Shedding Shackles
Let Your Food Be Your Meditation
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Mindful Eating, Mindful Living
Let Your Food Be Your Meditation
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Mindful Eating, Mindful Living
Roland
Trujillo
Copyright © 2024 by Roland Trujillo
This book is dedicated to people down through the centuries, including today, who stand for the truth. They often lose social advantage, employment, and even life, but they gain God’s approval.
Uncovering Food’s Mysterious Power over Us
The Subtle Role of Food in All Our Problems
How to Take Without Being Taken
Secrets to Overcoming our Food Problems
Avoiding the Mistakes Your Parents Made
Humility in the Making: Waiting,
Food Is Not a Substitute for God’s Love
Dr. Henry Bieler, a popular doctor who practiced medicine for over fifty years and who treated many Hollywood Stars, wrote a book called Food Is Your Best Medicine. Of course, he was talking about healthy food.
The other side of the coin is summed up in the words of Waldo McBurney, still going to work every day at age 106, who said, “We dig our graves with our forks.”
Food seems to be endowed with a mysterious power to make us better or worse, to upgrade or coarsen our existence. It is also the vehicle by which culture stakes its claim over us. Then, by continuing to eat our cultural food, we are claimed by that culture, and thus without even realizing it, we are somehow kept from finding out who we really were meant to be. It is for this reason that the average person lives in anxiety with a vague sense that something is wrong.
A steady diet of junk food, fast food, and processed foods seems to be contributing to making Americans overweight, undernourished, and unhealthy in many ways. Somehow, the fast food fare is also contributing to a general coarsening of the population. We are not as polite, as well mannered, or as noble as we once were. Our society is becoming impatient, selfish, harried, thoughtless and rude in countless ways.
Somehow, what we eat and the way we eat affect our way of living. Yet, though eating healthy food is good for you, it is not the total answer either. Health food cannot save you.
What then can we do? We must eat to live. Yet eating itself is somehow tied to our deterioration and demise.
The very act of eating has to be looked at and understood, so that we might eat in such a way that we can hang onto awareness and perhaps discover a dispensation from God that will protect us from the curse of food.
I wrote the preceding words fourteen years ago. Nothing has changed. If anything, things are worse.
Despite the proliferation of knowledge and easy access to information, people are more troubled than ever—with anxiety, food disorders, chronic health issues, depression, and sadly suicide on the rise. Something is still wrong.
This book is about eating and how the way we eat affects our consciousness. If eating, as I hope to show, is somehow connected to a lowering of consciousness, whereby we make mistakes and do foolish things, perhaps learning to eat with raised awareness might positively affect our lifestyle.
Then perhaps our raised awareness would become compatible with wisdom so that we would not only stop making mistakes but also recover true purpose and positivity. Now moving in the opposite direction, we might discover the secret to life and how to live forever.
So read on, if you will. Perhaps you will discover that solutions to your problems exist and so does a bright tomorrow. And it all might begin with the simple act of eating.
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Uncovering Food’s Mysterious Power over Us
Let us then look at the food mystery and part the veil to the power that food has over us. If eating wrong food contributes to sickness, ill health and a downgrading of manners, can eating the right food stop our downward slide? And even more importantly, might we then, with awareness and grace, discover God’s plan of salvation?
Food has a curse attached to it. It was in the Garden of Eden where the human race fell from faith and reliance on the Creator. Food was involved in the fall. God had promised Adam that if he ate the forbidden food, he would surely die.
When Adam ate the forbidden fruit, it sealed the deal and made God’s promise a reality.
Today we, the distant relatives of fallen Adam and Eve, must eat to live, but even as we eat, we are living under a death sentence. We try not to think about it, and for much of our life we manage to sweep it under the rug. But as the years pass, we must begin to confront its reality whether we like it or not.
Eating good food (healthy, unprocessed, natural food from God’s garden) is likely to help us live longer. But even so, all it can do is forestall the inevitable. Even the best of food may not help us if we eat pridefully or while upset, angry, or in excess.
The best of food only helps us live longer. It does not remove the curse. The situation appears to be an insolvable dilemma. Because we must eat to live, we can’t just stop eating. Yet, food was involved in our fall and somehow contributes to our deterioration.
The evidence of food’s involvement in our fall can be seen today, if we care to look. First of all, many people struggle with food in one way or another. Others simply eat too much of the wrong kind of food. Yet others don’t eat enough. Eventually both extremes lead to health issues. And then there are the vast numbers of people who just can’t say no to wrong food, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana and other substances.
Food is also very often involved in our own personal misjudgments and errors. Many an illicit affair got its start over coffee and was consummated after a meal. The salesman, recruiter, or person who is wooing you knows the best time to make his pitch is after the meal he invited you to. Somehow the food weakens our resolve and opens us up to suggestions we might have resisted before the repast.
And don’t forget that marijuana, alcohol, and drugs are types of food: something we ingest. Somehow the drug, the marijuana or the alcohol separates us from awareness, from reason, from common sense, and from self control and the kind of awareness that would protect us from the next mistake.
Medications are also substances to be ingested, and thus have the same trance producing effect that food has. While medications are often helpful, even lifesaving, they can also be addictive or cause side effects.
More importantly, we must be careful lest we place all our trust in science and technology and partake of medication in a trance of trust, with lowered awareness and gullible faith in the hand of man.
Medicine, like food, can be helpful, but whatever you do should always be done with awareness whereby you see that it is a wise course of action.
Could it be that these effects of food and food-like substances are extensions of eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden? It could be, and it is.
Food has an effect on the body. And food has an effect on the consciousness. But there is more to it.
Food is fraught with suggestions. It’s not the chocolate that makes a Swiss person, or the hamburger and soda that make a teenager act like a teenager. The food is loaded with suggestions, and when we eat the food, we unconsciously buy the suggestions. We begin to act like what the culture, through its various trappings, suggests we should act like. Then the eating of that food reinforces what we become in the process.
Similarly, it’s not the baggy pants or the tattoo that makes a gang member into a gang member. It’s the suggestions and what those pants and tattoos mean. It’s the rebellious actions they inspire. The manner of dress suggests a certain lifestyle and reinforces it. What we wear has an effect on us.
We act a little better when we are dressed up for church on Sunday. It is well known that kids act a little better when they wear school uniforms. The clothing has a suggestion in it.
It’s hard to see much wrong with dressing up for church or wearing a nice school uniform; but in the long run, we must learn to function from inward truth, not suggestions. And we must learn to eat to keep body and soul together without buying into the food suggestions.
If there are suggestions in the food or the clothes, then there must have been someone behind the suggestions. Parents, teachers, experts, cultural icons and the peer group are mostly our authorities. Nevertheless, most of their suggestions are just what they are passing on from what was suggested to them by their cultural authorities. Their power is likewise mostly acquired by acting like their mentors.
Their power is thus by transference, when we the psychotic masses simply recognize their dress, speech and overbearing manner as authority and these leaders are amazed at what power their have to direct us just by acting the role of authority. Most of them have a little larceny in their hearts and soon they take advantage.
But somewhere back in time, there must have been an original suggestionist who began the worldly order we now know based on a lie. He was there in the Garden, suggesting an alternate disobedient lifestyle which he knew would give him power.
Today’s ambitious, power hungry wanna be's repeat to us the lies they were told and give us false versions of the real thing. They know, just as advertisers know, that trance inducing cultural food is one of the best ways to keep us asleep and malleable.
We are encouraged to a pride of life. It is no wonder that education is big business. We are still entranced, living under the suggestion that education (knowledge) will bring us happiness. Even religion has fallen under the domain of knowledge, and millions lap up religious knowledge believing that religious study can save them.
We believe that science and technology can solve all our problems, that medicine can cure our ills, that psychiatry can solve our emotional issues.
It is not necessarily the knowledge itself that harms us (unless the suggestions are in error), nor the substance itself, though we know that food, drugs and medications can have deleterious effects. What is most destructive is the continued belief in the lie and a stubborn clinging to pride it inspires that keep us entranced.
When our prideful lifestyle leads to physical, financial, relationship, mental or emotional problems, we then double down on our belief in the saving power of knowledge and again look to our religious and scientific experts and authorities to save us.
If their help keeps us going a little longer, we fail to take full advantage of our wakeup call and soon go back to sleep.
For most people it takes extreme suffering, such as that of cancer treatment, to sober and wake them up from the comfort zone of culture. Likewise, some people will only wake up when they are literally in the gutter with their life in ruins. But as every counselor knows, some will still not wake up. Their stubborn pride finds a way to continue their belief in their own innocence, or perhaps they change allegiance and now are loyal to their new medical, technological, political, or religious savior.
Mostly what we want is symptom removal. We want the evidence of our faulty lifestyle removed or covered up.
Bear in mind that our error may be very subtle. That which brings otherwise decent upstanding people to ruin is not always gross and obvious. Wrong eating and stress take their toll, of course, and a simple lifestyle change can be very helpful. But the underlying error is often of a spiritual nature – a malevolent spirit that hides under a plastic facade of culture and penetrates us through our interactions with others who have been infected. From its hidden abode within it subtly alters us and renders us susceptible to illness that suddenly strikes seemingly out of nowhere.
Our medical men do the best they can, but it is only the utmost awareness and a pure heart that permit some to discover just what it is that is harming them and also had victimized those who passed it on to them.
The rebel may not really be bad. He is acting out the lifestyle suggested to him as a way to be free. At the cellular level, the rebel cells may be acting out under the influence of the spiritual intruder.
But if “king ego” became more forgiving and less ambitious, then the cells might rally to the now benevolent leader instead of rebelling, now that they are no longer being forced to overwork to meet the needs of the ambitious master. With justice prevailing, there would be nothing to rebel against.
Returning to the theme of this chapter, the person who eats and drinks too much is acting out a lifestyle suggested as a way of living it up and having a good time.
The weekly church goer may not really be a nice person. He is acting out a way of life suggested as a way of being good and acceptable. Even the slightest falsity is a sure sign that one’s behavior is being directed by the wrong spirit. Christ often warned about hypocrisy. Many of the falsely religious did not even realize they were acting out the part and had not yet found the real thing. And so it is today.
Can you see the role of culture in suggesting to us a way of acting out (even religious behavior) that is conveyed through the post hypnotic suggestions found in cultural food (or mom’s cooking)? Now you will be able to read the following passage and understand what Christ meant:
...Thus you have made the commandment of God of no effect by your tradition. (Matthew 15:6 NKJV)
Clothing has an effect on us. So do language, rituals, and music. But food’s effect is far more subtle and profound. Food is intimately connected with the fall of the human race. Food is loaded with suggestions which are reinforced daily as we eat.
Just as food may suggest party time, pride in ambition, pride in achievement, and freedom to have and do whatever we want, it also reassures us and then comforts us for what its suggestions have made of us.
It is under cloak of this false comfort--where we are reassured that wrong is right, and that we are okay the way we are--that the malevolent spirit is able to function through millions of people who are comforted by culture and who remain unaware that the evil even exists.
Bear in mind that cultural food also conveys pride in our culturally correct, religiously correct or politically correct conformity.
The rebels have their chips and soda or beer and marijuana. The conformists have their punch and cookies or wine and cheese.
Food offers a mysterious salvation and escape for us humans. And because it offers escape and comfort, we turn to it when our ego is hurting, when we need our anger soothed or our anxiety taken away.
For each of us, food has both a personal history and one that is inherited along with our heritage as a human.
When life is boring, we look for something distracting, emotionally stimulating, or something which excites our imagination.
When life makes us uneasy and nervous or anxious, or when we have a hard time coping with what we see, we look for escape.
Our false salvation comes by way of the two-for we get with food. It offers a pleasurable escape, as well as comfort.
The comfort part is easy to understand. Food fills our tummy and takes away hunger. It also is associated with childhood memories of mother, her love, and her food. So when our ego needs comfort, it turns to the mother love that food represents.
Food's escape value is also easy to see, but has a more profound aspect to it. The down to earth aspect is the simple fact that food offers a pleasurable diversion when, for example, we eat a nice meal, have a snack, or enjoy a sandwich with the Internet, iPhone or television.
But in a more profound sense, food also has a hypnotic quality. It ushers in dream time. We float away with our favorite food and we are carried away from reality. Watch people eating and notice how as soon as they start eating, they are gone, off in a very private munching world.
We celebrate with food, but we also escape with food. When our life is not going well, when we have issues and problems, when we don't feel good about ourselves, when people are upsetting us--we turn to food for comfort and escape.
But when we use food to escape from issues we should be facing and dealing with, and when we use food to escape from conscience--the awareness that we are resenting others instead of meeting life with grace, understanding and courage—it becomes dysfunctional.
When food helps us escape from the Presence of our Creator, His comfort, and His ready aid we are making our biggest mistake. In order to not face life we avoid the very source that would help us to solve our issues.
Now you can see why manipulative people make use of the hypnotic aspect of food to keep us from seeing what they are up to, control us, and lead us astray. Food seems to understand us--just as a mother might. Comforting and forgiving us, and reassuring us that everything is alright. Just as sleep is an escape for some people, so is the food trance.
Here is another very important aspect of why we have such a relationship with food. Food fills the emptiness.
A young lady whose dad is not there for her feels empty and unloved. So she turns to food to love her. Of course it is not real love and is only a substitute. But the truth is that the reason she feels so empty and unloved has less to do with what her dad is or is not doing as it does with the fact that she is resenting him.
Resentment separates us from love. The well being and security that come from a right relationship with our Heavenly Father is because His love is the only love that can truly satisfy the soul. So her resentment of her earthly father separates her from the love of the Heavenly Father.
Sure it helps to have a noble dad who we can respect and not resent. But if your father is not so good, you can still be okay if you don’t resent him. In fact, many of us actually had a dad who was basically a good guy. Not perfect, but with some good qualities.
But our little ego resented him for not letting us have our way; or perhaps mother resented her husband and we picked up her hate and judgment of him.
A man, who was close to his mom, might now be his own chef and cook for himself (thereby loving himself). But he will never be truly happy if love for mother is not balanced with a good relationship with dad.
Food represents love to many people--the kind of ego supporting love they got from their mother. Through food they love themselves. But they also hate the food.
They have a love-hate relationship with food. Food now represents their degradation, their loss of control, their emptiness, their loss of identity. Behind it all is an often unadmitted resentment of father for having failed to rescue them from everyone else's tender mercies. It is the resentment of our father that is the major contributing cause of food, self-image, and a host of other issues that many of us struggle with. Then the struggle with food itself becomes a distraction from having to see what the underlying conflict is about.
Of course, it is a small stretch to see how marijuana comforts and reassures certain people; or how another person will turn to alcohol (a variation of food) to comfort himself. Cigarettes, coffee, soda or even sipping on bottled water all day offer an oral comfort reminiscent of our early food gratification and assurance. The heroin addict even finds a sort of love in heroin, as it carries him away to his drug induced fog.
Here is a key principle to bear in mind: the human being is created in the image of God. Our soul should be loved and reassured by its Creator. But most of us do not have a bond with our Creator within. Most of us have not yet really found Him (though some will, and that is what I am trying to help you to do). Something gets in the way of being close to our Creator and having His love.
I have to say that the false church also bears responsibility for convincing some people that they have been saved (when they really haven’t). They stop searching, thinking they have already found it. They can’t admit that they haven’t found the real thing. Most of these people, sad to say, keep trying to convince themselves and others that they are saved, backslide and then try even harder. Others don’t feel right and give up on themselves.
Yet other people see the hypocrisy and deceit, but they make the mistake of resenting religion and rejecting it outright.
Just as a cat who sat on a hot stove will not sit on any stove, so a person who hates and has contempt for false Christians (who aren’t really Christian at all) rejects all Christians. But sometimes they guilt for their resentment drives them to come back and beg crumbs from those they had hated in order to try to take away the guilt for having hated them.
Then there are a vast majority of people who just remain confused. They want to have what the born again crowd seem to have, but something just doesn’t sit right with them. But they doubt themselves and just go along and perhaps even join in order to be accepted. The comfortable pretense makes them feel vaguely guilty and uneasy—and this is what most people know until the day they die. They somehow never find the real thing, due to the anesthetizing effect exerted by pleasant but shallow and stultifying traditions and conformity pressure around them.
If any of the above has happened to you, just realize that the ones you resented were not true Christians at all. The Christ they held up was not the real Christ. So you haven’t really rejected Christ; you’ve only rejected what pretends to stand for Him. Therefore just keep seeking and the real Christ will ever so slowly and gently make Himself known to you. Here’s another hint. It will be very private and quiet; not some big orchestrated event for public consumption.
If you were to find this inner rapport with God, then you would not need the love of the world. You could be a good wife, husband, or neighbor, enjoying fellowship with others--but instead of needing love, you could give love.
If you found the life of the spirit that would come from within, you would not need distractions, diversions, or escapes. You would enjoy reality. You would live and move and have your being in the light and love of the Creator. Life would be exciting in a quiet way, and you would receive an invisible comfort from being in the good graces of God.
You would still find a modest pleasure in food, friends, work, exercise and so on. But nothing would become more important that the inner life from above. You would find that you can be “moderate in all your ways.”
We are separated from God by pride. We do not want to become still before the inner light of conscience and admit we are wrong. And because we are avoiding conscience, we can receive no comfort from conscience. Instead we have to keep running from reality into comforting arms of whoever or whatever helps us escape from conscience.
We are also separated from the love of God through resenting and judging others. We resent our mom, dad, husband, wife, and neighbor. We resent people for their errors and imperfections, and we harbor grudges against them. Our resentment toward others separates us from the love of God. It says in the Bible: "You cannot hate your brother who you can see and love the Father you cannot see."
Next time you become angry and resentful--notice how you become hungrier and thirstier. Resentment and wrong living excite and awaken a lust for life. But the piper has to be paid. We lose the approval of God and we become dependent on worldly comforts to soothe our pains. A wife can have food problems because she resents and judges her husband.
God is ever ready to help us, but we fend Him off by running from what we wordlessly know in our heart is right. Nor will we experience His forgiveness unless we are willing to forgive others.
So we become locked in a love-hate relationship with people, objects and substances. We resent them, and then we love (need) them for the distraction or comfort value they provide. But when we accept their comfort, we then hate them for what their love does to us.
This love-hate aspect is also seen in such things as binge eating. For example, food may represent mother and her will. And her will, which we once resented and struggled against is embodied in the food with which we now struggle. But food also represents love, and the more we resent and struggle, the more we need this false love (for which we also resent it).
Beneath mother's catering and food service there may have been a resentment of her husband, perhaps even of the kids. Eating her food meant accepting her will; and partaking of her service (which she performed as a compensation for her hate and judgment) meant accepting her will, even her resentment of your dad.
Years later, the adult child struggles with food, having the same relationship with that food that she once had with mother. Just as the child had a love/hate relationship with mother and struggled with her willfulness, now the relationship is transferred to food (which represents mother).
Understand: I'm not blaming mother. Undoubtedly her father had not been there for her, and chances are her husband was not there for her either. She wanted something from him which he seemed incapable of giving. And for this, she resented him for failing her. You may even one day realize that your resentment toward your dad is not even yours—it is your mother's hate which you picked up from her now in you.
If you start to meditate and wake up, you will begin to observe many things about yourself which before you were unable to see or unwilling to see.
Do not be alarmed by what you see rising in due time. Take it easy. There is more hate in you than you realize. Just know that it is not even your hate. It got in long ago and now you are just seeing it. That’s all.
Place the entire weight of your salvation on God. Just stand back and observe whatever rises for observation in the light. Be prepared to one day see that there is something in you that is not you. It egged you on in your willfulness and then comforted you in your rebellions and pretenses. You always thought it was you, but now you will see that it is not you and that it does not have your best interests at heart. Do nothing about what you see. Just continue to meditate and watch all the tricks that it plays until one day, it will depart. As you come to God, it cannot stand upon holy ground, and it will be forced to leave.
When you see that its hate is not your hate, and that its thoughts are not your thoughts, you will no longer need feel guilty for what you once were ashamed of and protected. Desist from struggling with it. Let the Light do the work.