Digestive Fire And Its Link To Mindful Eating
How single-tasking can support your body’s intelligence?
I have a confession to make — I am the mindless eater. Many years I’ve trained myself in the habits I didn’t realise were not serving me. This kind of habits made me feel like finding a comfort in something, just because I trained my brain this way. But slowly, we are all able to transition off it.
If you are into healthy eating, the way you are eating and preparing your food is definitely something to look into. In Ayurveda a healthy microbiome and a robust digestion is a cornerstone of your health as well as of our physical and mental wellbeing. Modern science is fully backing this up by describing the connection between the gut and the brain. Ayurveda goes even one step forward saying everything is connected.
It also presents a concept of Agni, which is Sanskrit word for digestive fire or transformational force. One of its jobs is to transform matter into energy. A simple example for it: You are nourishing your body with food (substance) and it gives you the power (energy) to get up every morning and perform your tasks.
But this is actually happening in all layers of life, not only with food! Ayurveda claims that we are processing everything that comes from outside into our body / mind. So on a subtle level, Agni’s work is to process all the sensory input and information that comes in. Every sound, word, picture, impression or an instagram scroll… Everything requires Agni, in order for us to function. Agni is like the Sun. Without it, there is no life.
Everything is connected, remember? So even if the Agni that processes food is a different type of Agni than the one that processes sensory information, still if one is overwhelmed, the other cannot function properly. That’s why when I think of why so many of us suffer with digestive complaints or disorders nowadays, I cannot stop thinking, it’s due to the food quality only.
It also need to have something to do with the fact that we are greatly overstimulated for most of the day. Besides, we have the whole social setting that is very much directed towards pushing, achieving, rushing and numbing. Oh yeah, we are good at numbing! Food (or fast food, literally fast) has just become this vastly acceptable form of it.
In reality emotional eating is an attempt to still a hunger for something else. Something deeper in our lives. It might be a hunger for any kind of nourishment, often: Love, touch, knowledge or an opportunity that we once lost. With food we are trying to fill the void somewhere there (in our subconscious), but we are forgetting it can only work on a top layer. Going inward and facing the old wounds is necessary to solve the problem at its roots, but often it seems too scary and uncomfortable.
Back to mindful eating. How can you start rewiring your brain? A major one will be practicing single-tasking. Boomer! We spent most of the day on the opposite. Overstimulated, we end up cooking or eating our food distracting ourselves with something else at the time. We don’t know anything different.
Yet truly magical things can happen, if you just schedule 20 minutes for one meal during your day while you are able to sit in complete silence and only concentrate on what’s in front of you. Smell, taste, chew.
Depend on what kind of person you are, you can choose something that will make this time more pleasurable for you. You can lay the table, say a prayer or sit at the window and watch the sky or the nearest trees. If you are living in a family, hold a hand of a person, who prepared the food for you, express a few words of gratitude.
Personally, I find the last working best for me. It is also easier to set myself in the gratitude mode when I actually imagine, the whole process that the food on my plate needed to go through, before I can eat it. I think of the earth that grew it, the Sun that contributed to it, the farmers that cropped it and delivered it to the store. There are a lot of things we take for granted, when you think of it. The sole realisation of how fortunate we are to live in such abundance and comfort is a great way to shift into the desired rest-and-digest mode.
Proper chewing is also a crucial factor. But don’t worry, you will naturally chew your food slower and more carefully once you start doing the practices mentioned above. Some say that digestion starts in the mouth, but Ayurveda also says that digestion starts in the kitchen! There is nothing better for you than actually preparing the meals by yourself, because while you stirring up the ingredients, Agni is already taking in the sensory information and prepares the body to produce the enzymes that will help you digest it properly.
This is the truly amazing intelligence of our bodies that we have access to anytime, we just need to give it a chance and support it! Once we do that, coming back to balance is just a matter of time :)
