I recently decided to stop eating sugar. I had stopped eating refined, processed sugar but my last hold out was gummy worms that were sweetened with organic fruit juices and evaporated cane juice. I have comforted myself with the fact that it isn’t refined sugar, that these were actually healthy treats. In my defense, they did give me 100% of my daily required vitamin C. Plus, I really looked forward to my gummy worm snack. Which is why I decided to stop eating them and to limit my sugar intake to occasional dairy products and fruit. It felt like sugar was an addiction because when I didn’t get it, I would fantasize about eating them. The news show 60 minutes recently did a story on the toxicity of sugar. It is as addictive as heroin. It stimulates the pleasure center of the brain, just as alcohol or drugs would. The taste of sugar on the tongue causes blood to rush to the brain’s pleasure centers of the brain and causes the body to release dopamine, a chemical that controls that same pleasure center. Here is the link to the 60 minute story: http://nhne-pulse.org/60-minutes-toxic-sugar/.
When people come to me craving sweets, the first thing we examine is are they are getting enough deep nourishment, and protein. In traditional systems like Chinese medicine, food and herbs are classified according to taste – sweet, salty, bitter, spicy/pungent, sour. The sweet foods always surprise people. Most meats, vegetables, and whole grains are considered to be sweet. The sweet flavor is nourishing and is associated with the earth energy, a stabilizing and grounding force. When you look at the foods that are classified as sweet in traditional systems like Chinese medicine, you notice that they are the staples to a healthy diet. The sweets I was craving, though, are empty sweets, not the fuller sweet flavors that are deeply sustaining and satiating.
I even asked my husband, an acupuncturist, if he would do a protocol he had learned that is specifically for addiction, one I might add that he had used in a clinic to help people with serious drug addictions like heroin (it helped). He also recommended I find my own inner sweetness and treat myself to that instead of sugar. This is consistent with the other thing I tell people about sweet cravings, which is it isn’t about just food and what you are eating, but about nurturing yourself in all aspects of your life.
I have been reflecting on inner sweetness and what that means for me in my daily life in a practical way. I started to pay more attention to how I withhold sweetness and kindness from myself. In effect, I pinch myself off from fully experiencing the richness and sweetness that is available to me all the time out of fear of being vulnerable or self doubts about my worthiness to fully receive such sweetness. The results of these reflections have evoked a shift in not just how I manage my energy, but my food cravings as well. I realized that instead of being conscious of my internal state of being, I would look outside myself in the external world for a taste of something sweet.
It is important that I provide a little background here about the tools I used to assess my own internal state of being and how I changed the existing state to one in which I felt more connected to the deeper parts of myself. Different people have different tools that can achieve the same outcome. I am sharing my own process here.
The tool I use to accept and adjust my internal state is qi gong, a Chinese form of gentle movement, sound, and meditation, that literally means skill with qi. Qi is the subtle breath that enlivens and animates the body. One way to get a tangible sense of the feel of qi is to rub your hands together and feel the tingling sensation that ensues. This sensation can be cultivated and felt throughout the body through specific techniques that are designed to improve one’s health from within.
My practice for internal cultivation is rooted in Chinese medicine and Taoist philosophy. It’s what I can speak to, and as such, I will give you a brief overview here to explain my process. In this system the intelligence of the body resides in the organs. Five key organs – the liver, heart, lungs, spleen, and kidneys – are the main focal points . In qi gong practices, you are building a relationship, a line of communication with these five organs and with your own internal infrastructure. The five key organs are more than those five distinct organs. Rather, those five distinct organs are the gross manifestation of a larger function of the body, like digestion or respiration. Thus for example, the kidneys, which are the battery charge of the body, also include things such as the bones, the reproductive organs, and the adrenals.
The important thing is that your organs, your internal space is all you (or me!). You get to choose what enters this internal space and you get to choose how the energy flows through it. If energy or qi is concentrated in the head, for example, with racing thoughts, or headaches, or even hot flashes, you can direct the energy down and out of the head because that is all you and under your control, as long as you make that space conscious. There are many different qi gong practices, like the six healing sounds, which includes one for each of the five organs as well as the triple warmer, an organ in Chinese medicine which function as the connective tissue or the pathway that connects and integrates all of the five organs. The 6 healing sounds help to expel energy that has gotten stuck in a particular organ system (ie like excess anger or frustration in the liver).
In the system of qi gong I practice, which is an internal alchemy system, a Taoist practice, that was brought to this country and taught by Mantak Chia and by Michael Winn, there are multiple levels of practice that increase and refine the level of communication between your soul and your physical body. Internal alchemy is the conscious refinement of your inner space using the resonance of natural forces (like the earth, the sun and the stars) that exist within us, as well as in the larger universe. Inner alchemy is making those resonances conscious so that we can use their power to speed up the process of our own evolution. In Taoist internal alchemy, nature is the operating system and we, as humans, are created from that same operating system. We can look to the structure and patterns in nature and see them reflected in ourselves. For example, the five elements of Chinese medicine (metal, fire, water, earth, and wood) exist in nature and are mirrored in our five organs and five senses. In successive blog posts, I will be writing more about Taoist inner alchemy and how these practices align you with your authentic self to help explain what this looks like in practical daily life.
What I noticed within my own internal space was that my kidneys, my battery charge, were not feeling nourished and full. When I dropped my awareness and attention to my kidneys, they felt slightly stressed and anxious. Sugar was an excellent antidote. What is interesting, too, is that I have been nourishing my kidneys with herbs and qi gong practices for years. But I would continue to nourish my kidneys and then they would feel depleted again, in a perpetual cycle. I have experienced much overall improvement over the years, but there has always been a slight feeling of depletion that would return.
The deep underlying infrastructural issues was never completely resolved. I liken it to an onion in which my practices resolved it layer by layer to allow me now see this on yet a deeper level. Which simply put, is about feeling connected and fed by my authentic and higher self so that I always act and speak from that deeper place of truth. Now that is true inner sweetness!
Herbs and good diet are great for strengthening the postnatal qi, an external alchemical mixing of the beneficial qualities of the foods and herbs with the physical body. Postnatal qi is the acquired qi that is extracted through food and air. But the prenatal qi, the acquired or constitutional qi that you are born with, can be renewed and replenished with internal alchemy and qi gong. These practices are how I have been able to readjust that flow of life force energy to my kidneys, opening up a deeper flow of communication between my greater or higher self and my organs. What can complicate things for us all, though, is that we are not merely individuals that exist apart from the collective, but a part of the larger whole that makes up our family, our country, our planet, our universe. Which means that our individual beliefs and stories do not exist apart from our bloodline ancestral patterns (western medicine refers to this as genetics and looks to DNA) and cultural patterns.
The ultimate task, as I see it, is to remain clear, conscious, and flexible in light of all of this and to allow for a direct line of communication between our higher self and the self that is functioning on the earth plane. What that means for me is that it is important that I have a spiritual practice, a daily practice, that allows me to sit fully conscious of my internal space and what is happening within that space and to connect to the larger forces of nature, of which I am a mirror image. What it also means is that it is helpful to have a practice, like Taoist internal alchemy, that addresses the multiple levels and layers that influence us all.
I am struck by the countless opportunities I am presented with daily to express my own authenticity, my inner sweetness, clearly and consciously. I might have sugar again at some point, but hopefully, I will not turn to it unconsciously, but will first feel the richness and wisdom in my kidneys and their continual communication with my authentic, higher self.
