This week, from Saturday 29 to Sunday 7 is a retreat and a fast. No meetings, no family, no parenting, no relationship, no talk, no action, no phone calls, no email, no emergency. Breathing, fasting, enjoying and reconnecting with the pure energy of life, of breath, of
. Listening and releasing the inner demons, with love and compassion for myself.
I feel like a balloon that I just dropped and that is now floating and being carried by divine wind. It will take me exactly where I have to be. No expectations, no projections, no attachment. This retreat is for surrendering, for sitting inside the soul and let it percolate to the still ignorant, still encompassed layers of my terrestrian being.
Fasting is an important step in that regard.
Exploring the addiction to food helps me decide what exactly I want my relationship with food to be. How much prana do I want to absorb through food versus how much should come through energetical work (breathing, medidating, yoga)? What is the right balance? What is the right level of entanglement I want with food in order to serve what I came in this life for? How do I want to balance the different planes of the being (gross, subtle, etc...)?
This exploration of food can be broken in multiple layers.
What are the vital processes?What does exactly my body need to stay healthy, fit, alert, joyful? I am a vegetarian, almost vegan. What does my physical body need to absorb and not to absorb? What is the part of addiction versus current physical need? What quantity and quality of prana should come through food? How can harmonious relationships be developed between my body and who I am as an eternal soul? How do I let the soul descend into every single organ and cell to help them surrender to the divine work?
What are the social processes? Since babyhood, eating is a social habit. Eating is the first social link that binds the new born with the human community, through the mother first, then with his/her peers. Eating, absorbing, conjugated with other senses helps the baby build the early feeling of self (the lower self), the boundary of what is I and what is not I.
Although these boundaries are somehow clear in the physical realm, it gets more challenging to get a sense of the social self. We exist in everyone. Our being is a rhizome in the social soil. Where does it end? This is a living system. No doubt food plays a key role here.
How much of attachment do we have to one another through eating? How far does it keep us away from shifting to impersonal unconditional love?
What are the cultural processes?The whole culture begins to enter into the body via the food during babyhood. It's not just what we eat, but the cultural relationship to it, the rituals, the relationship with the environment. How is the animal seen? Is it blindly consumed meat like in Western cultures, or has it been consciously raised, killed and eaten in communion? How is a plant considered? And so on. I certainly want to leave the social habit of eating 3 times a day as a cultural conventional way. This "
architecture" has served the world as it is, it reflects today's ordinary consciousness.
Exploring the cultural realms of food is definitely part of building consciousness and freeing ourselves from the cultural binds that keep us trapped in the ordinary center of gravity of consciousness. What is the right architecture at individual and social level for the next world to come, for higher consciousness? This is connected to the pioneering work of
CIWC, as explored in
TheTransitioner.org.
What are the transgenerational processes?From the first breastfeeding to the spoon into the mouth, food comes with the story of the family. Each family carries heavy transgenerational stories of deprivation, poverty, survival stakes, wars. Food is the common ground because staying alive mostly involves food. The fact we over eat, I partially attribute it to ancient stories of deprivation that keep quite vibrant in the culture.
Get what you can get now, it says. It is also connected to the social situation and social class of the family. Don't we say
to make a living?
Food, money, life energy triangulate the family survival -- mostly unconscious -- mechanism. Most people who change their food habits and/or fast have stories to share about the break, if not anger, it can cause with family.
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Which of these early processes remain as an adult? What am I not aware of yet? Before deciding what I want to keep or get rid of, I need to bring the light of consciousness in every aspects of eating. Fasting is the first step to operate differentiation.
I certainly want to keep the celebration of food, the celebration of Mother Earth. To what degree? How? After separating from the biological mother, there is a time for separating from Mother Earth. By
separating, I mean become autonomous, individualized, differentiated. It allows the building of a harmonious relationship and the manifestation of pure impersonal, unattached love.
Food is one of the many forms of energies that go through us and that create exchange with the universe. Lifting the veil on food helps lifting the veil on all energetical exchanges, be they material or not, and then get into the very essence of relationship.
