Chocolate

Chocolate - You Really Got Me Now!

I was a picky eater as a kid, and I still am now. But one thing I have always loved is... chocolate! Dark chocolate to be specific.
Sound track by The Kinks: "You really got me now.
You got me so I don't know what I'm doing..."

I Came for the Cake

My mother told me that the afternoon before she went into labor with me, she had a friend over (She only had two kids to deal with at that time, so she actually had friends.) and she had baked a chocolate cake. After her friend left, she proceeded to eat half the cake. Then she went into labor.

She told me this story when I was about 20. Long before the days when we knew the term carbo-loading. I smile at the thought now. Did I feel the chocolate rush and decide it was time to get me some of that? Did the caffeine rush induce labor a little earlier than I might have wanted? All I know is chocolate and I have had a thing going ever since.

Those of you who more-than-love chocolate would probably agree with me that it is one of the basic food groups. That said, I have been on a food cleanse, which means I've been eating what I'm supposed to, which does not include sugar or caffeine. But a girl can dream, can't she? In fact, sometimes I do dream about chocolate.

I've Given It Up Lots of Times

I have given up chocolate several times for a year or more. I usually dream about it after a few days
without it. I'm sitting there enjoying a huge rich brownie with sweet frosting, and suddenly remember that I'm not supposed to be eating it. Really?! I'm ruining the fun for myself even in my sleep?

One time I had been off chocolate for three years when a coworker had an chocolate fudge cake for his birthday. My coworkers laughed when I said, "I just want to smell it; that will be enough." They laughed and waved the plate in front of me, tempting me to eat a slice.

Fireworks in the Brain

But it wasn't a joke. And I knew it. Later I read that there is a substance called pyrozine in chocolate, roasted nuts, and roasted coffee, that creates endorphins in the brain. I remember this term because it's like pyrotechnics (fireworks) in my brain. So when I pause to smell someone grinding coffee at the local market, or walk into See's Candies and inhale and feel delightful, there is a chemical reason for it.

So next time you pass the coffee grinder at the market, inhale deeply and enjoy!

Ecstacy in Chocolate

In the book Constant Craving by Doreen Virtue, I read a long list of feel-good reasons for why we like chocolate. One was "mouth-feel" because chocolate melts at body temperature. Some reasons were chemical. It said that the street drug Extacy is in chocolate. Really?! Well... That explains a lot.

So I'm taking a class on emotional eating. Yeah, I know, mom's bribes of chocolate dessert if I ate my dinner were a big set-up for this. But she was doing the best she could to get me to eat something.

How Your Brain Creates Habits

There is new research on this all the time. Here's a TedTalk video of Joe Dispenza on how your brain creates habits. We are actually making nerve pathways with our actions just like walking through a field of high grass. The more we walk down the same way, the deeper that pathway becomes. Now that? That really explains a lot!

How About You?

Are you a chocoholic?

Faith Stealthily Crept Into My Life

Faith was a foreign word to me for most of my life. But now I find that it has stealthily crept into my being. Looking back, I see that my faith has quietly been growing for a long time, and more rapidly recently. I am glad that I am opening to the most real part of Reality.

GPS - God Positioning Service

When I listen to who I am inside, and live from that place, I am living in faith, and am guided moment by moment in the direction of my heart’s desires. I cannot say that this was always so. This kind of faith has grown during the past year and half of my studies. I now know that I have a personal GPS – God Positioning Service – inside me, and I am learning to listen to It; living more and more from wordless awareness, living more from the inside out, with my life in much better alignment.

Prayer Isn't Pleading

In the past, I didn’t pray, because it seemed to come from an attitude of pleading, complaint, bargaining, asking the big daddy in the sky for a favor, or at the other end of the continuum, from demand or expectation. These approaches to prayer come from a sense of separation from God. When prayer comes from Faith, it’s another matter entirely. In Science of Mind, I am learning what faith means. With faith, prayer is a communion and a realization.

Sitting In a Tree

As a child sitting in the trees, I was one with nature. I didn’t know the word Faith, but this was the beginning of it

for me: a deep respect for the natural world, a reverence for such beauty and peace, and no feeling of separation. Though I would not have called it a cathedral, that’s what I had next door to our house. That early experience created a deep foundation for me in sensing that there is more going on than meets the eye. Learning about evolution in school, it was obvious to me that something much bigger happening. And now I feel more deeply the vast Intelligence of it all. How amazing that all of this is held in the One.

Sitting On a Cushion

I started meditating in 1973, but clearly got a message that in order to go further in, I needed to go out into the world first. I came back to meditating in the 1980s, and have meditated off and on since. Now it is a part of my regular spiritual practice. It is rich and sweet and full of intuitive knowing. There is an ease and purity to it that feels like being back in the woods of my childhood. I have a better understanding of what Faith is, and it is growing: wordlessly, silently, bringing more light and peace into my life.

I understand more deeply that we are made of Spirit. We are not really solid, as we appear to be. We are Spirit in form, but our eyes make us and the world look solid and real. Chopra echoes a thought that I have had about who and what I am:

“Just as a magnetic field can organize iron filings on a sheet of paper into a specific pattern, so the universe’s collective field can organize body and mind – and has. From this field spring all the impulses that are responsible for creation. Whatever lives and dies participates in this field and never leaves it. It is quite literally the ‘field of all possibilities.’” Creating Health, p103.5

A Path That Doesn't End

This is a path that can last a lifetime, always going deeper, always uncovering more of my innate wholeness.

This is the real treasure, the Kingdom of Heaven within. My mother would shake her head at that if she were still alive, in rebellion against her religious upbringing. But I think she would have liked Science of Mind. I asked her once whether she believed in God. She said no. I asked what she believed in. She said E=MC². But I think that’s one pretty good way to describe God. Energy changes to matter and matter changes to energy, all in a measurable way. 

Riding a Beam of Light

I watched a Nova episode on Einstein. He was obsessed with what it would be like to ride on a beam of light. And it got me to thinking, perhaps we are right now, in physical form because we are moving slower light, which is our Source. Thoughts are things. Mind creates. We are energy, just moving slower than the light around us, just denser than the energy all around us. We live in Spirit. We live in the infinite sea of Spirit. We are condensed areas of this energy, our molecules are simply moving slower than light. It’s all the same stuff. And it’s amazing if I just stop to think about it for a moment. We ARE riding a beam of light. Right now. Right here.
than

Now I am developing a faith that is more encompassing, deeper, and more constant, life is richer, I feel more connected to people and life, and I am more relaxed. Because I know not just that everything will be OK. I know that it already is OK right now. Time in nature, meditation, and prayer are great ways to remind myself, and a necessary part of my life. These practices build the faith I have, or maybe they just reveal it.

How About You?

Do you sit in silence? Does it help?