Monk Radio: Eating One Meal A Day

I was watching your video on exercise and you said that monks only eat once in the morning I was just wondering how one survives on that small amount of food I was short of sort of shocked when you said it do you recommend people who meditate to take this on absolutely um I mean I think I just answered this in the last question but uh you can survive with one meal a day you you clearly can you can't do much with it you can't go out and lift weights or run marathons or lift bricks um or what was I doing carry carrying computers I car had to carry all this computer from the room to here and that was um not not the most fun but uh well I'd like to actually turn it over to a living example cuz this uh aesthetic on my right is now eating today he ate one meal and you can see he's still alive let's ask him how he feels I feel good um yeah I mean like I said before like you just said it's going to depend on what you're doing but for just being here and meditating and studying it's not that you're exerting this tremendous effort that's just pushing your body or anything so one meal is really enough and I found that eating more then you're just leaving yourself open to oving and then you overeat and then you feel uh drowsy and lose energy really so yeah one meal one meal's good keeps you going I don't really even feel hungry it's like uh I found like you're saying it's just uh your mind plays tricks on you it tells you that need this or that but you get used to it and now it's it's not really even a problem the whole time I've been out here at first it was harder at first even just seeing two males later at night you'll be like oh man so hungry I want this I want that but then you get used to it and you adjust to it and then it's fine then it becomes it becomes the normal thing then and then there's no more problem I remember that I um on my first retreat with bante UT I um was one of those people who complained about hunger in the evening and um I really learned in in the first two weeks that it's not really necessary to have um more than two meals per day and um after I think three or four weeks being on Retreat I I wanted to try out how that is how that feels to to have only one meal per day and um I was so surprised that it was so easy and it worked so well and um out of that experience I can say two things it works it's possible when you meditate a lot and uh if you go on retreat with bante utad Damu he will not force you right away from the first day on to do do that um so if you if you can do that's wonderful and if not that's that's fine as well we will never force you to eat only one meal a day what I say would I tell the people here I'm so happy to be here now because we're so free we don't have to follow anybody else's schedule so I say okay we get food in the morning it's there um and you can take as much as you want as long as you eat it between Dawn and noon and you can eat us I kind of push people not to have more than two meals but I'll say you know eat it as you like we're not actually allowed to to to tell our students um to require our students to um to eat only one time what we're supposed to do according to the Buddha is eat only one set of food so we get our food for the day and then we split it into two parts if we choose you can eat it all then and have one sitting but this is considered to be the extreme end of what is allowed so you know many people do it and it's not extreme by any means it's it's quite normal and quite natural or you can split it into two parts eat some now and some later but you're still considered to be eating one meal you've got one set of food the point being it it it reduces the amount of of greed and attachment that's going to arise as opposed to going out and trying to find a second meal something different you know in the morning I had cereal and the and for lunch I want the pizza or something it's tort Jal just talking about it that was easier not having more food later on because like not not having in front of you not having to think about it all this and that's the the last thing I was going to say is that eating one meal a day is incredible in in so many ways the the as as nagasa says not thinking about it again you had had one meal that's it that's food food done no more food for the rest of the day it's it's it's a nonissue at that point you know that the food and when you do it again and again if you do that every day you find that food is totally a non-issue it's like oh now food time Bing finished and that was the the 24-hour cycle it becomes um quite easy to to let to let go of food when you eat only one meal in fact two meals two full meals is a lot more difficult um you you you will find that then in the evening you're expecting the third one when you only eat once it it is so reduced that the mind you know has no choice but to let go clinging and and wanting food for the rest of the day would be horrible so that you know the mind it's so extreme for the mind the mind's just like what am I going to do and it decides to let go and when it lets go then you feel great the other thing the other obvious um benefit not obvious but it's obvious once you clearly clearly seeable when once you start doing it is that you're free for the rest of the day now how much trouble monks have these days trying to find food at 11:00 or sometimes 11:30 and and looking at the clock and saying uh oh it's almost 12:00 uhoh this 11:00 meal has really tortured us time and time again sometimes you know you had your breakfast and then someone says hey you want to go somewhere let's do this do that oh you know what about lunch what do we do for lunch and and you've just lost half the day because you have to wait until at least noon before you can go anywhere that's what I find now now when I eat at 11:00 and it's like we want to go somewhere when will we go probably have to go after lunch so you've lost half the day when when you're eating only one meal a day it's like 8:00 we're out of here well what about lunch I ate already that's what we're going to try to do on uh on Tuesday anyway one meal is uh um We should strive for it the Buddha the one thing is that when monks ate one meal the Buddha would still encourage or allow them or um Express approval of them eating some kind of rice soup in the morning or some just boiled rice and water to make a a a rice soup um because he said that has several benefits and it's a great it's a great um uh sub substitute because it gives you that little bit of energy the problem is you eat after going on armr so you've got to go on arms r on an empty stomach and that can be difficult sometimes so it's good before that to have some some little bit and then after you come back to eat like when when we were at wat tamb and before our arms around you would bring me the the soya milk she wasn't she was a m a not even a mai I guess at that point I was a mai you were and uh you would be able to keep the the boxes the Tetra packs of soy milk so at 6:00 you would have one night have one and then I'd go on arms round and uh totally unrelated to the question but that one time I was just thinking about it today when I had to go on arms round I was thinking about the time when I had to go on armr half dead and I was like teering like cuz there what tambong is like is what 3 and a half kilomet from the village so I had to walk 3 and a half kilm with a fever I could barely see in front of me and I was like swaying back and forth on the road and just like Blurry looking at the road made it all the way to the village and just sat down I couldn't even get into the village was like didn't even have the energy to to go around from house to house so I just sat there until someone brought me some water and got me some food and brought me back to the monastery anyway totally unrelated just a thought okay mhm

Channel: Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu

Views: 55,686

Keywords: Ajaan, Ajahn, Ajarn, Awaken, Awakening, Balance, Buddha, Buddhism, Buddhist, Consciousness, Development, Dhamma, Dharma, Ego, Enlightenment, Freedom, Growth, Happiness, Harmony, Healing, Heart, Insight, Love, Meditation, Mindfulness, Monk, Nirvana, Noah, Path, Peace, Phra, Practice, Realization, Reality, Religion, Samadhi, Spiritual, Spirituality, Teaching, Truth, Vipassana, Wellness, Wisdom, Yuttadhammo

Id: d9NHIzDRMY0

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 15 2011