Our thoughts, our bodies, our emotions, and our spirituality- all these combined together give us identity, determine our health, and make us who we are. Mind-body-soul means that our wellness comes not just from physical health, but from mental health and spiritual health as well. To be “healthy,” we must pay attention to all three aspects of our nature.
Psychologist, coach and founder of Isra and now also an author-- Sneha Shah, and functional nutritionist, author and the founder of BONATRA-- Manjari Chandra in a session at the Times LitFest illuminated the listeners on such topics. The session was moderated by Kalpana Sharma, Lifestyle Editor with The Times of India online.
When Kalpana asked Manjari Chandra what motivated her to write her book ‘Heal with foods’, Manjari replied, “While working with hospitals and patients, I realized that when people get sick, they come with complete surrender that 'I’ll do everything I can to heal'. But before reaching there they don’t change the small things in their lives which can prevent them from reaching that point. There are a lot of books on food already but I wanted to write a book which takes us back to our kitchens and asks us to scrutinize what is there, how we cook it, and how therapeutic it can be.”
Talking about the power of food, she said, “If you eat your food like medicine, you really won’t get sick. That’s how powerful you can get if you eat the right food. What we eat drives our entire biochemistry. The power of food is immense.”
On being asked about her book 'What Shape Are You?', psychologist Sneha Shah said, “'Why do people behave the way they do?' and 'Who am I?'-- these are the two most important questions that my book tries to answer. The book talks about how the universe around us can be divided into five shapes. Each shape is a personality type. People can be identified with shapes. With the help of this concept, you can understand yourself, and the people around you. The minute you understand, you stop judging and you start understanding, accepting, knowing and relating in a much more wonderful way.”
Commenting on the emotional challenges that people face, she further said, “75% of people that we meet in this lifetime are going to be different from us. We encounter different people in our lives and we struggle to understand why people are behaving the way they do. In my practice I’ve seen the focus is often outwards. People try to change other people. But the matter or the fact is that we can’t change anyone other than ourselves. The only way we can make our lives easier is by understanding ourselves and the people around us.” She added that the quality of our relationships forms the quality of our lives.
Moving the conversation ahead, when Manjari was asked about the dieting myths surroounding us these days she said that eating all the time i.e. eating small frequent meals is the wrong advice. “Your body requires little food especially when we hardly do any physical labour. Always engaging your body in digesting and assimilating food is devoiding it from doing much greater things... You could just eat once or twice a day. Anything more than that is too much for the body,” she said.
Manjari also talked about how we’ve completely forgotten simple practices like buying vegetables, making our own ghee, pounding our own spices, serving people in the family and sitting down to eat together.
Sneha on being asked about the concept of happiness said that, “Happiness is like a changing goal post, when I’ve something it’s changed. Happiness is a decision that 'I’m happy now and everything in life is unfolding in the perfect space and sequence'. When I’ve that faith and hope going together is when things really start to unfold.”
(Byline: Devanshi Batra)
