Hungry, Hungry Hearts

Welcome, my friends, to another episode of a soul’s journey. I never know where this road will take me next. This week’s installation was a surprise twist that emerged while reading the book Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food.

Jan Chozen Bays talks about nine (!) different kinds of hunger, including stomach and cellular hunger, which are the only ones that can be satisfied by food. When I came upon “heart hunger”, well, the inner bells dinged big time.

A hungry heart is one that is yearning for connection and emotional experiences such as joy, love, fulfillment and meaning. If we aren’t aware of its presence, we might think that we need to answer its call with food.

But food can’t feed a hungry heart.

I know this for sure because I spent 40 years trying. Not ice cream, chocolate chip cookies or even organic superfood smoothies.

Just knowing about my hungry heart has been transformational. This understanding has helped to clarify a lot of irrational behavior.

I’ve started to recognize all the ways I try to fill the emotional void with consumption. Not just food and drink either. Consumption of goods and services, information and reaching out.

And that’s when it hit home. That trying to fill a hole that isn’t even a hole, just a desire for attention and love, is both impossible and detrimental to my well-being. It’s also just as ridiculous as that board game, Hungry, Hungry Hippos from the 80’s where you try to get your mechanical hippo to gobble up more marbles than your friends.

Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash

Mindless gobbling, the more the better, as if that will assuage the inner ache of not feeling seen or being understood in an utterly insane and upside down world.

This epiphany also made me think of Cookie Monster, and his insatiable gobbling of cookies, without enjoyment or even awareness.

I could blame the cultural conditioning I received as a child for this mindset, but it goes much deeper than that. Rather than analyzing how we got here, though, I think it’s more effective to notice what’s happening now, how we turn our attention outwards rather than inwards and give our power away to consumer habits to help us avoid our feelings.

Ouch.

You might be tempted to run out and buy a book (or twelve), swing by Google University or see what products Amazon Prime has to offer for hungry hearts.

Take a breath and pause. This is just more gobbling. It’s so engrained we don’t even stop to think about it a lot of the time. Don’t criticize yourself- billions of dollars have been invested to normalize consumption at the cost of our emotional integrity. It’s often our default response to whatever comes up and everywhere you look, it’s being promoted by sparkly, beautiful people.

Bad day? Have a whiskey. Good day? Here’s some champagne. Celebrating? Cake AND champagne. I could go on and on, but hopefully you get my drift.

That breath and the pause are a portal into an entirely new world. It’s possible you’ll feel very uncomfortable. And then the nervous system will kick in, misinterpreting discomfort as a threat and then biology will take over. Survival responses are very potent and you can’t logic your way around them.

You need to speak to the body. That’s where the breathing comes in, deep exhales, amplified with audible sighs. Move or bounce your body. Place a loving hand on your heart and speak gentle, soothing words to yourself. “You’ve got this.”

Learning to grow our capacity to sit with discomfort might be the most important thing we can master on the healing journey. There are so many factors at play trying to keep us in our tiny little comfort zone (cultural conditioning, neural pathways, sympathetic nervous system reactions, societal and familial pressure, etc) that it takes a lot of courage and energy to shake stuff up.

But all the things you want are on the other side of the big shake up. If they were easy and comfortable and didn’t threaten the status quo, you’d already have them!

Spend some time sitting with your hungry heart and ask it what it needs to feel full. Explore and experiment until you find your own unique soul foods.

For me, it’s time in the woods, laughing with my niece and nephews, reading a fun novel on the porch when its raining, those moments between waking and sleeping, savoring a hearty meal, meditating and writing. Yours are likely different, so I’m not sharing this as a to-do list, rather some fuel for inspiration.

I’ve recorded a guided practice to nourishing the hungry heart for paid subscribers. For just $7 per month you can have access to weekly audio support, simple doable tools that you can listen to over and over again to uncover the voice of your soul and/or adapt into your own unique practice.

It’s nice to have someone hold space and facilitate the process, but this is something you can do on your own as well.

If you’ve found this article to be beneficial, please consider tapping the heart button or sharing it. This will help others to find my work and also give me the warm fuzzies.

Thanks for stopping by! Let me know how it goes as you learn what and how to feed this hunger that you may not even have known was lurking inside.