getting started - meditation

so how do you begin, you might wonder? how do you sort all the foods you eat into their assigned categories? how do you know what foods are what color? how do you know what foods are "good" and what foods are "bad?" if you toss away all your diet books and magazine articles and internet mind-bytes, and everything you think you "know" about food, what do you have left?

when we were very small, our food choices were determined for us by our caregivers, and most of us were given only breast milk or infant formula. it was as perfect a place as you could be - you got hungry, the food you were fed satisfied your appetite, you ate what you wanted and stopped when you were full. for most people the stage of early infancy is the stage where our desire for food and our intake of it is as perfectly balanced as it ever gets.

so the first thing the Angels encourage us to do is to as we work through the more practical steps, is to spend time (maybe just a couple minutes a few times a day) imagining what it was like as an infant, when our appetite and our internal mechanisms were as perfectly in harmony as they could be. in my previous post, i shared how the Angels view mindful breathing as an important physical exercise.

try sitting quietly - maybe even on the toilet(!!!) - closing your eyes and breathing in and out. dont try to slow or deepen your breathing - just become aware of it. become aware of the flow of the air over your tongue, down the back of your throat, into your lungs. become aware of the press of your diaphragm, how your ribs so effortlessly expand and contract. appreciate the miracle of your own breathing. and if you can, imagine what it felt like when you were a baby and you knew exactly how much you needed to eat and exactly how it felt to feel full.

this is deep body wisdom that is part of our birthright as human beings - it is coded into our physical structure. it is a sign of how deeply we are separated from this primal sense of who we really are, of how far we've fallen out of love with some essential part of our human nature, that most of us are so out of touch with the mechanism that signals when we've had enough to eat. this isn't something we have to learn... this is something we have only to remember. and we don't have to remember it consciously, we only have to remember it in our cells.

the Angels want us to take joy in our physical bodies, to appreciate the goodness of the food with which we nourish ourselves, to understand that we really do have the ability to recognize the right foods for us when we eat them.