Food and consciousness - continued

My education in macrobiotics gave me my first insight into the deeper aesthetics of food. Instead of taste being the primary target I learned how taste, texture, color, presentation and preparation, when combined along the principles of yin and yang, produced a kind of alchemy in the meal prepared – it now held the power to transform you on a physical and mental level. I experienced these changes myself and always wondered why more people didn’t flock to this kind of diet when it held so much promise for curing illness, disease, and even neurosis. I even tried to cure my mother of MS, and succeeded in getting her into remission for 9 months, but she hated not being able to eat the food she was familiar with and went back to her old ways. After awhile it became clear that for most people the sacrifices they would have to make to follow such a diet were too extreme, and even for those of us that were willing and experienced profound change, our fundamental relationship to life stayed the same. The confidence, vitality, security and happiness that macrobiotics was meant to deliver never appeared.

Even so I continued to delve into the nuances of macrobiotics, inviting friends over for long dinners, or elaborate, gourmet picnics on the beach. I also cooked for pregnant and nursing mothers, and for yoga retreats. Often I would prepare meals made from plants and herbs I had foraged in the Boston Arboretum, whilst carrying my young daughter on my back. People started telling me I should open up a restaurant so I was definitely getting better. (The very first macrobiotic dinner I cooked in the study house I was living in was so bad that I was advised to either study up or refrain from cooking again)

After about 5 years of this I met my first spiritual teacher, Amachi. I wasn’t in the market for a guru, it wasn’t my trip, so it took me awhile to realize the relationship had occurred in spite of me. The turning point was my first experience of prasad. I was sitting in a garage in New Hampshire, the floor covered with rugs and the walls plastered with images of Krishna and Ganesh, about 30 of us blissed out in the presence of Ama. An Indian family arrived carrying a big pot of something very hot and handed it to Ama, who smiled with delight. She immediately took the lid off, plunged her hand into the steaming sticky mess and before we knew it big whacks of the impossibly hot, exotically spicy, and incredibly sticky pudding were slapped into our palms with Amachi laughing uproariously and urging us to eat, eat. It was an exalted experience of that alchemy, food, prepared by the devotee, transformed by the divine mother, received from the hand of God, eaten in a field of love, devotion and surrender to the guru. I had no idea what it all meant – only that something beyond the known had happened, I had received the sustenance and the blessing of the divine, through a pudding! on some level that my grosser, materialisitc self could not get a handle on.

To be continued J