“It’s so simple!” exclaimed a student the other day.

She was talking about the cosmos.

Once you begin to “get it” that the world is a continuity, you start to get that the processes that run the cosmos also are continuous.

For instance, I’ve written many times that there is only one longing—the longing for Self-realization. This longing gets expressed differently depending on a person’s degree of awareness.

You may seek out a donut, a dollar or a dharma teacher, but these activities are all propelled by the same force.

This is easy to recognize if you take a moment to tap into the feeling of longing. All longing feels the same. There are only varying intensities and objects to which longing attaches. Try it.

The entire cosmos functions just like this.

So, let’s consider digestion.

From a Tantrik perspective, the digestion of food, emotions, situations, and wisdom exist along a continuum. They’re all part of one world process: digestion.

There is no radical difference between digesting a meal and digesting a difficult moment in a friendship.

If we are eating efficiently, i.e. if our gross and subtle channels are open and functioning well, we extract a quantity of nourishment from either a meal or a life change. What is not nourishing, we excrete.

If we are not functioning efficiently, we become depleted, take on excess baggage, or both.

I am not using an analogy. This is literal fact. To understand it better, you need to understand nourishment.

Nourishment is a quantity of substance, energy or wisdom that promotes Self-realization. We take in nourishment, and our body, energy and awareness come into a greater degree of harmony with Reality.

Poor digestive capacity means we cannot recognize the nourishing quantity in food, be it physical food, emotional food, energetic food, or wisdom food.

So, for instance, people with anorexia often see food as toxic. They have lost the capacity to recognize food as nourishing. They have to first be reintroduced to the nourishing aspect of food before their bodies agree to accept it.

Self-realization is a process of remembering and recognizing our true nature. Taking in nourishment is intimately related to the process of Self-realization. You can’t Self-realize if you aren’t capable of taking in proper nourishment of every variety from gross to subtle.

A key point here is that we cannot digest what we cannot recognize. This is why although grace is raining down on us at every moment, most of us don’t get it.

This is why we can receive teachings and not be able to absorb them and put them to use.

On a gross level, this is why some of us have impaired digestive systems. Our physical-chemical system does not recognize what we put into our mouths as food. Western medicine has many names for these kinds of disorders, but from a Tantrik perspective, we are lacking the capacity to recognize what is nourishing.

When I was a young, Tantrik pup, I had a serious auto-immune digestive ailment. Food went in, but nourishment was not efficiently extracted from the food.

Shortly after I received initiation, I began a month-long sadhana suggested by my teacher to improve my health. I set up a little picture of the head of our lineage on my altar, and as I did the practice, I prayed to him for assistance. I told him that I wanted to Self-realize, and that I couldn’t do the necessary work unless I was in better health. I asked him to grant me this boon.

After a month, the disease vanished and has never returned.

This is grace in action. Grace is a name for the most subtle form of nourishment. The boon of receiving and recognizing a more subtle form of nourishment corrected the gross physical aspect–my guts–as well. Usually we have to begin on the gross level and work toward the more subtle. Grace comes from the opposite direction. It is the subtle acting through the continuum on the gross expression or manifestation.

I want to end by talking for a moment about vegetarianism. Recently, a number of people have told me that they had to begin eating meat again after some period of time as vegetarians.

Meat is a grosser manifestation than are vegetables and other aspects of a vegetarian diet. Most of us, even if we are eating a balanced vegetarian diet, become depleted and deficient because our digestion cannot recognize and extract nourishment efficiently enough from a more subtle diet. We need meat because, excuse the silly word play, meat meets us where we actually live. And working at the level of our real situation is the hallmark of any authentic spiritual practice.

We’ve heard stories about some highly Realized persons not needing to eat as much as a “normal” person. Anandamayi MA went through long periods of her life eating very little. During these periods, she was healthy, energetic and even chubby. So we are definitely NOT talking about anorexia!

We are talking about someone who was fully nourished because she was able to recognize, extract and digest the essence of nourishment from small amounts of food.

In fact, at one point she said that she had been experimenting with how efficiently she could extract nourishment from her surroundings and had discovered that she really didn’t need to eat what we commonly call food. However, she also didn’t want to disturb those around her, so she continued to eat.

Tantra assists students to take in nourishment and digest more efficiently on every level. This is why proper diet is just as important as learning how to take in nourishment through kriya yoga.

Some people feel that starving oneself physically or otherwise is a component of a spiritual path. Nothing could be further from the truth. God is love. And love is nourishment. If you starve yourself, you turn away from God–you turn away from your Self.

Siddhartha Guatama discovered this as a young man when he was engaging in a very austere practice. As he sat starving, freezing and burning, he finally realized the simple truth that we need to accept nourishment in order to fully discover Reality.

That is the moment when he became a Buddha.

In Ma’s love,
Shambhavi

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