(Indian Kitchen White Witchcraft)

On the morning of Ugadi — the new year in South India — the traditional practice is to eat a small mixture of neem flowers, jaggery, raw mango, tamarind, salt, and pepper.

Each flavor represents something life will bring in the coming year. Bitterness. Sweetness. Sourness. Spice. Salt. You eat all of them together, on the new year morning, as an act of acceptance.

I find this teaching embedded in food to be extraordinary.

We don’t get to choose which experiences come. We get to choose how we meet them. And the willingness to eat the bitter along with the sweet — not with reluctant resignation but with genuine understanding that both are part of the whole — this is the wisdom the tradition has encoded in a morning ritual.

Neem is a powerful plant. Neem leaves in cooking water are antiseptic. Neem twigs as toothbrushes maintain oral microbiome health better than many commercial products. The Ayurvedic name for neem is Sarva Roga Nivarini — the remover of all diseases.

But here is what the elders also knew: neem teaches the tongue not to only want sweetness. A tongue that knows only sweetness is an imbalanced tongue. And an imbalanced palate produces an imbalanced personality — one that wants only pleasure and cannot bear difficulty.

This is why bitter foods were always part of the traditional diet. Not because life should be unpleasant. Because a person who can receive bitterness gracefully is a person who cannot be easily broken.

Eat a few neem leaves in some honey every morning for one month. Notice what it does to your tolerance for difficulty. Notice what it does to your appreciation of sweetness. Sometimes the medicine and the teaching are the same thing.