Speaking with Mother Maya about spiritual practice, mothers, food and Mother Earth
The life of Swamini Mayatitananda (formerly known as Bri Maya Tiwari), and often referred to respectfully as Mother Maya, is a testament to the role of nourishment, and of sustained sadhana (spiritual practice). She embarked on the path of Ayurveda with an Earth-centered feminine approach to the discipline that focuses on ritual, our relationships with our food, ourselves, with our ancestral mothers and with Mother Nature, in a quest to heal her own cancer. Since then, she has become a preeminent Vedic Monk in the Veda Vyasa lineage. She is the spiritual head of Wise Earth School of Ayurveda and the founder of the charitable Mother Om Mission.
I was first introduced to Mother Maya 13 years ago with her books, Ayurveda: A Life of Balance, and Ayurveda: Secrets of Healing. They revolutionized how I cut vegetables, prepared food and thought about panchakarma (the cleansing practices of Ayurveda). Since then Mother Maya has written The Path of Practice and the newly released Women’s Power to Heal through Inner Medicine. We at LA YOGA are honored to be able to discuss nourishment with Mother.
FMT: One of the things that strikes me about your work is your emphasis on sadhana [spiritual practice]. How do you recommend people incorporate sadhana into their lives?
Swamini Mayatitananda
SM: A sadhana is not a practice, it is development of awareness. When we look at sadhana, food is a metaphor. Food is memory. Eating is remembering. The one thing that the entire world has in common is that we must eat; food is a commonality of all cultures. Therefore it is a striking metaphor for the message of harmony, or the message of peace. Human beings depend, regardless of culture, on an abiding harmony. Without that we have no peace, without it we have no health, without it we have absolutely nothing.
We could have a million sadhanas, and we do; every word is a sadhana, every movement is a sadhana. There are those that flow back into the elements, such as cutting the vegetable by honoring the lifeline, or washing the grains by understanding their life force, their own cosmic sentiency. When we look at thesepractices it brings us to a point of pause, and that is what sadhana does. It brings us to a place that is clear and serene so that we can sit in ourselves. So that for one untethered moment, we can be aware-full of who we are. And that’s all sadhana is. It’s phenomenal!
FMT: Food is something that permeates all culture as you said. You also do a lot of work with the relationship we have with our ancestors; part of the transmission we get from our family and our ancestors comes through with how and what we eat.
SM: Yes, in incredible ways.
FMT: How do you feel about how our practices around food and nourishment have changed as compared with our ancestors?
SM: We need to go back to how our ancestors ate: what they cooked, what time of day, the climate in which they lived. We can take some of those things into the universality of whatever we are eating today. But we need to abstain from certain aspects of what they were eating, because times have changed and the collective consciousness has been progressing.
Their need and justification for eating meat would have been very different from our reality today. With more awareness, with more global awareness, with more collective consciousness, I think it is necessary that we cultivate the life of ahimsa [nonviolence; non-hurting] in all of its ways by not contributing to, or participating, or perpetuating hurt in terms of killing and slaughtering of the animals. And yet we know that many of our ancestors, many of the Western ancestors, and now many of the Eastern ancestors have imbibed meat. Do we look at it as ancestral food? The reality is it is part of the ancestral activity, but is it food for us today?
Each one of us has an obligation to the greater good. And the greater good of that consciousness is a life of non-hurting.
If we are looking at the time, and we are looking at a time when there’s so much of an inundation of violence, poverty, wars, un-stillness, disharmony, each one of us has an obligation to the greater good. And the greater good of that consciousness is a life of non-hurting. And, it isn’t about judgment, it isn’t about what is right and what is not right and we are greater because we are non-meat eaters. We cannot really equate the level of consciousness depending on what our ancestors have eaten.
But, what we can say is that we all reach a point of cognitive awareness at different levels in life. Our awareness has to be applied to understanding that slaughtering is killing. To achieve inner harmony and world peace, we must eradicate the mentality of violence, and therefore, there goes the slaughter.
But getting back to our ancestral foods, we can hold on to the kindness inherent in our ancestral package, because it will help us to renegotiate the unkindness of our past. And it will also help, believe it or not, our ancestors, wherever they may be, to find that ultimate resolve within their subtle bodies. Because until that soul is in perfect harmony with its new climate, there is still that push-pull, that energetic push-pull that comes in from the other terrain, the other reality.
And so, spending some time in the awareness of preparing a rich barely soup if you’re from the Jewish tradition, you know warming and beautiful; or leek soup and potato soup if you hail from the Irish tradition or just an incredible hot cup of spiced milk from the Vedic tradition. Whatever it is, we need to take from it what inspires kindness in us. Take from it, because we can’t just alienate ourselves by eating only Chinese, Indian, and Italian food. The very foundation of the earth is in the grain of our people.
The word ‘engrained’ is derived from ‘grain,’ and grain is engrained within the foundation of our being, of the physical, emotional, and mental psychic spiritual being. Therefore taking the grain of our traditions, you know mine is rice, yours may be wheat; it could also be barley; in the African tradition and also in the Indian tradition is bajra or millet. So as we venture into wholesome foods we can reconnect to an incredible memory, what I call ancestral memory which lies in the cosmic source that has shaped our tissue memories.
FMT: In thinking about the grains, so many people have allergies to things like wheat.
SM: Because foods like wheat have been hybridized, an unnatural process. Wheat is the ancestral grain for many cultures, Irish, Eng- lish, North Indian, and European and so on. All of the sudden we are allergic to our ancestors’ food? It’s not like that at all.
What has happened in the last 200 years to our grains? What has happened to the good Earth? Who would have thought that the greatest violence in our time would come through the food source? Obviously, our present culture has a great deal to do with this.
FMT: And you’re talking about the violence in terms of multiple levels. Not just slaughtering animals, but also the engineering of grains, or the way that the seed companies treat the seeds.
SM: The way that it’s prepared. The manipulations. The actual plucking out of the live source of the food and then plonking in the scientifically engineered fodder on top of the food. All of it.
We look at wars, we look at the violence of our societies, we look at the violence that comes into someone’s home through television. We look at that which compels the violence in the streets, we look at the gangs, we look at all of those activities and what we end up with is one area of life that contains the core of violence in our society: that is, what we’ve done to our food source. Who would have thought that the greatest violence in our time would be through the food source?
Food is not the problem. The poisoned food source is not the problem; it’s how we respond to the entire process of our nourishment and food and its source in Mother Nature.
FMT: That’s a huge statement. If you think about where we get nourishment in life and how it comes through food, and how that gets so disrupted and you look at how many people are obese, and how many people are searching for love and satisfaction through food.
SM: A third of our American youth, 33% is obese. There are similar numbers and rising of potential Type II diabetes within the youth culture. And there are new diseases every day that we can hardly put names to, all of which relates to the degeneration, horrific activities in our food source.
FMT: There’s this conundrum in the modern world of deprivation and yet not being nourished with this growing problem of obesity because people are seeking that nourishment.
SM: And yet, at the other end is the problem of emaciation. We have people here, especially in this side of the country, with celebrities and all of that, who are basically size 0.
FMT: Yes, we hold this high esteem of having no body, really, and being a size 0. So there is a lack of a good relationship with how to be nourished.
SM: And it’s just different karmas responding differently to the same issue. Some people eat when they are under stress. Other people can’t look at food when they’re under stress. And so the difference between the size 0 and obesity is just our individual response to the issue of nurturance, or lack of it.
FMT: So it’s like we have this disruption in our relationship with food, which is what nourishes us.
SM: Yes, it is the thing we all have in common as the human race: the destruction of the food source, the violence that comes through the food source and how it affects our tissue behavior, our tissue memory, and therefore our lack of nourishment at a deeper level of the body.
Not just physical, but a deeper level of the body, our spiritual nourishment that comes from spirit of self. The magnificence of the human spirit is that we can prevail. How do we function in spite of all of it is a phenomenal question. Yet, we can and do prevail. Through the development of and understanding our karmas and awareness, we can prevail to change and to make us whole.
I just left a sadhaka [sadhana practitioner] who refused to buy anything that is not organic, and I said: do you ever contemplate that none of it is really organic? A garden that is organic over here and a garden that is sprayed over there, poised on the land that is polluted over here and the clear stream is over there – it’s all affected. In one way or another it’s all affected.
Food is not the problem. The poisoned food source is not the problem; it’s how we respond to the entire process of our nourishment and food and its source in Mother Nature.
FMT: What do you suggest to shift this violence to our food supply?
SM: Mantra, prayer. More than intention it’s called sankalpa in my tradition, no translation in English; let’s say sacred intention that brings a pervasive consciousness to hold that space with food.
Mantras are powerful because Sanskrit is not just a language of the Hindu tradition. It is coded by the rishis [sages] in universal, cosmic sound. They understood the infrastructure of the cosmos in terms of pure consciousness and therefore the efficacy of each sound.
Brahmarpanam brahma havir; Brahmagnau brahmana hutam; Brahmaiva tena ghantavyam Brahmakarma samadhinaha.
Brahman is the offering. Brahman is the oblation. Poured out by Brahman into the fire of Brahman; Brahman is to be attained by the one who recognizes everything as Brahman. Brahman refers to the Absolute One, Pure Consciousness. All of these actions, none separate from each other. I’m not separate from my food.
The act of nourishment begins before I imbibe the food. It begins at the time even before the mind calls for it. It begins even before the seed is planted into the Earth. And that understanding blesses everything, it blesses the good Earth, it blesses the seed, it blesses the farmer who puts the seed in there. It blesses the rains to come on time, the act of that then goes into the fire of your other temple which is your kitchen. Then that temple blesses the food through your own awareness and then that finally inhabits the body.
And then it becomes prasadam, it becomes the major blessing as opposed to nourishment alone, or the thing that sustains us. And that’s where the awareness can go, it embraces everything.
We need to understand that the present is the karma of one life, so reconcile it, weep for it, laugh for it, and get on with your life.
FMT: In changing how we are nourished, it sounds like one place to begin is with mantra.
SM: Yes, but the mantra is not a tool, it is you. It’s your thought going to the nexus of awareness. Your thought striving to go to a place of understanding. Your commitment to that inner harmony becoming the first priority in your life.
FMT: It can come down to being nourished by your food, your relationships, your connection to your ancestors, your being nourished by the sacrifice your mother made for you. Indeed, this is a compelling reason to not be resentful of our mother.
SM: To understand our parents, we must know that every one generation is conditioned by their time and space. This is such a good message for women in particular. If we understood that we could never know our mother’s reality, we have not walked in her shoes, it would be a lot easier for women to reconcile their differences and angst and frustrations with the mothers.
FMT: There’s something that I thought of as you were saying this. Sometimes we could get angry, because we don’t know the circumstances at the time – it’s like getting angry at the sun for setting in the west. Because we want the sun to set somewhere else.
SM: Yes, it’s a beautiful analogy. It has shifted a lot of women that I have worked with by the thousands, just that one comment, just that one light on the matter. You don’t know them, you don’t know their circumstance. You could never know them, so stop judging them and therefore stop judging yourself in the relationship. There’s nothing to forgive, forgive what? What there is to do is to understand, that’s better frame of mind to work from.
FMT: And then it’s from that understanding you can be different in the relationship.
SM: Absolutely.
FMT: So it’s like you can come to the relationship with a different sort of understanding.
SM: Understand that I will never know. It was not my reality to know. And, more importantly it was not my karma to know. But I can strive for a better understanding of my own nature. Short of so doing, we keep on inheriting our people’s karma. I would say not inheriting, what’s that word when you take without consent?
FMT: Appropriate.
SM: Appropriating our people’s karma. How dare we? Have your own. It’s so wonderful to know. This knowing has freed a lot of folks.
FMT: Free meaning? Free meaning you get to move on to the next thing?
SM: Free meaning; to be who you are – a precious being with your own set of karmas to sort out. Of course, we are influenced by our elders, parents and forebears, but we don’t have to endure the same diseases as our mothers. We don’t have to have the same ailments as our grandfathers. We don’t have to have the same pattern of defeat of fear or success.
I use the word ‘awareness’ carefully as we do in Vedanta because it isn’t just consciousness; awareness is what belongs to the person. Consciousness can be collective, it can be familial; it can be global, but what comes through you is your personal awareness. That is your inherent right to consciousness. And because of that, look at the care that we receive. Even from parents who may not know what they are doing, or maybe are too poor to do what they would have preferred to do. We need to understand that the present is the karma of one life, so reconcile it, weep for it, laugh for it, and get on with your life. It isn’t that simple for most people because we tend to be enmeshed in the emotions, but after it’s reconciled it is that simple. And this awareness serves us to build what is necessary for the present journey.
For more information, visit wisearth.org.
By Felicia M. Tomasko, R.N.
Felicia Tomasko has spent more of her life practicing Yoga and Ayurveda than not. She first became introduced to the teachings through the writings of the Transcendentalists, through meditation, and using asana to cross-train for her practice of cross-country running. Between beginning her commitment to Yoga and Ayurveda and today, she earned degrees in environmental biology and anthropology and nursing, and certifications in the practice and teaching of yoga, yoga therapy, and Ayurveda while working in fields including cognitive neuroscience and plant biochemistry. Her commitment to writing is at least as long as her commitment to yoga. Working on everything related to the written word from newspapers to magazines to websites to books, Felicia has been writing and editing professionally since college. In order to feel like a teenager again, Felicia has pulled out her running shoes for regular interval sessions throughout Southern California. Since the very first issue of LA YOGA, Felicia has been part of the team and the growth and development of the Bliss Network.