The Age-Old Quest for Nourishment

Today on the bus I saw a woman with a stroller get on and take a seat near the front.  She took out a bag of jelly worms and ate one, then fed another of the chewy red and yellow tubes to her infant.  I couldn’t see his or her little face, but I could picture the baby sucking the candy right down like a fat strand of spaghetti.  Ah, I thought--sweetness.  It’s the primordial taste, a direct link to our animal brains, the message that says “nourishment.”  But before someone gets on my case for advocating a diet of Haribo gummy candies for newborns, there’s a distinction that ought to be made.  There’s sweet, and then there’s sweet.  

As hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists--in other words, people who got along somehow without food-processing technology much more sophisticated than the blade, the mortar and pestle, and the clay cooking/fermenting vessel, humans evolved to recognize viable sources of nourishment by taste.  Basically, the things that tasted good to us were the things that would keep us going, providing strength and nourishment to keep us not just alive but thriving.  Things like animal parts (especially internal organs like liver and heart, which are typically prized by traditional cultures and are eaten first by wild animals), seeds and grains, starchy roots and tubers, fruit and nuts.  Most of these foods taste sweet, in subtle or not-so-subtle ways.  Take bread, for instance: chewed for more than a few seconds, the starches in any loaf break down into shorter-chain carbohydrates, i.e. sugars.   So, in the mythical golden age of human nutrition, when the only problem with most people’s diets was that they might not be getting enough to keep body and soul together, sweetness was a pretty good indicator of nutritional value.  Enter the industrial revolution, slave labor, factory farming, and the McDonald’s-ization of global food trends, and the picture gets pretty distorted.  Now sweetness can be extracted from its nutrient matrix and concentrated, packaged and sold.  And by golly the stuff is a hit.  Rather like crack is a hit.  The same can be done with fattiness and saltiness, two other once-reliable indicators of nutrient-density.  The result?  The ketchup-dipped french fry, which to our taste buds is the perfect combination of fat, salt, and sugar.   Unfortunately, 99.999% of the fries out there are made with bad fat (chemical gobbledygook with names like ‘partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil’) bad salt (refined NaCl, possibly iodized but stripped of all other trace minerals), and even bad sugar (high-fructose corn syrup, which manages to be even sweeter and more problematic than the old devil, regular old white sucrose).  The potatoes are from a sterile, mineral-depleted lunar wasteland fumigated by spacesuit-wearing farmers, and the tomatoes, well, aw hell, they can count as a vegetable!  

I tend to get a little carried away when I think about what our society eats.  But it’s not my fault--things really are that unbalanced.  I’m not really one for statistics, but I’d be willing to bet that the average American is at least five times more likely to know how to drive a car and upload a digital photo than how to cook a simple meal of beans, greens, and grains from scratch.  And once quotidian food preparation techniques like making sourdough bread or fermenting a crock of kraut are practically obsolete in mainstream  America.  There’s a lot more that can be said on the subject of our “national eating disorder,” as Michael Pollan puts it, but as that wasn’t really meant to be my focus in this post I’ll refer interested readers to his by-now seminal The Omnivore’s Dilemma instead.  My contribution here is this: people should eat real (ideally, local, seasonal) food in appropriate quantities, yes.  But what if that’s not enough?

Most of the people I see in my capacity as an Ayurvedic/herbal health consultant have something in common.  They are craving nourishment.  I don’t mean that they are wasting away, suffering from calorie-deficiency, but they find that they’re not as satisfied by their food as they would like, or they feel a nameless hunger for something beyond what they’re getting.  This hunger has spiritual dimensions as well, of course--the hunger for meaning that typifies the postmodern era--but I’m talking about the physical plane.  Perhaps its simply the people I attract--I, as someone who has struggled with issues of nourishment and who envision my work in this world as an act of nourishing, broadly-defined; maybe it’s the spectacles I wear that see everything in a nutrition-tinted hue--but I don’t think that’s all of it.  Across the nation and the world, people are hungry.

As I learned to see from Ayurvedic teacher Claudia Welch, how many Americans are weighed down with weight that doesn’t really belong to them, sheer ballast that’s standing in for true nourishment?  Eating nutritionally empty foods can lead easily to a vicious cycle of hunger for nutrients, a hunger which is then fed with more junk, which creates weight but leads to ever more ravenous hunger...even for those who eat a reasonably balanced, mostly whole-foods diet, there is the same craving for grounding.  

Grounding: this mysterious-sounding idea bridges the gap between physical and non, and ties in another symptom of post-modernity: we live too much in our heads.  Our lack of nourishment is inseparable from our lack of sensitivity to our bodies, and to the earth.  It might be said--I’ll say it--that we hunger, at root, for connection, for the umbilical cord linking us to the great mama underfoot.  “Alternative medicine” abounds in ways to talk about this: the root chakra, the earth element, sacral vibrations...these ways of conceptualizing all share an association with the lower parts of the body.  Maybe what we lack, on some collective level, is the ability to shake our metaphysical booty.  (This isn’t so far-fetched: health would be a lot more marketable if people realized the connection between it and their libido.) 

So what to do about it?  I haven’t even mentioned the myriad stresses we’re subject to, from traffic jams to conference calls and jet lag, environmental toxins, you name it.  From an herbalist’s point of view, luckily, these issues and those of grounding and nourishment all point to a common set of remedies.  For nourishing, for grounding, for cooling our feverish appetites, for building our reserves and stabilizing our frayed nerves, sweet roots are what the order of the day.  My staunchest allies, the herbs I find myself reaching for more than any other for myself and other people, belong to this class of nourishing, adaptogenic roots:  Ashwagandha.  Shatavari/Asian asparagus species.  American Ginseng.  Licorice.  These can be taken as powder or tea or even tincture, but my favorite way is simply to eat them, gnawing on the tough Ashwagandha, chewing the sweet Asparagus rhizomes like gummy candy, sucking and chewing up a slice of licorice root until the sweetness is gone.  All extremely safe herbs (the only contraindication for any of these is with licorice, which due to its watery nature shouldn’t be used in cases of water retention or hypertension), they can be chewed freely.  I’ve even been known to give a Christmas present of a jar of “nourishing roots to gnaw” to a certain family member who, I was reminded, loves to do just that.  

To these grounding, building, soothing roots, I like to add some more specifically nervine herbs, especially in cases of heavier stress or where there is more heat and irritation (Pitta involvement).  With my Ayurvedic background, Gotu Kola (Centella asiatica) and Shankhapushpi (Convolvulus alsinoides) are my go-tos, but more recently I’ve been discovering the deeply cooling, calming, tension-relaxing nature of Motherwort and the nerve-feeding capacity of Oatstraw and seed.  A nice Ayurvedic trick is to add some calcium-rich bhasma (calcined mineral) preparation such as prawal or muktasukti bhasma, coral or oyster shell ash.  Given conservation issues, I go with oyster shell.  It lends a grounding weight to a formula and is especially nice for the Vata/Pitta conditions that so many people seem to be struggling with, and it isn’t expensive.  Finally, in cases where some extra grounding (bordering on mild sedation, such as in anxiety with insomnia) is in order, I will use something along the lines of Valerian root.  I prefer not to give heavy, dulling herbs for long periods, but they can be indispensably useful in the short-term.  

     Nourishing roots: Dong Quai (Chinese Angelica), Asian licorice, Ashwagandha, Tien Moon Dong (Asian Asparagus rhizome), American Ginseng

While herbs can nourish us and supplement the problematic food sources that are unavoidable, they are no substitute for deeper grounding work.  Depending on who, what, when and where you are, this might mean digging in a garden bed, sitting quietly and doing nothing for ten minutes, going for a walk in the woods, or playing soccer.  It almost certainly means unplugging yourself from the cyberworld for a spell.  In the spirit of practicing what I preach, I’m off to cook some dinner.  

That High, Lonesome Road

I’ve mentioned how finding the right metaphor for a situation helps clarify it, give it handles for the mind to grip.  Four days into a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in early March, the right metaphor wasn’t hard to come by: myself on a rocky path, silhouetted against an inky pre-dawn sky, toiling onwards and upwards through thinning air.  Dry.  Cold.  Alone.  What had I been thinking, signing up for this?  All my Ayurvedically-trained intuition was clammering for me to stop, turn back.  Dryness, coldness, harshness--these are the very qualities responsible for aggravating Vata dosha, the internal wind.  Ayurveda, “knowledge of life,” is predicated on balance; balance is achieved by treating with opposites, so cold is countered by comforting warmth, physical dryness by the lubrication of moisture or oil and psychological dryness by life’s master lubricant, love.  “Treat Vata like a flower” says one Ayurvedic adage.  Looking around the barren scree slopes around me, I see no signs of life at all.  No flower could survive here.  Nor would one have to study the ancient Indian science of life and longevity to understand that the remedy for loneliness is human fellowship.  But here I was, sworn to silence at the retreat center.  Warmth was parceled out in the form of two silent meals a day and whatever time one could find to spend in the shower.  Sneha--oiliness, love--was not to be found at all, it seemed, and this above all was what was getting to me on the fourth day of sitting.  And yet here I was living on the charity of others, their freely given gifts, so that I might have the same experience they found so powerful.  I was being fed, housed, served, instructed for free; this out of the way center in Northwestern Illinois was no prison camp but a temporary monastery of sorts, and I knew that behind the external roughness of the experience lay a vast reservoir of goodwill.  Still, I felt a thousand miles away from the fellowship and overwhelming feeling of accomplishment I knew would be waiting on day 10, when we makeshift monks would break our silence and prepare to return to the world.  

Day 4.  Underfed and overwrought, I returned to the meditation hall, my mind a seething sea of doubt.  This wasn’t for me.  I had been sick, needed nurturing, not the harsh treatment of this spiritual boot camp.  I wasn’t going to make it; that was OK.  There was no shame in that.  I would talk to this instructor after this group sitting, explain my reasons calmly, go reclaim my belongings and call Thandiwe.  She’d arrive by evening, understanding, loving, and take me home.  I’d have lost nothing.  But I knew I would be harsher on myself than that, that to leave would be to fail in the task I had set forth.  I gritted my teeth and prepared for another cycle of wrestling with myself.  But now it was time to sit again.  

For the past four days, we had been learning and practicing a technique called anapana.  Sitting upright, we were taught to bring our awareness to our breath, to its passing in and out of the nostrils.  This breath awareness is the foundation of many meditation techniques, and it’s notoriously difficult at first.  The mind resists the ball and chain of fixed attention, slips subtly out of its shackles to frolick free over field and fen.  Into memories and fantasies it travels, past and future, ever resisting the present moment.  Realizing the attention has wandered, the instruction is to bring it back, gently and firmly, to the breath.  Within seconds it is gone again, cherishing memories of past pleasures or reliving insults; tracing the contours of forgotten episodes from childhood, or plotting how to spend the first day of freedom once this Vipassana madness is over.  You realize you’ve been duped by your own mind again, and try and focus on the breath.  It’s been 10 minutes or so.  You are to sit quietly, not opening your eyes or leaving the room, for another 50.  Then you’ll have a break before starting again.  And again.  And again.  You’ll have a tea break, then watch the evening discourse and maybe even get to laugh once or twice at Goenka-ji’s all-too-apt characterizations of us fledgling students, our predictable trials and tribulations.  Then one more sit, and sweet bed in your cold little cell.  Tomorrow at 4:30 it starts again.  But what’s this?  Where has the mind gone? You were exhaling...

For the first three days we practiced this anapana, awareness of the breath, with increasing subtlety.  Once an awareness of simple inhalation and exhalation was established on the first day, however shakily, we were to refine our awareness to the place where the breath first touches the nostrils.  The new instruction is exciting for the first hour, before monotony sets in.  The endless task of dragging the attention back to the patch of skin where the breath blows back and forth, the inevitable loss of concentration, the interminable sitting.  On day three we moved our attention to the patch of skin below the nostrils and above the upper lip: a further progression from gross to subtle.  There were moments now of quiet focus, perhaps 10 seconds at a time, between the mind’s protesting interruptions.  Grudgingly, I had to admit, something was happening.  Since the teacher, Goenka, likened Vipassana to surgery, I began to picture my attention as a blade.  Drawing the steel edge minute after minute across the stone, it began to gain an edge.  I was able to feel my breath below my nostrils, whereas I knew that four days ago I would have thought this impossible.  And this exercise represented a finer-grained stone than the previous day’s had.  My awareness was sharpening, slowly but surely.  And I knew that soon we would make the first incision.  

On the morning of Day 4, a sign posted in the dining hall proclaimed that this was Vipassana Day and listed a new set of rules and explanations.  After the previous day’s heroic push up a long dry slope, I felt ready to begin the real technique, the one we’d been honing our awareness for, the mysterious Vipassana.  But Day 4’s morning meditation dragged on, still concerned with our upper lips.  We were told now to notice sensations, not just the breath.  Perhaps there were some feelings, like tiny pricklings and itchy spots.  Christ, I thought,  how much longer can this go on?  Finally, after hours of morning practice and the afternoon group sitting, it came time to listen to the Vipassana instructions.  We were not to leave the hall for the duration, and the first instruction explained that we were now to practice adhitthana, the strong determination not to shift positions, move our hands, or open our eyes at all.  I felt the path steepen, the air growing even thinner, colder, the wind more biting.  After the previous day’s feeling of accomplishment and the confidence that went with it, I was now back in the jaws of fear and doubt. The instructions continued to unfold, Goenka’s gravelly voice on audiotape telling us to move our attention over the surface of our bodies and notice any sensations we might find.  It was crucial, he explained, not to react to the pleasant or unpleasant sensations we would encounter, and this was why we were not to shift positions or even scratch an itch.  Oh cruel technique, oh torturous technique.  I hadn’t seen this coming, this sadistic twist: the path seemed all but impassable now.  I labored upwards, trudging blindly, frostbitten.  I found my legs could keep moving somehow through the snow, even has they lay there crossed on the meditation cushion; flogged into submission, my attention and stayed mostly on my exterior and on the sensations that greeted it as it moved across my skin.  When the guttural sounds of Goenka’s chant signaled the end of our first proper Vipassana sit, I was a charged mix of emotions.  All through the past hour and a half I had been telling myself I would leave, would turn back.  Now there was a giddy high feeling that shot through me as well--I had made it, had sat adhitthana for over an hour.  I felt stretched to the breaking point, slightly mad.  Coming to the surface of my turbulent emotions once again was doubt.  This was the revolutionary technique?  Scanning the body for sensations?  I might be able to make it through six more days, but what would be the point?  What did this have to do with “purifying the mind,” creating new habit patterns in the consciousness, following the Buddha’s steps towards enlightenment?  I didn’t know exactly why I had felt compelled to come to the retreat, but surely it wasn’t to do this all day.  Outside the meditation hall I spied Josh, the manager of the men’s dormitory, an old student volunteer who served behind the scenes and sat the three daily group sits with us.  Early on I had noticed his inner quiet, his kind expression.  Someone I’d like to meet, I had thought.  He was the one person I was permitted to talk to besides our assistant teacher, and the only one with whom I felt a glimmer of possible communion.  Speaking with Josh was technically reserved for material concerns, so conversations with him should be strictly limited to a whispered “Josh, there’s no more toilet paper in my bathroom,” at which he’d nod and conjure up a roll.  On impulse now, as a last resort, I approached him and asked shakily, “are pep talks in your job description?”  He smiled a little, ruefully, and replied “not exactly,” but beckoned for me to step aside with him and talk.  Days of pent-up anxiety and doubt came tearing forth in a few short sentences.  “I--I’m not sure why I’m doing this,” I said.  “If I stay it’ll just be because I don’t want to quit.  But I don’t see the point.”  I looked over at Josh, putting him on the spot.  I was asking him point blank to give me a reason to stay, a purpose for the profound discomfort.  He looked at me with his deep, liquid eyes and said simply and slowly, “it...does change everything.”  Standing in the grace of his compassionate presence, I believed him, though such cryptic words might have only alienated me further.  Instead I felt my doubts melting a little in this ray of human warmth.  Echoing a feeling I was becoming aware of, he went on, seeming to choose his words carefully: “And everything changes with this sit,” meaning the beginning of Vipassana proper.  “I can see that, I think,” I replied.  Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the path plummeting precipitously below, and realized I had come to a pass.  The path ahead was rugged and wild, but I had reached the high country.  And I had made it through the first crucial phase of acclimatization.  I had made it through an hour of adhitthana without moving; though I would have to do this again and again, nothing more difficult would be asked of me.  Overcome with a slurry of emotions, I gave Josh a heartfelt “thanks” and walked in the late afternoon light into a grove of silver maples on the men’s side of the retreat center grounds.  I stood facing west in the circle of trees bare trees and let my tensions well up and out of me.  I cried hard, hardly knowing why, for a few minutes, letting the tears flow down my cheeks and into the mud at my feet.  My fear flowed away and carried much of my doubt with it, leaving a strange fierce joy.  I knew somehow that the worst was behind me.  I had had my crisis, and now I could get on with the journey.  

                      

         Image: Buddha displaying the Abhaya mudra (gesture of fearlessness) in Manang, Nepal

Vipassana is a Buddhist technique, in the sense that it originated with the historical Buddha, Sakyamuni.  And though steeped in a quintessentially Southasian worldview in which the concepts of karma and rebirth are assumed, Vipassana itself is simply a technique.  It is free from theology, and S. N. Goenka, Vipassana’s great modern promulgator, emphasizes the non-sectarian nature of the practice.  This approach follows directly from the Buddha’s teachings, for the Buddha offered his dhamma, or path, as a remedy for a universal malady.  The malady, what in Sanskrit is known as duhkha, is no more or less than the miserable human condition.  

We don’t have to look further than the Buddha did from the walls of the palace he was born into to see this misery, this suffering all around us: we all grow old and die, and we mostly spend our healthy years yearning after things or people we don’t have or cursing the circumstances we do find ourselves in.  Even in moments of peace and plenty, we are seldom content with out lot: the mind strays ever from the present, fixing itself on phantom or illusory objects.  On a broad philosophical level, our problem is attachment to impermanent things.  Even if we get what we want, it won’t last forever.  Our fair maiden lover will wither and stoop; our beautiful child may die a terrible death before his time, or simply disappoint us again and again with his choices, so different from the ones we had envisioned for him.  Moments of true happiness are rare, and, helpless to occupy the present, we usually recognize them only in retrospect.  Then we seek ways to regain the pleasure we remember, but such yearning does not bring peace.  Rather, it  paves the way for addiction: if not to drugs, alcohol, sex, or food, then to power, authority, making people laugh, to our own egos.  Or, when we encounter things unpleasant to us, we create addiction’s opposite: aversion.  We habitually shy away from pain and discomfort, from a rumbling belly or an unpleasant sound or image.  This is the difficulty in facing the present: the present is not always pleasant, and it is almost never as pleasant as we can imagine or remember it.  According to the Vipassana tradition of Goenka as passed down by Burmese Vipassana instructor Sayagyi U Ba Khin, all of our addictions and aversions, our attempts to replace the present reality we’re experiencing with one we can imagine or remember, are at root a single addiction or aversion.  This, tradition tells us, was the insight of the historical Buddha, the key to his enlightenment.  We are not addicted (or averse) to external objects themselves.  There is always an intermediary.  A heroin addict does not derive pleasure from heroin, but from the sensation the heroin causes in him.  Similarly, fear of heights is unpleasant because it causes us actual physico-emotional discomfort to look over the edge of a cliff.  With every pleasant or unpleasant experience, there is always a sensation on or in the body.  It is these bodily sensations we react to and, in reacting, grow addicted or averse.  

This is where Vipassana intervenes.  The technique trains one to develop and maintain equanimity, a state of not reacting to bodily sensations.  ‘An itch arises on my nose?  Ah.  An itch.  It may be unpleasant now, but it shall pass.  I will refrain from scratching it.  A lovely tingling up and down my arms?  Quaint.  It will be gone soon, and that’s OK.’  Through changing the mind’s habitual tendency of blind, unconscious reaction, it becomes possible to change the way one relates to the world.  When someone causes us anger, there is again a sensation on the body that makes us feel bad.  We are angry because we have been caused discomfort, whether or not we are aware of it as such.  If we notice the sensation and cut off the knee-jerk reaction, it is possible to bypass the ultimate reaction, anger.  

This, at least, is the theory upon which the immense body of Buddhist meditation practice rests.  First calm and focus the mind through anapana (or other similar practices, all of which fall under the category of Samatha or calming meditation) practices, then use the mind’s sharpened faculties to gain experiential knowledge of the nature of existence.  Experience the habit patterns of craving and aversion and work to change them at the root level, while realizing the truth of anitya, impermanence.    Ultimately, it is taught, this practice of samadhi (control over the mind) and panya (experiential insight) leads to full liberation as long as it is build upon a firm foundation of sila, moral conduct.  

And in practice?  How does it work?  After a month of Vipassana practice, I don’t feel much closer to enlightenment.  But I do feel a bit wiser, more focused and disciplined, and with that comes renewed confidence.  And then there’s the compassion that develops through better understanding the human condition.  I don’t expect to reach enlightenment in this lifetime, and I don’t know that I’ll ever really try to break all of my attachments to the material world.  But I have succeeded in adding a few drops to each of the 10 jugs with labels like “determination” and “loving kindness,” the paramita or qualities it is necessary to perfect in order to reach the final goal--and which just might come in handy in any case.  

After completing the 10 day course and returning home, I no longer look back to see a high, rocky path amidst snow peaks.  I took a difficult solo journey, it is true.  But I also built myself something solid and durable.  With no blueprint at first but blindly following step-by-step instructions, I lifted the heavy stones and set them into place.  By the end, I had put together a simple but sturdy hut.  Back in the world, the austere dwelling is a wonderful refuge.  It requires a certain amount of upkeep, but it pays me back with shelter and warmth.  It is far from indestructible, and I must work hard to shore it up and protect its foundations.  But it has the potential to grow into a magnificent structure.  Perhaps one day it will have room for guests, but for now if you’d like to stay you’ll have to do as I do and sleep on the dirt floor.  Or you can always build your own hut...

Vipassana meditation website: www.dhamma.org