Spiritual Nutrition - Nourishing More Than Just Your Physical Body
I want to invite you into the world of Spiritual Nutrition which is a whole new way to see nourishment compared to traditional physical nutrition.
Before I became a meditation teacher I studied Nutritional Therapy and saw that so often people were all trying to ‘fill’ a hole inside themselves with food or other substances - and not successfully. They were starving for Spiritual Nutrition.
The beautiful thing I’ve learnt on my journey is that there are many parallels to physical nutrition - quality, quantity, spiritual junk food that’s marketed as ‘healthy’ and more. Spiritual Nutrition of course also has ‘nutrients’ such as Presence, non-causal Ecstasy, Prana, Sound/Vibration as well as Sunshine, Cosmic Energy, and Earth energy.
For this blog post I want to share Spiritual Nutrition in two parts. The first part is related to how we can best nourish ourselves in order to enter the meditation bandwidth. The second section is looking at ways to nourish us that are not food related.
Eating for Meditation
As a nutritional therapist and meditation teacher I learned really quickly how much food can affect our ability to meditate. If you eat sugary food and stimulants obviously your brain is going to be on fire, erratic and all over the place - not that conducive to a meditation session! The things I’ve seen to be most important are:
Eating in a way that balances blood sugar spikes - so more low carb meals that keep you in a more steady state. Switch out processed food for wholefoods and loads of vegetables. Watch out for vegan foods that are full of sugar, especially more processed options like muesli bars and cereals - go for unprocessed wholefoods instead like a banana or apple as a snack or salads with sweet potato and avocado for something more filling.
Mineralising the body - minerals are like magic and I love adding naturally mineral rich foods to my meals. Try adding seaweed to salads and rice to get a super mineral rich hit. Good quality salt is also amazing for this and grounding - I prefer Celtic Sea Salt which has over 80 minerals in it. Table salt has been stripped of all these minerals and is the reason why salt has got a bad wrap in the past.
Adaptogenic herbs - these help align and balance our hormone production, especially when it comes to our stress response - I love Natalia Botanicals herbal blends which you can add to drinks easily like smoothies or warm nut milks and taste delicious.
Grounding food - this is where it’s important to look at the “energetics” of food. I love using the “Yin Yang” principles here. Too many salads, green juices and very yin foods can leave us feeling airy and ungrounded. Yang foods like slow cooked vegetables with salt and soaked and cooked rice can be very grounding and help us create balance. The Academy of Healing Nutrition covers energetic nutrition on their courses which is amazing if you’re curious to learn more.
It’s possible to write books on this topic, but what I’ve written above are some basics that allow us to feel grounded, more settled in our mind and more energetically efficient - if we’re tired and wired from what we’re eating it makes meditation that little bit harder for us. You can learn more in my Eating For Meditation Masterclass.
Spiritual Nutrients
Presence - The presence of your own energy being with yourself at 100% capacity is absolute gold. This is what keeps us feeling satisfied, rather than having our attention always searching on the outside. So often our energy is pulled outside of us and this is part of why we feel ‘empty’, which was my original point in this article. I share more on this in my meditation course Addicted To Being.
Prana - This is the life force energy that runs through our energy body and all of existence. When we do breathing techniques they are focused on circulating prana in our body. I have a free Energy Recovery Mini Course on my site that has breathing exercises and techniques on how to use and move energy so that you are nourishing your energy body. It’s very liberating and so much of us feeling tired is not about needing more energy, but how we are using what we have.
Ecstasy - Non-causal ecstasy is part of our divine make up. When we are not connected to this we crave it. I remember when I was studying nutrition that if the body is deficient in something, it will often absorb a mimic to try to fill that gap. So for example many women who were iron deficient would absorb chemical disrupting hormones that mimicked iodine. I feel this happens in spiritual nutrition too - if we are lacking something like non-causal ecstasy we will try to absorb a mimic - aka drugs and alcohol - but of course this just causes more problems and then blocks us from getting the ‘real thing’. I share way more about this in my course Ecstasy Now - a guide to non causal ecstasy and meditative living.
Sound - I believe sound is a very powerful ‘nutrient’ for many levels our body - our body uses frequencies to attract nutrients in at a cellular level, sound is known to ‘align’ our organs when they are out of tune, we can entrain our brainwaves with music and frequencies to aid entering into meditation and the pure joy that comes from singing and chanting (which crosses over into ecstasy).
Intuition and Wisdom - being able to access and allow our innate inner wisdom to come through is also very nourishing. We don’t listen to this aspect of us, we feel unaligned, uninspired and lost in life.
There is so much more to share on the topic of Spiritual Nutrition - literally a book! However for now I hope that this has opened you up to see nourishing yourself in a new way. When we are completely nourished on this level and our cup is full, we then have a great capacity to be of service to others, which is perhaps one of the greatest forms of nourishment, but as the saying goes, you cannot pour from an empty cup.