Balancing Body and Soul with Food By Sandra Garson l Foods to Provide Balance

Did you know that Rx actually stands for recipe? Medicine was, and still can be, a heroic effort to remove impurities and frictions that put the body out of sync with the spirit/soul/mind for which it is both temple and vehicle. Since the body is built from and runs on one fuel, food, traditional methods for remedying imbalances are dietary. Knowing the unique chemical properties of individual root vegetables, seeds, greens, fruits and fermented fare, and how these ingredients acted inside the body, doctors prescribed individual foods or combinations whose digestion could bring a body back into harmony with elements impinging on it - weather, time, geography, others. The kitchen was the pharmacy. Even now many medicines are merely compounds of food chemicals. That’s why the word hospital comes from hospitality and the drugstore icon is Rx. Like Christ in Xmas, most of the word recipe has been deleted. Here are some traditional foods used to balance body and soul.

Sandra Garson, a well-known cook for Dharma centers from Maine to Mongolia, is the author of Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking and How to Fix a Leek and Other Food From Your Farmers’ Market.

Walnuts

The Tao speaks of chi, life force energy, and claims disease, frailty and spiritual confusion result from its blocked or weakened flow. To keep chi circulating, Taoism prescribes specific exercises known as Tai Chi and Chi Gong. Chinese medicine absorbed these balancing remedies along with a belief in jing, the source or mother of chi. As the ultimate “decider” of how much chi we’re allotted, jing explains why some people are naturally more energetic. In traditional Chinese medicine, jing resides in the kidneys and can get dangerously depleted by lack of physical rest and mental calm. Supposedly eating walnuts, just two or three times a week, can strengthen, even replenish it. Science has indeed discovered walnuts release unique powerfully body beneficial chemicals and phyto-nutrients.

Buddha’s Delight

This ubiquitous menu item in the vegetarian column of every Chinese restaurant is actually an ancient Buddhist monastery meal formulated to symbolize purity and its promise of enlightenment. Its Chinese name, Luohan zhai, means “vegetarian food of the accomplished ones.” All its specific ingredients are emblematic - bean thread noodles represent long life, bamboo shoots new chances, snow peas unity, mushrooms opportunity, black fungus longevity, and tofu, a highly nutritious ingredient created by the alchemy of fermentation, exemplifies blessings. When the18 traditional ingredients are included, this dish balances body and mind by providing the four cosmic elements that sustain human life: earth (peas, bamboo shoots), water (moss, lotus root), fire (fermented tofu), and air (mushrooms and black fungus that depend upon wind to spread their spores).

Bishops’ weed: ajwain/carom seeds

Ajwain seeds, also called carom, are such a revered Ayurvedic remedy, Hindu mothers and grandmothers still hand a few to anyone who doesn’t feel well, especially from an upset stomach. Science now knows ajwain seeds are brimming with thymol, a chemical that encourages release of digestive juices to help food flow smoothly through the metabolic process. Thymol, loaded ajwain is equally esteemed for relieving sinus congestion by loosening phlegm and mucus so breath freely flows. Its considerable anti-inflammatory properties also purify the inflamed sinuses themselves. Since Hindus believe the soul rides the breath, ajwain provides vital purification.

Tofu

Buddhists who strive to purify their bodies and achieve pure mind, must adhere to their vow of no harming/no killing and maintain a strict vegetarian diet. The lactose intolerant monks of China and Japan relied heavily on soy for protein. Zen monasteries actually developed a distinct soy based tofu, miso, natto cuisine called Shojin Ryori, which can be translated, “to progress along the path to enlightenment through cooking.” Monks used the daily creation and preparation of a bland, colorless tofu to attain serenity by understanding how the absence of everything is everything. Tofu became so exalted for its supposed spiritual purification, for centuries only monks and the elite Samurai were permitted to eat it. Japan still has special Shojin days when people who are grieving loss try to sanctify their minds by eating only tofu laced food.

Yogurt

Yogurt, which is essentially fermented milk, may be the most universal and familiar medicinal food. Fermentation not only destroys the lactose that disturbs millions of bodies. It makes yogurt so richly alive, it can restore the good gut bacteria antibiotics exterminate and kill the evil bacteria that cause Delhi belly and Montezuma’s revenge. It is the fastest, easiest way for a body to adapt to and neutralize the threatening bacteria of its immediate environment. For thousands of years, Hindus and Buddhists have revered, even worshipped, pure white yogurt as the symbol of perfect purification. Its physical prowess inside the body made it the ideal metaphor for spiritual nourishment that cleanses negative karma, and it became one of the eight causes of good fortune.