The Indirect Diaries ep.3
I want to preface this series with emphasising the fact: this is my own individual experiment. Everyone’s body is different and unique. What works for me may not work for you. What I have found to be true in my experience might not be true you. Talking about food and dietary habits is always a touchy subject. If you have a history of eating disorders or other body dysmorphia issues, I advise to not read this series. I am not a doctor; nothing I share has scientific evidence or backing. It is purely anecdotal.
I also want to say — my experience with indirect light determination is constantly changing. It seems that as soon as I *think* I’ve figured it out, something else comes right around the corner that changes everything! Treat each piece in this series as a diary entry in real time of what I have discovered during a specific phase of my experiment. These phases and cycles will naturally flux over time.
Previous articles in series:
ep.1 - 2nd October, 2021.
ep.2 - 29th September, 2022.
‘The Peppermint Bottle’, Paul Cézanne 1893-95
My mind is pissed. PHS was all once fun and games, probably when the entire experiment was approached from a mental state (circa 2021). It doesn’t feel like I was truly initiated into my PHS experiment until August last year. That was when the body took over; I wasn’t mentally doing any of it anymore. I was just a witness to what was happening, noticing the subtle shifts within my body.
I’ve talked many times about only entering your PHS when the timing is right, if it ever is, through strategy and authority. But I’m a hypocrite and let’s be real, when the mind hears interesting new information, it wants to jump on it immediately as the ultimate answer, a panacea, the cure to all my problems. It wants to live “perfectly” according to the books, presenting some kind of virtuous and puritanical image to the world of how “good” I am at living my design.
The notion you can just “apply and experiment” with your PHS is very misleading. It assumes you have a choice in the matter of “deciding” when to experiment with your dietary regimen. You do not. Just because the mind resonates with something, doesn’t make it right for the body.
Whenever mutation occurs, there tends to be difficulty at the beginning; a feeling of chaos and disorder as you transcend limitation into the realm of something new. It feels like I am starting strategy and authority all over again, meddling through the confusion of the first few years where I have no idea what’s going on. I am noticing the stark dichotomy of my mind and body when it comes to feeding myself and it’s jarring.
Inner Authority Comes First
There’s a missing (and obvious) piece when it comes to PHS theory that I don’t see stressed enough: you must be following your authority first as a way of discerning what and when to eat, regardless of your dietary regimen. Forget everything you’ve read because it’s meaningless without a grounded understanding of your inner authority. I often wonder if we had never heard of our determination, if our bodies would naturally align with it over time without the mind ever knowing the information directly.
It’s dangerous to be exposed to PHS theory and assume you know what it means. The mind, especially in the first several years of deconditioning, is going to want to attach to the information and project onto it as truth, disregarding your own experiment. If the mind has not surrendered, it will use and twist this information against you and ultimately lead to bypassing signals of the body.
It always starts with inner authority. What this can look like:
If you’re a sacral generator, did you respond to your food? Did you see it first, or did somebody ask you, and did you notice your inner response or sounds?
If you’re emotional, did you follow your feelings all the way through? It’s easy to crave something in the moment but does that craving persist if you wait long enough. Is it real hunger?
If you’re splenic, did you intuit whether this food is good for you or not? Can you trust your instantaneous reaction to whether something is healthy for your body in the moment?
etc, etc — I won’t go through every authority here but I highly recommend checking out this document by Richard Rudd (available on Scribd) which helped click things into place for me.
My Hunger Disappeared and I freaked the F**k Out
It started with my hunger disappearing last year and my mind subsequently freaking out. When you have a history of eating disorders, you become very wary of changes in eating patterns as to not slip back into bad habits. We are generally taught that not eating is bad. It means you either have mental problems with food or there is something physically wrong in the body itself.
I tried to ignore it. I would push myself to eat something anyway, even if it wasn’t until the early afternoon. This might be “normal” for a lot of people who tend to skip breakfast — my direct light projector friend used to survive off coffee until 2pm and is only now experimenting with eating in the morning — but it was not normal for me. I was always the most enthusiastic person when it came to breakfast. It has long been my favourite meal of the day (I had oatmeal and Crispix every morning before school for at least ten years). So not eating breakfast at a normal breakfast-associated hour was WEIRD for me. I was stepping into new territory.
But eventually, talking about my lack of hunger and fasting with someone else very deep into their own PHS experiment, I realised I needed to lean into it. This was an experience coming from my body; it was not mentally ordained.
For about a week last year, I hardcore ate according to the theory of what it means to be indirect light. I ate only before sunrise and after sundown. This was during the winter in Australia.
But it was a too disconcerting for my mind to handle. The fact I felt so good meant I was terrified. Was this just the placebo effect? Was this just the high and endorphins that come from fasting when you enter a state of ketosis, not because I was following my PHS? I honestly don’t know.
I saw how quickly my mind attached to something “working”. It wanted to keep going and dogmatically stick to it as a rule. But that’s unrealistic, because every day is different when it comes to the needs of the body — just because something is correct for you one day, doesn’t mean it will be the next.
I’ve gone through many more periods of hunger disappearing since then and thus eating less in general. And as I get more comfortable with the idea that I won’t actually die if I don’t eat as often as I had been told I should, I followed it through even further. If that meant I didn’t eat for an entire day or two, I listened. This was still, very scary for my mind to go along with.
The Right vs Left Brain
I need to state that hunger levels may vary based on variable and the rest of your design. Fasting is definitely not good for everyone and it comes down to individual discernment and attunement to one’s body. I personally have a right brain. It is hypothesised that right brains do not need to eat as much in quantity of food as their left counterparts (yet, I know of some left-brain people who have found benefits in fasting, so again, don’t take as a hard rule).
According to theory, the right brain is designed to be passive and relaxed. It does not require as much energy to fuel it because there’s less energy output. In contrast, the left brain with its ability to focus and strategise, needs to be fed more frequently because of a higher energy expenditure. A potential conclusion we could draw from this is that the right will feel less hunger as they decondition, and the left will experience more hunger.
This may be too generalised of a statement so take it with a grain of salt. You can leave a comment or send an email if you can verify if this is also true for yourself (or not).
We are conditioned what to eat, how to eat, when to eat, and in social settings when it comes to food.
My mind and my body have very different timelines when it comes to food. I started to become more in tune with legitimate hunger sensations instead of mentally fabricated ones. I started to observe how much I was conditioned when it came to food and my eating habits, in terms of what foods are “healthy”, what times of day to eat, and all the social obligations and pressure when it comes to eating in a tribal setting with friends or family.
I recently listened to ‘You and Your Way’, a lecture recently released on Jovian on PHS. And Ra basically confirmed the sneaking suspicion I had that I didn’t want to accept:
We’re here to eat alone. On our own timing, in our own aura, with the foods and right circumstances we uniquely respond to according to our design.
PHS is not a diet. You are determining by your own authority what to eat, when to eat, and how much to eat. The rules are governed by yourself.
The process is inherently anti-social. I’ve heard this sentiment at least a dozen times and have only recently understood the depth of what this means.
Human beings’ bond over food, we show our love through cooking and sharing food, we socialise constantly over food. Going out to eat — for brunch, lunch, dinner, whatever else in between — is such a normal and accepted phenomenon. But the moment you step into that conditioning field, especially if it involves a large group of people, it can be incredibly hard to honour your individuality and your body’s needs. It is much easier to give in to the conditioning and social pressures of the group dynamic.
For example, a lot of memories for me come up for me when it comes to being forced to eat something I don’t want to, or when I am not hungry at all. If someone was pressuring me to eat something in a social situation, it would be easiest to just accept it because I don’t want to draw attention to myself or ‘make a fuss’. And because of my ED history, my mind will convince me, “eat because it’s good for you. Don’t be rigid or have any restrictions with food because that’s unhealthy”. It’s like my mind wants to show myself that I don’t have an unhealthy relationship with food so I should always say yes to everything offered. But the irony of that concept is I’m literally ignoring my body just to prove to mind its preconceived beliefs around what is considered socially “healthy”. It’s completely backwards.
I want to iterate that I’m not saying you can never go out to eat with friends or family ever again, that you are doomed to eat alone forever now you have discovered human design. This is your own experiment, and there may well be instances and circumstances when it’s correct for you to eat in a group setting. There are still times when it feels right for me to eat in the presence of family and friends. You must verify this for yourself by discerning with your own authority, depending on each individual circumstance.
Yet, I am finding in this phase of my own PHS experiment, that it’s hard to eat in shared company. When others want to eat, I’m not hungry. What is offered on a menu is usually not have what I am sensing I need through my inner vision cognition. What I really want, when it comes to eating out with other people, is the social interaction, and my mind tends to get ‘fomo’ at the idea of not going at all.
The Connection between the Solar Plexus, food, and emotions.
Derek Lee, Unsplash
I have never been an emotional or binge eater. Yet, the solar plexus is connected to food and pleasure. Eating is pleasurable — the brain fires off reward signals of dopamine when we eat. We all have our favourite comfort foods and meals we enjoy treating ourselves with at the end of a long day, or just because we feel we deserve it. Food for so many of us can be an addiction to these fleeting moments of pleasure, a reprieve from the rest of our lives which may be filled with stress and other burdens, which are incorrect for us to deal with in the first place.
Now that I am becoming increasingly attuned with my body’s actual hunger signals, I am noticing how often my mind reaches for food to avoid a feeling or cope with the emotional wave, even if it’s incredibly subtle. My mind gets sad now when I’m not hungry. It goes together with generally having less to do during the day (I have been unemployed for the better part of two years), a mode to escape the space and emptiness of boredom, a vacuum that usually can be filled with looking forward to every meal. Eating is one way to pass the time and avoid facing uncomfortable feelings.
Gate 55 is associated with eating and EDs, eating to feel “full” or anything at all, or eating to get rid of the emptiness of melancholy. (To be clear — just because you have gate 55 doesn’t mean you will have an ED. Likewise, if you don’t have it defined, it doesn’t mean you can’t develop an ED). Conversely, it could manifest as not eating anything, as one must be “in the mood” to eat. I have 55 activated twice on my design side. I am discovering my own strong emotional connection to food, something I never knew existed before. The absence of food or hunger has illuminated these strong emotional reactions — my mind did not know how much it relied on food as emotional comfort until my hunger was gone.
The circumstances must be right.
I went out for dinner last night with two friends. I thought I was hungry before we left, but when I got there — it was about 5pm and still very bright out, plus we were seated at the bar with several overhead lights beaming over us — my hunger instantly disappeared. Normally, I would ignore my body’s reaction and suck it up and force something down, as to not be the odd one out.
But this time, despite eventually ordering a dish, when the food came out, I just stared at it and felt every cell in my body contract as I couldn’t imagine taking a single bite without feeling sick. I ended up asking for a takeaway container to take it home instead. It was no big deal, even though my mind was embarrassed and wanted to desperately join in eating with everybody else.
Testing my limits: how radical do I need to be?
I am currently in the thick of the experimental phase in discovering and testing my body’s limitations and sensitivity to light. Can I eat during the day in a shaded room? Sometimes. It depends whether real hunger is present. Will my body only optimally function when I ingest food after the sun goes down? I am not sure. I am still figuring out how radical I need to be when it comes to my determination. Not that there is anything to “figure out” — rather, I am learning, experimenting, and attuning to my own differentiated eating patterns. Right now, my eating schedule is as weird as ever as it tries to regulate and adjust to what is correct for my body, unique and outside any prescriptive theory my mind has read (including PHS textbooks).
It's a grieving process. In the same way that strategy and authority broke down so many layers and illusions of who I thought I was and where my life was heading, PHS is radically reconstructing my relationship to my body, food, and eating habits. I’m having to let go of all preconceived notions and indoctrinated ideals of how to eat and look after my physical form. Instead, finding my own differentiated path based on my own internal guidance.
It is incredibly empowering to discover this relationship for yourself. There are no right or wrong ways to eat; only what works for you. Only you can know the sensitivity of your digestion when it comes to the conditions or circumstances of eating. If you are indirect and do not relate to anything you have read about it, great. Observe and watch your body’s natural responses. In the same vein, if you relate to the theory wholeheartedly, watch, observe, and see where the process is nuanced when it comes to your own experience. Don’t believe me. Trust yourself.