Eating food and Doing Yagna

Yagna is an important social ritual from Vedic times. What I am going to do is compare the process of Yagna with Eating. The intention is to drive home the importance of eating. First, let’s look into the components of Yagna.

1. there is a vessel
2. Ritual fire
3. Oblations offered
4. Boons earned

During the ritual, Divine Agni is started and in it oblations were offered. The offerings were believed to be carried by Agni to the gods, the gods in return were expected to grant boons and benedictions.

Now compare this with the process of eating. Our abdomen is the vessel, our digestive power / juices are Agni. Food that we eat are the offerings. The energy that we get is the boon.

In Yagna, the most important is the ritual fire. He is the messenger who takes the offering to God. In the process of eating our digestive juices are as important as ritual fire in Yagna. It play an important role. They digest the food and convert them to energy. Our goal should be to increase the digestive power of our intestine. Now how do we do that?

• Active lifestyle – Sufficient amount of exercise / active lifestyle plays an important role in increasing the metabolism of our body. If you lead an inactive lifestyle it means you are not adding ghee to the Yagna. When there is no ritual fire what is the use of offerings?
• Non-stop eating – Imagine you have started the ritual fire but you are constantly pouring too much offerings into it without any interval. You will be dousing the ritual fire, isn’t it? Likewise eating too much food and without interval will only result in reducing the capacity of our body to digest and in assimilation of nutrition.
• Oblations – Yagna is done with great reverence and the offerings are chosen carefully, likewise when we eat it is important to think about what we are eating. Today most of our food has no fibre. They are devoid of prebiotics and probiotics which are very important for the bacterias living in our guts, which  aids our digestion. These bacteria also secrete a hormone called Serotonin. An important feel good hormone. Most packaged foods are full of sugar and has no nutritional value. They are just a burden on our system.
• Dining out late on weekends is a must these days, but we need to understand that eating when our digestive powers are weak is like offering more when the ritual fire is not there. These only will wreck havoc on our digestive system.

In ancient times our ancestors did not categorise food as vegetarian and non-vegetarian. It was classified as Sathvik, Rajasic and Tamasic. Today most of our food style is Tamasic. We eat to satisfy the desires of our senses rather than to gain energy, heal our body and stay happy. Today because of our food habits we lose energy, damage our body and feel pitiful. The purpose of doing a Yagna is to gain a boon. The purpose of eating is to gain energy. If we are not care full of what we are eating, how much we are eating and when we are eating, then we will end up losing energy rather then gaining it.

Next time when you eat food, do it with great reverence as we are not eating, in fact, we are doing a Yagna.