Chocolate is the Way...

So its two days after Valentines, and every ones house is littered with the tattered
fragments of romantic jubilation, champagne bottles, empty boxes, little red construction paper hearts, and the occasional piece of candy unearthed on the floor found underfoot by adult morning feet only to be devoured by a happily willing customer of a family dog....
Except there is one problem: I'm not done with this holiday yet. In fact, I'm not even done with Christmas. Better yet, I am still knee deep in the festival of lights. It's a holiday all the time for me. I feel like an official Ambassador of BBQ on the fourth of July. New years is even more special for a cook, having the privilege of being the one to prepare the sacred feast of any kind is a privilege that I have always held dear.
I have told people before, my illustrious cooking career began in the Boy Scouts of America. I got sick and tired of burnt pancakes on rainy days under soggy tarps. I took over the kitchen ops, collected our little "grocery" money and did the shopping. I even got a dutch oven and started roasting chickens in them with root vegetables when i was 12 years old. Life is too short to eat badly, and I saw this right away.
If you are going to cook a meal, why not do it right? Except that what is RIGHT is up for grabs right now in our society, because unfortunately, what is RIGHT is also the most expensive. We pay extra for that Organic label from a government agency that also allows a certain amount of poison to be present in a major amount of our food. But here, have a little health. It'll cost you, however.
In the end, this attitude leads nowhere. To me, there is still the task at hand, what do we eat RIGHT NOW? Where is our next meal coming from? Who will prepare it?
This is the most sacred part of our lives, yet we are often so willing to turn over the keys, in both directions. Not enough time to consider our health in a more personal way, we enact accepted forms of health, healing, and nutrition into our lives. Too lazy to even consider health, some of us just eat whatever we want.
I say that they both have wisdom. Just like the resolution to any conflict often lays directly in the middle of both opposing viewpoints, I honestly believe that after all my years cooking for myself and others, I have come to this understanding.
That chocolate for breakfast is OK. And you don't have to equate it with doing exercise. Assimilating these two things is a horrible side effect of the health movement. We should never directly correlate "exercise" with "eating what we want".
This is in essence creating a very dangerous paradigm. Just because Americans suffer from a general increase in obesity, we are willing to overturn systems of diet and healing that have been in place for thousands of years.
A healing art, like Yoga, is not meant to be taken from. It requires the gift of you be given, and it in turn gives back. If we go to anything with a taking mind, how can we receive? If we hear wisdom and not truly listen, then it becomes useless.
I believe that the healing arts that have been Incorporated into our society are incredibly beneficial and crucial in our efforts to bring health back to everyone. It is not enough for a limited amount of people to be realizing health. Despite this occurrence, eventually the lack of health surrounding that limited healthy core will bring down the efforts. It's diffraction gradient, earth science. Things flow from more to less. What solves this problem?
Balance. And as we are seeing more and more, nature will balance itself, despite all our efforts to curtail this. This is The spirit of Yoga. In finding our own individual note of balance, we are able to play along in the key of the great balance that surrounds us all the time, everywhere we go.
What does this have to do with chocolate, and holiday obsession?
That eventually, within the American diet, labels will disappear. There is no difference to me between the USDA Organic label and the traveling snake-oil salesmen of early America, offering ambiguous solutions to every problem in each bottle of "Health tonic". The show is the same. Only the names have changed. What they have and still are doing is selling our health back to us in small, controlled doses of encouragement.
Only, our lives are getting harder. When life is good, one tends not to notice what one lacks. But when one is hungry, tired, and generally downtrodden, evil becomes more apparent in our lives.
The evil that surrounds someone or something that seeks to interrupt the pursuit of healthiness on the part of any individual seeking basic nutrition. It is the same as selling air to people. Food should never have become something that we pay for. We gave up our right at that point. We sold ourselves up the river.
How do we get it back? by seeing that the problem isn't the USDA. The problem is US. You and me. Every dollar we spend, or don't. They way we continue to ignore REAL FOOD all around us and carry on with what we think is important. Our jobs, our lives, our physical realities.
Often, many people that I have been with on their death bed, catch a glimpse of the perspective of what truly matters in our lives.
Like Bob Dylan said, "Everybody has to serve SOMEBODY".
We all need to serve our food, not demand that food serve us. We all need to give back to what we extract from, feed our souls again. We all know about composting, recycling, and "Organic" foods.
What we all need is a truly "Organic" set of priorities. The major one should be this:
That balance within one's physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual states of being is paramount to anything else. Without the proper mind in these aspects, anything we try to do to re mediate yet alone nourish ourselves is like throwing good after bad, like burning antiques to stay warm. Its a temporary remedy. But temporary remedies have great sales figures, because they bank on one thing.
A lack of confidence. This lack of confidence is fueled by guilt. The guilt tells us that we should watch our weight, eat this now instead of that, and generally view ourselves as inferior if we don't fit in to the norm.
Just look at the show "The Biggest Loser". I tried not to, and then I did. I wished that I could work with those people, that I could have offered then something that nobody did. Love.
We must replace the temporary remedy with that which heals, and learn how to make a healer out of the temporary remedy.
This is the way of masters.
Chocolate pounding Yogis everywhere will tell you.
Chocolate is the WAY.

Love,
Tenzo