I’m making a few quick notes and edits today (3/27/2019) because people have been recently finding this really old blog post from 2010. However, if you want more in depth thoughts about food that are more current with my teaching, check out these blog posts and videos instead.
Dietary Shifts and Food Needs in the Spiritual Awakening Process
Awakening, Food, and Common Sense (video)
Building a Body Strong Enough for Awakening
Spirituality, Food Ideologies, and Diets
Continuing onward in the practical side of spirituality, this blog is about food. There was a point where I think about half of my conversations with my one of my friends revolved around food. This really isn’t an exaggeration. Both of us in our processes have been confronted by the continual need to re-evaluate what is okay, helpful, and sometimes devastating in terms of nutrition. I still don’t really have this figured out, although I’ll relay some of what I’ve learned from myself and others. The biggest part is to trust your own body to tell you what and how much it needs.
There’s No Official Spiritual Diet
Sometimes I get the feeling from people that I’ve met that being vegetarian is somehow better than having meat in a diet. Then of course, there’s the vegan movement. And there’s the raw foods diet. And there’s raw foods vegan diets. There’s something call pescatarian in which the only meat someone eats is fish, and there’s the Paleo diet. The proliferation of different types of nutritional beliefs is pretty wild.
Hi and Welcome to Your Body
The biggest first step starts with your relationship to your food. Most of us don’t have a relationship with our food. This sounds pretty cheesy, I know, but bear with me. It’s important to be mindful when you’re eating, but that’s not exactly what I’m refering to. It’s more along the lines of selecting the right nutrition for you (and not just following a random nutritional pyramid set up by a gov’t agency or eating what your family has always eaten). I have learned to trust the different foods that I get attracted to during the day, and then I monitor myself to see how I’m feeling. Do I feel tired? Do I feel energized? Do I feel sick?
What Not to Eat/Put in Your Body
If you want to get yourself moving into an awakening process or are already in one, you can grind things to a halt by drinking alcohol. I feel pretty awful pretty fast with around half a beer. I don’t feel drunk like a light-weight drinker–I just feel sick and heavy and awful in the stomach.
It should go without saying that drugs, cigarettes, and all that type of stuff will screw things up. I know some people have found interesting higher states with stuff like LSD (Ram Dass–I’m looking in your direction), but ultimately, that stuff is temporary and potentially damaging. It can also screw with your perception. Anyone in an awakening can attest to that fact that it’s damn hard to figure out what’s what with the re-wiring that goes on internally as it is. Adding another layer or filter can make things even more challenging/harrowing.
Listening to Your Body
Above all, it’s really important to listen to your body to figure out what works for you.