A YOGI CHA BLOG

Using food as entertainment

I have spoken about eating disorders in the past and I have also spoken about emotional eating in general because we all (in the “food in the fridge” kind of world) eat in a very emotional way.

But today I want to take a new perspective on eating and that is the highly addictive reward value it has in terms of entertainment. 

What makes me say this? As soon as we are limited in what and how much we can eat in a day, we become very uncomfortable. 

Take the Ayurvedic fast of mono-dieting as an example. It is made to not be extreme or strenuous for our body so that we can rejuvenate without aggravating already existing imbalances of our system. Yet, when you present the procedure of this to people, they get apprehensive. Eating the same thing for every meal for several days? 

Even easier missions such as a specific diet for a few days (even though it’s varied) has us cringe. I know people who sign up for a week of keto diet for instance and have all the meals for the day delivered to their door in the morning. Three meals a day with even a snack sometimes. But all very “keto”, which means very low on carbs. It is a restricted type of diet of course and they are doing it for some reason or another. So there was a clear intention from the start. Yet, many give up a couple of days in. 

And the reason is that we need to feel that we are free in what we choose to eat. So we don’t eat for the sake of nourishing ourselves but to feel good. And when I say feel good, I mean to feel entertained.

We feel reassured if we know that anything we might crave is at an arm’s length from us. Through our mini computer connecting us to the world we can press order on anything and it will be with us that same day. It goes for food orders, here in Indonesia we would simply say “just gojek it” and that goes for ANYTHING you might want, at any time of the day or night. There are companies like Uber and GoFresh and so many others that I don’t know the name of, offering more and more specialised services of consumption. And some are absolutely ethical and can be great ways for those of us who are finding it hard to eat the right thing, to actually do so. You can get the ingredients for an exact recipe sent home to you. But there are still new ways to consume, to entertain our minds. 

I remember going to the US many years ago and being shocked by the number of fast food chains you would find on every corner of the street. It’s as if there was this collective anxiety that there would not be food around in case you got hungry. Nowadays it’s not just in the US, it’s in many parts of the world and Asia is a huge market for fast food stores lined up next to each other. 

Basically if you are somewhere in the street and you feel a growl from your stomach, you just need to look in each direction and within the next 50 metres you will see a shop that promises you burgers, chicken wings, tacos and so on. 

Actually, when we start to look at different habits we have, we realise that most of them are ways to keep ourselves afloat. If we would start eliminating them, we would feel rather naked and as if something was missing. It can actually be really detrimental for our mental and emotional wellbeing. For some of the issues we have in life, keeping the habits can be very important. I have spoken about the brain and it’s function of survival and familiarity in the past which means that we often use this to bring ourselves into balance or health. For this reason, what I am about to argue for you is not black or white. It’s not “this is right and that way is wrong”. It very much depends on how stable we are but also what the intention behind our actions is. 

For instance, I know that stripping myself off the rituals I have for sleep will not necessarily create more clarity of mind for me. Like many in the modern world, sleep is not obvious to me so I have prioritised the best sleep hygiene possible to support this. 

But when it comes to what I eat, I learned a very important lesson some years ago. And that is what I want to share with you today. 

It is therefore important for me to mention that those of us with either current or past eating disorders need to take this into account when they create a more dispassionate relationship with food. If my need is to control what I eat because my disorder is to restrict myself so much that I have lost all joy of eating, then I don’t want to feed that tendency by restricting myself even more. However, the way I can use the following information in this case is the teaching of how the different foods support my health. Because when we have had an eating disorder, we have often disconnected ourselves so much from the original reason we eat that we might need to learn the art of eating all over again. 

And ironically, for those of us who use food as entertainment instead of restriction, it is actually the same thing. The original intention of feeding our body with vitamins and minerals has been lost and we need to learn the art of eating again too. 

Once upon a time I was very controlled by my desire to eat. If it went into my head that I wanted something, my mind would not shut up until I had it. Just like the stereotypical pregnant woman craving strawberries at midnight, I could not get over the obsession when I had a craving. Its an addiction like any other, actually.  

But here’s the thing : cravings are the same thing as any other obsessive thinking. A way to escape the present moment. The midnight snacking for instance, a need to escape either that we cannot sleep or that we really should go to bed. We eat more when we feel lonely to escape the emptiness but we also indulge more when with others in order to feel connected to each other. It’s very hard to not do this since our whole society is very much based on these kinds of behaviours. 

The fact that we socialise with food, that we celebrate with it or that we also comfort ourselves by putting something into our mouths. 

In no way are these behaviours focused on the nutritious value of the things we eat. And as you can imagine, these behaviours are not helping our microbiome, our digestive system and our body image. 

In Ayurvedic lifestyle practices, especially two practices help us see clearly that we are entertaining ourselves when eating : learning the Ayurvedic mindfulness practice of eating and experiencing the mono-diet way of fasting. 

Firstly, we have lost touch with the feeling of hunger so we don’t know when we actually need to eat and when we want to be entertained. A great example of this was one of the participants in the Nourish-balance-Thrive program who asked me if they were to use the evaluation of hunger for snacks as well since she did not necessarily feel hungry when she snacked…. So I asked her, well why did you get the thought of having a snack in that case?

Secondly, we realise how uneventful the meal can seem when eating rice and lentils for all meals. We often discover, by the way, after a day or two that we naturally reduce our portions because we are not eating for pleasure. 

In both situations, a certain agitation happens that in the beginning leads to leaning into our habits. But after some time with this new awareness, we start perceiving a pause between the agitation and the reaction to lean into the habit. And in that pause you begin to investigate what the discomfort actually is telling you. 

It’s like Victor Frankle’s famous quote : “Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”.

When we begin to strip things off from our daily habits, we become aware of the void they are filling. We are confronted with our discomfort, the rawness of our pain. We get the opportunity to sit with it, to not try to make it go away but to learn what it is trying to tell us. About who we are, about the fear behind them. Anyone who has had a regular yoga practice might recognise this state. The subtle but clearly noticeable peeling off of the layers of decorations we carry around. 

We enter an actual meditation. Because this is what meditation does. 

It’s becoming so still that all the past impressions can surface and we can become friends with them. Like the story of Buddha inviting the personified evil that is Mara in for tea, we get the chance to invite our demons in for tea. 

Only what we fear will have power over us and when we learn to sit with it, that power becomes our own.

The place to start is in your own kitchen. It’s transforming that relationship we have to eating into what it truly is. Now this applies to all, whether we have had an eating disorder of restriction or filling a void by overeating and often the wrong things. Because we need to change the toxic relationship we have with the process of nourishment. When we learn that certain foods create certain effects as they are transformed inside of us, we look at those foods differently. 

 Learning to appreciate the taste of real, whole food. The textures and how they evolve depending on the way we prepare them. 

Understanding what it does for our bodies, getting in touch with the healing properties of it. When you eat, what goes in becomes you. 

A YOGI CHA BLOG

Heal your relationship with food to heal your life

When we begin to take an interest in what we eat and how we eat we notice that the relationship we have to food is far from dispassionate. On the contrary, we are completely emotional eaters, all of those who live with a fridge full of things in their homes. 

Ayurveda states that disease happens when we are either undernourished or overfed. In the modern world, undernourishment in terms of eating enough is not seen so much, yet we detect issues such as nutrient deficiencies that lead to disease. Instead of risking undernourished people, we see malnourished people in the doctor’s office. When it comes to being overfed, we also see contradictory signals. We have so much information on what to eat and there are new fad diets every few years, yet we don’t obtain the healthy results because people keep getting obese and develop diabetes. So clearly, we are not eating the right things. 

Ayurveda looks at food as medicine. This means that no real food is excluded but depending on what we use it for, it can be healing or hurting. 

Like I mentioned in the previous episode, it might feel overwhelming when we look into our kitchen cabinets and there’s not much more than expired cornflakes or tinned green peas. How do we start? Where do we start?

One thing is for sure : as soon as you start changing what foods you keep in your kitchen, you are taking the steps to change your life. It really begins here because what you put into your belly will be the driving force for your body.

So if you want to start, here are 3 very simple but important rules to keep in mind : 

• Consume whole foods that are not processed

When food that is nutritious in its original form is being processed, the aspects of it change. For the sake of optimising industrial processes and increasing the financial benefits, the food industry alters things like wheat, sugar and fats in order to have longer shelf life or to more easily add it to certain dishes. This devitalises the ingredient and removes all traces of nutriment. Then they might add on synthetic versions of nutriments (additives) without actually having enough data on long term effects on our bodies. 

• Avoid food with pesticides

It goes without saying that pesticides that are created to kill things that are alive, will not sit well with our stomachs and bodies. We have reduced our budget for food shopping and become so accustomed to paying very little for food that it feels expensive to eat real food. Hypermarkets and industrialised food can lower the prices in a highly competitive way compared to local farmers and specialised stores. But ask yourself : how can they still make profit on such cheap food items? Only if the production price is close to nothing and that can only happen if the ingredients are pretty worthless. So learn to reprioritise where your money goes. There are some incredible people out there who create coops for local farmers and organic foods. Cooking your own food is always going to be cheaper than eating out. So reduce the number of restaurant visits in a month in order to put that money in your kitchen budget. 

• Eat less

One thing Ayurveda taught me was that I was eating too much because I was eating too fast. We have completely lost touch with our hunger and we do not know anymore when we are actually hungry and when we have had enough. There are more than one factors in the explanation of this but let’s just start with the guilt trip around not finishing your plate. We were taught in childhood that this was not an option and so we kept that with us. Of course, for reasons of waste and so on, this is virtuous but not when fast food chains serve maxi versions of their so-called food menus. And even without going to fast food restaurants, often the portions are pretty big in order to justify the price of the meal in any place. Of course, there are the expensive places that will serve you rather small portions but it’s not for your health. Rather to make sure you keep space for that dessert. 

Having digestive issues is as common as chronic fatigue these days. And they all start with a weakened digestive system. How does your digestive system weaken? Firstly by overeating. 

You should stop before you feel completely full, at 70% of your stomach’s capacity.  The remaining 30% should be empty so that the digestive process can take place. Imagine cleaning out your wardrobe and its so fully packed with items that there is no room to make an order. You have to take all of it out and start from scratch. Well imagine your stomach like that. 

• It’s more important how you eat than what you eat

Because the digestion of the food is essential for your body to benefit from it, how you eat is going to be more important than what you eat. It’s the same reason I don’t encourage people to take supplements when they are deficient in something. If you eat the right food and a varied diet, there is no reason to have deficiencies. So first look at what you eat there but then realise that you are not absorbing the nutrients. In that case, even the most expensive supplements will do you no good. Eating in a way that establishes your metabolism will in the long run be far more effective. Undigested food creates toxins (ama). Accumulated ama leads to blockage of the natural flow of fluids (lymph and blood) which in itself has as a job to eliminate toxins. So the cycle of increasing toxins in the body is escalated through this blockage. 

• Conscious eating and the sacred

Preparing your food and eating it can be a sacred experience. After all, when eating you are taking in molecules from outside things and transforming them into YOU! 

• The Ayurvedic 10 guidelines to assure proper digestion : 
• Take food in a peaceful environment
• Say thank you to the food
• Eat quietly “låt maten tysta mun”
• Chew your food well
• Warm or room temperature for both food and drink
• Food should be moist / little bit oily
• Don’t drink large amount during the meal
• Eat until you’re 70% full
• Take time to rest after meal
• At least 3 hours between meal

A YOGI CHA BLOG

Your body type is not as important as you think

We love to compartmentalise because it makes things easy to understand. And we tend to simplify because it just feels better for our brains! 

I’ve said this before, we seek patterns in our surroundings in order to understand better. 

So when it comes to things like Ayurveda, people love to take quizzes to know which dosha they are. “What is your body type?” 

So if you are new to my podcast, here’s a quick recap of what that means and if you want more details, you can go back to some of the first episodes where I dedicate more time to explaining the 3 doshas.

Every living organism is built up by a combination of the 5 elements and consciousness. When consciousness brings them to life, they form the 3 doshas, 3 bio mechanical energies which are Vata, Pitta and Kapha. Vata is responsible for lifeforce moving in the body and all the other systems that circulate, Pitta is responsible for metabolism and kapha for structure. Depending on the ratio of these three energies we note that the dominant one tends to be what we align with. To make it very clear, an elephant has a higher ratio of structure, kapha than the other two doshas and so the qualities of kapha will be the tendency of bodily functions in the elephant. On the opposite side we can see that a tiny bird will not have a dominance in body tissues or even metabolism (expression “eating like a bird”) but more so of Vata. It even lives in the air. 

We recognize this logic in humans since we are also a part of the living organisms in this world. However, since we tend to not align with nature but instead to resist it, we develop imbalances more often than not. And that is what we work with in my program for instance. Bringing those imbalances back to aligning with the law of nature. 

I have spoken in the past about tendencies and how we can translate that word into habits when looking at it from a psychological perspective. Of course, when there is a tendency in us since childhood, we are more inclined to lean into that than anything else. This is why we would say that a Vata dominant person would more easily develop issues with the VATA dosha in them and that a PITTA person would lean towards overheating, because its main element is fire. 

This is absolutely true. However, it’s more complex in real life. 

And here is what that looks like. 

Firstly, two people with the same dominant dosha might not have the same ratio of the doshas which means that one might tend towards a pure tendency and the other might have quite the intertwined one with another dosha. Another interesting fact is that the combination of two can very much look like a third but as soon as we go into details about humour, digestion and temperature we realise that the look-a-like was only physical appearance. 

Secondly, our doshas actually become dominant at different stages in our lives. Childhood is dominated by kapha dosha, adulthood by pitta and third stage of life by vata. So a person’s age will also play an important role in what might flare up. 

How you have lived your life until the moment you consult for instance will also determine what dosha is out of balance because for anyone, a vata dosha out of balance for several years without any kind of rectification will naturally open the door to imbalances in the other two. Vata is air and if you will for the sake of this metaphor, the wind. The more the wind blows, the drier the climate becomes. That will more easily allow for fire to spread.  For this reason, a Kapha dominant person who has been living a very irregular life might present Pitta imbalances during the Pitta time of life. 

So where you are in life but also how you have been living until now will be more important maybe than what your original constitution or prakruti is.

Thirdly, it has always been said that the doshas move constantly since we move constantly and that is even more true today. After all, today’s movement has become polarised. On the one hand we don’t move enough at all. We sit still and have our backs hunched all day long. We take the car, we order in and so on. But at the same time we tend to move around by living in completely different areas to where we were born. Travelling to another country or another continent has even become as ordinary as taking the bus to another city for many. When we used to travel once a year to the max, these days many travel every month. We go And let’s not even get started on the speed we travel at. This is not aligning with nature. If we would walk to where we are headed, we would not get jet lagged of course because our whole organism would naturally adapt during the trip. 

So those are just some general aspects of how our doshas move but you will therefore also have a more complex movement inside your system which means that your digestion or your mind might be of a type that flares up. And that I would like to attribute once again, how you have been living until this moment. If digestion has always been a priority for you and so since your early 20’s you have been eating healthy, home cooked foods at regular meal times, it has been stable for a long time and Vata for instance will not shake it around so easily. But if, like many, digestion was absolutely not a concern and you might have been eating instant noodles or macaroni for dinner 4 times a week during university studies, then your digestion might be weak. 

What this part means from the Ayurvedic perspective is that by tending to your VATA dosha you will more easily stay in a balanced state and so you will help your organism to be stable. I want to take the image of the oil lamp where the steady and slow absorption of the oil by the mesh will maintain the flame strong and stable so that there is enough oil all along. When we move around too much, the flame will flicker and absorption becomes irregular and will tend to burn out too fast. 

So what this means is that you will need to tend to your vata first, no matter what constitution you have and this will first and foremost be as a lifestyle guideline. Then, depending on yes- your dominance of the doshas- but also, your age, where you live, what time of the year it is and how resilient you are (meaning how you have treated yourself before), the dietary guidelines and stress management might be different to the next person. Even the fact that your nervous system will detect danger differently to the next person is important here. 

A YOGI CHA BLOG

You’re not special, you’re unique

I want to speak about your uniqueness today because that is one of the most misunderstood concepts these days. 

As a link to the last couple of episodes where I spoke of envy, your lack of seeing the uniqueness in you and cherishing it, is what creates the feeling of envy in the first place. 

So if we hear that and then take a look at social media, we could potentially argue that there should not be any envy these days since everyone seems to be screaming on the top of their lungs just how darn special they are. 

Except that they are not being authentic. And here is why I can say that.

The extreme extroversion, the exhibitionism actually that we see on social media is not for your uniqueness as much as it is a fear of being ordinary. Because we have been taught since childhood – and when I say “we”, I mean generation Y and Z, born from 1980 and on – that we are extraordinary. That we can achieve anything we set our minds to. But actually what that really creates is that in order to be worthy, we need to BE extraordinary. Being ordinary means that we are not deserving of attention and as we all know by now, attention means belonging, means love. 

More than that, we are taught that life is supposed to be perfect, that our parents are flawless (try to live up to the super parents we had just seems to be the unattainable goal in life. And it is unattainable because, guess what? They weren’t flawless). 

It’s the story of the Golden child and the Scapegoat. One of them can’t seem to get anything wrong whereas the other never gets it right. And here’s the irony : it creates the same shame in both of them. If you are set for success, it’s important to never disappoint. If you feel as if you were the victim of blame, it will become your battle to show that you are good and worthy.

Both will seek to get the approval. And that approval is a hit and miss anyway because what you want to be approved of is that you are worthy but what you have been taught is that you need to produce or achieve to get it. So we have misunderstood the value of our BEING for the value of our DOING. 

The number of people I see who claim that they feel lost, lack of direction and without a purpose is enormous of course because if the whole journey was set by parents saying we could become something really big and important then we have spent so much time trying to figure if we can find that really important thing to be, without ever actually asking ourselves if we want it. 

We have taken on the rules of the family. And those rules weren’t even the reality for the family, they were all broken dreams and desires of our parents now trying to live through their children to feel that their lives weren’t failures after all. 

Am I painting a dark picture here? Well, just have a look at the kind of things we were fed with on TV during our childhood and teens as being “what it is to be an adult”. A group of friends that never really seemed to work but still lived in the most desirable places, had beautiful big houses, spent most of their time in a cafe, hanging by the pool or on the beach. Eating the standard american diet for a living yet with bodies having eating disorders written all over them. 

It is confusing when we leave the safety of our parents home and realise we will actually have to work really hard, not enjoy the work so much maybe and live in a place that simply corresponds to our budget and not our desires. 

All the while we are building up the protecting wall around our vulnerable hearts since no one can find out that we are not the superhumans we were told to be. 

Trying to live up to an ideal that actually never existed in the first place is just an equation for burn out. And adding on the last 15 years of instagram and now tiktok etc, it has escalated. Because the ultimate success would be to let everyone know just how much we achieved and so being on TV used to be proof that someone had made it. With social media, everyone got a shot at “being on TV” because now everyone could “broadcast themselves”. And then it went so far that unless you were broadcasting yourself, whatever you did wouldn’t matter. Because no one would know. 

“If a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?”

Unfortunately, our parents did not want us to feel the pressure of being extraordinary. Instead they wanted us to feel what they didn’t feel. That everything can happen. That it is possible.

They wanted us to believe in our future. 

And the sad truth is that all along we missed to realise that doing isn’t the same thing as being. 

When we are convinced that our worth is dependent on what we do, then everything in our day becomes a means to an end. “Will this serve me somehow?” If not, we don’t waste our time on it.

We don’t stop to smell the roses because we can’t use that smell to make a post. We can sometimes feel so good in a moment of radical presence and as soon as we become aware of it, we lose it because we are already planning what we will do with this insight. 

As if the insight itself, just by me in my own world was not enough. And of course it isn’t since I have not practised feeling enough just by being me. Yet it creates a really narrow world. We feel really small since we spend our days trying to figure out what we can do to improve ourselves. Yes, there is self absorption in self development. There is narcissism in selfie obsession. But for the opposite reason you often seem to think. Not because they are convinced that they are the best in the world but because they fear deep down that they are nothing at all. 

You see, the uniqueness that I’m talking about is not only in you but also in the present moment. And if the present moment is only a means to an end, life becomes very poor. If we would use that time where we are just waiting for something, like waiting for the bus to see the uniqueness in the now, our world would open up. If we would engage with the cashier at the shop for a second, if we would smile at the waiter or clerk at the post office, we would have an interaction. Even if it is very short and even if we will never see them again. There will be a connection. There will be expansion and we realise that this person is actually a whole universe in themselves. This person is as unique as a snowflake. 

What we have misunderstood is that extraordinary is what everyone is just by being a person. Because there is not really anything ordinary about anyone. But for us to realise that there is nothing ordinary about anything we would have to put the small child goggles on again, before the conditioning that we have to be so special came on. A small child is curious about everything in its surroundings, it will smile at the bus driver and it will chat to the lady next to you at the baker’s. We have to be so very open to what we have in front of us that we are not expecting it or wanting it to be different in any way.

Have you noticed how some of us (maybe you!) will tend to find imperfections with anything new they encounter? It’s the renovation where they missed this and that or the outfit that would have needed a slight adjustment. If we are not the one but instead being exposed to someone like this, we might think that they are just being plain mean. But it’s so ingrained in their system that they are not capable of seeing the bigger picture. Just like a chef will not be able to sit down in someone’s restaurant for a meal without evaluating if the ratio of salt versus sour or sweet is the right one. If it has been cooked at the right time, too long or not enough. And the reason it’s impossible is because there has been conditioning. For the professional it’s a question of training but for the person always criticising is the constant striving for perfection since only perfection will be worthy enough. What happens is that we scan the environment with the measuring stick but of course, we are totally missing out on what is happening. We do this with each other as well. The commitment phobe that will get a hang up on something their partner said or did in order to convince themselves that they have to break up. 

Now if we do this to situations, environments and to other people, what do you think we do to ourselves?

It’s the constant scanning for errors. How can I find the flaws before someone else sees them so I make sure to not be exposed to other people’s judgement. 

And once again we are not understanding just how much we sabotage ourselves by doing so. You see, it is only when we allow ourselves to expose our flaws that we are being vulnerable. And only when we are vulnerable can we actually create an intimate experience with another. 

If there is no vulnerability, there is no connection. 

If you lack connection in your life, you can be sure that it is due to a difficulty to be intimate, to be vulnerable, to be flawed. Mostly it’s because we do not dare to think that we would be loved, that someone will accept us when we are not perfect. But the actual uniqueness of you is actually often the imperfections you so crave to erase. 

A YOGI CHA BLOG

How Vedic philosophy solves our scarcity mindset

When addressing the scarcity mindset, we are talking about what most people are experiencing in the world today. As we speak about that from the Vedic philosophy perspective, let’s keep in mind that it names ignorance as the root cause of suffering. Making the mistake of believing you are limited to the ever changing aspect of yourself that we call prakruti or matter.

Now, I know that telling someone to not feel fear, jealousy, envy, anger because there is no such thing as separation will not be helpful. Especially in the midst of the emotion. I would even go as far as saying it’s often this that becomes spiritual bypassing and that is really toxic. 

Just like telling someone that their “bad vibes” or “negative energy” is not good for you is also highly toxic.

When we feel envy, we are indeed imprisoned in a small version of who we truly are and we are focused on ourselves. But telling yourself that you are therefore being self absorbed is just going to make the feeling push deeper down inside of you. 

If you listened to the previous episode, you know that the underlying emotion here is shame. Starting to tell yourself that you are being petty and self absorbed is only going to make you feel worse. Not only are you feeling envious but you’re also in your own bubble. How bad can you get?

So please see that this is not the solution. 

Like the saying goes, whatever we resist, persists. So the first thing to do is to recognise that you are feeling it. Once that is done, it becomes far easier to see that it is not true (i’ll get to how in a minute) and that is the biggest step because it is actually using our own intellect in choosing to abandon the belief that we are not whole in ourselves.

But let me emphasise again : do not try to move faster than your experience. Our mind is very clever and will find all kinds of reasons and excuses. Don’t get on your high horses and feel righteous and start bypassing the envy by repeating spiritual quotes or truths to yourself. You will know that you do this when you start noticing just how much you judge yourself and others. That is a hint that you do not allow yourself to feel your envy. 

You have to see that your emotions are always a perfect reflection of what thoughts are going around in your head. So if you are feeling this, it means that you are telling yourself a story. One of scarcity, falling short, inadequacy and hopelessness. Let’s start with that.

When you can recognise that how you feel is linked to what thoughts you are thinking, you can also realise that those thoughts are not necessarily the truth but more so, a manifestation of the state of your mind. Understand the power of this realisation because it means that you have started to see the actual truth. And that truth is simple, you have heard it many times but it doesn’t mean that you have properly taken it in. And that truth is : you do not have to believe your thoughts. 

Once again, I am turning to the scriptures and the very well described work for this in the vedic philosophy. Because this understanding is basing itself on the logic that there is something in you that is permanent and something that is impermanent. And the suffering happens when you identify with the impermanent and believe it to be real. 

If you can learn to see the impermanence of your thoughts, you can also work on them. When you are feeling envy and jealousy, you are believing that there is a lack inside of you. That someone else has more than you or that something can easily be taken from you. The only way that either of these two fears would be true is if you are not levelling up in worthiness to your imagined competition. You are placing yourself lower on the measuring scale because you believe that you need to be different in order to be enough. There is a belief that you are comparable. If you are comparable, it means that you are not unique. But that is not the truth. Simply by the fact that your history can only be yours, is a proof of your uniqueness. 

So if you see this truth, then we can begin the work on also feeling it. Experiencing your uniqueness, experiencing your true nature. 

Have you ever listened to the narrative of someone else about their lack and thought to yourself “how come they can’t see what I see?”. You can see them more clearly than they can themselves. And that is because they are oblivious to their own true nature. There is the matter part which is physical body, thoughts, emotions, past experiences and the patterns they have created but all of that would still need to be lit up (literally) by the energy source that makes us all be alive. Two things are helpful to you here : the uniqueness that is the matter part of you but also the true nature, the part that never changes that makes it so that there can be no lack. It’s as if you, the eternal part of you, came here to experience expansion. To do so, you need to see the world as dual, as things having relationships to one another. This is why we experience duality and it is also why we are unique as a snowflake, each and one of us. If you are absolutely unique, it becomes impossible to compare you since there are too many variables. But beyond that, the eternal. You see, that part means that there is no lack and what that means on your personal level is that there is not end in what could potentially become. The reason you might not see your uniqueness as something valuable is because you are missing to put the endless possibility part in the equation. What is your life today, is a sum of all the past experiences and often we forget to see that many of them would have seem impossible before they came into our lives. From the moment we accept the uniqueness that is us at this time, we stop resisting what is and can begin to use that to our advantage in order to transform the eternal part, the energy that is always us into whatever we decide to focus on. 

A YOGI CHA BLOG

Envy & Jealousy : the scarcity mindset

I received a request to talk about a very interesting and difficult subject. One we all have to face on a daily basis, I would even argue. 

That is the topic of envy. 

And I decided to add in the term jealousy since it can often be connected even though the two concern different aspects of scarcity.

I will speak about this topic both today and next week because I want to come to terms with what it is, where it stems from and destigmatize it through the psychological approach. But when it comes to dealing with it, to come out of it, I believe that the more spiritual approach will be more helpful.

I mention the need to destigmatize because it is a very stigmatised emotion and therefore shunned upon in society as being “bad”. Yet it is actually one of the emotions that we all experience. And since whatever we resist persists, it’s not helpful to ignore it. 

And the twisted thing is that within envy lies vulnerability. So as long as we keep resisting acknowledging the feeling, we are actually resisting to be vulnerable. Why vulnerable? Because if we have envy, it means we have the belief that we lack something, that we are not whole or even more so, that we are not invincible. Keep that word in mind as I go on. 

So, accepting that we are just that “flawed” that we experience emotions that are not pretty to look at allows us to grow. Pretending that we don’t feel them and we go for the psychological bypass of trying to be holier than thou. 

So let’s first agree on what scarcity is. It is a synonym for shortage.

Therefore, it is the opposite of unlimited, abundance, completion. 

When there is shortage, it creates a vigilance within us because it puts us in a risk zone of potential “not enough”. 

Not enough food, not enough to protect our bodies, not enough to survive. 

We turn our gaze towards others and we evaluate if they have more or less than us. If we perceive that they have more but that it is not accessible to us, we experience the feeling of envy. 

If, on the contrary, we experience that we have something they don’t, we can fear losing it to them and we experience jealousy. In both cases, we believe that whatever is possessed, is scarce. Is not in abundance, that there is not enough for everyone and more so, that we will not be able to secure our position with it. 

In both feelings we are positioning ourselves lower than our imagined rival. If we put ourselves as equals or above, we would not feel the powerlessness that the envy of something we cannot access brings. If we felt equal or more, we would not doubt that we have secured what we have even if someone else comes along. 

In both feelings, we are experiencing a threat to our person so we are feeling fragile. We are experiencing a false version of ourselves, a small version of ourselves. We are vulnerable. 

We feel envy when we see in someone or something, a superiority that we could only aspire for. 

The reason this feeling is perpetuated and starts to take over our lives is actually our resistance to it. We know from everything that we have been taught as children and even later in life that envy and jealousy are bad feelings and should not exist. So naturally, when we feel them, we push them away as much as we can. 

Let’s agree on something : envy and jealousy are both natural feelings. Every human experiences them because we carry desire. 

Desire happens as a result of our self awareness. To use the mythological illustration of the garden of Eden, from the moment we take a bite of the apple and realise that we are naked, both self awareness and (apparently) shame occurs in our psyche. 

And indeed, the reason envy feels so painful is that there is shame intertwined with it. Somehow, we do not trust that we can have it too. So we feel powerless to our condition. The power is not within, it is with-out. The power, the phallus belongs to someone else. If you have been listening to me for a while, this word “phallus” might ring a bell. I spoke about the power that phallus is when I spoke about personality structures. 

You can go back and listen to those episodes but to sum it up : the idea that we do not inhabit the phallus happens from the moment we come into relationship with the object. By object I speak on a general level which means that this can be people, animals or inanimate objects. It is when the world becomes dualistic to us. From a spiritual perspective I find it fascinating that we come into this world with an integrated perspective and we are taught duality as we begin to experience life. This is a necessary part of our expansion and after all, if we did not come here to expand, then what did we come here to do?

But this duality is also what creates desire since desire happens when we experience a void, lack. It evokes our capacity to expand, to grow yet it also brings the possibility of suffering into our lives. That is what Adam and Eve experienced as they took a bite in the fruit and realised that they were naked. Realising that they were naked does not necessarily mean suffering but since they felt the need to cover themselves, they made the nakedness MEAN SOMETHING ABOUT THEM. And that is where this feeling of envy is so detrimental. Because we feel envy of something we believe we cannot have or be and that implies that we are not complete as we are. 

I would stretch as far as saying we do not feel envy due to what we desire but to what we believe we cannot incorporate. So all of a sudden, it is not so much about the possession the other person has but the fact that we lack it. That we will always lack it. That we can never be that, have that. 

A YOGI CHA BLOG

How you live today is how you live your life

What you keep doing becomes your priority : shape yourself into what you want it to be instead of being a victim of your surroundings.

There’s  a famous quote from Mahatma Gandhi that states:

Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny ( and I would want to add, your destiny = your life). 

Let’s start from the ending of that sentence.

Begin with looking at your life situation today : what is your day filled with? What does your body feel and look like? What is the state of your mind and emotions? Can you imagine that this is a result of your beliefs?

If we can agree on that, another question arises. Where do our beliefs come from? Well they are shaped of course from what information our senses take in and what sense our intellect is making of that information. Our brain is made for survival and this survival happens at its best when we are capable of quickly adapting to our environment. For us to adapt quickly we need to understand it and for that understanding to take place, we need to see how it makes sense. This also means when something has a pattern that we can follow. If there is no pattern, we would say it is random. What is random is something we cannot make sense of. There is no logic. So we create an understanding of the world around us by taking in information and making sense of it. We also learn what our place in this world is through this. 

We learn what is important based on what the people who raise us find important. The very deepest of our behaviour patterns are being laid into the soil at this time. 

We truly are the fruit of that labour, we are the apple falling not so far from the tree. That which we call the automatic mode of our mind, our consciousness takes in all these behaviours and, like the gas pipelines buried deep under the Pacific ocean, we have no idea that they are there. 

The whole essence of this is that everything is happening below the line in the circle of awareness. What I am referring to is the definition of our consciousness by Joseph Campbell who simply makes a circle with a line straight through it. What is above or below the line of awareness. That which is below, we cannot see and therefore not control. Instead it is controlling us. 

My sister once said to me “I guess we repeat what we do until we don’t anymore” and that sounds simple but nonetheless it’s very true. It is the same thing as saying “you are who you are”.

And most of the time, this is how we live our lives. Blissfully unaware of what drives us really and the idea of taking responsibility for it seems impossible. 

But we do not have to let the automatic mode of our being be structured simply due to what we have been given from the people we are surrounded by. We do not have to live our lives passively. If you would pause and look at what your day looks like today, then you would see that this is how you live your life. It’s not just the day of today, it is a whole belief system. 

Have you ever heard that you are the average of the sum of the 5 people you spend most of your time with?

Whether that statement is solid or not, what is definitely true is that you will take on the habits and behaviours of the people you surround yourself with. 

This is why it can be really hard to know where we have gone wrong when we are not feeling well. Because it’s not just one thing and it’s often not the things you think. Furthermore, it’s often the things you really don’t want it to be. The things we have become quite attached to and believe we need to feel good are often what we use to compensate behaviours that are bringing us out of balance. 

The other day, just as I was leaving the audience of a workshop on Ayurveda, a lady stopped me and said : I really want to make some changes but it all feels so overwhelming, what would you suggest is the way to start?

One of the first ways to upgrade your health is to observe your natural urges, your body’s needs. In order to do so, we need to be very present because we need to actually become aware of what we do. We might need to note that down. 

If you look at what your day consists of today, you find that this is actually what your life consists of.

And what your life consists of is what your world looks like. And the way you look at the world shapes who you are because who you are shapes how you look at the world. 

The first step is to begin with becoming aware of all the things you do that lay under the line of awareness in the circle of consciousness.

You have to see what you do, so actually you have to start with observing yourself. 

A YOGI CHA BLOG

Everyday integrity : be the warrior Arjuna of your mind’s daily battlefield.

The topic of integrity can have so many layers and be very vast in terms of field of focus so I will continue today on this because most of us fall short in everyday life with integrity. 

It’s a bit like we do it with yoga or meditation, with eating plant based and so on. We get motivated by the promise of a better life and so we binge while we are in the moment. Then we step off the mat or the meditation cushion or come home from the retreat, and we go back to what we always do. Forgetting that the real work starts there. Forgetting that (what I always love to use as an analogy): It’s easy to be a Buddha on a mountain. It’s when you come down from the mountain and into the village is when you are really doing the work. 

The reason it becomes hard is because we are constantly triggered by two things : fear and desire. What I mean by that is that instead of seeing things clearly and acting from a place of wholeness, we react to fear and desire. So we manipulate our behaviour because these two drives have manipulated our intentions. All of a sudden it becomes far more difficult to “do for the sake of doing, not for an expected result”. It becomes hard to be righteous, to follow that intuitive signal of the spontaneous right action. So how do we take that equanimous state we cultivate on the cushion into our daily doings?

The principles of karma yoga are taught to us in the Bhagavad Gita where Lord Krishna is helping the warrior Arjuna in deep sorrow. He is in this state because he doubts his duty as a warrior in the battle that is to come. He must face his own family in war and for this reason he breaks down in tears. 

Krishna here gives him the teaching of Yoga. He reminds him of his dharma in life as well as the impermanence of the physical body to help him see clearly. 

So as we are taught what Yoga is from the perspective of the Bhagavad Gita, we learn that yoga is skill in action. It means to develop our action, our skill non-attached to the outcome so that the skill, the yoga actually, stands in itself as the action. Only then is it truly powerful, because it is non-dependent of external validation. 

This is such a powerful message because it can be understood from any perspective. In your personal relationships, in your relationship to money, work and nature at large. 

Can you see how this approach to yoga is just like all other martial arts we have been gifted with from old traditions?

These martial arts are not about killing any more than yoga is about handstands or eka pada sirsasana / aka foot-behind-the-head pose? It is meditation in movement which means that it is a continuous training of the mind to be present and attentive. The mind has to stay equinamous in this movement so that nothing disturbs it. The outcome has no importance, you are simply here and you are simply now. Be here now like Ram Dass would say. 

Krishna tells Arjuna : victory and defeat are the same. Act but don’t reflect on the fruit of the act. Seek detachment, fight without desire. And he explains that the objection to going to war is not about the act of war. Instead he says : 

“Your objection to slaying is your fear of slaying. You do not have a genuine objection to slaying.”

If you abstain yourself from an evil action for fear, you have not really liberated yourself from evil. As long as we are motivated by fear or desire, we are incapable of truly moral actions.

Only those actions that are truly moral which are unmotivated. If you are motivated to do good by fear, your good may by other circumstances be evil. 

As long as we have a motive, our actions are not free but instead reactions. 

This text has been misinterpreted many times, especially when there is a desire to imply that it glorifies war or killing. 

But this could not be further from the truth.

If you wish that your life takes a turn for clarity, you must begin with analysing your actions. Confusion is not of the physical but instead manifests on the level of the mind. However, the mind is a terrible master if we let it guide our physical body in its actions. When our actions come from a confused mind, they lack intention and direction. This is how we end up feeling lost and wondering what to do next. 

This promise of a skillful action, taken without fear or desire of an outcome but purely because of the spontaneous right action would be the remedy. Take any part of your life where you currently feel lost. Where you are heading professionally, finding a partner or deepening your relationship to just name a few. If you could train yourself to act instead of reacting to fear or desire so that you simply follow what is the right thing to do, what would you imagine the result could be?

A YOGI CHA BLOG

The law of Karma and Integrity

What is integrity and how is it related to Karma?

CS Lewis defined it by saying  “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” So it is a question of aligning  our actions with our words.

I would like to define it as : “the choice of non-violence when standing in front of a decision, because we have faith in accomplishing what we wish without having to corrupt our essence. Without having to split ourselves.” 

Of course, if we do not have that faith, it will be very hard to choose integrity. 

For me integrity is not imposing rules on myself but instead the shift that happens when it flows naturally. By this I mean, I do something that is indeed righteous but I don’t do it because it is. It’s the good deed we do without anyone watching and not feeling as if it was less important because of it. When we stand in our own integrity, we do it for the sake of doing, not for an expected result. We do not have the need to justify our “spontaneous right actions” and we do not feel the need to convince anyone else of the “rightness” of those actions. 

This relates very much to the modern world of social media of course because there is a complete lack of integrity in it. Everything is actually done FOR an expected result these days. I even see so called “reel” reels of people “showing” their true selves by being sad, angry, unfiltered etc. Yet none of that is authentic. None of that shows integrity because it is all done with the need of external validation. 

Can I act in the right way without anyone watching? Without any other intention than that it is what flows naturally through my veins?

As soon as there is an alternative motive, a hidden intention, I manipulate the action. It is not spontaneous anymore and it is not genuine. 

And this is most of the actions we take and we see around us. I do not wish to judge this or to create division by pointing at certain people doing this and other, righteous people not doing it. Instead I want to take a very honest look at it so that we can choose integrity as our way of living. Understand why we went another way at some point. Only when we address it without shame and blame can we truly make the change towards it, because we feel safe doing so. 

When we use manipulation it has one single purpose : to change the way we are / or how we are seen so that we will be accepted. So that things will go the way we want them to. 

If we do so, it is because we do not believe that things will go our way if we don’t manipulate, if we don’t modify. That by just being ourselves, things will not go our way.

So we split ourselves in two and this is where the true meaning of the word integrity comes in. Because to be integral, to have integrity means of course to be whole. To be ONE and not two. 

To be undivided, unstruck as the meaning of the word Anahata in Sanskrit is (which is the name for the heart chakra).

 When we are one, our actions and words align naturally because they are the same. The spontaneous right action is our nature, hence the “spontaneous” part. 

So please understand that we all have integrity inside of us but at one point we went another way.

I would even stretch as far as saying that probably everyone in the industrialised world is affected by this action. The reason is of course that we created a structure of society which is not humane and organic but instead artificial, linear and result oriented. And I think I have spoken over and over about how disconnected we have become to our true nature that today, I instead want to look at how we come back to integrity. 

The hardest part of this is actually that we don’t know ourselves anymore. When I have spoken to patients about why they feel lost and lack purpose, why they don’t take action or why they keep compensating their own health for other people’s benefit it really comes down to the fact that they don’t actually know what they want. 

The reason they don’t know what they want is because they have not asked themselves that for so many years that they don’t hear the inner voice anymore. 

Just like our body keeps sending us messages when we are mistreating it : at some point it will shut down. So does the inner voice of our preferences. So then we don’t know how to listen to it again.

Our bodies, when they shut down we begin to experience ailments and disease. Our psyche, when the inner voice is hushed, begins to experience boredom, sadness, frustration and ultimately depression. When we do not know what we like and dislike, we become very vulnerable to abuse because we do not have any boundaries anymore. 

We allow for our wellbeing to come second, third or worse and one day, when the bill comes in, we don’t understand what happened to us. We do not understand how to reverse it or where to begin. 

And this is where the beautiful teachings of Yoga and Ayurveda come into play. 

If we look at these philosophies of life from the perspective of integrity, their whole purpose is to strengthen it. The reason we call them self realisation is because they lead us to wholeness again.

This is of course why we feel less of a need to go out late at night and party when we have been living according to their principles for some time. Little by little, breath by breath, our true nature is starting to shine through. Our integrity is becoming more prominent. 

As I mentioned earlier on, an act of integrity is one where we do for the sake of doing, not for the result we hope for. And this is actually the law of karma.

Everyone has heard of Karma these days but many have a very misunderstood concept of what it is. 

Karma means action and karma yoga is the yoga of taking action. That every single act you do has an impact and an effect somewhere. 

The epic called the Bhagavad Gita teaches us what Karma Yoga is from the perspective of the warrior Arjuna and his conversation with lord Krishna. 

There are many beautiful and valuable teachings in this book but my teachers would narrow Karma yoga down to five essential points and those are our backbone to learning integrity.

So you are in luck! All you need to do is to learn these 5 principles and apply them to your daily life in order to integrate some of the most important learnings from the ancient scriptures of the Hindu philosophies. 

5 laws of karma:

1. Have the Right attitude : no duty is higher or lower in value. Therefore, do your dishes with the same care as you apply yourself to your favourite activity. 
2. Focus on action, not on motive : this is what I mean about spontaneous action. 
3. Do your duty/dharma : do not try to convince others, instead focus on where you are at with yourself. 
4. First take care of yourself / start with you : essential to seeing things clearly. Essential to coming from the right place when you take action, not from scarcity. 
5. Always do your best: any action you take, be in it fully. Commit to it. The lack of commitment we see around us really just shows people living life (pardon the expression) half-assed. 

A YOGI CHA BLOG

The science behind SEASON RITUALS –

Ayurveda’s Ritucharya

The human brain will naturally seek patterns of recognition. This is part of the survival instinct : we need to understand what we are looking at as quickly as possible so that we can MAKE SENSE OF IT.

That part there, making sense of it, is key to the rest.

Have you ever noticed that it was far easier to remember what you learned from a documentary you chose to watch out of interest compared to any class you took in school?

Because we need to feel that it has something to do with ourselves in order to integrate information. It needs to be personal.

What does it mean to be personal? It means familiar. Familiarity is what we feel when we see a pattern. If that is a pattern we even recognise, then we are in luck. Not only will we feel safe and stable (because we are on home territory to a certain extent) but we will also learn more easily.

What this means on a biological level is that our nervous system, immune system as well as our lymphatic system will be optimised. 

On the opposite of that : when we do not recognise our environment, we feel ungrounded, unsafe and threatened by anything that moves (just look at animals’ reaction when they are in a new place and you move towards them). 

What we are really talking about here is the need of human beings to feel safe in their environment. To do so, our brains will seek to make sense of what is happening and what it sees. For that reason it will search for familiarity, patterns, logic so that it can find the accurate reaction/response in past experiences. 

This is of course why we tend to react to current events with emotions from past experiences that reminds us of the present moment. 

It will always be economically speaking much more interesting since any brand new experience will need the integration of a new behaviour and comprehension. We know just how exhausting it can be to practise something new, like a new language for instance. 

We use far more energy to do something completely new or foreign to us than just activating a pattern existing in our subconscious mind. 

We could think of routine and the habits we practise in a day for instance.

But when it comes to changing seasons, we also have quite a few routines. More so, if we look at our ancestors, at the traditions existing in our communities (beliefs, nations, etc) the different rituals that have been practised for centuries are often rites of passage from one season to the next. 

What they do is that they stabilise us. They remind us of where we are and when in time.

They make us feel safe and grounded. 

Furthermore, they help us to notice where we are at with ourselves. Because as they keep coming back from one year to the next, they give us perspective on our overall condition. 

Just like taking the car for service every 5000 km in order to detect potential issues before they become dangerous to us, so do the rituals and traditions around season changes.

It is of course therefore logical to do our emotional and digestive detoxes around those times as well. 

The Vedic practitioners knew this instinctively and had specific rituals around seasonal changes of the year. Around these rituals, just like around ALL the rituals they had (daily, weekly and so on), they started with a prayer, a Sankalpa.

Kalpa means formation in Sanskrit and Sankalpa therefore implements the sense of I as in “I am forming” or “I am visualising with an intention”.

Now, you might have heard the expression “Where your attention goes, your energy flows”.

Actually, intention is a conscious directing of your Prana, your energy. Therefore, an intention is there to consciously direction our attention to what we wish to focus on in order to create the best possible outcome, or future.

What is anxiety? It is the non controlled direction of your attention. 

In Ayurveda, that is what high VATA is : your imagination used in a destructive manner.

Or “how could things go wrong?” Anxiety is foreseeing yourself suffering in the future. 

Now, we have to understand that this happens quite naturally with our energy if we don’t choose what to focus on because of survival instinct. 

All our past experiences have left traces in our bodies and minds. These traces, we call them Samskaras in Ayurveda and that can translate into “past impressions”. We can directly relate this to what I started out with : the patterns of recognition constantly sought by our brain. Doing things with intention means that we deliberately chose which patterns to revive / which Samskaras to be active in a moment (a ritual).

The reason we love to rewatch certain movies for instance, or read the same book again and again is due to these past impressions. They left traces on us that made us feel a certain way. It’s not the book or movie we are seeking, it’s the way we felt when we read and watched them. 

All our addictions are exactly this, the seeking of a state we were in the first time we experienced them. If we seek it, it’s because the memory of it is active inside of us. 

Therefore, to create an environment both inside and outside of our skin of safety so that our VATA is stable even when movement is very active in the atmosphere (and so within us too), Ayurveda gave us the suggestion of a certain amount of practices, procedures or rituals. They were to be repeated so that every time we do them, our brain recognises the pattern. These rituals were not made by hazard but instead aligned with how nature functions in that moment in time (seasonal).