All You Can Eat

In America, eating is often overlaid with meaning or divorced from meaning, but it can also serve as a vehicle of awakening.

By Mark Epstein, M.D.

"How can I know God?" Ram Dass once asked his guru. "Feed everyone," Neem Karoli Baba replied without hesitation. As someone whose family took pride in parsimonious dinner portions and the absence of dessert, the idea of the importance of food intrigued me. Didn't the spiritual path demand abstinence? What did eating have to do with wisdom? I assumed Neem Karoli Baba was speaking metaphorically, until I visited his temple and saw for myself.

Some years after I first heard Ram Dass tell his story, I travelled to Vrindavan, India, to the dedication of a murti, or monument to his guru's memory. Vrindavan is known as the birthplace of Krishna, a holy city whose very ground is worshipped as the body of the god. Neem Karoli Baba's temple was one of hundreds in the town, but true to his teachings, its dedication was an opportunity for a huge feast. Great vats of food were prepared by Indian devotees. Longtime followers of Maharaj-ji (the more familiar name for the guru) took the honor of serving lunch to the crowds. People came from all over the city and countryside and waited patiently for their portions, lines snaking outside of the temple courtyard as far as the eye could see. An air of quiet celebration, of peaceful satiety, dominated. There was enough for everyone, even the dogs.

The power of this simple teaching, "Feed everyone," is inescapable in as vivid a landscape as India's, where poverty hangs like the smoky haze of millions of outdoor cooking fires. In America, where starvation comes in emotional as well as physical forms, the maxim is no less powerful. What does it mean to feed everyone in a country where most people have enough to eat, where obesity is a national pastime, and where, despite our relative abundance, we are still loaded down with issues about food? The answer to this question has to do with recovering the celebratory aspects of the everyday. At Maharaj-ji's ashram the simple act of serving and taking lunch was an occasion for festivity and joy. Eating became a pure act of grace and gratitude. In America, eating can be either overlaid with meaning or divorced from meaning altogether, but it rarely serves as a vehicle of awakening to the spirituality of the everyday.

I found myself reflecting on Maharaj-ji the other morning while listening to a 40-year-old female patient tearfully berate herself for her inability to lose weight. Lonely and sad, her future, in her eyes, seemed bleak. "My clothes keep getting tighter and tighter and I'm never going to meet anyone and it's not fair," Chloe murmured. She kept turning to food to try to fill her emotional needs, but the short-term satisfactions always led to long-term frustrations.

An image of Maharaj-ji's temple celebration floated through my mind as she talked—so much food being offered in the midst of so much need. What struck me in my reverie was the pure joy at the ashram, not just of giving, but of consuming. The pleasures of food and the pleasures of devotion are linked in a capacity to appreciate the wonders of the everyday.

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