You are what you consume....A spiritual journey.

When I was a lad, any time I brought some scalawag friend over to my house and my mom didn't get a good vibe off of them, she would say, "Show me your friends and I'll show you who you are!"  At the time I wasn't really sure what she was talking about.  Now I'm quite sure that she was trying to get me to ditch the loser before his bad habits rubbed off on me.  This was a sweet gesture, mom was trying to look after her darling, angelic, innocent boy, ha!  The only problem with this line of thinking was that my mom held the belief that outside sources were causing the corruption of her otherwise saintly son and not the scalawag that existed inside of me.  She also used to exclaim, "You are what you eat!" as she fed me copious amounts of Lays potato chips and Ragu spaghetti sauce.  At the time I wasn't clear what this one meant either, although I was a bit saucy in my youth, I don't believe that's what mom meant at all.

As I got older, and a teensy bit wiser,  I started to pay closer attention to what I was doing to, or putting into my body.  Actually it's probably more accurate to say that I was forced to pay attention to what I had done to my body.  All the "good times"  of my teens and twenties!  The back yard football games without pads, the booze, the cigarettes, the sofa surfing, it all started to take it's toll and I could feel it in every joint by my mid thirties, ugh, fun hurts.  With a renewed sense of responsibility for this rig that carries my soul around, I started to eat better, read labels, research nutrition, exercise, do yoga and meditate.  At first this was a struggle and I wasn't consistent, but over time I started to look better and feel better, and think differently about life and what direction I wanted to move in.  The whole. "you are what you eat thing", started to sink in a little bit, it made sense to me on a deeper level.  Clean healthy food made for a clean healthy body, and this body is my platform  to perform in this life.  This body is my stage where I'm the front man and it's my turn to rock it, this is pretty hard to do when the floor is cluttered with Twinkies,  and soda cans and hamburger wrappers, at least not for the type of tune I want to sing.

There was also something even bigger and better that changed in my life when I started to change my eating, physical activity and my thinking.  The scalawags started to disappear from my life.  This was a bummer at first because how was I going to make it without all the degenerate losers that owed me money??? Oh, wait, no this type of change is actually really rad.  There was some empty space there where the old "friends" existed, but then some new super cool friends started to show up. Yogis, and athletes, and meditators and healthy eaters and positive thinkers!  Mom! look! look who I am!  Or look who I've become.  My mom was right, not to brag, but my friends now are super rad, creative funny, cool, available, lovable, well some of them are scalawags but just a little.  All I had to do was change what I eat, and what I thought, and how I spent my time, and who I spent my time with.  I guess "you are what you eat" is a partial truth, maybe "I am what I CONSUME" would be a better mantra to live life by.  What I eat, drink, breath, think, read, watch, say, where and who I spend my time with, it all builds a new me holistically, a new kind of consumer.  Some of my friends still have tattoos, but I think mom would be proud of who her little spiritual consumer chose to become.