Food, Yoga, Ahimsa and the Ego.

YogaMusings

Mar 31

TriggerWarning - eating disorders, mental health, diet culture.

Before you read on, I want to prefix this post by letting you know I do speak about my experience with an eating disorder and touch on diet culture and restrictive diets throughout. So please be kind to yourself and if you feel this may be triggering maybe save this for another day. I also want to say - it is not my intention to shame anyone’s eating choices, but to invite you to question your own choices and observe where they originate and why. Big love, Jas x

Hands up if you think to be a Yoga Person you have to be Vegan or at the least Veggie?

If you metaphorically held up your hand with a proud, “Hell yeah”, I want you to consider why that is your belief. Take a moment to really think about it. Chew it over for a sec before reading on.

(Pun intended.)

Did you think of lithe ‘Insta Yogis’ holding green smoothies and touting their plant-based lifestyle? Or maybe you have heard a teacher say that to honour Yoga’s roots you must be vegan. Or perhaps you have been on a retreat or training where they only serve veggie food, thus supporting this belief that all yoga practitioners are plant-focused-peeps.

Whatever your answer and it may be none of the above, it almost definitely has some roots in the Yama (the Yogic code of ethics and the first branch on the 8 limbed path of Yoga), Ahimsa. You may be like “ Awhatsa, Jas!?!” Luckily I’m about to tell you, so remember what it means because I will use the Sanskrit word throughout this article.

In Sanskrit the prefix ‘A’ means ‘non’ and ‘Himsa’ means harm or violence. Smoosh them together and you get ‘non-harm’ or ‘non-violence’. So the first pitstop on the ethical code, is to not be, think or act in harmful ways or with harmful intent. Below is a lovely definition I found for you.

A.HIM.SA =

“Non-violence towards one-self and all living creatures; an attitude of universal benevolence; the spontaneous expression of the highest form of love; the complete absence of violence from mind, body and spirit”

Katie Elliot, 2018.

It is easy to see why thousands of us yoga practitioners eat a veggie or even vegan diet as a practice of Ahimsa. The thought process goes = Killing an animal or exploiting one by way of violent processes, is harmful to the animal by causing potential distress and trauma. So therefore we shouldn’t eat animals or exploit them. Easy peasy. Did you hear that Patanjali? My practice of Ahimsa is done and I’m on my way to enlightenment.

Completed it mate.

Right?

Well I hate to be the one breaking this to you, but your work isn’t quite done and actually the practice of this Yama is a LOT more nuanced than just restricting our food - more on this soon. Thankfully the Powerhouses at Yoga is Dead (a podcast I HIGHLY recommend you listen to and have linked below) break it all down for you in a far more eloquent and educated way than I could. They spend a whole episode going into why attaching our practice of non-harming to our eating habits is not the only way to do things and why it can be problematic. They also unpick a bunch of the scripture which suggests that the ancient Yogis may not have been vegan or even vegetarian. The scriptures don’t say, ‘Thou must be veggie to follow the 8 limb path’. Damn. Annoying right.

Anyway, I’m not here, stabbing away at my keyboard, to get your back up about your eating habits or to tell you that you have more work to do on your non-violence...or maybe I am a bit actually, but it is all from a place of love, I promise.

I’m here to talk about the intersection between Yoga, what we eat, non-violence and our forever challenging (or at least mine is) Ego.

Let’s unpack the Ego a little, shall we. Fun.

“Ego is simply a sense of “self” or personality, the thoughts and reactions of a mind shaped by experiences, preferences, habits, and fantasies.”

Kathleen Bryant, 2013.

From a young age we begin to build our ego. Remember as a child how important it was to have a favourite colour or animal or friend? That right there is the ego developing. Maybe as you got older, some of those things melted away or changed or maybe they got set in stone. We all have our likes and dislikes after all. For example I cannot hack the sound of chewing; it really annoys me when people say Global Pandemic (look up the definition!); and for years I got really defensive and was disgusted when people asked me if I ate meat.

Some background; For much of my life I struggled with disordered eating and body image stuff as many of us do. Some context; It was the dawn of deliciously Ella and virtue-signalling by way of performative veganism was BOOMING, thanks in part to our new obsession with sharing EVERYTHING. Cheers Instagram. So in my late teens, I graduated from the binge-puke cycle and began down a path of obsessive healthy eating, now known as Orthorexia. I ate an incredibly restricted plant based diet and clung onto my performative eating preferences like Rose holding onto that piece of the Titanic. Being the ‘Green-smoothie-for-breakfast’ girl looked like a surefire route to happiness thus became central to my identity and how I wanted others to perceive me too. Did these eating habits come from a place of wanting to nourish my body? Did they fuck. They were a manifestation of my incredibly low self-worth and bolstered a deep seated belief that I had to be slim to be loved. Fucking sad, but incredibly and tragically common.

Why am I sharing this part of my story? Remember the above quote where it said Ahimsa is about non-violence to the other and the self? Does it sound like I was practicing Ahimsa? Somewhat - to the animals I wasn’t eating - but to myself? HELL NO! I was eating that way because I hated myself. My body felt great but heck, I hardly noticed because my mind was an absolute shitstorm as I practiced the opposite of Ahimsa on myself with every single bite.

This is not to say that one cannot practice Ahimsa through a plant-based diet, sure you can, but in a world where restriction often triggers feelings of worthlessness, where stats are showing that eating disorders -

“...Are responsible for more loss of life than any other mental health condition.”

The Priory, 2021

- I think it is dangerous to prescribe and popularise one way of practicing non-harming for all. One way of being a ‘credible’ Yoga Practitioner. I think it is time we remove our assumptions of what a frequenter of Downward Facing Dog or Meditation eats! Humans need wiggle room, space for error. We need that for sanity. In my experience, living out our perfectionism via what we eat is a really shit time and a great way to allow our egos to bully us when we eat the thing we’re avoiding. Or our egos convince us that we are holier-than-thou because we practice super-human conrol and restriction. It looks like a lose-lose situation either way, from where I am sitting. Of course we all have different enviroments and experiences that have shaped us, so it is not a simple black and white situation. If I have learnt anything it is that there is ALWAYS nuance. Maybe we just need to see things as less black and white from the external and project less of our own expectation onto others.

A bit more on our old mate, the Ego. Generally, the more we humour them - for example, me whining about people saying Global Pandemic All. The. Fucking. Time AND feeling hella annoyed by it - the stronger that part of my identity and the attachment (Raja) becomes. And if Yoga allows us to observe the ‘Chitta Vritti’ (mental chatter = EGO) it gives us space to see what is useful and what is causing harm.

Identifying with what we eat is not inherently bad and our egos aren’t evil either, but at some point we ALL experience death of the ego. Whether that is death of the body too or just the Ego via losing one or many of our identifiers (our job roles, our beauty, our body types, our health, our gender, our eating habits etc). So surely, slackening the attachment we have to elements of who we see ourselves as through practice, will help us build more resilience for when that time comes.

SO to conclude, by challenging our own identities we are in fact practicing the subtle and useful art of ‘Letting Go’. Letting go of our self-perceptions is one of the most imperative skills of all, because it instills in us flexibility. That is what you hit the mat for, right? Flexibility of body, mind and spirit. By introducing flexibility to our eating habits and relinquishing the need to identify as any one thing, we loosen the grip of the ego and CAN practice Ahimsa to ourselves in the process, thus initiating yogic philosophy into our everyday without sacrificing our mental health.

P.S If you are STILL using ‘Global Pandemic’ in conversation by now, here is the definition of Pandemic for you -

“an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people”.