Listening to Your Body

Q:  I would like to talk about addiction. One of my concerns is over-eating and I don't want to actually go on another diet or something like that. I just want to get to a point where I listen to my body and how it actually feels and do what it requires and care for it and love it. Then all of a sudden there is all this chocolate around! 

P'taah:  Beloved, you know, you have quite a terror of chocolate.

(Laughter)

P'taah:  So, chocolate is very beautiful, indeed. When listening to the body, nurturing the body, being playful with the body, moving the body, utilizing the body, becomes more important to you than the taste of chocolate, then the addiction is gone. So it is a matter of what do you want to focus upon.

It is not a matter of finding a diet. It is a matter of saying, "What is the focus here?" Is the focus truly on being in the feeling of a healthy body which responds in joy to that which is to dance, to play, to move? How does that feel to you, really, when you are in the activity? How does it feel when you are pampering and nurturing the body? When you are paying attention really to how the body is feeling? When you are having fun with the body, then that focus in a way precludes over-eating or the addiction to chocolate. Then you can enjoy your food, enjoy your chocolate, but it is not called over-eating. You understand?

Q:  Yes, Does it apply...I mean of course it does apply in a way to alcohol as well.

P'taah:  It applies to any addiction. You change the addiction when something else becomes more important.

Q:  I guess what I'm really afraid of it is basically letting go of it all because in a way, this has been a kind of feature of my persona. You know what I mean? I'm this person who loves to eat, who is a very good cook, blah, blah, blah...

P'taah:  None of that has to change, beloved. You can remain a very good cook. You can remain somebody who enjoys food absolutely, who eats with great gusto. You know, you can. That is not the change. The change is simply how it feels to listen to the body, to be in the joy of the body. And where that becomes the focus, then indeed everything else kind of falls in behind it.

Q:  What I find quite interesting, for example when I stopped smoking, was that I could only stop smoking after I found out why I actually had started it. I started because in a way it gave me a new persona, a new mask, like being grown up. I mean I started smoking when I was 14...

P'taah:  Most of you begin to smoke cigarettes because it is grown up.

Q:  Yes, and I realized when I wanted to stop that I couldn't stop because I didn't want to go back to that 14-year-old blob that I thought I was. And after I was ready to really see what is underneath it, then I could do it.

P'taah:  Well, you may say that the attention on food and the addiction is also about comfort. It is about filling yourself, fulfilling yourself. And where you may explore other ways of fulfilling yourself, then the idea of food becomes something different. You create beautiful food. It is an art form, is it not? Even that which is chocolate is something very wondrous indeed, but it is not taken to fulfill that emptiness inside.

And when you listen to your body and how joyous the body is when it is being listened to, when you are responding to that which is, in a way, the need of the body, to move, to be, to play, to have this kind of food or that kind of food in that moment, or no food at all for that moment, then that truly is a very beautiful kind of symbiosis, is it not?

Q:  Yes, it is.

P'taah:  Where it is simply to fill the empty gap within, then the body is being totally disregarded. You're not listening to that at all. You are responding to an emotional need. In the same way that putting a cigarette in the mouth, apart from the physical addiction, was fulfilling the need to be grown up, to be perceived to be fitting in as it were.

Q:  So this would be like the food makes me bigger so that I can feel... well, big and strong, in a way.

P'taah:  In a way, but do not forget the comfort of it simply.

Q:  Yeah, I know that is something which is always there, in a way, when I don't feel so good. That's true. 

And in many families food is used as a reward or as punishment or lots of other things so it has become something far more than something that just tastes good and nourishes our body. There is so much emotional stuff with food.

P'taah:  Indeed, that is so. So where there is an issue for you, then it behooves you to stop and just look at this idea of what food is. And you know, to eat food for comfort is very good also. That is very fine, but it is simply to be aware of why. And where you listening to the body then the idea of food for comfort etc. becomes not the main object.

Where it is an addiction, then there is something to stop and look at. Where it is not an issue, then indeed it is not an issue.

P'taah