Are you getting the correct of religious vitamin for you?
As a nutrition therapist and meditation teacher, I see many parallels in the way we nourish ourselves spiritually. I want to share with you some concepts that could really help your meditation practice.
Do you remember when dieting was a thing? Every summer there was a new trend towards low carb, no carb, low fat, high fat, and each would work for about 30% of people and the rest of us not that much? This is of course due to the fact that we are all individual and unique – we all have a different balance of power in us and need different things.
The same is true of our spiritual diet, and I believe that spirituality is beginning to go through the diet revolution. It's more complex than "just eating"! We need to find the right kind of spiritual nourishment for each of us as complex beings.
Intuitive food for the soul
It is wonderful to see how so many people learn to intuitively eat the right food for their body and move away from the one-size-fits-all approach. As a nutritional therapist, I would encourage clients to try certain food group balances (based on what I had learned about them and their lifestyle) and experiment with how they felt for at least a few weeks (unless, of course, they had a side effect) .
The same goes for meditation. We all have unique makeup and a different balance of energies, and so our meditation practice can reflect this. For example, some people are naturally more heart centered, they find it easy to love, but they become easily separated from each other and can drift away from meditation and dream instead of keeping IN their distance. These types of people are generally naturals in heart-centered meditations, but may benefit from strengthening their ability to be present.
Other people can then sometimes be more focused with their attention, but lack the love aspect. Without love, meditation can get really dry and again that type of person may find that they cannot really get into the meditation experience so a completely different technique would be required here.
Meditation is about being able to "balance" our human aspect – thoughts, emotions, body sensations – so that we can achieve a stillness that is conducive to connection with the subtle aspect of our being. The essence is our eternal aspect, which is omnipresent, infinite and our being.
From person to person, the techniques required to balance our human side can change. What emotions do we experience, how busy is our mind? From there, after a while, you can begin practicing the meditation techniques that are most effective for you.
Just like dieting, I don't always recommend this right away. You must first have the experience of trying different things and their effects on you, or ideally working with a guide or teacher. You need to first lay a solid foundation for this to really work. Otherwise, if you mess up something every day, you may never really experience the effects.
We have to adjust to what is right for us, try a few things right, and stick to what feels right to us at the time.
Deficiency and toxic imitation in the spiritual diet
Another favorite parallel that I like to bring to the conversation about spiritual nutrition is what happens when we are missing something?
In nutrition, when the body is deficient, it is more prone to ingesting toxic mimetics – one example is plastics that can leach and attach to cells in the body that affect hormones – we call them chemical hormone disruptors.
Our society today has many spiritual “poisonous imitators” who can influence us. I think the classics are drugs and alcohol – they are what most people want to reach for in order to feel "high" in order to escape life – when they are so desperately looking for that connection and union with the divine.
A concrete example of this could be drug ecstasy. In fact, when you even mention or google ecstasy it is most often referring to the recreational drug. But there is another ecstasy, and that is the ecstasy that arises when one is in contact with the divine aspect of you.
Many people who are new to meditation or spiritual teaching are familiar with the idea of bliss or peace, but ecstasy is also a divine feeling that is outlined by Osho. The word literally means "to step out of the everyday, to step out of the ego". While peace and bliss are great, this divine ecstasy is also a spiritual “nutrient” that we also have in our lives. This is not to be confused with the strange surge of excitement, which is often followed by a boring feeling – but with the pure ecstasy of connection, the touch of your own being, which makes you feel satisfied and alive.
Sound, ecstasy, presence and working with the inner senses are all forms of spiritual nourishment. When we don't work with them on a spiritual level, we instead absorb toxic imitations from the outside that make us dissatisfied and that can block the way we connect with ourselves as well.
Empty calories in your spiritual practice
Over the past decade, people have really taken note of the quality of the food they eat. In marketing there are often a lot of tough questions about what is actually healthy and we had to learn to be really critical. We also really need to judge the quality of the spiritual teachings and practices that we are taking up. Not just the practice itself, but how we do it – when we are absent from an exercise there is no "diet" in it – it is basically equivalent to empty calories. If we are doing a ritual, meditation, or yoga practice and are not really "there" and doing something robotic, it will not have the same effect on us.
Ultimately, the core nutrient is presence, that deep connection with the divine within us that guides us to see what really nourishes us spiritually.
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Belinda Matwali is a meditation teacher and electronic music enthusiast who is passionate about making meditation accessible and fun for all. She has been learning meditation with her master in India for 8 years and is studying sound therapy and nutritional therapy. She loves connecting the dots between her passions to create real aha moment revelations and brings this energy to her courses, classes, and 1-2-1 sessions. She has traveled the world and lived in Bali, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Ibiza and now London. Learn more about their Addicted To Being, Ecstasy Now, Flow meditation courses and private, bespoke meditation sessions Here.
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