Why is it that a lot of macrobiotics treaties ignore emotions and make you feel that they are only related
to food intake?

The roots of macrobiotics are Japanese and there is a tendency in Japan to ignore emotions. Some people with very strict macrobiotic diets are an emotional mess and it leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

It is clear that food intake has a bearing on emotions but there has to be more to it. Some of us
who have been doing macrobiotics for years know that emotional balance improves with yoga, tai chi and
meditation.

A sound macrobiotic diet is supposed to bring emotional balance but it does not always deal with
past wounds.

- Alvaro Daly from South America

Below you can read comments to Alvaro concerns.

Simon Brown - Jacques Mittler - Jampa Williams - David Passas - Christina Pirello
Leslie Ashburn - Larry Kushi - Phiya Kushi - Bill Tara - Meg Wolff - Susan Marque

Alvaro although it is true that food has an influence on your emotions it is not the only source. From a nutritional perspective a lack of minerals can increase the risk of depression and blood sugar imbalances lead to mood swings. I also think the living energy in whole living foods can change our own emotional energy. Aside from this emotions are also clearly effected by; patterns set up as a child, the weather, seasons, moon cycle, genetics.

Emotional responses may be acquired from people we grew up with. It is also suggested when we have an emotion like anger we release a chemical and that over a period of time our cell become addicted to that chemical resulting from physical cravings to get angry again to release that chemical.

I think these issues are not often discussed within macrobiotics as they are not something we have a lot of knowledge or experience in. Perhaps it is a case of sticking to what we are best at. My advice would be to seek other people or knowledge bases to help deal with past wounds, whereas macrobiotics and the food approach might be helpful if you just felt bad emotionally for no obvious reason.

When talking about emotions something that I also think has not had enough attention is our emotional attachments to food. Because when growing up we develop very strong attachments to certain foods, ice cream or chocolate as a treat or reward, it is important to create new positive emotional associations with the new foods. For this reason it would help enormously to be feeling really happy every time we eat healthily. I put on my favourite music or watch a comedy DVD with my children and eat with friends that make me laugh.

Within a surprisingly short time the associations get transferred to the new foods. Sometimes macrobiotic eating gets miserably serious with too much concentration on chewing and trying to feel at peace.

- Simon G. Brown

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Alvaro's question is a very good one !

I think Ohsawa did not worry about emotional and psychological matters. I suppose his teachings were intended for people who don't have emotional problems. But nowadays, we have to take them in account.
That is why I am trying to open the discussion on the fact that we must work simultaneously on the three fields: physical, emotional (and/or mental) and spiritual. This is how I understand macrobiotics.

It is a fact that food has a bearing on emotions. Anyway, without a psychological and a spiritual work, even a macrobiotic diet cannot drive by itself to good results. Thanks to Alvaro for her question.

- Jacques Mittler

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I totally agree with you if you do not love yourself, love life and especially the life within you, then no inner healing is possible.

- David Passas

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I think that it is more complicated than any one of us is able to fathom, truly. I think that Alvaro
makes a good point, but I also think that in this particular discussion, people have gotten quite
conceptual (a common problem in macrobiotics). We study the ideas that nothing is separated
from anything else and yet we do it ourselves. We separate food from emotion, say that we treat
one and not the other, etc.

Food is one component of healing. It is the foundation upon which strength and vitality are built. Without excellent fuel, how can we even consider handling our emotional well-being? I certainly agree with
alvaro, that in my study experience, I have heard that all can be handled with food…and for some that
may be true…but I also think that each of us has a responsibility within our practice and teaching to evolve ourselves, our theories and our teaching to reflect what it is that people need…

- Christina Pirello

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Hmmm... I agree that there is more to the picture than just the food you cook and consume. The environment at large is our food too. Along with the material world, we have the non-material world and so everything around us can be considered our nourishment. Even if a person eats a healthy diet, what good is that if the person is isolated, lonely, or cut off from others?

Health is holistic. Everything needs to be taken into consideration and to look at the big picture.
What about the weather? Does that person live in a cold climate? What time of year was that person born? These things all influence us -- it's not a simple cut and dried picture.

I agree that yoga, tai chi, etc. are useful to help move energy blocks from the body. The practice slows you down, keeps you mindful, and can teach you a lot about yourself. But food IS really important in this case.... What if you keep cleaning the rivers but people keep polluting them? It doesn't matter how many times you clean -- people have to stop throwing garbage in the water.

Since I have been teaching in Hawaii, I notice people ask about soy milk. They tell me they have switched from putting milk on their cereal to using soymilk, or from cow's milk yoghurt to soy-based yoghurt.

But what change has really been made here in terms of the energetic properties? Has someone REALLY changed their diet? Have they REALLY given up sugar, baked flour products, diary, etc? I was taught by my instructors in Japan that you have to completely 100% stop whatever food is causing you problems for any discharge (emotional and physical) to occur.

If you have even a little bit, it keeps those cells in your body alive, feeding the same emotional
patterns, locking in past wounds.

Isn't it Christina Pirello who talks about one's culture, food, and the influence of climate? I think William Spear also talks about this... Compare Italians and people from warmer climates who eat nightshades with people in Asia who tend to have a saltier diet and colder weather. Which is more overtly affectionate and possibly more expressive (at least on the surface)?

Having lived in Japan, the culture is certainly different than what I experienced living around South Americans. But once I got to know people on an individual basis, those I became friends with were deeply warm and compassionate, and no less emotionally expressive than me. It all depends on your perspective! So do people in Japan really ignore emotions?

I'm curious about the macro people being referred to who have serious emotional issues. Perhaps I haven't met enough macrobiotic individuals from my own culture to have a point of comparison and am still insulated from this being in Hawaii where the macrobiotic community is small? What I saw in Japan were people who were healing from deep emotional wounds through changing their diets, participating in community and a social network, and who were actively speaking about their traumas in a healing context.

My impression though is that there are long lasting effects of deep trauma that can take a lifetime to unravel. Can you compare that person who has these emotional issues with the person he/she was before becoming macrobiotic?

Have there been improvements? If not, then the person's diet/lifestyle must NOT be really balanced.
Strict does not imply balanced.

- Leslie Ashburn

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I agree that food is not everything. What one does with the food - and your body - is also important. We cannot assume that just because one eats "macrobiotic" food that one will be healthy or live a fulfilling life. If you also smoke cigarettes, do not get any activity, and do not find time to enjoy nature and the company of your friends, then that is a poor existence indeed.

- Larry Kushi

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Alvaro's concerns are not uncommon and have been echoed through the years and there are books in the
past that offer advice that aren't food centered from macrobiotic promoters like BIll Tara's book on Human
Behavior, Ron Koetzsch's book "Macrobiotics Beyond Food." Other macorbiotic promoters offer courses that deal with more emotional issues like Bill Spear ,Tom Monte, Evan Root and others. So really there is no
shortage in macrobiotic offerings that deal with the subject of emotions from standpoint other than food.

Exercise or an active life-style is essential in maintaining good physical and emotional health and is always
included in macrobiotic recommendations. Physical movement helps us to eliminate excesses much faster
(that we get from our food) which would otherwise stagnate and then affect our moods and emotions.
Additionally Michio includes "singing a happy song" in his recommendations as a way for people uplift their moods.

One thing that Alvaro should do is not underestimate the importance and power that food plays in the role
of emotions. There is more and more evidence linking aggression, delinquency and criminal behavior to
dietary patterns. It is well known that elminating sugar foods from children's diets make them more calm,
well-behaved and able to concentrate. At present, the conventional way to treat emotional disorders
is primarily through drugs and chemicals substances. If such chemicals are powerful enough to
alter emotions, why not food?

While changes in our diets can greatly effects the degree of our emotional reactions to certain situations
(e.g. from mild upset to extreme outburst) it doesn't necessarily determine WHY we react the way we do
(which inludes whether or not we choose to be wounded or not by certain experiences) and that is more
due to social conditioning. To that end there is everything from family upbringing, schooling, communities,
religion - basically our entire social world, that influences that. How individuals find their "inner peace"
is entirely up to them because it is based solely on their own past experiences and no one else and it
may take them their entire life to find.

A major source of emotional wounding stems from problems in relationships and sexuality or a misunderstandingsbetween masculine and feminine persons (be they straight or gay). One person that offers clarification in that area in a way that is also consistent with yin/yang principals (although he does not call it that) is David Deida who teaches the yoga of sexuality at place like the Omega Institute and Kripalu Yoga Center.

His teachings stem from ancient Yogic principals as represented by Shiva and Shakti. He has written several books including the "Way Of The Superior Man" that I recommend to both men and women interested in exploring and finding solutions with masculine and feminine issues. But in this area too, because it is fundamentally tied to our biology, also is greatly impacted by what we eat. By combining his analysis of the masculine and feminine with the yin/yang principals of macrobiotics one can see how changes in diet can influence those issues either positively or negatively.

- Phiya Kushi

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Thanks for the Alvaro comment. The issue of the relationship between emotions and food has been on the macrobiotic agenda for decades. Many people who have observed the macrobiotic community at work and play from the outside bring it up.

The usual remarks are that we seem cool, aloof, or repressed, humourless as a group. This is perhaps an unfair generalization but it is interesting. Many of the people making these remarks have respect for macrobiotic ideas and ideals it is the people they find disturbing. It would be too easy to simply reject these observations as the distorted views of the unenlightened or
the physically ill. If it walks like a duck and looks like a duck.

We know that diet has a huge influence on our physical and emotional well being. As far as I'm concerned that is an indisputable fact. It is also evident that there are other collective factors that affect our emotional life such as culture, family and environment. The relationship of these other forces to the macrobiotic diet might be an interesting discussion but I want to focus on the perception that there is a particular or even peculiar macrobiotic emotional manner.

Why do observers perceive this? It might be productive to look at our ideas about food, our ideas about illness and the culture those ideas have created.

The fundamentals of the macrobiotic approach to diet would save countless lives, improve the well being of billions of people and assist greatly in solving the problem of world hunger if universally applied. These benefits do not depend on strict adherence to any specific dietary regimen.

Only the application of the "big ideas" of whole grains as principle food, vegetable protein, locally grown vegetables and the like are essential. A little truth goes a long way but the devil is in the details. Is it possible to be too concerned with what we eat?

If we proceed on the premise that everything we want and need is supplied by food we can easily become myopic and our growth stunted. This extreme focus may be needed in the case of eating for a specific health goal but not as a well-rounded way of life. If we really think that we can chew our way through any problem or that we can eat our way to emotional health or spiritual enlightenment we are being lazy.

This is where the "macro" becomes "micro". We might become expert eaters but we don't need our unique human attributes to do that. This is definitely a yang symptom, reflective of a desire to reduce everything down to one neat, manageable, tidy package reflective of narrow conceptual thinking but not of the wonderful complexity of life.

Groups of people who conform to any belief system form a culture. This includes macrobiotics too.
Codes of behaviour are fundamental in any culture these behaviours are often in place to formalize
the culture, maintain orthodoxy and externalise the teachings and beliefs. Just as in any culture macrobiotics has certain rules of behaviour that are implicit or explicit in macrobiotic teaching.

If displays of emotion are seen as "a discharge" (a sign of physical or emotional imbalance), what kind
of behaviour is acceptable? Certainly the answer has to be emotional reserve. If eating outside of rigid
guidelines is considered "binging " or if fear is a dominant factor in food choices then certainly we are
talking about repressive behaviour. It would be impossible that these traits would not be reflected in
the emotional profile of the community.

One thing that may bother Alvaro and others is that Macrobiotic philosophy is put forward as a total
way of life (a promise that may be unwise in any case) and as yet it is not. Macrobiotic people shop
around for ways to carry out their desires beyond food and that's a good thing too. The world is full
of wonderful teachings.

The macrobiotic focus has always been on how food affects our health and the conclusions of that focus have been generally good. Excursions into the broader world are seldom seen by the macrobiotic orthodoxy as important. Information generated, outside Asia in particular, is seen as more of a condiment to the main course. What we should eat?

The conceptual application by teachers of yin/yang to comment on culture, history, mythology and the like is interesting but often has little application to daily life in quite the way that food choices and cooking have. I am sure that the work of Tom Monte, Evan Root and Bill Spear reflect their practice of macrobiotics. I am also sure that many macrobiotic counsellors reccommed other physical, emotional or spiritual exercises to their clients. That is a long way from that work being identified as an official part of a "macrobiotic" way of life.

- Bill Tara

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