If the Buddha Came to Dinner: How to Nourish Your Body to Awaken Your Spirit

by Hale Sofia Schatz and Shira Shaiman

Book Overview

If the Buddha came to dinner at your home, what would you serve? Fast food? A frozen meal quickly reheated in the microwave? Chances are you'd feed your honored guest a delicious meal prepared with love and care. But the next time you have dinner, what will you eat?

With so much processed food in the marketplace, obesity in adults and children dramatically on the rise, and digestive problems increasingly more common, it's clear that...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 078686883X
• ISBN13: 9780786868834
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Hachette Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

changed my life

I went on the three-week cleanse and have never felt better. Weight loss, while a goal for me, was secondary to how I felt and the concept of nourishing rather than feeding oneself. (I did lose 20 pounds on the 3 week cleanse.) Be warned though - if you choose to cleanse for 3 weeks it requires a time commitment. I found it helpful to actually plan out a week's menu (for shopping, prep and diverisifcation of meals). Recipes are good and very versatile. I have several friends who are now also interested in "clean" food and love coming to my house for dinner - even the skeptics.

Food for thought?

If The Buddha Came to Dinner is a wonderful opportunity to connect with the entire wholeness of food and feel great. This book illustrates that, as people, we often eat in our busy lives without connecting to the food. This is easily evident in everything fast these days. The book shows us how to take an opportunity we all have several times a day to connect with food and the spirituality that it feeds. The book takes you through a very manageable cleanse with many great healthy happy and delicious recipes. Looking at food in this manner has guided me to more clarity, energy, focus, and curiosity in ways to eat refreshingly. I am grateful to Hale for pointing out a simple and fun way to understand the importance of to whom we feed and how we feed it. This has shown us a way to access a stronger and vivid connection just by looking into what we eat to make us thrive. I hope there will be more books by this author to come.

If The Buddha Came To Dinner is a realization

This is an eminently practical and yet authentically spiritual guide to the vital subject of how we nourish ourselves on every level. The author touches us with stories of transformation from her practice and from her personal life. She gives specific suggestions without pushing the line into dogma. She knows the subtlety of her subject, and she approaches it with a gentle, graceful, but sure hand. I am greatly inspired by her chapter on Transformational Nourishment. Even the title says it all. We stand with our arms outstretched, reaching for the horizon yet it comes down to the simple day-to-day act of feeding our bodies, hearts, minds and souls. I have had years of experience trying different diets and I am pleased to say that this book takes all that I know to be true and puts it in clear, useful and inspirational form. It is subtle: you feed yourself in everything you do and think and say and feel. Each breath you take provides further nourishment. Now, which aspect of yourself do you choose to feed, to support, to give life to? I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a realization.

what a gift!

This book is a perfect combination of inspiration and information to help anyone use food to create greater physical and emotional health. I love that the book is extremely readable and funny but also is full of detailed, practical, step by step directions on how to make healthful choices and changes. I have already showed this book to my father, my sister in law, the woman who cuts my hair, and our teenage babysitter... every one of them found something in the book that made them say.. "this is exactly what I need!" what a gift!!

NOT counting calories---yeah!

Finally-- a book about food that has absolutely nothing to do with obessing over calories or counting carbs... this is a great book for real people, who think and feel and care deeply about how to take care of themselves on all levels. I think people who have burned out on "diet" books will find this heartfelt approach to food, and to life, extremely refreshing and useful.