Temple of Heaven: Altar of Fire

In thinking about the sacred and alchemical act of eating and digestion, it is important to consider the body as a temple, sanctum and sacred domain with its fields of energy, patterns, textures and mysterious elixirs. In fact all of Appearance is a sacred Mandala of the primal energies of space, air, fire, water and earth (gasses, thermal dynamics, fluid dynamics, and solids). Through the sensory orafices we see food, smell food, taste and chew, swallow and digest. With our legs, we walk towards the food…whatever attracts us as our brain stores these perceptions of what nourishes. With our hands we reach out and grasp the food, prepare it and put it into our mouth, where the tongue, teeth and saliva taste and begin the process of breaking it down for digestion. for The digestive tract alchemizes whatever we have consumed. We eat experience. The Stomach meridian tells this story as it traces a line from the eye to the nose, to the mouth, jaw, and up to the brain. Its trajectory moves down the throat, to the stomach, gut and down the leg to the foot. We eat the world, and in turn are eaten by the world. What was outside appearing as substance, has come inside and is alchemically metabolized into the living breathing fabric of our beingness. In this dynamic dance, the Kitchen or Hearth plays a central role. The sacred fire externally cooks the food, while internally the sacred fire Agni transforms the meal offering into flesh and blood, bone and marrow. The body is the magnificent house of consciousness, spirit, perception, feeling, heart, mind, soul and all of the miraculously delicate interlacing tissues of life. Cells and organelles, blood and vessels, networks of neural pathways, bone stronger than steel, muscles and sinews, lymph and crystalline glandular secretions, energy and aura, magnetism and warmth, virus and bacterium, flora and fauna. Whole communities of microbiomes, tissues, organs, liquids and gasses, ether. How marvelous!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSRs10NjT64