‘Your scars are someone else’s hope’ Danielle LaPorte
Food and freedom
I had planned to continue on journaling and creativity, but I ended up writing about food, mindful eating and cooking….. It is Saturday and I have bought over a kilo of fresh spinach, which I am going to use to prepare three dishes. Spinach pie, a spinach salad and a risotto type dish, my own preferred version of a traditional Greek risotto recipe. These last eighteen months or so and probably as part of recovering from the ‘mystery weight loss’ and of regaining weight I have been taking better care of me and eating and cooking more mindfully. Also, since our decision to cut gluten and sugar out of our diet I have been preparing a smaller variety of simpler dishes mostly due to lack of availability of certain gluten free products here. I have amidst the changes been engaging with the whole process of eating and cooking with more presence. Most of us eat and cook while being on the automatic pilot often thinking of other things or multitasking at the same time. Edward Espe Brown writes ‘when you wash the rice, wash the rice, when you cut the carrots, cut the carrots. A lot of time we have stuff on our minds. Take care of the activity’. Actually, Edward Espe Brown’s ‘definition’ of what Zen Cooking means to him quite resonates with me. He sums it up as: cooking as a personal spiritual act; personally selecting foods; recycling leftovers and waste; respect for and hospitality toward guests; an absolutely clean kitchen; use of the freshest seasonal ingredients; the ability to cook anywhere in the world with whatever is on hand; being equally capable of cooking frugally and extravagantly; using food to enhance health.
As part of this healing in some sense process I have also been experimenting and tasting things I hated as a child and have often found that I actually enjoy eating these foods now, which is natural because our preferences change as we grow up and most of us eat a greater variety of things as adults anyway. Foods that I used to not like in earlier times might simply have been linked to feared or unpleasant childhood incidents like choking on a fishbone or being made to eat a certain food because of its nutritional properties or a teacher insisting on my eating the sandwich I had already tossed in the bin. Thinking back on a film I saw a little while ago, The Cakemaker, directed by Israeli writer/director Ofir Raul Graizer, the leading female character in the film, objects to her brother in law’s strict, religious based, admonitions to her child in relation to what foods are acceptable to eat. She tells him she doesn’t want him to grow up fearing food. How many of us harbor all sorts of mostly unconscious beliefs and fears to do with food and many other things, too? If we pause to think we realise that so much of our daily and very basic experiences are seeped with old messages and rules and don’ts and shoulds that may be of no value and may not resonate with us in the present. While growing up many of us internalised all sorts of cultural messages, stories and judgments around food, our life path, self worth, creativity and so on that we would probably be better off without. Korean Zen Buddhist Nun Jeong Kwan and chef of her Buddhist Temple says ‘You must not be your own obstacle. You must not be owned by the environment you are in. You must own the environment, the phenomenal world around you. You must be able to freely move in and out of your mind. This is being free……’
Up until recently I sort of still avoided eating spinach risotto remembering my intense childhood dislike, but I have now discovered that if I tweak the recipe a bit I actually like it very much. So, this is how I currently make it. I sizzle the rice and onions in olive oil, add two chopped tomatoes, pepper and salt, and finally, the roughly chopped spinach, which I have thoroughly washed and drained. I then add a little hot water and allow the ingredients to simmer until the rice is cooked, but not too cooked. Traditionally, the rice would not be ‘al dente’ and the tomatoes would not have been added. Raw spinach appealed even less to me as a child, but as an adult I absolutely love spinach based salads and pies. The salad in the photo contains spinach, a fresh onion, salt and pepper, olive oil, vinegar, a few crushed walnuts, pine nuts, chia and sesame seeds. I might also add other vegetables, sundried tomatoes, olives and parmesan cheese depending on what’s available. For the pie pastry today I have used gluten free flour (not sure about the suitability of this flour though), a little olive oil, a spoonful of apple cider vinegar, salt and water and for the filling I have used roughly chopped spinach and fresh green onions, which I have moderately sizzled in olive oil, drained and allowed to cool, crushed Greek feta cheese made from goat’s milk, pepper and herbs. I am actually writing this post while the pie is in the oven.
Eating and cooking mindfully grounds us in the moment, and so on the one hand, past information interferes less with our present experience, and on the other hand, the likelihood of relevant insight arising is also increased, and when this occurs it can diffuse past experience and the associated beliefs. We gradually eat with less fear unburdened by a lot of past and unhelpful information. Engaging with eating and preparing meals in a more mindful way also increases the chance of our eating to nourish our bodies rather than eating or even stuffing ourselves to soothe our underlying stress, for instance. Engaging mindfully with the experience of eating may also help unhinge our sometimes unconscious resistance to food, and thus, allow nourishment to take place. It is a sad fact that in Western contemporary societies, obesity and the numbers of people suffering from eating disorders is on the rise. Tragically, there are also millions of people in the world who are dying for lack of food. In all cases the causes are complex and multifaceted – ranging from greed for profit and control, sociocultural expectations and media messages to conditioning and trauma. In his book, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk (2014) writes ‘if you are not aware of what your body needs, you can’t take care of it. If you don’t feel hunger, you can’t nourish yourself. If you mistake anxiety for hunger, you may eat too much. And if you can’t feel when you’re satiated, you’ll keep eating. This is why cultivating sensory awareness is such a critical aspect of trauma recovery. Most traditional therapies downplay or ignore the moment-to-moment shifts in our inner sensory world. But these shifts carry the essence of the organism’s responses: the emotional states that are imprinted in the body’s chemical profile, in the viscera, in the contraction of the striated muscles of the face, throat, trunk, and limbs. Traumatized people need to learn that they can tolerate their sensations, befriend their inner experiences, and cultivate new action patterns’. Finally, being more mindful of the whole process leaves room for deep gratitude to arise. As I engage with food while eating and cooking more mindfully, waves of gratitude also arise spontaneously.
‘….. Do not forget to add some salt, / when serving spinach warm;
if you do this kids find no fault / and sometimes may reform.
Though they can’t share your cool crisp wine / a Chardonnay, Tokay,
some Seven-Up will do quite fine / while following Popeye….’ (Gershon Hepner)
(https://www.rickhanson.net/writings/just-one-thing/). He writes ‘abuse of power can be called many things, including intimidation, fraud, discrimination, and tyranny. I’ll use a term that’s down-to-earth and gets at our nature as social primates: bullying’. He goes on to say that bullies and bullying are common ‘from homes and schoolyards to boardrooms and presidential palaces, they create a vast amount of human suffering’. He describes bullies as ‘a) Dominating; b) Defensive – Never wrong; fault and scorn others; avoid personal responsibility; c) Deceptive – Manipulate grievances to gain support; blame scapegoats; cheat; hide truth since power is based on lies’. He writes deep down ‘the mind of a bully is like a hell realm of fended-off feelings of weakness and shame always threatening to invade’ so this suffering deserves our compassion. He also makes suggestions of how to deal with bullying at all levels from naming the bullying for what it is and confronting their lies and their denial of the harm they’re doing to confronting enablers that are complicit in bullying to engaging the legal system and so on. And finally, he reminds us to see the bigger picture and the fact that ‘bullying is enabled and fostered by underlying conditions’.
I hope to describe the process in some future post. Meanwhile, here’s a short extract from her book of the many un/conscious negative core beliefs that we often carry: ‘In this week, we will work at uncovering our negative beliefs and discarding them. Here is a list of commonly held negative beliefs: I can’t be a successful, prolific, creative artist because: Everyone will hate me. I will hurt my friends and family. I will go crazy. I will abandon my friends and family. I can’t spell. I don’t have good enough ideas. It will upset my mother and/or father. I will have to be alone. I will find out I am gay (if straight). I will be struck straight (if gay). I will do bad work and not know it and look like a fool. I will feel too angry. I will never have any real money. I will get self-destructive and drink, drug, or sex myself to death. I will get cancer, AIDS—or a heart attack or the plague. My lover will leave me. I will die. I will feel bad because I don’t deserve to be successful. I will have only one good piece of work in me. It’s too late. If I haven’t become a fully functioning artist yet, I never will. None of these core negatives need be true. They come to us from our parents, our religion, our culture, and our fearful friends. Each one of these beliefs reflects notions we have about what it means to be an artist’.