In the early sixties, I was a very bright student. In the spring of 1963, my world was shattered when my mother died of breast cancer. Almost overnight I was uprooted from my home in Utah. We moved in with my aunt in California. Six months later my dad tried to commit suicide.
His Soul mate was gone and the pain was too great. He ended up in the sanitarium. All they did was keep him drugged. After he was released and we moved back to Utah, this once bright student was was just doing okay in school now. After some testing, I was classified with minimal brain disordered (it is now called ADHD).
My Aunt had been a health foodie in the 60’s. “Food Faddists” as it was called back then. In 1962, one of the lead articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association was titled The Nuts among the Berries — an article about food faddists.
I grew in my teens as a ‘Granola Kid’. We made our own bread, our own yogurt, ground our own beef. We were living an Ancestral Diet — kind of a cross between a vegetarian and Paleo diet. The theory behind the Ancestral Diet is that you will be the healthiest when you eat the foods for which your body is best adapted. Claims of potential benefits from an Ancestral Diet include weight loss, increased energy, more muscle tone, increased immunity and a reduced risk of some diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, cancer and arthritis.
After spending a year on psychiatric medication with the many side effects, this type of diet kept my father alive and well for 12 more years off medication and in relatively good health. He passed away at the age 70 looking 55.
Moving forward to 1988, I was working for Bright Day Health Foods, the health store I grew up out of. I learned so much in the 9 years I was there. Then I moved to Longmont, Colorado in 1999 to work for a natural food market called Vitamin Cottage.
Over the next 14 years, I worked for 3 more natural food markets and a vitamin company as a research assistant. I currently work in R&D for a online wellness company, Askdrgarland.com. Here I develop products and coach customers about their lifestyle. This lead me into philosophy called Soul Food Nutrition.
My philosophy on Soul Food Nutrition goes something like this. All it takes is to learn how to live in the Mystery.
What does it take to live in the Mystery?
What is the mystery? Does it mean to live with no assurances?
To live in the gray. No black or white. No control.
Control, what do we actually control?
We really only control our thinking.
We day dream, we drift off.
Are you wasting your time and therefore your life by daydreaming?
What if you could day dream with a purpose?
Direct your thoughts, your dreams into action.
Could you manifest your own best self?
Now we all have choices in our lives.
Would you rather be happy or right?
So to live in the mystery is choosing to be happy in the face of uncertainty.
Uncertainty is like going with the flow from opinion to opinion.
Uncertainty is like swimming upstream, going nowhere.
To be truly in the flow means to direct your flow.
When one is caught in a current, one is told to head toward the land but swimming parallel to the land and little by little you will make it back to land.
So with intention you can direct your flow and therefore your life. To go into the mystery,
is to surrender control. So you ask, how do surrender control and still direct my flow?
You ‘Ask’ for what you want.
‘Feel’ what it is like to have your desired outcome already.
Then you release it to the universe.
You ‘Accept’ that you are deserving and worthy of receiving
goodness and light into your life.
You ‘Receive’, be open to receiving your heart’s desire.
Then you bless it, which opens you to receive more.
The final step is to not get tied up in the outcome.
You can’t get poor enough. You can’t get sick enough to help a single person.
You deserve goodness.
You deserve greatness in your life.
So to live in this mystery we call life.
We put out our intention, let it go and again and are NOT tied up in the outcome.
To be present in the mystery we must know who we are.
The question is how many of us know who we truly are?
Who are you? You might know your body or mind and some of us
might even know or be in touch with our spirit, our soul.
The soul is. It has no beginning and no end but flows toward wholeness. The personality emerges as a natural force from the soul. It is an energy tool that the soul adapts to function within the physical world. Each personality is unique because the configuration of the energy of the soul that formed it is unique. ~The Seat of Soul
It is your persona of the soul, so to speak that interacts with physical matter. Persona is where we get our word personality. In Greek persona means masks. So personality means the masks that we wear. We all wear different masks or hats. We all have different masks or personalities for work, friends and home. But sometimes we can have some many masks that we loss our true authentic self and then loss connection to the soul, therefore we step out of the flow and disconnect from source. Could this is be the origins of mental illness like schizophrenia? Have you fragmented yourself so much you have lost your way back to Soul?
The Buddha says “Don’t believe what I say. Find out what is real or true for you.”
Just Breathe, Believe and you are whole.
