Melissa Grabau - The Yoga of Food: Wellness from the Inside Out: Healing the Relationship with Food & Your Body

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

The Yoga of Foods: Wellness from the Inside Out 2014 by Melissa Grabau, PhD.

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First e-book edition 2014

E-book ISBN: 9780738741628

Book design by Bob Gaul

Cover design by Lisa Novak
Cover illustration by Christiane Beauregard/Lindgren & Smith

Excerpts reprinted from: LIGHT ON LIFE by B.K.S. Iyengar. Copyright 2005
by B.K.S. Iyengar. Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098.

Editing by Ed Day

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Contents

Yoga as a Guide for Living and Eating Well

: Your Current Self-Understanding
The Foundation of Yoga, Food, and You

: Obstacles to Clear Seeing (The Kleshas)

: Your Repeated Actions (Samskaras)

: A New Perspective on Your Body
Introducing the Kosas>

: Your Physical Body (Annamaya Kosa)

: Your Energetic Body (Pranamaya Kosa)

: The Workings of Your MindLets Dig In

: Too Clever for Your Own Good
(Manomaya Kosa)

: Getting Closer to Your Wisdom Body
(Vijnanamaya Kosa)

Introduction:
Yoga as a Guide for
Living and Eating Well

Nine oclock a.m. Amanda is late for therapy. I hear the overtones of exasperation in her voicemail. She recounts her frustration later on in the session. The planning she put into being on time. Her anger when traffic foiled her plans. The pervasiveness of anger in the rest of her life. This is concerning and bewildering to her since she says she has never felt anger before, even in the face of her mothers cruel and unpredictable rages.

Amanda is thirty years old, with two young children, a husband, financial problems, and a lot of anxiety. She arrives neatly dressed, with her long brown hair pulled back in a tight braid that nicely frames her round, pleasant face. She looks professional, put together, albeit carrying more weight than she would like for her 5-foot-4 frame. Her voice is resonant with feeling and her words are elegantly articulated as she recounts further frustration with plans that have gone awry. My husband called yesterday and suggested that we go out to celebrate my birthday that night rather than Thursday. I thought, Why not? Id been good all day. And the day had gone really well. Im feeling better at my job. Nobody yelled at me today, and thats a good day. We went to the Outback Steak House. She went on to describe the meal laden with carbohydrates and fat. First they brought out a big plate of potato skins, then bread and salad with ranch dressing. Then the steak with fries. And then, because it was my birthday, they brought a cake! She looks defeated as she expresses her bewilderment at her lack of resolve, the collapse of her good day and mood as she left the restaurant with her little girls and husband, and a body that felt heavy and bloated.

Lets pause here for a moment and sweep this very ordinary scene with an inquisitive eye. Perhaps you recognize yourself in both Amandas good intentions and impending demoralization. Perhaps you often ask yourself why it is that despite your best intentions, you too repeatedly become derailed at the dinner table. By probing beneath the surface of this brief, seemingly inconsequential scene from Amandas life, you just might come to understand how it is that amidst the immediate stressors and background dramas that populate our day-to-day lives, the dinner table can take on so much magnitude. It not only wields the power to warp precious moments of your life with indigestion and bloat, it can contribute to heart disease, diabetes, and premature death, which we all know may lurk ever so silently in the background.

In my work as a therapist, I hear stories. These stories are often stories about the body and chronicle the frustrations and anguish plaguing even the most privileged bodies on our planet. One of the themes that continually replays in my office is the heartache and demoralization felt by women and men of all ages and circumstances who struggle with their weight and their relationship to food. This is far more than a petty cosmetic problem. This is a problem that encapsulates one of our main challenges as modern human beingslearning how to live well in our bodies. This includes our ability to manage our hungers, to balance pleasure with restraint and good sense, and to regulate our energies so that we are able to face the challenges of daily life without collapse. How we feel day to day, our general health and energy levels, and our overall sense of safety and peace in our own flesh have an enormous impact on how we feel about ourselves and our capacity to function effectively in the world. So many of us, particularly women, are at war with our bodies. This internal rift pervades everything and compromises our sense of self and our presence with others. Our cultures obsession with dieting, combined with the health crisis obesity presents, is a pressing societal problem. It is most obviously a health issue. It is also a psychological issue due to the emotional suffering food and weight problems create. Fundamentally, it is a quality of life issue due to the enormous impact our nutritional habits have on our ability to live well.

The word yoga literally means to yoke or unite. In yoga practice, we are often told that we are bringing together the mind with the breath or the body with the mind. The yoga of food means uniting the purpose of eating, nourishing the body and soul, with the practice and act of eat ing. Currently, there is a woeful discord between the actual purpose of eatingnourishmentand the act of eating, which for many of us can be negligent and, at times, even abusive toward the body. We may know in our heads that it is important to eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, high-quality protein, unsaturated fat, and so on, yet many of us continue to have a damnable time uniting this knowledge with actual changes in our eating habits. We are like Amanda, feeling pretty good and then sideswiped by a plate of food that leaves us speechless and uncomfortable in its wake. The good news is that you can approach this problem, which is both very personal, but also cultural, in a new way that will facilitate growth on many levels. You cannot and really should not do this work alone. We can extend the meaning of the word yoga to include an imperative to bring people and communities together to address the problem of our current nutritional habits and health status. We can and, I would argue, must unite in an effort to compassionately and tenaciously reconfigure our current culturally sanctioned self-care habits into saner and more sustainable nourishment for body, mind, and soul. Yoga provides a means to do this and this book will show you how, starting with you, the individual.