alcohol

Reclaiming our spirit – some thoughts on alcohol and self-love

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

I've been pondering humanity's troubled relationship with alcohol more deeply than ever, this last 18 months, since I stopped consuming it myself. Partly because the clarity of hindsight has allowed me to newly appreciate, and own, how alcohol was the bane of my life for just so many years; really, its consumption underlay some of the very worst experiences (and behaviours) of my life. In fact all of my biggest traumas except those relating to loss of a loved one had their foundations on a rock bed of alcohol-induced behaviours including some monumentally poor decisions and mindsets that had very far-reaching effects. The most pervasive of these was as a result of how alcohol imparted a subtle yet deadly sense of self-loathing that became deeper, more innocuous, year-on-year; only to be remembered like a faintly ringing Pavlov's bell each time I took another drink and thus snowballed into even more self-denigration with each occasion. I know these things for sure - the path to recovery requires that you take back your personal power, your responsiblity for your own health and that you unconditionally love (and respect) yourself; none of which are consistent with what alcohol, voluntarily, does to the body each time we consume it....

Knowing your sugar tolerance

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

The extreme effects that resulted when two of us revisited eating sugar after a long break from it reminded me that these are the normal outcome of sugar consumption for all people. So the variance isn't in the biological effects but in how much people notice them or have adapted to shield themselves from, or absorb, the backlash (though the resultant health issues are seldom avoided so much as redirected into another form of expression; often a more severe health issue, further down the line). Most people push on through the effects of sugar without really acknowledging that they are there; as I know I did, for years. The more we consume the crazy amount of sugar our modern diet makes almost compulsory and extremely (shockingly) normal, the more we become (ironically) immune to it as the nervous system is pushed over the limit to where it has no choice but to turn down its own sensitivity to everything, even those things we want to experience, in order to cope; like a form of self-created paralysis. Its as though sugar only knows one setting - one that makes us receive more sensation, delivered in the most abrasive way possible and it is more than our nervous system, which longs to experience many things but wants to be way more discerning than that, can cope with. We become over-stimulated...and so we break down or are forced to buffer ourselves like we are under constant attack and, of course, some of us stop feeling at all.

Tuning into your food

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

To open up to tuning-in – directly – to the food that best serves us as an individual – is self-empowerment realised; and is the most direct way to achieving optimum health and all the trimmings that come with that (including ideal body weight, strong bones, balanced hormones and longevity). How do we do this, do we have to learn a whole new skill set? No, we just listen to all the overt and more subtle clues our body is so diligently presenting to us. Believe me, the natural high you get when you effortlessly sync with your body’s most direct food requests and then allow your instincts to take over how you interact with that food to create colourful, ingenious, deeply-satisfying meals is the stuff of divine inspiration; its like playing in heaven’s kitchen.When you live in a place of joy and highly-tuned instinct around food you eat when you are hungry and you know just what to eat when you do; how easy can it get? After just a few months of living consistently like this, your body starts to trust that you are listening to it and delivering what it most needs in order to thrive...Its like the body lets out one enormous sigh of relief and sheds all of its stored-up layers of surplus fat and so much emotional baggage too…because it is now striving to meet the higher vibration of all the wonderful food you are delivering to it. It very quickly and easily drops all that old weight over the side, like so much unnecessary ballast, before taking off for the ride of its life and the sheer exhilaration of how different your body can feel is palpable; a very different way of experiencing life in human form.