Are You Living Scared or Sacred? Reframing Your Relationship to Food, Body, & Life

Ever have a word or phrase keep reappearing in your life, several days or weeks in a row?

It certainly has happened to me on more than one occassion…and where as I used to ignore it and not think it was anything special, I now know that there is a deep deep message trying to be birthed and given to me.

This was the case last week when the word “sacred” kept popping up everywhere. It was all over the Flip Your Switch coaching conference I was attending (created by branding expert Christina Morassi). It was showing up again and again in conversations. Then on Sunday, as I was watching Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday where she interviewed Caroline Myss, the word literally hit me over the head as I was reminded of her beautiful piece of work Sacred Contracts, which I bought years and years ago.

Sacred. I let the word soak in, let it touch every part of me.

The next morning, as I was doing my Morning Pages, I went to journal about it and then I made a simple spelling error.

In my haste, I misplaced the letter “c” and suddenly the word “scared” was on my page.

And I had this huge epiphany. How simple was it to switch the two?

How crazy was it that one simple letter, one little switch, could take from a place that is blessed, divine, full of beauty to one that is dark, lonely, and wrapped in fear?

One letter. One switch.

The same is true for our lives.

We have the ability in every situation to live a life that is either sacred or scared. In other words, we can live a life where everything is either cloaked in a sense of awe, newness, and divinity or drowned by our fears, worries, and old stories.

Because I work so much with women and their relationship to their bodies and to food, I couldn’t help but think about how much the two show up in this area.

Many of us have a story with food that is heavily built around fear, around being scared. We’ve dieted, restricted, aimed to tame our appetites because we are so scared of our hunger, of our body’s wisdom. We don’t trust it or don’t even feel we have it to begin with. We fear that if we let down our guard and let our bodies guide us, we would “lose control”…binge on chocolate for days, eat gallons of ice cream, have french fries with every meal. We are scared that if we open that door, we will never be satisfied. We see food as the enemy and our bodies as something we must equally fear. (This is true for those who don’t diet as well and instead tend to binge on low quality foods. It’s the same coin, just a different side.)

That’s the story that gets created when we live scared and when we are scared of food and trusting our bodies.

But if we simply shift from scared to sacred, everything changes.

When we can start to see the absolute sacredness of food and of our bodies, we realize there is nothing to fear. Our eyes start to open up to the abundant gifts that food provides. Food is medicine, nourishment, the very building blocks which create us. It’s love from the Divine and in preparing it, we give that love to ourselves, our families, our friends.

Likewise, our bodies and our bodies’ messages, including hunger, are nothing to fear. The body itself is the vechicle for the soul, the very means by which we get to explore the world, share our gifts, soak in the awesomeness of being ALIVE. All that goes into protecting and celebrating the beautiful gift that is our body is in fact sacred. Movement, eating, sexual connection..these acts and so much more allow us to celebrate the sacred, allow our bodies to thrive and more importantly, to be honored in they way that all things sacred should be.

When it comes to the body’s messages, such as hunger, the need for sleep, the desire for movement, sexual desire, the deep need for human and spirtual connection, these are not messages to fear, push down, or be scared of. Rather, they are sacred callings to honor the Divinity within us.

When we allow ourselves to see through this lens and tune in more deeply to the truth of our own sacredness, we can then relax and know that our Divine nature would not lead us down the path of self-destruction through overeating, undereating, abusing our bodies with brutal, soul-squashing workouts or years of never exercising at all. It would not allow us to fill our sacred bodies with foods that literally smother our very life force and poision us.

No. This is not the way of what I call the Body Sacred.

The Body Sacred can be trusted and must be allowed in. And when we do, Sacred Nourishment comes to us in all forms.

The greater beauty is that this is true not just with food and physcial movement, but in all areas of our lives.

In every moment, we can choose to reframe that which we are scared of into something we see as sacred.

My invitation to you is to embrace every opportunity you have to practice this principle. Very simply, when you find yourself scared, see where you can make subtle but literally life altering shift into the sacred. Food and body is a beautiful gateway to enter into the “scared turned sacred” reframe. Because, as you know if you have been following my work, my favorite life motto is how you do one thing is how you do everything…so how you do food/body is how you essentially do your life.

When you can deeply honor these fears as sacred opportunites and messages in disguise, your world and your body-food relationship will shift in profound ways.

I’d love to hear how this idea has touched you. In the comments below, please share how you will use this “scared turned sacred” reframe into your current relationship with food, your body, and your life.
How can you more fully embrace the truth of the Body Sacred?

And as always, if this post touched you, please share with your community and friends.

Lots of love,