Food IS Love (Re-Feeding part III)

feast inside...

I love food.

The bounty of textures on my tongue

kissing my belly, dancing through my blood,

feeding the ancestors, fueling the rain, praising the sun.

I become every blazing star, each mycorrhizal soil sprout,

when I feast from Gaia’s garden, hand to crying open mouth.

*FOOD IS LOVE

Love is fresh picked blackberry pies in the summer after a day getting snagged in the clear cut scrambling over nurse logs for our evening treat. It’s curtains of fresh pasta hanging in the kitchen hiding the top of my father’s head as he sweat over homemade spaghetti sauce. It’s fresh caught lobster with new friends every night for a week off the lip of Tobacco Caye, Belize.

Love is the secret 72 ingredient Oaxacan mole’ recipe handed down for 7 generations that keeps the fire in the belly burning bright. It’s the water from the well your great, great grandfather dug after singing to the land many moons ago. It’s bread being broken amongst friends in honor of the relationships that sustain our lives.

The banquet was provided, a paradise of color, taste and texture dancing with itself in a seamless orchestration of evolution. Sprouting, tending, learning, adapting, harvesting, assimilating, decaying, re- inventing itself in little micro movements towards a perfection that can never be captured by logic.

We are made of food. We are what we eat, what we ingest, what we digest and let go of (or more often what we hang onto) for new life to constantly seed itself in our garden. We know nothing without this body. Not one other thing exists without, or outside of, this body made of trillions of other bodies, made of octillions of little hands that make the Universe so.

We have lost touch with how food directly connects us to vast amounts of wisdom regarding how to be human in a way that sustains Life in bounty. The blue of the blueberry, that deep violet of the purple potato, the taste of the cold river in the fresh caught trout, the wild jungle cry in the dense sweet flesh of the first little banana- all carry a primal language of true inheritance, ancestry and belonging into the body.

An untraceable codex of God consciousness that dances between every cell awakens within us when we reclaim our sacred relationship to food. Calories, fat, carbs, sugars, proteins, minerals, vitamins- thank you. And, when we dissect our food we reduce ourselves in the process and lose our connection to the omniscient source of what feeds us.

Food teaches how to stand in right relationship with Life in praise and humility on this planet. Everything was created for our being here. The salmon swims itself upon the hook and the stag offers its muscled neck to the arrow, because to feed another body with their body is to become immortal. This is the sacred contract, the wisdom of the Circle that humanity has not upheld. We’ve stopped feeding what feeds us.

This consciousness allows one to lay her body down at the end of life in peace smiling, and as an offering, to keep feeding the Circle that regenerates God into new form. My body is food, fed by food.

My body is the intersection of multidimensional, universal wisdom, an Ancestral gathering, the fire that gathers the stories told through time and the hearth that holds the first flame that sparked the song of life.

My body is a portal for God to dance herself into Sun, Moon, infinite pebbles of warm sand underfoot and the blessing of a good storm that changes the course of a life.

There is no God without this body, no Sun, no Moon, no Ocean that churns the sand ashore and Earth that supports the feet to follow their path. All of life as we know it happens through the body-through bodies feeding bodies.

When we are in tune with our bodies, and our relationship to all that feeds us, we experience, feel and rest into an unnamable knowing that we too are a part of that cycle of death and rebirth. Our creative potentials turn towards serving Life rather than scarcity and fear. Food is proof of reincarnation, as is the body.

LOVE AND DISORDERED EATING

In the eating disorder recovery model it is taught that food is not love, but a substitute for the love that is missing.

Abusing food is how the food addict loves and takes care of herself. It is where her beliefs about love, receiving, self expression and power play out. Food is where she looks for mother, father and the repeated lovers who leave her, all the while missing that she is looking for God, therefore her-Self.

To know food as a divine expression of Love is to know the body as such. She must confront everywhere within her that is shut down to this truth every single time she eats. The wound gets poked repeatedly because she can’t live without the trigger, which makes choosing new patterns feel like she’s running up hill during a mudslide.

She tells her body food is bad every day with every bite. Rather than words of praise for the bounty, she repeats mantras of shame and her body goes into fight or flight sensing that something harmful is about to happen. Even kale and water 5 years after what the westernized medical system deems “recovery”- doesn’t matter. Armor, resistance and tension have become her body’s primary posture for too long.

This is why eating disorders have the highest mortality rate with the lowest recovery of all addictions. You can take the needle out of the arm, the bottle out of the mouth, but you can’t live without food. (I am sure this will somehow reach the one breatharian on Substack)

She must break her attachment to using food as a form of the love she never received and reattach herself to food as another expression of the Love she is.

Seeing food as Love itself begins rebuilding the bridge back to the belonging she has been seeking. The materials she needs are tender, dedicated reclaiming practices like prayer, ritual, nature time and a slow, intentional, fully feeling feeding of herself from her own hands with words of love and praise for her life.

This process further requires big breath, compassion, the proper support team, brave steps in the direction of her heart’s guidance, witness, tears, time- repeat. It’s a spiritual path that will guide her out of what

Dr Sharon Blackie

, in If Women Rose Rooted, coined “the wasteland”.

This correlation between food, love, fear and the grave confusion around how to feed ourselves affects each one of us on this planet. Many of us are all tangled up in disordered eating because most of us are all tangled up in a Love problem. A God problem.

Re-feeding ourselves with reverence for our food as Love helps her. When we re-connect with what freely feeds us at a cellular level, we understand that we are her and we begin making choices that feed, rather than deplete, the Circle.

THE CRY OF HUNGER

It’s like this ~
there lives a spring for your thirst
where your parched lips around Her waters
turns Her body on to make more honey
and your desolated heart becomes soft ground
Others will catch the scent of satiation in the air
They will come to the mouth of abundance to drink
When your body tightens around old fears 
of losing your free flowing treasure
-remember-
your mother's breast
an unsung maiden well until your cries for Love
set in motion a spiral of miracles turning
the Wheel of Life
upon which the codex of reciprocity is inscribed 
And in one line of this ancient scripture
you will find your Name

That first cry out of the womb and a warm substance was suckled into our fresh little blue bodies, settled the quiver in our round pink bellies, and we knew Love.

“Mother I need you, please fill me up”

We learned from day one that hunger’s rumble enacted a wellspring of sustenance-or did the wellspring call forth the belly’s cry? How would we know anything of this magnificent lifescape without our hunger? How would we know the sustenance of Mother, of God, of Love, without our sacred drive to stay alive?

We have lost touch with the benevolence of hunger and how it links us with the more than human world in order to survive. Hunger sparks sacred reciprocity and humility. It begets body wisdom and intuition.

One might say that a main goal of the spiritual path is to master the tightrope walk between hunger and satiation. Hunger can teach us how to guide and fulfill our desires through conscious awareness of the motivations and attachments behind them, so that hunger doesn’t devour our power. Hunger helps us identify the root of “the ache”, the insatiable longing that when befriended fills our cup. The paradox of satiation is that we were born full and can never be.

This is why fasting rituals are woven into every spiritual tradition because we get stripped to our most primal sensations. (anyone with a history of disordered eating should not fast until they are able to navigate the triggers associated with fasting in a professional/ceremonial setting)

Without hunger, there is no seeking. Without seeking there is no God, no Life because how anything is known is through this relationship between hunger and satiation, wound and medicine.

POISON AND PROFIT

“The inability to understand the spiritual roots of gluttony (as the inability to sacrifice) or to appreciate a culture’s role in fostering this anxious condition, makes it all the more difficult for individuals to find the help and direction they need.”

Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating

Food and hunger have been manipulated in the name of profit. Most of us have succumb to a culture that feasts upon on empty promises, unsustainable quick fixes and pop culture foods that separate us from our Source rather than enhance the wisdom of interdependence.

Stripping a culture of their ability to feed themselves from the land, by their own hands, and inducing literal starvation of the body, is an act of colonial genocide.

Inundating a culture with too many choices that contain more poison than nourishment is another form of starvation and genocide- masked by contaminated ideas of opportunity, abundance, ease and advancement. Aisles upon aisles of technicolor foods sever us from our body wisdom and create dis-ease.

Many of us are in a constant state of inflammation. Through my experience this inflammation is a downstream symptom of underlying wounds, and how we are feeding ourselves on every level of life, not a direct symptom of our food. The food is a symptom.

The soil is depleted, the Earth is rebirthing, our bodies are suffering from the disappearance of so much life in this process, life that we are 100% dependent upon. Bodies are speaking and there is an opportunity to begin a new conversation with matter as Life’s mouthpiece rather than matter as inanimate, unintelligent and subservient, as has been ingrained in the collective subconscious.

THE ANTIDOTE

In a world torn apart by fear, we can easily stray from the simple, fundamental, life practices and ways of being that, I believe, can create more change than fighting for change.

We have forgotten how adaptable we are. The body, made of body, knows the exact answers for the maladies we face. The body is endowed with the genius to shape shift, alchemize the poison, evolve with and replenish the soil of the soul, so that the gardens that feed us can grow new life.

So the soil is depleted- but what if there is still MORE life force waiting to feed our cells than not?

Yes, our waters are contaminated- and what if the malleable crystalline matrix of water is simply awaiting our praise to shape new life for a new story?

Slowing down with how we feed ourselves can help us reconnect to the hunger that is driving our choices with what and how we feed ourselves. When we are slow and present, satiation creeps in from a place deep down in the heart that has been crowded out by too much too fast. Emotions, wisdom we don’t want to hear because of changes we are afraid to make, memories and Love are all noodled together in the steaming pile of spaghetti before us. Who needs therapy when you have hand made meatballs!?

In presence we are invited to confront our cravings for more and their motivations. Our relationship to every facet of life can heal through our relationship with food.

For one month practice slowing down for three meals a week that you have made by hand:

• Breathe, bring all of your senses present before eating.

• Pray and give thanks.

• Eat in silence. No distractions. Watch your thoughts.

• Feel the food in your mouth, the miracle of teeth. Feel your belly open and receive. Notice.

• Take time to digest after with a slow walk or short meditation of gratitude.

Thank you for feasting on Life with me,
Shira Starfire

*My definition of food is: from the Earth, as close as possible to its whole, unadulterated form, zero-light packaging, organic when possible, forged by hand into digestible, delightful nourishment.

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