Notes from a Quiet Town

It’s been a long time since I blogged.  It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to say anything publicly.  It has been an eventful two months.  Where can I start?

Well, I am lost for words.  I still find the whole blogging/status updates/public sharing of my thoughts and feelings to be a strange and unnatural thing.  However, in order to maintain a wide and far-flung group of friends (my “Social Network”) the blog becomes essential.  Here’s what I have to share today.

I have experienced a huge energy shift in the past weeks.  Having reached the 7-month mark in my raw food adventure, I have begun to live the deep changes that this diet brings about.  I have also completed a full year of Yoga Teacher Training and am  feeling the benefits of the deep inquiry and pleasant discipline that are indisputedly part of the yogic path.  I guess that the main shift has been toward a feeling of greater peace and a greater sense of personal freedom.  I feel freer to express my thoughts and desires, and freer to act upon them.  My anxiety gap is closing.  The anxiety gap, for those of you who don’t know about this part of my personal philosophy, is the space between what you know to be correct and what you are actually doing.  The wider the gap between these two states, the greater the space in your life that is filled with anxiety.

I tested this a few weeks ago:  I had committed to go to an event that did not really excite me, but which I “ought to” have attended.  A few days beforehand, I read about a Yoga Festival in Catalunya.  Of course, the two fell on the same date.  Now, I knew immediately which I wanted to attend but had a huge grapple about being able to express my desire.  I nearly crumbled, but then I slept on it.  The morning before, I awoke from a vividly graphic dream.  I had been bandaged all over my body with waht seemed like sticky tape, over which had been tattooed big black tattoos.  This covered my whole body.  I looked in the mirror and realised that I could remove the tape from my face.  I began doing so, and gradually removed all the sticky tape/tattoos from my entire body.  I awoke with the knowledge that this dream had meaning:  a shedding of the skin.  With certainty, I canceled the undesired event, packed up the car, and drove up to Girona with my little daughter.  People, the elation at the freedom that I actually DO posess to determine at any moment my actions was an immeasurable sensation.  This is what caused the energy shift - the second chakra, self-determination.

Since then I have had a quiet certainty about my wants and purpose.  I have never had this before:  although I have managed to tread a path that has led me to where I am now, I have done so with great uncertainty, doubt and lack of faith.  There is a distinct saving of energy when one ceases to worry about a decision, desire or directiong being “right”.  This energy can then be directed towards the task at hand - instead of sucking the energy away thourhg worry, you inject it with purpose.

I have been watching David Wolfe’s videos lately.  For some reason I had doubts about the guy.  Never having met him, nor read his books, (apart from Naked Chocolate, a gift from my man on my 37th b-day this month) I still managed to doubt him.  That’s your negative mind at work, Rachel.  Anyway, he is strangely compelling.  Even in his videos you can sense his energy and humour, and purpose and simplicity.  I have found myself having recurring dreams about David Wolfe.  The subconscious is a rare thing, I tell you.

I love the fact that Britain’s new farming minister is a vegetarian, and so is his boss!

Having read an interview with Nobel-prize winnning neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini in today’s El Pais, I found her comments about the right vs. left brain intriguing.  While Shazzie and Kate Wood wax lyrical about right-brainedness, how we need to feed and stimulate this neglected intuitive part of our cerebrum, La Doctoressa Levi-Montalcini says the opposite.  Indeed, she says that people are right-brained when under the influence of crowds, dictators and instinct.  To become more human, we need to develop the rational, thinking, left brain.  Hmmm…..I guess that I can see both sides of the argument.  That intuition and feelings are certainly important if we are to develop empathy and cohesiveness. But  I can also see that rational thought can save the day when emotions run high.  I find it intriguing that La Montalcini says that the left brain has had neither somatic nor functional development to the same extent as the right brain hemisphere.  She says that the right-brain dominance is a throwback to our animal past that we must strive to shake off.

I have been doing yoga for ten years now.  I began living it today.

Oh no!  It’s been ages since I last updated my blog!  I have many tiny inspirations throughout the day, but seldom manage to get them into print. Maybe it’s time I started twittering?  I wonder if tiny soundbites fit my lifestyle better than well-developed missives.  Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it and just accept that I write when I write and when I don’t write, I don’t.  Although, I’m sure a few sparks of inspiration get lost in the process, which is what nags me.  Anyway…

I have the dehydrator running for the first time. I’m making flax crackers from a recipe I found on the Give It To Me Raw community.  I also whipped up a few atom bombs, according to the orginal recipe from many moon ago in my London days, and am having a go at dehydrating four of them.  It makes a fan sound, but otherwise is a pretty innocuous machine.

The Green Star juicer is proving to be a fab partner in the kitchen.  Amazing yield and fantastic juices.  I whipped up a little celery-carrot-purple carrot-pear-parsley-garlic green juice the other morning and man did it kick ass!  I walked around the whole day with garlic on the tongue, but I sure felt energized, even though I’d been up half the night with the baby.

The Blendtec Total I’ve also been using but am not totally convinced yet.  It is great for smoothies, and I made a fantastic almond mylk today.  But I agree with the critics of the Blendtec that the pre-programmed control panel is a bit of a pig to intuit.  I think I’d have preferred and nice twisty little knob.  And, the Blendtec doesn’t come with a tamper, like the Vita-Prep.  This means the dreaded situation where your ingredients are pasted to the edges of the jar while the blades fruitlessly whirl through air arises with frequency.  Or, at least, with what I’ve tried to do with it.  Maybe I am trying to make my blender be a food processor? Above-mentioned flax crackers were certainly not a happy glob in the ol’ blender.  Nor was the coconut I tried to cream the other day, but that might be because it actually turned out to be bad.  I dunno.  I am going to keep trying and see where the Blendtec leads me.

The cool thing is the my dude is getting quite into the whole raw thing. He’s making smoothies in the morning, salads at lunchtime, reading Shazzie’s books and generally quite enthused about the left-of-centre ideas that I keep springing on him.  Yay!

Please go listen to this interview with Colon Hydrotherapist Michael Perrine. It’s full of practical information but, more importantly, down-to-earth advice about our approach to food, raw foods, diet, detoxing and the search for meaning in life.

Please have a listen to the audio interview here for some information about the role of the lymphatic system in detoxing and the alkalyzing diet.  This interview appears in on the web site of the Movement to Reverse Diabetes Naturally.  Enjoy, then go out and make some green juice.

I am feeling very proud of myself just now.  I have just finished a 3-course raw lunch.  I have been sticking to the raw-all-day plan for a good while now, but admit that I have been less than creative in the planning of my meals.  Breakfast was handfuls of nuts, some dried fruit, green tea (cheating, I know) and lunch a large, lovely mixed salad.  But as my understanding of raw cuisine has evolved, I have begun refining my meals.  Breakfast today was a smoothie made up of fresh squeezed orange juice, coconut cream, banana, strawberry, milled flax seed and maca. Yum YUM!  Lunch was a fresh juice (beetroot, carrot, apple and celery), a large salad and then a little coconut based yogurty kind of desert. I admit that I used tapioca in the desert, so not 100% raw, but getting there!  and best of all, my daughter partook of the desert and proclaimed it good!  Smile!

It has been a difficult week for us.  My daughter has had a cold for over 7 days.  She started going to nursery school in the mornings, but that of course entails comoing home with runny noses.  Naturally, she is more clingy, more whiney, more prone to cry.  She is also outright rejecting what I deem to be healthy food.  It’s really frustrating for me that she will happily eat white bread and cow’s milk cheese, but refuse vegetable soups.  She will repeatedly demand industrial juice, and reject without even a sip the homemade juices I try to give her.

Now, I realise that this situation is of my own making:when I met my partner -Italian, remember - I fell under the spell that I could also indulge in pasta and bread and cheese without paying the price.  I mean, our diet remained high in vegetables and other grains, so it’s ok, right? Wrong.  The noxious effects of eating wheat are insidious:  someone like me, with strong digestion and no history of candida will not immediately feel ill. But after a year or two, everything comes to the surface.  While I was in Italy, I gained an enormous amount of weight.  I was terribly tired and emotionally fragile.  Perhaps some of this is due to new motherhood, but I don’t think that as a species we would have survived long if every new mother became physically weak and emotionally fragile.  I think that this change in me was due to my diet:  the lovely, killer plates of pasta served up by la nonna.

Naturally, my daughter was exposed to this fare and her little chip has been programmed from within the womb and then during breastfeeding to having the products of wheat (in)digestion in the bloodstream.  In short, I have unwittingly produced a food addict because of my lack of attention at such a crucial stage in her development.

Accepting this fact is difficult for me.  I feel like I have finally found my feet again, since going high-raw.  I feel light and full of energy, emotionally calm and much, much happier.  Although I admit to irritation this week due to above cold and due to trying to change my daughter’s eating habits.  She asks for juice and I say water.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Cry.  she asks for bread and I give her quinoa.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Cry.  `It’s tough.  And so I decided yesterday morning that whatever my dietary beliefs, I am acheiving nothing if they produce conflict in my home.  I adore my child and without spoiling her and giving in to her every whim, I have decided not to let it get to me.  After all, we cannot change the situation, we can only change our reaction to it.  Having taken delivery of my raw chocolate fromn Shazzie, and awating my blender (hurrah ‘express’ delivery in Spain),  I will begin to whip up nutritious, delicious treats for my girl that beat any barra gallega (a kind of ciabatta-like white bread) hands down. Om shanti peace in the home.

Please take four minutes to watch this video that explains very succintly the benefits of raw food:  http://tinyurl.com/d2×9rj