Imagine this: a meal in which a single bowl of buttered barley is set before you and you are grateful to have it. You quietly render thanks to the Universal Provider for your sustenance, and you eat slowly, savoring each mouthful while you feel the nourishment that enters your body, from tongue to cell to quanta.
This is love in action.
You are eating a peach picked fresh from the tree. You feel the fuzz of its skin on your lips, the tender yield of its exterior as your teeth break into its taut, rosy skin. A warm syrup slides to the corners of your mouth and a heady scent curls upward, a fragrant steam of life force and raw sunshine, embracing your face.
This is love in action.
Eating with awareness and gratitude is a spiritual act in which we are conscious of the life forces that sustain us. We can take that moment to recognize and give thanks for the interdependent relationships of all life on this planet. In so doing, our bodies become vessels of heightened spiritual awareness and joyful recipients of unlimited love.
Many seek happiness by having material stuff. They look for spiritual connection through the glitter of big buildings and pompous ceremony. They seek satisfaction in a mound of frosting on the cake or a whole cow sandwiched between the buns. Many today are consuming machines going faster, and faster, thinking less and less, losing soul parts as they go–like worn out cars flinging hubcaps along the highway.
Spiritual transcendence is attained through mindful thought and simplicity. Food today is hardly simple, as more is considered better and extravagance, best. As long as we have freedom to choose what we eat, what and and how we eat will reveal much of where we are in the frequency spectrum– or in other words, whether or not we are becoming conscious beings.
Why We Eat When We Need to Feel Loved
It’s not surprising that people often eat when they are feeling a need for love. Our unconscious minds make a connection between nourishment of the body and food for the soul.
When viewed with clairvoyance, eating for love is seen as a being a bit off the beam in our vibratory state. This imbalance will manifest as the response of reaching for food because the core part of us…deep inside…is aware that the act of taking in food is a loving exchange between multiple life forms and energies. When we eat to find love without knowing what we are doing, the result is calories, but no spiritual energy; weight, with a lean and hungry spirit.
Being Filled, Both Body and Soul
Often soul hunger can be greatly helped by slowing down, by noticing the simple things in life and bringing a reverent attitude into our lives.
My mother was mysterious, truly. I didn’t think so when I was young but in retrospect I think she was a guru. She used to tell us: “Let us dine, not feed.” I see now that this was more than a lesson in manners, but a message about simple, loving attention…and gratitude.
No doubt, she would fail to appreciate today’s fast food commercials with their busting ballistic buttons over the-one-too-many-mouthfuls, or wild-eyed eaters making gluttonous inhalations of ingredients slapped together without a shred of loving intention, a chemical mix made to part you from your money.
Television portrays our relationship to food as irreverent, self-absorbed and uncivilized. I would say “animalistic” but…have you ever watched a cat eat? They are so very dainty! In fact–other than hogs–I can’t name an animal that lacks more grace with eating than a human being in a television commercial. And when you get right down to it hogs are being the best they can be, while hoggish humans, aren’t.
So here’s food for thought: eating is an act of sustaining creation and of becoming one with that which sustains us. Next time we are tempted to “grab” something to eat let’s remember to receive rather than seize. Let’s strive to keep it simple and healthy. If we will let ourselves feel the love in the purest of food, we will soon reflect the loving consciousness that we have swallowed.
—And we will no longer be famished.