At some point in my life my relationship with food changed radically. Somewhere along the line, I became convinced that I had too many toxins in me and began a series of radical detoxes that all but one were based on drastic elimination of food groups and monophagy. All were also based on some old healing method that had obvious results or a newer version of an old therapy principle as it had been translated into our modern lifestyle.
They were all wonderful in their own right. They provided me with excellent clarity, health, loss of excess weight, a strong body and of course detoxification. I am not sure exactly what I detoxed from, perhaps I was eventually detoxed in my mind as I felt that all those bloody sacrifices were paying off, that in this rigorous and certainly extreme way I was taking care of myself and becoming better as both an organism and as a person in general.
However, none of these detox treatments actually helped me to structure long-term dietary habits capable of giving me the much-needed balance between food and daily life. Quite the opposite. To a very great extent they then led me into binges and excesses of food and habits. Combined with the fact that I started cooking regularly at a relatively old age, I hurt my body and upset the biorhythms of many of my internal organs, especially my digestive system, most notably my stomach and intestines.
There is an exaggeration to it all and then a remission accompanied by a deep humility; I believed in all the books I red, all the alternative specialists I visited, I invested in the idea that my problem was my diet. I went to the extremes of my biology every time, and now it just seems like a pointless excess that exhausted my body and psyche.
After the exaggeration of the effort came an inner depression that hid within it a peculiar connection with the futility of life, but not with bemoaning but with understanding and awe; I am but a small creature, on a small planet, in the vastness of the Universe. It does not matter so much for the course of Humanity whether I eat right or wrong. And it does not matter so much that I adhere to all these screaming healing protocols to perfection. What matters is simply that I hold on to life and live, for as long as I am allowed to.
This movement between the arrogance of excess and the humility of realization, like a pendulum swing, is what I see in all other aspects of life. My life to a large extent is a constant pendulum movement swinging from arrogance to humility. Many times I listen to myself vigorously asserting that I possess a piece of Truth of the kind that evolves Humanity a step further, while on the other hand I experience being consumed by a sense of insignificance, of being so small and ordinary that does not even worth any mention or any space or time to express what lives inside me.
This movement of the pendulum has never brought joy and balance to my life and how it could since its nature is to swing perpetually and with strong oscillation. The stronger the oscillation the greater the distance between arrogance and humility and the more likely the danger of inner derailment.
I find it very difficult to co-exist with very strong contrasts and separations within myself for very long periods of time. I feel such a dynamic eating away at my insides, bulimically sucking up vital energy that I need to live, to maintain my inner homeostasis. So how can I be healthy when inside I am moving like a pendulum? My diet is not to blame nor is it the solution. It is the movement that is tearing me apart.
The solution will never come from this self-referential movement of self-eliminating my energy, my potential. I need to stop, I need the stillness of non-movement. I stop the back and forth and just stand in the center of this ellipsoidal curve from one to the other. I stand, still, silent, stolid. I stay like this for a while, long enough to realize that I am no longer going back and forth. I stand here and steal glances at my arrogance and my humility. Though they are both in me, I do not identify with either of them. I am not that thing. I feel like I belong somewhere else, and although these two actions offered the framework of action that I have identified as me to date, I am not that.
Life always has movement in it; I know instinctively now that I cannot stay in stillness and inactivity for long. Soon I will have to start another movement. As I do not want to get involved again with two extreme ends interfering with me without even belonging to them or being owned by me, I look up from the middle position of silence I am in. As if a tractive force is pulling me, as if the tips of my toes are briefly lifted above the ground and hovering, as if I am being lifted and start again from another level.
My new path is not a straight upward lift to wherever it takes us; the new path begins to stagger, one right, one left, and always a little upward. I am struggling to master this new energy in my life. I navigate it and it too leads me better, with more harmony. As with nutrition, I now know empirically how to add what nourishes and sustains me and remove toxic substances and habits, so now I harmonize this movement with who I am. There are hundreds of methods, but only I can figure out for myself which one works for me for the life purpose I have chosen.
The new movement that breaks the omnipotence of the pendulum starts from my center. It is spiral and as much as I can, I make the spirals harmonious, ethereal, ascending, evolutionary. It takes a lot of energy to go this way too, since to ascend a few degrees at a time I need in advance to defeat the gravity of nature and the gravity of all my previous movements which were habitual movements of a powerful pendulum.
I am not aware of exactly where this movement is leading me, just as I was not aware before that I was simply performing the movement of the pendulum. Instinctively I know that this movement is at least not self-referential, not exhausted in a back and forth movement that serves nothing but the movement of the pendulum. I was in a movement of mere survival in which the only thing that gave me identity, presence and existence was a swing, which in fact I had to keep rocking, to maintain it in every way possible so that it would not stop.
If this movement within you is about to end, to end its self-referential cycle, perhaps you should not be afraid. Perhaps you, too, may be approaching the point of inaction and ataraxia, the point where the movement stops. Think about how long it is healthy for you to hold this transition phase and then think about how you will start again and what movement you will take on for your life.
What comes for you after the pendulum swing and what fundamental movement opens up for you?