An Introduction to Conscious Eating

I've modified (edited and added to) the Introduction from Conscious Eating by Dr. Cousens:

Conscious eating is the awareness of how the food we eat affects our bodies, emotions, mind, and spiritual life. Our choices reflect the state of harmony with ourselves, the world, all of creation, and the Divine. This synergistic view of nutrition is part of a core understanding of what it means to live an integrated, harmonious, and peaceful life on this planet. Conscious eating involves understanding how to develop an individualized diet, how to eat to enhance your psychophysiological constitution, balancing pH, in-depth spiritual aspects of an optimal diet, transition phases, and so on.  There's no "best" diet for everyone, but there are guidelines for developing a diet that's individualized to your needs.

Unhealthy eating is a way of numbing oneself to life. Conscious eating is about glowing with life and joy rather than attempting to gain this joy through food. It's about eating to further enhance communion with the Divine. It reflects and supports one's realization of the highest state of awareness.

To make the shift into harmony is a matter of making conscious lifestyle changes. To do this and to depart from the disease-generating practices of our culture, is considered abnormal and heretical to our current fast-food lifestyle. Though it's difficult to change one's old habits and belief system, this must be done if one values living a healthy spiritual life. Social forces are powerful excuses for ambivalence.  Nevertheless, for a totally functional diet, one needs to be willing to examine these patters and abandon what is no longer appropriate. Eventually, one begins to make food choices on the basis of what maintains and enhances the blissful communion with God, as well as the feeling of well-being in mind and body.

Even upon realizing the benefits of changing one's diet, it can still take years to complete the full transition. To make stable and lasting changes, it's best to make step-by-step changes, incorporated in sync with the overall context of one's life. Ideally, one has a solid support system for a successful, sustained change in the direction of high-level physical, mental, and spiritual health. Making idealistic yet drastic changes often creates imbalances which reverse themselves in short order.

The art of conscious eating is learning how to eat just the right amount of food to maximize every aspect of our lives. It's not a deprivation or minimal-eating diet. It does require some sensitive attention to the details of our daily activities. Our hunger for the Divine becomes the overwhelming appetite and guide to our choice of diet.

In developing a diet, clarity of purpose is necessary. (1) Developing a diet as an aid to spiritual unfolding, one that maintains, purifies, and honors the body as a temple for the spirit in a way that keeps the mind clear, balanced, alert, and elevated. (2) increasing the ability to assimilate, store, conduct, and transmit spiritual energies, to activate and increase one's potential for awakening. (3) Developing a diet that balances all our subtle energy centers on a daily basis (the "rainbow diet"). (4) Developing a diet that brings us into harmony with the principles of ahimsa, non-cruelty to animals, the universal laws of nature, and food-related ecological issues, thereby enhancing peace on our planet. Many factors play a role in how one goes about individualizing a diet, such as biochemistry, lifestyle patterns, how well one digests proteins, carbs, and lipids, the degree of physical activity, how much one meditates or prays each day, the enzyme system, and one's present level of health, vitality, and detoxification. Essential factors are also the seasons, the political and social context.

The diet changes with the seasons and with the maturation of our emotional, mental, and spiritual state. These shifts are guided by intuition. As we become healthy, we often require less food because the body is better able to assimilate the physical aspects of the food and more subtle energies from which the food is condensed.

To successfully make the appropriate adjustments, we must be free enough psychologically to distinguish between healthy intuition and the drives of our habitual eating patterns, peer pressure, or unconscious needs. The key is identifying nonfunctional food patters and being able to let them go if they are detracting from our love communion with the Divine or from our physical, emotional, or mental well-being.

If the process of letting go of certain food habits were always easy our culture would not have such a high percentage of the population eating such poor diets and living in such poor health For many people, overcoming their food issues can require intense and difficult work that takes them to the very core of their psychological beings. In the US it is staggering how two-thirds of people are overweight and obese and how almost everyone (about 97%) is addicted to meat and dairy. The more common negative beliefs and fears associated with being overweight have to do with the consequences people fear if they, in fact, lost weight and returned to normal body shape. People have fears related to sex, intimacy, rejection by jealous peers, or receiving too much attention. For others, food means love and attention: it's a way of feeling loved or to get approval. For others, it's a way to suppress feelings of sadness, anger, rejection, fear, anxiety, or loneliness, or to numb themselves to feelings and life in general. No eating at all or overeating are ways to oppose people who want you to do the opposite because it's the one thing we control. It's a way to punish or be angry with oneself or as a compensation for or avoidance of starving again. (People may subconsciously know there are severe food shortages on the horizon and this is related to the obesity epidemic.)... It's apparent that the negative thoughts that people have created in relationship to food contribute to the problem, not just the actual eating habits. These disharmonious thoughts maintain inappropriate eating patterns.

When these thoughts are released, a lot of blocked energy is simultaneously released. Thoughts filled with light and love add lightness and fluidity  to us. While eating it is important to be joyous and to think positive thoughts. Food is love. Life is love. Heavy thoughts block us from the experience of love in our lives.

A vegetarian, vegan, and particularly a raw-food diet, can be threatening to many people because it directly forces them to face their food issues, and indirectly, their life issues. Live foods have so much nourishment in them that considerably less food is needed to get the same amount of nutrition. (cooked food loses about 50% of its protein, 70-­80% of its vitamins and minerals, and close to 100% of its phytonutrients and biophoton energy).

Needing less food for optimal nutrition, however, forces us to observe whatever food compulsions we may have. The highly energetic qualities of raw food make it harder to suppress feelings when eating compared to overeating cooked or animal foods to numb ourselves to life. On raw foods, repressed emotions and thoughts seem to be more easily released. Sweet foods create the illusion of fullness and false contentment or good feelings. When people are feeling bad, empty, or depressed, they turn to junk food, especially sweets, in a misguided attempt to create feelings of fulness and happiness. It's similar to an alcoholic's illusion of drinking troubles away, eating away sadness and emptiness. Many people are addicted to this double, two tiered illusion: junk foods are an illusion of real food and thinking we can eat our troubles away is also an illusion. Living foods brings us immediately into awareness of it.

Self-healing is about identifying limiting, negative thoughts; witnessing these thoughts, and then dissolving them. Once these thoughts are identified and dissolved, they no longer have any power over us. It's a powerful and simple technique. To be successfully, one must get in touch with both their desire and resistance to lose or gain weight, or any aspect of food which is an issue to them. Some level of desire to change is usually found. Do not deny resistance with avoidance patterns - they're interpersonal manipulations around food; fears of change, self-mythologies, limiting self-concepts, and negative self-images, unwillingness to give up family and cultural images. Once the limiting thoughts are dissolved, one is free to become health.

Rigid diets can be a form of punishment in themselves, potential traps for being wrong and guilty. Once the blocks are removed, one is free to eat those foods and live in ways which bring health, love, harmony, and communion with the Divine. Unhealthy habits naturally fade when there is a reorientation toward eating to enhance health, joy, and communion. The joy of Divine communion helps decrease our physical appetite because we are already feeling satisfied from within. The body's desire for food has its roots in the soul's need for spiritual substance. When one is in touch with the Divine, there is such a sense of contentment, joy, peace, and fullness that food has no power to throw one out of balance.

If one surrenders to the divine unfolding, slowly and gently, harmony with the diet and body also happens. One spontaneously moves to a positive self-image. Trust the unfolding and one's observations and intuition.  When the habituating thoughts that distort our eating patterns are dissolved, the balancing process is delightful. One feels free to eat or not to eat. One is attracted to certain foods that one intuitively knows are appropriate. The joy of eating increases. One actually pays attention to food. The energies and flavors of the food are more sensuously experienced.

Related: Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine by Dr. Cousens

The Next Step beyond Conscious Eating: Spiritual Nutrition by Dr. Cousens