Food and the Life Force

rainbow carrots

rainbow carrots

Wow!  Have you seen these rainbow carrots? I thought they were so lovely that I decided to buy them no matter what the high-end grocery store was charging. They would be so fun to cut up! I couldn’t wait to see how much they held their color when cooked.  And would the purple ones taste any different from the plain ol’ carrots I’ve been eating all my life?

I love it when something fairly simple and completely natural takes my breath away. Somehow it’s proof of persistent innocence. And of the real things that tend to give us the  most pleasure.

It occured to me when I roasted these carrots with garlic and good olive oil, rosemary potatoes next to them, that food we consider beautiful probably gives us extra nourishment. All the research being done about the mind/body and about the body’s propensity to open with pleasure and close with fear on all its levels of functioning–well, the facts are a blur. But the impression I have is that when we take time, when we choose foods that are beautiful and pleasurable, our body breaks out into a big purr and is able to use the nutrients in the food to bolster the life force. And life force is what we want.

I had a client the other day who has been through such a major trauma that I feared she might be in a depression too deep for me to handle. I asked her how big she pictured the life force inside her to be.  I asked her to picture it in the form of a flame, figuring she might tell me it was the size of a pilot light.  She floored me by telling me it was as big as a house. I’m not worried about her now. Sure, I’m empathetic about the grief and the pain she has to go through, but I’m not worried about her in the long run because she has a life force as big as a house.  She has rainbow carrots inside her.

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