Introduction

Synchronous events sometimes emphasize a point in my life and this week I have been approached on the subject of food and diet by no less than three people. Nourishment for the bodymind is such a critical issue in sacred-spiritual life that you might wonder why I haven't addressed the subject already. I have no adequate answer except to say that I am inspired daily by so many pressing issues -- the need for a ritual ceremony at age twenty-one sanctioned and supported by an intelligent society to induct human beings into adulthood, the deep understanding of the spiritual teacher-aspirant relationship and how to distinguish it from the present-day manifestation of power play, and the fundamental need for parent-adults to be free of their own unresolved childhood issues in order to be equipped to support and care for the next generation -- to name but a few! It has been fun assembling the following information and guidance. I hope you find something useful here in this three-part BLOG.

We will be discussing food and diet under the following headings:

·                     Everything is an Act of Love

·                     Orality  and Your Early Life Experience

·                     Awareness and Sadhana

·                     Experimenting with Diet

·                     Conscious Eating

·                     A Moderate Diet

·                     How to Eat

·                     Negative Stimulation

·                     Changing Your Diet

·                     Idealism and Food Fadism

·                     Food Metaphors

·                     Spiritual Teachers and Inconsistency

·                     Living in This Present Single Eternal Moment

PART 1: Entrée

The following story is from the life of Krishna. Krishna's mother, Yashoda, has heard that her son Krishna has been eating mud:

And the Lord who had become a human child without any loss of His divine powers, now opened His rosebud mouth. She bent forward to peer more closely and felt herself whirling in space, lost in time. For inside the baby mouth was the whole universe of moving and unmoving creation, the earth and its mountains and oceans, the moon and the stars, and all the planets and regions. She was wonderstruck to see the land of Vraja and the village of Gokula, herself standing there with the child Krishna beside her with a wide-open mouth, and within that mouth another universe, and so on... and on... and on. "Oh God!" she thought. "Am I going mad or is this a dream or the magic wrought by this strange child of mine? "Krishna," she cried, clinging to His name like a drowning person to a lifeline. "Krishna." It was a despairing cry, for she felt her head whirling. Immediately, He shut His mouth, and she got back her equilibrium. In a trice, she had almost forgotten what she had seen. "Why have you been eating... ... ...?" She had stopped in mid-sentence. What a fool she was! This child carried the whole universe within Himself and she was worrying    about a few grains of sand! "Krishna! O Krishna!" she whispered, snatching up her boy in her arms. "Who are You? Who are You? Who are You?" she whispered.

Everything is an Act of Love

In spiritual life everything should be done with consciousness, with awareness. As we deepen into the aware state what is real appears more and more clearly and what is false begins to fade.

Before we discuss food and diet in spiritual life, consider this. Everything that is done in consciousness -- speaking, walking, acting in service, or eating -- is an act of love. Love to yourself or love to others -- it makes no difference at all. It is simply and straightforwardly a conscious act of love.

Love and consciousness affect the way in which food is assimilated in the body and only through awareness, consciousness, and love can food and diet be said to be spiritually nutritious.

What is the role of food and diet in spiritual life?

Food is a fundamental issue in life. It is nourishment for the mind and body, entertainment for the senses, punctuation in the routine of our days, a means to social contact and ego-distraction, and the center for a ritual of social cohesiveness or conflict.

Orality and Your Early Life Experience

Food is a direct oral issue and human beings today are fixated and obsessed with orality. Taking in the world, putting things in our mouths, taste and sense sensations, filling our stomachs, sexual stimulation, emotional stimulation, addiction to experience, and attachment to worldly events and circumstances stave off our insecurity and fear of not surviving.

Your orientation to orality is dictated by your early life experience. How much, how often, whether you can have it when you want it or it will be taken away, how greedily and desperately you take it in before it's taken away -- these are the oral bases of neurosis concerning sustenance, survival, and nourishment.

Working with a Sacred Attention therapist through the seven core elements in the context of the Process of Self-Discovery and emerging through the first stage of awakening is a way to release the egoic contraction and character limitations of our attachments to orality.

Awareness and Sadhana

Spiritually we begin our examination of the role of food and diet, as ever, with awareness. Don't change anything, simply notice what you eat, how you eat -- do you taste the food? How quickly do you eat? What emotional state are you in around food, the processes of preparation and presentation, the ritual of the food table, and how do you habitually approach the whole ceremony of physical sustenance?

Spiritually the issues around food are this: does eating support your ego-self or does it support your sadhana (spiritual discipline)?

Moving through your awareness to an understanding of how different foods affect your body emotionally, sexually, energetically, mentally, and physically is a good start. Become aware of all these things as well as your digestion and elimination. Be aware of restlessness and urges and impulses and their relationship to the foods you eat. Notice how emotions play a part in choosing what food you eat as well as creating emotions in you.

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Three important principles may help guide you to Truth. They are stillness, space, and joy.

Stillness is reached through deeply relaxing the body and the mind. In order to do this neither special preparation nor waiting for a special time are necessary or desirable. Simply enter into inner stillness now. Closing your eyes, breathing consciously, relaxing your physical body, and allowing yourself to feel peaceful are enough. Notice that even a few seconds of this conscious interruption in your mind-driven, forward-moving, restless life are enough to feel some benefit. Imagine if you commit to this for, say, five minutes... every day. You will begin to enjoy this stillness practice so much you will extend it to ten minutes, say, several times a day and so on. Embrace stillness as a way of cultivating inner peace, deepening in emptiness and receptivity, and simply as a demonstration of this essential aspect of your true nature that you may have ignored for far too long.

Space -- can you see that space is all around you? However tightly packed you make your day, there is still space. Mental space, physical space, emotional space, energetic space... and the heart thrives on space -- time to pause, to take in, to experience, and to feel. The heart thrives on space and conversely the heart contracts when there is not enough space. Recognize the space that is all around you and behind all your activities, thoughts, anxieties, feelings, relationship dynamics, and life events. Dare to enter that space on its own terms -- as space! Take space, occupy space, tolerate and flourish in it, spread out and play in it. Your contraction will lessen and you heart will expand.

Joy is available to you in every moment. Joy is a sign of spiritual transcendence. It arises naturally and spontaneously when you become aligned with your true nature. Every moment brings an opportunity to cultivate and choose joy. Deepen in your awareness of this choice and dismiss the negative influences from the past that cause you to favor misery and unhappiness. Breathe into your heart and allow feelings of heart-strengthening and expansion. It takes courage to choose joy and a certain abandonment of the societal and cultural norms. You must follow a carefree feeling of letting go. For far too long happiness and joy and their expression have been associated with a lack of responsibility and shirking duties. We are taught that to be adult we must be conscientious, diligent, and burdened, purposeful, serious, and hardworking. Yet we have a primary responsibility to ourselves to be ourselves. Your true nature is happiness and joy. Be truly responsible by allowing yourself to feel lightness, become less serious, and less purposeful. You may relax your tight hold on the reins of your life by surrendering in trust to existence itself and by choosing instead to enjoy living.

Stillness, space, joy -- nivata, nari, muda is the translation of these words in Sanskrit. Use either version to remind yourself and through the internal repetition of this mantra -- nivata-nari-muda -- manifest these spiritual principles in your world. In case you are dismissive of mantra practice, reflect for a minute on the state of your mind. Isn't it already filled with mantras -- demands, imaginary fears, worries, planning, dialogues, and insane gesturing? Perform a spring-cleaning of your mind -- bore it into purification! -- drop this mantra, nivata-nari-muda, into the crowded house of your thoughts and allow it to clear things up!

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To know that you are a prisoner of your mind, that you live in an imaginary world of your own creation, is the dawn of wisdom. -- Nisargadatta Maharaj

I remember my first visit with my guru. He had shown that he read my mind. So I looked at the grass and I thought, 'My god, he's going to know all the things I don't want people to know.' I was really embarrassed. Then I looked up and he was looking directly at me with unconditional love. -- Ram Dass

One of the earliest people to recognise Ramana's greatness was a famous poet and scholar called Achyutadasa. One day a holy man with a bright face came with his disciples for darshan. After performing bhajans, he sat near and caught hold of Ramana's feet and   immediately went into a state of ecstasy. As his disciples came to catch hold of his feet too, Achyutadasa stopped them and said, ‘This is a huge fire. None of you can get close to it.’ -- Kunju Swami

Much has been written about the feet of the spiritual masters. Many stories reflect the reverence in which the guru's feet are held. There exists a wealth of traditional knowledge about the multi-layered meaning and significance of the guru's feet. Here, however, I would, as in so many other matters, like to talk from personal experience... and offer a few anecdotes.

The worship of the spiritual master's feet, while firmly embedded in oriental culture, sits awkwardly in the West. The western mind has some aversion or fetish or Victorian embarrassment, even shame, about feet. The Nisargadatta volume, The Nectar of the Lord's Feet, for example, was mysteriously transformed into The Nectar of Immortality before it became popular with western readers.

Our feet are quite extraordinary and through the years my own and others' feet have yielded a wealth of teaching insights. Is this because they are the part of our anatomy that is most often in contact with the earth? Is it because they, by extension, denote the meeting of our soul and spirit with the world of matter?

Symbolically the guru's feet are the whole of her or him. Containing the ending of the nerve currents from throughout the entire body, they stand in a sense both literally and metaphorically for the guru him or herself. Therefore to touch the spiritual master's feet is to touch the master. Feet fill us with gratitude for anyone we love in our life, for their presence here on this earth and with us. But how much more do the feet of the guru incite our heart feeling and endless thankfulness for the divine presence?

The guru's feet stand in the heart of the spiritual aspirant. The meaning of this reflects the reality of the higher chakras or energy system in the body. The chakras below the heart or fourth chakra reflect personal, animalistic concerns relating to the world of matter, survival, and procreation. The chakras above the heart reflect our higher or spiritual sensibilities aspirations, capacities, and potential.

This position for the feet of your spiritual master, teacher, or guru with whom you are practicing sadhana is highly significant. It denotes your spiritual destiny as the Divine Person. The Divine Person or God standing in your heart feels at first like a massive weight. Then, as your heart responds with acceptance and yields to the pressure, so the heart breaks open... and open... and open. The only way to receive the guru's grace is with complete surrender. Total acquiescence reveals your true nature. Love becomes a storm in you, clearing away all impurities and leaving you in the impersonal, pristine state of source-less Love itself.

There is a wonderful story about Ramana Maharshi. A woman who practiced ceaseless devotion, the way of bhakti, always performed a traditional ritual when she came to Ramana for darshan. She prostrated herself daily before Bhagavan, touched his feet and would then place her hands on her eyes.

One day Bhagavan addressed the woman:

Only the Supreme Self, which is ever shining in your Heart as the reality, is the Sadguru. The pure awareness, which is shining as the inward illumination 'I' is his gracious feet. The contact with these inner holy feet alone can give you true redemption. Joining the eye of reflected consciousness, which is your sense of individuality, to those holy feet, which are the real consciousness, is the union of the feet and the head that is the real significance of the word 'asi' (being-ness). As these inner holy feet can be held naturally and unceasingly, hereafter, with an inward-turned mind, cling to that inner awareness that is your own real nature. This alone is the proper way for the removal of bondage and the attainment of the supreme truth.

Being is the pure state, attained when the individual merges with pure consciousness. The heart is the location of this merging and the feet of the Divine Person standing in the individual heart transcends any difference whatsoever. Love, Being, and the True Understanding are the three aspects of the true Heart.

Divine grace flows through the feet of the guru. During his second visit to Ramakrishna, Narendra (later Vivekananda) had an extraordinary experience. Ramakrishna drew near him in an ecstatic mood, muttered some words, fixed his eyes on him, and placed his right foot on Narendra's body. At this touch Naren saw, with eyes open, the walls, the room, the temple garden, everything vanishing, and even himself disappearing into a void. He felt sure that he was facing death. He cried out, 'What are you doing to me? I have my parents, brothers, and sisters at home.' Ramakrishna laughed and stroked Narendra's chest, restoring him to his normal mood and said, 'All right, everything will happen in due time.'

To those of you who aspire to the third stage of awakening, which I have spoken about in many lectures and written about in many books now, I advise the simplicity of the direct heart-opening practice of worship. Find someone who inspires you with such love that merely to see their picture, to hear their words, or to be in their presence ignites the heart of longing and centers you in the flow of radiant love.

When you find or suspect you have found that one, do not hold back. Your liberation is in sight and all else pales into triviality. When you feel the guru's feet standing in your own heart, surrender to the pressure, which is the grace of Love.

Over the last four BLOGs entitled Becoming Emotionally Literate we have brought some close attention to feelings, describing emotions -- both verbally and physically -- locating them in our bodies, our experiential sense of emotional states, and much more. I hope this series has been helpful and illuminating. Please share your experience of the feeling life and the content of these BLOGs for others to enjoy and learn from.

In this part I would like to discuss conditioned emotions, freedom and emotions, and the role of feeling emotion in spirituality.

Spoiler alert! Some of what follows may be offensive to those people who are attached to their personalities and character.

Emotions in the first stage of awakening (see part 1 of my book  Your Essential Self) are exclusively conditioned. They don't always -- and may never -- seem that way, but they are. Conditioned emotions are not free, not spontaneous or unpredictable. They are entirely predictable because they are reactive. Reactive emotions are familiar, habitual, and preset. You have emotional circuits inside you that proscribe how, when, where, why, and what you feel, how you deal with the experience of feeling, and how you express and demonstrate your emotions.

Through expectations and assumptions from your conditioned past you are wired with cues and responses and predictable sequences of emotional, actionable behavior. These emotional action patterns are rather like choreographed movements, participating in the mental realms as well as the emotional and physical ones that comprise a complex structure of psychological programming. This makes the patterns hard to detect and still harder to do anything about. Your patterns are inevitable in appearance and arising form. Thus you feel trapped, you feel their limitations, and you react against them. You react against your reactions and dig yourself in to a deeper hole.

In Sacred Attention Therapy we entirely dismantle the structure with insight and emotional and psychological breakthroughs by raising awareness of these patterns and their underlying foundational assumptions and expectations about yourself and your life.

In this way it is entirely possible to be free of your emotional attachments to the past and to embrace a fresh life of reality, love, and spontaneity. Freedom in emotionality is neither something to be addressed lightly nor something that can be embraced before you are ready for it. It is a tide of feeling that you will wash away all your fears and insecurities and throw you up onto the shore of spiritual surrender. So it is best approached with great caution.

Freedom in emotional life leads you into the state of authenticity and compassion. Feelings and emotions are sometimes completely impersonal, as you move beyond your individual identity, separateness, and the vestiges of divisive character.

Increasingly your emotions are felt spontaneously. Negative emotions stay for far shorter lengths of time. Emotional patterning has less and less power over you.

As emotions become less subject to censure and inhibition so they lend themselves to love. With feelings no longer controlled or predicted the sometimes fierce face of love, the challenging aspects of compassion, and the poignant tenderness of radiance and affection are filled with kindheartedness and warmth.

In spiritual life per se, or what we call in Sacred Attention practices third-stage awakening, emotions are no longer owned and neither are they personalized or subject to our will or intention. Emotions may come and go but the backdrop of placidness and contentment tends to render them less turbulent, less distracting -- more like a gentle accompaniment than the principal melody.

Not only personal emotions (the delusion that emotions are somehow ours), but emotions in the service of compassion recede. In the sacred-spiritual life of practicing consciousness in perpetual sadhana the inner or outer of the relative world are experienced as fleeting, never sustaining, always arising and leaving. Thus they claim far less of our attention with no particular effort, resistance, or manipulation. Unreality simply fades in the light of Truth.

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Next, the primary color of fear.

Acacia, blond, lemon, corn, and cadmium -- yellow has many, many variants of generic yellowness. In the same way the emotion fear can be expressed as panic, terror, dread, hysteria, desperation, apprehension, uptightness, worry, shyness, or hesitancy.

Which of these emotional variations of fear are you most acquainted with? Which do you habitually feel and express? Which do you see in others who are close to you? Explore the emotion of fear in yourself and in the world around you. Don't forget there can be a distance between feeling fear and demonstrating it, as there is a difference also between expressing fear and releasing it. Everyone feels fear at some time; how do you experience fear? What types of fear reside in different parts of your body? What happens when you close your eyes and give your full attention to anxiety, to worry, to agitation?

Draw, write, dance, sculpt and in other ways find creative expression to expand your emotional literacy by giving expression to fear. Every graduation of emotion that is given some outward expression lessens its hold on you.

Next, the primary color of hurt.

Absinthe, apple, khaki, keppel, laurel, and malachite -- green appears to us in many permutations and variations. In just the same way hurt can be betrayal, neglect, anguish, devastation, or pain.

Explore your personal patterns of feeling hurt. Learn to discern the exact shades of hurt that are familiar to you. Now, where precisely do you a hurt, how do you experience hurt, and what happens when you bring your attention to the physical location of painful emotions?

Apply the other principles of examination, exploration, expression, and release that we have discussed here and in the previous BLOGs in this series, concerning feeling and describing, and working with anger and sadness.

In the concluding part 5 next week we look at conditioned emotions and the freedom to feel.

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