THE SOUL OF EATING...
A Path to True Nourishment

By Premsiri Lewin

The SECRET is out again: Diets ultimately don't work. Have you come to this conclusion through your own experience, that diets don't work for you? With Geneen Roth and her best-selling book, Women, Food and God appearing on Oprah, millions are resonating with the perennial truth that food will never satisfy your emotional hunger.

Women, Food and God is based on the retreats Geneen Roth and I co-founded and co-created. This work is a passionate journey to the real hunger beneath the suffering with food. For decades, as a psychotherapist, yoga teacher and spiritual facilitator I have supported people to transform their preoccupation with food into true nourishment.

How do you get from emotional eating to conscious, intuitive and mindful eating? What is the path to true nourishment? How do you find the wisdom buried in the wound that is momentarily soothed and comforted by emotional eating? This wisdom can transform your relationship to your authentic hunger and real needs.

Finding true nourishment requires so much kindness and support. It means feeling your unfelt feelings, examining your core beliefs, finding your heart's hunger, your true hunger – and few of us ever learned how to do that. This spiritual transformation comes from your yearning to be deeply free – as well as to be liberated from substituting food for your real needs. And, we often do need to change the way we eat when we've been using food to manage our emotions, needs and wants. But we can change our food choices from a place of clarity and inner fulfillment that naturally leads to wanting to nourish our body with healthier foods.

Building inner capacity and resources to feel what your mind says will overwhelm you is a gradual awakening to your inherent self-worth, which is closer than your own breath. This goodness can feel like it's outside you in reaching for the food, but this innocent misunderstanding can be agony, as well as a portal to your essential self. The true nourishment that we seek can never be found in food and eating – yet it is our cravings that can lead us to it!

The Soul of Eating is about food as a doorway, an invitation to the depth of soul in the midst of everyday life. We are often consumed, distraught, despairing about our physical size, yet as we learn what it is about ourselves that is not just our physical size, but deeper still, our sizelessness or sizeless nature, we begin to tap into a dimension of reality that points to what is beneath and beyond our hunger for food.

You can begin this inquiry now by listening from your deep self, your heart or quiet mind: become kindly curious about what triggers your movement toward food – and does getting the food satisfy the longing beneath? If the answer is 'no,' stay with it, wait without an answer, hang in and let something bubble up from the yearning itself. This moment of taking a step on the path to true nourishment is also a step toward embodying the soul of eating.

Related Articles:

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Using Hypnosis to Recover Healthy Eating by Jessica Levine
5 Causes of Overeating—Finding SOULutions... by Joan Hitlin
The Roadmap to Your Perfect Diet by Nan Faass
The Herbivore's Enigma... by K. Stiles Bingham

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