Sacral Chakra – Emotional Eating
Eating habits are guided by the desire for pleasure or to avoid pain. Even if life is going smoothly for you, food can be such a pleasurable experience that it is easy to lose discipline. The other side is that food choices can also be a way to cope with difficult emotions. Life stresses with family, career and worldly events can be tough to deal with so food becomes the source of comfort. Without awareness of some of the underlying emotional triggers, eating habits can remain largely unconscious. Repeatedly going on and off diets is a strong sign of this. At its worst, poor food choices can be a form of self punishment or even addiction.
Lifestyle considerations that will help:
Tools like mindfulness, coaching or therapy to manage the emotional stress of relationships, career and life are key. Identifying what situations trigger you to eat and learning to manage the stress of those situations is essential. Until coping skills are strong enough for you to self manage, support from others will be needed.
When emotions run high the body needs more calories. Intense emotional processing drains vitality and the post stress food binge is your body’s way of recovering this energy. Being able to recognize when you are going through some inner turmoil and temporarily increasing caloric intake from high quality foods during those periods is binge preventative. If you overeat then its important not to judge yourself to harshly. This only makes things worse. Instead use the situation as opportunity to practice self inquiry and build more awareness of the cause of your trigger. Learning to stay calm and centered reduces the extra energy demands for emotional processing and will decrease appetite over time.
At this stage food and pleasure are one. You won’t likely eat anything healthy if it does not taste fantastic. Finding healthy recipes that taste amazing will satisfy the desire for pleasure without having to grab for junk food. Make delicious food preparation your hobby.
Exercise at this stage should still be mostly yin/restorative. Stretching, meditation, gentle yoga, tai chi, walking, being in nature are all good. Low intensity and long duration is great for mental processing and to burn off anxiety. Very short duration high intensity exercise can be beneficial in specific situations to provide release for yang emotions like anger. Freestyle movements like dancing are also a great way to stabilize the flow of emotional energy in the body.
The focus for the body is still largely based on healing and nourishing.