Published May, 2024
In a world where the rational mind reigns supreme, hunger all too easily gets uprooted from its home in our body; its impulses find themselves under the purview of the mind’s shifting world of ideas. This makes our relationship with hunger suffer a parade of ambivalence. We either deny hunger’s existence entirely or we are a slave to its disembodied urges that would have us eat without end because we can no longer tell we are full. We come to demonize one of our greatest protectors and servants, based not on its inherent qualities, but on the qualities it takes on when extruded from the self-organizing ecology it grew inside of.
True hunger only seeks its own satisfaction, and when satisfied, it is complete. We can never know this by living in the disconnected demands generated by a mind that has not yet surrendered to Eros and is capable only of trying to fill an unfillable void.
Hunger is our protector; it will keep us alive even against our best efforts. It will even break our rules of propriety to do so. Hunger has a fidelity to life that we can see in both our hunger for material things like food and shelter and in our hunger for meaning, for beauty, and for things that capture us.
Although our hunger protects us, what our hunger hungers for most is a return to its source.It is accessed through the doorway of hunger itself—not from an effort to control our focus or extinguish desire. This will allow a regathering of what has been discarded. Then we are drawn back to the source not by avoidance or rejection but by recollecting.
This proposition can look dangerous because, if our aim is the slightest bit off, we can fall into either deprivation or gluttony. But when we land perfectly inside of hunger, we land perfectly inside of our capacity for reception. This reception is the ability to turn on both the inner ear and the inner heart to draw in the resources specific to the nourishment of this particular consciousness.
The qualities of approval and acceptance are implicit in a healthy practice of reception. We assume an open posture, giving every voice our hunger presents a fair hearing.
As we traverse the stages of hunger, we filter out the yearnings of unmet historical needs, the fears of the present moment, and the demands of the perfectionist mind. We need only say yes, draw in all, and allow our bodies and minds to recalibrate to their original knowing—a knowing from before we introduced manufactured, results-based notions that demand our body look and act in ways that produce an imagined end rather than to simply settle into itself and incarnate.
If we approach our various hungers as something to fix or heal, we can never experience the truth that hunger, when properly fed, positively incentivizes and at its source, instructs us on how to make our bodies and minds a pleasurable place for consciousness to be. Encoded in each hunger, in each moment of appetite or desire, is a message sent from below the level of the rational mind about who and what we are in the depths.
The Rosetta stone for that message is an approving reception because approval breeds trust within a body-mind that we may only now be learning to pledge fidelity to.
