Sacred and Fit
Health and wholeness through science and scriptural teachings
By Cheryl P. Talley
Health and wholeness through science and scriptural teachings
By Cheryl P. Talley
Chapter One: Love
“What is the greatest commandment- That you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and you love your neighbor as your Self.”
What this book is about
This is not a diet book. You don’t need another diet book. You are perfect as you are. Realizing your perfection is a fundamental step in the path that Jesus set forth for health, wholeness and well-being…the knowledge of who you really are…the knowledge of your Highest Self.
Jesus' life and teachings proivded guidance on how to become aware of your highest and truest Self. His teachings speak to the essence of what it is to be a human being…the realization that you are more than a human being. You are a child of God. The path to this realization of your inherent goodness is the path to Self-realization. You may have thought yourself a sinner but by faith, and by inspired revelation you can know yourself as redeemed. You imagined yourself separated from God but by deep insight you can know yourself as intimately connected to Divinity. You (or others around you) might have commuicated negative things about you…and you may have actually come to believe that you are bad, wrong, stupid, ugly, fat or otherwise unworthy. The annihilation of those type of thoughts will come from your new awareness of you True Self your God Self.
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And with the Word everything that has been made was made. Without the Word nothing was made that has been made"
When you know yourself as God has created you then you will have the body that you want and it will be the right reflection of the temple that you are .....which is good and perfect and holy. As you grow in the knowledge of an intrinsic God-presence you will become more and more aware of illusions including all the illusions associated with an “imperfect” body. Awareness is more powerful than any belief about the body. Awareness is more powerful than any appetite or addiction to food. Awareness will do what diets, eating plans and exercise regimens have failed to do. Awareness opens your eyes to the Truth about yourself... that there is nothing wrong with you.
However, becoming Aware does not happen quickly. Awareness of your True Self requires that some familiar but erroneous thoughts, views and opinions that you have about yourself must die and other empowering, loving and truthful thought forms must be cultivated and nurtured to replace them. This process will take time. One sign of growing awareness will be that your thoughts, words and actions come into alignment. You will no longer think one thing and say another; or say one thing and do another. You will think, speak and do things that are consistent with your highest and truest Self. You will learn to trust your Self as you learn to love your Self.
In order to create the permanent change you wish to make in your own thinking and behavior and to see the change reflected in your body then that change must be aligned with Love. This is not a diet book. This is a book about love. This book is about loving who you really are. With love you will be able to align your thoughts about your Self with thoughts of peace. In peace you will do the right thing. In doing the right thing, you will not do violence to your Self or another. When you love your Self like that, free of judgment and criticism, free from the effect of past wounds, free from negative messaging given by parents, partners or any other person, free from comparison and competition; then you will be able to love all others. You will then be free to love God and reflect, from within your own being, the Love of God into the world.[4]
Love for your own Self may sound like an easy thing but it is not because most people confuse their True Self with their bodies and their egos. This confusion is at the root of feeding the desires, following the dictates and obeying the urges of the physical body. This confusion is also at the root of feeding the desires following the dictates and obeying the urges of the ego-mind. These activities become major distractions from knowing the True Self.
You must no longer be confused about the purpose of the body which is simply to house your True Self while on this earth. Your body is the temple. Like other temples the MOST valuable aspect of the structure is not walls and furniture but the sacred acts of prayer and devotion and love that take place within it. You must no longer be confused about your your ego-mind. The ego-mind is supposed to be the servant of your True Self and in that capacity it will enable you to create a life that is peaceful, joyful and bountiful. However, only your True Self can be the boss. You play a unique and essential part in a much larger divine plan. You are special. You are necessary. Identifying yourself as your body or ego distracts you from contributing all of your good to the world.
This is not a diet book. This is a book about living your God-given purpose by first learning to subjugate the dictates of the physical body and ego-mind and place them under the control of your True Self. The way to do this is through love, loving your True Self more than anything else. Your True Self is the person that you actually are. Your True Self is Your Spirit Self. Your True Self is your God Self.
Your True Self can reframe the erroneous conversations that come from other people and negate their harmful effects. Your True Self can identify the oh-so-famiiiar but disempowering self-talk and silence it. Your True Self knows everything about your body and what it needs to be healthy and strong. Your True Self knows exactly what size you should be and how to get there. Your True Self is the truest source of your strength, determination and forbearance. Your True Self will provide patience, compassion and self-discipline. Your True Self will help you limit the urges of the body and ego-mind by placing a ceiling on desires. Your True Self is wise and knows intimately the body that it has come to inhabit and the mind through which it must work. This is not a diet book. This is a book about living your life as your True Self.
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To begin to be led in your health habits by your True Self you will first need to learn to hear the still small inner voice of your True Self. Once you begin to hear the voice and to trust it your journey toward health will begin. However, you you must first know that you are up against. Before now you have been inundated with years of negative communication. These communications are still with you and have not only become entrenched in your belief systems they have also become a part of your body. The messages exert powerful influences from beneath your conscious awareness. In order to win the battle, you must also develop strategies that alter the inner subconscious landscape and the cellular and molecular body memory. The primary strategy is love.
The chemicals of Love
One result of Loving your True Self will be to reprogram your body and ego-mind starting at the molecular level and at the level of the subconscious. The molecular level of your physical body can be reached by your subconscious mind. This is why placebo pills can work as effectively as some medication. Belief can reach the same molecular level as medications and affect healing. Moreover, emotions wield powerful effects on the body. Many people are familiar with how stress can lead to illness but few now the opposite that love can lead to wellness.
The idea of Love as a chemical has broad implications because it shows just how far- reaching Love is. Love is much more than a feeling. In psychology, love may be an emotion or a state of mind but in biology Love is a brain function, a response to a stimulus, a chemical reaction caused by substances that are produced in bone marrow. The chemicals are composed of ion, electrons, protons so at the molecular level Love is an electrical force of vibration; oscillating chemical molecules pulsing through an intricate network of organic fibers. This communication network is made up of tiny cells and tinier spaces and it feeds every organ, tissue and system in the body. In this way, love influences every mood, feeling and behavior. When you love your entire being loves.
This is not my idea but comes from the pioneering work of Candace Pert, a research neuropharmacologist. Dr. Pert has published extensively on the topic of the molecular basis of emotion ever since her discovery of the mechanism of action used by a particular class of chemicals called neuropeptides. Neuropeptides are released into the bloodstream and into the fluid that surrounds the brain. They are known as ligands because once in the bloodstream or cerebral spinal fluid, they latch on to cells and cause them to change. The word “ligand” means “to bind.” In her book “Molecules of Emotion,” Dr. Pert explains that emotion molecules form the basis of feelings like bliss, desire and love.
Ligands are not released randomly. Rather their presence in the bloodstream or in the cerebral spinal fluid is the result of signals from the cellular environment or the organism’s outer environment. For instance, when a frightening or threatening stimulus, such as a snake is perceived by the senses this leads the individual to perceive a threat of bodily harm and almost instantaneously there is a release of a particular type of ligand (catecholamines) that helps the organism to either fight the snake or escape. Over an extended period of time, the presence of these fear-related chemicals in the body can result in changes in the internal environment and have debilitating effects at the cellular level. It is important to note that the “perception” of the frightening snake, which can be generated by the mind, is what causes the fear-related chemicals to be released. There does not need to be an actual snake to generate a fear response. A memory of an encounter with a snake or even an imagined snake can cause the same physiological response in some people. When a frightening stimulus is generated by the mind on regular basis, this is called “stress.”
Just like fear, according to Dr. Pert’s and other researchers, love also has a chemical signature. When you have the feelings of seeing your sweetheart after a long absence, being with your closest friends or holding your newborn baby, you entire body is awash in neuropeptide-type ligands. Like catecholamines, neuropeptides are made up of tiny tangled necklaces of protein that are composed of beads called amino acids. Catecholamines and peptides differ in the stimulus that causes their release and also in the cellular structures in which they are received. The two main players associated with this complex dance are the ligand and the receptor molecule. Just as an egg carton receives oval-shaped eggs, receptors receive a portion of the ligand because of the molecule’s specific shape. A small portion of the tangled necklace fits into the receptor like a key in a lock..
Particular neuropeptides, such as oxytocin actually peak in the mother’s blood after her baby is born and are released every time the mother breast feeds (or even thinks about breast feeding). The presence of this ligand helps stimulate milk production and also contracts the stretched uterus. The bound ligand helps elicits feelings of love and connectedness between mother and baby. In order to have this global effect, oxytocin must be received by cells all over the mother’s body. Thus, the presence of the baby influences brain chemicals; the brain’s chemical environment influences the mother’s behavior; the mother’s behavior influences the chemical environment of her brain. The brain and body work together to create a huge interacting system of mother/baby love.
According to Dr. Pert, there are over 200 neuropeptides that have been mapped in the brain and body. These chemicals have been associated with such feelings as love, bliss, relaxation and anger and also hunger and satiety (feeling full). Researchers who study digestion have long known that chemicals mediate the brain signals associated with hunger and satiety. Furthermore, these signals are sometimes altered in people who have a history of deprivation. Dieting is self-induced deprivation and causes changes to important physiological systems, including the bodily cues of hunger and fullness. This change in physiology may be one reason that it is possible for a chronic dieter to not ever actually feel hunger yet have the desire to eat.
Changing health habits like healthier eating and regular exercise is a daunting challenge. Such a change requires alterations all the way down to the cellular level. The chemical, molecular and vibrational networks must also receive the message. This does not happen easily or quickly in most people. So while a heart-felt intention to embark on a healthy life style is an important thing to do, initially a desire to change is not enough. What must also change are the communication networks that have been set in place by previous habitual thoughts/behavior patterns over years, sometimes decades. According to Dr. Pert, the past behavioral patterns consists of communication networks made up of the accumulated chemical signatures of past emotions. These emotion-related cellular pathways act like the memory of the body-mind.
The body-mind or what Dr. Pert also calls the Body-Wide Psychosomatic Network refers to the physiologic structures that contribute to body memory of psychological states. Psychosomatic does not mean you think you are sick when you are really not. Dr. Pert defines psychosomatic as your entire body participating in the behaviors of thinking and feeling. Pert defines the body as the real subconscious mind since just like immune cells “remember” the polio vaccination you had as a child, your body also “remembers” when you felt love and bliss and also when you felt fear or shame. The structures of these “memories” exist as receptors that coat the membrane of trillions of cells. Cells are “trained” by experience to make receptors more receptive based on past inputs or to release certain ligands more readily. This same type of dynamic interplay between ligand and cell receptor also forms the basis of how memories are stored in the brain. In fact, most of the very same ligands and receptors that are in the brain are also located in the rest of the body. Since there are an estimated 700 trillion cells in the body and over 100 billion nerve cells in the brain, the communication network is amazingly complex. A highly complex and adaptable system is what would be needed in order to accurately record and covey the vast amounts ofinformation, constantly coursing through the body/mind.
In her latest book “Everything you need to know to feel Go(o)d” Pert writes more about molecules of emotion and recent neuropharmacological findings that reveal molecules of information. The body is constantly translating our sensory experience into our biology. In the book, Pert examines the myriad of ways that emotions and behaviors create direct physiological consequences. In fact, many of the chronic diseases that are so common in modern America are a result, according to Pert, of a “toxic burden” carried in our bodies. This toxic burden is partly caused by unresolved trauma or daily stress. For most of us dealing with issues of weight, there is very likely to be issues of unresolved trauma and daily stress. Therefore, a permanent behavior change can’t occur without dealing with all of the reasons for over eating or unhealthy habits, including the deep cellular/molecular ties in the body/mind.
Of course, you must deal with the basic physical drive to eat which is to obtain nourishment but that is not the only reason that eating makes you feel good. The nursing baby receives nourishment at the breast but also feels her mother’s skin can look into her mother’s loving eyes, can smell her mother’s comforting smell and hear her mother’s soft reassuring voice all while guzzling until she is contentedly full of sweet warm milk. It is no wonder then that as an adult, so many other “needs” get met by eating food. We eat when we are nervous or lonely or bored. We eat because we “deserve it.” We eat because eating provides temporary relief…like a drug. In fact, there are studies that reveal the drug-like character of some foods. Foods like sugar utilize similar chemical pathways to those used by cocaine. Furthermore, there is evidence that like a predisposition to alcoholism some people may have a genetic predisposition to over-eat.
Yet, the system is malleable. All of the networks associated with certain feelings, moods or drives can be changed and when the network is altered, the behavior will be altered as well.
The receptor onto which a ligand will bind has been likened to a lock but it is not static, waiting for the key to come. The receptor moves or conforms itself into different shapes or configurations. This constant movement creates a particular vibration or pulsation that literally attracts the right ligand molecule to it. Moreover, the number of active receptors change in response to the number of ligands that have bound to them in the past, making some receptors more “sensitive” than others. As an emotion is experienced, the chemical signature is left at the level of ligands and receptors. The more times that a particular emotion is experienced the more prepared the body/mind becomes to experience that emotion. Entire networks of cells associated with that emotion become primed and the emotion becomes easily triggered and harder to disrupt..harder but not impossible. This adaptability is known as “synaptic plasticity.”
Synaptic plasticity is what will allow for you to slowly, systematically and permanently lose weight. Armed with a better understanding of what you are up against, you will no longer attempt to change deep-set cellular firing patterns with a new gym membership. You will go to the source and change the body/mind’s memory, heal the patterns of trauma and stress that may still be welding influence and create love and bliss around the whole idea of eating and health. You will in essence, create actions and behaviors around knowing your Self as a spiritual being instead of merely a body-bound human. You will be completely free and released from compulsions, addictions and unhealthy habits around food. This kind of deep change is what occurs on a spiritual pilgrimage. However, first, like with any other type of journey, there must be a commitment to begin.
Love as Intention
Because there is more to eating than the outward behavior even a strong intention to lose weight is not enough. The intention must be sufficient to affect the well-practiced and underlying vibrational pathways of the body-mind. People who are successful in loosing weight temporarily can make themselves think and behave differently for the short term. However, the statistics say that only a very few people are able to sustain the new patterns of belief and action over time in order to keep the weight off permanently. In fact, researchers who study dieting consider the 5 year mark the indicator of a successful diet. Using that criteria, the vast majority of diets, fail. Spiritual practices are a means of changing the internal messages permanently. One reason for this is because a spiritual practice brings with it the expectation of permanence. While you may plan to go “off “ your diet, one usually doesn’t plan to go off their spiritual path. Spiritual aspirants seek to live from their Truest Selves and therefore they are in it for the long term.
Living as your True Self not only requires long-term commitment, but an understanding that it this is a deep internal search. Ancient religions use ritual and symbolism to help access the deep places within the body/ mind that are inaccessible to language. Spiritual seekers from ancient times apparently knew something about the body/mind long before we knew about the vibratory attraction of neuropeptide receptors and cellular resonance. Ancient wisdom teaches that we should first quiet the mind and then use the Holy Scriptures to reprogram vibration, molecules, cells, organs, systems all the way to thought-forms, moods, motivations and behaviors. It is the deep, slow and steady re-programming that causes the old to fade away and for the new to come.
Flashback
I have learned from my own experience, that real behavior change seldom comes quickly or easily. I became a born-again Christian when I was sixteen after having grown up in the A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) Zion church. The decision was based primarily on the realization that I was finding it difficult to live out the teachings of the Bible. I found that I would have the upmost of good intention while listening to the church service on Sunday but usually before Monday came the temptations of the flesh were back. I had an anger problem. My anger issue was very resistant to change. It did not seem to be moved my tears of repentance It would only lay low and come back stronger the next time. I recall several attempts at “leaving it at the alter.” I “accepted Christ” and when that didn’t work, I did it again and again. By the time I was 30, I had joined 18 different churches from various Christian denominations ranging from Apostolic Pentacostal to Baptist. I confessed my sin and had hands laid on me. I was baptized in water. My head was dotted with oil. I prayed in tongues. I memorized verses on not being angry but my tears and my pleas seemingly went unanswered. I still got angry and no matter how strong the intention was, under the right conditions, a powerful fury would engulf me and carry me away before I even realized what had happened. So, while I appeared to be a stellar church member, at home I screamed at my children and would punish my husband’s perceived infractions with cold stone silence that could last for days at a time.
My anger had a long history. I had learned as a young child that outward expressions of anger would bring repercussions from the adult world and so I learned to be angry and not speak. I could slam things, or break things or give glaring looks or ignore you completely. I could go silent and seething for days on end and I practiced this skill with great consistency. When I left home and went to college, the anger that had gone largely unspoken and pointed toward others turned inward on to me. I constantly compared, criticized and condemned myself. When a family crisis and health issues caused me to drop out of school, I experienced serious bouts of depression and engineered a wanted “unwanted” pregnancy to save myself. It didn’t. Neither did marriage, a beautiful home, three college degrees or money in the bank. None of these things could save me from me. At one point during graduate school, I felt like my life was spiraling out of control. It was during this period that I finally became open to the idea of an inward search for God. The inward search began when I finally gave up. I surrendered. I admitted that I was powerless to change myself. Instead of going hither and there searching for another church, book, workshp or conference, I stopped and became still.
During this process of surrendering I made a commitment to engage myself wholeheartedly to the inner work. I had read enough to know that other people had found peace and contentment and so I determined that I could, too. I was motivated to engage this inner work due to desperation. I had to admit to myself that I appeared to be further along the spiritual path than I actually was. I had to recognize that that all of my previous methods had not work to the extent that I needed.
That was 30 years ago and the lessons learned from that early seeking are still bearing fruit. My life now revolves around my spiritual practice. I still have bumps in the road but my family will agree that there has been a great change since enrolling in my own custom-designed Self School. I have learned that this Self School has no graduation date. Knowledge of your true Self, simply leads to deeper and deeper levels of understanding and more and more unfolding. If there is a destination, it is gaining the capacity for greater and greater love. You grow in the ability to love yourself to love other people and therefore to love God.
Honestly, I have found this Self School to be the most demanding and the most rewarding of any type of training that I have ever encountered. It really does require a motivation as powerful as love to keep at it, month after month, year after year. Moreover, this curriculum is not for the timid. Like any great endeavor Self School begins with a clear intention but an intention that reflects the agreement between mind, heart and body. The declaration from your made-up-mind is only the beginning. The declaration must be followed by an entire series of moment-by-moment decisions motivated by heart-felt determination to do the right thing. Over time the new behaviors become habits of the body. These habits reflect a lasting commitment to give your body what it needs. You not only know how to eat right and exercise, you willingly engage in the behaviors associated with the knowing. There is cohesion and integration because your spirit, mind and body (Head-Heart-Hands) are all in agreement.
Only you will know when the time is right to enroll in your own Self School. It will be after you have gotten tired of being out of agreement- your spirit saying one thing and your body doing another. Once you reach the state of “enough is enough;” “Something has GOT to change;” “ I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired;” I’m not going to be like this any more.” Once you have reached that state where a change MUST happen… then it is your time to begin.
A suggested declaration for when you are ready.
I am now ready to surrender to God my relationship with food.
I understand the necessity of developing self-discipline around food and exercise and realize that this requires a God-focused mind.
My mind is not completely God-focused if I currently exhibit some habitual patterns of thinking and behavior around food and exercise that are not health-giving or peace-promoting.
I am ready to learn how to quiet and re-focus my mind.
I am ready to reprogram my body-mind and permanently alter old patterns of thinking and behaving.
I am now ready for the next step of my spiritual unfoldment as I grow more in love with my Self.
[4] 1 John 4 20-21 For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21 And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.
