Nourishing the soul- The story of the food yogi

First printed in AUSTRALIAN YOGA LIFE
(Sept – Nov 2013)  www.ayl.com.au

nourishing the soul

Sitting on the beaches of Sri Lanka at the start of his world tour earlier this year (2013), Food For Life (FFL) Global Director Paul Rodney Turner was quietly reflecting on his life’s journey. “I meditated. Why do I find myself traveling so much?” He wrote on his blog “Food yogi travelogue” Why can’t I seem to settle? The easy answer to this is: because I can. I am single, without any debts and a mission all over the world. “

But there is something more to this story “Yes, I travel for these reasons,” he said. “Anyway I am also traveling because I am looking for my home”

What does “home” mean for this yoga devotee who was born and raised in the western suburbs of Sydney and who runs the largest plant-based dietary relief organization in the world? “In a pure definition home is a spiritual field or where my soul is happiest,” he said. “Since I am not qualified to be in the spiritual field at the moment, I can only hope to find a sense of home by being in a place of happiness to my soul.”

Turner believes that to be qualified to enter the spiritual field we do not have to reach a state of purity so that our consciousness can tune into a higher spiritual frequency “Being in a place where the soul is happy means that, until our consciousness is corrected in a higher spiritual frequency. higher spiritual frequency, we can at least enjoy our connections in this world in the purest way possible through unconditional love,” he said.

With the slogan ” Uniting the world through pure food”Food For Life Global works with the hope that through the free distribution of plant-based foods prepared with loving intentions, it can help bring peace and prosperity to the world. Founded in India in 1974 by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness and its volunteers, who are now active in 60 countries, serving over 2.5 million free meals worldwide through initiatives such as free food restaurants, home delivery services, home and school feeding programs. Responding where needed, this charity also provides relief in many of the world’s natural disasters and war zones, including the war in Chechnya in 1994, the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and the tsunami and earthquake in Japan in the 2011. “

Life is about connections, and when we realize the importance of food in creating these connections, we will be happier” says Turner.

Tall and slim, with blue eyes and a handsome age-lined face, Turner is also an accomplished vegan gourmet chef, numerologist, yantra (talisman) expert, designer, poet, sought-after speaker at vegetarian conferences, and writer. On his current world tour he is working on expanding Food For Life projects, while also leading workshops and promoting his book Food Yoga: Nourishing Body, Mind and Soul . Determined to impart to others what he has learned through his decades-long immersion in holistic vegan cooking, Turner wants to emphasize the “nutritional and spiritual value” of food and it’s not just about the food you eat, but whether how they are consumed.

“Life is all about connections, and the more we realize the importance of food and the role it has in creating these connections, the happier we will be.” Turner was initiated into the Vaisnava traditions of bhakti yoga 30 years ago.”What you choose to eat has a great physical, emotional and spiritual impact” he says “When you are eating fully aware of the blessings of food and the power it has to transform and unite, you will find a sense of consciousness that will follow you through all your activities, helping you make wise decisions.”

The first days

Turner’s evolution to be the Food Yogi began when he was initiated into the Vaisnava culture tradition of bhakti yoga 30 years ago as a teenager. At age 19 he decided to join a community of artists in the Blue Mountains of Sydney where he was introduced to the basics of Indian cooking by a formal hare krishna monk. Seeking a sense of sensitivity, Turner became a monk. “I always had an inquisitive mind and wanted to know the answers, karma and reincarnation,” he told me. By studying the   Bhagavad Gita  he believes that he found the answers to the questions he had. “Krishna in the   Bhagavad Gita It beautifully explains how the soul is eternal and can never be cut, burned or destroyed in any way,” Turner says. “Only the body perishes, but the soul / where consciousness is located, lives and passes away when the body departs, receiving a new body, which is determined by the state of mind at the time we die. I love the idea that God gives us another chance if we make mistakes in this life.”

Turner learned to cook gourmet vegetarian food in his early years as a monk, and it wasn’t long before he was in charge of preparing Sydney’s Hare Krishna temple Sunday party, which drew as many as 300 guests. He was drawn to India’s Vedic culture of hospitality, that no one should go hungry, and it was an example of his selfless ability to provide food to those in need that inspired him to start his own food distribution program. “.

My first service was helping to make meals for the free cafe we ​​used to have in Parramatta,” Turner said. “A few years after I started my own Food For Life project at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, in the that would offer a free vegetarian lunch for students. The students began to know me from Priya. “Turner quickly learned that food had the power to influence people. “Pretty soon, I was getting free publicity for my charity work through local media outlets, and my recipes were being published in the student newspaper and I was paid to do catering events for Student Union meetings.” After this success, he graduated with a major in media,

Social issues in Oz

As Australia entered an economic recession in the 1990s, Turner became concerned with what he saw as worsening social problems, such as high unemployment and the destruction of environmental resources. “One of the things that we now teach our leaders with Food For Life is the importance of being relevant in the minds of the public,” he says. “I insist that whatever they do in their community, they should also try to target the social ‘soft spot’.”

Turner sought funding from the federal government so his charity could employ the unemployed by calling them to grow organic vegetables on Food For Life farms. Funding was granted and the project was a success, with participants leaving the program with additional skills and a new sense of confidence. Seeing how this was able to strengthen what Turner saw as an example of a social weak point – as a result of Australia’s high unemployment rates – he says, “What this did for me personally was convince me that With just a little creative thinking you can find a solution to any problem if you use food as a medium,” he said.

Another social pain point Turner identified was poor nutrition in children, after hearing that local school children were missing out on a proper breakfast because their parents had to leave for work early. She approached a school in Millfield, NSW, and offered to start a “Breakfast Club,” where students can come to school a little earlier and get a healthy breakfast courtesy of Food For Life. “We usually do fresh whole grain pancakes, farm fresh milk, granola and fruit. It was a big hit with the kids,” she recalls.

Food For Life projects currently operating in Australia include Crossways restaurant in Melbourne, which serves discounted food for seniors and concession cardholders, and Perth-based organization PAWS, which participates in the food distribution and community gardens. Crossways manager Jay Vaghela says he and the eight volunteers who work at the restaurant supply around 300 meals a day, customers benefiting from healthy and nutritious food that is vegetarian and freshly cooked. “We also offer free meals for those who can’t pay,” Vaghela said, “as long as they are willing to help us for at least half an hour at our request.” Volunteers are always needed, and “

It was the example of his selfless ability to provide food to those in need that inspired him to start his own food distribution program…

sustainable food production

Successes like these have encouraged Turner to position Food For Life Global not just as a food relief organization, but as an organization for social change. Keen to encourage sustainable food production rather than just food provision, the organization has developed agricultural and training projects in famine-stricken areas, and partnered with projects such as   Working Villages International in the Ruzzizi Valley in the Congo, where more than 200 different varieties of organic crops are grown, harvested and sold. Speaking about the project in an interview on the US television show ‘Good People, Good Works’, Turner said the project was going very well – with sustainable land use and more than 2,000 people employed. However, it recognizes that, as the United Nations indicates, there are more than a billion undernourished people in the world today, much more work is required.

Turner believes that a plant-based diet, which the Smithsonian Institution says is more cost-effective and environmentally friendly than a meat-based diet, goes a long way toward solving the unequal distribution of food around the world. the world. “The most damaging expression of selfishness is the growth of factory farming,” he says. “Of all farmland in the US, nearly 80 percent is used in some way to raise animals. Furthermore, to service the growing demand for animal agriculture, more than 35 percent of all grain production in the world is fed to cattle and not human beings”.

orphanage initiatives

An additional Food For Life Global initiative is supporting orphanages in South Asia, including the Gokulam-Bhaktivedanta Children’s Home in Sri Lanka. By providing safe accommodation and three balanced, vegetarian meals a day, the 150 children who live there are able to focus on their education as well as have improved physical health. During his current world tour Turner visited the orphanage and was very impressed. “We had to keep reminding ourselves that this was not your regular school,” he said. “Some of the children were actually war orphans,” having suffered the traumatic experience of seeing their parents murdered in front of them. And yet here they were, studying to be good citizens of Sri Lanka,

Food For Life Global’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. World leaders and politicians such as former South African President Nelson Mandela and US Senator Arlen Specter have given the charity glowing testimonials. And the former prime minister of Chechnya, Salambek Hadjiev, was once quoted as saying, “I pray that your Food For Life program expands to bring about a world of peace.”

work without rest

It is toward this goal that Turner and the thousands of Food For Life volunteers are working tirelessly. “By connecting people through food, you can connect with everything else,” Turner says. “Food For Life Global, therefore, serves food indiscriminately, and in doing so, no one is denied. Everyone come, we can feed everyone. All we really want from this effort is peace and prosperity in the world”.

I first read Food Yoga when I was seven months pregnant with my first child. As my yoga instructor had pointed out to me, it was a time to embrace the changes my physical body was going through. She believes that the body of a pregnant woman was like the soil of Mother Earth, and should provide a positive and fertile environment that is sustainable and cared for. And reading Turner’s book inspired me to do just that. She left me wanting to devour the best and purest food to nourish not only my own body and soul, but, more importantly, the body and soul of my unborn daughter as well.

Turner, who has her own daily yoga routine, says: “Food choices are an integral part of the yoga path, because according to these same traditions the body is our personal temple. Imagine practicing yoga while feeding yourself meat, white bread, sugar and caffeine. No doubt the mind and body would be completely disturbed by such a diet. It is easy to see that for a balanced, calm mind it is much easier to reach the goal if you feed the temple of your body properly. ”.

One of the most important rules of Food Yoga, he says, is that of ahimsa, or the principle of non-violence. “The food you eat should not cause harm to you or anyone else,” he says. “The natural questions are therefore: Is the food I am eating causing harm to my body? Am I unnecessarily harming someone in the creation or transformation of this food? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, you he is not practicing ahimsa and therefore he is not practicing real yoga”.

Turner puts this principle into practice by shopping for fresh produce at local organic markets and is happier subsisting on a diet made up largely of green smoothies, kale salads, homemade dhals, fruits and seeds, or walnut paté.

Unlike many healthy food books, Food Yoga does not outline specific foods or special dietary guidelines to follow. Rather, Turner acknowledges that everyone has different needs and there is no one diet that fits everyone. What he does, however, is that we should make an effort to incorporate more raw foods into our diet. “My personal experience has shown that the raw fruits and vegetables that people eat, make us more sensitive, intuitive and respectful of nature become.”

But as much as Food Yoga is about making better food choices for yourself, it’s also about honesty and respect for where your food comes from. It’s about awareness and being grateful for the food we receive. And it is about feeding our fellow human beings and acting selflessly with the food we have. “This is how one thanks Mother Nature in a practical sense,” Turner writes, “for feeding some of her children, in gratitude to her. they are not for mere self-gratification, but for the good of all beings.”

It all goes back to Turner’s global mission to further the work of Food for Life Global. “Food For Life literally is a revival of India’s ancient Vedic culture of hospitality, which is based on the principle of equality,” she says. “We are trying to teach people that we are all brothers and sisters, we are all part of one family… and we should respect every human being on the planet. If you honor the earth, if you eat pure food, if you share this Food in a loving way can literally transform villages, transform cities, and transform consciousness, because food is a very powerful means of love.”

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AUSTRALIAN YOGA LIFE

Author Suvi Mahon is  a freelance writer with articles appearing in parenting and children’s magazines and the Weekend Australian. Her latest fiction was included in ‘women and power’ Review. www.redbubble.com/people/suvimahonen

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