Part One
How to Get to the Spiritual Zone
Waking Up Your Awareness
Just as you would have started planning your fantasy Italian vacation months in advance, so too have you been planning for this adventure into the Spiritual Zone—for your whole life. Everything you have been and done has brought you exactly to this point. Every thought, feeling and experience you have had has contributed to the whole of you that you are right now—appreciate them all with gratitude that they have brought you to a tremendous spiritual opportunity on this very page at this very moment. Regrets? Sure, you've had a few—you might have awoken and got here a few months or years or even decades earlier—but remember, please, that all mistakes are learning opportunities: once bitten, twice shy. So even your mistakes have directed you to this very moment—refining your path to your point of departure.
Consider that when you were born you were in a pretty sleepy state; in fact, you spent much more than half of each day sleeping. As you have matured you have grown more and more awake; your body probably only sleeps now eight or fewer hours a day—only a third each day. You have matured from a child concerned only with survival to a self-conscious adult concerned now with how to awaken even more consciousness in yourself. Instead of questing for food and shelter and love and sex and comforts as you have done during previous developmental stages in your life, now you are setting out on your quest for spiritual meaning—and all the magic that comes with it.
You are not alone on this journey. In fact, you travel in royal company. Preceding you on the quest have been the great mystics and philosophers and initiates, for this quest had once been reserved for the spiritual elite. Times have changed. Consider the changes to physical life during the past 200 years. Even in the most prosperous countries, human beings were living very simple lives in 1800: plowing by mule, reading by candlelight, writing with quills and sending letters by horseback. Yet even these recent ancestors were well on their way to the sweeping materialism that has captivated Western and world society today. Forget plowing and planting: we now buy our factory-farmed food ripe, picked, washed, irradiated, seasoned, preserved, pre-cooked, packaged and ready for the microwave. We watch movies and listen to books on tape; we communicate by e-mail at the speed of light.
The pull of materialism brings with it inherent dissatisfactions: we have lost touch, literally, with the earth. Think about this: how often does your skin touch soil? Except for our humanized house pets, we have also lost contact with the animal kingdom. Your great-great-great-grandfather's partnership with his mule as they walked together through fields was one of the most important cooperative ventures of his life. The pause to dip his quill into his inkwell enforced frequent thoughtful moments. I imagine there was a built-in connectedness to other beings 200 years ago that sustained the spiritual lives of our great-grandparents' grandparents.
Today, we feign a connectedness to the whole of life, trying to pretend that our broadband hook-up to the World Wide Web is in itself meaningful. Yes, we can e-mail friends and strangers anywhere in the world within a matter of seconds. Sure, this is a fantastic tool—but how many times, honestly, has it enriched your spiritual life?
I believe that the descent into materialism brings with it its balancing opposite: the quest for spiritual experience. This is the very quest that drives you and me to be here together now. No doubt this hunger for spiritual experience is widely present and growing. Look at book sales statistics: self-help books are the biggest growing sector of publishing. Look how the aerobics and workout craze of the eighties has been eclipsed now by yoga studios on every block; this is a perfect demonstration of how in a very short period we have grown from being (somewhat self-indulgently) focused on our physical selves to now demanding that our workout time feeds our spiritual as well as our bodily needs.
This is all to say that you are not alone on this journey to the Spiritual Zone. Human beings are traveling to the Zone in far greater numbers than ever before. Just as you can travel to Italy by air, land or sea, people access the Zone through a multitude of means—including study of books like this, lectures, meditation, numerous spiritual practices, yoga and prayer.
All of these include the requirement of self-study. Getting to know who you are better and why you are who you are will accelerate your readiness for our departure. This will be the focus of this chapter as we wake up our consciousness in light of our three primary human components: our bodies, our minds and our hearts.
Preparing Your Body for the Spiritual Zone
Our bodies are the temples of our spirits. If we don't feed the right things to our bodies, we won't be in alignment to stay tuned and receive the messages and guidance we need. We also won't have the energy and stamina to do the work we are here to do.
I know good health—diet and exercise—is critically important for me to keep clearly tuned in to my feelings and my guidance. As we have begun to awaken as a people, we have become more aware of the importance of healthy diet. We are told we will live longer and better lives. You know what? We will also live truer lives. We must feed our bodies appropriately so that they may serve our spiritual selves effectively.
What (and how much) we take into our bodies has a profound effect on our vibrations—the rate at which our nervous systems and cellular structure harmonize with the frequencies of the Universe. If we are dulled by alcohol or overeating, our sluggish vibration can contain only heavy energy. If we are wired on caffeine or sugar, our frenetic vibration channels only scattered energy. If we are poisoned by animal antibiotics and excess hormones, our bodies will be incapable of settling into the harmonious silence where our guidance is waiting. Remember my experience in Notre-Dame in Paris? I had been meditating quietly for three weeks.
Our appetites and cravings are established by our past mistakes (which set up metabolic, as well as psychological, expectations) and by tremendous commercial and cultural influences. Simple, detoxifying diets can purify us of these influences and expectations, clearing the opportunity for truth to let us know what our bodies need in order to house and accommodate our spiritual missions more effectively.
Rather than making us slimmer, sexier, more beautiful, popular or successful—as our media-driven consumer culture would have us believe—the real need for a healthy diet is to become awake and truly available to our spiritual purpose. Once we have taken a decisive step in this direction, our bodies will act in joyful service of our spiritual intentions—and we'll find old cravings and attractions will have lost their powerful appeal. There is an old saying: 'You are what you eat.' Well, truly, you are what you think, but how you think is greatly affected by what you eat. So let's start with diet.
Eating for True Health in the Spiritual Zone
The word 'diet' is loaded with associations of overweight people wanting to slim down, hoping that depriving themselves of some kind of food indulgence will make them trimmer, happier and more loveable. Diet books, too, are constantly making their way onto the bestseller lists. Yet obesity continues to plague the Western world. Why is this? What are people so hungry for that they continually and obsessively overeat?
I believe that the vast majority of overweight people are feeding themselves to numb the pain of their alienated lives. Our consumer culture has led not-so-awake people to think that the more and better material things they possess, the more fulfilled they will feel. Yet this is not the case. Many people eat to fill the spiritual void in their lives. Some of you who are reading this book with me now are overweight. Some of you have been eating to comfort the anxiety and alienation that are inherent in a culture that has made consumerism its idol. To you, my friends, I say welcome home.
In the Spiritual Zone you will experience a connectedness with and
a belonging to the unity of all of life. Your loneliness will evaporate as you learn to forgive your mistaken (and unconscious) beliefs about separation. Food will become true pleasure and sustenance instead of compulsion. In the Spiritual Zone you will recognize your deepest hunger as spiritual longing, and you will know that this longing is already satisfied.
If you were planning to spend your summer exploring the hill towns of Italy, you'd want to make certain that your body was prepared for the local challenges—the steep cobblestone streets, the world's best pasta and gelato on every street corner. You might do very well to eat healthfully for the few months prior to your departure, knowing that you are more likely to enjoy the trip if your body can keep up with your interests. Preparing for your Italian vacation is an opportunity to bring more consciousness to your diet. Italy pervades your thoughts; it's easier to pass up that second serving of chocolate decadence because you know by doing so you'll feel and look better by the pool. Planning for your trip has made you more awake to your actions. It has brought more consciousness into your day-to-day decisions. The anticipation of your trip is already impacting your life.
So what should you eat/not eat in preparation for the Spiritual Zone? There is going to be a different answer for each of you. Our bodily needs are different, but what we can each immediately do in preparation for the journey is to wake up to our eating practices. Make eating a conscious practice. This way, you will be more likely to eat only what you truly want. This heightened awareness can be applied to whole meal...
