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Originally Posted by Gem
Yes, food starts an emotional connection as soon as an infant is born and is nurtured and comforted from the mothers teat forming the deepest earliest bonds. And food, nourishment, nurturing continues to be the primary shared quality of physical and emotional sharing in family and community life, making food an integral part of 'togetherness'. There are social signals of food, like if you are 'interested' it's going for a coffee, and if you want a relationship, it's going out to dinner together, so all aspects of love and togetherness from birth and through adulthood, across the lifespan, revolve around food, and this touches our deep emotions. People can have 'holes' in their emotional self and use 'emotional eating', to fill those holes, and even have disordered eating as part of their image of acceptability and worthiness. Even turning to alcohol and drugs is usually something to do with food associated with 'something missing', so to speak.
Food is a lot more than fuel and nutrients, as it touches not only the physical, but the psychological, emotional and social dimensions of human beings. Even the spiritual is a use of food, like 'the body of Christ' during communion, and veganism is often thought of as a sign of being 'spiritually evolved'. Food is in everything that is a human being.
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Absolutely and not everyone will dig this deep to understand why and what is going on with their own personal relationship with food. It runs deep in so many ways of love, connection and our own grounded stability to self and others.
You’ve touched upon our earliest relationship to hunger, care, nurture and contentment. Food weaves so many stories through our mind/body relationship. Our earliest memories related to ‘control over our world’ come into this picture as well. Food and eating is one such area where you see children develop patterns where they control what and when they eat. It becomes one part of their world they see they can control. So you see all kinds of ‘unwillingness’ to eat, try new food, setting the scene on their terms. You see parents frustrations and emotional reactions, you see punishment and deprivation.. gosh it’s crazy at dinner tables at times. You see many parents force feed, because they are afraid if the child doesn’t eat they will get sick or even the worse project fear of ‘death’ so you get dry strong reactions in this way. I’ve seen it all, experienced it myself in some form. I think one of the worse scenes is the forced eating and punishment. ‘ you can’t move from the table till it’s eaten’ ‘ you get nothing else if you don’t eat your meal’. Your sent to bed and deprived of your evening space with the rest of the family. So therefore you miss out in the mind of the child being deprived through food
These of course are a select few of the negative reactions and projections. There are surely many happy family stories in amongst these as one. Where children are given more choices, more care and support around food.
The most interesting thing is in my experience is that most children when relaxed and under no pressure at the table, who are in a relaxed shared space in ways beyond food and eating, is a loving supportive environment tend to explore food more and often try things that are new. I have found, with children who are fussy eaters, when they are able to participate in the food prep and have a reasonsonable afe stsge amount of choices they do eat better. They form their own relationship with food in this way. They tend to explore food more willingly without need to project the adult frustrations and control.
Time is a big factor for most parents nowadays so it’s difficult of course to maintain these kind of time consuming experiences but still even a few times a week puts the power of back into their little hands, so it’s a good reflection of balance for any child and also an over controlling parent.
Food is a huge disguise for so many areas of our inner world. It’s a primary basic need but as we see with something that plays a huge defining role in most families it can turn into a spiritual nightmare,when you uncover your relationship with food their is a huge host of deeper awareness to be awakened.
I’ve just had the most delicious smoothie. Avocadoe, banana, lettuce, sultanas nuts and maca with some green powder. I feel very satisfied.