Many people say ‘I have been working on myself for years and have developed many skills and strategies for dealing with my emotional pain and traumas, but still there is something missing and still I feel a lot of pain from what happened and although I am better at managing it, it still hasn’t disappeared completely and still gets me when I least expect it. Just when I think I have dealt with that successfully and I have moved on, it comes back and it hurts and feels raw as if I’ve never done any work on it’. Join the club. We all feel like that, therapists or clients. All of the mental and emotional strategies are very good for alleviating extreme inner pain which comes from unacceptance of what happened, from the injustice of it and from the severity of that. And yes we need to continuously develop skills and strategies to make ourselves feel better in a crazy volatile and unstable world which one minute looks like it is becoming better and fairer and another minute looks worse than the past. And the inner work that we do is mirroring the ebbings and flows of the world around us. It can only help us to manage the traumas and the pain from not enough love but it can’t replace love. And on the other hand and in parallel to the inner work we do, we also need to drive in the opposite lane at the same time which is to consider that if we were supposed to process traumas easily and quickly, our brains would have been structured in that way. For many years I was going only in the direction of developing skills how to make myself feel better as above, and was succeeding to a great extent. And one day a very different idea occurred to me: what if we were designed like this on purpose, to struggle with processing traumas and to feel deep pain, and to be in strong resistance to what is, and what if this purpose is that we get moved from the pain to such an extent that we get acting to make changes and to make the world a better place. Imagine a world where humans process their traumas very quickly and seemlessly. There would be rapes, murders and abuse all around. 500 years ago, people in London used to watch hangings of pirates in their lunch break. They used to gather by the river at around 1-2pm, watch the hangings and then go back to work. If this sight happens to anyone of us today – we will be traumatised for life and we will never forget that experience. So the human brain in the past was much better adjusted to process traumas than the human brain today.
Clearly the brain is not developing in a direction to process traumas easier and faster. The brain is coming from that place and is developing in a direction to be more sensitive and more unaccepting of traumas and emotional pain. And while we continue developing on the road of ‘how do I make myself and others better’ we also need to start thinking what if there is a meaning of this direction of brain development and what are the benefits of this direction of brain development, not just the costs. It is our mental and emotional intollerance and resistance to injustice and suffering, and our inability to process traumas, that actually lead to making changes in the world from one year to another and from one century to another. If all people could process traumas easily we would still be living in the age of public hangings and short lives many people had those days. If all women were processing their traumas easily – we would still have no equal rights today. And if all minority people were processing their traumas easily – they would still have no equal rights today. What if the way to deal with traumas best is to accept that we are purposefully designed to be unable to process traumas so that we can stop these events happening. The ugly dysfunctional resistance, unacceptance that lead to so much inner angst and pain and that look so unkind to oneself and so maladaptive and so rigid and entrenched and leading to personal unhappiness are actually the propellers for change and progress and for making the world more equal and more just and in this way improving our health and wellbeing and prolonging our lifespans. What looks maladaptive and dysfunctional on the surface is the most adaptive and the most functional for the commmon good of humanity. Most human rights were achieved by this lack of acceptance of what is. A symbol of maladaptiveness and dysfunctionality such as Courtney Love, was actually the first woman who revealed publicly the truth about Harvey Weinstein. That was 10 years ago, a decade before other women gathered the strength to speak up. And if humanity was more sensitive at the time towards sexual crimes against women, her statement would have had much bigger consequences. Unfortunately at that time there were too many well-adjusted individuals in Hollywood and and in the press to take much notice of what she said. It took another traumatised person, son, brother, Ronan Farrow, whose sister was raped, and who could not process his trauma of being a son of a rapist and a brother of a raped woman, and his suffering was so great that it moved him to fight against the Harvey Weinstein establishment, which no one else had done before. His individual suffering brought so much goodness and progress for all women in the world. After his exposure of Harvey Weinstein, the world in 2017 is a far far better place for women than it was before. We can now talk openly about so many things that even a year ago we did not feel comfortable to talk about and the truth about how much women are still judged for being victims revealed so many rotten parts of the human consciousness which only until a year ago were kept hidden. Your pain and your suffering and your ever bleeding wound is moving you to action to make this world a better place for everyone.
It is not unusual for humans to drive with our thinking in two opposite directions. We do this as parents naturally. We are loving towards our children and we are strict towards our children. So the same approach can help us with our emotional wellbeing. On one hand we drive on the road of developing ourselves to process our traumas and heal our pains and at the same time we drive on the road of accepting our emotional suffering and looking at the benefits of it and stop counting only the costs of it. Abundant blessings for more love and more compassion in the new 2018.
This is not aphrodisiac nutrition for arousal, but nutrition for strengthening the self from within which is so so important when getting involved in a love relationship. I have compiled a list of the top foods which strengthen the body, the mind, the emotions, and bring our centre into the body.
If there is only one food you can add to your diet to strengthen and support you through the trials of love, let that be cacao nibs. Organic 100% pure cacao nibs. Pure cacao is an ancient ingredient of marriage ceremonies in South American tribes and in peace making rituals. Use with no sugar or milk, for strengthening your body, mind and emotions. My favourite form of cacao is the nibs which give me a very pleasant crunchy experience and they amuse me with their smallness of size and greatness of impact. Try a handful of these miracle nibs and let me know what happened. I feel uplifted, confident, spirited, centered, comfortable, pleased, gladdened, nourished, complete and it not that I can’t feel like that without them, but they are gently helping me, supporting me on the path, and there is nothing wrong in getting help and support or admitting that we need help and support.
If there are two foods you can add to your diet, then make the second food to be black pepper. It is one of the favourite foods of the base chakra which is at situated at the coxis. It provides instant nourishment and strengthening of the root chakra. A plant cannot be strong to sustain the winds, the rain and the changing weather conditions without strong roots. Black pepper is a powerful healing food for the root chakra which determines our stability in life. When the root chakra is weak there is a lot of instability in the person’s life. And most people have that. So it’s always useful to keep nourishing and strengthening the root chakra.
As if anti-cancer properties are not enough, fermented foods are also great foods for dating, loving, and relating because they flatten the stomach, expel the gas generated by bad gut bacteria and create a wonderful sense of wellbeing in the gut. It can easily be argued that physical and emotional wellbeing depend on the physical sensations in the gut, and when these are not comfortable – bloated or acidy, it is not fun being inside our skin. And when it’s not fun being inside our skin – that is when we disconnect from our bodies, from our true natures, from our authentic selves. From that position of discomfort is almost impossible to relate and to connect with other people, when we are experiencing such a bad connection with ourselves. Fermented foods help us to feel grounded and centred within ourselves, by creating this very comfortable feeling in the gut and stomach. Feeling comfortable inside our human body and in our skin is not given to humans by default. We need to meditate and direct our breathing inside and do all kinds of woo woo, to achieve that, while fermented foods do this so much faster and easier just by consuming them. Garlic is another flatulence burster.