Foundation: Living in harmony with the outside world by taking it into the inside world

What motivates me is love, what inspires me is faith... sometimes you don’t know why you do something, but from the depths of your soul an idea takes form.  Maybe there have been many of them in the past, these ideas that arise and seem like your destiny but somehow they do not come to life in a tangible and satisfying way.  Something else strikes your fancy, or gets in the way and they don’t become realized... or they are stored in the bank of ideas that becomes a nourishing fertilizer in a deep bed of perfectly porous soil for that one idea that becomes the rest of your life...

I’ve struggled with food for a very long time, or at least as long as I’ve been conscious of “right and wrong”.  From the junk food we were allowed only at visiting day at camp in maine, that we hid in soap boxes, tampon boxes, and in pillow cases and hoarded through the summer.  To the large bags of candy I used to buy from the HUGE bulk section at the price choppers in burlington when I was in college and having the late night “munchies”.

Food is the essence of my spirit is what I’ve come to understand.  In Ayurvedic school I learned that digestion is key to health and balance.  If the channels (how we like to call them in Ayurveda) of digestion are clear, meaning the sense organs to begin with to the mouth, the esophagus, stomach, pancreas, liver, gall bladder, small intestine, large intestine, anus etc. etc. are open with just the correct amount of space (but not too much less Vata move in, more on Vata later) we can digest the food we eat in the correct amount of time, absorbing the nutrients in the correct way, and assimilating them into the correct tissues, our physiology (body and mind) and our ethereal spirits both are nourished.  The question then comes, what of the food that we are putting into these clear channels?

Let’s go back for just one second; so we can understand now that it is important to keep the digestive channels clear.  There are many ways of doing this, and for that perhaps you can call your nearby Ayurvedic practitioner for a consultation, or receive pancha karma.  But this is about food, and what we eat, how we eat, and why we eat, so lets stay on the pulse of that topic.  So the question was, “What of the food that we are putting into these clear channels?”  This is the question everyone wants to know in a consultation, what should I eat?  I spent a couple of years out of Ayurvedic school giving people a list of food recommendations somewhere along the lines of these are things advisable for vata and things to avoid, same for pitta and kapha.  Telling my clients, just experiment with the vata column for instance.  Also I will send you some recipes to try out.  Inevitably, the client would come back having some difficulty.  “I used the list, but it seemed overwhelming”, or “I couldn’t find enough things that fit in both the vata and kapha columns”, or i”t took too much time to think about it” and on and on.  I felt this part of my understanding was lacking, and was having trouble understanding myself, less trying to clarify for my clients, the Ayurvedic philosophy of dravya(substance), guna (quality), karma(action) and rasa (taste), virya (energetic), and vipaka (post digestive effect). These are the explanations of the ancient rishis (seers) of the why’s and how’s of the effects of food on the body and mind.

Another theme that has been important to me through time has been the idea of the Localvore.  This isn’t a new idea, it’s an old movement with roots in indigenous cultures throughout the world.  It’s the notion of living in harmony with nature, meaning that we as humans, of any race or culture are simply another part of nature.  Just a small piece of Gaia (mother earth).  The immensity of this understanding is that we as humans are no more special than an ant, a rock, a river, or a yak.  We do have a place within the space of Earth, but it is only to the extent that the harmony and balance of Gaia is maintained.  Why is this in any way related to what we eat?  It is so simple!  If we eat, and use as medicines the living beings that exist around us, we are more naturally living within the existing balance of Gaia, while at the same time harmonizing our bodies with the already existing natural world, in our little place on the planet.  In essence, by eating what is readily available, we are becoming in body and mind, more and more indistinguishable from the world that we live in.  Thereby reducing the disturbance in harmony of the whole (i.e reducing human created and human aggravated natural disasters), becoming a more functional and useful part of the whole, and beginning to understand the inevitable and essential connections between the vitality and health of our external world to the vitality and health of our bodies and minds.

I went to Herb school in a town full of hippies, anarchists, farmers, and environmentalists.  These notions are not new to them, in fact, they are woven into the fabric of the daily life of many of the people in my Oregon community.  The sprouts of these ideas were infused with nitrogen, and grew insatiably during my first few years in Oregon.  Then I went to Ayurvedic school in New Mexico, and understood that my Oregon community was unique in their understanding of the local, and of plants, but that it was younger in its ability to bring it all back home, to the self.  Not unique to the people of my community, but common throughout the western world, and actually the east as well, as their communities are infused with western culture and experiences via the raging tides of globalization.  People are confused... confused about their purpose, their path, their identity.  There is so much dis-ease, so much depression (which according to one of my teachers means low expression or improper expression), so much lack of consciousness in the treatment of other humans, and other beings.  There is a lack of love, and joy, and vitality.  I too have been, and continue at times to be confused, what I have realized is that in order to shift these things, I have to continuously come back to myself, to my health and balance, to my vitality.  By correcting this disharmony within myself, the external world that exists beyond my experience of it, as well as the external world that I experience automatically become more harmonious.