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.Meditation on these yantras maychange the mind as profoundly as mantras can.Using mantra and yantratogether engages both the verbal and visual sides of the brain and canwork miracles for our emotional health.The art of bringing harmony to our homes is equally powerful.LikeFeng Shui, the Indian art of placement known as Vastu identifies the bestshapes and colors to use in the construction of home and work environ-ments.Vastu also takes into account many other aspects, such as thefour directions, the location of water elements, the choice of indoor andoutdoor plants, ventilation, and so on.Balancing Sensory Input 133Nature provides us with refreshing and inspiring sights, whichshould be sought out as much as possible.Our work environments andespecially our cities are usually deficient in the quality of colors andshapes.Grays and rectangular shapes are predominant.Architects ofhomes, buildings, and cities bear a responsibility that few really seem toappreciate.Keeping the eyes down is the best way to travel through mostcities, because of their ugliness and the lack of positive stimuli.Veryoften street advertising stands out with plenty of color and beautifulpictures.We should be aware, however, that such displays are designedto increase our levels of desire (see chapter 25).Of all senses, sight is the easiest one to shut down.Whenever rest isneeded, we can shut our eyes for a minute and peace will be automati-cally generated through the production of melatonin.TasteAs noted earlier, one of the translations for the word rasa is "taste."From the tanmatra of taste the water element is created, which is the pri-mary element that affects the Rasas.That makes taste a very importantsense when dealing with our emotions.Food chemicals that come in contact with the taste buds of ourtongue directly produce a variety of neurotransmitters.Eating sweets,for example, immediately increases the level of endorphins - our naturalpainkiller - in our body.That explains why a little sweet is very effectivein soothing a hurt child.Tastes also strongly relate to memories.Tastes that trigger agreeableand less agreeable memories will produce information molecules thatcreate corresponding emotions.Personal body chemistry and tempera-ment will also affect the production of information molecules throughtaste.If we feel an unusual desire for a particular taste then it is the cor-responding emotional effect that we are after.In most cases, it is fineto give in to it, as long as these desires do not become addictions.Thebitter taste is calming and detaching, the pungent taste motivating and134 WORKING WITH OUR RASASalerting, the salty taste sedating and grounding, while the sweet taste issoothing.Addictions to the tastes of chocolate, coffee (caffeine), meat (adren-alin, dopamine), sugar (endorphins), fats (endorphins), and so on arebased on the same basic problem as that of real "drugs": doses thatare too high reduce our own ability to generate the related informationmolecules naturally, thus creating a dependency on the related taste anda need for ever higher doses.The effect of the sense of taste goes far beyond the direct sensorylevel.It is unusual to taste something without eating it, so what we tastealso affects our emotions through digestion.The best possible exampleis chocolate.The extremely strong attraction that many people experi-ence toward chocolate is easily explained because it contains or pro-duces serotonin (antidepressant), phenylethylamine (the "love peptide"),and endorphins as well.If eaten in relatively large quantities, the agree-able feelings that are generally produced through the taste are rapidlyreplaced by the less agreeable feelings that are caused by the high intakeof sugar and fat and by a mildly toxic effect on the liver.Sugars especially cause emotional imbalance through the insulintrap: Insulin is produced in the blood to even out our blood sugar lev-els.When the body detects extremely high sugar levels in the blood, theinsulin reaction is so strong that our blood sugar level becomes too low,causing a new craving for sugar.When the blood sugar level is below thelimits, it creates depression.If too high it causes hyperactivity.Eating toomuch sugar thus creates manic-depressive cycles of behavior.Children especially need sweets now and then.It pays to rememberthat it is the soothing taste that they are really after.Choosing lollipopsand hard candies that take a long time to dissolve is a smart way toavoid overloading their biochemistry with the sugars and fats containedwithin sweets.The effect of foods through digestion is further discussed in chapter17.The taste of rotting foods in between the teeth is quite disgustingand creates feelings of disgust as well.Regular tooth brushing and floss-Balancing Sensory Input 135ing thus not only serves the health of our teeth, but also our emotionalhealth.SmellAccording to evolution theory, smell is the most primitive sense.Wehave less power over the effect of smells on our feelings than over theother senses because there is only one synapse between the nerve thatcomes out of the nose and the amygdala in the brain.The amygdala, inturn, is able to affect body chemistry directly, without interference ofour frontal brain, where our more conscious thinking takes place [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]