Food

Balancing Vata for Fall

As we shift into fall we are leaving the Pitta season and entering into the Vata season.

The Vata element is associated with air and ether. It functions as movement and energy, and seasonally it is the time of year when the atmosphere is dry, cool, and rough (windy).

It is easy to see how Vata presents itself if we look at what is happening in nature (especially those of us that live in a four season climate). The cool air begins to dry the leaves making them brittle and rough and eventually they fall. These qualities translate to our own inner climate as well. Often with the rise of Vata our skin can become more dry and rough, our hair and nails more brittle, and it is not uncommon that our digestion and immunity may suffer. The sometimes erratic nature of the Vata element can also make our minds feel more scattered, disrupt our sleep, and even contribute to unwanted mood swings.

So, how do we avoid the usual struggles of fall?

Balancing Vata can be simple if we are diligent about balancing our system as a whole. This means we have to look to not only our diet but, exercise, self care and lifestyle habits as well.

Diet:

Favor more warm or cooked foods
Add more healthy fats like ghee, avocado oil, olive oil, and coconut oil to your dishes
Spice things up with more warming spices: black pepper, cumin, ginger, mustard seed, cayenne, and cinnamon
Eat more tubers! Pumpkin, beets, Sweet potatoes, and all types of other hardy winter squash
Drink more warming teas in between meals
Make golden mama milk
Add soups or stews into your weekly meal routine

Exercise:

Walk more and run less
Favor resistance training over cardio loading
Gentle yoga and meditation

Self Care:

Take a sauna break !
Make self oil massage a daily ritual
Read a book by the fire

Lifestyle:

Wake up and go to bed at the same time every day (vata craves routine for balance)
Try not to overdo it with too many social obligations
Take more time to pause throughout the day and observe your breath

Sattvic Goodness Bowl

Dreaming of bowls packed full of Sattvic goodness. Sometimes all you need is a bowl of steamed veggies! ⁣⠀
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Steamed carrots and spinach on top of quinoa spiced with mustard seed, fennel, and turmeric. Hidden below is an Avocado dressing! ⁣⠀
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Avocado Dressing:⁣⠀
1/2 avocado⁣⠀
1 TBSP Apple Cider Vinegar ⁣⠀
1 clove of garlic⁣⠀
A handful of chopped parsley⁣⠀
1 TBSP of nutritional yeast ⁣⠀
A pinch of black pepper + turmeric ⁣⠀
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Blend and enjoy! ⁣⠀
(This dressing is delicious thick, but feel free to add water or vinegar for your desired consistency). ⁣⠀

Instant Pot Kitchari

Kitchari is good for all doshic types and can be tailored to the seasons with seasonal-appropriate spices and veggies. Basmati rice and mung dal are sweet, cooling and easy on the digestion. It is a complete food, said to nourish the tissues, boost strength and increase our vitality. Kitchari is also the preferred food we use when doing any type of deep cleansing.

To cook the Kitchari, you can use a pressure cooker/instant pot, or stovetop to cook!

The reason why using an electronic pressure cooker is so rad is not only because it cooks everything faster, it’s also because the pressure further removes lectins and other anti-nutrients that plants produce to protect themselves. Learn more about that in this book: The Plant Paradox.

Plus, you can get your pressure cooker going and then forget about it, when it’s done cooking it automatically switches to the Keep Warm function until you’re ready to eat.

Honestly, I use the pressure cooker every day. It’s changed the way we eat and prepare food for the better. We’ll be doing a post about pressure cooker bone broth soon.

Prep Time: 5-10 minutes

Cook Time: 15-25 minutes

These measurements are for a one or two person serving:

(you’ll have to experiment with how much you want per serving/ for how many)

4 oz. split yellow mung dal (preferably soaked for a few hours to remove lectins)
4 oz. cup basmati rice
1 bushel of fresh cilantro (as garnish or to make pesto)
2 tablespoons ghee and/or coconut oil
1/2 teaspoon Ajwain seeds crushed
1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder
1/2 teaspoon ginger powder
1/3 teaspoon cayenne powder
1/3 teaspoon salt
12 oz. of water (not including broth)

Directions:

Add Ghee and/or coconut oil to your instant pot/electronic pressure cooker
Add your spices, salt, garlic or onion (if you're putting any, it's not necessary), stir until it's an even consistency
Add mung dal, sauté for a couple of minutes
Add rice, sauté a minute more
If you're going to add broth, you do this now and let it mix a half-minute with the mung dal/rice
Add lots of water (I like adding so much that my Kitchari is really wet, porridge like)
Place cover and set to Pressure Cooker for 15-25 mins depending on how much you're making (you'll have to experiment with your device to get the right consistency). You can use the custom, Multigrain or Rice setting.

For the stovetop: In a large saucepan over medium heat, heat the ghee, add the spices, stir until fragrant for about one minute. Add the mung and rice, mix well. Pour in the water or broth and bring to a medium boil. Let boil for 5 minutes and then turn down the heat to very low. Cook, lightly covered, until the dal and rice are soft, about 25-30 minutes.

In the meantime:

Sauté your seasonal greens or veggies in a saucepan on the stove; and/or
Make a coriander-based pesto or pull your pesto out.

When the Pressure Cooker is done, release air.

Open and serve your Kitchari in a bowl, add your pesto and then the sautéed veggies or greens on top et voila!

Use discount code KATIES15 for 15% off Banyan Botanicals where you can find the mung dal, rice and many spices that are all organic.

3 Steps Toward Divine Feminine Ayurveda

A Movement Towards True Ayurveda and Healing

Feminine form Ayurveda is the true Ayurveda of ancient India. You might wonder—what does it mean for something to be the true Ayurveda? There are two answers to that question.

The first is that before India came under British rule, Ayurveda flourished not only as a system of medicine, but as a spiritual practice. Healing was known to be a spiritual affair, medicine and spirit were one. The influence of the West in India changed India’s approach to medicine. The wisdom of Ayurveda was all but lost under British rule. For Ayurveda to have legitimacy as a healing system, it needed to conform to allopathic (Western) medicine’s approach. Thus, it was stripped of its spiritual and feminine roots.

Second, it was the women of India who continued to practice the Ayurveda of pre-colonial times. There are two reasons for this: i) woman had always been the communities’ healers, both in the West and in the East. Their knowledge was passed down orally; and ii) In the age of modernization and patriarchy, women were excluded from the healing arts, medicine became institutionalized and one had to study for many years in order to “practice medicine”. This excluded woman who were mostly kept out of higher education and the sciences.

In the West, the eradication of feminine form healing arts was exhaustive due to the millions of women killed during the witch hunts that cycled through Europe and the Americas. We have of our Indian sisters to thank for keeping the flame of feminine form medicine lit for us.

That is why I refer to feminine form Ayurveda, and why my students have now come to call it Divine Feminine Ayurveda. It’s an approach to health that is radically different from the “traditional medicine” that we are familiar with in the West. It even differs from what Indians of the last few hundred years have known due to the Westernization of Ayurveda in India.

Begin Now: Divine Feminine Ayurveda

1. Intentionally cultivate and expand your community. The human Ātman, soul, desperately wants to be seen. Not necessarily fixed or saved, but simply witnessed and loved unconditionally. Organize a potluck and extend the invitation to your outer circle of acquaintances, plan a community activism meeting and get in the habit of regularly volunteering your time to a nonprofit. Feminine medicine comes through the oral tradition, through community, and through relationships. It’s not entirely taught and learned through a textbook, it’s learned through direct experience and relationship.

2. Honor your desires—spring is when we are intuitively most attuned to our deepest driving desires. We learn Divine Feminine Ayurveda not through the pre-frontal cortex alone, but through the back of the brain and body as well. This is foundational because it means that we first heal ourselves and learn the healing arts through our own practice of self-love and self-healing. It means digesting the material IN and WITH the body, not just the intellect.

There exists a culturally imposed need to be very masculine about our approach to health: What pills, what herbs, what’s wrong with me? With a feminine approach to health, we’re not adding anything, instead we are subtracting what isn’t real anymore, what’s not serving us. Divine Feminine Ayurveda ask us to find the place within our being that is already balanced, that needs nothing else, and begin the process of healing from there first.

A practice to connect with your subconscious self:

For 40 days, first thing every morning, write down your dreams. The more you practice this the more you will remember from your dreams. Our beloved Ayurveda father, Dr. Vasant Lad, explains in our Shakti Ayurveda School textbook: "Dreams are a discharge of the nerve cells, the drainage of incomplete thoughts, actions, and feelings. In a dream, you finish unfinished business and the brain is able to restore order”[1].

According to Ayurveda, dreams are classified as vata, pitta, kapha. Vata dreams are very active, includes: flying, death, autumn and are sometimes fearful; pitta dreams are fiery, includes: feeling of having arrived too late, being embarrassed, problem solving, summer; and kapha dreams are often romantic, includes: doing something slowly, eating, spring or winter. Dr. Lad says “Classify the dreams, then treat the dosha and you will have good results”.⠀

Many times, studying our dreams gives us a window into the subconscious—our deepest anxieties and dreams.

3. Adaptability as health. The adaptability of our nervous and immune system is directly linked to the strength of our Ojas, the subtle energetic honey of our body. Think of Ojas as your psychophysical container or shield. When Ojas is strong, we have abundant energy, strong immunity and can adapt to the ever-changing circumstances of life with ease.

My go-to super ojas building plant is Shatavari (Asparagus racemosus). It’s a staple in my kitchen and I always recommend a student on the path of Ayurveda befriend this unctuous plant. Shatavari builds the tissues and fluids of the body. It’s a nutritive tonic, powerful adaptogen and a wonderful demulcent for vata-type bodies that struggle to retain water. It’s especially recommended for regulating and rejuvenating the female reproductive system. To stay hydrated, strong and lubricated, use Shatavari to make a tea. Let it steep as long as you like (a whole day even!) and then sip it warm, little by little, throughout the day.

Divine Feminine Ayurveda understands that there is no ideal health. That the mind/body complex is never in perfect balance, but always in flux. When we study Shakti, Life Force, we see that she is always shifting and changing. For that reason, she is not reaching for a standard of perfection, but instead concentrating on her own resources of adaptability. Feminine form medicine understands health as your ability to adapt to the changing environment and circumstances of your life. Divine Feminine Ayurveda is subtle.

The Laws of Nature

Divine Feminine Ayurveda is the ancient wisdom of the body and the cosmos. It reminds us of what we have forgotten--it asks us to remember, Smarana, our ancient knowing. Divine Feminine Ayurveda is deeply connected to nature. It awakens the deep knowing: You Are Nature. You are Already Connected to Nature.

Our society has confused scientific opinions, social media, and advertising, with the limitless knowledge that lives in our hearts. Instead, feminine form medicine asks us to trust ourselves and our bodies. It’s a practice of radical trust, creativity and insight in ourselves: radical self-sovereignty. It asks us to claim our power, our experience and our understanding of our bodies.

Divine Feminine Ayurveda asks us to trust in OWN bodies, as our bodies contain the intelligence of the cosmos, the intelligence of nature. Nothing external can help us if we are not in conscious communion with our body. It posits that we can find balance through our OWN resources.

Divine Feminine Ayurveda bows to nature as the eternal feminine, the most creative and nourishing channel of this world. It is not static or idealistic. It has no preconceived notions of what our body should look like or our minds should be like. It is not authoritarian structures, it is not statistical averages and standards. It is fluid and adaptable.

With this self-sovereignty and trust in nature, feminine form medicine stresses the importance of asking—What do I need now?

It’s a meditation on self-love as the very first step in healing. It’s a mentorship with Self. We are in a moment of revitalization of the feminine. We are remembering Her and finding the courage to live from the heart. We are awakening the Divine Feminine Ayurveda.

[1] “Chapter Five Dhātus.” Textbook of Ayurveda, by Vasant Lad, Ayurvedic Press, 2002, pp. 161–162.

A version of this article appeared on Banyan Botanicals blog on June 20, 2018.

The Four Glorious Goals of Life

When our digestion is good, our sleep is deep and our emotions and sexuality are being channeled properly, we have more energy to engage in our passions and pursuits in life—in Ayurveda, our foremost pursuits are known as the four goals of life.

According to the Vedas (the spiritual root texts of Ayurveda), your soul has four goals or desires, which the texts call the purusharthas, “that which is for the purpose of the soul.” The Ayurvedic tradition takes these four core human motivations and gives us permission to enjoy and pursue them, while not becoming overly attached to any of them. In this way, we can enjoy pleasure, seek success and purpose, strive for material gain, and seek out the practices and mentors that will teach us how to live a more integrated, enlightened, soulful life. By no means will my general overview do justice to the complex tapestry of what these four motivators are or how we can succeed in their fulfillment, but I do hope to give a brief summary, as they are paramount in our sense of total health and happiness.

Life Goal #1: Luscious, Everyday Pleasure

The first goal of life is kama, meaning pleasure or enjoyment. (Surely you’ve heard of the Kama Sutra! A sutra is a teaching, making the Kama Sutra the “pleasure teachings.”) If we are to live life fully, we need life to feel good. There is nothing like the sensory stimulation we get from smelling a baby’s skin, stroking a kitten’s silky fur, seeing a peony in full bloom, or feeling a man’s deltoid dipping down to the nape of his neck. What brings you deep sensory satisfaction?

The great news is that Nature has set it up so that many of the things that feel good to us are also physiologically and emotionally good for us. Science shows that touch (whether a massage therapist’s or a lover’s) increases the hormones in our body that keep our immune system functioning.[EN1] It’s a downright miracle that just the smell of onions simmering in olive oil causes our body to release the very digestive enzymes that it will use to process the food when we eat it. That’s Divine Intelligence, and Mama Nature’s way of saying, “Relish this moment!”

The problem with all this wonderful kama comes when we overindulge. Remember in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when Augustus Gloop ends up as a piece of fudge after falling into the river of chocolate? Without proper guidance, the out-of-balance, overindulging aspect of our senses can ignore our internal attempts at regulation. If we leave our senses in the driving seat, we run the risk of overdoing it—whether it be booze, chocolate, shopping, sex, TV, or exercise.

The secret to true fulfillment in the realm of pleasure is self-awareness, moderation, and nonattachment. Nonattachment has not always been an easy thing for me to practice. When I enjoy something, I sometimes wanna hold on. Talking to the Divine has helped me build a form of surrender. Whenever I feel myself clinging to pleasures, I will stop and say something like, “Oh, Divine Mama, let me trust in your infinite abundant sources. May I know that this pleasure may rise and fall, but that you are continually dropping your grace into my life.” When we cling, it is as though we don’t believe in all that the Universe offers; it is as if we are saying that we don’t have faith that pleasure (or whatever it is we want to cling to) is abundant and always waiting for us. It helps me to simply pay attention. I know that I don’t need to cling because when I’m paying attention, I see that the beauty is always being dropped down onto me.

Another way to practice non-attachment is to be deeply aware of the present moment while enjoying pleasure. Think of it as simultaneously relishing and releasing.

Life Goal #2: The Means for Prospering

The second goal of life is artha, or the ways and means of prosperous living. Artha is related to the tools that help us move forward in life. A place to live, enough money to pay the bills, good health, proper clothing, and even our iPhone are all examples of tools that help you move through life with more ease.

Just as we want pleasure, we also love the feeling of abundance and good health. It feels good to rest easy knowing that our basic needs are met. It’s hard to think about the meaning of life when we are pawning our jewelry or arguing with credit-card company minions. And in fact,

Ayurveda encourages us not only to pursue financial abundance, but it also states that without a certain sense of ease around finances, our advancement toward knowing who we are is hindered. Why? Because if we are worried about finances, our mind becomes easily disturbed, fearful and distracted. A similar thing happens with our health. If we are sick, it’s hard to meditate, help our kids with their homework, or launch our dream business.

Imbalance in artha occurs when we become greedy or too focused on materialism. When we have thirteen shades of lip-plumping lipstick and feel we really need just one more, we may have an accumulation problem. I will never forget walking into my neighbor’s house. She had amassed 157 stuffed animals. Shoes (still in their boxes) were stacked from floor to ceiling, wall- to-wall. She had a guest room full of purses (piled on a virtually invisible bed, price tags still attached to many of them). The primary motivating force in her life had become acquiring things. She had slowly built up a safety bubble composed of teddy bears, high heels, and handbags. I think that if we are honest, many of us have a little bit of the crazy-teddy-bear lady inside us. Ayurveda teaches us how to embrace our love for stuffed animals without smothering ourselves with them.

Artha can also be imbalanced when we mistakenly think that we need nothing. I know a few spiritual people who feel wrong or guilty for wanting nice things, like a warm home, soft clothing, or a chocolate bar (even if it’s organic, fair-trade). This is the opposite end of the artha spectrum, and it is just as harmful for our total wellness. The lesson? It’s okay to need things—in moderation and for the purpose of the higher good.

Life Goal #3: Roll Out of Bed With a Purpose

The third goal of life is dharma, or our essential life purpose. In the craziness of daily life, many of us forget what a mind-blowing opportunity it is to be in a human body (as opposed to being born a honey badger). Ayurveda says that every human being comes into this life with a specific dharma, and until we are living that dharma, we will not be happy. My teacher, Rod Stryker, says there is a you-shaped hole in the Universe just waiting to be filled with your full expression as an individual. Until you figure out how to embody your full expression and purpose, you will feel out of sync with what your Higher Self longs to become.

Dharmic pursuits do not necessarily have to fulfill any holier-than-thou requirements, however. Dharma has nothing to do with what we could call “a job,” but is more likened to the unique thing you bring to the table in any of life’s circumstances (be it a job, a relationship or a project). What is more, people working in jobs that may not have cache in society can be quite important on the cosmic scene. For example, have you ever met someone with what our society may consider a lowly or bad job, yet they seem to be totally in love with it? Or they use it to make your day better? That is the embodiment of someone living her dharma.

In order to align with our essential life purpose, we need enough balance to actually hear the inner voice of our intuition. Most people who are fully working in their passion will tell you that they had no choice; their job chose them. They say they feel a kinetic flow of energy when they are working in the realm of what they love. Researchers such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are now confirming the existence of a creative psychological flow space that people enter when they are working in their dharma. Time seems to slow, even stop. Energy levels are high, and there is a feeling of aliveness and presence that gives us even more motivation for the work at hand. Feeling this flow space is a good indication that we are aligned with our dharma and in what Csikszentmihalyi calls the optimal experience in his book Flow.

Life Goal #4: Give Me Liberty

The fourth goal of life is moksha, or freedom. Ultimately, behind all of our actions lies the drive to move beyond the recurring cycles of pain/pleasure and birth/death, and to feel the happiness of not being subject to these polarities. Moksha is waking up in the morning and feeling fearless. Moksha is the sense that there is nothing out there that will bring us ultimate happiness—it’s all inside ourselves. Moksha is truly needing nothing and no one to be whole and complete.

The further we advance on the path of knowing who we are, the more this goal becomes clear and the more we can align our life choices with things that will support our own true freedom. If we become too attached to the idea of freedom, we run the danger of becoming a holier-than-thou, spiritual egoist. I have seen students and friends attempt freedom through the path of what psycho-spiritual experts call “spiritual bypassing”—basically attempting to run away from the “bad” world by checking out into some flaky spiritual zone where we don’t deal with our issues. The teachings state that this is impossible. We can’t run away from pain or pleasure, birth or death, or even our own internal struggles (karmas). What we can do is learn how to become a loving witness to all of life’s duality.

Real moksha is about tapping in. It’s about seeing the bigger picture, what life looks like beyond our own motivations. You can measure your success in the realm of moksha by how fearlessly and joyfully you live your life in this current, imperfect world, as well as how well you surrender your negative feelings when you don’t get what you want. It’s also about seeing things as they really are and moving beyond the material world. But the stuff that flashes on billboards, the phone calls, the dinner dates, the news, and the warm touch of a loved one are all very real to us, so the more we work toward knowing who we are, the more we can delight in the existence of this illusory, temporary world of the senses, while at the same time experiencing the Divine delight behind it all. In this sense, we become free because we are fully and delightfully engaged with the temporal beauty of life as it is unfolding.

~Katie

Sister Sciences in the Vedic Tradition

Ayurveda is a complex and ancient system of well-being, and just as Western medicine is based on biology and other sciences that can take a lifetime to understand, Ayurveda has many foundational concepts and tenets that you can explore and deepen your understanding of for years and years.

For our purposes, there are some basic principles that we’ll start with, so you have a clearer grasp of Ayurveda’s view of the universe—both macro and micro—and our relationship to it and each other. These basic tenets of Ayurveda are really a jumping off point both for beginning to introduce Ayurvedic ideas into your everyday life and for further study, should you wish to do so, of the deeper philosophies of Ayurveda.

If you have a yoga practice, you can also look at this Ayurvedic foundation as a way to deepen that practice. The mat-based poses many of us would refer to as “yoga” encompass just the tip of the iceberg that is the broader Vedic tradition. A part of this breadth is Ayurveda, yoga’s forgotten, but incredibly important sister science.

Think of yoga and Ayurveda as two interrelated branches of the same massive tree of Vedic knowledge, each playing its own role in your journey towards health, happiness and vitality. While yoga typically deals with the use of techniques such as asana (postures), mantras (sacred transformational sounds), and pranayama (the management of energy), Ayurveda deals with reducing disease and healing the body and mind.

Yoga supports your health, and living an Ayurvedic lifestyle supports your spiritual journey. While yoga supports healing, it is the ancient art of Ayurveda that teaches us how to heal.

~Katie

Eat Well

That you are what you eat may be standard wisdom, but according to Ayurvedic tradition, the state of your mind, emotions, and your environment while you eat also has direct impact on the way you feel. These teachings (as well as modern scientific nutrition studies), show us that eating in the right way can reduce stress and promote calm.

The ancient yogis taught that one of the first and most important of spiritual practices was food sadhana, the art and discipline of what, when, where, why and how we put food into our bodies.

For physical, emotional, and mental health, it may not be enough to just load up on organic fruits, veggies, and grains. Even if we eat super-healthful food, if we consume mindlessly, eat in a rush, or shovel it in while texting or similarly distracted, the body can’t settle into its digestive processes. And if we eat while feeling sad, angry, or under significant stress, the digestive fire gets weakened, and instead of feeling satisfied, the mind will feel disturbed post-digestion.

Here are 10 simple Ayurvedic tips for cultivating calm-body nutritional habits:

Prepare your food with love. The energy of the cook is always in the food. Avoid eating meals that may have been prepared in anger or resentment. Ayurveda understands that we not only eat the food, but also the emotions of the chef. So, if you are angry or distracted and can’t seem to focus, put down the kitchen knife, pick up the phone, and order some yummy take-out instead.

Awaken to your food. Begin to bring consciousness to your eating habits. As you are preparing the food, sense that you are offering it up to your divine self. Tune into the smell of freshly baked bread, the color of sunny turmeric, or the texture of jasmine rice in your hands, even before you taste the flavors of the food.

Tune into nature. When we eat, we are not only consuming the food on our plate but also the stimulus in our environment. According to Ayurveda, the impressions we take in through the senses can disturb the mind and hinder digestion. If you are watching television or reading the newspaper, you are “ingesting through your eyes,” causing prana to move out and not inward where it needs to be for proper digestion. It is highly recommended that you eat in or near to nature. If that’s not practical, even placing houseplants within view of your table will help. Of course, birds and flowing streams are an added bonus.

Savor the chewing. Take time to chew your food slowly, until it becomes an even consistency. Ayurvedic practitioners recommend chewing each bite of food 30-50 times so that you begin to break down the food in the mouth before it travels the rest of the digestive tract. Complete chewing allows complex carbohydrates, sugars, oils, proteins, and other minerals to reach maximum levels of absorption.

Make eating a ritual. Pause for a moment as you sit down to eat, mindful of what you’re doing and where your food came from. Possibly offer up a prayer of gratitude for all the people, animals, plants, and Universal forces that brought the meal to your plate.

Let it digest. Following your meals, take some time to relax to let your food digest before going on to your next activity. Even if it’s just for 5 minutes, it is helpful to take a small pause between your meal and the next activity. One of my Ayurveda teachers in India offers this easy little ditty for remembering a post-digestion ritual:“After lunch, rest a while. After dinner, walk a moon-lit mile.” And allow at least three hours between meals to allow your food to fully digest. If you feel hungry, sip herbal tea.

Stop before you’re full. This is easier to gauge when you eat mindfully and slowly. When you overeat, you weaken agni, or digestive fire. Whatever you don’t digest will turn into accumulated toxins in the gut. This has a dramatic impact on how you feel physically and mentally.

Take a lunch break. Make lunch the largest meal of the day, and take time to eat it. Digestion is strongest around mid-day, when the sun is at its peak. The body’s rhythms mirror the rhythms of nature.

Watch emotional eating. Do you turn to the chocolate or coffee when you feel overwhelmed or exhausted at work? Do you dig into a bag of chips when you feel lonely? If so, try to consciously make a different choice like taking a brief walk or having a cup of herbal tea and see how you feel.

Do table meditation. Before eating, take a moment to close your eyes. Bring your attention to your belly and breathe slowly. Ask yourself, “What do I really need?” Before eating, ask yourself, “Am I hungry, or am I just angry (tired, lonely, exhausted, bored, etc.)?” This is the crucial moment where we have the capacity to move from the unconscious realm of compulsive and dysfunctional behavior, and into the realm of awareness and calm. From this place, we have better access to the inner teacher that knows what we need for nourishment and strength.

This article was originally published in the Yoga Journal Blog on January 26, 2012.