You Are What You Feed On

When you are open to receive, to hear, to know, to learn…it seems the supply is never ending.

I received this e-mail encouragement, just getting in from joining a fitness club closer to home, and when I read:

“Weak minds lead to weak actions. A strong, disciplined mind, which anyone can cultivate though daily practice, can achieve miracles. If you want to live life to the fullest, care for your thoughts as you would your most prized possessions. Work hard to remove all inner turbulence. The rewards will be abundant.”

~ Robin Sharma from The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

I of course thought about how much money the physical fitness industry makes from us folks, and yes I am included.  I’ve always worked out, been a part of a fitness club or community classes, at least since I had my first child….a very, very long time ago.  I was so active in the classes at the YMCA they suggested I should instruct; and so I did.  I took the Y fitness certification classes and am a certified fitness instructor, weight trainer, etc.  I taught classes until … approximately 55 years young and then due to other commitments, decided it was time to pack it in; the instructing part, not the working out part.

So where am I going with this?

We spend a fortunate on our physical bodies; the need to look good on the outside, all the while the inside might be rotting away – and I don’t mean literally and physically, but the essence of you and I; our Spirit.  How much attention do any of us pay to the inner man, that which is our true self?  How many of us even decide that we need to delve in and know the inner self, or even know there is an inner self to know; to feed, to noursih, to encourage and to strengthen?  It seems these days there are more and more who are seeking the “spiritual”, which can mean as many things as there are pebbles of sand on the beach.

If you ask me what it means, I can only tell you from my perspective, because that is the only perspective that matters; me knowing me.  The world and society has labelled me all my life; heck I have labelled me all my life, and not so nice labels.  It brings to mind an incident in the office the other day when an associate had made a mistake in filling out some form and said of herself, “How can you be so stupid.  That was dumb.”  BUT, she realized what she had said and immediately retracted it before the negative and damaging words could take root.

What are we feeding our minds with; not just our bodies but our minds?  Do you plant yourself in front of a television and watch violent programs, the latest trendy shows like “Survival” or “The Bachelor” or any of those other situational programs.  I’ve sat and watched a few, the latest being “How to Look Good Naked.”  So, this person, this woman, who has issues with her body, ends up strutting herself in a billboard high above the city, her teen-age daughters looking on as she parades half naked in a large Toronto shopping mall, and my mind is asking, “What in the hell is wrong with this picture?”  The show is telling this woman that if you can get “strangers to tell you you are fine,” well, guess what, you are just fine!  That’s not the way it ought to be done.

If I don’t feel good about myself, all the strutting and crowd approval isn’t going to fix it; nor the weight loss programs or exercise programs, nor the latest in fashion.  I know what I am speaking of re the latter statement re fashions.  In my journey into self, I was brought back to a time where I was dressed in a dress that matched my mothers.  I saw the little girl looking up at her mother, and my thoughts were that she was thinking, “Now mommy will think I am pretty; will like me!”  That’s one hell of a revelation for me some 50 years later!  And in being honest, most of my life past that little girl was spent being the “latest fashion statement.”  Damn, I looked fine on the outside, but was rotting on the inside!

After marriage and giving birth to my first child was when I got into the physical fitness thing.  It was never to lose weight; thankfully that’s never been an issue – at least on having excess weight; there have been times when I needed to put a bit of meat on my bones.  I was still working on the exterior with now getting into the fitness thing; added to the clothing thing.  Still no journey into me and why I was like that, felt that need, nor what might even possibly be wrong.  After all, I had the perfect marriage, perfect kids, perfect house in the burbs with the 2 cars and all the bells and whistles.  But something was still missing and I had no idea then that something was missing.

I’ve been on this inner journey for a while, however, it started on the outside with a ritualistic baptism at age 40, joining the church clubs, reading and studying the bible.  I even did the bible college thing, but something was still missing.  I was being fed, but it was someone else’s interpretation of things spiritual, from their perspective, so in essence they were telling me if I did this or thought that…I too could be just like them.

Our lives are personal.  No one else can live them for us, and no one else can fix them for us.  We have to make the decision that we are worth it, and “go for the gold.”

So what am I feeding my mind these days?  I am using other peoples’ writings to trigger my own processes.  That’s it; something is read that triggers a truth within me, brings up a memory, just like the one I just shared with you about wearing the same dress as my mom….and I examine that moment of my life back then, how I felt, and even how I am feeling now about it, as it is revealed to me.  I am finding things, words that had been fed to my mind that took deep and dark roots, within my very soul, that were killing the Spirit of me; stiffling me and in essence I’d been bound and gagged.

I feed my body the right things (occasionally binging on ice cream…like last week-end, and regretting it for days thereafter) and learning to feed my mind, my spirit, my essence…with Love Things.

Oh, and today, I signed up and am going for my certification as an Holistic Life Coach – for you see I am a certified fitness trainer, a Reiki Master, have several years of structured “bible/spiritual” studies, about 30 years of reading and studying on my own (a prolific reader); have dabbled in Auryvedic medicine, all kinds of naturopatic studies, herbal studies, gnostic studies….so am going to obtain my “certification”:  a piece of paper that tells the world a bit about me, that I already knew!  I’ve been feeding my mind with Go(o)d things, and shall continue to do so…thereby disbursing and ridding myself of the negative things that would see my Spirit silenced.

Leaving you with the source of the phrase, “You are what you eat,” which speaks to the physical.  Take this and apply it to what you “feed your mind” and do the right thing, the Go[o]d thing and you will live a long and healthy life; a balanced and dis-ease free life.  “Disease” is nothing more than not being at-ease.

You are what you eat

Meaning

The notion that to be fit and healthy you need to eat good food.

Origin

This phrase has come to us via quite a tortuous route. Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, 1826:

“Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.” [Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are].

In an essay entitled Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism, 1863/4, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach wrote:

“Der Mensch ist, was er ißt.”

That translates into English as ‘man is what he eats’.

Neither Brillat-Savarin or Feuerbach meant their quotations to be taken literally. They were stating that that the food one eats has a bearing on what one’s state of mind and health.

The actual phrase didn’t emerge in English until some time later. In the 1920s and 30s, the nutritionist Victor Lindlahr, who was a strong believer in the idea that food controls health, developed the Catabolic Diet. That view gained some adherents at the time and the earliest known printed example is from an advert for beef in a 1923 edition of the Bridgeport Telegraph, for ‘United Meet [sic] Markets’:

“Ninety per cent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat.”