Food for thought: Food for the emotions

This weekend was Seminar number 6 of my natural energetic cooking course. I took some great photos of the delicious dishes we prepared, but my iPhone got stolen on the way back home (an ordeal I won't go into here), and the photos went with it, so all I have are the sensory memories (and the recipes!). Some of the highlights were a seitan and vegetable lasagna with cauliflower white sauce, seaweed croquettes, olive paté, and apple "donuts" with carob sauce and strawberries.

This weekend's main topic was food and the emotions, a very interesting subject because there really are so many people who use food as a surrogate for something else, people who tend to eat in order to feed not just the body, but also the emotions (or maybe we all do this at times). Sometimes we eat to relax, or we eat to get our adrenaline running (physical, energetic needs), or sometimes we just eat because we want to feel a connection to something that we're missing (a "sweetness", our mother...).
So the idea is to reflect on what we eat and see whether we are actually trying to nurture our physical body or the emotions, and if it's the latter, then we have to try to find a better way to find nourishment.
A question Montse had us ask ourselves was how often do we feed our emotional body? We try to give our physical body nourishment three times a day, every day, so shouldn't we do the same with the emotional body, who also needs it?
Nourishment for the emotions are the moments of being present with oneself, in whatever it is we are doing, moments of connection, awareness, being with oneself in our actions, or in our silence.
For me my daily ashtanga practice is definitely food for the emotions, since I started practicing on a daily basis I feel much more nourished in this sense.
For someone else, food for the emotions might be a daily ritual like lighting a candle before a meal. You don't even have to get too esoteric to feed the emotions, it can be just a silent walk back from work or just a moment of inner presence while you are doing the dishes! Anyway, I'm sorry if I'm sounding too new-agey here (definitely far from my intentions), but I found this idea of feeding the emotional body very interesting and necessary and particularly neglected in this day and age. (So here I was, having a moment of inner connection walking back from the course, thinking about how happy I was to be doing things I enjoy and believe in so much, and this freak on a bike rides by and yanks my iphone right out of my hand, hitting me on the cheek in the intent. Talk about a wake-up call...oops, I said I wasn't going to go into that here).

This is another exercise we did in class related to food and the emotions, very illustrative, you can try it:

First draw a circle on a piece of paper (big enough to be able to write some things inside):




Now write how you feel when you cook a meal, on any random day.

This is what I had:






OK, now next to your circle draw a fork and knife.




This is your plate, this is what you are about to eat, how do you like what's on it?

Pretty graphic, isn't it? Our emotions are transmitted into the food we prepare, so it's best to try to cook in a relatively calm, aware state (at least as often as possible, if not at every meal).