This shift to a total carbohydrate diet that has happened in the last twenty-five or thirty years needs to be reversed because a person’s long-term health will be seriously affected if they just eat lots of carbohydrate and very little of other things. - Sadhguru.

Sadhguru on one of the major reasons of our ill-health.

Sadhguru : “Today, doctors are saying that 40% of the Indian population is heading to be diabetic. One of the reasons for this is most Indian people are on a single-cereal diet. People are eating either only rice or only wheat. This can definitely cause health problems. It is important to bring in a multigrain diet in one’s life.


In the last fifty years, they say eighty-seven varieties of pulses, grains, legumes and cereals have been lost for good in India. If you walked into a shop even thirty years ago in South India, there would be so many kinds of lentils. Today, it is either tuvar dhal, urad dhal or green gram dhal, that’s it. Even in Arab countries today – where half the land is desert – you find fifteen different types of cereals. India has only three or four left because we are wiping them out so effectively.


Traditionally, people always ate lots of grams, pulses, legumes and other things. But slowly those things have gone away, and if you look at a South Indian’s plate today, there will be so much rice and just a little bit of vegetable. This is a serious problem. This shift to a total carbohydrate diet that has happened in the last twenty-five or thirty years needs to be reversed because a person’s long-term health will be seriously affected if they just eat lots of carbohydrate and very little of other things. This is a basic conceptual change which needs to happen in people’s minds. The majority of the diet should not be rice but all the other things. Rice is your choice – whether you want to eat or not, you decide according to your hunger levels.”
– Sadhguru

Healthy Food and a Proper Diet -- How Does One Decide? - Sadhguru

What we are concerned about is that whatever you eat, should be as far away from you as possible in the evolutionary scheme of things. - Sadhguru.

Questioner: Sadhguru, can you tell us what kind of food we are supposed to eat? Why are meat and meat products not considered the right kind of food for people on the spiritual path, and how is

seafood different? If this is just about killing or violence – isn’t a plant also life?

Sadhguru: This is not just about violence. We know life is violent. The question is just, will you conduct violence only to the extent that is necessary or will you overdo it? No one can live here without violence. Every breath is violence. Whether you cut a carrot, an apple, a chicken, or a goat – it is violence. Whether it is an ant, a cockroach, or a goat – for every life form, its life is the most precious thing on the planet. You may think, “Just a goat’s life.” A goat never thinks so. See with how much pride it walks. It thinks it is the most important life on the planet. Just like you.

In the yogic culture, we call the different life

forms jeevarasi. One heap of life – different levels

of evolution. Different levels of sensitivity. What

we are concerned about is that whatever you eat

should be as far away from you as possible in the

evolutionary scheme of things. Plants are furthest

away. If you have to eat an animal, we say it must

be in the water, because that is the first form of

animal life. If you want to look at it in terms of

stationary life and moving life, among the moving

life, fish are the furthest away from us, so we say

it is okay. You don’t eat a mammal because it is

very close to you.

If you think that if you eat a goat, you will

become healthier, why don’t you eat a human

being? Maybe you will become even healthier.

What is the problem in eating another human

being? It is that they are so much like us. A

certain life form is more complex only because of a certain volume of memory. Suppose we bring back your ancestors. If we raise the previous 10 generations, out of these maybe 150 to 500 people, at least 25 people may look startlingly alike, because the memory continues.

In the human system, the memory is more intricate

than in any other life form. As life evolved, the

memory became more complex, and the structure

of the system became more sophisticated. If you

eat an animal or any creature that is closer to you,

which has its own very complex memory, do what

you want – you cannot digest it. If you eat a plant,

you can digest almost 100% of it – you eliminate

its memory and impose it with your memory.

Your body started with two cells. Two cells of

memory multiplied into all this – still maintaining the same characteristics. But if you go on eating food that has more complex memory, your ability to superimpose your memory on it becomes less and less, the closer it is to you. You may think a goat’s life is nothing, but that is not true in terms of life. It is so much like you. If you cut open a goat, you will see its digestive system, its liver, and its kidneys are very similar to yours.

Your body is just an accumulation of the food

that you have eaten. If you want to impress your

samskara on the food that you have eaten and

make it yours, the complexity of the memory in

the food should be minimal. The more complex it

gets, the more you lose your characteristics. The

inherent qualities that have flown through you,

25,000 years of culture will go waste on you if you

eat food that has a complex memory structure.

The idea of creating a culture and a civilization is

so that it can be transmitted from one generation

to the next. Transmission is not only in the

school room. It happens in the genes. There are

substantial studies to prove this today. We

have always been saying this is your samskara.

Samskara means a distilled essence of civilization

flowing through you without being taught. You

can see this from one person to another person.

Even if you expose two people to the same kind

of external influences, still one person is different

to the other. This is because of samskara. Your

ability to let this inherent quality flow through

you will become minimal if you eat food with

complex memory structure.

Mahavir said this 2600 years ago – if you eat the

flesh of an animal, you will slowly become like

an animal. This does not mean if you eat goat

today, tomorrow you will look like a goat. Over a period of time, the kind of food that you consume will create a kind of memory distraction in your system. If you eat food with minimal memory, your body, your memory structure, and your genes easily imprint themselves on that and make it “you.” If you eat complex memory and you reproduce, the next generation will be confused, because the imprint of memory on them will not happen as clearly as it would have happened if you ate food with less complexity of memory.

If you consume animals that have emotions

and thoughts like human beings, it is close to

cannibalism. This is not a religious or moral issue.

It is an existential and scientific issue, a profound

understanding of how the system works. If you

consume meat or any food with complex memory

and strong emotions, you will slowly lose your

fundamental characteristics of being human.

Cooking with Love, Chants and Hymns.

Your physical body is just the food you eat.  With how much care, tenderness and love, you handle the food, thats how your body will be.  As a child, my mother and grandmother never prepared food for the children without singing some hymns or chants about some God or Goddess because they want the food to be enriched.  And it makes such a difference.  A child would never grow up feeling depressed, rejected or neglected. - Sadhguru.

Enjooooooooy. An ebook released on Food and Body by Isha Foundation. Click the link below

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Are Ayurveda and Siddha Better Than Allopathy? - Sadhguru

Sadhguru speaks about vital food inputs:

Honey

Consuming honey will bring a certain balance to the circulatory system which is very essential for a yoga practitioner. Because you are pushing the body in certain ways, it is important that your blood chemistry is in a good place so that the body doesn’t have to make any absurd changes to adjust to the chemical disproportion. Keeping the blood pure and the chemistry in a certain balance will definitely happen with regular consumption of honey. It is very necessary for someone who practices yoga.

Turmeric

Turmeric also does similar things: it purifies the blood and brings a translucence to your energies. Turmeric is one substance which not only works on the physiology, it also has a very big impact on your energy system. It creates a purification process in the blood, body and energy system. You can use it as a purificatory even from outside. If you just take a small pinch of turmeric, put it into a bucket full of water and pour it over your body, you will see the body will be vibrant. When people look at you, it looks like you are glowing.

Neem

Neem is a very unique tree. A neem leaf has over 150 different kinds or formats of chemistry. It is the most complex leaf that you can find on the planet and it has particular benefits in opening up the system. In India, if you have psychological problems, they “thrash” you with neem leaves. If you have a toothache, we use a smaller stick. If you catch very bad infections, we put you on neem leaf. If you want to prevent cancer, we put neem paste into you. Above all, it generates heat in the body. Generation of heat in the body is supportive for generating intense forms of energy within the system.

Kollu

Horse gram is one of the most protein-rich lentils found on the planet. It is very high-powered. Horse gram also helps with ushna and generates a tremendous amount of samath prana, increasing heat in the body. In English, ushna translates as heat, and sheeta translates as cold or cooling. But that is not an appropriate translation. Suppose you are in a state of ushna, the body feels very hot. But if you measure your temperature with a thermometer, it will read normal. However, in your experience the body feels hot. That means you are in a state of ushna.  For a hata yogi, it is particularly important to stay slightly oriented towards ushna because if you are on the colder side, you become prone to injuries.

Source Link :  http://blog.ishafoundation.org/yoga-meditation/demystifying-yoga/the-making-of-a-hata-yogi-eating-right/

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Sadhguru talks about existential way of hanling health called Bhuta Shuddi.

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Have we lost the art of picking up the right kind of food? A tip from Sadhguru.

Sadhguru : Another thing is the type of food that you eat. Whenever a little affluence comes, people think they have to eat everything in a single meal. In India, orthodox people never ate more than two or three items in a meal, and those three items were always matched together, not mismatched food. People understood the body so well that in our homes, they knew that when they cook a particular vegetable, they will make only a particular kind of curry. When they cook this vegetable, another kind will never be made because traditionally, they understood that if they put this and that together, the body gets confused.

As young boys, we were trained – if we go to the market, how we should pick up the vegetable. These days it is totally gone, but when I was young they trained me – when we go to the market, “If you buy this vegetable, you do not buy that because these two cannot be eaten within a span of two days. If you have eaten this, you should not eat that,” because the body will get confused. Once your body gets confused you will go haywire in so many ways. This understanding was always there.

What I see is, if you go to any affluent dinners, it has become madness. Recently in one of the events, someone was very proudly announcing that they have 270 different varieties of food. People take a little of everything and eat. The body gets confused with this kind of food.

These are things that have been deeply understood and life was structured in a certain way around that. Now, in the name of freedom we want to demolish everything and suffer. Maybe centuries later we will realize that this is not the way to live. - Sadhguru.

Do we sit in the same way?

Sadhguru:

There is something called organ comfort. There are various aspects to this. Just to handle one aspect of it – see right now, most of the vital organs of the body are in the chest and abdomen region. These organs are not rigid, they are not fixed with bolts and clams. They are loose, hanging in nets. Only if you sit with your spine erect, your organs will be in the maximum possible comfort.

If you travel 1000km on a reclining chair, your lifespan will come down by at least three to five years…

Now, the modern idea of comfort is to lean backward and slouch. If you sit in such a posture, your organs will never be at comfort. They will not function the way they need to. This is especially true if you eat a full meal and sit in a reclining chair. A lot of travel happens in reclining chairs. I would say, if you travel a thousand kilometers on a reclining chair in a car, your lifespan will come down by at least three to five years. This is because the organs suffer so much, their ability to function will go down dramatically or you will at least be impaired in some ways.

Keeping the body erect is not because we don’t like comfort, it is because we understand and experience comfort in a completely different way. You can train your muscles to be comfortable, with your spine erect, but you cannot train your organs to be comfortable while slouching. There is no way to do it. So, we choose to train the body, so that our skeletal system and muscular system is comfortable sitting this way.

Source Link :  http://blog.ishafoundation.org/lifestyle/health/the-importance-of-a-good-posture/

Sadhguru on Yoga and Weight Loss

If you are doing yoga, excess weight will definitely go. Yoga not only functions as an exercise, it rejuvenates the system and brings so much sense into you that you will not overeat. Once a certain level of awareness arises in your body, your body becomes such, it will just eat what is needed for it. It will not eat anything more. This is not because you are controlling or regulating your life in anyway or because somebody is telling you to go on a diet. With yogic practices, you do not have to control yourself. You just do the practices. This takes care of the system in such a way that it will not allow you to eat more than needed. If you do some other exercises or dieting processes, you are always trying to control yourself. This is the big difference with yoga.

When you start kriyas, certain people start losing weight, certain people start gaining weight. If your digestion was bad and your ability to convert the food into flesh was not good, when you start practicing kriyas, the digestive fires get activated and because of the improvement in digestion, the conversion of food to flesh will be more efficient and you start gaining weight.

If your digestive fires were already okay and you start doing kriyas, once again the conversion rate will improve. But instead of turning the food into flesh, it will turn food into a subtler dimension of energy. Now, however much you eat, you will find you are losing weight.  If you are practicing the kriyas, you may even find that if you eat a larger quantum of food, you still do not put on weight, you even lose weight. Or, it may be the other way around: your food quantum comes down dramatically, but still you do not lose weight. This is simply because the conversion ratio is being altered.

We do not teach yoga to reduce weight. It is not something that you do to slim down or for your backache or your headache. Yes, those things will anyway happen – becoming healthy, becoming peaceful, loving, gentle – these are the side effects of yoga, not the focus of yoga. The focus of yoga is to set another dimension alive within you, which is beyond the physical. Only when that is alive, slowly the existence opens up to you in a million different ways. Things that you never thought existed become a living reality for you, simply because a dimension beyond the physical has become alive.


Source Link :  http://blog.ishafoundation.org/yoga-meditation/demystifying-yoga/yoga-and-weight-loss/

Pink October, 2012: Sadhguru Talks About Breast Cancer

October is celebrated as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the world over. All through this month, campaigns are held to spread awareness and also raise funds towards the research, diagnosis and cure of this disease.

 

As described by Wikipedia, “Breast cancer is a type of cancer originating from the breast tissue, most commonly from the inner lining of milk ducts or the lobules that supply the ducts with milk.”
22.9% of all cancers in women worldwide are related to the breast. In 2012 alone, the American Cancer Society reported 226,870 new cases of breast cancer in women and 39,510 deaths from the disease. Some of the most prominent risk factors for breast cancer are related to lifestyle – lack of physical activity, smoking, poor diet, obesity, high hormone levels, and lack of childbearing or breast feeding.

Today, as a part of our contribution to the ongoing breast cancer awareness initiatives, we would like to present to you Sadhguru’s own words on the subject. He tells us about the way the yogic system views cancer and what can be done to avoid the disease.

Sadhguru:

Cancerous cells are present in all our bodies. In the yogic system, we describe cancerous cells as being similar to, let’s say, criminals in a society. If there are a few individuals here and there who commit petty crimes, it doesn’t really affect the society. But when they gang up together in one place, something begins to happen. Similarly, having a few cancerous cells in your body is not going to affect your life or health in any way. Generally in yoga, we look at it this way: when certain kinds of blanks happen in the energy body, either because of a person’s attitude, food, lifestyle, or any other factor due to which the energy body gets affected, an atmosphere conducive to the growth of cancerous cells is created. So if the flow of energy is not good in a certain part of the body, cancerous cells choose that place to hide and fester.

Breast cancer is very rampant today, especially in societies where a lot of women never conceive. It is a good thing they are doing for the world, anyway. But even if they have children, generally in today’s world, for most women child-bearing happens only once or twice and is over before a certain age. So the next 15 to 20 years of their life that they still have the capability to bear children and the necessary hormones are still being produced – this is not being made use of. This is one of the main reasons for both breast and uterine cancer occurring among women.

The mechanism of the breast, which was mainly made to feed the offspring, is not made use of. Or, it is made use of at a very early age and not after that. If a woman went through the normal process of conception, from the age of 16 to 18 until about 45, she would be conceiving periodically which would have kept her whole system active and kept the energy flowing. Because it is not made use of the way it should have been physiologically, that part of the body becomes low energy. Such an atmosphere always attracts cancerous cells, and it becomes a place for them to accumulate and do the necessary work that they do.
So does it mean to say we must produce more children? Please don’t. There are ways to find solution for this.

One of the simplest solutions that we have for curtailing cancerous cells in the system is periodic fasting. One aspect of these cells is that they need a lot more food than a normal cell, up to 30 times more. Just by denying yourself food on certain days, you could put down the level of cancerous cells.

There are also certain types of sadhana one can do where one’s hormonal secretions can be controlled. The Shakthi Chalana Kriya^[1] and asanas we teach help in correcting and balancing the system. We have seen many women with uterus-related problems, such as polycystic ovaries getting completely cured by simply practicing certain asanas and kriyas. The hormonal conditions inside the body become controlled, rather than simply reacting to the kind of food you eat and atmosphere you live in.

To what extent the practices have helped patients suffering from cancer, we cannot document or confirm this. But we have definitely seen that they recovered quite well. The doctors who were treating these cancer patients were quite surprised at their response to chemotherapy. We have seen a few people who recovered from chemotherapy very quickly after doing yogic practices. Whether their cancer went away because of the practices, there is no way to say that. I would say supplementing yoga with medical treatment could definitely benefit the patient.

 

[1] Shakti Chalana Kriya is taught as a part of the yoga program Shoonya Intensive at the Isha Yoga Center. To know more, please visit: http://www.ishayoga.org/advanced-programs/shoonya-intensive

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On proper food diet and fasting

While one is practising yoga, the ideal gap one should allow between meals is eight hours.

But a minimum of five hours is a must for everybody.
This is because your excretory system functions properly only when your stomach is empty.
As an experiment, split one day’s worth of meals in two portions and eat it over two meals in a day. Then, split the same meal in 10 portions and eat it over 10 meals. You will see that when you eat the same meal broken into 10 parts, you will put on more weight.
This is simply because the excretory system is not efficient. A lot of garbage, which would have otherwise gone out of the system, is still there because the stomach is constantly full and digestion is constantly happening. Only when the stomach is empty, the cleansing happens well.
If you observe the natural cycle of the body, there is something called a mandala of 40 to 48 days. In every cycle there will be three days when your body does not need food. If you are conscious of how your body functions, you will know the day on which the body does not need food, it is a cleaning up day. On that day you should not eat. Without any effort you can go without food on that day.
Since most people do not have this awareness, the day of Ekadesi was fixed, once in every 14 days. If a person is unable to go without food because their activity levels are such and they do not have spiritual practices to support them, they can include fruits in their diet. Those whoconstantly consume coffee and tea will find that fasting can be very difficult.
So before fasting, they should prepare their body by having the right kind of foods. It may not be a good thing for everybody to fast, but it has many benefits if it is done in a proper way.
You may have observed that while you are sick and weak, you walk every step with full
awareness when you get up from the bed. As you become less of a body, your awareness of the other dimensions of you naturally gets enhanced.
When you are very hungry, all your body wants is food. But at that point pause and say a prayer. Then wait for one moment and then start having food. Just a simple act like this releases you from your body. It brings awareness that you are not the body. When you are veryhungry you are the body. Just give it a little space and suddenly you are not that. Hunger is there, you are there and it is okay.
If one wants to fast for a certain period, it must be supported with the right kind of spiritualpractices or sadhana. If you fast forcefully, without preparing your body and mind, you will only damage your health. But if your body is prepared in all aspects — mentally and energetically — fasting can be of much benefit to you.

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Removing toxins from your body with a little boiled lukewarm water

Have been drinking 1 Litre of water every morning empty stomach to remove toxins from my body. But it was an arduos effort. Just accidently drank water which was little warm in temperature. Just drank it effortlessly. I then understood the significance of why since ancient times, people have been advising to drinking a boiled warm water.  Just boil the water for a few seconds to a lukewarm level.