Food Meditations
I follow Dania, my tall, slim red-haired dorm mate from Ireland into the ashram’s dining room. We file in barefoot behind the other Yoga vacationers and teacher training students who have arrived here from all over the world to the Sivananda ashram in Neyyar Dam in South India. The dining room also doubles as a Yoga studio during the day and features breathtaking views of the surrounding countryside. Metal plates and cups have been set out in horizontal rows and ashram members are filling the plates with healthy looking vegetarian fare. At the front of the room, a small Indian man dressed in yellow robes is beginning to chant in what I later discover is Sanskrit. We all join in on the chanting as we seat ourselves on the floor.
In the course of my first afternoon at the ashram, I have met people from Iran, Israel, India, Poland, Switzerland, Greece, you name it, they’re here. Our paths have intersected at this particular place and point in time for various reasons. I am coming off a tough two-year period where I have lost my father to Alzheimer’s, my pets in a fire, and have reached that point in my life that used to be called a mid-life crisis – where one questions all of their previous assumptions about life and their place in the universe, to be more precise.
Interestingly enough, one of the changes I hope to make in my life is to become healthier in both mind and body. I have always been the one in my family of origin who was teased for loving chocolate bars, thinks nothing of picking up breakfast from the McDonald’s drive-through, and has continued an off and on again love affair with soda and French fries. After enduring numerous lectures from my middle sister who lives in NYC and, dare I say, my teenage niece, Kamala, I’ve realized that I want to change my eating habits for the better. As an off and on again practitioner of Yoga from Yoga videos and classes, the ashram appeals to me on a number of levels. The Yoga vacation is described on the Website as an opportunity to “give your life a boost, develop positive thinking, radiant health and inner peace through the practice of ancient yogic techniques for balanced living.”
I’m aware that I will be expected to participate in the daily regimen of meditation (an hour and a half in the morning and evening), Yoga (two hours in the morning and evening), Karma Yoga and vegetarian fare (no meat, eggs, garlic or processed sugar). Being half-Indian on my father’s side, I naively think that the vegetarian food will be similar to the Indian food I’ve grown up with (samosas, pakoras, lentils, curry, bread, basmati rice) a veritable cornucopia of the foods I’ve come to know and love. I quickly find out that is not to be the case. The food that we are served three times a day becomes a blur of various shades of yellow and brown mush that is somewhat unrecognizable to me. The highlight of the day is tea time, when we meet in the courtyard outside Shiva Hall for morning tea that is brought in large silver pitchers.
I find that I am enjoying the strenuous demands and attentions of the Yoga classes with the dedicated instructors, but the food is becoming a major obstacle for me. After the fifth or sixth day, I realize that I am not eating enough to sustain the energy needed for the rigorous schedule, and begin incorporating trips to the Health Hut into my morning and afternoon schedule. The Health Hut is located at the top of a hill and has even more breathtaking views of the surrounding countryside. It features banana shakes, lemonade drinks, and grilled cheese sandwiches, which I begin ordering on a regular basis. One of my dorm mates from the Netherlands, who also admits to having difficulties with the fare, tells me over a shared cracker that I should at least try to eat one meal a day at the ashram because “we didn’t come here to eat cheese sandwiches.” My Polish roommate who doesn’t realize it, but is a lifelong member of the “clean plate” club also shoots me disapproving looks when I say I am skipping dinner. I’m starting to feel like a food rebel.
By the eighth day, I’m starting to fantasize about foods that I don’t even enjoy eating back home (thick juicy steaks, ice cream sundaes, deep dish pizzas) and it’s almost becoming an obsession. On our weekly free day, I travel into the neighboring city of Trivandrum with another American and gorge myself on lamb curry and ice cream at a local restaurant, which displays large multicolored pictures of ice cream dishes on its walls.
The final night at the ashram, after our evening meditation, a film is shown about the unhealthy eating habits of Americans. Rotund Americans are shown gorging on large pieces of meat, interspersed with animals being held in small caged areas that are obviously raised to feed our insatiable, carnivorous appetites, I leave the “show” early and retire to the dorm to sit outside and listen to the night music from the surrounding villages. My Swiss roommate seems to sense my discomfort and returns from the show saying, “Could they have found a more recent film than something from 1975?”
My tenth day at the ashram, I wake up and realize that I need a break. When my dorm mates rush off at 6:00 a.m. for the morning meditation, I pull the covers over myself and pretend to oversleep. I’ve already decided to leave, although I remind myself that I will need to lug my heavy luggage up the steep stairs that lead past Shiva Hall to the main office. As I wheel my luggage noisily past Shiva Hall where the entire ashram is meditating, I feel guilty sneaking out of the ashram so surreptitiously. I pass an Israeli classmate from my beginner’s Yoga class and he says, “You’re leaving?” I say, “Yes. Just for a couple of days, but I’ll be back,” knowing that probably isn’t the case.
I manage to convince the Indian man behind the desk that it’s ok to check me out before 11:00 a.m. (the official checkout time) and walk up more stairs to the road that leads out and away from the ashram. One of the taxi drivers comes walking toward me and guides me to a large car that looks like something from a 50s movie.
Fast forward to the present. I’ve now been home from India for two months. After an overnight stay in New Delhi where I also gorged on pizza and ice cream, I returned home and promptly got violently ill with dysentery. Strangely enough, I’ve found myself unable to eat some of the food I used to love so much, and that I fantasized about while in India. I still eat pizza, but it now seems incredibly fatty and caloric. Meat seems less and less appealing to me, and I can no longer order the occasional small fries and rationalize that I need to boost my fat intake. Sometimes I almost have a mental image of fat clogging up my arteries when I think about eating certain foods.
I will never be a Vegan, but my relationship to food has changed in expected and unexpected ways.