CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 The Vibration of Food and the Spirit of Eating
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Chakra Issues
CHAPTER 4 Foods for Grounding and Protection: Feeding the Root Chakra
CHAPTER 5 Foods for Feelings and Flow: Feeding the Sacral Chakra
CHAPTER 6 Foods for Power and Transformation: Feeding the Solar Plexus Chakra
CHAPTER 7 Foods for Love and Compassion: Feeding the Heart Chakra
CHAPTER 8 Foods for Communication and Truth: Feeding the Throat Chakra
CHAPTER 9 Foods for Intuition and Imagination: Feeding the Third Eye Chakra
CHAPTER 10 Foods for Purification and Clarification: Feeding the Crown Chakra
Appendix A List of Foods, Substances, and Processes that Deplete the Chakras
Appendix B List of Foods and Their Activating and Balancing Effects on the Chakras
Appendix C Chakras and Corresponding Foods
Appendix D Health Conditions and Corresponding Chakras
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Giving thanks is one of the best parts of writing a book. You don't do anything alone in life, and it's so rewarding to step back and admire the web you are intimately enmeshed in. Writing these acknowledgments gives me this opportunity.
Above all, my deepest, most soul-full, heart-full gratitude goes to Spirit . . . for the inspiration, knowledge, and seamless thread of words that were gifted to me and flowed from my fingers to the keyboard.
I often tell others that I wouldn't be speaking or writing about this material if it weren't for my mother. Not just because she gave birth to me, but also because her epiphany when I was nine years old fueled so much of what my life is about now: food and spirituality. I admire her grace, strength, and dedication to her true path. She set an example for me to live my life to the fullest. I am grateful to the rest of my family: Dad, for instilling the genes of passion within me; Brenda, for her sharp-mindedness and humor; and Ian, for his bountiful creativity.
My (spiritual) teachers, Patrice Connelly, Cyndi Dale, Char Sundust, Caroline Myss, Louise Hay, Jeffrey Bland, and Paramahansa Yogananda, have imparted gracious gifts of wisdom, insight, and love—all of which have made a profound difference in my life.
I give heartfelt thanks to all of the participants who took part in Nutrition for the Soul classes and workshops, especially those who helped me get them started in the summer of 2007. Without all of your continuing requests for this book, I may not have had the same drive to get this material into book form. Therefore, I write this for all of you. You've helped me to implement what I was inspired to create.
My heart extends those who have helped me in the publishing process: my agent, Krista Goering, for passionately believing in this text and being able to take it to the next level, and my remarkable editor at Red Wheel, Caroline Pincus.
And finally . . . I bow to my teacher, my support, my love . . . Mark.
PREFACE
Perhaps you've been working on small pieces of yourself—like your diet, or becoming more aware of your body, or maybe you've been exploring your spirituality. I have noticed that many people are hungry for a spiritual connection with something greater than themselves. Their souls wander a path of longing and questioning. Similarly, others struggle with the needs of their physical bodies. They are in continual search for the ultimate understanding of why they remain unsatisfied with their appearance or why they have numbing pain. Still others are confused about how to eat. Their minds are swirling in all the diet information that bombards us on a daily basis. And most of us, if presented with the choice, would want to have it all: how to bring our bodies and souls to a higher, more contented spot and park there indefinitely.
Of course, we cannot live without the body or the soul, as both are wrapped into one—it's a package deal. As you will read in the following pages, nutrition, body, and spirituality form a solid, inseparable triangular relationship. The mission of this book is to help you understand your relationship to food and eating so that you may bridge together body and soul, to be and feel complete, whole, and full of love. Of course, food and eating present powerful options to unite body and soul; however, keep in mind that they represent one path into the whole of your being. To fully support your growth and evolution, it is also essential to shift not only your eating, but your whole way of life, including your thoughts, actions, activities, and beliefs. Changing your eating is an important step in that process.
To help you arrive at the “sweet spot” of unifying all aspects of the self using the conduit of food, I have blended a dash of science and generous amounts of intuition and training into a foundation of spirituality. The spiritual template I use is one based on the ancient system of chakras established by East Indian yogis, which is cultivated through the art of yoga and threaded through timeless Vedic texts.
Choosing the chakras to combine with foods and eating became an obvious choice to me as a nutritionist who practices yoga and has studied the chakras through books and experientially. And, most of all, it worked! I noticed in my consultations with individuals that many imbalances in the chakras coincided Chakra Foods for Optimum Health with food issues. For example, several people with solar plexus chakra deficiency, who felt stressed and worn out by their environment, also revealed to me that they had issues with sugar. Indeed, I discovered with my blended intuitive and physiological perspectives that these two seemingly disparate presenting complaints were actually interrelated and woven into each other. The nutritional advice I was accustomed to giving individuals extended not to only food advice but also tips on living life in a balanced way for that particular chakra. Each instructional piece