Eating food with the hands in today’s Western society can sometimes be perceived as being unhygienic, bad mannered and primitive.
However within Indian culture there is an old saying that,
” Eating food with your hands feeds not only the body but also the mind and the spirit”.
The ancient native tradition of eating food with the hands is derived from the mudra practice.
Mudras are used during mediation and are prominent within the many classical forms of dance, such as Bharatnatyam\.
Our hands and feet are said to be the conduits of the five elements.
The Ayurvedic texts teach that each finger is an extension of one of the five elements. The thumb is agni (fire) (you might have seen children sucking their thumb, this is nature’s way of aiding the digestion in children at an age when they are unable to do an physical activity to aid the digestion), the forefinger is vayu (air), the middle finger is akash (ether – the tiny intercellular spaces in the human body), the ring finger is prithvi (earth) and the little finger is jal (water).
Each finger aids in the transformation of food, before it passes on to internal digestion.