Recovering Your Health

From The Book of Macrobiotics by Michio Kushi

In order to recover and develop our physical, mental, and spiritual health, we need to reorient our way of life in the following ways:

• we should reflect upon our own daily life, whether we are pursuing only sensory pleasures and emotional comfort, and thus forgetting our native potential for greater happiness and higher freedom

• we should reflect further upon our daily food and drink and consider whether our meals are really balanced to produce the best quality of blood and cells as well as to secure the best mental and spiritual conditions.

• we should also reflect upon our thought and behavior toward our family, friends, and other people and consider whether our respect and love are really dedicated from the heart and whether our behavior toward them is really serving for their health and happiness

The beginning of self recovery from all personal unhappiness, including physical and mental disorders, is our understanding of the perceptual order of yin and yang. In order to release ourselves from all physical and mental disorders changing our degenerative tendencies towards health and happiness, we must first apply our understanding of yin and yang to our daily dietary practice, how to choose, prepare, and take our food and drink. Through proper eating, our blood and body will become sound and whole. Mental and spiritual well being will naturally follow. food is creating us. If the nourishment we receive is proper, we are naturally more energetic physically, more comfortable emotionally, and more elevated spiritually than when our way of eating is imbalanced and disorderly. If our daily food is improper, our health declines, our emotions are disturbed, and our spirit becomes chaotic. Personal feelings, social relations, and our approach to any problems are influenced by what we eat. When we feel any frustration and disturbance, we should first reflect upon what we have been eating. Our physical and mental habits, as well as tendencies in our thinking and capacities of our consciousness all depend upon what we have been eating for a long period, from the embryonic stage through childhood up to the present. To change our food is to wholly change ourselves. Through food, consciously or unconsciously, we shape our destiny.