I took a series of workshops years ago, and one of their sayings was “Suffering is optional.” They meant it in the sense that experience happens and it’s our layers of mental chatter and interpretation about what’s happening that causes the experience of suffering.
Now, that might sound callous: “Oh, easy for you to say, with all your Western advantages,” but even psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl believed this, and it formed the basis for his logotherapy treatment.
Which brings me to chocolate. No, really, it does!
My commitment in adapting the way I eat is to make this be a positive change, not a battle or an argument. One great way to make that work is to take the opportunity to find out just how good food can be.
For years, food to me was just kibble. Energy. An unavoidable nuisance. Naturally, this was often reflected in the choice of what I cooked and ate. Like I said in a previous post, I may have been a vegetarian, but I now realise I was a pretty clueless one.
It’s been nearly two weeks since I made this change, and I feel great. I’ve been preparing really tasty meals we don’t have to feel an ounce of guilt about, and they even look pretty. I can’t help wondering if there’s something hard-wired between attraction to colour and nutrition. Or maybe I’m just making stuff up.
The only thing I’ve been missing was the little treat the fella and I had with our tea before bed — like a fig roll or a biscuit. Nuts just don’t work at that hour, and I haven’t reached the point in the plan where berries are okay.
Enter chocolate: It turns out that, in its raw form, chocolate is not only not-bad, it’s actually very good for you! So on a break yesterday I made my very own raw chocolates!
The process was a bit daunting, because I’m a cook, not a baker. But it all worked out, and it felt good to have a hand in making it — melting the cocoa butter, mixing in the vanilla (a fine powder that smelled like pipe tobacco), adding a big bag of raw cacao, then pouring in agave syrup (from the same plant used to make tequila, it’s a sweetener that doesn’t have the insulin effects of sugar and sugar substitutes).
…And with the left-over unsweetened mix, I made a chilli-chocolate soup — not one of those “hot chocolate in a bowl” ones, but a savoury soup that was Aztec-licious!
After dinner, we had one square of the chocolate each, and then another with our tea before bed. I’ve never been particularly fond of chocolate, but this was the best I’ve tasted in my life! And no guilt! What’s not to love!?
As they say, suffering is optional.
~
Speaking of eating what nature intended you to eat…
This morning, Craig found a huge bee in the house. A co-worker had coincidentally mentioned to him just recently that when she finds a sluggish bee, she puts a “dod” of honey next to it. So Craig caught the dozy bee in a glass (it made a sound like a phone on vibrate), took it outside, then went back out with a big blob of honey for it.
What do you know? It loved the stuff, and stayed there licking at it for half an hour. We were just afraid that one of our blackbirds or thrushes would pluck it up as a snack. (I looked for it a while later and it was gone, hopefully on its way to a hive somewhere.)
