CLEARING

7Nov11  Day 68 of 92 Juice & smoothie feasting/fasting

I have been stumbling along with this juice feasting business – modifying & modifying until I sometimes wondered if I had fallen off long ago & did not notice that the wagon had careened off, leaving me wandering in a hinterland of my own making, no rescue in sight.

But, somehow, here I am on my 68th day – who woulda thunk? - & by gar, there’s been some kind of shift.  Don’t know exactly what, but it’s a shift – something’s happening.

I am feeling detached from eating.  Even the smells of my husband cooking meat, frying things, heating up beans, do not unleash cravings.

My stomach feels rather empty & detached from me – or me from it.

I visited with a friend on a Saturday morning in an empty college cafeteria where a series of tables was laid out with every manner of food, including fruit (apparently the potluck lunch of a gathering in the next room).  It was only later that day that I realized I had sat there talking & did not think or yearn about the food-laden table!

I am reading my friend Bryanna Clark Grogan’s wonderful new COOKbook, World Vegan Feast 

(http://www.bryannaclarkgrogan.com/page/page/3115952.htm & https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.184779704909777.50953.100001332474362&type=1&l=7cc139d565), &, even as I pore over the recipes & pictures, fantasizing over preparing dishes in the future, I am not craving them in the here & now.

My friend Metta is visiting from Victoria.  We go out for walks in the gorgeous west coast forest, beside the ocean & mountains, walking my Jack Russell, Maggi-May, & we talk & talk & talk.

I pound on about raw & vegan being the underlying, fundamental basis of health, that if our diet is optimal, everything will heal – body, mind & psyche.  (I emphasize vegan because that is about compassion & consideration for Other – other people, the animals, the planet.)

Mette is coming from the other direction – psyche first.  She believes that we have to get rid of the burdens of our childhoods – so many of us have come through traumatic childhoods.  Mette thinks that some of us cannot shed our extra weight, the extra ‘shit’ until we have confronted out childhoods & are ready to let them go.

Wow!  Here I am realizing – finally! – that I am bunged up with impacted fecal matter (ugghh!!) – mucoid plaque, which I have had for decades.  I have been lumbering around with my ‘meateater’s belly’ & in denial that I actually had that belly, even to criticizing others that do.  For a ‘Born-Again Vegan’, this is horrible for me to imagine how long I have been packing around my meateating persona.

The other thing – the great big trumpeting but unseen elephant in the rooms of my house – is the fact that I am a hoarder!  Oh my god!  I have long admitted that I do ‘collect’ things – that I am a thrift shop aficionado.  Oh I have such wonderful, beautiful, amazing things – some phenomenal bargains.  And books.  Many, many books.  But much of this stuff is packed away so I haven’t seen it in years.  Hoo, you can imagine how I have veered away from the topic of de-cluttering.

My hernia.  On one of our past walks, I theorized to Mette that my hernia was finally my ‘shit’ extruding, protruding into my life, making it impossible to ignore.  I thought this was about my mucoid plaque.  But Mette, in her gentle, diplomatic way, suggested that the mucoid plaque & my ‘collecting things’ were connected.  Why do I collect things?  Well, probably because I have gone through some times in which money has been critically scarce – I buy things so that if I am broke again, I will at least have the basics of civilization.  The other reason probably has to do with my alcoholic father, forever moving his family, who threw out & burned my childhood (we lived in the bush of the Chilcotin Mountains of B.C. Canada when I was a teenager; at 17 I went off to school in Vancouver & while I was gone, my family moved & my father burned all my murals, paintings, letters, poems, diaries).

Mette suggested that this is fear-based.  How would it be if I went forward in confidence that my needs will be met as they arise?  Hoo!  Does this mean, if I can let go of all that stuff, all that ‘shit’ – that the other will follow – as goes the psyche, so too goes the colon?  Not to mention the burdens & weights of my childhood.

Thank you Mette.  When the student is ready, the teacher appears?World Vegan FeastBryanna Clark Grogan