“When you like something, you pay attention to it. When you like something—love something—you take time with it. You want to be present every moment of the rapture. Overeating or restricting doesn’t lead to rapture. Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it is not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It is about your desire to flatten your life. It’s about the fact that you have given up without saying so. It’s about your belief that it is not possible to live any other way—and you are using food to act that out without ever having to admit it.”
- “Women, Food and God - An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything”, Geneen Roth
Food is an essential part of life, that is a fact well-known to all of us. And being so essential, it is, consciously or unconsciously, at the very heart of so much of our general culture and personal philosophies. It is also an important vehicle through which we bond and connect — our celebrations and festivals are unimaginable without a hearty meal. Even our modern, digital age recognises, although with less of a sacralised allusion, that the food is central to one’s orientation in life — for us food becomes a matter of personal belief, ideology and even political positions. To be a vegan is to be of a liberal or an environmentalist disposition, and if one is to be “based” or a “vitalist”, one must devote themselves to drinking raw milk.
On the internet, there are also many young women who share dietary advice. Along them, there exists a whole eating disorder subculture where young girls advise each other on how to make it through a day with 700 calories without fainting. One can even notice the “Coquette mysticism” trend — a space where images of Virgin Mary, songs of Lana Del Rey, quotes of Sylvia Plath and Ottessa Moshfegh prosper —, and see how the young girls in it often play (even if only superficially) with the idea of eating God, with the imagery of blood, figs and pomegranates.
Whatever the outer form, all admit that food, indeed, is God, and how one relates to food is essentially, how they relate to life.
For a woman, this becomes not only central, but deeply personal, because, on a symbolic level, food is the mother, and the mother is a part of herself. It is because mother is our first food — the first nourishment we take, the first warmth, the first comforting breast after coming into a cold world out of the warmth of womb. The daughter is an extension of her mother’s own Feminine self. She is usually the life that her mother didn’t get to live, the life mother denied — hence the saying “Mother’s fate and sins are the daughter’s dowry.” The food on our tables — the meats, the vegetables, the fruit, the oils, the dairy — are also mother, although more of an archetypal one that we call the Mother Nature, who with her bounty and endless cycles, gives to us, feeds us and sustains life.
A popular cultural idea of femininity is of it as soft, nurturing and compassionate — and while such expressions of it certainly exist, the Feminine is at the core also ravenous and heated with desire. The entire physical reality runs just because of her hunger for experience —the desire to experience this reality is simply her desire to experience herself as every colour, every shade, every woman. Women are often afraid of themselves, of their desire and of their souls’ call to become symbolically large, vast, wide, spacious, “fat”, red, luminous, ecstatic, blissful. Because how could she move towards this hunger, towards this largeness without coming to destroy everything small and weak, everything that doesn’t point to the Absolute, to the Divine, to the Holy Madness? Woman is, essentially, always a Virgin because she can never truly be loyal or yield to the World (the Collective Ego) — to the politics, to the man-made laws, to the man enmeshed fully in it — , they can never fully seize her even if she is told and taught to obey them and follow them. She is free and if there is one thing that a man learns from her, it is this freedom. Women who choose to be “good”, to obey the laws that they don’t believe in, even if outwardly polite and caring, carry internal hunger, that when suppressed and unaddressed, manifests as a deep feeling of emptiness, and then as viciousness and cruelty, as a vampiric urge to consume the life of others instead of creating it and experiencing it.
For a woman who wants to truly open to her path, to her destiny, and who desires to truly experience Life, Beauty, Abundance, accepting the deep hunger is the first step towards that, because to accept it consciously is to create space for Life to enter.
And secondly, which is the focus of this article, it is important for a woman to heal her relationship with food because the food is where this hunger impulse and the fear of herself are the most visibly manifest - whether through binging or restricting. For a woman, to become conscious of her relationship with food and the manner in which she eats is a way to come to know so much about herself. Food is life, and the woman who has an unconscious relationship with it will resist life in every other form. To either binge or restrict is to move towards death, to give up — to numb yourself to life or to attempt to “egoically” control it, is equally hostile to actually living. And yet life is what a woman, at her innermost heart, wants.
Today, I shall give you some practices and techniques that will help you gain more consciousness in this domain and I can promise that as your relationship with food changes, your entire life will as well.
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