Discover more from Her Many Faces
(Hello there! It’s tad long, but there is a song in the middle to help you take a pause before you carry on with the rest)
Early morning of the day I ended my 48 hour fast to open my tree diet with Noya Rao, I woke up with a wild, near raging, voice screaming “BANANA” in every cell of my body. I thought I might go mad with the craving. I was depleted, my body needed sustenance. All I had was my breath to help me sit with the kaleidoscope of emotions that arise in the empty space cleaned of excess. I marveled at the accuracy of my body’s needs, how clearly I could hear this simple desire.
In the dieta traditions fasting is common, and a stripped down menu during the dieta is mandatory to reduce distractions in the body for the medicine to take hold. White rice, potatoes, yucca root, quinoa, some steamed veggies, oatmeal, eggs, local white fish, broth and sometimes plantain and banana. No salt, sugar, spices or oils/fats of any kind. The center I journeyed in would not allow any fruit at all, so fruit is all I wanted.
The crying in my body for banana was getting serious. I ran out into the already balmy morning, through swaths of mosquitoes, to the three banana trees by my tambo. Big bountiful bundles of green bananas just dangling there out of reach. The torture. I just wanted a taste. Instead, I stood chewing on the desire, need and hunger wrangling in my body.
Fasting is a ceremonial rites of passage. Inside of carefully placed restrictions we are able to feel the impulse of cravings. We can travel to the source of our preferences, see what is driving our desires and meet our maker as our longing sears through our veins cleaning out addictions to things that don’t serve. This clearing begets gratitude for all we have and humbles us to our place on the Circle of Life.
Hunger is a sacred signal that awakens the innate need of the body, and in some purely mythic and mysterious law of attraction, calls forth and/or seeks out the food, medicine, or other ally to satisfy that need. What comes first- the baby’s cry or the mother’s milk? Hunger is a blessing that keeps us in our rightful place with our inherent Universal belonging. Hunger is a guide. Innate hunger helps us befriend the natural world, sharpens our primal senses and supports sacred law.
Hunger has been weaponized. Our intuitive nature denatured. Manipulating our hunger is a sure fire way to control a population. Providing an excessive amount of choices is also a form of starvation, it deprives the senses and manipulates our sense of worth. Of course, literally starving people is a direct form of torture and homicide.
Anyhow, back to me :). My hunger did not care about the rules. I sat down and asked the medicine within me-this wild flying love tree, my spirit and any other spiritual entity within breath’s reach- and there are many in the jungle, if I could please have a banana. I heard a clear YES.
So, this absolutely lovely 70 year old man named Jose and his wife Delia make all of the food for the center. I had mine delivered each day to stay in isolation. Jose would come to my tambo and “hoo hoo” to signal that he was there. Finally at about 10am my breakfast of oatmeal, eggs and yucca arrived. I opened the door ravenous, called my wobbling power to my center, looked Jose right in the eye and in Spanish said “Noya Rao told me I need a banana, can you please get me a banana.”
He looked at me a bit skeptical. I knew I was making him an accomplice in my rebellion, and he knew not to argue with an old sacred Love tree. I smiled, he melted (whatever) and told me he would have to get them to me tomorrow. I would have to wait.
I hate waiting. And, I have mastered waiting. I have witnessed the profound wisdom of the divine plan wrap itself around me when I wait. I know this life is not fully mine. I am at the grace of hand much stronger and wiser, a hand I have prayed to, wailed for to- “do what you will with me, please guide me.” I feel so free and at peace when I surrender, and I still HATE waiting. My mind goes into eight hundred and three unhelpful stories about what is happening in the space between where I am and what I want, especially if it involves other people.
The next day Jose arrives whistling with my standard breakfast and not one, but 6 bananas. Ok, hmmm. Banana is the sacred symbol of abundance in many cultures, predominantly the Hindu traditions as an offering to the Gods. I was grateful. Yet, I immediately got this old familiar feeling of being punished for receiving. My mind began to second guess my body’s wisdom. If I eat this banana I am going to fail my diet, ruin my life, be punished, cast to some limbo realm in the jungle and become Jaguar food.
The old eating disorder pattern, that has been running in the background of my life every single day since the womb, flared up. I had to dance with this {again}. I did not buy a front row ticket to the Shaman show for nothing. I sat my oatmeal, eggs, yucca and one banana down in front of me, lit a candle and prayed. I peeled back one inch of the the banana tore off a small chunk, smelled it, put it to my lips and then into my belly it went with a small bit of oatmeal.
The air stood still. There was an exhale in my body. I could feel all of the ways I have been deprived the sweetness of life. That was all I needed. I have never asked for much, just a little sweetness. Maybe I should ask for more of Life, but I just don’t need all the stuff, just a touch of sweetness.
Then, a cascade of fear washed over my joy. My belly cramped, my head got hot, I was nauseous. I began to panic, my prefrontal analyzer spun out trying to manage the “what is wrong with you, is it that thing, or that other thing, you can’t eat that, or have that, it must have been that, how do I fix this, you’ve really done it now, tell me what is wrong dammit, please stop hurting, what did I do, tell me? It must be the banana, I knew it, I can’t trust that voice, my body, this life aaaah”. Total panic.
Then, from the mysterious space in between all things, from deep within a place inside, I heard a voice
“IT’S NOT THE BANANA”.
The way the voice came out was a mix of Burt Reynolds meets Tree Spirit. I am sorry if you don’t know what Tree Spirit sounds like (or Burt Reynolds). I fell over myself in hysterics. One of the ways Noya Rao worked with me was through humor. It is necessary on this path, and is common shamanic language. I laughed until the message was clear and then I cried for a long time and released a large piece of very old insidious programming.
It has never been the foods I have eaten. The caveat is that, of course, it can be the foods we eat if they are filled with poisons. It has always been my mind’s programming triggering a cascade of emotions and contractions within my nervous system, creating disease in my body. “Will this hurt me? Will I be punished?” EVERY single meal of my life since I was three years old has been conditional upon whether it was good or bad, will it hurt me or not, am I allowed to have that or not, which quickly translated in my body to whether I was good, bad or allowed to receive.
You might say, “well of course! That is Psych 101 for eating disorders- it’s not the food that’s the problem (and it also is on a larger scale).” Yes, yes. I know this. I have always known this. Mental knowing is only a 5% slice of the cake that I eventually get to eat too. I have to travel that knowing through my senses, often many times, and be satiated by its message to wake up the wisdom within me. It must be embodied for transformation to occur.
I realized that still after years in recovery, on the daily, that when I eat a part of me is already anticipating a negative response, stirring up fear in my body around whether the receiving, enjoying, digesting (or in my case not digesting) of this food is going to hurt me, before it even goes into my mouth. So what does my body do? It prepares for danger, and builds ice walls where gentle rolling seas should be. It assumes incoming poison, even if it’s kale. Do that for every meal for every day of your life and the receptive body shuts down, nothing gets in without a fight aka- massive inflammation in my cells because they can’t receive the energy they need to regenerate life force.
The thing with eating disorders and why they are the number one most challenging “mental illness” and addiction to cure, that have the highest mortality rate of all addiction and mental illness, is that we have to eat food. And very rarely in the eating disorder world does anyone talk about why eating disorders can have devastating affects for years, if not decades, after the person has become “sober” (very few of us, including you my love, are really sober).
Regardless of how much work I have done, how many times I have put that monkey to bed, it jumps right back up again when I eat. It just dances around screaming obscenities and taunting me with a bundle of bananas I am not allowed to have. Until Noya Rao, until now.
In order to heal at this level it takes every bit of my energy to stay highly conscious to my thought patterns. I could be casually eating an apple and because my response to food was contraction for so long, the moment something hits my lips there is a barely detectable ripple through my subconscious. I am being triggered into fight or flight multiple times a day over feeding myself. I have to bring a whole other flavor to praying over my food.
This is not my fault, but it is my homework. I live within an industrialized system that has denigrated our food source to something so unrecognizable to our bodies that I wonder how many of us are still alive, which points to something within all of us more powerful than poison (up to a point). I live in society that creates eating disorders to maintain control. I know very few people without an eating disorder. We have forgotten how to feed ourselves and what was lovingly created to feed us.
We are inundated with an overwhelming amount of options, diet fads, food pyramids run by big agriculture and big Pharma and some supplement for everything you are lacking. It’s insane how manipulated we have been. If the industrial complex can remove us from our body’s wisdom it has a better chance at control. Restoration of innate hunger and intuition would disrupt current systems; our body’s naturalness is a direct threat to the machine.
We don’t wake up each day and approach one of the most intimate things we do, bring another being, a gift, a piece of the Earth into our bodies with reverence and awareness. Mostly because we aren’t consuming things created with reverence, or from Earth. We wake up each day to some food plan to heal what is broken, to look like something, to defy the laws of gravity and age, to be ripped and fit and skinny and super human and super charged to be super better super producers and super doers in a super narcissistic system.
We essentially go to war with ourselves constantly, sending messages to our body, mind and soul that we must be sick. And if we are sick, lacking, starved- then there is a product, a plan, a thing for you for only $19.95 times as many times that “they” can convince you that you aren’t good enough, wise enough and strong enough as you are. So, a lot of times.
It is a fine line to walk between understanding that food is our medicine and treating ourselves like we are sick. Many of us, myself included, have had to be on modified food plans. Yet, I am letting that go. As I do I am finding that my body is naturally gravitating towards what it wants, not what my cravings and fears want, but what my body wisdom wants. I believe that if I put a variety of nourishment in my body at the right balance, according to my body, which can shift each day, and I am eating with a mindset based in my truth aligned with the truth about my body, that my body knows exactly what to do.
So, I must have contact with my truth and learn to listen through a different lens. I must re-pattern myself to receive which requires letting go of what stands in the way of being receptive to what I need. I must also feed myself in alignment with my virtues. Every choice I make, every thought, has an impact on my health and vitality. I don’t condone war, so why am I choosing that for my body? I choose to be fed by the most high Source of intelligence, I choose peace in my body by aligning with its guidance.
In order to do this I have had to confront my wound identity and tremble as I take a trust fall into the arms of Life. I am in the practice of not engaging in habits, thoughts or routines attached to the wound. And when I say wound, I am not demonizing the tender pains that afflict a human life- I am talking about the thumb of the wound complex we live under.
Here ya go…
My body is not a thing to conquer, and so I must decolonize my mindset. We can evolve to extraordinary states of consciousness, but we don’t get to live into the consciousness faster than the body- for a reason. There is a great love affair you have been missing, a deeper reason for living that lives within your flesh and bone. But the wisdom is silenced under our incessant solutions and constant urgency to make something happen NOW.
Instead of immediately jumping to a solution for some ailment, I stop, breathe, listen and do nothing but feel. If some solution rises out of that space, and from my body, then I will move towards it. I will wobble in this. The mind’s old patterns are threatened by change and shapeshift into very convincing rabbit holes that want to take me away from my center.
I am choosing to trust this wisdom to such a degree that I have even given my beautiful body, battered around by addictions, distrust and dissolution of Self in favor of some illusory life on a screen outside of me, permission to die. I will stand loving witness and let her do what she was made to do, even if that means my soul must move on. However this goes, from that stance, it will be medicine, it will be beautiful because I am employing the master midwife.
As I align with my intuitive body to this degree I begin to slip into a whole new paradigm of living. I receive visions of what is possible and my vitality is restored. If I feed myself in alignment with Life then the vibrational field around me responds differently and life changes simply by this “simple” process- of dying to every lie and every model attached to the wound complex. So, it is a kind of death.
There is a term in the eating disorder world “re-feeding”. In that system it doesn’t matter what one eats. A pop tart is the same as a banana. (sooo much to say about this for another day). It does matter what we put into our bodies, but it matters more how we are feeding ourselves. This is my re-feeding.
I ask you, what is your motive really for eating that thing, consuming that thing, adopting that food plan and taking that supplement? I imagine, no matter how much you will deny this, that a part of you is trying to fix yourself and become like something else, something more beautiful and worthy.
My love. My love. You have never not been the most beautiful thing Life has ever seen.
What if the mindset shifted from “I have to restrict this thing because it is bad for me and I have this disease.” To- “my body is going through a natural rebalancing and I am so grateful for this meal, I have enough, I am enough and I am listening to what my body is trying to tell me”- a little like Stuart Smalley (I did just date myself).
This is how we heal ourselves- and our Mother. This is how we ensure that the banana still comes from a tree rather than an AI factory. There is a miraculous medicine in every living thing we eat that carries a transmission about the story of life. It wants to partner with you and awaken your soul story. When you bring that transmission into your body with awareness, you begin to change your inner programming and that begins to shift Life and the story, not just for you.
So, for one day, try re-feeding yourself with the one tried and true, forever lasting, guaranteed diet plan- Your body’s wisdom.
Blessed be.
Please share. It means a lot. Thank you!
"It's Not the Banana"
I've shared with many women. And my husband. Beautiful piece, sister. Important. 🍌💛