Digesting Life

By Vishali,

Author of You Are What You Love

Most people think of the digestive process as something limited to the foods and liquids that we put into our mouths. However, digestion is best understood as a metaphor for life.

According to Eastern systems of self-healing, our entire body is an aggregate of different types of digestive intelligences. For example, our eyes digest light waves, so we can make perceptual sense of our world. Our ears digest sound waves so we may enjoy our favorite music, (or get indigestion from listening to our windows vibrate from the secondhand rap blaring from a car three blocks away). When we touch one another, our hands digest intimate contact through the tactile feeling feedback system. There is a reason for this conglomerate of digestive efforts. And that is because, as Eastern philosophies say, everything we encounter is a form of food; Divine Love and Wisdom has accessorized our human experience with a myriad of assorted digestive skills, so that we might get the most from the nurturing sustenance of life as it is offered to us in its entirety. We are literally digesting our lives.

What digesting our lives means in practical everyday terms, is that every thought, feeling, experience, emotion, etc. that touches our lives, is a form of food. So let’s eat!

The first thing we have to be able to do with our food is to be able to swallow it. Then we need to be able to stomach it. Once we’ve got it down, we need to pull from these forms of food what enhances us, makes us stronger, wiser, more loving, healthier, balanced people. Finally, we need to be able to let the rest go; to recognize and release the waste in our lives, for what it is.

Now that we have the food part down, let’s move to the main course; the meaty metaphor. The Eastern self-healing philosophies really want us to understand our thoughts, emotions, perceptions and experiences travel through our digestive tract in the identical fashion as the physical food we eat because it is a non-physical form of food. If we take something in, mentally or emotionally, and do not release whatever part of that process contains the waste, the useless, then we are still carrying that around in our body, and will continue to do so, until we let it go!

So, how much of what we give our attention to, and how much of what we feel about life, can we really swallow, stomach, and convert into life sustaining energy? Metaphorically speaking, some things can be really hard to swallow, and even harder to stomach.

Do we ever consider, in our movement through life, if there is anything useful in what we take in, that our bodies, physically, emotionally or energetically, can assimilate, or do we just ingest whatever is put in front of us?

If what we give our attention to is limiting, then there’s nothing there that is useful for us. So how do we assure there is value in the food we eat? And, if we do become bloated and constipated by overindulgence in toxic waste, how do we find the emotional, psychological, experiential and perceptual ex-lax needed to inspire us to let go? This is the toughest part of the entire human experience; recognizing the useless in our lives and discarding it completely, instead of clinging to it, thinking it has some place or value. So how do we do it? How do we get rid of what is not serving us and move on?

We do it with our awareness. When we find ourselves giving attention to worry, or some other inner dialogue about how we do not have enough time, love, money or opportunity, do we ever question that food? Do we consider its nutrient to waste ratio, or do we just shove it down our mouths like a 99¢ taco? Do we stop and ask ourselves, “Is that really what we want to feed ourselves? Did we come to planet Earth and take a body just so we could swallow that garbage?”

What is the Divine plan behind feeding ourselves a daily critical diet of “didn’t do it right” and “not good enough” tasteless morsels? Bet you can’t eat just one! In other words, how much of the time, when we find ourselves giving our attention to limiting things, do we realize we are actually feeding ourselves refuse, and how much of the time are we just mindlessly taking it in as something that has value and legitimate meaning in our lives?

The best way to not partake is ask ourselves if what we are giving our attention to looks, sounds, tastes, smells or feels limiting. If the answer is, “yes” then a healthy digestive answer would be to take that item off our diet. We cannot give what is limiting our attention, unless we want to feed ourselves noxious, meaningless, mean cuisine. If we want to poison our body with what is pointless, bon appetit’! This digestive metaphor thing brings a whole new meaning to “junk food”.

If we find ourselves consuming mass quantities of negativity, in the same way the Coneheads consumed beer and chips, there is a digestive remedy. Stop! We must recognize what we are giving our attention to and choose something else. Giving our attention to what is unlimiting will always purify the poison. When we give our attention to what is unlimiting, the emotional, mental and physical bodies will immediately recognize what needs to be discarded from what needs to be taken deeper to sustain life.