A Balanced Perspective About Food and the Physical Body

When the great yogi of Tibet, Milarepa, was eventually given the teachings by his Guru, Marpa, he was sent to practice intense meditation. When Marpa sent him to his meditation retreat, he gave him a scroll of information with the instruction that he should open it at the time when it was an absolute emergency. He was so engaged in the practice that he did not pay much attention to eating. He wound up many days (months, years) subsisting on a tea of nettle leaves. (This is the reason that he is depicted as having green skin.) Milarepa reported (as set forth in Tibet’s Great Yogi, Milarepa, a biography from the Tibetan, edited by W.Y. Evans-Wentz) “Living on nettle broth alone, I continued my meditations. I had no clothes on the outside of my body, nor any wholesome food inside. My body became shrunken to a mere skeleton; and it was greenish in hue, just like the nettle, and over it grew a covering of greenish hair.” At a certain point, he felt that he could no longer concentrate in his meditation, he felt his energies disrupted and reasoned to himself that this constituted an absolute emergency. He opened the scroll to reveal the instruction that he needed physical nourishment and he should feed his body. He took up this suggestion and reported that once he fed his body, he was able to achieve deep and powerful meditation. “I rejoiced at the prospect of having food such as ordinary human beings eat, and, on partaking of the food, I enjoyed a sense of bodily ease and comfort, and a cheerfulness of mind which tended to increase the zeal of my devotional exercises; and I experienced keen spiritual happiness such as transcended anything I had known before.”

Indulgence of craving or desire for food obviously distracts the being from its concentrated focus; but suppression of that desire, such as extreme fasting, is equally a focus on the desire and can even make the desire stronger through compression of the energy until it has acquired substantial latent power, like a spring that has been compressed.

Under our existing embedded habitual form of acquiring physical energy and substance, food is needed to sustain the body (although there are also cases of those who can miniimize this need and obtain energy directly from the universal prana). Thus, we can look on the body as a vehicle that needs proper fuel and maintenance, but should not be over-indulged or under-fed. In this case, a balanced attitude, as Milarepa discovered through long periods of trial and suffering, is a great aid to putting aside the fixation on the body and thereby allows the seeker to shift his concentration to the spiritual pursuits which are the aim of his endeavour.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “What is necessary is to take enough food and think no more about it, taking it as a means for the maintenance of the physical instrument only. But just as one should not overeat, so one should not diminish unduly — it produces a reaction which defeats the object — for the object is not to allow either the greed for food or the heavy tamas of the physical which is the result of excessive eating to interfere with the concentration on the spiritual experience and progress. If the body is left insufficiently nourished, it will think of food more than otherwise.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pg. 166