Making It Sweet
Good Monday morning!
It has been a few weeks since I was here. I had a client with me last week for a retreat. As always, I love doing the retreat-style one-to-one health exploration. It allows both me and my client to relax deeply and enter an almost timeless zone where so many new pathways can emerge. And I love to do the cooking!
I never imagined, as a young person, entering the profession of healthcare, that I would find so much joy and expression in cooking. Now, it is truly one the main ways that I create and integrate with someone when they are with me. It feels so real and alive, so easy and yet so stimulating. I realized that I really like the challenge of making food that looks and tastes good, while also embodying the principles of change that are needed in a person’s personal circumstances.
One of the more interesting dynamics that often presents itself is the one between too much and not enough. What is enough? What is too much? There is usually so much baggage around these questions for so many of us. The questions go on, not limited to the ones for myself in preparation, but continuing at the table as we eat and afterward as we explore how the diet affects the body in the short and the long term. I’m sure you can imagine the questions.
In many cultures, food is synonymous with generosity. Our generosity is so easily expressed with food. And yet, our relationship with food can be fraught and confused, especially by our notions of what is healthy or what is generous. What often happens when I am cooking for someone is that I become over-zealous, anxious to give them more what I think they need because, of course, I want them to be happy and healthy. Naturally.
But it is good to remember that the meal table, like all of life, is just an example of what is offered. We still have to choose. The question of how we choose, on what basis do we choose, is completely personal and unique to each person and each circumstance. I know I’m like a broken record on this point. But becoming aware of how and why we are choosing is always the most powerful pivot point in any experience.
Choosing food is hard when we bring our past, our culture, our projects to the table. But when we simply open ourselves to the beauty and inherent richness of our world, something easy can happen. When I prepare food for the table during retreat and during my daily life, I practice the same way. I practice making the food appealing to all of my senses. I practice letting the food be new, smelling as if I had not had such a thing before, seeing it as if it is a new feature of my landscape.
Choosing to engage in this open and fresh way at each meal, trusting that such openness will lead you to healthiness, wholeness, this is, in fact, the practice of generosity. Allowing ourselves to experience both your own newness and the newness of a particular meal, paying attention to how you feel inside and out at that moment, this is being generous to yourself no doubt, but it is also your way of being generous with your world, allowing your world to touch you and talk to you.
I hope you are allowing your world to touch you and talk to you, allowing it to be sensual, speaking to your senses, and allowing it to be sweet. Then, you can afford to eat as much as you like because you will never overeat. A strange but lovely paradox that is, allowing it to be sensual and sweet, you never overeat.
