Guest guest Posted May 9, 2007 Report Share Posted May 9, 2007 HARE KRSNA. Mitahara: Moderate DietThe tenth yama is mitahara, moderate appetite. Similarly, mitavyayin islittle or moderate spending, being economical or frugal, and mitasayanis sleeping little. Gorging oneself has always been a form of decadencein every culture and is considered unacceptable behavior. It is thebehavior of people who gain wealth and luxuries from the miseries ofothers. Decadence, which is a dance of decay, has been the downfall ofmany governments, empires, kingdoms and principalities. MarieAntoinette,Queen of France, made the famous decadent statement just before theFrenchRevolution: "If the people have no bread, let them eat cake." Nearlyeveryone who heard that imperious insult, including its authoress,completely lost their heads. Decadence is a form of decay that themasseshave riled against century upon century, millennium after millennium.All this and more shows us that mitahara is a restraint that we must allobey and which is one of the most difficult. The body knows no wisdom asto shoulds and should-nots. It would eat and drink itself to death if ithad its way, given its own instinctive intelligence. It is the mind thatcontrols the body and emotions and must effect this restraint for itsown preservation, health and wellness of being, to avoid the emptinessof"sick-being."According to ayurveda, not eating too much is the greatest thing youcan do for health if you want a long life, ease in meditation anda balanced, happy mind. That is why, for thousands of years, yogis,sadhus and meditators have eaten moderately. There is almost nothing,apart from smoking and drugs, that hurts the body more than excessiveeating, and excessive eating has to be defined in both the amount offoodand the quality of food. If you are regularly eating rich, processed,dead foods, then you are not following mitahara, and you will have rich,finely processed, dead, dredged-up-from-the-past karmic experiences thatwill ruin your marriage, wreak havoc on your children and send you earlyto the funeral pyre.For the twenty-first century, mitahara has still another meaning. Ourrishis may have anticipated that the economy of mitahara makes it aglobaldiscipline--eating frugally, not squandering your wealth to overindulgeyourself, not using the wealth of a nation to pamper the nation's mostprosperous, not using the resources of the Earth to satiate excessiveappetites. If all are following mitahara, we will be able to better feedeveryone on the planet; fewer will be hungry. We won't have such extremeinequalities of excessive diet and inadequate diet, the incongruity ofgluttony and malnutrition. We will have global moderation. The Hinduview is that we are part of ecology, an intricate part of the planet.Ourphysical body is a species here with rights equal to a flea, cockroach,bird, snake, a fish, a small animal or an elephant. Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check out new cars at Autos. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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