To truly be conscious about what we eat is not just about what is going in our mouths, but what is going on in our hearts.

There are many great practical tips and guidelines out there for transitioning from a meat eating or even vegetarian diet to a completely plant-based diet and lifestyle. Lots of wonderful tips for how to give up and find substitutions for your favorite meats and dairy products. I don’t want to just share tips about what vegan foods to eat or great recipes, I want to offer an exploration into an area that I feel is most at root of our food choices but is the one that is least talked about: the emotionally conscious and subconscious reasons that we eat the food that we do.

I introduce this topic in this post about choosing a vegan diet being what I feel is the most emotionally and spiritually conscious choice. I have been working with parts or subpersonalities of myself and with others for over 10 years and I’ve been serving others in various capacities for over 15 years, including a five year career as a certified medical assistant in which I gave dietary advice to cancer patients. Once I began getting to know my own parts, I realized that their relationship to food was deep rooted and often not even conscious to me, until it was.  My inner magical child part called Aurora was the one who was leading the cry and desire to not eat animals anymore.  As a kid, I was not a big meat eater and I remember sitting for hours at the table with ice cold pieces of fish or steak in front of me because I just couldn’t find a desire to eat them and my parents wouldn’t let me leave the table until I did. This is a common practice for parents to do this and one that I feel is blatant emotional abuse, but that’s for another article perhaps.

When I began to connect with my inner child and through the years developed a relationship with her, it became impossible to ignore that I would be actually harming this part of me to eat and prepare meat. I remember having a very strong visceral and emotional reaction inside of me the first time I heard the sound of pigs screaming when they were being slaughtered (sounds just like humans! says Aurora.) One of the journaling questions that we have people engaging in SoulFullHeart ask a part of themselves is, “What is your favorite food and why?” It is an interesting exploration into your emotional consciousness to feel the answer to this question.

The reason for a favorite food usually has to do with a subconscious emotional need or association of comfort related to family or childhood. We receive a huge template related to food choices from our birth families. We are literally ‘at their mercy’ every day and night for most of our childhoods in terms of what we will be fed and what we eat. Most of us have little choice about what we are going to eat or not eat (cold fish swallowed down by warming milk, feeding food to the dog under the table…sound familiar?), so we learn to associate love and emotional needs with certain foods. It amazes me how many times I have witnessed, especially men, share a process around how they felt their mothers loved them through the foods that she would prepare for them. This may have been the only source of affection and love they received from their mothers, so it leaves a very deep emotional impression. My husband Wayne has felt this very deeply in parts of himself, including his inner child. So, if your mother fed you meat and that equaled love and attention and emotional needs getting met to part of you, wouldn’t it make sense that it would be really difficult for parts of you to give it up? Or milk and cookies after school? Or a big turkey on thanksgiving?

This is where emotionally conscious negotiation with parts of yourself comes in. Through journaling with your parts and sharing this with a SoulFullHeart facilitator, we feel the relationship that parts of you have with certain foods, what you experienced in your childhood around food, and support you to become more emotionally conscious about what you are eating connected to your feelings. We also offer body health and nutrition sessions which aren’t just focused on your physical body but also connected to your emotional process and your parts. We have seen this offer much deeper and permanent results for people because its working at the level of physical consciousness and emotional consciousness.

People commonly talk about ‘comfort eating’ or how they are ‘emotional eaters.’ I am offering that we are all emotional eaters to the degree that it is predominately subconscious to us. This is why diet programs so often don’t work for people. This is why facts and data about animal violence in raising meat, the environmental impact, and the health benefits still don’t get people to change what they are eating to a vegan diet. This is why most of the diseases that people suffer from can be traced back to diet. One of the very few things that we can completely and totally control in our worlds is what we eat or don’t eat. And parts of us like to make big (subconsciouslly motivated) statements with that control. Until we can consciously feel what our relationship truly is to the foods we eat, we are literally in the dark about why we eat what we do and how to change it. Unless another part of us comes in and uses will power or self righteousness or even self image or peer pressure to change our food choices, but none of these motivations is actually a self loving and emotionally healthy reality. To truly be conscious about what we eat is not just about what is going in our mouths, but what is going on in our hearts.

Jillian Vriend is co-creator of SoulFullHeart, parts work facilitator, writer of books and on this blog, and sacred humanity-Divine Feminine teacher. She has been serving others in various capacities for over ten years. Visit soulfullheart.com for more information about the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life.