How I Gave up Chocolate and Discovered the Power of Choice

As the holiday season gets into full swing, you may feel tempted to eat foods you know are not healthy for you, spend money your wiser self says you should not, or act in ways that don’t support your highest good. Beginning this week, I will share a series of contemplations on how to make healthy choices even when challenged.
Until my mid-teens, I was convinced that the best desserts for me contained chocolate. That is how I had been encouraged, growing up in a house full of chocolate lovers. In a Pavlovian way, whenever I saw chocolate, I started to salivate. I was convinced I wanted some!
But puberty brought with it a call to make choices that honoured my authentic nature. As hormones ran through my veins and my body grew in new ways, I also developed debilitating migraine headaches that would leave me sick and bedridden for days.
The doctor told me that I needed to stop eating foods that were well-known migraine triggers, one of which was chocolate. I thought my world had ended. In some ways, it had; and as it did, a whole new one opened up.
Life with my family became an opportunity to grow into my own choices. It was clear to me intellectually that chocolate was not good for me. I did my best to white-knuckle the temptation that seemed to grip me, only to find myself giving in from time to time and getting sick again. Eventually, however, what I once understood as mere medical advice arose as a willing directive from within me. Chocolate was not good for me, so I did not want to choose it anymore.
With new understanding now resonant in my cells, I was able to perceive chocolate differently. It no longer seemed to call to me, beckon me, and weaken my will. Instead, it became a potent reminder for a young teenager of the power of choice. I began to see all chocolate as poison, rather than delight. I knew it would make me sick, just as poison does. I very quickly lost all desire for it. What once was a tough choice because of my conditioning, became an easy one because of my willingness to see things as they are.
AT FIRST, CHOICE IS EFFORT
In today’s busy digital world, you simultaneously face a wider range of choices than ever before, yet may feel overwhelmed in the face of it all. In truth, you have never had a better opportunity to put into practice the power of your free will. You may convince yourself that you don’t have a choice in a given situation. You may feel obliged, for example, to stay in a job or a relationship that feels empty and unfulfilling, as you perceive no other options. But not doing anything about feeling unhappy is a choice in itself.
As I shared in my Being In the Wake of Violence series, no matter where you are, or what you are doing, you do have the choice in how you react to what life brings. The idea of having choice can feel uncomfortable to anyone who is attached to feeling like a victim. But life is never happening “to” you. Everything you experience is the result of choices you have made in the past, your previous karmic tendencies. What you think and believe affects how you perceive, which determines how you act, which in turn creates the trajectory of your life.
Your state of awareness is in constant co-creation with the moment, which manifests your experience of being alive. When you perceive that life is happening “to” you, you limit your field of awareness. When you believe that your source of power is outside of you, you give away your ability to make choices.
But when you see that you are in constant co-creation with life, that whatever life brings is grace, you become receptive to this moment as it is. You awaken to greater possibilities. You move beyond limiting beliefs and habits, and begin to make choices that support the light of your nature. Such choices always feel rooted, vital and expansive. But they may not always feel easy. That is because your habits that do not support your greater good have momentum. You have likely invested energy in them for some time, often lifetimes. They keep moving in a certain direction, while you go along on auto-pilot.
Once you are fed up with feeling lousy about your life or yourself, you become willing to make changes. When you are willing to make better choices and soberly realize that you have some habits to overcome, you do need to apply some effort. It takes willpower to not get up in the middle of the night and go to the fridge for a piece of chocolate cake, or to not bring it home at all!
The same applies for other habitual choices you may have that pull you away from your true nature, such as shopping beyond what you can afford; watching TV when you would be better off socializing, studying or tuning into what you feel; or compulsively checking your phone to see, ultimately, if you are loved; or even deeper issues such as losing your temper, procrastination, self-judgment, getting involved in unhealthy relationships or acting in ways that contribute to global suffering.
As you move through the week, check in with yourself to see where you can make healthy choices in the moment, to create a healthier life. Avoid temptation. Remember you are worth choosing well!
I will continue this exploration next week, to support you living a happy and healthy holiday.
Until then,
Love yourself.
Love others.
Love our world.
We are one Earth family.
Parvati