Advice for Healthy Eating The Hidden Virtues of Food	(excerpt)
Essene exercises and methods

Advice for Healthy Eating The Hidden Virtues of Food (excerpt)

Wheat is an excellent food.  Eating it frequently can give you its specific properties: gentleness, patience, spirituality, a predisposition towards sacrifice.  While consuming it, you can internally ask to acquire the gifts that it provides.

If you have good teeth, you can eat wheat raw, simply soaking it overnight.  Otherwise, pour four cups of boiling water onto a cup of wheat and boil it 10 to 15 minutes.  Then let it cook very gently for two or three hours, without salt.  To eat it, you can add salt, or honey, nuts, and cinnamon, which is delicious. 

An excellent way to purify the body and to tonify it is to put yourself on a diet of boiled wheat for 10 days at the end of February.  It is necessary to consume approximately 300 grams of it per day, depending on your appetite – that is, about one cup per meal.  Drink a cup of hot water beforehand.  You can also eat, for an identical period of ten days, a cup of wheat and a pear or an apple per meal.

Eating wheat germ in the winter to support the heart is very beneficial, even in serious cases, but you must be sure to chew it well.  To strengthen a weakened person, it is recommended to eat about 50 grams of wheat germ, 10 to 15 minutes after breakfast or lunch. 

To germinate wheat, you must wash it and soak it for a day in a porcelain cup.  The next day, throw out the water and put the wheat germ on a plate; it has been sufficiently moistened to produce germination. 

Eating rye increases stamina and imparts idealism.  You can brown the rye before grinding it and then use it in place of coffee. 

Millet favors the tendency towards humility. 

At the beginning of spring and for the two months following, nettle supplies a highly reconstituting food.  It can be consumed in soup, in puree, or steamed.  It is very rich in vitamins and other indispensable elements.  Dried in the shade and reduced to a powder, it can be used to season soups, salads, etc. 

Fasting is an efficient method for toning up the nervous system and renewing the cells.  You can, for example, fast each week for 24 hours by not eating on Thursday evening and Friday morning.  These days we recommend are the most favorable. 

To get rid of certain faults, or an illness, fast, for the duration you have determined, during the waning moon – that is, between the full moon and the new moon.  If you want to acquire a virtue or a quality, do the opposite and fast during the waxing moon.

But, no matter how careful you are in choosing your food, know that you will obtain only mediocre results if you omit the most important thing – that is, making goodness the foundation of your life.  If you do not respect each living being, if your thoughts are not pure and elevated, if a high ideal does not guide you while excluding all negative thoughts and feelings, you will introduce poisons into your body.  And, in this way, you will destroy all that you have built.  To avoid that, send grateful thoughts, when you eat, to all of the beings, to the animals, to the plants, to the elements, to the forces that take part in maintaining your existence.  Never sit at the table in a mechanical fashion, without having a spirit of gratitude towards the source of all life.  The awareness of the grandeur of life, and the sentiment of gratitude that you will feel filling up your heart with a vivifying warmth, will contribute to the development of everything great and noble that you receive.