Nourishment
Nourishment
Our relationship with nourishment genuinely reflects
our relationship with both giving and receiving love
and compassion. Nourishment is the essence of life.
Our connection to our spiritual life, our
relationship with ourselves, our parents, our family
and friends, our community, and to our society as a
whole, are all based on the giving and receiving, or
lack of giving and receiving, of love and
nourishment.
Ideally we would make careful choices about what we
bring into our lives and into our body, choosing
partners, friendships, jobs, food, homes and other
things based upon what is genuinely healthy for us.
In reality, when we are unbalanced, lacking in
knowledge, deprived, unconscious, influenced by
others or rebellious, we often choose what will
poison us, hurt us and set us further off balance. It
is as though our ability to recognize or accept
positive nourishment is lost, so that we choose
short-term addiction, gratification of desires, or
the comfort zone of familiar patterns of pain and
suffering, even when we know that these choices are
hurting us.
It is these choices that we make in life, which
reveal the deepest reality of our relationship to our
inner source of nourishment, and they are, in a
sense, signposts that can guide us back to sane
choices, which nurture our wellbeing, rather than
causing harm. From the person who chooses junk food
over real food, or chooses to purchase a house to
impress others rather than a home they can feel truly
comfortable in, to those who have a genuine sense of
generous hospitality and the capacity to give and
receive love, many are the ways that we reveal this
core part of our being, and each choice we make has
the power to teach us about the parts of our self
that are healthy or are calling out for healing.
Formed from the earliest beginnings of our lives,
perhaps even before our birth, our relationship to
nourishment develops within the life pattern of our
parents. Birth, our reception into the world,
touching, talking, cuddling, and nursing, form our
primal ground of nourishment, which continues through
infancy, childhood and puberty. Partially in response
to our parent’s capacity to give and receive love,
and partially due to our own inherent capacities, we
develop our sense of emptiness or fullness, a sense
that is simultaneously reflected in the choices we
make for ourselves.
Varying degrees of our needs are automatically
provided for, and we either learn to ask for what we
want or we don't, and we either get what we ask for,
or we don’t. For all of us there are needs that we
must learn to live without. We watch those around us
work for, manipulate, seduce, steal or lie to get
what they want out of the world, and we learn what
gets results. Our personality forms around our
ability to deal with acceptance or refusal.
We develop dreams, goals and ideas that we believe
will give us the sense of fullness or satisfaction
that we want, but most often when we attain them, we
find that we are still hungry. This sense of
emptiness, deprivation and starvation is strong, even
in the wealthiest of families, and is in fact the
common ground of modern society. A common ground
capitalized upon by countless business savvy
individuals and corporations around the world.
How often do we feel truly nourished in every aspect
of our being, content, relaxed and at peace? This
balanced state is relatively rare. More commonly we
spend our time and energy seeking out things to
‘fill’ the space. Only temporarily do we feel
satisfaction and completion. For most of us, hunger
is our life experience.
By looking at our lifestyle habits and dietary
choices, our relationships with family, friends,
bosses, employees and other significant people in our
lives, and also how we respond to our bodies and
personal needs, it is possible to learn about our own
personal relationship to nourishment, and begin the
process of healing this core part of our being.