Theos-Talk Archives (February 1997 Message tl00606)

On Wed, 26 Feb 1997, Thoa Tran wrote:
> One great thing about being made to feel like a scum is that once you get
> back on your dignified feet, you learn to trust your own judgment more than
> anybody else's.  Experience of abuse under someone else's hand makes you
> realize that you're better off putting yourself in your own hands.
	A thousand times yeah to that! My own diet, for what its worth, is
an anti-diet. In my teens and early twenties I experimented with all
manner of different diets for a variety of different reasons  - ethical,
health, and "spiritual" - until one day, rather suddenly, I kinda had a
flash that, well, that *all* of them were impositions of the rational
mind's assumptions *about* the body onto the *body itself* - and that the
rational mind's wisdom was almost entirely incompetent in that realm
compared to the wisdom of the body itself. Every cell in the body is
connected, in an unbroken chain, to predecessors that stretch back
literally millions and millions of years .... in each is chemically
encoded the *cumulative* knowledge of those countless millenia of cellular
interactions with the planetary biosphere. What I discovered was that this
knoweldge is *accessable* if one sorta just gets the knack of listening. I
stumbled across this after (first) throwing out *all* conscious ideas
about diet and food, and just telling the body it was free to feed
itself with no judgements superimposed. It took all of a couple of weeks
before its "voice" started speaking - or actually, I realized the body's
voice had really been speaking all along, in fact speaking quite strongly,
but I just hadn't acquired the knack of listening (or for that matter even
considered that there was anything to listen *for*). The body (of course!)
is *continually* monitoring, at a virtually entirely unconscious level,
the moment by moment, second by second chemical and electrical balances
within itself and continually adjusting them to even microchanges in its
immediate environment.
	At the surface level, my diet since then has looked quite the
hodge-podge. Sometimes it seems to make little difference what I eat
(though my hand instinctually goes to organic food in stores, and refuses
to drink tap water) - but at other times it seems to be pursuing some
mission ... it'll go for a whole week and only eat fruit, in fact
occaisionally it will simply not eat for a day or two (I wonder whether
the body *itself* decides to do purification fasts when it feels the
need). While mostly the diet is vegie, periodically it *will*
unmistakeably choose meat. Its desired food changes quite dramatically
with the seasons, with the different places I travel to, with different
jobs ... in fact a couple of times I've noticed almost a prescient ability
in the body ... noticed a couple of times that for a few days my diet had
made a sudden and considerable change, and then had an unexpected need to
travel somewhere for work arise  ... as though the body itself was already
adjusting to a change in environment I was not yet consciously aware I was
going to be making. Weird.
	I know this sounds odd ... but the proof's in the pudding and I
get ill about once a decade, and even then the body rights itself almost
immediately. In fact, counterintuitively enough, I've talked a few friends
who had weight problems into trying this and in every case it worked - at
first it felt weird, almost naughty, to say the body could eat *anything*,
and as much as, it wanted (what the hell kinda diet is *that* one of them
asked laughing (-:) ... but the real trick is eating what the *body*
wants, not what the emotions are shoveling for their own purposes, or what
the mind is imposing to suit its own ideas -- and its suprising how
quickly the body's voice differentiates itself from all other promptings
when its even given half a chance.
	I even wonder whether the diet the mind resonates with may, in
each person's case, simply be that which is best tuned to that unheard
bodywisdom. Perhaps (for instance) Doss has an organism that, for its
physiology and life's purpose, would rarely if ever touch meat, while if
Ann vehemently refused meat she might on a number of occaisions be going
*against* her body's voice.
	Oh well, I've babbled enough.
					Good eatin' all,   -JRC


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