Healthy Desires

Desires and Health

“I feel that people are not regarding poor health as seriously as they should.  They place their health problems secondary to all their other problems – financial, domestic, real and invented…without health there is little that one can truly enjoy.” Bernard Jensen – Tissue Cleansing Through Bowel Management, pg. 63

Consequences of Desire:

I am practically flying down the freeway, careening sideways when I realize I’m out of control.  Part of me recognizes this feeling.  It’s deep and ancient and pierces into the primal realms. 

How did I get myself into this precarious moment?  I was hell bent on impressing my two friends who were following me.   To accomplish that goal I decided to purposefully pitch the car   at 55mph.  I had gone too far, of course.  Now, my life was in another’s hands.  My body was locked in a metal box with wheels, rolling end over end.   In the “end”, I had broken my neck.  I paid a fee for a desire (the desire to impress). 

            There are many other types of desire.  There are many other things to desire.  Desire for food, sex, money, security, etc.   There is no inherent problem with this experience of desire, however I do notice that things tend to go awry when conflicting desires meet up.

What I see, after more than 20 years practicing nutrition and health, are many of these conflicts manifesting in people.  In the context of health and vitality, many people live out conditioned patterns vs. following what their bodies are saying. .  A simple way of saying this is our eating habits override our “gut feelings.”  Admittedly, I have a PhD in the deleterious art of habitual altered-states with foods, herbs, and meditative states.    I kept up these habits despite uncomfortable symptoms.  William Wordsworth nailed it when he wrote, “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd.”

As a young man, I began to see some unhealthy patterns of overeating and fatigue.  Yet, the part of me that was the detached observer could not change.  This part of me just watched, and I watched it watch.  It watched desire cause hay fever symptoms.  I knew.  My guts knew.  But my mind/ego overrode my knowing and chose instead for taste and sensory gratification. 

What I did not know at the time was that because of my eating addictions I had alcohol fermenting in my irritated and yeast ridden belly.  The cravings I experienced must be similar to what an alcoholic feels.  The loop of addiction went like this: 1) craving, 2) think or act on craving, 3) initial sensory satisfaction, 4) minutes to hours later a gurgling gassy belly, and maybe some belching, 5) shame, guilt and sorrow, 6) feelings of tingling in my head with initial sinus irritation, 7) sneezing “attacks”, 8) itchy eyes, water dripping from nose and more sneezes, 9) disassociation from reality and fatigue, 10) recovery, 11) repeat cycle.

            It happened so many times, and often I find myself still shocked that I let it happen as long as I did.  Yet it is true.  The symptoms were the admission price for desire and I was willing to pay.

            Even after many years of meditating and learning to focus on the body and sensations, I would see the painful patterns arise, and often suppressed them for ascetic yogic type reasons.  But they were still acted upon, despite the symptoms and the ideals of austerity.  Finally, I began to inquire who or what it was that was actually the craving.  Could it be the trillions of microbes that share this body with me?  What exactly was this “me”?  Where was this awareness?

            When I began to really look, I began to see.  This awareness from which these cravings emanated were multivalent.  One was the primal soil based awareness in my own belly.  I knew one day that the sweets were fermenting in my belly, causing me to become drunk.  That was why I never liked alcohol.  I produced my own!  Later, in a book by an MD, I saw my first confirmation of this in a special DUI case.  The “offender” had eaten lots of sugar, but no alcohol.  He tested drunk!  So did I.

            During this recognition, I knew the yeast and fungus and bacteria with their own agenda were using my nervous system to signal cravings.  I labeled them, “pathological cravings.”  It took another ten years to sort out pathological cravings from normal cravings.  During those ten years, I also felt like I was breaking a horse.  The horse was in the habit of running life unquestioned.  But now, my mind was no longer lost in sugar trance and I was ready to make lasting changes. 

            It was also during this period that I was training in herbal medicine with Michael Tierra.  It was a correspondence course, but I also learned directly from him.  In the course booklet Mr. Tierra states, “Toxins are desires.”  When I read that I was blown away.  Some part of me awakened and I was cut loose from a veil long covering my eyes.  I then saw how toxic I was.

And I finally did do something about it.

A group of healers, including Mr. Tierra, held a spring seminar that year in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and I had another horrendously painful allergy attack.  I was eating too many carbohydrates and too much food in general.   I kept thinking about the quote, “toxins are desires.”  It soon became like a mantra, which I repeated when desire would arise and repeated when symptoms arose.

Mind Over Matter (belly and primal needs):

In the ancient teachings of the Vedic’s and certain yogic teachings, subjugating the ego through austerities, postures, and diet are ways to mature.  We might say these techniques can give us glimpses of joy and truth.  But in the modern world, I see most people doing the opposite, subjugating the body with the wants of the ego/mind.  Many of us know the old cliché, “mind over matter.”  This became clearer and clearer as I saw my uncle drinking and overeating at a Thanksgiving dinner and wondering why he had back pain, and heart and circulatory problems.  “It tastes so good, just one more bite!”  Meanwhile the body is crying out, No!”

Let me share a little story about ego subjugation and a yoga posture Adho Mukha Svasana (downward facing dog).

     After 15 years of practicing yoga, I finally felt comfortable in downward facing dog.  For those of you who have done the posture, especially as a beginner, you can see the difficulty in a tense and stiff body.  But I had a teacher that said, “Don’t do the postures that are easy, do the ones you find challenging.”  I hated this one at first, but some part of me kept at it.  After 10,000 tries, something clicked and part of me let go.  At this point I began consciously using the posture to go into deeper states of focus and letting go.  I began to see how the mind labeled everything, including sensory states.  Some were nice.  Some were heating.  Some were bad, like pain.  I began to question all the stories.  An inquiry arose during a five-minute downward dog, “What would it be like to not label the sensations?”  My body was aching after a minute, but after the curiosity arose, the sense of release came of just resting in sensation without any judgment of good or bad, pleasure or pain.  The body became the vehicle to question the trance states of the ego.  When the sensations became too intense, I saw a lifelong pattern of escaping into daydreams, thoughts, and judgments very clearly.  What these trance states were protecting me from is another story.

How To Undercut Desire:

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), there are emotional states symbolically associated with organ and bodily systems.  There are also elemental energies associated with emotions and their organ systems.  Desire stems from needs (nourishment, touch, housing/shelter) and from wants.  It is the area of wants that needs to be examined if we are suffering symptoms; especially conflicting wants.  Let me give an example from my own life.

Surfing versus Spirituality (Peace):

Upon ending a very unsatisfying BS degree in nutrition, I began discovering the ancient elemental and energetic techniques of the world’s traditional cultures.  I began to see the truth in what a great health teacher, Geoges Ohsawa, said about human health, “You cause your own suffering.”

As I mentioned earlier, despite seeing how I was causing allergic symptoms through overeating and too many sweets, I was in denial.  Then, I began experimenting with changes.  I noticed after a year of eating a lighter vegan Macrobiotic diet that I did feel better.  But the symptoms still came.  And another surprise realization came.

          There was an emerging paradox.  I discovered the stamina and strength I had been used to, was diminished.  Part of me was beginning to meditate much more, and practice more yoga.  This part of me was growing while another was dying.  My first loves were surfing and the ocean, but they were being put in the backseat.  This was because my new diet and lifestyle was not supporting the desire to have hard physical activity, yet it was supporting looking inward, resting, and “reprogramming.”

            I began to see the conflict.  “Can I eat the meat and still meditate too?”  I was finding the clear head, the calmer nerves, and the lighter feeling was much more preferred to the uptight, stiff, and reactive self I used to be.  Yet, the conflicting desire to surf, to work out, and to push myself physically was not being acted upon.  The peace I used to feel in the water was fading.  I was discovering there were deeper states of peace in yoga, meditation, and fasting. I was learning the art of resting in paradox, and living more simply.  The reprogramming was accelerating.

            After following a suggestion from a macrobiotic cookbook, my meditations were merging into a strange new technique.  I began using inquiry into bodily needs, separating actual needs from pathological desires like candy.  I began asking my body what it wanted.  I began asking my body what was causing its pain.  Answers came slowly, yet steadily.  I found the Five-phase and elemental system of Macrobiotics and Traditional Chinese medicine very effective at mapping out where I was weak and strong.  It is a circle, like life, never ending.  We will begin with some key words about the elements and how the circle proceeds:

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The questions below can be used to inquire into your own health, through your own direct experience.  Who lives in your body?  You or the doctor?  We know ourselves best.  Let’s use that inner knowing and not project our healing onto the doctor.

*Where do I stand in health?

*Is peace already here?

*What does ___________ (body part) need?

*When did I begin to feel lack of ease today?  Was it because of an outer circumstance?

*Is satisfaction already present?  Do I really NEED this _________?

The List of Root Habits causing “dis-ease, generating more desires”:

*Quick fix with no thought of consequences (pain killers, surgery, drugs)

*Eating predominately for pleasure, not nourishment

*Habit patterns like coffee drinking first thing AM

*Not questioning doctors orders

*Overscheduled

*Refined foods – flour (gummy), salt (irritating and electrical activity screwed up), sugar (bipolar, adrenal emergency, hot fire to cold and drained), oils (hormonal imbalances, cellular signals, clogged lymph)

*Eating late in the day chronically

*Chronic lack of activity

*Chronic sitting too long

* Chronic straining (eyes, neck, shoulders, arms, hands)

*Resisting what is happening (misunderstanding from childhood – poor programming)

= tense muscles and fascia

*Trusting large companies to provide us with nourishment (implicit)

*Lack of sleep, which ties to lack of activity

Feel free to investigate all this for yourself.  I feel no need to be right.  I want the truth more than I want to be “right.”  Each of us must see all this for ourselves.  Go and see.  Then let me know what you’ve found.

In health,

Craig

PS - Wouldn’t that be refreshing if our leaders used this way of operating?