We walk around with our baby bottles of coffee in the morning, suck on our cigarette pacifiers all day, and finally go to bed guzzling our glass of wine/mommy’s milk?
Exactly. We are babies walking around in grown-up bodies sniffing around with our mouths for something greater, deeper, richer that will give us fulfillment and satisfaction, just like mamma used to (or didn’t?) give us when we were young. We are so attached to this feeling of oral pleasure, which signals a desire for a deeper kind of nourishment.
We are a hungover society. In the morning we feel tired, so we go for a cup of coffee. We feel uneasy during the day, so we smoke a cigarette, and finally, we want to unwind from the stressful day at work, so we drink alcohol. We wake up the next day feeling hungover, and so continues a cycle that never ends. We feel down and lacking energy, so we use caffeine to bring us back to life, to get us excited and focused.
We try to medicate ourselves with food and drugs when really, our symptoms are screaming at us to look deeper.
We are constantly shoving things IN our bodies, shooting food down our throats as we stare at screens all day. But what are we trying to bring in really? What are we seeking?
I say self-evolution – a craving to evolve. Our humanity wants it; it’s what we are here for. Evolutionary pressure, or the urgent need to step into a better version of ourselves is constantly nudging at us, asking for our disposition to evolve, and we simply don’t know what to do about it. We don’t know how to interpret it, and we misinterpret it; we become paralyzed, deaf, blind, insensitive, tuned out, and then opt for distraction with sugar, alcohol, tobacco, or whatever we can get our hands on. And these compulsions only take us further away from ourselves.
We go through life expecting things to turn out a certain way and we want life to be on our terms always. However, more often than not, it turns out the other way around: life takes turns and even gives us the exact opposite of what we were expecting to receive. Getting what we don’t want is often exactly what we need in order to evolve.
Someone once told me that life is a continuous process of letting go — of letting go of our attachment to wanting things to remain the same.
Perhaps the only times we notice this evolutionary pressure is when we are in deep pain, and then we know that we need to make changes. But, what if we didn’t let it get to that point? What if we became more aware, more awake, and instead of puffing on cigarettes all day and getting drunk until we become blind, we listened more closely to the signs that are given to us?
First, stop the resistance. Stop resisting the way things are happening in your life right now.
Second, stay open to learning a lesson even in the most painful situations. Understand the meaning and why they are coming to you. Third, ask yourself: what do I live by? Is there a greater wisdom? Source? Meaning? Or is this all just randomness…? When you have more trust and faith in your life, then at the most fundamental level of physiology, a profound relaxation response is activated in the brain and you create the optimal state for digestion, assimilation and calorie burning.
Tips for how to avoid coffee, chocolate, and cigarettes:
- Instead of coffee in the morning, try 2 rounds of sun salutations and sip on moringa lemon ginger tea.
- Instead of having a cigarette, try taking full deep breaths through the nose. You can also try kapalabhati breathing if you’re at home.
- Instead of having a glass of wine at night to wind down, take a bath with salts, and try these stretches.
We complain about feeling fatigued, of binge eating, of feeling anxious, and all of the symptoms that are connected to a person who is unhappy with the world, who is sour about life, who curses about how things have turned out, and we continue to move into our future with disappointment and unhappiness.
We have to find the roots of our suffering. Life is a teaching workshop, and it is our responsibility to explore and learn how to find inner peace, love, and clarity. Most of us are here in life, but haven’t fully agreed to be here and are walking half-dead, one foot in and one foot out. We are in a state of long-term, low-level depression living life as a drama. We develop bad eating habits, dissatisfaction with weight, body image, binge eating, overeating, addiction to certain foods… and we carry these to our graves.
The first step towards evolution and healing is to agree to be here. I’m not saying you have to love everything or agree to everything about life, but open yourself to accept and receive both good and bad. In order to move on and evolve we have to first agree and accept everything that has happened to us up to now. This is exactly the life you are supposed to live simply because you are living it.
Without a true agreement to be here, poor health habits are predictable and bound to happen as metabolism weakens accordingly. When a part of us checks out, we disembody, we lose presence, we lose power, and the body loses integrity and capacity for metabolic momentum; metabolism diminishes accordingly.
On the other hand, when we agree to be here, metabolism rises to the occasion. In a sense, you are telling your system that you choose to be alive and to metabolize life.
“Usually people that say they need motivation, really need inspiration.”
Using willpower to mush down our old bad habits is using a very superficial power and shallow strength to push us into things, and force us to move through a situation. Inspiration on the other hand, is about breathing in with ease, breathing in life, breathing in spirit. It is about being moved by a force greater than us; a higher energy coming through us. Motivation comes from your own motor. Inspiration comes from something greater than just you; the engine is already going on. It is important to keep focusing ourselves on getting fueled from a higher place.
Think of when you fall in love: there is this explosion of energy and you feel you can conquer the world. LIFE IS GOOD. Truth is, we can access a lot of that frequency and vibration whenever we want to! It’s there! It’s ours! We actually have access to that power that lies latent in the body and in the heart anytime. It doesn’t mean you have to keep falling in love with different people to feel it. It simply means we can fall in love with life, with ourselves, with the world, with the universe, with life as it IS. It is a matter of tapping into that source of love in ourselves, which will give us the power to move forward joyfully in the world.
All of our unwanted symptoms are really screaming at us to look deeper. They are calling at us. It’s about self evolution. As we evolve, the body heals and steps into a higher level of function and metabolism.