My comfort foods are spaghetti and chocolate milk. They have been for years. Not necessarily together, at the same meal. Especially not together since it would be a prajnaparada, a crime against Ayurvedic wisdom, since milk (the dairy variety) does not mix well with other things. They’re comfort foods because of the carbs and the subsequent serotonin effect, because they were both comfort foods for me growing up and have those pleasant childhood associations. And, in some ways, I suspect there’s a bit of the addictive allergy that may not be the best thing for me at play in my relationships with those two foods.

People often ask me about cravings: do we crave what will bring us into balance or do our cravings throw us further out of balance. The answer: It depends. It depends because it depends on our relationship with our ability to listen to ourselves, to our state of being in balance, to the nature of our body and mind’s innate intelligence.

So, when we’re truly craving something that is good for us, that we’re calling for from the depths of our being, and when we consume it, each cell in our body sings in a joyous symphony, well then, we’re craving something good for us, that is going to bring us back into balance, or keep us in balance in the first place. We can feel it, if we’re listening and being truly honest with ourselves.

On the other hand, if we’re craving something that merely makes us more out of balance as we already are, that exacerbates the condition of too much air, or too much fire or too much heaviness of earth, well, then that’s something to question, to stop and pause. To ask ourselves if we’re craving it out of mental habit, emotional desire or some convoluted need to ease some pain. Habit is a strong force, from an Ayurvedic perspective, and one which can pull us in directions we maybe shouldn’t go.

But then if we are craving something, we can look at what it is, and perhaps, what are some alternatives that could even be balancing. I’ve substituted chocolate almond milk today; it’s not as congesting or kaphagenic. I added freshly ground black pepper, fresh ginger root and some pine nuts to the pasta to heat up the wet and damp qualities of the wheat. And it’s been at least a couple months since I indulged in pasta, so for an experiment, I can check on how I feel. Tomorrow, it will be time to eschew the pasta for greens and not get caught up in the habit.

The easy part is making New Year’s Resolutions. The easy part is drafting a list, setting goals, coming up with plans and wishes and desires and creating intentions. The more challenging part is the day to day transforming intentions into actions.
Manifesting New Year’s Resolutions and making them part of our daily routine, our very breath and our embodied experience of who we are is the real practice. This is the tapas, the fire of our discipline. It is in the fire that our practice is forged, and who we are as a person is shaped and formed. Just like building a fire and keeping it going, the practice of integrating resolutions in our everyday life takes attention and awareness. Transmuting a New Year’s Resolution into a habit involves daily decisions where we choose to take a specific action. We tend to live our lives in familiar grooves, from pattern to pattern like continually driving a car down a muddy dirt road. When the tire tracks create deep grooves in the road, it is easy to drive down those same paired grooves. It takes more effort to drive the car along another path. This is what it is like when we try and create new habits and incorporate them into our lives. We have to gently coax our steering wheel, our tires, onto another track. We have to peer at the map and set a different route than the one that may have been chosen automatically by the GPS. But with enough repetitions of the new pattern, it becomes ensconced in our bodies. With enough time, the new becomes familiar. People say it takes anywhere from 28 to 40 days to create a new habit and for that habit to become part of our bodies, part of the routine of our everyday lives. Embodied thought.
I thought about this while gazing in the bathroom mirror this morning. One of my New Year’s Resolutions this year is to floss my teeth, one of the repeated recommendations of my dentist that I diligently repeat for a while before the intention falls away. It’s time to recommit and to remind myself that the implementation of this resolution comes in the daily decisions, in deciding to pick the dental floss up off of the counter and actually use it. Every day. Every day it’s a new decision, and that new decision creates a new habit. Soon, the resolution is part of our everyday lives, integrated as fully as the breath, practice made personal.