Your Pharmacy Should be Your Pantry

As a psychotherapist I have been dismayed when clients beat themselves up because they are depressed.  How many times have I heard someone say, “I know I should feel better—I am trying to lick this depression, but I am failing?”

It seems to me that people often erroneously believe they should be able to tackle depression and by sheer will alone, wrestle this nemesis to the ground.

I want to climb a high mountain and yell from the summit, “Depression is not a personal weakness.”

Depression is a sign that our physiology is out of balance and depression is not just in the head:  often its roots can be found at the physical level of our being.

When we wrote Healing Depression the Mind-Body Way we were delighted to discover a great deal of research backing the Ayurvedic assertion that food affects mood.  The Vedic sages knew what modern science is rediscovering—–that we can infuse vitality into our being one morsel at a time.

Food and mood are interlocking pieces of the holistic health puzzle.

We all remember Mother telling us to “eat well” but what exactly did she mean?  The current proliferation of information on the connection between food and health confuses us.  We are continually faced with an overload of nutritional information that points us in different directions.  The list of books on diet and nutrition grows exponentially by the minute.  What information are we to believe and what should we dismiss?

The ancient science of Ayurveda answers many of our questions about food in a clear and comprehensive way.  Sandra and I believe that Healing Depression the Mind-Body Way illuminates this information.  In Chapter 14 we tell you how to feed the mind, body and spirit in a helpful and healthful way.  We do not talk about food in terms of calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, or even micronutrients like folic acid and vitamins.  There is, according to Ayurveda, more to food than its biochemical building blocks.  Instead we urge you to think of food as packets of information, couriers of universal intelligence and transporters of life-sustaining prana.

Good food becomes us.  It’s the life in our food that matters; the energy in the food becomes matter. Fresh, whole food chosen to meet our constitutional needs and eaten at the appropriate time of day is imperative for our health.  Make your pantry your pharmacy and remember that good health comes to you from the morsel at the end of your fork.  We urge you to think of food in terms of its qualities. We are what we eat, literally.

In our book we help you to understand your unique biological needs.  Understanding your body’s biological needs bolsters the desire to support those needs.  After all, everyone wants to feel good.  Knowledge precedes action.  We hope that by reading Chapter 14 in Healing Depression the Mind-Body Way you will become better equipped to embark on a program of nourishment that will  benefit your physiology, make the farmers more affluent and keep the pharmacist away.

 

Thanks for reading,

Nancy & Sandra

 

 

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