While biodynamic food and farming now are household words, you may wonder where it began. Stroll to the vegetable market and look for the finest vegetables in the organic stalls and biodynamic vegetables will stand particularly forward in color, size and potency.
Biodynamic farming is a vegetable revolution in both health and nutritional quality. A huge inspiration to live practically and in greater harmony with nature and the cosmic rhythms. It reflects an alertness of the world and its natural balance. The biodynamic way of cultivating farmland is also the most sustainable. This makes biodynamic agriculture and food products extra important for our health, environment and climate, both now and in the future.
Moreover, because biodynamic farming avoids adding toxic substances, it provides for a greater diversity of living organisms in the soil and in the adjacent areas. Compost with biodynamic preparations hightents soil quality and plant health. Several long-term scientific studies of organic, biodynamic and conventional farming show that the biodynamic method is the best to build and nurture the earth’s topsoil and bind CO2. In this way, growing vegetables, tending your garden and providing natural, clean food is a way to respect the mandala of your physical body, family and relationships.
Hundred years ago the Austrian thinker, Rudolf Steiner, began forming his ideas and came forth with a radical principle: placing the individual human being at the forefront rather than the system. He formulated these principles under a new name, anthroposophy. In his words, “anthroposophy is a way to grace, which will lead the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe.” Today it is a scientific and artistic movement based on a particular insight: that human beings are essentially spiritual beings.
Thus, anthroposophy is not only the knowledge of human beings, but also a method through which people have the opportunity to achieve recognition of themselves as spiritual individuals as well as consciousness of their origin in a transcendental world. The methods for this are well described in the anthroposopcal literature.
In Europe, USA and Asia, when progressive parents look for a suitable kindergarden or school for their child, they often choose a Steiner school, or the like, with the hope that here the child will have better circumstances for developing its creative potential and capacity for independent thinking. In Steiner’s schools you find subjects like expressive movement, dramatic art, music, architecture, sculpture and painting while using those topics as tools for learning reading, writing and math.
As we look into the philosophy of Steiner and of his contemporaries, we find that those days offered a lot of strange and extreme ideas to the aspiring spiritual seeker. Prior to this, there was a flowering spiritual culture in Europe, with both reliable and unreliable sources, from the established religion, folk heritage, the Theosophical Society and other secret and esoteric organisations. Rudolf Steiner claims he received his knowledge from the Akashic records. The Akashic or the Hall of Records are a space-like compendium of thoughts, events and emotions believed by Theosophists to be encoded in a non-physical plane of existence known as the astral plane.
Rudolf Steiner’s principles and methods regarding holistic cultivation cover a wide spectrum of how to let the vital forces of nature and the cosmos work in unison. In present day Sweden, the colorful village Ytterjarna outside Stockholm is a living example of this. It contains culture house, school, hospital, hospice, theater, green houses for biodynamic farms and so much more. It’s worth a visit to see it’s possible to combine the best of both worlds, modern and the ideal.