There is a wave of consciousness that is pulsing through the planet that is making us realize that we are not separate and undeniably connected and interdependent.  From the air and water that we share, drink and pollute to the petroleum and food we’re depend on as well as the magnificent range of microbes – beneficial and pathogenic – that live on and inside us, we are interconnected, and must recognize that we are related.

This interconnectedness reveals itself in us and our surroundings. How we are with this deep mystical truth is a significant factor in understanding and creating health within us and around us. Because everything is connected in a matrix of all kinds of systems, most if not all of our actions have an impact. Quantum physics asserts that how we see things, does to a degree determine how they show up.  Our world has been organized on the principles of control and dominance for centuries if not millennia, where things were understood to be separate and not connected. That mind set gathered plenty of evidence, like Darwin’s survival of the fittest, which actually has been re-written to be the more successful survive because they collaborate and interdepend.

As all the movements in consciousness, commerce, health, industry and our environment are revealing this interconnectedness – sometimes with painful evidence – is certainly a better survival strategy. This truth is equally applicable in our understanding and experience of FOOD.

Evidence of the Fight Comes Home

Our battle with food and what to eat — which seems to be a variation of the battle with our bodies — feels relatively timeless.   Our modern pathological culture  makes it nearly impossible to remember a time when our relationship with our world, our food, our bodies and our selves was harmonious. But things are changing, awakening is happening, and memories of that saner time are returning.

Having experienced this inner war intimately for most of my life, Ive struggled to reconcile the cultural control that has been imposed on my body by our cultural mind.  I offer a way out of the fight — by listening to the often forgotten, neglected and abused voice whether it is the body’s or the mind’s…. and relating to ourselves, our bodies, our food and each other.  The process of recognizing this relatedness is key – and it guides us into ourselves and eventually extends out of us.

What’s Really Between Us

Similarly another phenomenon that is surfacing in our consciousness is the a recognition of the space between us – WE Space.  Science has chimed in stating the 96-97% of reality is invisible, that means that we are only experiencing 3-4% of things with our physical senses.  By becoming aware of this ‘invisible dimension’ of our reality, we can harness the power that is between us — and this looks like how we experience each other and create community and tribe. The tools of presence and awareness are very important on our eating-feeling-being journey — as important as what we put into our bodies.

So Nutrition isnt a static thing. Nor are our bodies. Nor how we relate to all of it. A lack of relational understanding allowed us to think they were. Instead understanding that all these things are dynamically interrelated – can be overwhelming – but can give us a more realistic picture of what we’re dealing with – and how we can transform it.  If the shamans that greeted Christopher Columbus knew what they were dealing with, the story would have probably been written differently.

From the way we source and prepare our food, to how we connect around it and share it is part of RELATIONAL NUTRITION and that extends out into our human tribe and community.   It’s about recognizing when we are in the Fight — and not related —  with ourselves, our bodies, our food, each other, our earth… taking a breath, recognizing that we are not alone and choosing to find our way back in… to We-Space.

© 2018 Antanas Vainius

As a Nourishment Guide, people come to me looking to change and heal.  By far the most common question I receive is “What do I eat?”

My answer is always the same. There are 2 ingredients that really matter: Awareness and Compassion.  Initially it may be confusing to have these two ‘invisible’ ingredients be so central – after all you can’t eat them — but you can eat with them. When we bring these two elements into our food, the soul is fed. When the soul is fed, the mind and body will, in time, receive the benefit…..

Originally appeared here

Living in a processed food culture, our bodies and our minds have lost the ability to perceive what is truly nourishing. We can easily trick ourselves by believing what advertising tell us — that what is nourishing is actually only temporarily and momentarily satisfying. Access to that deep wisdom that our bodies have is key as we navigate how to regain/maintain our health, cultivate wellbeing and open up to our true potential…..

Originally appeared here

Context is so important. In fact it is crucial to appropriately understand ourselves in our world. Our venture, Relational Nutrition, would benefit from a little context as well. As we try to make sense of our lives as well as our trajectory of health, context — which is another way of expressing interconnectedness — serves us here too.

Our current worldview, the one a lot of mainstream healthcare — and consensus reality–  obeys can be traced back to Descartes/Newton who saw the body (and the universe) as a machine whose parts could be interchanged — replaced with new ones when they broke.  Before that the worldview most folks were influenced by had it’s origins with Hippocrates, later Galen and St Paul, where the body was cast in a dualistic framework, a battleground where good and bad fought it out — even in the body. This has a residual presence in our world with the all out attack on germs with hand sanitizer available everywhere. As well as the obsession with reinnoculating probiotics at every opportunity. Fecal transplants are a remarkable and effective example of that orientation AND restoring probiotic viability in our microbiome points to the deeper reality as well as understanding of interconnected dynamic web where we rely on these hopefully symbiotic relationship to digest, assimilate and protect us. All happening with the grace and elegance of a symphonic orchestra or better yet an exquisitely healthy rain forest where everything is in communion LITERALLY thru the mycelium that keeps the living matrix vibrantly alive.

This conceptualization of the living matrix points and returns us to the earliest understanding of reality — dating back to approximately 50,000BC where the body was seen as an interconnected web AND part of the interconnected web of life. This relatedness extends throughout the body and into the surrounding environment informed by the partnership model of culture according to Marija Gimbutas, where everything was seen as connected – like those cute little probiotic critters teeming either harmoniously — or fighting in our microbiome.

Back then, consciousness probably didnt even get a chance to differentiate — or get compartmentalized or fragmented into our facebook-sound bite culture. I imagine it was akin to the states of unitive consciousness available to the modern explorers of altered states of mind ??using tools and plant medicines. This consciousness has eroded, or more accurately, been slowly obliterated, by the dominator culture that sees everything including the body as something to be controlled, subjugated, exploited, raped, used…

* Thanks to Susan Weed for her pioneering work identifying the Wise Woman Way that I am calling the Culture of Nourishment.