Food has a dual purpose for the body. It is not what you may expect it to be.
One is to prepare us for what will come in our future. The other is to help us respond to what has happened in our past. Food is the fuel for how we choose to live out our purpose.
Do you eat to nurture your future? Or do you eat to hide from your past?
Food is conflict. Food is temptation. Food is delicious. Food is a blessed sacrament.
Have you noticed how food has evolved into things that we no longer recognize as food? Read the label on the side of the box and see how many words you can visualize as food? Have you noticed that disease transforms into illness without understanding the root cause? We seem to understand how we get a cold or a flu or an infection because those aliments seem to be aligned with the seasons of nature. But cancers, auto-immune and neuro issues are not of the nature of seasons. They are more of a mystery of transformation. Is there a connection?
Food is confict. Without conflict there is no story to our own life. Conflict is what teaches us to grow into what we are supposed to be. Food is a daily conflict that the majority of us struggle with. We wrestle between what we want to eat and what we should eat. Why is this endeavor so hard?
It is no longer a mystery to me on why God chose “food” as the source of the original temptation that would lead Adam and Eve to being kicked out of the Garden Eden.
Today we are “the lost” trying to find our way back into the garden. I mean that both literally and figuratively. Food: the eucharist is the giving and receiving of the divine in our life. Food is the blessed sacrament. Food is holy communion. We need to understand that food is more than just for our taste buds; that it is our connection to being divine, daily.
For 5yrs I have been putting off writing this post. Why? Could I be honest, 100% honest with you the reader and myself for that matter? Food is a consuming bugger of a thought process for me. I eat for pleasure, I eat for taste. I eat to kill time, I eat because it's there, I eat because my daughter didn’t finish her plate. I eat because it's medicinal, I eat because it's fuel.
It has taken me years to learn this “fuel” lesson. Food or fuel? What am I placing into my body? Everything we place into our body has purpose. We are conscious of this in so many other ways...soap, shampoo, sun screen; we only place a product on our body if it has a purpose. Why not take that same outlook to food?
Is it fueling my health or is it fueling my illness?
Food can have a profound effect on our healing and our lifestyle, especially when living with a chronic disease. With that said, living life with a chronic disease is tough enough and sometimes you just want to have a cheeseburger and enjoy. Chronic disease can take many things away from you and at times all we have left is the pleasure of a good meal.
Somewhere around 5 or 6 years ago I went to a nutritionist. My health improved dramatically. I did not get cured but I got much better. Then life became about choices between the food that I loved, the food of my past and the food of my future. It became believing in food as a fuel for medicinal healing.
Integral food? Food for goodness, truth, beauty, perspective: that is the outlook on food I wish to influence you towards. You need to eat. You need to enjoy the food that you eat. You need to have an integral purpose to the what, how and why of your eating habits.
Food is consciousness...and sometimes if we are lucky a shift happens…..
