Digestible

Week two of a four-week course.

I’m eating chick peas and kidney beans as I write this. I know this isn’t very interesting for you to hear, or at least I am anticipating this may be your reaction, but you really should be interested, and I will get onto why very soon. But for now, it is only right for balance that there is also some pork and beef in the mix of my bowl of bolognese. I wouldn’t like to feed the trope that this yogi has yet evolved to the verdant hallowed plain of vegetarianism.

I lived in East London most of my life, a short stroll from a road called ‘Green Lanes’ where the large Indian community congregated, shopped, and ate. As a result, there are plenty of cafes and restaurants, many of whom are vegetarian, which cater for the community. Having had quite a few students come to my house to study, many found themselves on Green Lane partaking of the food, and on a few occasions, I joined them. One particular time, we went to a recognised and highly rated vegetarian place for a late lunch. The folk I was with ordered and tucked into a number of amazing-looking and smelling dishes, but I went for a very simple dal dish, specifying “no fresh coriander!!”. My dish arrived, and it tasted pretty good. The trouble was that I managed to get half way through this small dish before my tummy ballooned against my belt, whereupon I politely left to take my wind-assisted journey home.

The thing is, for all of my life I’ve come up against foods which just do not agree with me. From the bottles of milk at school that made me wretch and eventually vomit, to the consumption of beans and pulses that left me uncomfortably bloated and antisocially toxic, don’t get me started on fresh coriander, yet there was always the noise that I should stick with them as ‘I will learn to digest it’. There’s something quite sticky about the attitude that if you stick with doing the thing you obviously don’t like, your body will adapt. An alternative view is that if you keep traumatising your system, it’ll never get the time to settle enough to adapt to the changes it needs to go through.

Which is true, as my family had cats throughout my childhood. I was allergic to all animal hair amongst many things, and yet I found that if I avoided touching the cats and getting my face near them, I’d be okay. It didn’t stop me from being allergic to all the other animals I came across. But it did work in the home environment, and now, where my nervous style is much less bound, I find that cats and dogs no longer make my nose rain. Another example is how my mother and sister have taught themselves to eat some varieties of cheese, and even if I still wretch at the smell of cooked cheese when it’s placed under my nose, I am now very happy to cook and prepare it for others.

Now, having tucked into my meal of pulses, my tummy feels pretty good. Something has changed. Something fundamental has shifted and what was once indigestible is now easily assimilated. I feel this has happened because I no longer hold the tensions I had, and since these tensions span their way through my five bodies of the physical, mental, emotional, psychic and spiritual self, these tensions manifested very differently on the face of it, yet underneath they are intimately connected. They may well have showed themselves as allergies and intolerances, yet they all grew from a singular area of stuck-ness.

The process of learning to give ourselves the space to digest our tensions requires some experimentation. We need to look at the level, or dosage we can tolerate to know when practice is creating more tension than it releases. Think of it in the same way I re-introduced animal hair, beans and pulses back into my life, in that I took a break, found I didn’t react in the old way, and gradually reintroduced them when they no longer created discomfort.

So in week two, I want you to look at the dosage of your practice. How digestible is it? Of course, it can feel like the lentils did for me, in which case, do less and leave more time to digest after practice. Which may well mean going for a walk, or doing nothing. But try not to buy a ‘burger and chips’ straight after, meaning try not to fill the digestion time with scrolling, podcasts, or idle telly.

Digestion also refers to the question “When do I get hungry?” As ideally, you want a practice to last you all the way through to the next practice, ideally that evening or the next day. The simple method to test this is to listen to your nervous system. Think of this in the same way my tummy relates to anything cheese-related, in that I can intend all I want to eat it, but the reality is that it just wants to come back up. So in practice, this means that if, when you decide to practice you still feel almost itchy and full, then you know it’s not time to practice. It may even be time to simplify the practice, to focus on strengthening your conscious connection to the fabric of your bowl, as this seems to help with the inevitable grumbles which come up during a period after practice like this.

The main and often overlooked benefit of paying attention to ‘digesting’ your practice, is that when you get the dosage right, it clears the blocks in the way of you letting go and assimilating aspects of you previously intolerant to all prior attempts. Change happens; we just need to give it the space to happen, and this means giving your practice the appropriate digestion time.

My continued request is that if you are following this and if it makes a difference (which I know it will if you actually do the work), you will do three things:

1. Continue for three weeks.

2. Tell someone about your success.

3. Buy me a matcha or three, and maybe even pay me for my time by becoming a paid subscriber.

I look forward to sharing the next video with you and I will see you there.