Rice and Dal and a Curry and fresh Fenugreek are just a few balancing ingredients for a basic Kichadi.

Although the first line of defense against an unbalanced and troublemaking dosha excess is changing lifestyle, that may take a long time to change :  other people’s influence, your job, your living quarters. Food is medicine however and it works so quickly.

People who struggle to understand the complexity of prakruti (doshas combination at conception / fixed) and vkruti ( doshas combination during stages of life, the seasons, life events) look to food as medicine. And the simplest of all Ayurveda foods is the infamous Kichadi.

Kichadi is perhaps as misunderstood as is curry. Curry, as we know, is not one spice. It is a combination of spices and with Ayurvedic understanding the ratio of cumin, coriander, peppers, and many, many other spices is a highly individualized process. More about curry in another blog.  For now, here is a recipe of Kichadi courtesy of Maya Tiwari, who famously cured herself of a profound cancer with profound changes of her lifestyle (fashion model in large city to simple life in an ashram) and her study of food as medicine.

Kichadi means only a combination of a grain and a bean.  Commonly used are rice and mung dal.  This very simple food is a wonderful base for a cleansing.  Use it for a spring fast, a quick meal ( I just had some for breakfast), or part of a cleansing routine.

Most important, join us on Sunday March 29, from 1 to 4 p.m, in a large private kitchen where we will cook in a small group and talk about individual balancing of doshas. I will bring lot of spices – dry and fresh. This class is limited to few enough people for highly individualized understanding of food, tastes, likes, dislikes, and questions.  Register by calling me at 717 576-2099 or email to roberta.strickler@yahoo.com. Cost is $30 and bring a container for a sample to take home and your journal. And your questions. And your apron. And…….see you there !

Brown Rice Kichadi.

Serves 2.

Good for V, VP, VK, P, PV, PK

Wash until water runs clear:  Soak mung in 2 cups water for 2 hours; drain.

1 cup brown basati or short-grain brown rie

1/2 cup whole mung dhal

In a large pot heat 1 Tablespoon ghee and sauté 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 2 tsp cumin seeds, and 1/2 teaspoon ginger for a few minutes.  Add rice and beans. Saute over low heat for 3 minutes.

Add 8 cups of boiling water ( less water is okay; it will make a thicker stew), a pinch of turmeric and a pinch of sea salt.

Cover and simmer gently for 1 hour over low heat, stirring occasionally. Serve warm.

We will use this basic recipe during our cooking class. If you like, make a set of it and bring your cooking questions with you. You can buy all of these ingredients at Lemon Street Market and get advice on herbs to be added at Radiance.

You might write it as  dosa and you might say dosha. Either will do. The sound of the s – in this case of Sanskrit – is a ch sound. So say it as you like it. But do try to know your dosha: how it is truly your basic nature and how it weaves in and out of the situations in your life. That could be the food  you have eaten, your emotional – even hormonal – state, the climate in which you live – or where you are forced to reside.  Your age-appropriate style of householder, explorer,or wise elder, even those nice situations affect the status of your dosha package.

The three doshas are these:  Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. We use the Sanskrit words because they describe these meanings that are not so clearly defined in other languages.

Altogether they represent three fundamental,  psychological and physiological principles of the body. Their ratio determines your individual constitution and that combination was determined at the time of your conception. When your dosha ratio is in normal balance you would recognize your own true nature, the feeling of comfort with yourself and your surroundings.

LIfe,of course, can be fickle. Stresses of all kinds affect our psychology and our physiology. And the doshas themselves might be easily disturbed: depleted, aggravated, increased; they are moveable. In food or behaviour, in lifestyle, this tendency underlies the principle of Like Follows Like.  I like chocolate or coffee or lying in the hot sun in the sand. But when I am undiscipled about my longings, the more i get of it, the more I want of it, and so a pleasant experience becomes negative because that undisciplined longing will throw my doshas ratio way out of balance.

Too often, too far out of balance and the state of imbalanced doshas can create disease.

But knowing your doshas profile, applying principles of balance with nature, this Dosha Balance creates harmony, a life of balance and joy.

Beware the pop culture to dismiss your behaviour by applying a dosha word to an action: Oh She is SO Vata !  Let’s hope that every one of us has at least a bit of Vata in our constitution. For without Vata, there is no mobility, no change.  Without creative Vata, fiery Pitta becomes intense and is not able to do its work as the Transformer.  Kapha gets stuck in its very steady groundedness and like the earthbound turtle, goes nowhere fast.

Come to one of my workshops and explore your dosha profile and be alert to all the ways we can catch imbalance before it becomes disorder and dis-ease.  See the post on Ayurveda Basics here.

Here (below) are the details for a set of very informal gatherings being staged soon in Lancaster. Ayurveda is an India-originated, Sister-to-Yoga, Science of Healthy Living and the Prevention of Dis-ease. This is a highly individualized system. You are helped to learn your own true nature and then given access to common tools that you can use to balance your life, your body, and to quiet your mind.

What seems to work best is this: Take the Basic Workshop in Fundamentals where you can probe your own highly individualized natural constitution. (It is fixed for you. But it will vary by the Season of your Life or the Season of the Year in Nature.) Once you understand how to monitor this changeable feast, you can find innumerable ways to get back in balance. Or even better – Catch the warning signals of pending imbalance and right yourself.

After your initial understanding of the basic fundamentals of Ayurveda – a life in balance -we get together in a living room, a kitchen, around a table for food planning, and we share questions, experiences, to broaden our understanding.

In an ongoing set of programs, I am partnering with natural food grocers, aromatherapy experts, herbalists, yogi studios: it continues to unfold.  Natural-minded folks in the Lancaster Community join me to provide expertise or a dedicated venue for study of the large variety of threads (sutras) of Ayurveda study:  Food. Cleansing practices. Therapeutic level oils. Meditation. Yoga for your Constitution. And more meditation: Mindfulness.

Please watch this space for the growing calendar of specialized get togethers and become one of my Ayurvedic pioneers in balance with nature.

I appreciate your Comments on this site and hope you will sign up to get notification of new posts and new events.  Here’s a sample of the topics we have scheduled in the past.

Ayurveda Foods in the Kitchen.    Making Kichardi

Around the Table: Menu Planning and Food Sleuthing at Lemon Street Market,  a walkable Lancaster city neighborhood grocery store.
We talk about meal planning in their back room table, surrounded by dozens of kinds of rice, grain, flour, vegetables, sweeteners, and everything natural and organic in this city marketplace devoted to organic ways. Sort through all the balancing qualities of foods and how to prepare them. I emphasize learning how to make one meal that the whole family can enjoy so this becomes a lifetime path to mindful eating and not an exercise in cooking to “suit a diet that no one else in my family will eat.” 2016 schedule to be determined.

Basics of Ayurveda:  Saturday afternoon, April 2, 2016, in the York studio of Evolution Power Yoga. Watch this space for signup and registration details.  This can be a review for folks who have some idea of their dosa and want to probe deeper into understanding. It is also a primer for those people who know nothing and want to begin. Call Roberta at 717 576-2099 or email mindoveryoga@yahoo.com for more details.

.Heritage Grains and their qualities. Hosted by a Lancaster County Amish farmer.

Meditation Workshops . Mindfulness and meditation techniques explained and experienced. Spring 2016 events to be announced soon. Get in touch to schedule this workshop at your space, perhaps even with a small group of friends – alternative to a raucous party ! Its the trend.

This blog was first a thought that would fit under Julian Barnes’ nostalgic title, The Sense of An Ending. His wonderful novella tells of a middle-aged man who has never dealt with his past until presented with an odd situation that obliges him to consider a variety of events he had not thought deeply enough to understand in their time.

And then, my own sequence of events that brought me here, to write on this page, was influenced again by a delightful Cowboy book with a preface extolling the seductive role of an epigraph. (In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, a quotation or a poem that is set at the beginning of a document. The epigraph may serve as preface, summary, a counter-example, or a link to suggest context. The best example of epigraph, she suggests, is Renee Zellweger’s line to Tom Cruise in the movie Jerry Maguire: “You had me at hello.”)

Hold on, I’m getting there.

Here’s the epigram, paraphrased (and altered with my own examples) from Julian Barnes:

You get towards the end of life–no not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You  are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?…I thought of a wide-eyed woman tasting an orange peel for the first time… I thought of a cresting wave of storm-sent ocean, lit by a full moon…I thought of another cowboy fashioning a toothbrush from a soft branch of tree, around a remote campfire.

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.

And then there is transition. There is space and time and within it emerges wordless insight. There is knowing that in the end of a long string of events called life change does happen. Whether it comes at the end of life or the end of a chapter of life, the accumulation sorts itself. And there is knowing the meaning of that life -or that chapter – for the first time.

How freeing it is – not being greedy, not clinging – to things, to people, to possessions.

Among the yamas, Patanjali’s five abstentions, we come to the last one, to Aparigraha.  In one sense, this final admonition is so valuable in the world of the “material girl”.  We wonder how to go about letting go of “all our stuff” – thoughts, bottles of water, more than one winter coat, the compost of life that gets in our way when we want to loosen up in our relationships to other people and to the world around us. To be free of the pursuit of things, with time for the pursuit of meanings.

Patanjali says (II:30) that not being greedy, not hoarding, is about our capacity to use things in the proper way. But he goes on to say that Aparigraha is not accepting gifts.  Hmmmm. What does that mean?Satchidananda suggests that accepting gifts creates an atmosphere of obligation . Think House of Cards, think political swapping, think payola.

Donna Farhi  suggests that we hold onto material things to reinforce a sense of identity: an executive ego with foot soldiers called the right clothes, the better house, the impressive car, the job, the image required to maintain an illusion of power. Begin a practise of not grasping, withdrawing our hand to reach for material things, she says, and eventually the need to reach outward is diminished until there is recognition :

That which is essential to us is already at hand.

“Time does not move. But all changes happen in time.

“Time is eternal.”

“The past and the future do not exist. However, we acknowledge them. And therefore, we make divisions in time so that we can categorize events.”

“Matter changes. Therefore we need time to explain matter.”

OK. These are only a few thought provoking ideas that we can ponder on these snowy, inactive days. I am still thinking and sitting with these ideas from my teacher for Ayurveda.

This blog will be short. I do know that getting all hung up in the past and the future are perhaps the biggest detriments to the happiness of meditation that I observe in students of meditation ( and life ).  If you have been my student you know I will sometime or another say:  Lingering in the past is to be depressed .  Projecting into the future is to be anxious. The past is gone; we cannot change it. The future: Aha !  That!  How can we be sure a future will come? Why not be right here in the moment and focus on this moment. Allow time to pass. Be curious about what will happen next. So calming a thought. This one single thought, indeed,requires a giving up of control, eh?  Tat!

That sweet taste on the tip of your tongue has a sweet-sounding name in the Sanskrit expression of tastes in Ayurveda:  Madhura.

Not so long ago I cleaned out the once active, now denounced items in my pantry. Gone went my jumbo sized bag of artificial sweetener. Much like Gone Girl, the recent film, my artificial sweetener was a complicated mixture that was really just hiding a lack of substance from me.

0 calories, 0 fat, 0 carbohydrates, 0 nutritional value.

In fact it IS the tip of the tongue where the complex system of digestion begins by recognizing the taste we call sweet. It alerts the thyroid that metabolism of food is now beginning its journey through the body. As an aside, the thyroid is also the seat of repressed emotions, grief and sadness being chief characters in the drama of repressed emotions. Sweet assuages sadness as grief is opened in the yoga pose, Fish, where the throat, the  heart, the fifth chakra are exposed and deep down, the thyroid gland is massaged.

Without my beloved artificial sugars where have i turned?

There are plant-based sweeteners and they get a lot of support because they are easy . Open a package and off you go. But I’d rather eat local, seasonal food that give me a few calories (because of the Moderation rule) and lots of nutrition.

Sugar Cane. Yes that is a natural. But by the time it has finished its route through processing and sitting around in a packet, it has lost the moisture and the coolness that are so beneficial in balancing doshas with calmness.

HONEY…yes, we call sweet people “Honey” do we not? Honey has always been healing. Honey does NOT like to be hot. Left in a hot place it will ferment and in baking it creates ama — the sticky debris of digestion. So add your honey to any hot food at the very end just before you drink your tea, for example.

MAPLE SYRUP.  What is more local all around than the native North American syrup from the indigenous maple tree forests of Pennsylvania to Vermont. Not easy to tap, Maple syrup can be expensive so moderation is important. it calms both Vata and Pitta. And it can be heated so it is useful in baking.

MOLASSES.  Hot, heavy, oily, wonderful for Vata imbalance during cold, windy winter days. Light, unsulphured molasses is the mildest form. If you aren’t a fan of the molasses family then Blackstrap might be too heavy an application for you.  I have been using molasses to hold together a mixture of black mustard seeds, flax seeds, and powdered ginger, an exotic combination that instantly satisfies my sweet tooth and my love of the pungent ginger, so good for its digestive qualities and a fine counterpoint to sweet.

Everywhere I go somebody – generally aged 25 to 40 – is tempting me to smoke medical marijuana. (You can obtain the kind that affects the mind;  or you can choose a version designed to affect parts of the body, so they say. THAT tempts me to check this out. I always want to know  how I can get to the mind OR the body of students in any given yoga class. The mind generally lags behind.) Meanwhile, the most recent roundup of drug dealers in the Walmart parking lot in a nearby once-country town listed names of men and women in age  between 50 and age 65. No heroin there; it was all prescription drugs.

Without my ayurvedic training it was easy to see food as mind altering. And body altering, that’s for sure.

But within the science of health called Ayurveda, food as medicine is specific. it is healing, nourishing, balancing. All that happens when the effects are understood and carefully prepared. It’s important to realize who you are – at this moment. For example,  I recently made a variation of chicken broth with mushrooms . Because my fiery temperament always needs to be rescued from inflammation, I loaded this winter soup with spices, especially fresh tumeric from the Central Market. Because my basic bone structure is sturdy, earthy Kapha dosha and this is cold moist weather, that piece of my vkriti is in balance and the soup could bear some meat. (another blog will talk about why Ayurvedians ( if that is a word) are meat eaters and yogis are vegetarians. But save that for another day…

On a bright summer day, in Pitta season, these Punjabi beans were fresh and seasonal.I sauteed them in sunflower oil ad garnished, as you can see, with coriander and coconut. This way of cooking is all new to me. My past food experience would never combine these interesting four ingredients. But they are balancing, grounding to Pitta when the sun is hot and fierce and compeling to an already hot temperament person whose innate dosha is composed of fire and water. The Pitta profile.

Food,now, for me, serves many purposes: It still offers contrasting or soothing tastes for pleasure or companionship, Calming qualities when life is full of anxiety; It is a resting point within a day. But, food as medicine, taken wisely and appropriately, mindfully, moderates the fire in the belly. Or in the mind.