Ancient Wisdom guides us back to fundamental truths about who we are as human beings. My fortunate encounters as a student of Hawaiian Kahuna Abraham Kawai’i, gave me new avenues through which to experience existence through the body. These pre-historical indigenous teachings are based in the simplicity of Oneness. In other words, ‘Everything is connected to everything else.’ When we apply this knowing to the human body, we may notice that nothing occurs in isolation. While we may imagine that our emotions are somehow separate from our thoughts or spirit, they actually all occur in the same location. All of us is always here, now. The memories of our childhood don’t disappear when we go towork and our hopes and dreams are not erased when we’re at the dentist. Moreover, our conscious experience of Life, and even our identity, are in deep synergy with the more expansive part of ourselves: our cellular processes. Although we may identify with who we ‘know ourselves to be’, we are, in reality, mostly Life Itself.
When we consider just what has occurred in our bodies in the past 24 hours, without our conscious participation, we might realize that even our most brilliant thoughts are tiny in comparison. Since yesterday, the Life of your body has shed and replaced approximately 1 million skin cells and your heart has pumped 2,000 gallons of blood through blood vesselswhich include 40 billion tiny capillaries. We have a brand new stomach lining every 4 days and our taste buds renew themselves every 7-10 days. Clearly, we being lived by a Wisdom that is beyond our comprehension.
This Ancient paradigm teaches that not only are we mostly Life, but that this Life inside of us is itself Alive with consciousness. While we are in this body, we cannot separate spirit and tissue, except in our imagination.
Perceiving from this embodied place, nourishing ourselves with food can become a new adventure. In our current modern world, Food is often used to fill an emotional void, or supress difficult emotions, hence the popularity of 'comfort food'. How does our relationship to food change when we take into consideration this Great Mystery inside of us? We must be willing to listen with new ears, without agenda or interpretation. Eating what we think is good for our bodies is not the same as paying attention, and letting our whole system be heard. The language of the body includes emotion, sensation, rhythm, texture, temperature, image and color. The practice of listening to the language of consciousness as it appears in the body can open new doorways of communication with Life Itself.
We humans are used to being ruled by the mind. If we can create a practice of holding open attention in the body, we can notice how we actually feel in the presence of certain foods, how the sight, smell, appearance, and taste impact our system, It can take a bit of practice to notice if we are actually feeling or making a mental assessment. Most of us are deeply programmed to automatically base our perceptions on the thoughts and impressions of our conscious mind. Ancient Wisdom guides us back to the body. Our cellular self does not think, it simply operates in a synergy of wholeness. Our listening can become very simple as we align with the motion of this synergy. It can become very clear what foods result in vitality and well being, and which deplete us.
In my experience, I gradually began to feel what was only yummy to my tastebuds, and what was nourishing to my Life Force. My awareness grew to notice when I was eating to stuff my emotions, and when it was actually more nourishing to skip a meal. The proportions and quantities of what I ate changed, and cravings disappeared.
What nourishes us at the level of Life Force, nourishes us in every part of our being: the quality of our emotions, thoughts, relationships, self-worth, energy, awareness, connectivity and general health.
The Being of our Life Force, the Great Mystery inside our own bodies, becomes more available, the more it is recognized. As we listen, we may find it is eager to communicate. When we feed Life Itself, Life, in turn, feeds us with vitality, health and joy, increasing our potential to be of greater service to our loved ones, community, and world. If we can make the shift out of the old paradigm of separation, we may experience more interconnectedness between what we had previously seen as our ‘Body’, ‘Mind’ and ‘Spirit’. We may begin to experience our whole system in it’s natural state — as One.