We can start with the comment we most often hear in connection with this idea, and that is, ‘You are what you eat’. While that is true, there are several sources that feed who and what we become. We are absorbing information through all of our sensory systems. When you take a step back and look at what our bodies are made up of, we are sensing machines. We see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and when we go deeper, we sense, feel and perceive. We are what we read, we are what we listen to, we are what we watch and so on. We will cover the aspects of being multi-sensory beings later.
Getting back to the first and most obvious method of consumption, which is food. Paying close attention to everything we eat is easy to understand, and many people will pay the little extra to have better quality food, whether that is homemade, locally sourced or organic foods. It is important to eat good food. I have always like an idea popularized by Dr. Mark Hyman. When asked how you determine whether something is good for you or not, he answered, “the basic starting point is this, ‘If it was made by Nature it is good, if it was made by Man it’s not.’ ”
Most people know that if you eat well, as in wholesome food, that is easy to digest and makes it easier to for the body to obtain its nutrition, you will feel better on many levels. Most people know this, but most people don’t ‘make it so.’ Our energy levels increase by virtue of the fact that less energy is being used to break down processed food.
Basically ~ less energy to digestion, more energy for You!
We won’t go deeper into the food topic, because it is really a big topic of its own. So, let us move on to all that we consume with this quote from the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (460-377 BC)
“Let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food.”
Only paying attention to what we eat and not to everything else we consume is half baked living and incongruent. In order to really understand what makes us up, and what creates a healthy balanced person, we need to have a look at everything coming in; through the eyes, ears, nose, touch and so on. Once we have had a closer look at all the ports of entry, we will then be able to look into feelings and sensations.
~ We are what we experience.~
Our eyes take in a lot of information. When we stand at a high viewpoint, we are able to see and absorb the beauty of our planet. We look out onto the valleys, the forests, the ocean, and it makes us feel good. It gives us a sense of place. We can open up to wonder and appreciation for where we live. Watching the wonders of nature, like a kitten discovering everything and playing with its own tail, or a flower blooming in your living room, a baby smiling at you; all these visions make us feel good. It’s connection.
One of the visual intakes for our eyes is Television. There is so much to see and hear in the programming that comes out of the bright hypnotic screen. Although people don’t seem aware of the fact that they are consuming the information that flashes before them, it is easily confirmed by the use of the word “Programming”. No one hiding anything there! It is a programming device, and it has never been more clear than in recent times.
The “programs” show us how life can be lived. It is a point of reference for how to be with each, how to share a meal, how to deal with issues and disagreements, how to love one another, how to kiss, how to be intimate,,, oh, and how to kill each other. In fact “how to murder someone you don’t like or disagree with” seems to be one of the most popular messages of the 21rst century. 1001 ways to kill another human.
Violence has reached outlandish levels in modern movies. It is easy to track the trend. In an effort to keep the viewers attention, the level of violence increases in every movie made. The effectiveness of that approach is up for debate, but that is not the debate we are having here. What we are talking about here is the quality of what enters your mind. What we are watching!
The increase in violence has the opposite effect on sensitive people or anyone really paying attention to what is going on, however the majority, what we sometimes refer to as ‘the masses’, are consuming the violence without a problem. It is even seems to be finger liking good! To say this is not a problem, and that it is not having an effect on humanity is really like sticking ones’ head in the sand. We could call it the great denial. The trend is blatantly clear and the trend is alarming.
Programming always has an agenda. It can be ideological, political or cultural, but there is always an agendas. The ideas are presented in such a powerful way that it even has people arguing and defending points of view,,, violently, at times. Some discussions can go to a level of anger and battle, as people shout, “I saw it on TV!!”
The idea that it was ‘stated’ on television holds a lot of weight for many. Sadly, most people are oblivious to the programming and brainwashing that beams into their eyes and floods their air waves.
Turning off the TV and its endless images, and listening to music offers a broad spectrum of flavours. Instrumental music can have very soothing effects on us. I remember when having a high quality set of headphones and listening to high fidelity recordings was a thing. We used to sit in a chair and listen to music of various styles, and that was the activity. We were called audiophiles. I was influenced by a couple of people in my life who listened to classical music on big reel to reel tape machine. Chopin, Bach, Vivaldi and Mozart never sounded better! Now we have MP3.
The appreciation for classical music has been replaced by relaxation soundtracks and guided meditation. This is popular on the internet these days. There are so many sites and apps providing soothing sounds to de-stress our society. This helps greatly in clearing the mind of negative thoughts and avoiding situations that annoy us.
Popular radio stations and the Web pump out an infinite amount of music as well. The violence in the lyrics of popular music is, again, astounding. Lyrics are supposed to have poetic qualities to them, and obviously some still do, but as a singer songwriter myself, with hundreds of songs in my personal cabinet; modern song writing has mostly gone to ‘literal complaint therapy.’ Lyrics like. “You hurt me, so I hate you now!”… subtle stuff! The Tower of Song has has fallen, and Leonard is gone.
Many forms of expression have gone to an extreme. It seems to be the only way to get attention. To make things worse, the attention span has gone to nearly nothing for most consumers. Two minutes is a very long time in the attention grabbing industry. The modern perception is that the only way to get attention is to be aggressive, disgusting, loud and graphic. It’s like a form of shock therapy!
The result is not artful poetry, beautiful expression, painting images with words and sounds… it is crash-bang attention grabbing jabs, pain and half baked ‘complaint therapy.” To make things more challenging, we seem to be dealing a fear of silence; a deep rooted fear to be in silence and in the company of our own thoughts.
~ Later, we will talk about the sound of silence, and its benefits! ~
Another mode of consuming is reading. Perhaps the one channel we can control the most, by virtue of the fact that we choose the book we want to read coupled with the fact that reading takes effort. You actually have to make yourself read. We are gravitating towards an illiterate society, which is obvious when we look at the popularity of video over text and the written word! But there is choice there.
Reading the newspaper used to be a great morning or daily tradition, but times have changed. Most of the news agencies have become broadcast centres for ideologies and have a very strong political and economic agendas. The polarization of opinions has become much stronger in recent times.
One of our greatest challenges is how impressionable we are. Yet another reason to be careful of what we consume. We are very easily influenced. If it is written, then it must be true. If it is on the television, it must be even more true. Our faith in what comes out of a television is truly astounding! Our faith in what is written in a magazine or newspaper is fairly strong as well.
Getting back to the idea that “You are what you eat”, the meme that propagated through our social networks and popular culture, including all print media and documentaries, we can see that if we focus on just what we put in our mouth and put through our digestive system, then we are focused purely on the physical aspect of what we are. Site and sound has added a whole new dimension to what we consume. As we talk about what we consume, it becomes more and more obvious that we are so much more than just our bodies!
We are just touching the tip of the iceberg in this chapter. We have not talked about things like the water we drink, which should be filtered, mineralized and structured. We haven’t talked about absorbing sunshine into our skin. The sun is a tremendous source of nutrition. The sun does not make people sick, as it is popularized through news feeds… it is the toxic creams and sun blockers that make us sick.
Did you know that our skin is considered our largest organ? Our skin absorbs everything it comes into contact with. There is a whole isle of skin products in grocery stores, pharmacies and big box stores, with a vast quantity of toxic ingredients. It is a small part of what the physical body takes in, but we rarely consider it. Most people don’t even think of it. The skin cream industry is, for the most part, unregulated.
If we expand our vision of ourselves to the greater Beings that we are, we have to include all our senses, all our information gathering apparatuses. After looking at what all our senses are absorbing, we then have to look at what our internal receptors are perceiving; like intuition, instincts, gut feelings and hunches. The amount of information coming into our mind and body is astounding. It then becomes obvious that we have some major sorting to do. There is a lot of information coming in, and we have to make sense of it and then make some choices.
When we become more conscious of the things we watch, read, listen to, put on our bodies, put in our bodies, we come to realize that we are much more than we eat! We are everything we take in and absorb. We are everything we choose to consume. We should then become aware that we need, and choose what we let in. We need to be more discerning of the quality of our intake. We are what we experience on every level and in several dimensions.
~ Be mindful of what you let into you body, mind and soul! ~
After looking at all that we consume, we come to the most crucial, the most constant, the most important life giving fuel that enters our body… the air we breathe. We consume air for oxygen, and Life Force Energy. These words express it!
We can survive two months without food
We can survive less than a month without water
We cannot survive more than a few minutes without air!
The air we consume is far more important than we give it credit for. We breathe all kinds of toxic products, including “cleaning products”- ironically, in our home, our schools and our workplaces. Most people don’t pay attention to the air quality around them. Yet our sense of smell is a very sophisticated alarm system. It warns us about any threat to our life. A toxic smell will automatically send a danger signal to our brain, and we do what is necessary to get to safety. It’s a survival instinct.
When the threat is milder, and considered “not so serious”, we ignore it and continue as if there were no problem. It is so important to insure we have good air to breathe. There are several things we can do to ensure that. Proper ventilation is the first thing we can do.
Nature provides an infinite flow of fresh air; we just have to make sure it gets into our living spaces and to us. If the air is contaminated, then there are different types of air filters that can be put into place to filter out dust particulate, molds and mites.
The advantage of filtering these things out of the air before we inhale and store these things in our lungs, is that our body does not have to roll the foreign particles and toxic chemicals up in phlegm and make us cough it out later. Our body eventually eliminates these things though different systems. Avoiding consuming it in the first place, goes in the category of preventative maintenance. Use an external filter to eliminate the dust and mites instead of using our body to filter and process them out. Why put your body system through the trouble and work?
Cleaner air delivers more oxygen and life force energy to our body, and the lungs are able to extract the life giving energy more easily. The purpose of cleaner air, cleaner water and cleaner food is to make it easier for the body to obtain what is needed for our body to function properly.
Can we survive with dirty air, toxic water and processed foods? Yes we can!
The real question is the quality of life we have with those conditions.
The KEY ingredients to a healthier body and mind:
Clean air – natural or filtered
Clean water – from a spring or structured
Real food – not processed or scorched
Good books – real poetry and inspiring stories
Non toxic Reading – not news or fear driven stories
No Radio – mostly advertising and programming
No Television – no programming
~ Direct Your Own Programming ~
~ Make Your Own Music ~
~ Write Your Own Story ~
~ Because You Are What You Consume ~
Join us in the The Elemental Living Group. There is guidance there. Become a conscious participant in the creation of Your Life. Discover Meditation! Discover the power of Silence. Choose what you let into your mind and body. You are the Director of your thoughts and intentions.
Looking forward to seeing you in the Group!
Marcus Dupuis
