The Yoga of Eating

Published in Yoga Living magazine, September 2006

These are confusing times for the health-conscious eater. Each diet book seems to contradict the others. Raw foods contradicts macrobiotics; Atkins contradicts Ornish; Ayurveda contradicts Weston Price. And what about probiotics? Supplements? Juicing? Sprouting? The glycemic index? Your blood type? What are we supposed to do—buy into the theory of our choice and hope it is the right one? Or must we become nutrition experts and study all of them, all for the sake of something originally so simple and basic as food?

Reading the title of this article, you might suppose that here comes yet another list of do's and don'ts, should's and shouldn'ts—here it is, the "yoga" rules for diet. Another thing to do right, the yoga way.

No. I advocate a radically different approach: instead of looking to outside authority, we can access inner authority. Instead of trusting rules imposed from outside, we can trust our natural appetites. Instead of denying and restricting our food choices, we can follow our authentic desires. Are your alarm bells going off right now? How can we follow desire when it is desire—in the form of cravings, urges, and greediness—that seems to cause all the trouble in the first place? "If I allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted, wouldn't that mean a whole bag of potato chips, a whole quart of ice cream... as much food as I could possibly stuff in?"

We have a deep distrust of our desires. We think that health, success, and spirituality come from the control of desire, not its fulfillment. In the area of food, we think that by denying ourselves sugar, fat, or meat we'll be healthy, thin, or spiritual. Thus we set up an internal civil war, pitting one part of ourselves—the mind or spirit—against another part—the body and its desires. Diet, and life itself, becomes a struggle. Goodness becomes a struggle against selfishness, success a struggle against laziness or bad habits, spirituality a struggle against the ego and temptation.

This struggle is unnecessary. The problem is not desire, it is desire denied. You see, what has happened is that we have become cut off from our true desires, and deluded into accepting substitutes. Truly desiring freedom, we might buy a sports car instead. Truly desiring to express our greatness, we might become obsessed with a sports team. Truly desiring intimate involvement in other people's stories, we might start watching soap operas. Truly desiring to give ourselves love, we might buy jewelry instead.

It is the same with food. We can use food for excitement—for some people mealtime is the high point of their day. We can us food for distraction, something to take us away momentarily from a task, an environment, or a relationship. We can use food to identify ourselves as good and right—I am good because I eat vegan, or eat raw, or eat healthy. We can use food to show ourselves love, such as when we reward ourselves with treats and eat "comfort food".

The problem with all of this is that the real underlying need goes unmet. Just as television does not actually bring us into intimate relationship with the characters on screen, neither can food ever satisfy our deep need for self-love, for excitement, or to live a life we care about passionately. All it can do is to numb the hurting that the unmet need or unfulfilled desire generates. That is why willpower eventually fails when we try to hold ourselves to a diet. It fails because underneath the cravings there is a real, unmet need. And when we undergo a life transformation and meet that need, the cravings disappear as if by magic.

All of the greediness for which we castigate ourselves, all of the cravings and food abuse, is simply our noble but tragic attempt to fulfill our beautiful human needs. You cannot receive love, so you eat ice cream instead.

How, then, do we identify and meet the deep needs for which food substitutes? The way I teach is to follow the desire, not resist it. In your mind or in reality, fulfill your desire with complete permission. Put guilt aside and maximize pleasure. Give yourself the full experience of the ice cream, including all the pleasure and all the not-so-pleasurable aftereffects. Seeking to maximize pleasure, you ask, "Is this really what I wanted, or could I give myself something even better?" Food can be a way to practice giving ourselves what we really want. By taking pleasure seriously and following desire, we are led ultimately to our deepest and highest desires.

What is our deepest desire? Different spiritual traditions answer that in different ways: to be with God, to awaken to our true nature, to become whole. Fighting desire will not get us there. Yoga, after all, is not about winning a civil war within a divided self. It is about wholeness, union; it is about ending and transcending that war. For many years we have "tried hard" and when it didn't work, vowed to try even harder—in other words to do more of what didn't work. Life doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be a struggle. It doesn't have to be hard. Find the courage to accept and trust your natural self, and the joy of your highest desires will manifest.