Soul food… what is it? All those things that I love to eat, but I know aren’t good for me, that’s what I’ve called soul food. Ice cream, pizza, chocolate… the things that if you eat a bite of it’s too little, and a serving of it’s too much.

You regret eating it a little, but also know you wouldn’t be the same person, or as happy a person, if you never had it again.

I’ve gone long stretches of time without eating junk food or sweets, even alcohol. 4 years without alcohol, maybe a year without sugar. At the time, I felt like I was being healthier these stricter diets. But those years have also been some of the most physically painful of my life.

Once I started to eat some sweets and drink some alcohol again, I began noticing what feels like a sort of darkness creeping in. My body gets kind of tight and crampy in different places, my mind starts to wander, I become more lethargic. In many ways this feels negative. But strangely, when this happens I experience a sort of recoiling effect. Here’s what I mean:

When I don’t eat these foods, for whatever reason I have historically gotten so stiff and straight and focused on eliminating the impurities in my body, that I quite literally burn myself out and stretch myself thin. When I eat the soul foods, my body begins to cave in, it cools down, in curls up. And in between these two states is where the magic has been for me.

Of course, every body and circumstance will be different, but for me it’s been in the transitioning where I’m not too rigid or floppy, where I’ve been able to find more of a center and balance. It’s quite literally, as if the soul foods, like wine, bread and ice cream soften me to the extent that I can start to break down and then open up, I’ll go as far as to say, to the energy of spirit.

This isn’t to say that a diet full of soul foods is optimal or sustainable in the long run, but it has at least humbled me to not be so set in my ways of hardcore dieting, or hedonistic grubbing, and that the middle way, can be found, in many unexpected places.