Why I Don't Eat Onions or Garlic

People ask me why I avoid onion and garlic. It sounds dramatic until you look at what I'm actually optimizing for. I avoided them initially because I was told to, and I kept avoiding them because I noticed a difference. This piece starts with those two foods and widens into something deeper and, in my opinion, more interesting: how inputs shape inner stillness.

Ayurveda has a language for foods and habits that sharpen, agitate, dull, or clarify the mind. In that framework, onion and garlic are considered rajasic and tamasic: garlic overstimulates, onion dulls. Neither supports a sattvic state, which is the calm clarity meditation requires.

So this piece isn't really about onions and garlic. It's about what supports a still mind. The food is just the opening, and the destination is meditation.

Meditation looks simple from the outside. You sit. You breathe. You close your eyes. In practice, it's incredibly sensitive. I'm still learning this, but one thing has become clear: meditation is never an isolated activity. It's the downstream result of dozens of upstream choices. When the inputs are calm, meditation feels almost effortless. When they're not, no amount of discipline fixes it. And I've abandoned more sessions than I'd like to admit.

This piece organizes those inputs across three domains: bodily (what you eat, how you sleep, what substances you consume), environmental (screens, noise, lighting, timing), and mental-emotional (stress patterns, unprocessed feelings, cognitive load). Everything upstream echoes into the sit.

What I’m really sharing here is a small map of what I’ve noticed supports stillness, what tends to disturb it, and why something as ordinary as dinner can quietly shape the quality of your mind the next morning.