Feeding our sensual selves is a foundation for nourishing our souls as well as our bodies.
Many of us have deprived ourselves in recent times with ready meals and takeaways. We may plonk ourselves in front of the TV, eating numbly, without awareness.
We could be more interested in the news or the soap opera on the tv than listening to what our bodies want and to when we are actually full from eating.
When we start to get creative in the kitchen, like getting in touch with the essence of our food as we prepare it, and absorbing the colours and sensations of the food then we start to learn the true nature of nourishment.
“Three meals a day, 365 days a year, for an average life span of 76 years would mean that we have 84,000 opportunities to have meaningful, healing interactions with food", says Deanna Minich in her book Chakra Foods for Optimum Health.
Food is vibration and can be healing at a core level beyond our calorific needs. We need to redefine our role in the kitchen. If we look at ourselves as sensory beings and energetic bodies, we can start to see how colour, smell and touch feed our sense of taste and enhance the crude enjoyment of our food.
Meditation With A Banana
When I teach yoga, we sometimes do what I call the Prana Banana meditation. We sit and meditate while holding a banana – receiving this banana as a blessing from the universe. Prana is our rejuvenative life force energy. We then sit and eat the banana with awareness, still in meditation. The banana is the best banana you will ever eat. Eaten with full awareness.
We can bring that awareness into the whole cooking process, from the moment we are in the store, drawn to the different colours and textures of the fruit and vegetables or even as we grow our own food. We can bring that awareness into the kitchen as we chop veggies, grind spices and mix with our hands.
Choosing specific coloured foods can stimulate our tastebuds and start to bring balance to our chakra system. Our chakras are a map to our well-being within the body.
In the Kundalini Yoga Cookbook, we find a great Rainbow Vegetable and Herb Salad to nourish all the chakras: “For this dish we combine a broad selection of vegetables, their different colours reflecting the different colours of the seven chakras. Red is for the first chakra, orange is for the second charka, yellow is for the third chakra, green is for the fourth chakra, and purple and white represent the fifth, sixth and seventh chakras. When eating the salad, not only will you enjoy its abundance, you will also enhance your chakras.”
Colour
Working with colour stimulates our creativity. It becomes a visual feast to the eyes as we mix colours. And the phytochemicals that give our food colour give us essential nutrients.
“Each compound of colour, whether the purple anthocyanidins found in grapes or the red lycopene in tomatoes, has a specific function in the body,” says Minich. “If we omit a colour from the rainbow spectrum, we are not providing ourselves with the physiological and spiritual functions of that vibration. We are eating what I like to call the ‘Brown, Yellow and White Foods Diet’ - the Standard American diet.”
Eating a rainbow range of foods can bring balance to our whole being. So get experimental in the kitchen. Orange is the colour of the second chakra, our realm of creativity. Load up on beta-carotene and get creative.
Try Minich’s Creative Carrot Curry Soup:
Heat one tablespoon of olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add one medium yellow onion chopped and stir for four minutes until it turns golden. Add two pounds of chopped carrots and stir well. Stir in one tablespoon of curry powder and cook, stirring constantly for 30 seconds. Add five cups of vegetable broth and bring to boil over high heat.
Reduce heat to medium-low, cover and simmer for 30 minutes or until carrots are tender. Blend in a food processor until smooth. Transfer back to pan or into a large bowl and stir in one cup of light coconut milk. Season with Salt and Pepper.
“Food has an amazingly potent effect on the emotions, body, mind, and spirit, and conversely, our food choices affect these parts of us as well. By hitting the internal ‘reset button’ to arrive at our inherent, intuitive baseline, we can eat in harmony with you we are as unified body and soul,” she says.
For more recipes check out
The Kundalini Yoga Cookbook, by Ek Ong Kar Singh and Jacqueline Koay. Also
Chakra Foods for Optimum Health by Deanne Minich. For more about healing our soul through food read
The Path of Practice by Maya Tiwari.
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