Addressing Food-Desire Effectively Without Over-Emphasizing the Focus on It

When an individual takes up the spiritual path, he seeks guidance, perhaps from books or through online blogs, podcasts, videos, webinars, perhaps from people who are treading the path, perhaps from a teacher or Guru who has come into his life. Generally he comes away with some guidelines to follow. In many instances, the guidelines set forth ultimate desired results but do not provide detailed instruction taking into account the individual’s starting point, situation and circumstances. This can lead to substantial anxiety in the seeker as he tries to measure his thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions against a standard that he is not able to meet at that moment. Substantial time, energy and focus is then dedicated to what may be, in the big picture, relatively small things.

It is part of the process of maturing along the path for the seeker to begin to refine the time and attention so that these matters can be seen in a more balanced light, and thus, not allowed to occupy the mind that should be ideally focused on the spiritual pursuits. While most people are more easily able to spot faults outside, in others, the spiritual seeker tends to take a more ‘close up’ view of his own reactions and thus, magnifies the faults he sees when he tries to compare them to the ideal as set forth in the teachings he may be attempting to implement.

Sri Aurobindo’s approach is to cultivate detachment and equality, thereby reducing or eliminating vital desires that arise, over the course of time. This standpoint helps the seeker to find that right balance where the focus remains on the spiritual effort, the aspiration, the consecration and the receptivity to the higher force and the rejection of unwanted vital reactions plays out through the action of the higher force responding to the call and the openness that the seeker eventually develops.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “Neither neglect this turn of the nature (food-desire) nor make too much of it; it has to be dealt with, purified and mastered but without giving it too much importance. There are two ways of conquering it — one of detachment, learning to regard food as only a physical necessity and the vital satisfaction of the stomach and the palate as a thing of no importance; the other is to be able to take without insistence or seeking any food given and to find in it (whether pronounced good or bad by others) the equal rasa, not of the food for its own sake, but of the universal Ananda.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 4, Desire — Food — Sex, pg. 67