12/05/2022
My best spiritual advice is this:
Eat. Eat often. Put the full power of your teeth into your efforts, let your soft and searching tongue guide your food from your mouth to your throat. Swallow with the satisfaction of the newborn sucking mother's milk for the first time. Let yourself be fully hungry. Greet your hunger with the reverence of the guru that it is. Let hunger saturate your body, then eat. Eat as if your mouth were a prayer and food your god. Because it is. This is not a metaphor. Eat!
Eat as if food were s*x (because it is). Don’t eat just because you are supposed to. Don’t eat by nutritional labels, diet books or clinical studies. Eat like a lover making love to her beloved. Eat like the bee drunk on nectar stumbling around the entrance of a flower which later becomes fruit because of the drunken act. Eat not like you are merely the recipient of life but in full, ecstatic co-creation with it. Become a mindless eater. Let affairs of matter be decided by matter.
Don’t merely consume. Don’t eat as if you were only the consumer and not also the consumed. Part of eating well is surrendering to knowing we are also the food. Allowing for the reciprocation of biology. Sometimes I am the eater sometimes the eaten. Bacteria, Protozoa, amoebas, parasites, viruses, fungi, and all manor of flora reside in us, on us, because of us and us because of them. Food is as full of hungry lifeforms as it is of nutrients. Stop warring with them. Yes, sometimes they get to dominate, and that is life winning. Life is always winning, there are no sides because we are all one. We all create an interwoven biological tapestry of miracles. There are no losers in Life.
Eat what you are hungry for. Do not try to make do with substitutions or be satisfied with half-truths. There is no eating kale when what you want is cake (or vice versa). There is no pretty wrapper or nutritional claim for your longing. You hunger for life, so eat it! However it comes. Make no distinctions between what is good for you and what is not. Eating is good for you, what we cast out is all we cannot yet stomach about ourselves. Have no preference of mind. Do not make judgments or calculations. Hunger with the purity of a jungle cat, make no apologies for your appetite, let all table manners die. Eat with your hands, your mouth, the full force of your yearning. Let the juices drip from your chin unashamed. Play with your food, love it with devotion. Cast no aspersions on what or how much you, or others, eat. Eat as if it were a prayer.
If you fast, fast because your body longs for the ecstasy of emptiness. Not to prove your worthiness. Not to redeem your sin of gluttony. Not to force your flesh to comply with an ideology or to show your devotion. Not because some chart on Instagram tells you the perfect clock by which you can master your metabolism. The fire of your belly grows when it is fed. God is not counting calories or hours of abstinence.
Stop talking about food as if it were a sin. Stop demonizing sugar, or caffeine, or gluten, or any other food or part of food. Stop making some foods “super” and other foods “junk”. Stop objectifying all your neuroses onto the miracle of plenty we have access to. Sugar is no more addicting than a beautiful woman is asking for it. Take back your power and responsibility. Eat what feels good, not what you are “supposed” to eat in order for you to feel good. Know the difference.
For all that is sacred, stop eating (or not eating) as a punishment/discipline/reward. Don’t force down any substance because it is good for you. Consent begins here. Treat your body as the beautiful, autonomous, incredibly intelligent force that it is. Bow to its beauty and wisdom. Listen to the subtle cues it gives constantly. Resist the urge to colonize it (or anything else). Learn this one thing well and all else follows.
It all begins here. Love begins here, peace begins here, belonging begins here. In real, tangible ways, not ideas. It all begins with the first mouthful of mothers milk given, (if we were lucky) out of pure abundance and unconditional love. And every mouthful afterward when we decide our sacred worthiness. Eating is an act of love, of devotion, of being fully moved by life as life. It is proof of non-separation. The tangible evidence that we are one with all there is, that we are the one life co-creating itself. We eat and that food becomes one with our bodies, our bodies become one with earth. We have never been anything other than food for this one Life, we will never be anything more, or less than the divine substance which sustains all Life.
So EAT. Eat as if your life depends on it. Because it does.
