As I write this, the Sun’s at 26 degrees of Cancer. The transiting giant flashlight’s been shining on all of our Cancerian stuff, including home, family, belongingness, happiness, security and – you guessed it – nurturance, emotions and food. How we care for/nurture ourselves is a central part of the Lunar archetype, and Moon rules the sign of Cancer. The Sun’s in Leo now, of course, but we always have to make space to deal with what we learn from the Sun’s transits after the light’s moved on. For some of you, it’s time to process what you learned about yourself during the Sun’s trek through Cancer.
Since December of 2008 I’ve been working formally on research into the karma of eating disorders, though I include not only clinically diagnosed/-able situations but all uncomfortable or unhealthy relationships with food. My approach to the link between karma & astrology and health & wellness is unique, and this topic seemed the right opportunity to first take you with me into an exploration of how emotions (and our emotional history) affect our health. This topic is great for this because it’s easier in our current mindsets to understand the link between emotions and eating than emotions and many other physical situations, though if you follow the development of my work on karma and health & wellness, in time you’ll see the links between karma/emotions and every situation/condition/disease that can arise in a body. This article is one kind of introduction to that work on food issues– the rest will likely get itself into my “Unraveling Karma” podcast, available in iTunes and via my web site’s blog, in the coming months.
Why This Now?
My aim now is to help people adjust to the energetic shifts taking place on Earth that culminate at the end of the Mayan Calendar. This process is a spiritual one, and modern-day spirituality requires that we live fully in the world (asceticism is so last few millennia!). Doing so requires bringing all of our bodies into alignment; being present to and in all parts of ourselves; taking all of us with us wherever we go. If we want to live healthy lives we must ensure that our physical, emotional and mental bodies are aligned with what our Spirits came here to do. In other words, physical, emotional and mental balance is the route to spiritual health, which is the route to successful and happy adaptation to how life on this planet is changing now.
The relationship between clarity, self-love, and the health of our four bodies cannot be overemphasized. When I started exploring psychic mediumship a few years ago, I began to see the link between a medium’s physical, emotional and mental health and his or her capacity to open to, work with and trust Spirit. How we vibrate physically, emotionally and mentally determines our capacity to vibrate spiritually. You simply cannot live and evolve in the spiritual ways our times ask of us if your physical body, emotions or thoughts are in a state of imbalance – it’s just not going to happen – the messages from Spirit you pick up will be limited to the vibration you can carry at any given time. While wherever you are is perfect (and so then whatever Spirit-based vibe you can track is perfect), this link needs to be better understood for any and all who wish to go to “the next level” and perhaps are not sure why they’re not there yet or how to get there.
The “Why this now?” question is also answered personally by the call I’ve received to go deeper into my own physical, emotional and mental health in order to enable myself to vibrate at the level my Spirit craves. And I’ve decided to offer you a glimpse into these issues as I understand them personally and as I work on them with clients. (If it’s more emotional archaeology I’m up to, I’m less dragging you into the pit with me than showing you the tools I use in my own dig site, all laid out on that pleasant gingham thingie spread out on the grass/dirt/sand/veldt….)
Questions
As always, part of my answer to any question involves asking you questions. Before I get into the karmic deal with emotions and food, take a moment to read these and, if you’re feeling adventurous, open to answering them. You may find multiple answers inside you, coming from different places within you. Let them be; hear what they have to say…even if this is not a daily thing for you and perhaps challenges you.
Also notice the judging voice you may also hear in there. Let it say what it says, but hold the intention to hear everything that’s inside and withhold judgment. Listening to that voice is precisely how and why we usually don’t spend any time looking at and feeling into these kinds of questions. Your invitation is to allow any and all answers that may exist to have a space in your conscious awareness.
What is food?
Why do people eat? Why do people need food?
What are the reasons you eat?
Is there anything other than survival that you tend to think food will/can offer you?
What do you actually get out of food, other than survival?
Are you aware of the effects of what you eat? Do you notice how you feel (physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually) as you eat?
Do you notice how you feel after you eat?
Where did you learn to eat the way you do?
For what reasons did the people you grew up with eat?
Were they aware of how what they ate made them feel as they ate it?
How did they feel after they ate?
How did their relationships with food affect their lives overall?
Remember: Choose to withhold judgment of any and all answers. Judgment takes us out of a willingness to love ourselves. Openness to the truth, to allow it, is your biggest ally in this process.
The Food Deal
Nature
Food is fuel for the physical body. You require nutrition in order to survive and maintain health.
Nurture
We learn all kinds of things about food from the families we grow up in, as well as from our cultures/social surroundings. Food has much to do with habit, with what we’re conditioned over time to do, with repeated patterns. What we’ve seen or done a lot of is what we tend to do.
We have responses to life that lead us to various sorts of foods and food experiences, and we have responses to foods and food experiences that lead us to various experiences of life.
Nature & Nurture
For anyone to whom this article speaks, the task of balancing nature and nurture in your relationship with food involves choosing to observe your choices and patterns, and then choosing conscious awareness of the parts of you that make your choices about food. The only way to change habits is to get inside them and consciously choose to change them.
The Karma Deal
I work with karma as emotional patterns that have been shaped by experience, and that are the basis for continued experience. In other words, we believe the world is the way it is after analyzing/assigning meaning to experiences, and then we create further experiences based on those beliefs. Karma is cyclic in this way, yet karma can be changed. This is one of the great teachings ripe for the people on Earth right now: We create our reality. Just us. Only us. If we don’t like what we’re creating, then we have numerous options about how to learn to create something else.
Awareness both of those emotional patterns and the emotional triggers that we use to repeat those patterns are the basis for changing karma. Observing our emotional natures with compassion and choosing behaviors based on self-love (what’s best for us in any given moment) is the thing to do. It’s easy to say this, and yet it does take effort to see and feel into those patterns in order to change our beliefs and behaviors.
Karma, Emotions & Food
If you’re in any way unhappy with your relationship with food, understand that there are emotions behind your choices. Whether your situation is clinically diagnosable or not is not my concern. Helping you understand why you make the choices you do, and supporting you in making choices based in more self-love, is.
Humans are in many ways terribly complex beings. Yet there’s a bottom-line thing we’re all after, and that’s love. Food often becomes a stand-in for love, as infant humans receive food and love from parents and other caregivers – when young, everything we receive is wrapped up with love. And if there’s anything out of whack/imbalanced in what we receive or perceive love-wise, then our relationships with food as we mature can be mixed up with the perceived whacked-ness/imbalance of the love we received or didn’t receive when young. The karmic link between emotions and food is the development of patterns of food-related behaviors that are attempts to meet an emotional need that’s not otherwise being met.
What I’m told over the etheric airwaves is that the human journey centers on living in these organic carbon-based bodies and remembering our true, spiritual nature. Along the way, we invite each other to tell us what the world is like so that we can explore what it’s like to be here. We aim eventually, however, to remember who we really are – the Spirit part of us that exists beyond the physical incarnations we experience. We ask others in the form of parents and other family members to teach us how to live, including what love is. We have all kinds of reactions to what our parents/families teach us about love. Ideally, we learn to find the love generator inside us and release others (including parents/family) from the responsibility of providing us all love.
This human trip, then, has a lot to do with evaluating definitions of love and saying no thanks to the ones that don’t work. Any version requiring that someone else provide us with it is one to be tossed.
Regarding food as a stand-in for love, several things have to happen to wind our way out of the unhappy-choices cycles we may be in and move into more conscious relationships with our food and our bodies, minds and emotions.
1. Getting clear on just what food is. What it does. What we’re to get out of it at the biological level. Why we animals eat.
2. Being honest with ourselves about what we expect to and perceive we receive from food, beyond biological survival.
3. Choosing conscious awareness of how food affects us physically, mentally and emotionally.
These three ideas are where the questions you read earlier come from. Given what you’ve read since then, take another look at each of them:
What is food?
Why do people eat? Why do people need food?
What are the reasons you eat?
Is there anything other than survival that you tend to think food will/can offer you?
What do you actually get out of food, other than survival?
Are you aware of the effects of what you eat? Do you notice how you feel (physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually) as you eat?
Do you notice how you feel after you eat?
Where did you learn to eat the way you do?
For what reasons did the people you grew up with eat?
Were they aware of how what they ate made them feel as they ate it?
How did they feel after they ate?
And then what about these?
Who are you behind your learned behaviors and habits?
How do you want to feel?
How are you going to love yourself? In what ways will you show yourself the love you seek, that you need?
What do you want to accomplish with your life?
How can your relationship with food support you in “completing your mission?”
They represent the next step of the process: Creating all aspects of your life to reflect what’s truly important to you. Aligning all aspects of your life so you can experience more of your true nature and achieve what you came here to do. Living what you came here to do.
Getting down into the emotional history related to unhealthy eating patterns is not easy, I know. But if you want to make some changes in your life in the direction of self-love, know not only that it’s possible, but also that you can do it. And when you’re committed to the direction of more and deeper self-love, it becomes less possible than it becomes likely – this self-love work on food, body and emotions is integral to the kind of spiritual growth many humans are being invited to do now as we shift and prepare for the end of the Mayan Calendar.
And there are people in all kinds of places responding to this invitation. I wish you continued willingness to stay honest with yourself and deepen into your evolving relationship with yourself as Spirit having a human experience.
In love,
Tom Jacobs
Evolutionary Astrologer & Psychic Medium
http://www.tdjacobs.com
tom@tdjacobs.com
(213) 925-6019