Conscious Choice: Feed Your Body … Feed Your Soul

September 2005 | Whole Health

Feed Your Body … Feed Your Soul

The new dietary system of Spiritual Nutrition emphasizes plant-based foods for balancing our chakras and associated glands, organs, and nerve centers

by Gabriel Cousens, M.D.

Brace yourself for this diet. Spiritual Nutrition soars above conventional nutrition by giving wings to your spirituality! Stunningly, it offers a blueprint for creating the critical mass of conscious people necessary for planetary transformation. Now that’s a mouthful.

Gabriel Cousens, M.D., creator of this way of eating (and thinking and living), is an holistic physician, psychiatrist, homeopath, and family therapist. Drawing on 14 years of clinical experience and research, Dr. Cousens discusses nutritional issues that tackle this weighty question: When we eat, can we feed the soul as well as the body? In other words, can a diet have impact on spirituality? He believes so. Read on …

Spiritual Nutrition

The Spiritual Nutrition paradigm fills a gap in the meaning and value of nutrition. It honors and describes the purpose of nutrition, not in terms of health per se, but in terms of how it affects and amplifies the evolutionary unfolding of the spiritual Being. From this perspective, we clearly have an opportunity to think about nutrition in a different way. We begin to understand that what we eat affects the quality of the functioning of our mind, whether our mind is noisy, quiet, at peace, or irritated. Our food choices and the way we lead our lives are both the cause and effect of our diet and lifestyle. Our food choices reflect our state of harmony with ourselves, the world, all of creation, and the Divine. This view of nutrition is part of a core understanding of what it means to live an integrative, harmonious, and peaceful life on this planet.

There are only three gross substances that we consciously take in to support our life process: food, air, and water. In the past, breathing and drinking water did not take much thought. Before the days of air and water pollution, it was fairly automatic. Food, on the other hand, consumes a lot of our time. We forage in the supermarket or health food store for our food, then we have to gather it, prepare it, bless it, eat it, and digest it. We must also grow it or earn money to buy it. By the time this process is completed, we ought to have a unique understanding of our relationship to food. Yet in the last 200 years, for most of us, this relationship has remained a mystery. It is especially mysterious when we think about nutrition for the enhancement of our spiritual life.

More Than Food

The appropriate eating of food is a means of extracting energy from our environment in a harmonious way, and in today’s world, this relationship has broken down, becoming mystified and confused. How else, could we, on a national level, have approved the irradiation of fresh fruits and vegetables as a way of “preserving” them? This represents a complete break with Nature. What seems normal is abnormal and vice versa. It is as if we are banging our head against the wall. When we stop, we discover our headache is gone and it is easier to meditate. Meanwhile, modern technology is studying the physiology of how to live normally while banging our head against the wall. Because most people are normally banging their head against the wall, we are considered abnormal because we choose to stop. We are the funny ones eating “a birdseed-and-grass diet.” It is difficult to change our program in the face of this social pressure and our old programmed habits and belief systems. Nevertheless, it is necessary to examine these patterns and be willing to abandon what is no longer appropriate for maintaining our experience of blissful Communion with God, our feeling of well-being, a balanced body energy, and nurturing the spiritualizing force of the Kundalini energy within. Diet itself is not the key to spiritual life, but it helps to open the door to Communion with the Divine. To live and eat in a way that enhances this Communion is the guideline.

(The Right) Food for Thought

[A] major source of nutrient energy is oxygen. In some modern Yoga teachings, it is said that approximately 90 percent of the energy utilized by the body is from oxygen taken in by the lung and skin systems. In the absence of oxygen, our physical bodies can only survive a few minutes. “Vitamin O” is our most important nutrient. This form of energy intake is the most commonly used meaning for the word prana. This oxygen energy comes into the lungs, which surround the heart chakra and act as a balancing point between the upper and lower charkas.

Oxygen is also taken into our systems directly from our food. Poor diet is [a] form of oxygen stress. Foods that are excessively acidic such as meat, coffee, carbonated drinks, and alcohol create acidity in the system. This acidity is an excess of hydrogen ions (H+) in the system, which deplete oxygen by combining with it to create water. When less oxygen is available for metabolism, there is a build-up of lactic acid, and our cellular environment becomes progressively acidic, resulting in the destruction of cellular function. According to Dr. [Steven] Levine, Ph.D., hypoxia, or lack of oxygen in the tissues, is a fundamental cause of all chronic degenerative diseases. Low tissue oxygen has been associated with candida albicans infections and the degenerative disease of cancer.

Eating foods high in oxygen content seems to be associated with good health. Water is 85 percent oxygen, so we benefit by drinking and eating foods with a high water content, such as fruits, which can be up to 90 percent water. The next highest oxygen-content foods are carbohydrates, which are slightly more than 50 percent oxygen by weight. These foods are vegetables, grains, seeds, and nuts. Seeds and nuts have fats and proteins that lower the oxygen content, but are still high in complex-carbohydrate content. For example, sesame seeds have three times the carbohydrate content of red cabbage, mung bean sprouts, green snap beans, and many other fruits and vegetables. Proteins contain an average of 25 percent oxygen. Fats have the lowest oxygen content, an average of about 12 percent. Although we need some unsaturated fatty acids for cell membrane formation, they steal oxygen. Another problem with fats, especially animal fats, is that most pesticides, herbicides, and other environmental toxins are fat soluble, so they increase our environmental toxin load and divert oxygen for detoxification. For these reasons it is better to consume foods that contain essential fatty acids rather than nonessential fats. Avocados and sesame seeds are examples of these beneficial fats.

The perfect diet cannot even make us 100 percent healthy because, although diet affects the mind and the spirit, its primary effect is on the physical body. For diet to be truly effective, it needs to be in the context of a full spiritual life of meditation, good fellowship, right life, Loving our neighbors as our True Selves, and continual Love Communion with God — in other words, the Six Foundations. On one hand, diet is a powerful discipline that can help us balance our bodies, minds, hearts, and lives in general. On the other hand, diet is an expression of our state of Beingness and of our harmony with the universal laws of creation.

Gabriel Cousens, M.D., is the founder and director of the Tree of Life Foundation and Rejuvenation Center in Patagonia, Ariz. (treeoflife.nu)

Selected excerpts from Spiritual Nutrition: Six Foundations for Spiritual Life and the Awakening of Kundalini by Gabriel Cousens, published by North Atlantic Books, © 2005 by Gabriel Cousens. Call 800-337-2665 or go to www.northatlanticbooks.com.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: