Falling asleep for a while... and ponderings on sexual energy

Just recently I've resumed normal eating (cooked vegan), eating a lot more than I have for a long time. Typical family life, the cold weather, and a bug that I've caught, make me unable or unwilling to reach out any further, at this time. Perhaps I also feel that with Christmas coming, to opt out would be a mean thing to do, with the children and my wife who has happily adjusted to my veganism, and often fruit tendencies...

I don't feel bad about it, and I also feel that some beings out there see this as a welcome thing to do, for a variety of reasons.

And yet... I feel somehow that my connection to many things has dimmed, because of the food. Also, I've been having random sexual thoughts, which I look at with detachment, even humour. These thoughts, interestingly, are associated with the consumption of food. I read somewhere once, in a Buddhist text, that appetite for food and sexual appetite are closely related. Certainly, these instincts seem to come from basically the same areas of the body. 

In a study related by Richard Wrangham, in his book Catching Fire (How Cooking Made Us Human), I was interested to see that a study conducted on raw vegans and fruitarians, showed decreased sexual appetite and where some women even stopped having periods. This was regarded as a bad thing in the study (as of course, the success of the human race depends on reproduction) and therefor showed the detrimental nature of these diets. Obviously, in general culture, decreased libido is seen as a 'bad' thing, and where somehow happiness is meant to be attained by people having sex. And yet, in spiritual culture, happiness is attained from rising above sex or food impulses - and where sexual unions, or eating, are based on principles of love and decision.

Anyway, I've found this before, that food, especially certain foods, stimulate areas of the body that generate sexual feelings.

Eating has its drawbacks. A yogi text I read once recommended staying away from spicey foods, as these were 'rajasic', fire inducing (and would therefor increase sexual appetite).

I'll get back food refinement after the Christmas period.

Negative Emotions and Food

Something is definitely going on inside of me. Sometimes I feel like my body is a totally different entity to who or what I’m used to. I also feel that it’s turning into something different, and I can feel different energies at work. I can feel an accumulation of energy in me, that is so solid that it even feels physical,  it’s like an energy of light with real opacity, or substance. So i feel strong at the moment.  For me, this is a deeply welcome transformation - I even feel that everything that I have gone through in my life, is to bring me to this point.

An aspect of things, is that I find myself continually challenged as to my thought patterns on basically everything. I might write one thing or another, but it’s only a perspective, an opinion. In many ways, I really don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t even think (!), that thinking in an analytical fashion has any great use in the scheme of things. I don’t know.

While working on what I put into my body, I’ve been experiencing real irritation recently. On the one hand I feel that I’m working  through stuff, and getting rid of stuff, while on the other, I feel that inner essences are being re-balanced, to get to a better blend of passivity/assertiveness. This irritation is a curious thing - I feel so irritable, when there’s no real reason for it. Conventionally I might think to myself, it’s because my blood sugar levels are down, but I know that this isn’t the whole answer. As irritability passes, I feel peaceful and somehow secure. Then feelings of irritation and sort of soreness come back. It makes me think of when I cut down drastically from being veggie to vegan, an incessant pain that I had across my chest area - this was emotional pain, for various reasons, but which went some time ago now, and no longer experience.

I’m learning that it isn’t so much what I eat, it’s quantity that matters - the less the better. For example, this morning I had some orange juice, for lunch a sandwhich with lettuce and a veggie sausage in it (ha ha, like a good old fashioned sausage butty). This evening? I don’t feel like I want to have anything really, but will be eating with my other half some cooked food, due to a difficult day (last night was just fruits again). Just being outside under the moon and the stars, in the cold air, was enough. But  today has been difficult for various reasons.

Which brings me onto the title of this blogpost: negative emotions and food. They are so connected I think (just my subjective opinion). There’s nothing much to conclude about this, except that negative emotions clearly trigger a need for something - usually food. And negative emotions can lead to so many different types of food problems, addiction or aversion. This is also why I have been so keen to keep a healthy approach to food, and its place. The refinement of a bodyspiritual nature, which I find myself writing about, and this need to refine food intake, I want to conduct in a positive and even cheerful way, perhaps as a way of rooting out negativities and avoiding potential (psychological) problems. This means being happy about eating, if it lasts, and allowing the subtle processes to slowly become more established.

What was going to happen?

When I had an astonishing urge to refine things in my life, including my diet, I turned vegan from vegetarian. I lost a lot of weight, from just under 13 stone (about 82 kg)  to now 10 stone (about 63 kg) (I'm 6ft2 in height = 1.87m). At first, my weight dropped to 11 stone, and I was happy with that. I just cut out all of the rubbish really and of course dairy and so on. I've felt great - more flexible, stronger, greater endurance, and of course I look skinnier. I felt like 11 stone was my personal weight, but without really depriving myself, my weight continued to drop, levelling off at 10 stone. At first I wasn't happy about that, but I've easily adapted to this new weight which is normal for me now.

But something has been pushing me onward, and I've been eating less and less recently (well, that is, until 4 days ago), where for 3 days I ate very little, just a little bit of food at one point in the day, and on one day nothing, just juices. I could feel the deeper things of existence with greater clarity. This was a kind of juice-fasting. I could feel a kind of alliance between myself and a deeper reality. And yet...

When I checked my weight, I had dropped to nearly 9 and a half stone (about 61.5kg) and was beginning to look outlandishly slim (but not lacking in energy, I have to say). Still, that was enough for me to worry, and since then I've been eating a lot more. Ironically, while I was worrying about this weight issue, and deciding to get back onto food (cooked and non-cooked), I could feel the strongest impulse yet from deeper sources, toward refinement, which was saying 'don't worry, we have you in hand'. Yet, I haven't been willing (yet) to follow this impulse fully (at this time).

The thing is that being back on the eating, is that I don't feel great on it. In a way it's a series of eating inputs, to mask over the somewhat down feeling from the previous inputs -  a cycle at work. Experiencing things this clearly though is very instructive, to see how food works.

What was going to happen with my weight loss? would it have stabilised? I'll have to reduce again at some point, for the spiritual reasons that seem to drive me on.

I'm beginning to see the value also of a quick  process, such as the well-walked path of the 21 day process, to make a clean break, though I have little attraction toward it.

Generally, I also have this feeling that there are changes going on inside of me, that are really quite unhindered whether I eat or not, and that it's just a question to time and timing.