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Why tomatoes??
Food has been quite an area of struggle for me my entire life. From growing up in a home where there was never enough food (and when we did have it, it was never a healthy option), to being forced into diet culture at a very young age, to the constant pressures of society labeling certain sizes as acceptable and certain foods as “healthy” 🙄 (what a topic there)….
Food is a point of discomfort for many of us. What I’ve come to realize is that in every way we’ve been encouraged to detach from the process of eating.
Whether detaching in order to pretend our bland, passion-less diet food is palatable
or detaching because we’re hungry and don’t have enough food available to eat
or we’re in a rush and a quick on-the-go option is all we can squeeze in on our drive to work
or we’re eating from a place of desperately needing the dopamine and serotonin boost due to turbulent emotions
or we’ve been guided to believe our body is problematic and we need to punish it with restriction…
we are detaching and removing ourselves from the sensory experience that is tasting, feeling, and nourishing with food…
I have been stuck in EVERY piece of this detachment loop many times over for the majority of my life. Trauma around food is so common and so many of us struggle.
The thing is, our core processes are mirrored in every aspect of life. So if there is a struggle somewhere in the process of sensory experience, we will experience that in nearly every sensory area of our life as well.
When we heal that core process and begin to truly FEEL and EXPERIENCE and CONNECT with ourselves in a way that honors, respects, and hears our internal dialogue and belief systems, we heal all areas in our lives that are mirroring that process, as well.
Practicing presence while nourishing, to be fully engaged in the sensory process of creating and consuming food, is something that does not come naturally to me. And it is something I have to actively bring myself back to every time I start to mentally and emotionally drift and escape, per my ingrained trauma response.
But what an amazing thing to witness this loop and to be able to actively choose to step out of the habitual pattern and be free.
That’s a quantum leap.
And that’s how we heal.
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