Feed Your Ease
Sep 07, 2024
Medical help and treatment is the largest business in our country today. It seems our population is in a chronic and ever-growing state of “Dis-ease.” What were once uncommon maladies are now common. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Parkinson’s, ALS, MS, Alzheimer’s, etc. - our bodies are being attacked at new rates and new levels. Diseases and conditions that were at one time thought to be relegated to the mature are now even ravaging the young. Our children are now being barraged with these maladies.
Why?
Why has our state of “Dis-ease” grown so out of control? How has the occurrence of rare conditions shifted to normal states? We are created for “Ease” in our bodies and minds, but that is not what we are seeing and experiencing. As a whole, if we look beyond ourselves and see our connectedness and interdependence, we are sick, and we have lost our state and sense of ease.
One of our biggest problems is stress.
Stress is our problem and we are feeding on it. Yes, there are different types of stress, but stress nonetheless is what is placing us in a state of “Dis-ease.” Even good stress, if constantly applied and consumed will eventually lead to deterioration. A perpetual state of stress does not allow the body to respond and recover with strength and vitality. It just continues to weigh the body, its systems, processes, and even its soul down until things start to become unbalanced and then break.
We can fix this.
We can return to our default state of ease. We can do this by ceasing to feed on stress, literally and figuratively. It’s not an easy path, but it will get easier as we practice it. One way we can practice not feeding on stress is to stop over feeding our bodies with food that doesn’t serve us well. I won’t go deep into this, but it may be useful to treat eating like strength training; we could even call eating health training or a health discipline. With eating, we could practice things like choosing healthy foods or choosing not to eat junk foods. We could practice eating just enough, but not more than we need. We could even practice gratitude with every bite we intentionally choose to put in our mouths, knowing that bite will somehow be miraculously transformed into our own body.
By the way, food is information. When we eat, we are sending messages to our bodies. The better the food, the better the message. It may be more appropriate to say the truer the food, the truer the message.
Anyway, food is not the only thing we can overfeed on. We can overfeed on fear, negativity, lies, news, and manipulative entertainment. This is all bad information. Bad information causes a host of problems. These problems start in our heads and our hearts, but then they also make their way to our bodies. We live in a sea of bad information, and this leads to chronic stress in our bodies and a loss of our ease. This affects our whole being and our connections with others.
On the inside, we become inflamed and sick. Everything gets off kilter: our hormones, our immune system, our endocrine system, our digestive system - it all pays the price, and we get all the “itis-es”. But on the outside, we spew out bad information for others to choke on. Think about it, when you are in a state of dis-ease, your posture tells the world, your expressions tell those around you, and your words spew darkness of fear, gossip, lies, pain, and negativity. In a way, when we are not at ease, we may even poison those around us with our dis-ease.
We were created for ease and harmony in ourselves and in and with our communities. And one way we can return to our ease and harmony is to practice discipline in what we put into our mouths, minds, and hearts. We are what we eat. We are what we consume. We are also what we express, radiate, and share with the world. Our fruits declare our roots every day.
This is why it is so important to consume goodness intentionally; it releases us from the ravages of stress. Whether it be whole, natural foods, reading encouraging information, or spending time with positive, uplifting people, these are the things we should be feasting on; these are the things that give life to us. We should use our awareness to avoid consuming junk and darkness that doesn’t serve us. Oreos, Sugar Pops, News at 6, Toxic “friends,” thoughts of scarcity and fear - these things destroy our ease through stress. They can lead us to a life of self-absorbed pain and isolation, kind of like a black hole in space.
The point is we need to be aware of what we’re taking in. We must guard our hearts, our minds, and our mouths. This is one way to heal from the dis-ease of stress and restore the ease we were created to enjoy.
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