Relationships through the Cakras

As I sat last night in meditation, my mind humming the same old tunes it's been singing at least for the past year, which are an echo of that song that's been playing in my head since I can remember becoming aware of my body.

Oh, I want to be beautiful, it is my responsibility to god to have the best, most healthy body I can. Ok, I actually believe this, in a way. But there is a difference between knowledge and mental rhetoric which translates into ice cream eating over real action towards achieving said goal.

Body consciousness. Why, I ask myself, AGAIN, has it been so challenging for me to really change my eating patterns and habits and simply take off the weight I feel so burdened by? (We're talking 15 pounds here.)

Ok, these thoughts only come after I've eaten something heavy, and sweet, like the coconut milk (sweetened only with agave nectar) ice cream and chocolate cookie (homemade with sugar) I finished a little while ago. Sugar induced svadhisthana sheepliness.

What is about my attitude that is wrong? (How else do I explain my behavior? Does not right understanding lead to right action?)

Well, usually I think of hunger as an ENEMY. I feel it creeping up on me and my pitta consciousness becomes aggravated easily by it. It is one of the small things in life I have any control over--which quickly becomes a joke and a lie as I satisfy such cravings for food with foods which often lead to more and deeper cravings.

Now, a craving, is not something that is easily controlled. It can be satiated for a time, and for a long time, I thought this was the answer to a craving.

Nevermind the constant teachings from the scriptures and masters regarding the importance of mastery of the senses. What does that mean? These masters must not have lived in the world of refined sugar and such blatant advocacy for a life lived based primarily on gratification of sense to know what we're up against!

However, I do believe they had human bodies, in which sensual desires are apparently a great part of the territory.

Here is the recent leap in my thinking: Become friends with hunger. I've tried many times to become friends with my body. All the time I fight it, I don't want it, I will eat whatever it tells me to to allay it. I call this sugar addiction. People's relationship to food varies from constantly obsessed with it to barely aware that it exists as the foundation of the physical body.

Becoming friends with hunger, or perhaps I should say, my digestive fire, feels like a step up to Manipura cakra. In muladhara, I eat for survival. Imbalanced, this would mean overeating for fear that future food supplies may be interrupted. (Totally irrational based on ALL my life experiences.) In svadhisthana, which is where I've lived inharmoniously lately, food fulfills various cravings for needs ranging far beyond that of food for survival. Food is to indulge the sense of taste, fill the void of sexual lonliness, etc.

In imbalanced Manipura, hunger/food is the enemy. Actually, it seems food has little role in Manipura, since here it is burned by the digestive fire. It is a raw material once again, as it was in Muladhara, only now at the elevated process of actualization of food as the basis of the physical body.

Anahata is the relationship of lovers.
Vishudda, student-teacher
Ajna-perfect balance of male/female
Sahasrara--no relationship, total oneness, no differentiation

Basically it is all about embracing. Embracing everything, as He does.