Hi angel! I love you dearly. Welcome back to the inside of my brain.
Here’s a transcript of this podcast episode for all my voracious readers:
As human beings, our diet is not just limited to the food that we eat. Anything that enters your body through any of your five sensory organs is part of the nourishment that you're giving yourself, because all stimuli have an energy.
I'm making this piece as a reminder and a call to action because I think we live in a culture where we're also obsessed with what we eat, but we neglect the content that we consume, the music that we put on, the people that we speak with, the environments we enter, the clothes that we wear. It all matters. Let's get into it.
At the end of this essay, I'm going to offer up a few yoga techniques that are going to help us all take charge of a more holistic diet. And I'm not just talking about what you put in your mouth; I'm talking about how you interact in general with all the ideas, energies, and physical matter coming in and out of your physical body.
Peace and love, y'all. My name is Etai Atula. I just spent the last year solo traveling all across Asia. I hit nine countries, a lot of ashrams, a lot of monasteries, studying yoga, and in the process, I've gathered a community of over 400,000 yogis. I've dedicated my life to translating ancient yoga wisdom into modern tools for transformation.
The fact that you are reading this means that self-development, spiritual awakening, serving this planet, and serving yourself is important to you, and I commend you for that. Congrats on no longer victimizing yourself and becoming the main character of your journey. I hope that I can help you come into your highest self.
Right now, I'm coming to you from my backyard in Brooklyn, New York. I'm home for a few weeks just before I go hit the road for my next travel adventure.
One thing I noticed about being back in America, the country of my birth, is that I can no longer deny the fact that we're living in a world where every day we have less and less control over what we consume. The very idea of curation and individual taste is being threatened. We get our food from a corporate grocery store. We get our music and videos from an algorithm. We get our movies and TV from a multi-billion-dollar studio.
The oligarchy in this country is alive and well, and I know this country isn't the only one. Globally, consumers are being force-fed different things through their mouth, through their ears, through their eyes, without being given the opportunity to give much of a thought to whether what they're consuming is actually going to have a good effect on the system. And I don't fault the consumers at all; trying to make a good decision feels like swimming upstream.
When I used to be in a band, we would tour all over the country and when we would get to middle America—in zones that we call food deserts where you can find nary a vegetable—there were a lot of days where I had a lot of trouble eating. Everything was funneling me towards: have this burger, have this fried dish. I'm not trying to knock you if that's your jam, but for me, because of the goals that I had for my body, I was not interested in eating the ultra-processed food that we call the standard American diet. And I felt like I was crazy for feeling that way because the powers that be have made it so that we are not the ones deciding what we consume anymore.
But that's not me being fatalist or nihilist. The reason I'm bringing this up is 'cause I'm about to explain exactly what we all have to do in order to protect and shield ourselves from the influence of companies and people in power who really don't have our best interest at heart.
One of my favorite teachers and authors of all time is a lovely Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thích Nhất Hạnh, rest in peace. He's the one who first introduced me to the idea that maybe food is not just what goes into your mouth. Food is the words you hear, the words you read, the images you see on your screen, the clothes you put on your body, the sheets you sleep in at night. Every material element we interact with leaves an imprint on our body. And in a world that seems to love diet culture, we have a terrible disregard for all these other facets of consumption and nourishment. Not because we want to hurt ourselves, not because we have a death wish, but because nobody has stopped us and said, "Why aren't we thinking mindfully enough about this?"
I mean, just for myself, I haven't left my house all day and I can probably fill pages and pages with all the things that I consumed. I watched The Sopranos with my dad—that's a mob show where they talk about murder. I ate some hummus that my dad made from a family recipe, and he put some canned chickpeas in there that probably got some citric acid, some xanthan gum, maybe some other additives. This shirt that I'm wearing right now, it doesn't look like cotton. It might be polyester.
I could go on and on. Now, when I first started my yoga journey, I was a little too obsessive about this stuff, and it triggered, if I'm being honest, OCD that runs in my family. I was terrified of putting something with even a trace of a pollutant in my body or on my body because I thought that it would kill me. This was a big problem, and I was denying myself the basic pleasures of life, like a slice of cake or streaming a simple comedy special.
Thankfully, traveling the world for a whole year straight allowed me to lessen my grip on that control and overcome my fear of taking in things that aren't a hundred percent pure. You know how much single-use plastic they use in Japan? I was still in that convenience store every day. I told myself, "I'm here to experience a culture authentically. I'm not here to judge anyone for how they exist. I'm just here to observe and learn and soak." The consequence of that was not that I got super sick or had a lot of toxins in my body; it was just that I brought mindfulness to the act of consumption.
Being in a strange place like India or Japan, where I'm not familiar with the customs or infrastructure, I wasn't able to just let my subconscious mind take over because it was all non-routine. It was all very new. In India, I had to start wearing a mask on the street 'cause there's a lot of dust there. As a foreigner coming from New York, I was accustomed to a different kind of air quality. I noticed myself getting sick if too much dust entered my lungs. So that brought a lot of mindfulness to the act of breathing.
And let's just remember real quick that breathing is food, too. The exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide is the most nourishing thing we can do. So take a deep breath right now and actually feel how that air feels. Imagine the air in the forest, the air by the beach, the air in the middle of a big city, and recognize how those are all different dishes, if you will, to run with the analogy of food.
So now the question is: how do we bring this mindfulness to things we do every day, to things that we're so numb to that we don't even realize they could be impacting us negatively? I'm talking about scrolling on your phone. I am talking about hanging out with that friend who's always complaining about everything. We bring all these opinions and perspectives into our mind, into our body, without thinking about how they're going to impact us.
By the way, I've opened up some time for one-on-one private yoga sessions. It's an entire hour dedicated to whatever you want to work on in that moment. Whether you got anxiety or back pain or insomnia or all of the above, I will help you design a personalized yoga routine that fits your needs. Check it out.
This topic was inspired by a question I got on Instagram: "Do you think that music lyrics can have an effect on your subconscious mind and your thoughts and your actions?" Yes, absolutely. And that doesn't mean I have to cover my ears and burn all the CDs that aren't holy in the name of God. It just means I have to be aware and conscious when I listen to this music and tell myself, "I'm observing this. This is a separate entity. This is not me." I am able to control what ideas I internalize versus what ideas just pass right through me. That's the main thing.
What is that one habit that you have where you're kind of just mindlessly consuming, not because it nourishes you, but just because it's a form of escapism? A distraction? And what are the implications of having that energy enter your field day in and day out?
Let's all understand that compulsion is the opposite of consciousness. Let me say that again. Compulsion is the opposite of consciousness, y'all.
Compulsion is when you do something without really thinking about it, especially when you know it might not be the best thing. Everyone has that form of escapism they go to. Maybe it's a bag of chips, maybe it's an adult video, maybe it's a psychoactive substance. What makes it a compulsion is that we do it habitually and that we do it against our own best interest. As someone who used to be a huge marijuana addict, I can tell you that it's so hard to quit your compulsions. I only got sober once I started doing yoga because yoga taught me something about consciousness, taught me how sneaky our brains can be.
So let's run with the example of marijuana for a bit. Stay with me. Let's say you're trying to quit smoking. You have that first thought of, "Oh, you know what would be nice if I rolled up?" Then you roll up, you put the joint to your mouth, and in that moment you're like, "Oh, should I do this?" It is a million times harder to say no in that moment when the joint is already at your lips. If your brain was following a recipe of compulsion, it's already completed steps one through six, and now at step seven, you want to say, "Dump the whole cake in the trash." That's going to cause so much cognitive dissonance in your brain.
Instead, you have to stop before step one even happens. The only way out is to unpack why you have that thought. What are you getting from it, and what is something else you can do to get that feeling? I'll tell you: the feeling is dopamine, pretty much. And dopamine actually peaks right when the blunt is up to your lips, before you actually take the hit. There's a reason why when you repeat a behavior it has diminishing returns; it's never going to feel as good as it did the first time because your dopamine gets way out of whack.
Beyond that, dopamine is not the only way to feel good, y'all. My favorite happy hormone in our body is oxytocin. The best thing about oxytocin is that it overpowers dopamine. You cannot hijack your oxytocin system in the same way you can hijack your dopamine system. Oxytocin only gets secreted when we feel love and connection, and it feels way better than dopamine. Dopamine can be very insular, very introverted. Oxytocin comes from being with the world—hugging a tree, hugging your dog, hugging somebody you love, laughing at a funny joke, receiving a compliment. That's how we must overcome compulsions, and that's how we bring mindfulness back to our consumption.
I'll say it again: your diet is not limited to food. Your diet is everything you put in your body. Part of diet culture is this idea of fasting. That's really not new. Actually, yogis have been fasting for a very, very, very, very, very long time. But fasting doesn't have to only be about food. You can fast from media. You can fast from human interaction. Just like fasting when it comes to food, when you fast on all these other things, it shouldn't be done indefinitely. Make a plan for when you will stop so that you can experience an isolated moment in time where you feel what it's like to not have that thing.
One of my favorite yoga techniques to stimulate this kind of fast, even just for a quick moment, is walking meditation. What you gotta know now is basically that walking meditation just means getting outside without your phone, walking around without anywhere to go, for as long as you please, walking a little bit slower than you might have otherwise without being obsessed with a destination. When you walk down the street, there is so much you're consuming. How does the ground feel under your shoes? What is the weather like? What noises can you hear? We either have our headphones on, or we're deep in thought, and we don't appreciate these things. Walking meditation can just make you way more aware of the food you're eating through all five senses.
Next, here are two journaling techniques that will really help with mindful consumption.
The first one is very simple. It's just the prompt: I like ________. Can you fill up an entire page in your notebook saying, "I like strawberries. I like The Sopranos. I like musical theater. I like a hundred percent cotton fabrics. I like silk pillowcases. I like photography books. I like going to the museum"? Why is that such an important and powerful practice? Because, like I said at the top, we live in a world where we don't get to choose what we consume. It's time for us to exercise our ultimate freedom of choosing what goes in our brain, what goes in our ears, what goes in our eyes, rather than relying on algorithms to fill the silence with noise. Do this journaling exercise so that you can design your own curriculum.
The second journaling technique is called Areas of Study. I like to do this at the top of every morning where I think of a few things that I would love to study, to consume media about. What do you actively choose to devote your attention to? What books, podcasts, shorts, or videos do you want to consume because they'll actually nourish you, not 'cause they'll numb the pain of existence? That's why I write down my areas of study.
I'll say it one more time, y'all: our diet is not limited to the food that we eat. Our diet is what goes into our body through any sensory organ that we have. This is a deep, deep topic that I'm personally still unraveling, but I've loved discussing it with you today.
I will catch y'all for the next episode. Peace and love.
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