It was painful to watch. Activist and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver visits a family in Huntington, West Virginia – a town given the label as the unhealthiest in all of the United States. On his new television experiment, Food Revolution, part reality show, part educational programming, Oliver explains to the mother that the freezer full of processed frozen pizzas and continual trips for fast food are killing her, her truck driving husband and her already obese children. He quizzes and informs her with hard-hitting questions and health based facts about diabetes, heart disease and other related issues that await them. Does she deliberately want to usher in a life time of health problems and shorter life spans, all for the sake of current convenience?
Manipulative perhaps, but you can’t help but agree with his assessment and concerns. The mother tears up as most mothers would, and agrees that something has to change. He teaches her new ways of grocery shopping, meal planning and provides her with recipes to get started. He even encourages the kids to get involved for he knows that teaching them how to cook is one of the most empowering tools for shaping a healthier future.
Cut to a week later. He revisits this same family. Upon opening the refrigerator, Oliver discovers that most of the produce bought last week remains untouched. He directly asks the mother if she cooked the recipes he had provided. And although she claimed she did, the full refrigerator tells a different story. It was only after asking the six year old daughter what her favorite meal of the week was, that the truth was revealed.
“Pizza!” she exclaimed, and the mother knew she had been busted.
Our life reflects our loyalties.
What we offer our loyalty day after day, thought after thought, decade after decade is what increases in our daily existence.
Loyalty equals devotion. If I am devoted to someone or some thing, then I give them or it a dedicated exchange of my energy, resources and investment.
When one begins a path of self awareness, we begin to take responsibility for all our profound dedications – be they powerful allies or crippling barriers to our good. We make the simple yet startling discovery that nothing outside of us can make fundamental changes for us but ourselves.
Our life reflects our loyalties according to a creative process, a spiritual law outlined by everyone from Jesus the Christ to the Buddha with axioms that tell us, “It is done unto you as you believe,” and “What you think you become.”
It’s an all-encompassing thing this Spiritual Law, and each of us are blessed to have it operating 24/7 in our lives. Whether conscious of this law or not, it is always operating – the same way the laws of physics/gravity are perpetually operating whether we understand or are conscious of them. We learn gravity through our continued attempts at standing up as babies. And, if you are going to pick up that plant and move it across the room to where it can get more light, you know that because the Earth’s atmosphere is pulling on that object, that you must apply the same force when lifting it to keep it from crashing to the ground.
If that mother is sincere in wanting to create healthy change for her children, then her loyalties must change. If they do not, if does not condemn her to a life void of anything reputable and good. It means that she will only continue to reap what she persists to sow. It isn’t personal. It is the law of cause and effect. Regardless of how many generations before her did as she did, she possesses the ability to start anew. As outsiders observing her situation, it is fairly obvious how to begin doing that. Stop buying processed food. Create budget friendly menus. Enroll your kids in the process. Exercise. And yet, as great as all those things are, they are still only effects of greater controlling loyalties.
Inner devotions produce outer experiences
There are other, more unconscious loyalties we all engage in – loyalty to self loathing, unworthiness and not being good enough. We may be loyal to fundamental, mass conscious core beliefs that have simmered in an energy of futility for so long, that one can’t even recall when they felt that life offered them anything to be hopeful for. Such loyalties, left uninterrupted, can never deliver the long anticipated answer to a frail prayer.
If inward loyalties of thought become molds that shape our day to day experiences, then which of the following molds to you want to regularly interact with?
can’t afford
not good enough
can’t catch a break
the Universe supports me
everything I need shows up in the perfect time and in the perfect way
I am willing
there is more than enough
When we give only when we feel obligated to or when there is absolute certainty of surplus, we are loyal to the idea that our Source is limited, life is a game of chance and that our connection to susatinability is hit and miss.
When we respond lovingly only when others love first then we are loyal to feelings and beliefs that love, in and of itself, is unsafe and must be proven before allowed in to our experience.
When we take an action towards our growth, well-being, creative endeavors only when we are absolutely forced to, we are loyal to beliefs that undermine the value of who we are and that what we have to offer is second-rate and disposable.
and
When we set clear-cut tangible goals and corresponding intentions, then what we are loyal to is the expectancy of demonstration(s) meeting us in ways expected and unexpected.
When we joyously give of our time, talent and treasure because we are loyal to the spiritual truth that our Source is infinite, then Source reveals Its infinite nature and we lack for nothing.
Our life today is a reflection of what we are loyal to. By changing your loyalty today you change tomorrow’s experiences.