Food, Joy and Biodynamics
by Leslie Kenton
I am often asked why I advocate that people eat a diet in which a high
proportion of their foods are raw fruits and raw vegetables. I recommend
this because I find for most Western people that if they take 75% of their
foods raw, they gradually come to experience a whole new level of energy,
where many of the both minor and major complaints that they have vanish,
whether they be aches and pains, anxieties, or depressions.
Good Eating and Good Health
It is very, very important, I think, that you go to healthy eating in order
to obtain from it whatever you need, in order to live at a higher level
of well-being, with greater awareness, and to go beyond it. For what being
healthy is really about is never having to think about health. I believe
the goals of healthy eating, doing yoga, taking up a fitness course, meditation,
deep relaxation and stress control should be to bring each one of us to
the point where we no longer have to concern ourselves with being healthy.
Then health becomes what it is meant to be, a foundation, not an end
in itself. The last thing in the world that I would ever ask anyone to
do is to spend all their time thinking about how they should eat or what
they should do to stay healthy. Sometimes people come up to me and say
"I could never do all the things in your books." I say "I don't expect
you to. Go to a
book. Find what works you in it. Use it. Then forget the rest."
Each one of us is totally individual, and the details of our diet and
of the exercise that we need are individual too. So you need to find what
works for you, make use of it, and then let go of it once it has done its
job, and move on. For what food is about, what health is about fundamentally,
is to establish a relationship for each one of us with life, where we are
in a state of balance. That does not mean a static state; but immersed
in a dynamic living process, in which we are able to relate with the whole
of our being to the world in which we live.
Good eating is probably one of the most important requirements for good
health, a way of helping to bring us to the centre of our own being, so
that we are able to live at ease with our body and to experience different
levels of reality in all their splendour. But nourishment doesn't just
come through vitamins, minerals, proteins and fatty acids, and you cannot
think of food only in biochemical terms.
When you look at food, you are looking at a whole energetic system.
The food that we eat comes from our environment, it links us up with our
environment, it gives us information. Some of the information is biochemical,
in terms of vitamins, minerals, and so forth; some of it is energetic.
It is the great volume of top quality information implicit in a diet high
in raw foods which makes it so effective at rebalancing the body, so that
you begin to experience your own being and your own centre and your sense
of natural joy. For joy is natural to the human being; it is not something
we have to create. It is there already! All we have to do is clear away
whatever is in the way of our experiencing it.
We Are Connected to the Earth
But we need to broaden our awareness as well as to be really healthy. We
have to be aware of the fact that we are taking this information from the
environment; we are entirely supported by the Earth who is our Mother,
who gives of her abundance with all of her being freely. It is so beautiful!
I live in the country in Wales and I watch things grow; it's a miracle!
There is a cycle that is created. We take from the Earth, with the foods
that we eat; we give back to the Earth in nurturing the land, and (at least
in "primitive" societies) in giving back our waste products and the products
of our animals to her soil. Nature in her wisdom is able, about 99% of
the time (which is pretty amazing) to rebalance the minerals in the soil,
to be able to produce again new plants that we can eat again for a very
high level of well-being. It's so beautiful!
What I came to realise, about two years ago, is that seeking to be healthy
is not, as it is so often presented, a narcissistic thing. It leads to
a growing sense of awareness of one's connectedness to the Earth. One of
the first ways to experience this is to begin to experience our own centre.
I had an interesting experience when I was about 28. I had a very difficult
decision to make, and I felt that I did not have the wherewithal to be
able to make it wisely. I had a friend who said to me "Why don't you fast?"
I said "Why should I fast?" He said "I just think it might clarify your
mind; I think it might help you to make the decision." He added "you must
never do it on your own." He was very wise, because fasting is an extraordinary
state; therefore you need someone who is highly knowledgeable about it,
just to act as a link with ordinary reality, if you do fast. So I said
"OK." I must have had a glass of grape juice a day, mixed with water, for
three weeks, 21 days. As I fasted, suddenly this image of myself, as a
burdened, not very confident, not really very nice person, all fell away,
and I experienced real nourishment, the sense of limitless joy and love.
I really loved everybody. It was amazing to me. It was so ridiculous that
I kept saying "This is weird!" I kept a diary of it because it was so extraordinary.
Alas, after I broke the fast and had taken food for four days, I was back
to normal, with my usual emotions!
What that fast taught me was very important. It taught me that, really,
what we as human beings are all seeking is to come to the point where we
experience that kind of state for most of the time in our lives. In my
case, it took me another fifteen years before I started to live in that
way for a good part of the time. Because my body was polluted, because
I had to learn, because I had certain sensitivities to work out, I had
certain adjustments to make in my life as well; believe me, it's not all
biochemical! There were ways in which I was living that were wrong (there
still are.) I had lots of things to learn on that level as well (and I
still have.)
The Seeds of Unfolding
What is so wonderful about this sense of nourishment and joy, the natural
joy that is ours, is that in each human being it is unique. There is within
each of us a unique power which is like this: a plant has within its seed
the form that the plant is meant to be. All that it needs to grow into
that form is sunshine, air, water, and a good rich soil. Similarly, each
human being, when he's born, has within him the seed of his own unfolding.
Unfortunately however, in our society, because of its many distortions,
some of them physical, some of them psychological, some of them spiritual,
we do not often have the opportunity for this seed within us to grow in
the shape that is meant for us. So our "form" becomes distorted, not just
our physical shape but our emotional and spiritual shape as well. Good
food and other health techniques are really there in order to help us eliminate
the distortions, so that our form comes to discover its natural shape again.
What is so wonderful about the human body is that, the more it is used,
the stronger and more wonderful it becomes. For within the human body is
a wisdom that no scientist throughout creation (and believe me, we have
had some brilliant scientists) has ever touched even a tiny part of. Because
deep within, each human being knows, it knows its own forms, it knows its
own potentiality and it knows how to heal itself. It's wonderful! Once
you begin to experience this then you begin to experience nourishment at
other levels as well.
The Joy of Sensory Awareness and the Imagination
When you go through the process of cleansing your system, say on a high
raw diet, you begin first of all to have new sensual experiences: the colours
you see are brighter, the smells you smell are more intense. Do you remember
how wonderful the colours looked to you when you were a child? As we grow
older, we lose that joy, we lose that capacity to respond, because our
senses have been dulled, and because we live in a culture that, unfortunately,
has a whole educational system that is against the senses being able to
live.
We have programmed ourselves into an intellectual-based value system;
we value only the intellect and verbal things. Why? Because in the 14th
century, monks used the scholastic method of teaching to weed out, from
the monastery, those novices whose intelligence was more sensual that verbal,
because they were the troublemakers ... for they might upset the status
quo! Really, they didn't make good monks! And no, without our even being
aware of it, we are stuck with that educational tradition! So today, we
have children with wonderful sensitivity, musically, kinaesthetically,
with colour and light. But we are not really providing for them in our
society and so are not really using their unique soul power, because our
education system is limited.
Fear of Freedom
Many of us have lived so long with limitations that we have grown scared
of the sensual response that begins to come when we begin to experience
real health and joy. But once the body becomes less polluted and starts
to clear itself, and you begin to experience life in a richly sensual way,
you are also nourished by the Earth in that way. And this nourishment is
every bit as important as the kind we get from vitamins and minerals in
our foods. We also begin to experience our connectedness with the Earth.
Probably the worst thing that has happened to us in Western society over
the last 2,000 years is that we have lost our sense of connectedness to
the Earth. As this happened, we were forced to create artificial systems
of morality, for the following reason. You see, when one feels one's connectedness
with the Earth, one feels one's connectedness with others, and at the same
time as the body becomes more alive, the mind becomes more aware. In this
state, you do not want to do harm; you want to nurture. You don't have
to try it; it's not like virtue, it happens. It's normal. A child that
is centred, happy and healthy is full of joy, and all of us could be "children"
like that. We have just lost some touch with it. Health and healthy eating
can help us rediscover it.
Once your sensory experience is heightened, so that you are actually
relating very strongly and you are being here is the moment, smelling the
scents, breathing the air, connecting with the people that you are with,
then I find something else begins to happen, a deeper part of your being
comes into play. It is the part that makes stories, the imagination. Children
have the ability to look at all different kinds of things, all this sensory
input that I have been talking about, and to pull it all together, to synthesise
it: they make it into stories. They are always synthesising, always bringing
together, whereas our society and our scientific tradition have tended
to separate and to fragment experience. Only recently have a few far-sighted
thinkers and scientists have begun to bring together all the different
knowledge that we have in a way that begins to be unified, so it can be
used to serve the wholeness of human life.
Realising Our Inner Powers Through Myth Making
There is a deeper level still, which you begin to become conscious of,
and that is the level of myth making. We have within us powers which are
far beyond our individual consciousness or 'ego', but that are very much
us. You find, as you become more aware of first, the level of sensory contact
and second, story making, the putting together of things, that you start
to become aware of myths that you are living. By a myth, I do not mean
something that's not true. I mean something that is like a story but has
far more 'power'. A myth says so many things and speaks to us on so many
different levels. For me personally, the myth of Prometheus is very important,
because it is the myth of the hero, the real hero, who does what he knows
to be right regardless of the consequences.
What happens, when you start to touch this deeper mythic layer of your
being, is that you find that you have energies, abilities and power to
enjoy and to serve life which you never dreamed you had. For myths are
stronger than anything one can think up from one's mind. All of this to
me is part of the process of realising one's potential for health which
can start with healthy eating. In truth being healthy really means becoming
whole. It starts, very often, with food, with the cleansing of the body,
and leads to the experiencing of living on a different level. I strongly
suspect that, beneath the mythic layer, is what we might call 'the ground
of being', 'the source of life', or 'God'.
At the Deepest Level, We are All in Harmony
What is interesting is that, as you experience and move down through these
levels and contact the energies available at these levels, you experience
more and more connectedness with other people whose myths are different
from yours, and you find you have more and more of the desire to do whatever
you can to enliven the centre, the knowingness, the individuality of another
person as well. Because, when a person begins to live from his own centre,
he contributes dynamically and in harmony to society and to life as a whole;
and he doesn't need rules to do so.
It's very much as though each of us is like a cell in a body; I don't
want to do your job, and you have your job to do, but all of us have to
work together in order that the organism, the Earth, our society, may live.
That is what is so beautiful, and to me that is what real health is
about. When you begin to experience the totality of your being, you experience
a joy that nourishes you deeply from within, a joy you can draw on and
pour forth. It is not a question of giving; there is no question of giving.
Ultimately, I suspect, there is no question of selfishness or unselfishness;
it simply has to be done. Man is by nature creative. That which he is,
when it is not blocked, pours forth for the benefit of everyone,
for life itself, as well as being extremely satisfying for him.
We Can Really Transform Our World!
I believe that we live in extraordinary times. We live in times where the
pollution of the environment is unprecedented in the history of the world.
We live in times where we, at any point, can blow ourselves up with nuclear
weapons which we have produced. We live in times when the social order
is breaking down, when we see destructive
impulses being expressed in a form that, even twenty years ago, we
did not imagine. These things are happening. And yet, what is so exciting
is that, Just as with a lot of people who have suffered some sort of illness,
the illness itself has been the key to their finding the road to real health
and to the unfoldment of their own form--their inner being--the expression
of their inner nature. So it may be with our Earth. When times are as drastic
as these, when there is so much to fight against, these are the exciting
times, because it is now that we have something which we can take hold
of and which we can change and, in changing, change our lives and change
the lives of the children that come after us. Then we are creating real
health.
Leslie Kenton is the author of "Raw Energy"
(Arrow Books, London), a best-selling book about the merits of fresh uncooked
foods. This article is based on her discourse at a health exhibition in
London which was printed in "New Paradigms Newsletter" (29 Fairford Crescent,
Downhead Park, Milton Keynes MK15 9AF, U.K.)
This article was published in New Renaissance magazine Vol.1,
No.3
Search
engine optimization by A1-Optimization
|
