Let's Talk About Food
How do you relate to food?
One of the fascinating things I have discovered in my journey with Yoga is that whenever we are going through stress, it shows up first in the way we consume food. When our psychology is disturbed, our relationship with food changes immediately - either we overeat or undereat. We hold behavioural patterns around food. Have you observed how you eat your favourite food?
Welcome to the third episode of Algorithm of Yoga.
This is my ongoing attempt to explore Yoga the software way! In my last episode, I spoke about Mind-Body architecture and explained how it generates Perception Debt.
In this episode, I want to give a real-life example so that you can understand how this architecture influences our choices in real life.
Imagine a day at work, wherein you had a series of long meetings. You had a late lunch and you are anxious to wrap all your work by EOD. While you are buried deep in your work, your teammate offers you a piece of chocolate cake.
Visualise a lush sinful looking cake that has that distinctive smell when it steps out of the oven.
As soon as you see the cake, your sense-organs of sight, taste and smell are activated all at once. You know that your stomach is saying ‘No thanks’ but you are tempted. This internal disharmony reflects in an agitated breath but you aren’t aware of it. Why are you tempted?
Let’s look at the manager in the Mind-Body Architecture. The primary job of the manager is to define and reinforce its identity in this world. And how do you do this? By defining narratives about yourself. And how do you create these narratives?
By defining your likes and dislikes. You like that which gives you pleasure and you detest that which gives you pain.
How do you reinforce this identity?
By craving for pleasure and running away from pain.
Hence, the temptation for the cake.
The manager constantly colours everything as likes or dislikes with varying intensities based on how much pleasure or pain it experiences. And this gamut of experience is continuously captured by the memory bank.
The intensity of an experience is directly proportional to the weightage it adds in influencing the manager in its future responses.
An important question arises here.
What decides how the manager holds each experience? Take any scenario. Clearly, two different individuals never experience it the same way.
This is where the power of the mind-field reservoir comes into play. How intensely the manager is impacted by an experience depends on the source code that lies in the latent realms of this reservoir which is far beyond the reach of our conscious mind.
And this source code is constantly being updated every wakeful moment by new impressions being captured by the memory bank. Since the manager is programmed to trust the memory bank, it often overrides the signals received from the body and misguides the supervisor to be drawn towards the senses.
The manager realises that it derives pleasure out of eating a chocolate cake and hence, it influences the supervisor to reach out and eat the cake. We need to understand that each time we hang on to the narratives, we are reinforcing the manager within.
Each time we step back and observe this entire process for it is, we have an opportunity to look deeper into the very basis of the narratives we build about ourselves. This pure observation without judgement, holds the key to reclaiming the leader within, to reclaiming our agency within.
The true power of Yoga lies in this ability to step back and watch this entire mind-body architecture in action.
How do we reclaim the agency of the Leader within? We’ll continue our exploration in the next episode.
One of the fascinating things I have discovered in my journey with Yoga is that whenever we are going through stress, it shows up first in the way we consume food. When our psychology is disturbed, our relationship with food changes immediately - either we overeat or undereat. We hold behavioural patterns around food. Have you observed how you eat your favourite food?
Welcome to the third episode of Algorithm of Yoga.
This is my ongoing attempt to explore Yoga the software way! In my last episode, I spoke about Mind-Body architecture and explained how it generates Perception Debt.
In this episode, I want to give a real-life example so that you can understand how this architecture influences our choices in real life.
Imagine a day at work, wherein you had a series of long meetings. You had a late lunch and you are anxious to wrap all your work by EOD. While you are buried deep in your work, your teammate offers you a piece of chocolate cake.
Visualise a lush sinful looking cake that has that distinctive smell when it steps out of the oven.
As soon as you see the cake, your sense-organs of sight, taste and smell are activated all at once. You know that your stomach is saying ‘No thanks’ but you are tempted. This internal disharmony reflects in an agitated breath but you aren’t aware of it. Why are you tempted?
Let’s look at the manager in the Mind-Body Architecture. The primary job of the manager is to define and reinforce its identity in this world. And how do you do this? By defining narratives about yourself. And how do you create these narratives?
By defining your likes and dislikes. You like that which gives you pleasure and you detest that which gives you pain.
How do you reinforce this identity?
By craving for pleasure and running away from pain.
Hence, the temptation for the cake.
The manager constantly colours everything as likes or dislikes with varying intensities based on how much pleasure or pain it experiences. And this gamut of experience is continuously captured by the memory bank.
The intensity of an experience is directly proportional to the weightage it adds in influencing the manager in its future responses.
An important question arises here.
What decides how the manager holds each experience? Take any scenario. Clearly, two different individuals never experience it the same way.
This is where the power of the mind-field reservoir comes into play. How intensely the manager is impacted by an experience depends on the source code that lies in the latent realms of this reservoir which is far beyond the reach of our conscious mind.
And this source code is constantly being updated every wakeful moment by new impressions being captured by the memory bank. Since the manager is programmed to trust the memory bank, it often overrides the signals received from the body and misguides the supervisor to be drawn towards the senses.
The manager realises that it derives pleasure out of eating a chocolate cake and hence, it influences the supervisor to reach out and eat the cake. We need to understand that each time we hang on to the narratives, we are reinforcing the manager within.
Each time we step back and observe this entire process for it is, we have an opportunity to look deeper into the very basis of the narratives we build about ourselves. This pure observation without judgement, holds the key to reclaiming the leader within, to reclaiming our agency within.
The true power of Yoga lies in this ability to step back and watch this entire mind-body architecture in action.
How do we reclaim the agency of the Leader within? We’ll continue our exploration in the next episode.