MacroLife – Marijke de Coninck – Macrobiotic Counsellor and Healer

 Macrobiotics is a way to understand the laws of nature and to see how we are part of them. By living a macrobiotic life we get the possibility to make positive changes in our life on lots of levels, because everything is connected with each other on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level.
Originally macrobiotics comes from the greec, which means ” big ” ( macro ) ” life ” ( bios ). The path to a long and healthy life in the most  broad and deepest understanding of the laws of nature.
Through a macrobiotic way of living, gradually , you get clarity to achieve your life aim.
Macrobiotics is not a diet or a cure neither a therapy .It is no treatment, no sect or religion. I can describe macrobiotics as a way to approach life.Macrobiotic food can help us to live macrobiotically and to develop our spiritual consciousness.
 
It is an art of life in which you become more and more conscious. Conscious of the responsability you have to give your life shape. The search for, which belongs to it, is first of all the search for our true self. Who am I ?  What am I doing here in this lifetime ?
 
What kind of food can I eat, when I choose to cook macrobiotically?
 
 If I tell people what they better avoid to improve their health, they always ask what they can eat.
For our climate, generally spoken, we eat basically whole grains, vegetables, beans, soup and seaweed. We prepare the food often with a bit of oil, seasonings, condiments and use some seeds and nuts and small portions of fish and local fruits. Ideal is that the choice is organic, as local as possible, fresh and as less as possible processed. We try to use the food that’s growing in the season and climat we are living in. For optimum health it is best to create a varied cooking style : variety in taste, cutting style and preparation…It is good to see a consultant if you want to change your eat- and lifestyle.
 
 
What is ” eating macrobiotically? ”
 
To me there is not such a thing as “a macrobiotic diet “. Because macrobiotics is an approach to life and food, someones eating habits can be funded on macrobiotic principles. They vary a lot depending on someones physical condition, the time of the year, if you are man or a woman, which work you are doing, where you are living…
For a very long time, century after century, before there was the possibility to massive transport, people always ate what there was in their surroundings. We didn’t eat kiwi’s and bananas, this was only food that was available around the equator.
All over the world, grain has been the most important food for human beings, during thousands of years. Till recently ( the last century ) , we choose to become our primary food ( grains and veg and beans ) less important and animal food, dairy, refined sugar, processed food took its place.
Traditionally people ate in a temperate climate, like we are living in, cooked grains, vegetables, beans, seeds and nuts and small amounts of animal food.
By neglecting our traditional, ecological food habits, we created chaos on a social, economical, ecological and medical level from which we are witness today ( newspapers, television, neighbours, friends,…)
Macrobiotics is not an alternative to modern a modern adventure of medicine or not an approach to solve daily little illnesses, whether they are personal, social or ecological. Macrobiotics is more the repair and the awareness of our original traditional wisdom, adapted to the time we are living in and of top of that to consider what we have learnt through science and materialisation.
 
 View (vision)
 
By ” natural lifestyle “, we understand a life style which contributes to the development of a healthy society, with healthy people.
Healthy we define as flexible, prepared to transformation but with both feet on the ground. A holistic approach, is looking how food , in the broad sense of the word, everything that comes in in our body, influences our being. Through our senses, what se see, hear,eat, drink, breath in, touch feel (energetically ) changes us on a physical , emotional, mental and spiritual level.
Health, as well as on an individual as on a social level, you don’t achieve by curing problems neither by avoiding pain and to try to live as long as ” human ” as possible. As long as we consider illness and problems as enemies we have to conquer, we live in duality. As long as we live in duality with ourselves, we are in duality with the world. Transformation happens when we step out of this duality and embrace the other pole, so that we experience oneness. Oneness is harmony. If we experience harmony in ourselves, we open us for the world and we create the possibility for the world to feel harmony.
Real health, you only create to accept the problem or illness and to be its ally and to accept its presents, to open yourself to the sense and meaning of it.
Illness and problems are the doors to transformation. They give us the chance to find the missing piece of our personal and social jigsaw puzzle and to integrate them. We encourage love to all parts of our self. We become whole, who we really are, instead of “curing” the person we are suspected to be.