Spiritual development, life forces in foods and will forces

Posted by Christy Korrow

My favorite breakfast lately has been a blueberry smoothie:

1 cup blueberries
High in antioxidants

1 cup brazil nut milk (we make our own)

1 TBS. hemp seeds (we buy Nutiva through our co-op)
Hemp seeds are high in omega three fatty acids and protein

1 TBS. raw cocoa powder (from Love Street Living Foods)
Raw cocoa contains all kind of antioxidants , read Naked Chocolate by David Wolfe and Shazzi to learn all about the health benefits of raw cocoa

2 tsp. maple syrup

For supper lately, I will have a Giant cucumber salad, since we grow our own cucumbers, I leave the skin on, I go pick parsley (lots of trace minerals), basil and sometimes rosemary, chop lots of garlic and onion, and a couple of tomatoes. Drizzled with umboshi plum vinegar, olive oil and some salt and pepper, I will live on this for the rest of the summer. I can eat as much of this as I want, and be very full and satisfied.

I am the kind of person who can eat the same things over and over again, everyday for days, sometimes weeks at a time. So each morning, for the last several weeks, I’ve made the same smoothie. And each afternoon and evening for the last month, I’ve eaten the cucumber salad. (Disclaimer: I’ve eaten out a few times, and splurged on ice cream and other goodies). An extreme form of repeatedly eating the same food or foods is called mono-dieting, and has been used as a medicinal treatment for centuries, although controversial, there is documentation of results. (Read The Detox Mono Diet to learn more.)

Author and nutritional counselor Natalia Rose describes a breakfast/lunch of a nutrient-dense smoothie as modified fasting. As a routine way to maintain optimum health, it can be followed further in the day by what she calls a diet dominate in “Quick Exit Foods,” those that don’t bog down the body, or the mind. I eat what I eat because it feels good. I can gage my body’s reaction to a food when I notice things like: Do I have energy spikes and crashes? Do I feel sluggish? Am I craving sweets and breads? Or, Do I have sustained energy throughout the day? Do I feel light, and clear headed? What kinds of ideas am I having, are they original, interesting, and do I have easy access to my own creativity?

And, here is, to me, the most important question of all: Am I able to keep my thoughts aligned with my highest spiritual self, or am I quick to resort to annoyance, impatience, judgment, criticism, anxiety? This is what I find so interesting—to compare what I eat, with how I feel, physically and spiritually. Rudolf Steiner said to his colleague that our inability to maintain spiritual thoughts was a question of nutrition, and that foods no longer contain the nutrients and life forces required to support the will forces needed for spiritual development (Agriculture).

He suggested that eating foods with high levels of life-force energy activates and strengthens the will forces we need to develop the new habits of thought that he describes in so many of his lectures, so that we can actively and consciously move forward on our path of spirituality. For example, when a thought surfaces that doesn’t feel so good, there is that golden moment when we can notice this, and then have the will to shift to a new thought. Whether it be to look out at nature, to turn toward our mantra, to center ourselves through breath, or to shift from, for example, a critical or stressful thought, to a solution-oriented thought or one of reverence or appreciation—in that moment, it takes a great deal of discipline and effort to make the subtle shift. But with repeated practice we ultimately aquire new thought habits and we affect reality through consciousness, actively co-creating as we move through life.

By drinking nutrient dense smoothies each day, and eating nutrient rich meals, I am flooding my body with nutrients, not to mention continually detoxifying my cells, which, I believe correlates with detoxifying my thoughts also. Thus, eating light raw foods supports my mediative life.

Rudolf Steiner described in his lectures on nutrition (Nutrition and Stimulants) that a vegetarian diet supports spiritual development, and that he himself was a vegetarian for this reason. He went on to specifically describe how a raw, plant-based diet activates formerly latent forces which can be used specifically for development of our higher self (more than that, it is important that they be used, otherwise we might become egotistical). He also tempered the information he gave on nutrition with a cautionary instruction not to become fanatical about diet, and also that there was not one singular set of dietary instructions that could be recommended for everyone. I am not a vegetarian, but simply do what I feel is best for my body most of the time.

Eating Meat or Not

I do believe we will eventually evolve out of the need to eat meat, I was once told by Hugh Courtney, who runs the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics that “biodynamic farmers will be the last people to stop eating meat,” because their lives are so intertwined with the cow. But, our soils are now so depleted of both nutrients and life forces that it is utterly impossible to rebuild them without animal manures, therefore it seems natural that a sector of our population will continue to eat meat, making an immediate conversion to widespread vegetarianism unlikely. (Building soil through only cover-cropping would take 15 -20 years).

Ostensibly, as people evolve, we will eat less and less meat, and more of that meat will be raised on small scale farms, where animals and vegetable crops are once again integrated, so that there are only enough animals raised needed to produce compost to raise the vegetables on that farm. In time, more and more people will decrease their meat consumption, and perhaps eat only eggs and raw milk, still maintaining a domestic animal population.

My own experience is that when we were farming full time for over 15 years, I expended a lot of energy, and ate a lot more meat. Now that I am in publishing full-time, I notice my body does not require as much meat, and I am eating a much lighter, raw food based diet. So, there are not only the environmental impacts to keep in mind, but we can also ask how what we eat affects our consciousness, and does it support what are we trying to create in the world? And also, in the realm of consciousness studies, there is much judgment towards our food choices, judgment against ourselves and others. Rudolf Steiner emphasized that is was important not to become fanatical when it came to diet. He said that he was a vegetarian, that indeed he needed to be in order to do his spiritual research, but was once reputed to order a steak in a restaurant to make this point. He gave many teachings on the results of dietary choices, but was clear that what one eats is an individual choice, depending on where that person was in their own evolution, and he said he could not prescribe a “diet” that is right for everyone. —Christy Korrow

The Bees

Interview with Biodynamic Beekeeper

This was an interview I did this spring for LILIPOH.

Honoring the Bien; For the Love of Honeybees

Author: Interview with Michael Thiele
Issue: Summer 2008: Honeybees as wise messengers - Issue #52, Vol. 13

Michael Thiele grew up on a farm in a tiny village in central Germany. He has been deeply influenced by the German biodynamic beekeeping movement and now teaches classes on natural and holistic beekeeping in the United States. He worked for seven years as the beekeeper at Green Gulch Farm, a Zen center just north of San Francisco. He takes care of the hives at The Melissa Garden, a honeybee sanctuary––including several “alternative” hives. Melissa Garden utilizes biodynamic methods and will seek Demeter certification. By extension, their beekeeper, Michael Thiele, is practicing biodynamic beekeeping methods according to the standards put forth by the international Demeter Association. Michael was interviewed over the phone by LILIPOH editor, Christy Korrow.

LILIPOH: Please introduce us to the concept of the bien. What does it mean, and how is it related to beekeeping?

M. Thiele: It’s interesting that, let’s say, maybe 150 years ago, before the introduction of modern beekeeping, beekeeping was not something special and not performed for any agro-industrial production. The crops, so-called crops, were not really the focus of beekeeping. It was just part of agriculture. Part of regular life. Culturally, the bees have always been important to humans. But it was not about the crop itself.

Then, at a very interesting time, when modern beekeeping emerged, meaning the Langstroth hives (square boxes), some people started raising their voice and said “wait a moment.” The tendency of the modern human mind is to approach the world through reduction and to look only at certain aspects of the bee hive. Due to this, the notion of the one-being was created ( Einwesen, in German) also called the Bien (bee in German is: Biene)

The concept of the bien reveals itself as an undividable entity. As something which is beyond the sum of its small and many parts. The modern equivalent to bien could be called super-organism. More like the biological term for this. A super-organism is something which goes beyond individual organisms, so this is what the beehive is. It’s something which goes far beyond its individual parts. So that is the basic understanding of bien.

LILIPOH: If we are to approach the hive with this in mind, then it affects the choices we make on how to prepare their home, where to place them, and in general how we treat our bees.

M. Thiele: Once you approach the honeybees with this kind of understanding, everything gets turned upside down, beginning with how we name the individual parts. For example, “worker bees.” Calling them this is so limiting to the female bees, and I always feel it doesn’t do them justice. These names we have for bees were derived from our own intention...Read the entire interview

New Top Bar Hive

Our daughter Gabbi stenciled our new hive body, and Chris built the shed ... it can hold two more hive bodies. The hive was designed by Gunther Hauk, a well-known biodynamic beekeeper who has recently established a honeybee sanctuary called Spikenard Farm.