One should be really cautious about cleanliness, like washing hands, feet, and face before sitting for any meal. We shouldn’t eat anything while walking, standing, or lying down. We should try to be silent or listen to holy conversations while eating. Eating at a place with pictures of God around or some saints sitting nearby is the purest place to have a meal, as it saves your mind from indulging in wrong thoughts.
Food As Per Modes Of Nature And Their Effect On Celibacy
Food In The Mode Of Goodness
Sattvic (goodness) diet is a prime necessity for celibacy and a healthy body and mind. Our meals should consist of seasonal fruits and vegetables. We should avoid those made available with the help of chemicals or delivered frozen from cold stores. Our food should be light, like wheat, rice, barley, green gram, legumes, chickpeas, cow’s milk, ghee, rock salt, sugar, sweet potato, etc. These options do not harm celibacy at all.
Food In The Mode Of Passion
Another diet category, “Rajasic (passion)”, stimulates the mind around desires. Food that is extremely hot, bitter, spicy, sweet, salty, peppery, sour, or oily, like Samosa, Puri, Kachori, etc., should be avoided. Including items like onion, garlic, red chillies, asafoetida, carrot, black gram, extra mustard, too many spices, meat, fish, egg, alcohol, weed, and drugs, will never let anyone remain celibate. These foods enhance sinful behaviour and make our minds fickle, lustful, aggressive, and greedy while deteriorating a person’s age, glow and competence.
Food In The Mode Of Ignorance
Consuming rajasic food when extremely hot or in too much quantity makes it “Tamasik (ignorance),” the third type of diet. Apart from the foods listed above, meals that are stale, tasteless, foul-smelling, burnt, refuse waste, and prepared in the same oil repeatedly make one’s intelligence demoniac. This type of diet increases evil negativity, and the person often stays ill, sad, lazy, foolish, hotheaded, greedy, unprincipled, sinful, needy, and immature. These foods should be avoided by someone looking to remain celibate.
Regulate Your Thoughts During Meals
Whatever we think/watch while eating provokes emotions inside us, secretes juices towards the gut, and affects the whole body. Even a Sattvik meal is affected by thoughts and has the same impact. Hence, we should not watch, read, or discuss anything negative that may pollute our thoughts. To keep our minds engaged in positive emotions through God’s name, we can watch or listen to some saint’s lectures, holy name chants, vaani paath of hit chaurasi ji, or any holy discussion on our phones/TV, etc.
We should not ruminate about food all day; instead, we should focus on our spiritual routine. Staying hungry all day or eating too much in one meal are the wrong options. Everyone’s appetite and anatomy are different, so one should check the amount of food he/she requires during the day. It should be enough not to interrupt your spiritual practices and daily routine. That’s why fasting won’t make sense for someone whose thoughts wander around being hungry all day. It’s better to eat something and focus on remembering the lord.
What Are The Rules Of Eating In The Daily Routine For Celibacy?
1. The eating time should be fixed and disciplined every day. Eating twice a day is considered optimum for the daily routine. The morning meal should be between 10 am and 1 pm, and dinner should be finished before 8 pm in the late evening. Food eaten very late at night is not digestible and harms celibacy. The diet should not contain excessive spices, salt, chilli, sweets, or foods that stimulate the mind too much.
2. One should not lie down just after eating food and should walk for some time; this keeps the body healthy and supports the spiritual routine. Consuming extremely hot food or drinks and going to sleep just after is not good for celibacy. So, if someone drinks milk before sleeping, it should be mildly warm.
3. If tired at night, one should not eat or drink anything and sleep without eating. You may eat early in the morning, but it becomes difficult to stay celibate if you eat hot food and sleep immediately after eating and are tired at night.
4. Drinking water during a meal is not ideal. We should drink water one hour before or after a meal, not while eating.
5. One should drink as much water as possible on an empty stomach just after waking up first thing in the morning. It helps to release body heat and enhance morning spiritual practices. Water kept in a copper vessel at night is good for the body to drink. Even Ayurveda suggests that this water has many advantages and can help cure many internal diseases.
6. We should also walk for a while after lunch in the afternoon and then take a short nap before resuming the daily routine. Similarly, the body should have digested the food we ate for dinner properly so that we can be active enough to do our prayers and then sleep peacefully.
Daily Practices To Strengthen Brahmacharya
1. One should avoid bathing with the geyser’s hot water daily. It softens the skin and weakens the seven bodily tissues defined in Ayurveda as “Saptam dhaatu”. Saints keep their physical bodies strong by bathing in running water on the banks of the Ganga/Yamuna rivers. It’s necessary for the body to feel cold and enhance restraint on our mind, thus helping celibacy. Follow this suggestion gradually as per your body type. Everyone should keep a check on their body’s capacity and practice taking a bath with running/cold water.
2. We should drink at least three litres of water daily. Water in the body is lost in the form of skin evaporation, sweat and urine excretion many times during the day. Hence, we should drink at least three litres of water and increase the intake based on the season. This saves us from the ill effects of constipation, indigestion, etc., that harm celibacy. We should not drink water while standing or lying down, rather sit in “Vajrasana (yoga pose)” and sip water slowly and gently. Not consuming water in the optimum amount daily may cause problems like regular nightfall.
3. A fixed and regulated diet is paramount to maintaining celibacy and following the spiritual path with strong control over the mind. Being on an empty stomach all the time or eating too much whenever one gets a chance harms celibacy equally.
That’s why we should follow all the above-mentioned principles and be cautious about our diet in our everyday routine.
Note: If you are struggling with nightfall or excessive masturbation or on a journey to maintain celibacy, these articles will be helpful:
- How To Stop NightFall
- Side Effects Of Masturbation
- Importance Of Celibacy And Ill Effects Of Mobile Phones
Guidance By: Shri Hit Premanand Ji Maharaj
