Have you read Yogananda’s mind-blowing “Autobiography of a Yogi”? It recounts his years as a young spiritual seeker searching through mystical India for his teacher, his guru. In ancient times, before the days of calling cards and websites, spiritual leaders needed to demonstrate their prowess to validate their capacities and to attract followers. There were different ways to do this, but commonly they developed siddhis or signs of spiritual accomplishment. Yogananda describes many amazing feats he witnessed including “the poison eating saint”. This fellow’s demonstration was to eat poison and broken glass and remain unaffected; that is, as the story goes, until he repeated his siddhi on a day when he was in an agitated state of mind and unceremoniously died.
My experience of these matters is that there is a spectrum like in most things. Some people do have strong minds and strong constitutions and can manage on a wider range and quality of foods. However, it is a high level of accomplishment to be able to eat any old rubbish and be unaffected by it – especially long term.
For most of us mere mortals our health and our capacity to heal is dramatically affected by what we eat. Unhealthy eating is linked to six of the ten major things that kill people, as well as MS and rheumatoid arthritis. Healthy eating leads to long term good health and assists recovery from illness powerfully.
The trick with food therefore is twofold. How are you sure of what is good for you, and how do you enjoy eating it so you keep on eating it?!
Easy. You need good information and the right state of mind.
Everything starts with the mind. It is our mind that decides what food to buy, how to store and prepare it, how much to eat and what state of mind we are in when we eat it.
How then to use the mind to good effect? We need to use our mind, our wits, to gather good information; then we need to train our mind to serve us – to follow through on our good choices and lead the way in deciding what we eat and how much we enjoy eating it.
Here is the kicker. Here is the real secret so many people I met in the past were not aware of, but who on learning of it changed their lives dramatically for the better. Here is the secret to enjoying what the theory says is good for us:
Anything you do often enough you get used to. Nothing is difficult once you get used to it. Anything you choose to, you can put your mind to and enjoy doing it. It is not such a great accomplishment to decide upon the state of mind you will do something in. With just a modicum of willpower, most people can do it.
So use your intelligence. Choose the salad and choose to enjoy it!
Happy, enjoyable, healthy eating.
COMMENT OR A QUESTION?
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RESOURCES:
Previous Blogs:
Mind Training 2 CD set by Ian
Cancer nutritional information from Ian:
- Book: You Can Conquer Cancer
- CDs: Eating Well, Being Well, and Eating for Recovery
MS:
- Book: Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis by George Jelinek
Lifestyle-based programs and counselling for cancer, MS disease prevention and wellbeing:
This is quite a problem. It is easy to eat what I feel like and doesnt that do me good if I like it? Its not always easy to enjoy health food at least for me.
ReplyDeleteDo people really find they can just decide how they feel about enjoying things? I would like to know how to do this and what other people do.
I began a wholefood vegetarian diet [ with juicing ] after witnessing the positive effect it had for my younger brother who survived for 6 years with metastatic pancreatic cancer. He had refused chemo & radiation & suffered the usual rejection from his oncologists who gave him 4 - 8 months to survive. He did more than that.. he thrived! Rather than being the typical sickly cancer patient, he went diving, sea-kayaking, hiking, camping & back to work as a wildlife guide part time. He also was pain free until the last month of his life & even then had only two bouts of liver pain. [ due to secondary cancer ]
ReplyDeleteI have turned around a lifelong bowel disease that required frequent antibiotics & was heading me down the road to colon cancer by eating what I call " the kind diet." That is, kind to me.. kind to animal welfare & kind to the planet. I wish I had been better informed earlier in my 61 years, but we live in a culture that ignores diet as medicine. These days my wife & I plus one of our sons choose to eat mindfully. We were all once typical meat eaters, but today don't even regard meat as food, so absolute is our conversion to plant-based nutrition. Eating this way becomes a way of life, it affirms philosophic values & there is no struggle to maintain it, as it has become who we are, what we believe in. Thus in the act of eating mindfully you offer a kind of prayer for a better tomorrow.