Or: How challenges with diet, food, and eating offer doorways for evolution.

While the courgette-and-carrot bake is in the oven, and the beetroot for the experimental pasta sauce (or maybe soup?) is happily bubbling away, I'd like to take the time to look at and contemplate a less pleasant aspect – also known as a “doorway” – of diet. Any diet, yours and mine.

You see, as much as I enjoy talking about food and sharing recipes, the Ascension Kitchen is not meant to be just another vegan catering or a foodie blog. Yes, healthy and plant-based diet is a passion, one that I love to share with others.

But I am also interested in the shadows that hide in our diet. And I don't necessarily mean the junk food, or the small sins or indulgences ~ I'm talking about the challenges around any diet, but particularly a plant-based one. The obstacles, the derailments, the times we “fall off the wagon”. That one junk food we can't let go of, no matter how hard we try.

Because these are all reflections. Every obstacle, every challenge tells you something about your consciousness. So they are all doorways into a deeper understanding of Self ~ to unravelling more, possibly, probably, even karma.

And so, instead of taking the easy way out today and share another recipe, I'd like to invite you to share your challenges when it comes to a plant-based diet. Because as the brave handful of participants of the first Ascension Kitchen workshop reflected to me: there are many, and they are varied.

What is your biggest challenge when it comes to a plant-based diet?

You would like to go vegan, but your body is not happy with legumes and so you wonder where to get your protein from?

The cheese-addiction has you in its grip still?

You're new to this whole plant-based thing and don't know how to cook now?

Or do you have a whole bunch of vegan recipes you have been meaning to try, but they're all a bit complex and you have neither time nor energy, and so end up not using them after all?

Struggle to balance plant-based food with high-energy work?

Dense (work) environments make you binge eat?

Something else entirely? What is your challenge?

And what might you have manifested it?

I'll even go first!

Mine is a reptilian gone crazy when eating after a long work day at around 7pm ~ simply having dinner is not enough: I eat, and then go, “Hmm, nice, what do I eat now?” Nuts, candied ginger, corn or lentil cakes with veggie-spread Toskana-style … nothing necessarily “unhealthy” or “junk food”. Just a lot.

Way beyond hunger, sometimes even beyond the line where “full” becomes “discomfort”.

Just the reptilian running absolutely wild. Uncontrollable, more often than not.

And it is not simply caused by the density of the work environment, either, though that makes it worse ~ food too late in the day, and this will happen. 6pm is the latest for me to eat without things spiralling.

Haven't yet figured out the connection between time of day and ravenous reptilian consuming everything in its path. But it's certainly interesting.