Meghan | Meghan Genge

A Year of Magical Eating ~ The Rules

June 7, 2017

First we eat, then we do everything else. ~ M.F.K. Fisher

No matter what else I have to do, I keep coming back to thinking about A Year of Magical Eating. It feels so True for me; so straight-from-Source that I want to do it right now.

So despite saying that I wasn’t going to follow any rules, I think I need to set myself some rules, and if this is an experiment, I’d also like to create myself a working hypothesis so that you and I and we and the Universe all know what all of this is about.

The Rules:

This is not and will not become about food porn. It is so easy to get sucked in to what other people are showing on their beautifully styled counters, but that is not what this is. This is about me finding the Magic in food, and so that needs to be deeper than ogling and liking and fondling and curating.
No diets or programs or isms of any kind. Even if the spirit of Julia Child herself comes and presents me with the latest and greatest and best diet in the history of the planet; even if they suddenly decide that The Chocolate-Dipped Mesolithic Diet is the way to go, I’m out. For a year. NO. PLANS.
I will stay gluten free because a doctor told me to.
Magic is the word I use for the moment of connection between me and the Mystery/ Source/ the Divine/ choose the word that makes you happy, so this is all about me playing with connecting to the energy and the life force and the relationship and the biology-driven purpose behind eating, and what that means to me.
Science is the prerequisite for this course. As Magic is the focus, for balance I will also be looking at some Science. (And I will not comment on this stage about how close those two things really are, but I will warn you of author bias in this area.)
I am open to the magic of where this takes me.

And once again, the beginning, the basic premise and the working hypothesis for this year is:

“…realise that you are eating consciousness in a fruit costume.” ~ Dr. Barbara De Angelis.

A Year of Magical Eating

June 5, 2017

I should have felt like a million bucks. The eating program that I have been so faithfully following told me that I would begin to feel ‘amazing.’ And a week or two ago, I did.

But I have spent the last week in bed with one unrelated symptom after another, until, kidneys aching and mind confused, I sent my husband out for drugs.

Once they kicked in and my thoughts started to make sense again, I realised that I needed to take my own advice: I needed to plug in and tune in and figure out what the heck was going on.

I needed to start thinking magically.

So I asked for help, a sign, an idea, the answers – and what I got was an intervention.

Before I tell you about that, I need to give you some backstory: I have had a case of hives off and on – mostly on – for over a year now. Most nights I get hot and annoyed and up come some hives. Despite already being off gluten (I have Celiac Disease), and eating really well, we couldn’t figure out if it was food related, so I decided to do an elimination diet. In the next 24 hours, three people I knew on FB talked about a popular elimination diet, so I thought I would give it a try. Luckily, as he is the chef in the family, my darling husband said he would do it with me.

I lost weight, I stopped bloating, I felt clearer, stronger, and way more connected. I still had hives and eczema, but everything else was feeling good. The only issue for me was that I was eating bucketloads (not really) of chicken. And a) the chicken here is definitely not organic and b) I had been almost vegetarian before this and ethically I really would like to be, so this was a tricky one.

So back to my intervention:

As I was showering and asking for this help, my husband was meditating in the next room. When I came out he said, “I can’t explain it, but I just had a very clear thought that you need to stop eating that chicken for awhile.” It felt really true for me, so I agreed. (Even if you take away the ethics of how they are raised, the sheer level of junk that is pumped into those poor birds cannot be a good (sometimes twice daily on that program) choice for me as I try to figure out my own health.)

Then I opened my Kindle app to find the book Soul Shifts open to this quote that I used in my one-day retreat: “…realise that you are eating consciousness in a fruit costume.”

Read that again: …you are eating consciousness in a fruit costume. That sentence gives me goosebumps and asks me to open in ways that I can’t even imagine. If I still had a vision board, it would be right in the middle of it.

Then I thought about Martha Beck saying, “The way we do anything is the way we do everything.”

The way we do anything is the way we do everything.

I realised that despite me believing that we are all divine and that we are all connected, despite talking about how everything – even food – is magic, and despite me being called to see the light and the soul in everything, I had given my power away.

Food – and more specifically, what I eat – is still a place where I ignore the magic, I ignore the truth, I let myself be led by fads and cravings and doctors and Instagram posts.

Food is the part of my life that speaks to me the loudest when I am not in alignment with my best self, so of course it is the part that is easiest to ignore.

And that is not what I want.

I choose to believe in Magic. I choose to see what happens when I allow everything to be Magical. And I choose to open to what I eat being consciousness in a fruit costume.

So for a year – because I need a deadline – I am going to try an experiment: I am going to treat food as the magical teacher that it is. I’m going to let myself trust it, and learn about my relationship to it. I’m going to listen to it, understand it, play with it, talk to it, and maybe even go all quantum physics on it. And I’m not going to BE anything – no pescatarian/ vegetarian/ vegan/ carnivore/ fruitarian/ only-eating-things-that-fell-off-a-tree-arian for me. I’m opening to understand – really understand – the Magic. And we’ll see where that goes.

Food is magic at its purest. So I know it is going to be my greatest teacher.

Costa Rica, Finding the Magic, I AM

Magic Happened.

May 10, 2017

Today I am going to tell you a story about Magic.

Several years ago – and I can’t remember exactly how many, but it’s more than 5 – I was part of a wonderful coaching circle led by my friend Jamie Ridler. Jamie IS Magic, and the circle she led was all about us moving our creative dreams (and lives) forward.

During one of the calls, Jamie had us visualise our future self. Now, I am more auditory than visual, so I have found visualising a challenge in the past, but Jamie always manages to get me to ‘see’ something.

I saw myself in a house. It was mostly white, open plan and all on one level. It was quite modern looking, which is weird because I always pictured myself in something else. There was a large deck around it and a walkway to it, kind of like a dock. I have always wanted a dock, so I intervened and put it onto a lake – because nothing else made sense to me.
The me that I saw in the house was wearing light clothes – I was even in a skirt. (Me?) I felt comfortable. Peaceful. Soft. Grounded. I knew who I was and what I was doing. My days were filled with love and creativity. I was connected to something more. Most of all, I felt a sense of freedom. I had stopped searching for something.

When Jamie gave us time to journal after the meditation, I sketched the house and then, over time, forgot about it.

Two years ago when we started picturing our house, we were going to build a wooden bali-inspired house, but in the living here and the understanding Costa Rica (especially that bugs LOVE to eat wood), we have changed our plans. Now the house we are building is an open-plan, one level, very white, kind-of square, modern house. With a huge deck that you have to walk across to get to the door.
(I’m sure YOU can see the connection, but I didn’t.)
Fast forward to last week. I was sitting on the couch with my husband and we were having a conversation about True things. We were quiet for a moment and out of somewhere I got a strange feeling of, ‘oh there you are!’ and felt this weird click.

In that moment I knew that somehow I had caught up to my future self; that we had finally come together and were now the same person. I had forgotten about the meditation, but in the middle of the click I remembered it and saw me and the house and all of it. I felt a strange sense of peace and what I can only describe as yesness.

Holy holy holy.

The most interesting part is that I never – not once – aimed at that image. The house was nothing like I thought I would live in – and I was in a skirt for heaven’s sake! But for the past six or seven years I have been focusing on those feelings: Peace. Soft. Grounded. Knowing who I am. Love. Creativity. Connected to something more. Joy. Gratitude. Belief. Wonder. Transcendence. And Freedom: Magical Freedom.

I didn’t plan it, but somehow, even all of those years ago, I knew. Or someone or something did.

In that moment I could only sit and breathe and wonder, and it has taken me a few days to process it all. I feel different, and all I can feel right now is gratitude. There is so much more to all of this than we can possibly imagine. It’s a Mystery and a dance and a conversation.