{"id":267,"date":"2026-05-06T13:09:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T23:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/?p=267"},"modified":"2025-05-12T17:00:03","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T03:00:03","slug":"lesson-25-living-with-siva","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/lesson-25-living-with-siva\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesson 25 \u2013 Living with \u015aiva"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div style=\"height:20px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/LwS-Lesson-25.mp3\"><\/audio><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Recording: Gurudeva&#8217;s cloned voice<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:20px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Mit\u0101h\u0101ra: Moderate Diet<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><em><samp>The tenth yama<\/samp><\/em>\u00a0is\u00a0<em><samp>mit\u0101h\u0101ra,<\/samp><\/em>\u00a0moderate appetite. Similarly,\u00a0<em><samp>mitavyayin<\/samp><\/em>\u00a0is little or moderate spending, being economical or frugal, and\u00a0<em><samp>mitas\u0101yan<\/samp><\/em>\u00a0is 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: \u201cIf the people have no bread, let them eat cake.\u201d 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. <br><br>All this and more shows us that\u00a0<em><samp>mit\u0101h\u0101ra\u00a0<\/samp><\/em>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 \u201csick-being.\u201d <br><br>According to\u00a0<em><samp>\u0101yurveda,<\/samp><\/em>\u00a0not 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,\u00a0<em><samp>yog\u012bs, s\u0101dhus\u00a0<\/samp><\/em>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\u00a0<em><samp>mit\u0101h\u0101ra,\u00a0<\/samp><\/em>and you will have rich, finely processed, dead, dredged-up-from-the-past\u00a0<em><samp>karmic\u00a0<\/samp><\/em>experiences that will ruin your marriage, wreak havoc on your children and send you early to the funeral pyre. <br><br>For the twenty-first century,\u00a0<em><samp>mit\u0101h\u0101ra\u00a0<\/samp><\/em>has still another meaning. Our\u00a0<em><samp>\u1e5bishis\u00a0<\/samp><\/em>may have anticipated that the economy of\u00a0<em><samp>mit\u0101h\u0101ra\u00a0<\/samp><\/em>makes it a global discipline\u2014eating frugally, not squandering your wealth to overindulge yourself, not using the wealth of a nation to pamper the nation\u2019s most prosperous, not using the resources of the Earth to satiate excessive appetites. If all are following\u00a0<em><samp>mit\u0101h\u0101ra,<\/samp><\/em>\u00a0we will be able to better feed everyone on the planet; fewer will be hungry. We won\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n\n\n\n<p>NANADINATHA S\u016aTRA 25: WARNINGS AGAINST ANGER<br>Worshipers of \u015aiva who are victim to anger or hatred refrain from meditation, japa and ku\u1e47\u1e0dalin\u012b yoga. They confess sins, do penance and engage in bhakti and karma yoga to raise consciousness. Aum Nama\u1e25 \u015aiv\u0101ya.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mit\u0101h\u0101ra: Moderate Diet The tenth yama\u00a0is\u00a0mit\u0101h\u0101ra,\u00a0moderate appetite. Similarly,\u00a0mitavyayin\u00a0is little or moderate spending, being economical or frugal, and\u00a0mitas\u0101yan\u00a0is 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 class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/lesson-25-living-with-siva\/\">READ MORE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-living-with-siva"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4658,"href":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions\/4658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kauaishindumonastery.com\/mc-daily-lessons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}