Peace is not a synonym for agreement. Peace is a quality of stillness and acceptance. When we can stop placing our mind’s conditions of peace onto the world, then we can be at peace. When we can let go of the grip we have on our own agenda and find a deeper trust in our lives that is bigger than anything we could have imagined, then we are entertaining peace. We don’t “fight” for peace. In peace, there is no againstness. Peace does not exist when something else stops existing. Peace is in the stillness that is already here. Are you listening for it? Are you able to let go when things don’t go the way you want? It’s hard, I know. We get so invested in our plans and our hopes for ourselves and for others. We get confused and we think that we are being loving. What if loving was much simpler? What if there was no effort in loving, as loving just…..is? Peace.

Orienting ourselves towards peace and loving helps us navigate from an empowered and uplifted state. Imagine, every morning, taking a moment to refocus on your loving nature. Imagine taking a breath, or two, or ten, that was only devoted to peace, to stillness. How might this small activity shift things for you? How might you choose differently in your morning routine? What would stay the same?

It’s simple. Not easy. There are many distractions. And the distractions are not going anywhere, and likely will become more compelling. Bringing down inflammation is very much about choosing healthy foods, and it is also about soothing what is inflamed within us. When we attend to the fight within than we are really making progress for our own wellness. So how do you do that?

We have to give up the luxury of thinking the problem lies outside of us. Catch yourself when you blame them, or him, or her, or anything external for being the problem. Instead, turn your gaze inward. The answer to your discontent does not lie outside of you. Peace is not about managing your reality into a fragile harmony. It is about soothing the conflict within.

Where is your inner conflict?
Where are you judging yourself?
Where are you pressuring yourself?
Where are you suppressing your feelings?
When are you telling yourself you are unsafe, unlovable, no good, a failure? How are you hard on yourself?

The willingness to explore this terrain is critical.

What is also critical is the willingness to let go of the inner conflict.The idea that letting go of all the ways you control and manage yourself with judgments, criticism and fear will most certainly lead to you being out of control and worse off than you are now is how fear maintains its grip on you. We must challenge this kind of thinking, and start to consider what it might be like to trust in yourself.

Trust is essential and many of us early on had reasons not to trust. I get it. Me too. And so the journey back into trust becomes all the more worthwhile. It is possible to stop living in fear. Fear of messing up, saying the wrong thing, getting fat, being rejected or abandoned. Yup, all that is there. For most of us. And it does not have to rule you. It does not have to be your boss. Consider that everything so far in your life has brought you right to this very moment. Right to the place where you are starting to consider that you are worth more than you thought you were. Consider that every hardship has been in service to your own awakening into a deeper understanding of yourself. You can trust yourself and you can trust your life.

Everything in your life, on the micro and macro levels, is working for you.Every disturbance, irritant, discontent, is grist for the mill. It is a stepping stone for you to reach deeper into yourself than ever before, past all the pressuring and judging and attachments. The world is for your own liberation. Liberation is the opposite of control. Beyond liberation lies peace.

Use your lifetime to find your own liberation. I believe this is what deeply serves the world. More so than our anger and our cynicism ever could. It is exciting to me to think of where your liberation might lead you. What might you create? How might you treat yourself and others? Ultimately we each have the opportunity to genuinely love our lives and love ourselves. So cultivate peace from the inside out. Do whatever it takes and then observe the changes in yourself and the world. Then tell us all about it.

It plays a role in our personal and cultural history.  It informs our biology and genetic expression.  It triggers powerful memories and holds negative and positive associations.  It has a strong place in the rituals of our seasons, and our day to day lives.  Food provides us with a wealth of sensation, pleasure, creativity, nutrients, health, energy, and metaphor.

The choices we make around food are powerful indicators of our relationship to self, namely our attunement with our own needs, our sense of self-worth, our sense of lack and security, our experience of empowerment or disempowerment, and even our relationship with our mothers!

Our behaviors around food can highlight the inner experiences, beliefs, or feelings that are driving us.  Most of the time, these are unconscious to us.  Food is primal and has been apart of our lives from the beginning.  Literally as our bodies were forming within our mothers’ wombs we are being nourished by the foods she ate and those flavors and nutrients and even smells were coming in through the placenta and building a foundation for our own relationship with food.  Breastmilk by mom is mutable and shifting to meet baby’s needs from morning to night and throughout the months of nursing.  Formula is not mutable, but static in its composition, only the amount given changes for baby.

Solid foods are introduced in the container of our relationship to our caregivers and family of origin. Are meal times pleasurable for baby?  Or stressful?  Is baby given appropriate foods at the appropriate developmental stage?  The stress of a meal can be internal (too much food, too complex, too soon; or not enough food) or it can be external (is there tension in the family? Does it feel safe to baby to explore food with mouth and fingers?)

Family meals can lay additional foundations as children grow up. Is there enough food?  Is poverty an issue?  Do family members get along?  How is food viewed in the family?  Is the family mindlessly eating in front of the television and not talking to one another directly?  Is there a shared meal from which everyone partakes?  Is the children’s food separate from the adults?  Is the food beautiful?  Tasty? A celebration?  A chore?

The culture has its role as well. Eat more of this, less of that.  This food will kill you, this food will save you.  Lose weight. Gain weight.  Try and attain an ever shifting and impossible ideal by controlling your relationship with food and your body. Women and men are subjected to this onslaught.  We are all told to be beautiful according to media’s standards, which have nothing to do with being healthy, or culturally diverse.

As we grow up we experience life and as a result of our experiences we make decisions. We decide whether we are lovable or not, whether we are safe, whether we are worthy of love and kindness by others, whether to hide our bodies or exploit them to get what we need, whether we belong or don’t belong and how we feel about all of it.  This is normal, to make such decisions.  We are human.  Life is messy and we are all doing the very best we can.

One day, though, you can begin to take stock. You can begin to reflect and notice your behaviors and investigate what decisions you did make about yourself.  And sure it may have seemed logical at the time.  But those limiting beliefs are not serving you anymore.  Believing you are unlovable, leads only to being unlovable.  When we can forgive ourselves for believing that, with understanding and compassion for how we drew such a conclusion, then we are free to investigate being lovable.  And if we are lovable, than it follows that we are also worthy of great care and consideration.  The person who can best supply that care and consideration?  It’s you.

Here are 8 key points when it comes to using food as a gateway:

1. Don’t be analytical.
   Just listen to yourself as you would listen to your best friend, or your child.  Nobody feels better being analyzed.  If you think you already know what is going on, try and drop that story and listen deeper.  Chances are there is more vulnerability there than you might expect and analyzing yourself is not listening.  Stay open and curios.  Explore.
   
2. Don’t do it alone.
   Find a qualified therapist or friend who knows how to listen and reflect without judgment.  There is so much judgment in our culture regarding food, it is critical to find our way out of that mindset.  We can’t help but integrate it some because we are apart of the culture.  Working with another person to explore your own relationship to food can create enough space so that you can steer clear of those judgments and stay open and curious and kind.
   
3. Consider that you are the expert on yourself.
   You know your history, you know what your life experiences have felt like.  You were there, no one else.  You are your own best advocate and ally.  Don’t dismiss what you know to be true for yourself because an “expert” says otherwise. Food is more than macro and micronutrients.  It is a metaphor and a representation of many events and moments and meanings.  Each person is unique and each person’s history matters.
   
4. Take it slow.
   One step at a time.  Small awarenesses and small changes have the best effect over time.  Let go of finding the magical solution.  Let go of the idea that if you just did (blank) then you’d be (blank).  You’re on a journey.  This is your precious journey and it’s not about trying to attain some ideal.  This is about you and your discovery and learning what you came into this life to learn.
   
5. Explore your roots.
   Look into your lineage, your history and discover where you come from.  What is the history of your people?  What’s your tribe?  What have been the strengths and the challenges your people have faced?  What is the health history? Take it further than your family or origin.  Your roots are deep, no matter who you are.  Your family of origin story is important and deeply significant and you are apart of so much more.
   
6. Create.
   Cook your own food.  Or create in other ways.  Sew.  Paint. Sculpt.  Write.  Grow a garden.  You decide.  Get in touch with your creative self.  Don’t stop yourself before you start because you don’t know what to do.  Start with what you know even if it means coloring like you did when you were a kid.  No one has to know.  Just start and it will take you somewhere.  Be willing to go.  This creative part of you is a resource.  It is a safe place to lean on when you need help.  Nurture it, give it room to breathe.
   
7. Begin to notice the beauty around you.
   Pay attention to what you see as beautiful.  Is it a tree outside your window?  The shape of a cloud in the sky?  A shaft of sunlight?  The color of your bedspread?  Start noticing the beauty and train yourself to look for it every day.  This will shift the habit of looking for the problem, or the mess.  Let yourself see the beauty and it will start to heal you.
   
8. Practice gratitude.
   Be grateful for what you have.  Be grateful for your next breath.  It’s the small things.  Be grateful and let that build inside of you.  When we are grateful, we cannot be in lack and we will not need to fill ourselves up unnecessarily with food because we will already be full.  In gratitude we are more likely to respond accurately to ourselves, because we are no longer in an unconscious state.  Practicing gratitude brings us into the present moment and brings us conscious of what is right before us.
   

This is one way to move into self-discovery. There are many ways, and this is a powerful one.  The reason you do this is not because you aren’t good enough now, or because you need to work on issues or get better at life.  You do this because you matter.  Absolutely, you matter. And you are fascinating and your story is interesting and you will find that it never ends. There is always more to discover about yourself when you are willing to look under the rocks and travel the distance.  You’re amazing.  You’re worth it.  You’ll see.

The choices we make based on that information is the next step.  Mind you, I am certainly not promoting perfection or idealism here.  It is completely important to have flexibility and fluidity, especially with diet and lifestyle.  In fact, the rigid voice inside that allows for zero wiggle room, may not be the voice to ultimately listen to or take at face value.  

The perfectionist inside is not the boss, she is just highlighting how we’ve tried to manage our fear and vulnerability. Conscious wellness is not about living and eating perfectly.  It is about knowing yourself and honoring that relationship.Going out to dinner and having some wine with friends might be totally worth it for the positive benefits of social time and fun and laughter.  It might be completely appropriate to do this and take the cost that a few drinks might do to our health to have the benefit of a good time.  But maybe this isn’t the rule because there might be a day where physically you are already stressed, say from too little sleep or not enough nutrients, or exposure to illnesses or other stressors.  In that case, the cost might not be worth the drinks.  So you see, we are not static either and it is always worth it to take account of the context of things, rather than make decisions or “rules” in a vacuum and call that health.

Building trust with ourselves is an ongoing dynamic willingness to relate to ourselves.It is the opportunity to master ourselves in relationship to whatever task the world offers us, from the very small choices to the very big challenges.  Who we are is a fluid, breathing organism, affecting and being effected by the environment in which we live.  We are not meant to master each task with perfection like some outdated achievement model.  We are meant to discover who we are, and to continue exploring the depths of our Being, so that we can ultimately be living in a harmonious way.  Through listening inwardly, we build trust in who we are and choose ever more subtly this deeper alignment.  

Conscious Wellness isn’t about having perfect bodies, or even perfect health.  It is about really and truly being yourself, at the deepest level you can and being willing to continue on, as Rumi says, “to flow down and down into ever widening rings of being.”

Responding to the messages of our mind, body, and emotions is a way to build trust and hope that we can meet our own needs and persevere through challenges with resilience.  For the sake of this dialogue, let’s assume again that most of us have from time to time ignored the signals from ourself and continued with a behavior, or activity, or relationship that really wasn’t working for us.  

Making the choice to become conscious and commit to our own wellness is making the choice to listen and do our best to respond appropriately to our own messages. As we do this more and more, we build the skill of listening and realize that the messages become subtler and subtler.  The journey continues to evolve as we evolve.  In other words, there is no static end or destination of finally getting it right.  It is an ongoing practice of checking in with ourselves, taking the time to be in relationship with ourselves and being willing to hear our own feedback.

Sometimes this is difficult, I get it. Even as I am committed to listening to myself and do hear the feedback from my body and my moods, I don’t always necessarily want to hear it.  Its at these times, when the temptation to override caring with wanting is strong, that we really have an opportunity to strengthen that inner muscle, so to speak, of choosing to value ourselves.  Its when the idea of getting our way seems more important than our health, that we are most at risk of undermining our own worth.  And this is the habit worth interrupting because no matter how delicious or “fun” or whatever, the thing or action is, let’s be honest, it comes with a price when it is not truly aligned with what we really need.

Almost everything we discuss is, at its core, about noticing whether experiences are nourishing or depleting. The practice of learning to listen to our bodies is no exception.We must learn to tune in to our bodies and trust how they guide us.This is a challenge in our society, which highly values the capacity to analyze and think through practical applications. For example, we often seek a written manual or expert advice to provide clarity on how to eat. But these sources are not always reliable. We are easily seduced by the latest trends in healthy eating and healthy weight management. When this happens, we bypass our own internal wisdom.

Our bodies have a lot to tell us about what nourishes and depletes us, and how to tell the difference.To begin, we have to identify and trust our body’s sensations, and make connections with the food choices we make. Are we really hungry, or are we having cravings? What do we feel like eating when we’re tired? Are our moods and emotions appropriate to a situation, or are they unstable depending on what kind of food we eat?

By recognizing how our choices make us feel, we are able to consciously make choices that will nourish us.When we truly learn to listen, we can discover the pathway to a life that supports our vision. Listening to our bodies will eventually allow us to make choices that transform our relationships with our bodies, our health, and our authentic selves.

At Conscious Wellness, we provide tools and support to help us listen to the body’s wisdom and trust that it will guide us on a path of wholeness and wellness. One tool that can be used to facilitate this process is the Conscious Wellness Diary. By developing the awareness of our bodies, noticing when our bodies are nourished or depleted, we transform the relationship we have with ourselves.

Thank you for reading this post. We hope that it was useful to you. If you are interested in further support, please contact us.