Today we’re sharing an audio podcast exploring how becoming more conscious of our true nature as God’s spiritual offspring frees us from unhealthy impulses and habits.
To listen, click the play button on the audio player above. For an edited transcript, keep reading:
My background in my growing-up years was in the world of dance. And during those years, I must have done every diet in the book. And each one promised beauty, health, strength. But it never fulfilled the promise.
And that was because, I think, it was always based on the premise that health, strength, self-worth, and beauty live in matter. And they don’t. Often we’ve looked at ourselves in terms of how many pounds, how many inches, how many years, but mortal measurements don’t tell us who we are. Health, self-worth, beauty, strength – these are qualities of God, who is infinite good, and every single one of us has that full spectrum of Godlike qualities, and these qualities of God can be seen as our sense of life as Spirit grows more pure, more beautiful.
Mary Baker Eddy says in her book “Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896,” “The true consciousness is the true health” (p. 298).
And that’s a radical statement. The true health is found in becoming more and more conscious of God with us, of the goodness and the beauty and the glory of God always expressing itself to us and through us.
Now, I’m not talking about this simply as a sort of mental exercise, because it must be a spiritual exercise, a true desire to see what is spiritually true and to give up one’s own habits and tastes and opinions, the things that hold us in a material sense of life.
In the years that I was performing, our director had a very, very strict sense about weight. At the point that I was in college, I was weighing myself five or six times a day. It was almost an addictive sense of checking in constantly to see how I was.
So at one point I called a Christian Science practitioner and said, “I need some help on this.” And I’ll never forget – he said, “I’m going to give you a miracle diet.” And I thought, “Oh boy.” And you know, the miracle diet was one verse and it was Jesus’ words, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me” (John 4:34).
And I thought, “I have no idea what that has to do with my weight. I don’t know how to put that into practice.” But I started to work on this idea of just doing God’s will. What was God’s will? Not what serves me best, but how can I worship God more? How can I honor Life and Truth and Love?
And things began to even out – not just with weight, but with life. My experience became more harmonious, more joyful.
The Bible says, “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you” (I Thessalonians 5:16-18). And this is my sense of what balance is. This is what health is. It’s turning away from self and turning toward God.
When we begin to even get a glimmer of what it means to be God’s entirely spiritual ideas, what it means that we’re not this material being living in a material world – we are God’s image and likeness, and we can only image forth what God is and what God knows, and God is entirely good – that frees us from that fear that there’s something out there that could be harmful to us.
In the proportion that we identify ourselves as God’s image and likeness, we will be rightly motivated about food and everything else.
For an extended discussion on this topic, check out the “When food stopped being the enemy” episode of the Sentinel Watch podcast.
