The Bell of Truth | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, May 7, 2024

(Golden Age of Gaia)

May 6, 2024

For something so small, it
wreaks havoc. Feeds on my
sweat. Opens old wounds.
She hisses demands, and I do
nothing but obey. No one
sees me, she says. Only you
and the choke-chain around your neck.
~Sarah Nichols, The Monkey on My Back

While I was restlessly shifting, trying to stop my back from hurting so I could sit and eat lunch, the phrase flashed into my head: Get that monkey off your back for good. 

I visualized it scampering away, chased not by hunters or anything corporeal, but a cold relentless wind of dark gray energy. That gray wind is powered by my desire to be free of pain. And if that requires refraining from random sugar consumption, I have to embrace that as well.

*****

What is the correlation between pain and sugar?

I’ve had back pain occasionally over the years, but the pain always lessened as the day wore on, and vanished within a few days. Not today. No remedy, position, movement, or utter stillness brought anything resembling complete relief.

At some point, the thought wandered through: what has changed, recently? What am I doing, or not doing, that’s different from before? Thinking back to yesterday, what did I do that might’ve caused this agony? Well, I did eat that thing for breakfast, and that other thing midmorning, and then that really big bad thing after dinner. Sugar plus sugar plus sugar.

The thing that’s changed recently has been a marked increase in eating sugary food. 

It didn’t seem like an obvious cause and effect, though. Eat sugar, get back pain. A cursory Internet search, however, brought up multiple hits about the correlation between sugar consumption and back pain (as well as other pain caused by inflammation, which can be caused or exacerbated by sugar consumption). 

But surely not so quickly…one day of mindless sugar binging causing severe pain the next morning. Could it possibly have such a drastic effect, so quickly?

*****

In my experience, it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to analyze or intuit information about a situation when in the midst of severe pain. But the bell of truth was tolling, audible even over the gear-grinding rumble of pain.

It may not seem logical, but for me, at this moment, the correlation is absolute. You’ve been eating more sugar for weeks than you have been in the last several years. Don’t bother looking for research to prove or disprove that increased sugar intake can lead to sudden back pain. Your body is your lab, and the results are evident with half a second’s contemplation. 

*****

Am I willing to go to any length to stop this misery? Am I willing—not for a week, or a month, or forever, but just for today—to refrain from consuming sugary food? 

For today, I can manage that. Tomorrow, I’ll worry about tomorrow. The only time I could consume sugar is in this very moment; right now is the only time I could abstain. Speculation about an unknowable future is meaningless, like garbled code fed to a computer. Garbage in, garbage out.

Ironically, that feels like a metaphor for this very subject. Garbage into self will produce a garbage existence. Very far away from the 5D magical life I want to encourage.

I don’t feel compelled to behave like an a*******c fervently declaring “never again,” emptying bottles of expensive hootch down the drain. Dramatic gestures like that as often as not lead to replacing the bottles the next day, and kicking oneself for having thrown away good money. So I won’t be rooting out the breakfast bars or the sweetened instant oatmeal. At least, not today.

But those two sour cream old-fashioned donuts I stuck in the freezer? Trash. I will put that garbage outside of me, rather than in.