For the first sixteen years, I did most of the cooking at the ashram. I learned a great deal by doing that. I learned how people project their self-criticism, their dissatisfaction with their own development, into food and eating. Very often people who are overweight are projecting their unhappiness into their food. If something isn’t going their way, they go to the fridge and say, “I will treat myself. Nobody likes me. Nobody treats me well. I will give myself a treat,” and so they eat a whole cake, a whole pudding, a whole container of ice cream. This is a projection of dissatisfaction in oneself.
In the early days, when the ashram was in Vancouver and we had very little money, I made a pudding with cream of wheat and milk. I served some strawberries with it, and that was our dinner. It was not an expensive meal, but someone criticized me for spending an unreasonable amount of money on the strawberries. Someone else raved at me because he thought the meal was too rich. “How can you do this! The people here are trying to practice brahmacharya [celibacy], and here you are feeding them all this rich stuff.”
I said, “Brahmacharya starts in the mind, not in the stomach.”
Another time there was a woman who was very strict about the amount of food she ate and very critical of what she thought was excess in others. She thought what I was serving was an absolutely unnecessary luxury. But discipline is not achieved by giving people more or less to eat. Discipline is shown in how much you eat, or in whether you eat slowly or just shovel it all down. Discipline is in your choice to eat good food, not just cater to your sense of taste.
And some people are very picky. They stand over the food and they say, “What’s this? Hmm. I’ll try a little of this, some of that.” If they were this picky about what is going on in their lives, great! But it’s so much easier to project it into food.
I also learned a lot about greediness in my years in the kitchen. I saw people who just loaded their plates and dribbled food all along the floor, with no concern for whether there would be enough for everybody. The mentality of stuffing oneself with no regard for anybody else is quite remarkable. People did this even in the days when we had very little money. So when people who work in the kitchen say to me, “I’m onlyin the kitchen,” I tell them, “You will learn more about people in the kitchen than you can learn anywhere else. I could write ten books from my experience of being only in the kitchen, and I could create at least two workshops on just the psychology of eating and choosing your food.”
There are also people who are very indulgent, loading up their plates, and then in the end throwing half of it in the garbage. They waste a lot of food. One person like this talked in big words about how much more spiritual he was because he was one hundred percent vegetarian. He wouldn’t eat an egg, he wouldn’t even drink milk.
It isn’t only the expense. It sometimes takes two people three hours just to wash the lettuce when it comes from the garden. People work very hard to get the vegetables clean because we don’t have big machinery like fast food restaurants. Here lettuce has to be washed one leaf after another by hand. Then it goes into the garbage can, with a big hullabaloo: “I’m vegetarian!” Certainly some food can go to the compost heap, but there is no excuse to throw good food away.
You have to have reverence for life everywhere. Just because you can’t hear the nuts and seeds that you grind with your teeth screaming at you, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t killing life. Every time you eat, you kill a form of life. If you can say thank you to the plant for giving you its life and nourishing your body, and if you are nourishing your body because you want to serve the Most High and find God-Realization, then you are justifying your life and how you stay alive.
When you want your body to be healthy for the worship of the Most High, you spiritualize your food and then you don’t need a lot of it. Spiritualize everything. When there is too much clatter and talk at meals, your mind is not on the life that is on your plate to nourish your body.
Gratitude begins right there. Every day that you wake up, be grateful that you are alive because there is no guarantee that you will wake up tomorrow. You take it for granted. You don’t even think about it. But there is nothing that anybody can take for granted.
Some years ago, when I was at the Sivananda Ashram in Rishikesh, there were people who went on long, long fasts. One of them was critical. Nothing pleased him.
Sivananda asked him, “How many days did you fast?”
The man said, “Nine days.”
Gurudev said, “Wonderful. How many more days do you want to fast?”
“Oh, maybe another ten days.”
“Wonderful,” Sivananda said, “But you should fast the mind instead. Then you wouldn’t say such bad things.”
He was very often much to the point.
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