Hard to believe it has been almost a year since I have blogged here. For the last year, I have been praying about whether or not to continue with this blog. I had been praying for guidance about whether or not to restart. This past week, I was contacted out of the blue by a food site called Chew the World. They wrote a blog called The Definite Guide to Spaghetti Squash. While doing research on the topic they had run across a blog on Spaghetti Squash Spirituality I wrote over a year ago. We chose to help make each other’s work visible. Even though I was not included in their guide on how to cook it, to have my work recognized and shared by another food blogger inspired me to think about writing about the spiritual lessons from food again.
It was this connection with Chew the World that inspired my writing again this week. Their most recent blog was about How To Make A Topsy Turvy Cake The Easy Way. I am not sure if you have ever seen one of these cakes but they look amazing and like they are so difficult to make as if layer tilts at a different angle. The secret they point out is having the right equipment, you can actually buy pans that do this, and making sure the counterbalance between layers is correct. “As long as every wedge of the cake counters its adjacent wedges, the load distribution stays stable, and the cake won’t fall over. “ Counterbalance is important in our spiritual lives as well. As long as we maintain spiritual practices which assist us in our daily lives, we remain stable. Each spiritual practice we have been discussing and practicing the last few years has been to counterbalance another pattern or behavior. For example, the spiritual practice for this month is shadow. Working with and recognizing our shadow self assists us in counterbalancing the extent to which we project things on to others or the tendency to focus on the positive and deny the existence of anything unpleasant. This practice enables us to achieve a state of wholeness.Our lives are like a topsy turvy cake. If we do not ensure that we are engaging in spiritual practices that keep the wedges of our live properly counterbalanced, then we find aspects of our live out of balance and our cake (life) falling apart. Bakers can buy topsy turvy pans to help ensure that the layers counterbalance each other. As human beings, we can engage in spiritual practices that help the layers of our life counterbalance each other. We can practice love to counterbalance fear. We can practice hope to counterbalance despair. We can practice gratitude to counter balance greed and a sense of entitlement.It does not matter how awesome a job we do at icing and decorating our “cake” if the layers are not properly counterbalanced, people will see through the façade. Take this time to look at where your life is not properly counterbalanced and engage in spiritual practices which will restore balance in your life.