Yoga Comes Home

Early morning on the Pali

Our planetary orbit around the Sun that is Yoga is finally bringing us back from the cold outer reaches of the solar system to the warm & sunny realm we like to call home. Yoga on the Go has certainly been an epic journey filled with adventure, rain, snow, family, friends, way too much food, puppy kisses, some dis-ease, and of course yoga. The Yoga on the Go experiment started as a documentation of how sprinkling yoga into airplane and car travel might help ease the accompanying physical and mental strain of traveling. This really is quite obvious: integrating yoga into the act of traveling does significantly cut down on mental exhaustion and physical fatigue. Holiday travel can be especially stressful, and while we did experience some minor twinges of manic energy, we mostly cruised through packed airports, planes, and highways, thanks to yoga. All of this I anticipated.

Took the "red eye" home

However, what I didn't see coming was the challenge we experienced with everyday living away from our established "lifestyle of wellness." Not to say that we live a perfect lifestyle, by any means, but it is a pretty darn good one by our standards. We run, swim, yoga, surf, garden, and eat a largely vegan diet. The only component of that list that came on vacation with us was yoga. Apparently, everything else stayed home. Granted, we didn't expect to do much swimming or surfing or gardening during a mainland winter. Yet, the biggest flaw in our Yoga on the Go series was in failing to plan for maintaining some semblance of our diet. We decided before embarking on the trip that we wouldn't "impose" our diet on the friends and family with whom we'd be staying. Rather, we'd happily eat what our loved ones were generous enough to provide. While we were deeply grateful for all the wonderful food our loved ones prepared for us, we certainly felt the difference between our largely vegan diet and the largely un-vegan diet we encountered on our journey. Perhaps the most interesting of things we noticed about the diet change was the sheer quantity of food we were capable of eating. The most glaring example was the now infamous pumpkin roll with cream cheese filling. This was a devilishly delicious cake, I must admit. When we ate a slice of this cake after a plentiful dinner, we both felt like we could easily go on to eat the entire cake ourselves. This, of course, terrified us. Many of the processed, ultra rich foods we ate triggered this ravenous craving for more of the same food. So, to satisfy curiosity, instead of having another slice of cake, we decided to try an orange. Not two bites into that orange we both started to feel just how overfull our bellies actually were.

So we became keenly aware of just how critical a healthy diet is to a yoga-fied lifestyle. It's incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent yoga practice when we eat nutrient deficient foods everyday. Those foods affect not only our physiques, but also our moods, attitudes, energy levels, and on and on. How can we expect to nurture a lifestyle of holistic wellness when we fuel our bodies with empty calories?
It's taken about a week for us to start recovering completely from the havoc wreaked by 3 weeks of meat, dairy, and various processed foods. And this is in no way a criticism of our loved ones, but rather a cold, hard look at our culture of food. Simple, raw, organic foods are just not available in many places. Or if they are available, they are outrageously expensive and out of reach for many cash-strapped budgets. There's also the emotional attachment to these fatty diets with which we all grew up. That's why they're called "comfort foods." Yet, they provide no real comfort for our bodies, and probably only serve to make us sick.

A rare treat: tofu curry bowl!

Many of our loved ones expressed a desire to explore a cleaner diet, but were frustrated with the difficulty of making that transition. We happen to live in a part of the world where we can grow food year round, and have plenty of health food stores and vegetarian or even vegan dining out options. I really don't have an easy solution for my friends and family who live in places with a fast food joint on every corner. The only thing I could encourage them to do was to take it one meal at a time. Let that one meal gradually grow into more. Pay close attention to how a vegan meal affects the feeling in the body, mind, and energy level. Compare that to a heavier meal. Experiment with different foods and find what feels the best. That should help spark the motivation to create that lifestyle change. For indeed, it does take a great deal of motivation and determination to eat healthy foods when unhealthy foods are quick and easy in most places. The tipping point came for us when we found very clear intolerances to dairy and wheat products upon trying a monodiet for a week, then introducing foods back in one at a time. That was a huge motivation for us to make a big change in our diet.

Also, check out this great film I just watched, called "Food Matters." It definitely fits right in to this train of thought on yoga-fying our eating habits. It's good to be home, and, as always, NAMASTE!