FOOD and EATING: AWARENESS & COMPASSION - the most important ingredients on your plate
By Antanas Vainius, Nourishment Coach
As a Nourishment Guide, people come to me looking to change and heal. By far the most common question I receive is "What do I eat?”
My answer is always the same. There are 2 ingredients that really matter: Awareness and Compassion.
Initially it may be confusing to have these two 'invisible' ingredients be so central - after all you can't eat them — but you can eat with them. When we bring these two elements into our food, the soul is fed. When the soul is fed, the mind and body will, in time, receive the benefit.
What does it mean to eat with Awareness? It means being aware of where your food comes from, who grew it, and how it was grown or made. Learning about these aspects of our food begins the process of painting a fuller picture of what we are putting into our bodies and how it connects us to the world.
With the ingredient of Awareness, food transforms into nourishment....even a slice of pizza can become a source of goodness and celebration that can feed the soul.
There are limits to pizza magic though, as you may have suspected. This is where Compassion comes in to our food choices. Compassion is critical whenever we want to make new and lasting choices.
If we choose to eat something without Awareness or Compassion, we will likely end up feeling charged in a negative way which can come out sideways. We may blame our spouse, kids, dog, the crazy driver or the red light, but this ultimately becomes an opportunity to explore our relationship to self.
When it comes to our food choices, Compassion helps us hold ourselves with gentleness, neutrality, and curiosity. These qualities inherently make more awareness possible. When Awareness and Compassion co-arise, vistas of possibility open and our relationship with food can become a playground for pleasure and exploration.
The subject of food, nourishment and eating is so vast. There are spiritual and psychological dimensions, there is individual physiology that impacts our body-mind, not to mention the implications for our planet's body.
With awareness and compassion we can uncover connections that will allow us to more easily hold the question 'what do I eat?' and find our way toward deep nourishment... without punishment!
The more awareness and compassion we can summon, the greater the potential for true change we can access.
I want to invite you to join me as we begin to explore....
Antanas Vainius, Nourishment Coach is a deeply gifted wizard of nutrition and nourishment, knowing how to make change and healing easy, delicious and fun. His knowledge extends into somatics, energy psychology and breathwork which he uses to help clients move through blocking beliefs and stuck emotion to return to ease and flow.
Get in touch, email Antanas.
