Exploring Hunger with Lilith

As mentioned the other day, celebrating the completion of the new book Lilith: Healing the Wild for me isn’t in going out to dinner and celebrating as we often do. It was in beginning a modified fast.

Whenever I do a cleanse or fast I’m reminded of a moment one evening in college when I was about 19. I was reading with some friends in the student center before dinner, waiting for another friend to join us before heading upstairs to eat. A strange feeling came over me and made me nervous. I didn’t know what to do – I’d never felt it before. I told one of the others and he was concerned. He told me to explain what I was feeling. I did and he thought I was joking. It would have been like me to take something as basic and universal as the feeling of hunger and make a joke about it, explaining in detail the physical sensations accompanying it and acting as though it was a novel experience for a human.

Many times in the last 20 years I’ve stopped to consider this and been blown away. I had eaten in ways that did not leave me to experience hunger.

In the following years I began to play with this novel (for me) experience. I never quite got used to it. When it comes on today I’m not nervous unless I’m about to do a call with a client or have something scheduled for a few minutes down the road. I actually kind of like it – it brings me straight into my physical body and, by taking emphasis off the mind, alters my perception.

What happens when we’re hungry is that the messages of the body become clearer – our awareness of the body becomes clearer. Eating enough to not know the feeling is pretty standard among many people. Weird little sensations and emotional triggers make many think they’re hungry when they in fact are not.

My celebration of the launch of the Lilith book continues with a modified eating schedule. I’m careful not to get messed up about eating or not eating – no rules or dogma – but am listening to what my body needs. For about 1.75 days last week that was fresh juice and water, letting things rest. I didn’t have intense hunger during that time as expected (it passes typically after 3 days) and so when my body clearly sent the signal to eat, I knew I wasn’t after all doing a real fast (the original plan was fresh vegetable and fruit juices). I ate and it felt awesome. I didn’t eat because I was hungry but because my body told me it was time.

In the days since then my body is sending me what look like mixed or contradicting signals. It’s just that they are varied from day to day, from hour to hour – my mind is finding it impossible to discern a pattern. I suspect there is no pattern but that I need to make sure to include times for my system to rest even as I don’t let my digestion shut down fully for a few days or weeks. When this period is done I might water fast for a day each week to insert a pause to give my system time to rest. In principle it feels good to do that (I did that for a few months several years ago) and I’ll have to wait and see if it turns out to the be the right time.

And that is the nature of the body – to give one signal one day and a different one the next. I’m using this experience as an experiment to get closer to Lilith. My true Black Moon Lilith is in my 2nd house, the house of survival and resources. In this part of the chart instinct will tell you what it is that you actually need in a given moment regardless of what your brain believes you need.

For many, the idea of not eating is shocking. For some, terrifying. But we have gotten far away from being in touch with the realities of how our bodies function. And they need to rest periodically. They always tell us when something new needs to happen or something old needs to stop. It’s our challenge to get in touch with these instinctive messages conveyed through the physical body and learn to listen to and take them seriously. We usually run our lives with our minds until we crash into something and the mind tries to figure out another way to be. Let’s all learn to take Lilith and our bodies seriously before we crash into illness of one kind or another!

Everyone who manifests any health issue of any kind has been sent messages from his or her body that something is out of balance or wrong in his or her life – every single one. We have trained ourselves out of listening but the messages are always there.

As I explore hunger now, it’s an amazing feeling. It leads me to appreciate food more when I eat again but also helps me stay present to the feeling of being in my body – of having a body, this body. I’m not always happy with what it does but I do need like most people to develop more awareness and acceptance of it. It is always telling us through energetic cues what is resulting from our beliefs, choices, and actions. The physical body cannot help but to conform to the energetic reality of a person, and in time situations manifest physically to tell us what is happening.

Lilith can help us learn to listen to our bodies once we get over the idea that she is a demon and is to be feared. Is Lilith really the mother of all demons and to be feared? Or might she offer the opportunity to know ourselves as extensions of the natural world and heal the imbalance between masculine and feminine that we’ve been living through on Earth for 6,000 years?

Read Lilith: Healing the Wild for the full story on this misunderstood and maligned archetype and order the true Black Moon Lilith Natal Report to learn about Lilith specifically in your birth chart.

It’s time to heal the wild within us. For now, my job in this arena is continuing to deepen my sensitivity to the messages of my body and honoring what it tells me.

What’s yours?

Tom Jacobs is an Evolutionary Astrologer, Medium, and Channel helping you understand and do what your soul came here to do. Eleven books, two original natal reports, and numerous astrology and channeled MP3s are available through tdjacobs.com. Join Tom Jacobs when he channels Ascended Master Djehuty for a Full Moon Grounding & Release call for the Sagittarius Full Moon to release beliefs you no longer need so you can be more fully present and in compassionate charge of your life.