How Restrictions Can Be The Path To Freedom

Photo by Annabel Graham

I’ve definitely felt an energetic shift since we entered Leo season. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s also summer, which is pitta (fire) season in Ayurveda, but i have noticed a powerful shift into action and I’m feeling it!

One action that i’ve taken is I’ve started to create a daily ritual around going to the river every afternoon, during golden hour, which is just as the sun is beginning to set. I live close to the Hudson River Park on the West side of Manhattan and watching the sun set in the early evening has been super cooling and calming for my physical body and for my emotional well-being.

Speaking of well-being, I want to address an aspect of wellness that I’ve personally been working through and that is all about restrictions or how we give up certain things so that we can be healthy. Because I have a lot of digestive issues I’m working with, I’ve had to restrict my diet quite heavily - no dairy, gluten, garlic or onions, nightshade vegetables etc. It’s not only socially difficult to have all of these restrictions, especially living in NYC, it’s meant that I started to feel really uninspired by my food and eating in general. It’s as if I felt that as long as I had a bunch of restrictions, food had to be functional and medicinal and no longer primarily pleasurable. It’s like I got so focused on what I couldn’t do and what I could or couldn’t eat, I stopped cooking for joy and for taste.

And, the funny thing is, the food I was eating wasn’t really helping my health issues because I wasn’t energized and emotionally nourished by eating it.

Recently, I met with my Ayurvedic teacher and I was telling her about this lack of joy around eating and she challenged me to make a list of five different options for breakfast, lunch and dinner with foods that were both balancing and delicious. They have to taste good.

In Ayurveda, taste is so important for health, and I had forgotten that. I guess what I want to communicate is, you can eat and do all of the right things - take the herbs, eat healthy, go to bed early etc., but if you’re not enjoying the process, if you’re perceiving it as a punishment rather than a nourishment, you’ll have a hard time experiencing the benefits.

It’s not about the mind/body connection because the mind and the body are not separate. In fact, Ayurveda believes that physical sensations are a manifestation of what’s in the mind.