Warm Bread- A self-reflection on gluten and friendship.
After a long zoom call a colleague from around the world said: “If we lived closer, I’d invite you over to share warm bread.”
We took a moment and in our hearts and minds we smelled the steaming hot bread right from the oven.
Suddenly some protest arose up and out of my throat and declared “I don’t eat bread”
I felt my heart deflate.
There was a soft hurt inside. A moment of internal chaos. The bread was her offering, her joy and I could not partake. Some part of me could not receive it.
So what was this protective puff of resistance? It felt like a bruise. For a split second the breath stopped inward while the outside kept talking. Inside a silent grief witnessed my inability to accept gentleness and intimacy wrapped in the word “bread.”
I am very food sensitive. In the US, there are legalized layers of glyphosate on the grains and other chemicals in our food source that inflame my digestion and weaken my biological field. The protection response arose even from an offer of grace. I just had to sit with that. It was an uncomfortable witnessing of the instinctive protective layers on my heart.
I’ve lived and survived for decades. The protective layers are habitual flash responses arising in my field of self defense. The instincts are nature’s process to protect us. Becasue of humanity’s evolved complex relationship to our mother nature, bread, which is basic sustenance can now be toxic. But the offering, the thought is not toxic and yet my instincts leapt to a kind of virtual or false self-care. The pain body is a layered field of protection. Once again, self noticing, I am aware of so many micro-trauma habits that are wanting to be digested, to be outgrown. Real self-care is spacious and deep breathing, consistent but not habitual. Real self care arises in silent moments of appreciation without having to fill in the silence. Real self care is not rushed.
Witnessing and validation, without judgement or shame is the true teaching, the true trauma healing in the moment of occurrence. And we have to be willing to feel the pain body without rushing to reject it. It is definitely not comfortable. It is creative and present, not just a technique waiting to be applied. There is no technique. There is life, there is breath. There‘s validation from one part of my self to another. I am in pain. And yet I can still care.
All of this took place in time within a split second. Because of her self-care, her mindful practice, her generosity and spacious beingness, a world opened in that split second. I offered her roasted walnuts and coffee instead. She graciously accepted.
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