Mitāhāra: Moderate Diet
The tenth yama is mitāhāra, moderate appetite. Similarly, mitavyayin is little or moderate spending, being economical or frugal, and mitasāyan is sleeping little. Gorging oneself has always been a form of decadence in every culture and is considered unacceptable behavior. It is the behavior of people who gain wealth and luxuries from the miseries of others. Decadence, which is a dance of decay, has been the downfall of many governments, empires, kingdoms and principalities. Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, made the famous decadent statement just before the French Revolution: “If the people have no bread, let them eat cake.” Nearly everyone who heard that imperious insult, including its authoress, completely lost their heads. Decadence is a form of decay that the masses have railed against century upon century, millennium after millennium.
All this and more shows us that mitāhāra is a restraint that we must all obey and which is one of the most difficult. The body knows no wisdom as to shoulds and should-nots. It would eat and drink itself to death if it had its way, given its own instinctive intelligence. It is the mind that controls the body and emotions and must effect this restraint for its own preservation, health and wellness of being, to avoid the emptiness of “sick-being.”
According to āyurveda, not eating too much is the greatest thing you can do for health if you want a long life, ease in meditation and a balanced, happy mind. That is why, for thousands of years, yogīs, sādhus and meditators have eaten moderately. There is almost nothing, apart from smoking and drugs, that hurts the body more than excessive eating, and excessive eating has to be defined in both the amount of food and the quality of food. If you are regularly eating rich, processed, dead foods, then you are not following mitāhāra, and you will have rich, finely processed, dead, dredged-up-from-the-past karmic experiences that will ruin your marriage, wreak havoc on your children and send you early to the funeral pyre.
For the twenty-first century, mitāhāra has still another meaning. Our ṛishis may have anticipated that the economy of mitāhāra makes it a global discipline—eating frugally, not squandering your wealth to overindulge yourself, not using the wealth of a nation to pamper the nation’s most prosperous, not using the resources of the Earth to satiate excessive appetites. If all are following mitāhāra, we will be able to better feed everyone on the planet; fewer will be hungry. We won’t have such extreme inequalities of excessive diet and inadequate diet, the incongruity of gluttony and malnutrition. We will have global moderation. The Hindu view is that we are part of ecology, an intricate part of the planet. Our physical body is a species here with rights equal to a flea, cockroach, bird, snake, a fish, a small animal or an elephant.
NANADINATHA SŪTRA 25: WARNINGS AGAINST ANGER
Worshipers of Śiva who are victim to anger or hatred refrain from meditation, japa and kuṇḍalinī yoga. They confess sins, do penance and engage in bhakti and karma yoga to raise consciousness. Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.