Hi! I am Parul. My ancestors are from South Asia, I was born on Turtle Island in Tkaronto, and I currently live on the island of Bali in Indonesia. I use poetry, prose, poetic frames to unravel entanglements of our thoughts, feelings and experiences. Call it an evolving decolonization practice that is liberating the many intelligences our existence contains.☝🏽 I read you this newsletter, or you can read it yourself! 👇🏽
I love cinnamon buns.
Markville mall, a mall close to where I grew up smelt like cinnamon buns. Sometimes after school we would get a lucky surprise from my mom and gorge on cinnamon buns. Bliss.
I moved home after gradating from university, and I decided to run a marathon. I would run around the cinnamon bun mall every Wednesday for my 10k run. So I ate a cinnamon bun every week. It tasted better than my dreams, each and every time.
A few weeks ago, I found gluten free, vegan cinnamon buns here in Uluwatu, where I live. Sold at a place called Salad Lab, which makes it even better. It brings me so much joy and nostalgia.
I have a long history of bun life.
i am on the road to my perfection
i don’t need correction
please don’t try to chance me
i’ve been so patient baby
every now and then i smell fire burning
i am coming alive
[adapted from the song Coming Alive by Two Together]
Then, a few weeks ago, crazed with finding gf buns, I ate 4 of them in one week. It was a delicious adventure before the compound tremors of sugars shook my body.
Aftermath: Visible noticing of low energy levels, weird dreams, moody irritable attitudes and sugar cravings magnify a million fold. An incredulous reminder of how food and mental health are so tangibly connected.
Example interlude: Someone I love cut dairy out of their diet, and it changed the landscape of their mental health so significantly they were able to come off of medication. It changed their lives. Their body was able to bounce back to its natural equilibrium state, self-healing.
As beautiful as this is, it is also not surprising and is absolutely horrifying when considering the mass production of milk and “fortification”/ manufacturing of milk that brands boast. (Link to previous article.)
Food is a continuum of physical growth and nurturing the bodies. In yoga, Ayurveda and spiritual sciences of India it is known that there are 5 bodies called koshas:
annamaya kosha (physical body)
pranamaya kosha (life force/ breathe body)
manomaya kosha (mental body)
vijnanamaya kosha (astral body/wisdom)
anandamaya kosha (bliss body)
This ancient knowledge weaves together our spiritual and mental continuum in a way that is so complex it is simple. We are intertwined beings where a nudge in one place ripples through all systems.
We can see how we are all connected:
ecosystem’s health = our physical health = our mental health
our questions invariably shape our answers
What is our truth when it comes to food?
I mean our ability to grasp our own truth is a journey of self discovery. Even upon “arrival” to this self-knowing it is likely that our truth is usually accessible on the best of days, where sight with your eyes, ears and heart is at its utmost clarity.
Many of us dilute our truth. Our truth in relation to food is not always straightforward.
In the moment before an edible experience I usually ask myself:
Do I really want this?
What purpose is this serving?
Is this serving the best version of me?
Is there something else, aside from hunger, that is provoking this choice?
When eating that 4th cinnamon bun, I asked myself these questions and in retrospect I was 1000% justifying a psychological desire of fulfillment, rather than a biological readiness for more sugar.
This cinnamon bun binge is also a classic modern experience. We have normalized binging, especially Netflix. (My current Netflix binge is Peaky Blinders.) Where we have a crazed need to consume all of a show, or eat all the things, until we feel sick or restless. It plays right into the hands of consumerism and materialism.
This crazed need for more is akin to the 7 cardinal sins that scaffold the confession aspect of Christianity. But more on this in a later letter.
I was mentally pacifying an emotion through food. A normalized emotional tactic. Where I denied my bodies to share its cellular intelligence with me by overriding my truth.
Food is more than food. It includes all of the stories and structures that bring people to a specific moment in time.
Food is remembering.
Food is nostalgic.
Food is home.
And tbh I was eating my feelings of home.
What feelings, if at all, have you been eating lately?
“If you intensify and complete your subjective emotions, visions, you see their relation to others’ emotions. It is not a question of choosing between them, one at the cost of another, but a matter of completion, of inclusion, an encompassing, unifying, and integrating which makes maturity.” — Anaïs Nins
Much love 💙💛💚
Parul Auntie // @parulbee
letter: 014 Cinnamon bun life is the best kind of life 👀 🤤