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Recipes for good health

A satsang offering practical health advice based on Ayurvedic principles.

"Eleven almonds in the evening, put them in water. The next morning, peel them and eat them first before any breakfast, anything."

"Turn your life to the Phalahārī diet... no grains at all in any form... no milk products... no potatoes and no bananas. The rest of the others, all you can eat as much as you like."

Swami Satyananda Saraswati responds to questions on specific health concerns, providing detailed recommendations. He suggests remedies for eyesight, including almonds and honey, and outlines a strict Phalahārī diet for weight loss. He extensively praises the purifying properties of neem and turmeric, and shares anecdotal evidence about the vitality of water charged with specific stones and rose petals.

Filming location: Breda, NL.

DVD 432

It is said that before eating, ten or twenty minutes prior, you take one teaspoon of yellow mustard seeds. So, one teaspoon of yellow mustard seeds, fifteen to twenty minutes before eating, is said to be very helpful. Also, Agnisāra Kriyā to strengthen your digestive system, and to drink anise tea—that is also very good. There is a problem with the eyesight. "I have a problem with my eyes. Would you help me to accept that I can't see clearly anymore?" Well, first of all, of course, we have to take all advice and precautions from the eye doctor. I'm sure that eye doctors have more knowledge about eyes than myself, so we should know what the problem is. Is it a diabetes problem or something different? First, we have to know the cause. If needed, some operation. And it is said, for the eyes, it is very good to eat almonds. Put eleven almonds in water in the evening, and that pot, cup, or glass should be ceramic. It means not this burnt ceramic, what we call china ceramic, but like a flower pot, this kind of ceramic pot. So, eleven almonds in the evening, put them in water. The next morning, peel them and eat them first before any breakfast, anything. Chew them as long as you can. In old times in India, they used to grind them on a stone for a long time, make a paste, then mix it with milk and drink it. There is also almond paste you can get, bādāma mūsli, but that is not the same. It changes something chemically when you soak them in water like this. So in Āyurveda, they ask for this. You can eat the other one too, but these eleven almonds are very good. Use cold, in fact, tap water. And it's good to practice Trāṭaka, but you have to ask your doctor again. The exercises, all bending forward, that's also very good. You have to know: if you are bleeding in the eyes, then you should not do them. Also, it is said carrot juice, vitamin A, is very good. So these are some pieces of advice for the eyes. Praṇām, Swāmījī. Many people have a problem with overweight, including myself. What can we do against it for body and mind? Thank you very much. Well, it's not difficult to reduce the weight. We need willpower. That's to turn your life to the Phalahārī diet. Phalahārī diet means: eat as much as you can, but you can't eat anymore? Then eat more—not only one time, two times, three times, but four, five, six times. Eat and eat. But what? This is the question: no grains at all in any form. This means no rice, no wheat, no barley, no corn. That's all kinds of breads and rice and cakes. Take out all that is made out of the grains. Second, no milk products, except milk in your coffee or in your tea, but also limited—not too little, because then you drink one tea more and one tea more, and only in the milk. And only in the milk. So, no potatoes and no bananas. The rest of the others, all you can eat as much as you like. You can eat salad, you can put oil on the salad, you can cook your vegetable with all kinds of spices, you can use a tablespoon or teaspoon of cold-pressed sesame oil or olive oil. When you put everything in the pot for cooking, then you put on the top a little oil. So you can eat any kind of vegetable, except potatoes. That's it. And no breads, no cheese, no cream, no rice, no pizza, no spaghetti, and so on. So this is one of the best diets. And you can have vegetables with spices, without spices, boiled, raw, as you like, and nuts. You can have every day, let's say, twenty grams maximum—twenty grams of nuts. So you will see that your health... your weight will go down very quickly in the beginning. And you will dream at night to eat some pizza, yes, and also ice cream. You will dream. So in which also no ice cream, no chocolates. Phalānāma, no gimujima ice. Most of the grain has a lot of calories and a lot of sugar, and so on. So no corn, no grain, no form. But you can have mung bean soup, green soy soup. Then a little yogurt, and then a little milk, and then a little piece of cheese. And then a little, then a little, a little, a little—a bite here and a bite there. No? Okay. So that is good. But, of course, you also have to know that you don't have a lot of calcium. But you also take milk in tea or milk in coffee or something. And with the calcium, you can take a little baked yogurt, a magga yogurt. And whenever you have a feeling to bite something hard, then carrots. And you know, it's very good. Carrots, you can cut them long and make nice chutney, sauce from vegetables with chili or without chili, or something like this, and dip in and bite. It's very good. Or you can shape little, little carrots—burfali saagman, no?—little, little. And then put a little mustard oil inside and a little mustard, and a little salt and a little ginger, and a little cumin seeds and a little haldī on it. And a little salt, and then a little olive oil on it. And this you eat is a very tasteful pizza. And then spaghetti all remains behind when you eat this. It's so nice and tasteful, only sat. So we have too much eating, that's why we are fighting with the kilos. Discipline—this is one. And second, you must exercise every day. Otherwise, when you are fasting, you will be losing kilos, very good. But as soon as you begin to eat, then it will happen like the bone being soaked in the fruit; it will look very different. That's it. And there you have to train the whole system; the whole system we have to change. Our muscles and tissues and the nature of the body take five to six years or ten years. You see that Divya Jyoti from Croatia? When she was coming, she could hardly walk like this, and now she's running like an eighteen-year-old person. There are some people who only get kilos from looking and eating. You know, yeah—cooking, your neighbor is cooking, but you are gaining from the smell. This is some have like this nature of body, but it can be controlled. It can be. You see, it's unnecessarily we are carrying this burden on our body. And then you have knee pain, then your joint pain and hip pains. So she was reducing in eight months, thirty-eight kilos or thirty-four—thirty-four kilos. But a thirty-four-kilo suitcase, can you carry when you have to walk to the second, third floor? Even two kilos or two, two suitcases you can't carry, so heavy, thirty-eight kilos. So that's it. We have so much kilos of... you can eat. So eating then the neem, that's very, very good. So you take the neem powder and mix in neem powder. So, a quarter teaspoon neem, quarter teaspoon haldī—this yellow spice, turmeric or kurkumā, kurkumā or turmeric, this is a yellow powder—and a quarter teaspoon ginger pulp, and a quarter teaspoon Triphalā Cūrṇa. This all mixes into one big bottle. Mix it all according to like this, okay? Let's say ten grams of turmeric, ten grams of ginger, ten grams of this, this... Okay, and then mix it. And then every morning take one teaspoon in the mouth, drink water on it. Then you will see what things are happening. The whole body will clean itself, you know. And at least once a week, you should apply it on your body—the neem powder paste. So you put it: neem powder, about two, three tablespoons—two tablespoons in one cup, put water on it, hot water. Next morning, go to the bathroom and take this and rub it on your whole body, everywhere, okay? Close your bathroom, yes, because you will look like a green frog sitting in a bathtub, a green frog. So when you have applied all this green on it, then you do your other business: brush your teeth, all right, clean your mouth. This means give fifteen minutes to yourself that you have nothing on your body, but only this neem paste. Beautiful, you will have a feeling you can't imagine. Then, after cleaning it, your whole body begins to breathe differently. And on that day, you don't use soap. Afterwards, you can use some sesame oil, cold-pressed sesame oil. That is something very, very good. And it is said that if you can get black sesame oil, that's another beautiful feeling. It's hot. It's hot after putting black sesame oil on your body. You will feel warm when you are very cold, and my heater doesn't function, and so, but then you apply a little sesame oil on your body, and you will see, like, your body is becoming hot. And now they discover that black sesame seeds have a high quantity of calcium. So there's one German lady, she's going to Nepal and importing from Nepal organic food to India, and she developed cake, one cake, like we have here, the moon cake, yeah, moon cook, no? So it was like with the black seed, so tasteful and high quantity of the calcium inside, and that's very good, healthy also. So neem you should have constantly at home, at least half a kilo or one kilo of neem powder. It is also for when you have a house plant, and there are some animals, and they don't go. Then you mix the neem in the water: in one liter of water, put one big tablespoon or two tablespoons of neem inside, and the next day, spray. Now, all these creatures will disappear. And if it is still not, then you put one tablespoon tobacco and one tablespoon neem—two tablespoon neem powders—and leave it in two liters water, two, three liters, and then the next day fill it in the spray, and then you bottle it, and you spray it. So this is very organic, very good. So neem is a blessing that you can have. Also, once a week, you put it on your head and then leave it for a while, and then you can clean it. That is one of the best things. The neem has more than one thousand good qualities. That's what we have. The title for the neem is called Nīma Nārāyaṇa. Nārāyaṇa is God Viṣṇu. So, like the neem is like a Nīma Nārāyaṇa. So, there are many, many good things which we can supply to our body: so neem oil, neem leaves, neem fruits, neem bark. If you have some wound and you can't hide it, it doesn't heal, then put the neem bark on it. Make the paste out of the neem bark with the water and then put it on it. Within three days, it will be healed. It's a great thing to have a neem tree, even without using it in your house. It is a good energy: kurkumā, iṅgva, and neem, and Triphalā Cūrṇa. Triphalā, so if you take Triphalā, that is these are the three different fruits: āmalakī, harītakī, and bibhītakī. These three fruits have a very high quantity of vitamin C and have a great effect on the purification of the blood. So, this is what I give. All these recipes have a very, very strong purification effect on the body, the tissues, the blood, the vessels, digestion, and many things. Or, you can mix and make this, and there you can buy the capsule, soya vegetable capsules, and you can fill it in, close it, and every day take two capsules, that's all. No, so we can do very many things for our body. And the best is that if you are staying in one place, so you can do. But a person like me, who is traveling constantly, ten months a year in different beds, so this is not, uh, not easy to carry all these things in the suitcase. There are some countries they don't allow, even... no, it's a very great difficulty to do when you go to Australia and New Zealand, and here and there they ask, "Do you have any spices or anything?" This is because of the agriculture problems. So, it's a neem. And the next day you take a bath with the rose petals. Of course, we don't have so much water, the Indian Rajasthan, you know. So when I'm talking about a bathtub, then see, you know, with one bathtub, one family survives one week for water, using it for everything: drinking, cooking, cleaning. And we just sit inside ten–fifteen minutes, and we let water out—this only Holland people can do, because you have so much water here. But these rose petals, we have a special quality of the rose from Jādan, dried petals, and they are organic. And what you do: you take in your hands and make it powder and put on the salad, or put in your milk drinking, or put on your yogurt. It is only doing like this. This rose petal from Jādan, whole day your hands will have beautiful smell. There are special roses, which roses which you can eat. That's it. Also, there is one more thing which we are talking about: health. Anything, you know, one lady gave me one glass pot, a glass ball, or a flower vase, clear. It's like an oval form, beautiful, and she gave me some kind of stones—little, little amethysts, different kinds of pink, white, and so on, not even half a kilo—and I put in that water and a flower. Now, this flower, which here will remain, let's say, fresh for one week, but they are two months as fresh, better than they were on the plant. What happened last year in the month of, I don't remember, March or something, someone gave me flowers and one leaf. This leaf looked like a philodendron, a big leaf, no, and it remained in that pot. I went to India, I came back. I went to America, I came back, still it was there fresh and good. Winter passed, I went to India, came back, and the leaf was as fresh as it is. And what happened? The leaf got roots. You can't imagine that this stem from the leaf stick, this will get a leaf. Now we put it in the earth. Now, because there is no node or anything, that leaf cannot grow, can't give a branch. But it's in very good condition, fresh and got stronger and stronger. All these nāḍīs, the veins inside, are thick and strong. This year, winter was cold, and I was not in Vienna, so someone mistakenly put it near the window. So that was a little bit of suffering; it got little brown spots because of the cold. But still, that is very nice. That is already one and a half years. That leaf which was in that water, and we put another flower, I think nearly two months ago, they are as fresh as it is, and now they also got the roots. So now you see these stones, this combination in these waters, there is something. So if you can put these stones for your drinking water in your room and fill it in this pot, and put some rose petals inside—the rose petals which you get, we have, I don't know, but maybe they have here from Jādan—and then drink your water, and then you will see what happens. The rose are ought to be very good for the eyesight. So I think while we are talking so much about eating, that we all have hunger now, already no? But we are talking about eating, that we should not eat now, okay? Any more questions? Perhaps yes. All the inside, not outside. Yeah, very good. Honey not heated, honey natural and cold. You wash your hands with the soap and nicely. In the evening, then it's one finger dip in the honey, little, and the eyelid down, and put it in like this, and this side also. It burns a little bit, little bit burns, but next day your eyes will be so pleasant, your vision will be so good. Yes, this is very, very good. If your eyes are infected and your eyes are red, and you have this, the burn, the best treatment or ointment for you is the good, fresh honey. Dip in it, do it like this, this side, this side. If you have infections, then it will burn a little bit, half a minute, you know. You sleep so nice. Morning, you will be surprised when you get up, so many ants are in your bed. No, that's not that, yes.

This text is transcribed and grammar corrected by AI. If in doubt what was actually said in the recording, use the transcript to double click the desired cue. This will position the recording in most cases just before the sentence is uttered.

The text contains hyperlinks in bold to three authoritative books on yoga, written by humans, to clarify the context of the lecture:

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