Thursday, May 7, 2015

Sitting in Awareness

So, who am I underneath all of the control? (This post is related the the previous one.)

When a student comes to see me for the first time, I always explain that there are two paths to take. The path to self improvement, or the path to awakening from the little self. Nobody wants to wake up. And that takes courage to admit. Nobody really knows what's going to happen to them, and everyone is afraid of words like God and spirit and awakening. 

We're happy to meditate and practice yoga and we're happy to chant a mantra, but when it gets down to it, we feel very uncomfortable about talking about God and our life's purpose. And we should be. It's a huge question and it has the possibility to change your life for ever. 

I was looking at my need to exercise, and my need to control my food intake and I was looking at my lifestyle, and I realised that many of my choices are based in a fear of becoming something I didn't want to be. So I have chosen a lifestyle that I hoped would stop me being close minded, fat, unhealthy, bored by life, ungrateful, dishonest and a slave to the dollar.

Being in Catalonia, I noticed that many Catalans describe themselves in terms of 'nots'. That is they are not like the people of the south and they are not like the French and they are not like the Spanish of the centre. I always thought that was peculiar because I'm from Australia and I didn't grow up comparing myself to another country (at least in the 70's and 80's). 

However I see clearly that I have set up a lifestyle dedicated to nots. And food and fatness is one of them. I'm a vegetarian, not necessarily because I am a healthy person or I love vegetables, but because I don't like people killing animals for food in a factory line up. I hate it. So even my number one restriction about food is about being NOT a meat eater. And it continues through so many of my choices.

What am I going to do?

Well, I've banned the scales for one. I will not step foot on a scale for the rest of the year. I'm going to do a little experiment on myself and discover what I really like. Not what I don't like. 

This is not for ever. Just for the rest of the year. I want to know what I like. When I was much younger I read a book by Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen. There's a passage in it that I have often thought about. The protagonist was used to eating eggs the way her partner ate eggs, and he called her out on it. She discovered that she didn't know what she liked and didn't like. She was easy going and didn't mind. But that was just the surface. The book is about her journey into discovering how she liked her eggs and so much more. 

Good luck to me!




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