People are usually drawn to the health food movement first and foremost because of vanity. People want to look good and they want a fit body. As we get older, this changes. Our motivation for eating healthy and taking care of ourselves is because we don’t want to suffer and we want to live a long life.
But I rarely, if ever, have heard anyone talk about the importance of eating pure foods and keeping the body pure because of how it affects mood and overall consciousness. Generally speaking, people don’t talk about that because if they don’t experience it then they don’t understand it. It’s difficult to have a very deep awareness of consciousness and truth if the body is intoxicated. This is for a number of reasons; one of them is that if one’s body chemistry shifts then it slightly anesthetizes consciousness.
If this is something that you haven’t recognized as having happened to you, then you’ve got to have a certain level of faith to understand some of the following concepts. If you allow yourself to detox completely from all the different things that you eat, it will really alter your chemistry. At first it will desensitize you and make you feel disassociated from your life. But there will be a sense of euphoria when you come out on the other side.
This is particularly important when you are practicing meditation or yoga. If your diet is not pure and right, it makes it difficult to go to the highest levels. Some secrets of the universe that we have access to may be embedded in our consciousness. And it’s as if about half of our lives are spent experiencing various less than pleasant events and struggles and the second half of our lives unraveling and dealing with the mental and emotional consequences associated with them.
My guess on the ages and time frames may be off. To be more precise regarding the first half:
We spend the first few years in the pleasure and care of the cradle and our needs are cared for. We are naive.
We have no idea of what things like illness and death mean.
We are not greedy.
We are not corrupt.
We don't have extravagant needs.
We are super absorbent sponges that pick up everything.
How we adapt to the world depends on the love and protection we receive.
Our character forms.
By age 11-13 the foundation is set In our personality. Only dramatic and powerful events can really shift us after that point in time. And such shifts could move us in either direction. For example, a very positive intervention can take place in a person whose life is troubled. That would set them off in a positive direction. Or something really traumatic may have happened in someone’s life, rattling and shaking their foundation and possibly setting them off in a negative direction. What are the things that build our self-esteem when we're that age? Accomplishments?Our parents? The words said to us and actions are done to us by our primary role models?
It might not seem to be something obvious to do, but it’s important to reflect upon the types of foods that we were raised on. This is so because these foods influenced us as well. Our chemistry can be completely thrown off by a lifetime of poor eating. By the time we were 13, almost all of us were deeply invested in junk food. We ate too much animal protein and we were likely addicted to refined processed sugar; not just from candy, but from overly cooked foods, canned foods, cereals, cold cuts, processed bread products, and many other unhealthy foods and drinks.
Such things affected us very negatively, both emotionally and physically. But we need to keep in mind what miraculous healing machines our bodies are. As adults, we can break the addictions to those toxic products. And we will reap tremendous benefits when we do so.