Ok, so I am cliff-diving. Day after tomorrow, I begin training my replacement to take my place at "the best job I ever had". This will end my successful, well-respected career of twenty-something years as a Chef, and will lead me to jump, head first, off into the unknown to pursue my dream of being an astrologer/healer/teacher.
I will write more about my attraction to Astrology later, but for now, what I am thinking about is what I refer to as "The Great Divorce", the end of my relationship with cooking as a career, and the beginning of a new connection with cooking in a more personal sense, as a way I nurture myself.
For the most part, I have had a passionate, trans-formative relationship with cooking. This has taught me a multitude of lessons. During the first half of our time together, I learned how to be powerful and strong, developed my sense of individuality and fluffed my EGO. In the last part of my career, I learned humility, servitude, how let go of the need to be right in order to make myself and others happy. Cooking brought me my husband of 17 years (we met in culinary school), and allowed me to travel all over the place and support myself. It awakened my senses and gave me a deeper appreciation of some of the more exquisite things in life. It connected me on a trans-personal level with all kinds of people and cultures in all kinds of places. I have been able to recreate dishes for people which remind them of lost loved ones or happy memories from the past. For all these things, I am grateful.
In the meantime though, I lost a certain part of my ability to nurture myself in a healthy way. I have given it all away through my career, and I have been disinterested in caring for my own body. I cook a beautiful meal at work, and I come home and eat frozen pizza. I am on my feet all day, but when I am not at work, I have trouble motivating myself to move.
In the restaurant business, I learned to eat fast, whenever I could, usually standing over a trash can in between orders. This frenzied behavior has not changed, even when I am at home (I don't eat standing up, usually I chow down in front of the t.v.). Very rarely do I bother to sit at the table. Very rarely do I actually taste and smell and appreciate my food. If I did, I would probably not want to eat such crap.
Then there is another dark side of our relationship, not specifically with my career, but with food itself, and with the way I have taken care of, or not taken care of my body. And that is about safety for me. I have felt vulnerable in my life. I have had an instinctual fear that if I am too beautiful or too sexy, I will be attacked or taken advantage of. I have used my weight to protect myself. When I first had this realization, the fat around my belly felt just like a foam rubber life preserver. It was weird.
So, part of diving off the cliff for me, is about re-defining my relationship with food, and making it personal for me. I feel safe in my body and on the Earth, and I am comfortable being beautiful. I want to experience everything life has to offer, and not be trapped by fear in my own body.
So here is where I begin. Re-parenting myself at a very basic level. I think I will start with eating at the dinner table, no elbows on the table, napkin in the lap, eat my brussels sprouts (ICK)... baby steps. Mindfulness.
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