“In the truth of My heart I say to you, your flesh is just as divine as your spirit.”

By Tiziana DellaRovere

Recently, I was watching a TV program about weight loss. The expert being interviewed, an M.D., was a super lean, wiry woman with one of those body types that could eat like a horse and never gain weight. She declared, with an annoyed, smugly superior self-confidence, “It’s real simple: A calorie is a calorie, regardless of where it comes from. Eat fewer calories than you consume, and you will lose weight.”

“No, that’s a lie!” I wanted to scream. I don’t care how logical her statement seemed. Eating 400 calories of chocolate cake is not the same as eating 400 calories of fish and vegetables! I've never heard of anybody overeating fish and vegetables. I've heard of many people stuffing their mouths with chocolate cake and still wanting more and more of it. Besides, what is overeating for one person might be a regular meal for another. Reducing a complex and torturous issue like our relationship to food and our body to a formulaic mathematical equation makes me bristle. Food calls to us with the force of a primal imperative. Without food, we die. Period. 

But food is not just a necessity. Food is nurturance and pleasure. It is the reassurance of mother's milk. It is the sweetness of Divine Mother imbued in the succulence of a piece of fruit. Food gives us strength and endurance to persist in our daily tasks with stamina and steadfastness. Food fuels our brains and brings clarity to our thoughts. Most of all, eating the food that Mother Nature offers us induces a sense of relaxation in the body, a surrendering to the experience of "just being" that feels like an internal embrace. Eating is the closest we get to the love of Divine Mother expressed in the physical world. Eating is an act of love toward ourselves.

So, how does it happen that food gets entangled with self-punishment, debauchery, ill health, emotional torment, and a corrosive sense of personal failure? We cannot experience the pleasure, sustenance, and the love that is inherent in food if we’re not willing to feel the sensuality of our bodies. When we wolf down our meals, simultaneously reading the newspaper and keeping an eye on our e-mails, we are not being sensual. We're being mental. We might protest that we are multitasking because we are too busy, we have "too much to do," but really, we know that is not the deeper truth.

Beneath our busy mental attitude toward life lies a profound discomfort about feeling our bodies in a tender, sensual manner, to feed ourselves like a mother would feed a baby. You might wonder why that is, since most of us want to relax and be nurtured with the same kind of intensity with which someone lost in the desert seeks water. In truth, feeling the body is scary. When we slow down enough to feel our bodies, all of the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that we have kept at bay will come up. Being sensual is uncomfortable for many people. In fact, it is a lot easier to be sexy than to be sensual. We can be sexy because we look or act sexy. We don’t necessarily have to feel it. But we cannot fake sensuality. Sexy is from the outside in, whereas sensual is from the inside out. We exude sensuality only when we inhabit and feel our body.

For millennia, the body has been demonized by our patriarchal society and religion as a source of temptation and corruption. All kinds of spiritual traditions, including but certainly not limited to Christianity, have upheld ascetic practices as a path to God. They have taught us that the body must be subjugated, controlled, and mortified on our journey to spiritual attainment. Sensuality, which is part of our receptive, feminine nature, has been considered inferior to asceticism, and even downright sinful. Many of us still hold these values buried deep in our unconscious, and when we begin to embrace our body and sensuality, we meet with an undefined internal agitation, which arises from the patriarchal archetype of devaluing the body. To embody, we have to be willing to leave the familiar elevated realm of the Father, the realm of the mind and the spirit, and descend into the deeper realm of the Mother, the realm of the body and the impulses of the deep psyche.

When we are not willing to inhabit our body, we cannot receive the love of the Mother through our sensuality. This point is especially crucial for those of us with food issues because it is when we no longer receive Her love that we feel that we are starving. We eat, but we do not register the feeling of being nourished and loved. This sets up a vicious cycle of feeling starved even when our stomach is full. This vicious cycle is the merry-go-round of addiction. Addiction sets in when we try to achieve a result (feeling loved) by the wrong means (food). We do not feel satiated, no matter how much we eat, because it is not the food that we want, but the love of the mother in that food. Then we eat more in order to search for the comfort we need, but instead of finding comfort, we begin slowly to slide down into the abyss of self-loathing, frustration, and self-punishment. Many of us know this vicious cycle intimately, having traversed it many times.

We need to radically change our approach to weight loss. The old system is based on an externally imposed discipline which triggers resistance, rebellion, and feelings of depravation. Instead, I propose a radically different approach, an internally-motivated system based on sensuality, love, and the spirituality of Divine Mother. Yes, the new weight-loss program has a structure, but it is designed by you. You are the expert because only you know what is best for you and your body. This weight-loss system provides you the support you need to sustain the unique program that you design with the devotion and determination necessary to reach your goal and maintain it.

The first thing you must do is not to compare your body with others. Instead, embrace you body and get to know it with compassion and sensitivity. Then, you will never again exert your body to the point that it becomes your slave. Your body is not a beast of labor. Your body is holy, not just a vehicle for your spirit, not just the clothing that you discard at death. Your body is a particle of Divine Mother's body. She embodies in you. Your body is divine and deserves your respect, devotion, love, and care. Even when you abuse your body, it tries to heal. It is designed to self-regulate, to accommodate abuse and misuse. It is designed to be loving, unconditionally loving. Your body works faithfully and constantly to keep you alive and healthy, and to give you pleasure. Your body is the externalization of your soul.

No, it is not about “calories in, calories out.” It is about learning to relate to food as a sacred communion. It is about respecting and honoring the body as divine, as the spirit. It is about fulfilling your craving for mother's love. And ultimately, it is about re-mothering yourself through the sensual act of feeding yourself with awareness and love.

“In the truth of My heart I say to you,
your flesh is just as divine as your spirit.
I want the tangible creation of abundance in all forms that you desire—
as opulence, as love, as needs fulfilled, as deep connection with the the Source of Infinite Love,
as all manifestations of life’s magnificence.
It is one of the reasons I am here with you.
It is the journey of renewal of the earth
and all humanity living on the earth.
Sweet children, you grow through opening to love, not through denial and renunciation.
Through love, I draw you to Me.”

~From Adorata: The Path of Enlovement
The Virtue of Serenity