you need to ask yourself and answer only to yourself, as to if your food helps with the practice.

But how sensitive are you?

If you are not sensitive enough, you cannot derive the proper answer because you will have no way of knowing which foods are denting your practice. This is where I may be able to help you. May is an important word because I may not be able to assist you anyway. This is why I do not go around barking to students about their yogically-counterproductive diets and why I detach myself from those people who want to influence every person to change into a vegan or vegetarian dietary scheme.

Apart from what you eat, you also must ask yourself if your times of meals are the best time to help the practice. Are you eating solid food after say about 3pm?

Is it a requirement that you should stuff your belly at night?

Does your body require that?

Do you twist and turn if your stomach is not protruding with food, stuffed full at the end of the day or night?

The responsibility for your meals and for the time of meals is on your shoulder. It is not on mine. It is certainly not on the people who feel that every one of us should be a vegan or vegetarian. The pain or trauma that nature inflicts on you is your responsibility or is enforce by nature from within your mind and emotions to be your trauma. Hence, if anything, you, as a sensitive being, should have the sense to find solutions to avoid these afflictions. If you are not interested, if you do not sense out these traumas and their causes, if you are satisfied to go on with them and do nothing about then, then what can the critics or I do?

As far as I am concerned, if you could eat human flesh and become a spiritual advanced person, then I would say, “Go ahead and do so.”

I could care less about what you eat and when you eat it. My concern is for you to investigate what is in your spiritual-realization interest, as to what promotes that in all aspects of lifestyle.

I am realistic. I say that if you realize that something is not in your interest but if you find that you must do it, then okay, that is good, keep your eyes open so that as soon as you can jump away from that habit you would do that promptly and escape.

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During the winter months, a yogi should protect the body from cold weather and should not assume an attitude of “I can handle it” as others do. The reason for this requirement is that to heat the human body, one has to eat and one has to provide environmental heat.

The problem with increased eating to heat the body is that it contravenes the yoga practice because it means that the organs have to work more than usually which takes more attention from the life force which in turn will afflict the self which into the practice.

Heating the body will cost money which the yogi may have difficulty acquiring or which he or she has to work for which means increase hours working just to heat the body, and that would affect the practice.

Hence protect the body from cold weather so that you do not have to increase the quantity of food just to cause increase heat by chemical action in the body. And all the same, regulate the living quarters so that you do not have to spend much money to heat the accommodation because you have foolishly left it exposed to the elements which caused you to have to use heaters more than necessary.

One way to heat the body internally is to use alcohol and also to use certain foods which cause the body to heat up. There are foods which people use as habit in the Northern hemisphere which allow them to withstand intense cold and also to require themselves to be in cold living quarters because those foods cause their bodies to heat up inside chemically. But these foods are not for yogis because they affect meditation, sleeping pattern and some other features which negatively impact yoga.

Use your intelligence and do what is in your interest because at the end of the day, it is you who will experience afflictions when nature enforces her reactive schemes.