A truly elegant taste is generally accompanied with excellency of heart.
- Henry Fielding

Ayurveda Cooking Class: The Six Tastes

Nature’s evolutionary, self-regulating, nourishing, harmonizing intelligence is conveyed to us through her foods. Each flavor of nature’s bounty expresses a different ray of this intelligence. There is Sweet giving us comfort, strength, fortitude. Salty gives protection, lubrication, stability, and helps us “taste” life. Sour gives courage, clarity and the power of digestion. Pungent gives enthusiasm, adds spice to life and increases metabolism, helping us convert elements and experiences into things useful, beneficial. Astringent helps us pull it together, focus, extract the essential from food and the essence from life. Finally, Bitter gives expansion… but only by helping us let go, release, detoxify, purify.

When we include all six tastes in a natural, whole food meal, the body gets fully nourished. It feels satisfied, so cravings diminish. Most importantly, you build healthy tissue, increase energy, strengthen the immune system, feel light and comfortable in your body, and more clear and concentrated in your mind. When you eat a meal balanced with all six tastes, you feel peace ~ the peace of all that intelligence harmonized within you.

We don’t need to count calories, or measure protein-carbohydrate-fat ratios. We need to taste our way to wellness. Vigorous, vitalized, optimal health is really never more than six flavors away!

Photo by Gregg Weber

Our food brings us the intelligence of the sun through the six rays of taste.

To learn more about the application of Ayurveda’s Six Tastes, read about my  adventures
Six-Tasting the World ~

From Russia, With Love

The Fleeting Beauty of Spring