[excerpt] Sātyma: Smells Like Home

a ritual for Smell from (c) Sense-Care is Self-Care: Āyurveda & Yoga for Mental Resilience (2026)

All around the world, specific combinations of spices and herbs have made their way into traditional meals that can immediately invoke a sense of belonging and familiarity. These emotional conditions are excellent for ensuring proper digestion at a physiological level, but also make food nourishing to the mind (no matter what the food actually is). This is partly why, when we look around the world, some foods that modern science deems anti-nutritious—namely, carbs!—are not at all a problem when consumed in the context of feeling at home. Whether it’s Italian bread and pasta, white rice or curries, tortillas, or scones, our sweet foods are more digestible when the mental state in which they’re made and consumed aligns with a deep ancestral vibration. In Āyurveda, this principle is called sātmya—a word that refers to food that is suitable and wholesome to a person. This isn’t to say that we are limited to only eating foods that come from our cultures of origin. But it is an invitation to apply Āyurvedicic principles to all cuisines, not just Indian and South Asian, and tap into the roots of your agni so you can feed it what it knows.

Practicing sātmya doesn’t have a specific form—it’s basically a food adventure/scavenger hunt! Here are some suggestions to set you on the path of connecting to your digestive roots:

• Ask your mother if there were certain foods she loved or avoided while pregnant with you. This the most a direct line to what nourished your body as it was forming. Sometimes the foods she ate abundantly are foods you will not enjoy (or even have allergies to); sometimes the opposite is true. This exploration might reveal why certain foods are challenging to you, or why you have certain cravings.
• Ask family members if there was a trademark dish that a relative or ancestor made for special occasions—even if it is unrelated to your culture of origins (i.e., Sunday night dinner, your aunt’s “famous” Thanksgiving pie, etc.). Repeated exposure to certain foods would make them sātmya as well.
• Research and experiment with dishes and ingredients that come from your culture of origin, even if your nuclear family hasn’t cooked with them much. You might discover that your nose and taste buds “wake up” and “remember” foods that are brand new to you in this life, but perhaps were sātmya to your wider family lines (and, that you digest them well).
• If there are cuisines or foods that you know you enjoy and digest well, but don’t seem to have a direct connection to your ancestry, dive into the ingredients of those foods. There are often surprising connections between cultures that are continents apart. For instance, half of my family line is Polish, but I didn’t grow up eating much Polish food; when I learned that “clarified butter” and spiced lentil soups are common in that cuisine, I realized why I might be drawn to, and easily nourished by, their close equivalents in the Indian and Mediterranean cuisines I’d discovered on my own. The chilled dill-and-beet soup (borscht) of my ancestors looked a lot like the beet raita I learned to make in Āyurveda school and the beet salad that was my “regular” order at my favorite hummus spot when I worked in midtown.
• Experiment with cooking the potential sources of sātmya you uncover. If these new-to-you, but old-to-your-cells, foods agree with you, try incorporating them into your meal rotations if not weekly than on special occasions (perhaps when you practice an ancestor ritual).
• And if you’re intimidated in the kitchen, find a local restaurant or specialty grocery store where you can enjoy these foods made by an expert. In addition to enjoying the additional diversity in your food-diet, take this as an opportunity to nourish your emotions and mind by connecting with ancestors you may have never met and the land they called home; to honor the way that these foods nourished all of the layers of your family that have made their way into who you are, now.