BEAUTIFUL WEATHER

Today was a beautiful spring day, though it is not yet May. Nor even March. The winter months march on and the rains don't come and life is strange, and then each day is a gift.

Can we allow ourselves to accept this gift of a beautiful day. Some other day we will have a challenging gift of a cold and stormy day. And then our job will be to love that day.

Hmmm. Anyway, today was nature's little Valentine to us in the Sonoma Valley, before the grape growers get out with their…. Hey, let's not go there.

Beautiful day.

Thanks.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HAPPINESS

Happiness is how we like to be, and yet many of us spend big chunks of our days, and hence our lives, either unhappy, or in some sort of busy trance where we are neither happy nor unhappy, but mainly just "busy." On the way to the market, thinking of what we will buy. In the market, thinking of what we'll make for dinner. Eating the dinner and thinking about wishing we didn't have to clean up afterwards. After dinner some sort of event to rush off to, or perhaps a time to blotto the mind with television.

Oh, well.

And what is it about happiness that is so good for us?

When we are happy we are not striving and complaining and wanting for something else. We are here, now and in a state of fullness and joy about being here and now. This is good for our health, and good for our soul, and good for the people around us, and good for the world.

Let's bypass all the arguments that might say you can't be in bliss all the time, and just think about this: when was the last time we were just here and now and happy?

And when were we happy today?

And when were we happy yesterday?

And what did those moments of happiness feel like? And what did we do, or forget to do, that helped create those moments of happiness?

You know, so much of psychology, so-called, is pouring over our unhappiness. What if we just took the other approach and put awareness on recalling and increasing our moments and times and hours and days of happiness?

Wouldn't that be a step toward a sweeter life, a life that would be nicer for ourselves and easier on those around us, and also, since we wouldn't need to rush and buy so often, much kinder to the Earth as well?

SEEDS AND NUTS: Soaking a Way Good and Healthy Idea

If you want to eat raw

Or
You want to lose weight

Or
You want to have rich yummy smoothies that are way good for you

Or
You like real protein and fat and want to lessen or avoid animal stuff

Then:
Eating soaked nuts and seeds is essential to great health.

In my opinion.

You, as always, get your own opinion in the food wars/ opinions/ ideas.

Anyway: if you go for seeds:

Soak them before you eat them. How ?, someone asked yesterday.

Like this: get a quart jar (canning jars), add half to three quarters of organic seeds or nuts (they expand when the water comes), add filtered water and let sit overnight.

The next day, pour off and use some of the water and some of the seeds in any smoothie you wish, or eat them straight on, or in salads.

Then keep rinsing them once of twice a day.

If the seeds are sunflower, rinse a lot and start to refrigerate after a couple of days if you haven't used 'em up. They get funky after that long.

If they are flax, refrigerate after the first couple of hours, cause they start to mold.

Why soak? To undo the enzyme inhibitors in seeds and nuts the way nature does: by soaking them and starting them off to being living and sprouting entities.

PORPOISE OF LIFE, Raw Chocolate, Pleasure Anyone???

This is the food blog, the health blog, the backpages and reference blog. It's the more experimental, in a way, though they all have a great variety of articles and approaches.

If saving the Earth, is one of our jobs in life, saving the earth and saving the oceans, and saving the porpoises for their swims of delight through their lives and their waters, then how we eat has some impact on all this.

Some of the things we do, we have no idea the impact until someone like Bill Mollison, the co-creator of Permaculture starts to talk about cat food, and huge areas of the Gulf of Mexico being denuded of shrimp for the cats. Should we stop having cats? I don't know.

Children will end up taking a lot more of the Earth's resources than a cat will, and an army tank, charging down some desert in some foreign land may consume more than any child will.

So, who knows.

And, back to food: if we eat meat, let's get our meat from places where it got to be on pasture or wild most of its life. If we eat meat let's look at the living conditions and the food these animals were feed.

If we eat fruit, let's see if the fruit is from Earth and trees that haven't been harmed and weirded out by pesticides and other chemicals.

You know all that.

Okay.

Raw chocolate.

You can buy it in the store, raw and organic and sustainably grown. It keeps you up a little at night and is bitter and is a lot of fun.

Here's a high class way to get a hell of a lot of nutrition and still be okay for diabetics or those with Candida.

Raw Smoothie for the Health Nut:

Get yourself a blender or a Vita Mix.

Add some good filtered water.

Add some healthy weeds (dandelion, mallow, chicory) or health greens: cilantro, endive, parsley).

Add some Synergy.

Add some soaked sunflower and pumpkin and flax seeds.

Add some raw, organic chocolate nibs.

Add some Stevia, ginger and any other herbs, like cinnamon, cayenne, maybe do one at a time and see how it's coming.

Blend it up. Make a lot. Drink slowly, outside, standing up and sensing your feet and your breathing and looking at some trees and clouds and blue sky in the distances.

This is good. This is life. Yes.

Jokes Are Good for Your Health

And your happiness.

And, sometimes, your brain.

JOKE
Jokes, like dreams, if grabbed soon after the experience, can much more readily be kept alive and in memory. Tonight was the joke show on Prairie Home Companion, and if you don't know Prairie Home Companion, 'tis a shame, indeed. But let's see what I can remember after a bit of a doze from eating too much, an occupational hazard of the raw foods world and the Chris Elms mind, I've mentioned before.

Some bears come down from Canada into Minnesota, and they are a bit strange, sometimes very happy and charming and entertaining, and sometimes extremely unfriendly and savage. Bi-polar bears.

A bunch of thieves steal some Viagra and take off with it, hardened criminals.

A man goes into a party and spies a curvy and beautiful woman. He goes up to her, "I'm so glad you are here. What's your name?" "Carmen." "Carmen, that's a nice name? Did you always have that name?" "No, I gave it to myself for the two things I like best. I like cars. And I like men." She smiles at him. "And what's your name?" "Golftits."

Albert Einstein goes to heaven and St. Peter says, "You look like Einstein, but can you prove it?" So Einstein writes a bunch of formulas and St. Peter nods and lets him in. Then Picasso comes, and St. Peter again says, "You look like Picasso, but can you prove it?" So Picasso reproduces one painting after another, and St. Peter lets him in. The George W. Bush arrives ( a stretch, perhaps) and St. Peter says, "You have to prove who you are. Einstein showed he was Einstein, and Picasso showed he was Picasso." George W. Bush says, "Who's Einstein? Who's Picasso?" And St. Peter, satisfied, says, "Okay. You've proved it."

Did you hear about the paranoid dyslexic who was afraid that he was following people all the time?

And the cannibals, who tasting a clown they were stewing up, ask each other, "Does this taste a little funny?"

Now I'll go ask Marlie what she remembers.

The bra that says to the hat, "You go on ahead and I'll give these two a lift."
A snail has an operation to removes its shell. Afterwards they ask it how it's feeling and it says, "Fine, but I'm feeling a little sluggish."

And now, trying to bring up a couple of more. Can't. Maybe they'll come in dreams.

Well, their website is a big help. Here are some I liked: From tonight's joke show:

Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House. That's the farthest anyone who wears a dress has gotten since J. Edgar Hoover.

Nancy Pelosi was visiting Iraq. President Bush said he was against setting any timetables for her to return. He said to bring her back prematurely would send the wrong message.
There on my computer are the two buttons representing the things I can never have: Control and Escape.

I'm having a problem with my computer. When I type in my password, all it shows are those little stars.

Right. Little asterisks. That's for your protection. So if someone were standing behind you, they couldn't see what your password is.

Okay, but they show up even when nobody is standing behind me.

The blond got a present from her boyfriend, a cell phone, and the next day, while she was shopping, the phone rang and it was him. He said, "How do you like your new cell phone?" She said, "I just love it, it fits in my purse, and your voice is so clear. But how did you know I was at Wal Mart?"

Two men took the test to qualify for a job and both men answered nine out of ten questions correctly, but they gave the job to the first man: he answered Question No. 10 "I don't know" and the other man answered it, "Neither do I."

I needed some time off from work so I decided to act crazy. I hung upside down from the ceiling and when the boss asked me what I was doing, I said, "I'm a light bulb." "You're going crazy," he said. "Take a few days off." I left and my officemate followed me. The boss asked where she was going. She said, "I can't work in the dark." ---- Did I mention she was blonde?
What's the difference between "Congress" and the "Library of Congress"? n the Library of Congress you can't mess with the pages.

The minister raises his hands and says: "we are but dust..." The little girl turns to her mother and says, "mother, what is butt dust?"

If you don't go to other people's funerals, then they won't come to yours.

Bill Gates died and went to heaven and was given a little cottage in the woods and next door was a mansion on a hill with a golf course and tennis courts, and there lived the captain of the Titanic. "Why does he deserve better?" Bill said to God. "Because the Titanic only crashed once."

How many Christians does it take to change a light bulb?
Three, but they're really one.

How many Catholics does it take to change a light bulb?
CHANGE?! Did you say "change"?

Third Grade Jokes
Why did ancient Romans close down the Coliseum?
The lions were eating up the prophets.

Is it true that an alligator won't attack you if you carry a flashlight?
Depends on how fast you carry the flashlight.

Religious:
Q: Why did the Unitarian cross the road?
A: To support the chicken in its search for its own path.

The children in the Unitarian church school were drawing pictures. One girl said, "I'm going to draw a picture of God." The teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like. "They will when I get done with my picture."

A woman went into a fabric store and asked the clerk for nine yards of material to make a nightgown. The clerk said, "Nine yards is way too much material for a nightgown." The woman said, "I know, but my husband is Unitarian and he would rather seek than find."

A priest, a Pentecostal preacher and a Rabbi challenged each other to a preaching contest. They would all go out into the woods, find a bear, preach to it, and try to convert it. Two days later, they got together to discuss the experience. Father Flannery said, "Well, I read to him from the Catechism and then I sprinkled him with holy water and Holy Mary Mother of God he was gentle a lamb. The bishop is coming out next week to give him first communion and confirmation." Reverend Billy Bob said, " Well I read to my bear from God's HOLY WORD! And I took HOLD of him and wrestled him down to the creek. And I DUNKED him and BAPTIZED him and he became as gentle as a lamb. We spent the rest of the day praising Jesus." They both looked down at the rabbi, who was in a body cast. The rabbi said, "Looking back on it, circumcision may not have been the best way to start."

Others:
Q: What do you get when you throw a hand grenade into a French kitchen?
A: Linoleum Blown-Apart!

The statistician lay with his head in the oven and his feet in ice, and on the average he felt fine.

Did you hear about the mechanic who was addicted to brake fluid? He said it was no problem -- he could stop any time.

Why did the urologist lose his license? He got in trouble with his peers.

An Irish priest is driving down to New York and gets stopped for speeding in Connecticut. The state trooper smells alcohol on the priest's breath and then sees an empty wine bottle on the floor of the car. He says, "Sir, have you been drinking?" "Just water," says the priest. The trooper says, "Then why do I smell wine?" The priest looks at the bottle and says, "Good Lord! He's done it again!"

What did the Earth say after the Earth quake? ----Sorry, my fault.

How can a woman rid her apartment of cockroaches? ----Ask them for a commitment.

Have you heard about the new existentialist breakfast cereal?
It's called Raisins D'etre.

A B-flat, a D-flat, and an F walk into a bar. The bartender says to them, "I'm sorry we don't serve minors here"... So the D-flat leaves and the B-flat and the F have an open fifth between them.

Q: Why do Jewish Mothers make great parole officers?
A: They never let anyone finish a sentence.

Jewish mother sent a telegram: "Start worrying. Details to follow…

An elderly Jewish man was brought to the local hospital. A pretty nurse tucks him into bed and says, "Are you comfortable?" He replies, "I make a nice living...."

Chinese civilization goes back 4000 years and Jewish civilization goes back 5000 years. So what did those people eat for a thousand years?

These two I didn't hear, but are pretty good, which shows how easily I'll take my laughs:

A cop sees two kids parked in a car late Saturday night on the edge of town and he walks over with his flashlight and shines it in the window. The boy is listening to the radio and the girl is knitting a scarf. The cop says, "What are you doing here?" "Just listening to music and she's knitting." "How old are you?" The boy says, "I'm 22." The cop says, "And is she 18?" The boy says, "She will be in about fifteen minutes."

A wagon train got lost crossing the Plains and they're low on food and they see an old Norwegian sitting under a tree. They stop and ask him, "Is there food around here?" He says, "Well, I don't know, but I tell you, I wouldn't go that way ---- there's a big bacon tree over that hill." "A bacon tree?" "Yeah, so I wouldn't go that way."

The wagon train talked about it and a bacon tree sounded good to them so they went over the hill and over the next hill and a thousand Indians were waiting for them and attacked them from all sides and took them prisoner except for the leader who went crawling back to the old Norwegian and said, "There was no bacon tree there, just a mob of Indians who took everybody captive."

The Norwegian said, Vait a minute. He picked up his Norwegian-English dictionary and looked through it, and then said, "Oh, it wasn't a bacon tree. It was a ham bush."

CAVE MAN/ WOMAN DIET
In the old days they had no super markets, they had no gardens, they had no farms. We are talking the really old days.

Some people think this is humanity's most natural and healthy diet. As you've seen over these pages, I keep putting out food ideas as alternatives, not givens. This is something to be explored and not turned into dogma. Food is fun and experimenting is fun and trying out non-habitual pathways is fun.

I'll push that, the Feldenkrais Way, as I call it: the way of exploring, and going slower and lifelong learning and transformation and improvement. This I'm clear is good for all. The food thing, is more tentative. What you eat, this is a game that is great to play and to learn.

So anyway, cave people, didn't eat grain. They didn't eat sugar. They didn't eat dairy. They ate meat, fish, nuts, berries, fruits, vegetables, eggs, and insects. Most of the "cave man diet" people don't mention insects, but that was a big part of a primitive diet. Do you want to eat insects? Probably not, though the French eat snails. But that's what the beginning humans ate.

Some people turn this into a raw meat diet, which is an interesting experiment. There's a lot to be said for raw meat and raw milk and raw cheese and raw eggs. I won't give a long exposition here, but all the earlier comments of raw food having all the enzymes necessary for complete digestion of the food, those comments apply to raw meat and eggs and milk.

I personally, like raw milk that has begun to be digested by fermentation, which is either making it into yogurt (add a little yogurt and let it sit at warmish temperatures, in a sunny window or above the fridge) or kefir (same, add kefir and let it make itself), or sour milk (just let the milk sour with age.). I like to add enzymes (see link at side to Enzymes International) to get the milk to not only go toward yogurt or kefir, but to thicken a little towards cheese.

At any rate, if this seems interesting to you, lots of diets, like South Beach or Atkins, point you toward the cave person diet, and if you have diabetes, and you skip the fruit part of the cave person trip, you can do wonders for your health, and some have said, going raw meat will undo diabetes. So, it's all a grand experiment.

Meat without the greasy cooked smell needs a nice sauce to cheer it up, and it's pretty easy, either with soaked seeds, and some veggies like carrots, and whatever spices you love, like ginger, or turmeric, or garlic, or basil, whatever, to make a helluva nice sauce.

Experiment.

Life is good and so are you. Keep learning and discovering.

DIFFERENTIATING AND HEADACHE “CURE”
If you have been following the essays in the WakeUp Feldenkrais sections, you have seen that this work is not about "fixing," but about finding greater unities and connections, by bringing back into awareness and actions parts of us have atrophied or been forgotten or never discovered.

We don’t fix.

And yet, when the headache comes on, we want it to "go away."

And, as Anat Baniel made clear in the recent training segment I attended: if we have something going "wrong," the problem is almost always in insufficient differentiation.

What does that mean if you haven't been to a Feldenkrais or Anat Baniel Training of late? It means that things are too simplified and tied together, that there is not enough subtly and complexity.

Say Iraq. Bad Hussein. Good USA. Solution: get rid of bad Hussein. And what has been the result?

Or in a marriage, when one partner gets stuck on some idea that the mate should "listen to me more." And that becomes the mantra, the demand, the complaint. None of the subtlety of when do they listen, when do they not listen, how do I make it hard or easy for them to listen, when do I listen, when do I act closed to them in just the way I complain they are closed to me. The Work of Byron Katie is nothing if not the differentiation of our fixed and enslaving "thinking / feeling" habits.

Anyway, with a headache, differentiation can often evoke amazing changes. This is just something I invented along the way.

The first and amazing idea, is to let the headache be, and get interested in it. This is the first and greatest differentiation: headache as something of which we can be aware, vs. headache as something being imposed on us from Beyond.

So here we go, on an awareness and differentiation parade.

On the in breath sense the headache on the right half of the skull and head, and on the out breath the left side. Then sense the exact contours of the headache while doing that, what is its size and shape. Its exact size and shape and texture.

Then begin to give the left half, now sensed as an exact shape, a certain color during the out breath, and the right half, now sensed as an exact shape, a certain color during the in breath.

And while doing this, sense the larger body and its shape as containing this smaller, two part, two colored, exact shaped headache.

So we have all this differentiation in the headache: right and left. Inside the contours of the headache and outside. The headache itself and the larger body. Our breathing in and our breathing out.

With all these to pay attention to and follow, and become interested in, the pain is often forgotten, and even when it is there, it is just in the headache contours and not in the rest of us, and is half the time in the awareness of one side of the head and in a certain color and shape, and half the time the pain is over on the other side in a certain color and shape.

Under this onslaught of interesting possibilities for attention the "pain" almost always dissolves. Our attention passes from out of our control victimhood, to in charge intentional exploration. We are no longer run by the "headache."

We are free to watch the headache, and to discover the awareness that is much closer to who we really are than this pain. We are the doer and the awarer and the explorer.

This is good.

HEALTHY EATING
The joy of eating is one of our great pleasures in life. The tongue is a big part of our brain, an unfortunate antecedent to rampant cell phone usage but a good way to be for a species that has learned to communicate by language. The mother tongue is the language we first learn.

To sense and be aware of the tongue is a path to a heightened and altered state.

And to eat with awareness of flavors and the gestures of a meal is a great gift to ourselves.

So, we are having a nice gang of food sit around together and eat at our lunch breaks during the Anat Baniel Training. The training is great, and I’d suggest checking it out, ( anatbanielmethod.com), if you are at all interested in dramatic and significant transformation in your own life and in your abilities to be of service to others, others as varied as golfers and skiers who want to improve their sport, to children with cerebral palsy and other neurological disorders, to “plain” everyday sore backs and necks and shoulders.

So we sit around, and have the old conversation: is this food good or bad for you and how harmful is eating sugar say, and how harmful is being obsessed with not having honey a bit if you are on a diet that is trying get rid of Candida.

I don’t know.

I think sugar can mess you up and rob vitamins and lead to worse health. I could be wrong.

I think if you are on a Candida diet you can have fun being strict or you can have fun being lax. I think both are good.

I think driving yourself nuts is probably not so healthy and definitely not so fun. Basically, what I think could be true, could be nonsense, I like to eat extremely healthy and then when I fudge, it’s fudging into fairly healthy, and I’m way ahead of the game.

What you like to do, is up to you.

I really like eating well. I think tons of good flavors and possibilities are out there. I think the more we slow down and really taste our food, and the higher the percentage of raw food we eat, the healthier we will be.

You don’t have to agree.

Love yourself, and let your breathing be full and easy and happy while you eat. This I can recommend without reservation.

TO BE HUMAN

To be human is to have all sorts of choices and chances. Choices to hold grudges or choices to forgive. At a concert tonight, John McCutcheon quoted his father in law as saying that the hatred we hold for other people is like poisoning ourselves and expecting that to hurt the other person.

If we want to be well and healthy, this is a must: to find anyone and everyone that we are having trouble, and forgiving them.

For our sake.

And for theirs.

If we don’t have the generosity to want someone else to feel better, even the rats and assholes, then we aren’t going to have the generosity to want the less well parts of us to heal and be happy again.


What other choices:

To be happy or not to be happy.

To be present or not to be present.

This is a lot. We have amazing choices.

To learn, or to stay in our ruts. Isn’t that great, all our choices?

ENZYMES

The whole raw food thing has a couple of delicious attractors to it.

One: the food is easy and tastes good. A fresh peach off the tree is heaven. Some chard these days, that has been softened by frost after frost is delicious. They are right there for the picking, they couldn’t be any fresher and they taste great. This is fast foods the way fast foods is supposed to be: from the tree or ground right into your mouth if you are lucky enough to have your own garden and orchard, or have one to easily visit. ( Or ride a bike to, and cut out the fossil fuel connection.)

Two: the food is high in water. Our bodies, we all know are 70% water or more. Raw foods are full of water that nature has kissed with sun and soil and plant magical transformation. This is the best water you can get and raw foods are full of this water.

Three: every raw food has intact the enzymes that nature has provided for that food to breakdown. Either the food breaks down like the peach to create food for the seed, or the food breaks down the way chard would to return to soil and keep the cycle of growth and vitality going, but these live foods still have enzymes in them. So when you eat them, the foods break down inside of you and are much more easily digested. When we are young, or so the natural doctors say, we have extra enzymes, and so we can handle food without enzymes. As we get older, these enzymes get used up and the foods are harder and harder to digest.

Cooking destroys the enzymes. Any heat over 110 or 115 degrees (stick your hand in and have to pull it out quick), destroys enzymes, so all cooked food is worthless in having enzymes.

In nature, foods full of natural sugars have the enzymes to digest those sugars, and foods full of protein have those enzymes and foods with fat, have lipase to digest the fat. This is why Victoria Botenko talks of how she lost 120 pounds eating gobs of avocados. The lipase in the avocados digested her extra fat. And the lipase in sunflower seeds or almonds or raw butter or olive oil would also do the same.

Recall an earlier essay on seeds: to de-activate an enzyme inhibitor in seeds and nuts, soak them at least overnight, and then if you want even a little more umph in them, start draining and sprouting them. Again, we want to maximize enzymes for ourselves.

All good raw foods books, and the Price Pottenger Nutritional Foundation, have tons to say about nutrition.

You could try any of these, and many more:

Price Pottenger Nutritional Foundation.

Carol Alt

Raw Family

ON FEAR OF BEING COLD

Many of these essays I write to pass on my understanding of some problem that has been bothering me for a long time, and since I’ve been gnawing away at it, and have chased down many dead ends, and have made some progress, I’m interested in passing on what I have learned.

And here’s a problem I have made little progress on, if I am to be honest. I could fake some answers: bundle up and get out into the cold, but really, I’m avoiding going outside now that we’ve got a cold snap.

And the “cold” here, in the forties and low fifties, much of the rest of this country would love to be experiencing now, in January, which is, after all a winter month.

So: I could and have bundled up and got outside. I’ve done real work in the sun. I’ve ridden my bike at top speed and worked up some happiness and warmth.

And still: I’m avoiding it.

So what tools do I have at my disposable?

The work of Byron Katie for one. And for a big number two, the idea of separating out the real sensation, from the story about what’s going on.

The real sensation, I realize, I don’t give much credence to, I don’t really get into the “present moment” with my sensations of being cold. Except when I first go to bed, and the sheets are icy, and I’m usually a bit cold to start with, I’ve realized and discovered, that to move a bit and let my feet feel the cold at its worst, and then to just breathe into and sense the coldness of the cold parts of me begins to dissolve a state of contraction and fear in me.

But this is with the help of a bunch of blankets covering me (we do sleep with the window open, in a room where we shut the door to keep the rest of the house from freezing, but it is cold in the sleeping room), so I know my body heat will start to rise.

But now. To go outside. Take a brisk walk, and not to avoid the cold. To sense which parts of me are the coldest, to sense what that cold is actually like as sensation, and to do the Work on the story.

The story that “this is too cold.” Or, that, “it should be so cold.” Or that, “I should have a better body that can heat up better in cold weather.” Or that I “need to eat more fat.” All these words give a place to burn off bits of the anxiety I experience when I get cold, but they end up draining and disconnecting me from the moment.

Which means I can’t be happy. Which is not how I want to live.

So, time to go take a walk and see if I can separate sensation and story. ( And I discovered….. still a lot to learn. Good.)

SUPPER TO END THE DAY.

.....Make it light.

So, la, la, we’ve come from breakfast to lunch to dinner. After roaming around on some raw foods sites, I must say that some present a strong case for just starting the day with fruit and others talk of the healing and miraculous powers of the

Green Smoothie,
which is a salad in a blender, say kale and spinach and some parsley, with some fruit to sweeten it, like pears, bananas, apples. (Again, if you are diabetic or into a Candida reductions program, maybe some stevia instead of the fruit.)


Anyway, you can hear from many people lots of ways to go, but I’d say: figure out a way to start the day eating raw and end the day eating light.

Remember the old word: supper, that was what they used to call the night meal. Supper was for soup. It was light. The main meal was in the middle of the day, and just a little soup, or a snack of fruit, or a salad to finish you up tidy, this was a way of life far more healthy than the big rich meals with which people cram themselves to hide from whatever it is that they wish to hide from.



So, maybe you’d like to try to eat lighter at night. A raw soup of carrots and ginger and some fennel or cucumbers. A cooked soup of some odds and ends in the vegetable world. Another Green Smoothie. Some fruit and a cup of tea. Try something like this, easy and experimental. See what happens.

See if you need less sleep.

See if you wake without the usual grogginess. See if you feel excited about life in the morning.

It’s all an experiment.

Enjoy.

LUNCH, FOOD COMBINING, NEW WAYS OF THINKING, PERHAPS

Okay. So you’ve started the day with some super food, or a piece of fruit, or a little bit of yogurt and you’ve snacked on some more super smoothie or a piece fruit or vegetable and you’re ready for lunch.

Here’s another shift in habit that drives some people crazy, and then again, some people like to try new ways, and many of the health advocates indicate this way of eating, and that’s food combining.

The main rules of food combining are simple:

1) Eat fruit alone, and on an empty stomach. ( I expand this and say fruit with any all raw meal is fine, including a nice thick high protein / fat raw smoothie).

2) Combine proteins with vegetables. The strict people just like protein and leafy vegetables, but I expand, protein and any vegetable that is raw. Not protein with cooked starchy veggies like potatoes and carrots and turnips and whatnot.

3) Combine grains with vegetables, here since the grains are already starch you can add starchy veggies, and it’s good, in my mind to have some raw veggies with your meals if you can.

What this leaves out is the combinations to which we are so accustomed: meat and potatoes, bread and peanut butter, pizza with the starch/grain crust and the cheese / protein filling. Some other day, I’ll give a little write about how milk products that are organic and aren’t raw aren’t so great, (with yogurt, kefir and butter being possible transitional exceptions), but for now: the old macaroni ( or pasta) and cheese: bad for you since the macaroni (or pasta) is in the refined flour category that Weston Price (see earlier essay) found common to all people with lots of ailments, and bad for you in combining the grain and the protein.


So does that leave anything for lunch?


Yes.

And lunch, the middle of the meal day, many recommend being the main meal, the big meal of your day. See perhaps, The Three Season Diet. ((And, of course, buy from a local bookstore, such as Readers’ Books.)) This book, the three season diet, has many instances of people radically losing weight by shifting their eating to the middle of the day, and eating seasonally.

And what big meal would be nice with food combining?

Some meat and a salad.

Some (raw) cheese and a salad.

Some protein smoothie/ dressing/ dip and a batch of any sorts of veggies, be they salad or not.

Make your salad dressing a feast: olive oil, flax oil, miso, tahini, spices, raw apple cider vinegar, even a little fish oil. Some digestive herbs like ginger and turmeric and coriander. Make it yummy. Make sure the olive oil is organic and cold pressed. This is great for you.

Some whole grains, whole wheat, rice, millet, quinoa, barley, rye and some veggies or salad.

The key to getting things to taste good is your use of spices and your combinations. Again, lots of the raw foods and the various healthy eating books can give you recipes that follow these combinations.

Fit for Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, is kind of the classic in this way of getting healthy by food combining. They encourage people to start the day with fruit alone, to make sandwiches (I’d say skip all bread, but if you do bread, do Ezekiel bread or one of those that are closest to being whole grain) with just tomato and onion and avocado filling say, to have a protein meal of steak and salad. I’d say, better, salmon and salad, and cook the salmon as rare as you can, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

The ideas are this: for lunch, eat a lot. Give yourself time to rest a bit after. Give yourself time to eat and enjoy. Give yourself time to eat and follow your breathing and have a sweet conversation, if only with yourself that’s fine too.

In this lunch have either protein and veggies

Or veggies and grains, preferably whole oats, or whole wheat kernels, or whole rye, barley, millet and so on.

As per always and always: food is fun. They are gobs of delicious ways to eat with these combinations.

See, perhaps: Raw Family Recipes. Or: Living-Foods.com/recipes.

Think of your favorite ways to do the above food combining. Invent, create, discover.

(And one advantage to an all raw meal is that everything combines with everything else, since they all come with their enzymes intact.). Experiment. Enjoy. Thrive.


(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Life on Earth ::: Slow Sonoma
for the last two essays.)

START THE DAY OFf RIGHT WITH SUPER FOOD

Health begins in the morning. And what nicer way to do this than a hug and a smile and a stretch and some exercise and some super smoothie?


The whirl in the Vita Mix

Which means what?

It means: do a little exercise ( some stretches, wiggles, Feldie fun, take a talk of the short sort) and then have some wheat grass juice. Now that I’ve got a camera working in the digital mode, I’ll go through once more how to make super wheat grass. Not today, though.

Anyway: have some wheat grass and then do about an hour of real exercise. Or half an hour. Or twenty minutes. Do some.

Then have a super smoothie to start your day. You can see in the before picture the ingredients: soaked flax seeds, soaked pumpkin seeds, soaked sunflower seeds, Synergy, enzymes, ginger, Celtic sea salt and a little bit of Stevia.

This is to make a power drink, full of protein, full of fats that will lose not gain weight, full of nutrients. Here’s the list of what you get in Synergy:

Pure Synergy’s Ingredients (from web page: Synergy Facts)

Synergized® Algae 3.40 grams/serving
Fresh freeze-dried, cold-dried or Refractance Window™ dried: Pure Spirulina Crystals™*, Pure Klamath Crystals™*, Pure Chlorella™, Dunaliella*, Kelp*, Wakame*, Kombu*, Bladderwrack*, Dulse*, wildcrafted Dumontiaceae (Cryptosyphonia woodii).

Synergized® Phytonutrients & Enzymes 2.87 grams/serving
Fresh freeze-dried enzymatically active Sprouts of Millet*, Quinoa*, Broccoli*; Apple Fruit*; fresh freeze-dried Blueberry*, Raspberry*; Green Papaya Fruit*; natural plant Enzymes (Amylase, Cellulase, Lipase, Protease).

Synergized® Chinese Mushrooms & Herbs 2.61 grams/serving
Reishi*, Shiitake*, Maitake*, Agaricus*, Cordyceps*. Standardized 7:1 herbal extract: Astragalus Root*, Eleuthero Root*, Lycium (Wolfberry) Fruit*, Tang-Kuei Root*, Schizandra chinensis Fruit*, Atractylodes macrocephala Root, Fo-Ti Root, Paeonia lactiflora Root, Rehmannia Root, Codonopsis Root, Licorice Root*, Jujube Fruit, Poria cocos Root, Ginger Rhizome, Tangerine Peel, Polygala Root, Ligusticum wallichii Root.

Synergized® Green Juices 1.72 grams/serving
Fresh freeze-dried or CO2-dried: juice concentrates of Wheat Grass*, Barley Grass*, Oat Grass*, Alfalfa Grass*; Parsley Leaf*, Spinach Leaf*, Kale Leaf*, Collard Leaf*.

Synergized® Western Herbs 1.15 grams/serving
Fresh freeze-dried: Nettle Leaf*, Red Clover Flower*, Burdock Root*, Yellow Dock Root*, Skullcap Flower* and Leaf*, Dandelion Leaf*, Ginkgo Leaf*. Rosa canina Fruit (Rose Hips)*.

Synergized® Natural Antioxidants 2 milligrams/serving
Rosemary Leaf*, Clove Bud*, Sage Leaf*, natural Vitamin E (sunflower).

*Organic.

All of the ingredients and the final drink

Okay: so the Synergy gives you all that , the flax seeds give you gobs of omega-3 fat, the sunflower and pumpkin seeds give you high quality fat and energy. The enzymes give your body help in rebalancing all that we have lost over the years, the ginger makes it taste more fun, the Celtic salt gives a little help and some sea minerals and the stevia sweetens it up.

This is a drink a diabetic could drink, or someone wishing to rid their body of Candida. That’s another story.

If you are not in either of these categories, you can substitute all sorts of fruit, from berries, to apples, to peaches, to bananas to make this a delicious treat.

It’s fast, it’s super healthy and it’s easy to digest. Drink lots, and if you need a snack before lunch, either have a bit more, or if not diabetic or doing a Candida cleanse: have a piece of fruit. If you are: have either more smoothie, or some raw vegetable like carrot or celery.

This is a wonderful gift to yourself, and you might enjoy trying it. As I say in the link, the Synergy story is well worth reading, and if you do order it, mention me and Marlie and we’ll get a discount on our next purchase. The stuff is expensive and when you re-read the list of all the ingredients, you’ll see why.

Enjoy.

(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Life on Earth ::: Slow Sonoma
for the last two essays.)

FOOD AND HEALTH
To be healthy is one thing we all want. The sad part about being healthy is that you really have to eat healthy to be healthy. And you need to exercise. And you need to be relatively happy.

Which means: it’s a bit of a job.

And yet: the wonderful part of being healthy is that you get to eat really great tasting food. And another wonderful part is that you get to get outside and do what your body loves to do: move around. And a final wonderful part of being healthy is that you can enjoy your life so much more when you are happy and healthy.

Happy?

We’ll talk some about happiness tomorrow ( see Happiness and the Work at the slow sonoma site, as these essays are one a day, but rotate thru the sites), when we come to the Byron Katie work, but for now please consider this as a stunning possibility: we are the ones who chose to be happy or not to be happy.

And now to food. It’s the new year and people like to think about eating healthy. The first thing that comes to mind, usually, is to eliminate junk foods. Good thought. If it comes in a package, if it’s got a list of ingredients on the package (or can), you can probably live just fine without it. If it’s served at a fast foods place, you don’t even have to hear what I have to say about that.

And still there is a core to healthy eating that is contradictory to the habits and addictions of most people in this sickly country. This core is to eat lots of fresh, raw, in-season and organic food.

And to avoid two elements.

A little background on these elements. In the 1930’s a dentist named Weston Price went around the world to find people with the best teeth. He found these people in small enclaves as varied in diet as blood drinkers in Africa, fish and oatmeal eaters in the British Channel Islands, fish and fruit and nut and vegetable eaters of the Pacific Islands, raw cheese and sourdough rye bread farmers in the Swiss Alps. Since this was the thirties, and the “modern” world as coming in fast, most of these people had relatives or a nearby village who had gone “modern,” which meant : sugar and refined flour. Without exception, the people who had gone “modern” had poor teeth and all the diseases of our time, cancer, heart disease, arthritis and so on. Those eating their “traditional” diets had almost perfect teeth (one cavity per twenty people or so), as well almost a total absence of these “modern” diseases.

He wrote a book about it, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. And the modern way to get this information is to get Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions, and read all her commentary between and around the recipes. I advocate a different diet than Sally Fallon, but she makes the case strong and clear of what Weston Price discovered:

(1)IF YOU WANT TO BE HEALTHY, FIND WAYS OF GETTING SWEET WITHOUT SUGAR. Pears and apples, honey and stevia, sweet potatoes and carrots, there is a lot of sweet in the world without sugar. And

(2) FIGURE OUT HOW TO LIVE LIFE WITHOUT REFINED FLOUR.

That’s “hard,” if you want to stay the same as everyone else, and maybe not so hard if you are excited to explore changing your habits, and seeing what life without bread and crackers and cookies and cakes is like.

For incentive, think of Scott Nearing, co-author (with his wife Helen), of Living the Good Life, out building with stone and working in his garden until his late nineties, and compare that with most of those we see even in their eighties.

There are many books out there with thousands of healthy and delicious recipes that live a life free of sugar and refined flour. Maybe you’d like to explore them. Maybe not.

These choices are always wonderful and exciting and best to be led by an intuitive pull. Maybe you’ll feel the tug.

(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Life on Earth ::: Slow Sonoma
for the last two essays.)

THE GLORY OF TODAY

Today is the end of the year.

Tomorrow is the beginning of a new year.

This is bogus and this is wonderful, a chance to remember how amazing a day can be, how amazing it is to be alive, how wonderful is the miracle of always, always, always being able to come to the present.

In the present we can begin anew.

A new year, a new day, a new moment: when we are now, we are alive. Sometimes we are stuck in our habits of what to do next, so: do nothing. Or stay present and move slowly, think slowly, feel slowly, allow the newness of now to inspire you to discovering a new way to move, a new way to feel, a new way to think.

Each moment is a gift.

Each moment is a present.

What a nice day, today, to move slowly and ponder and wonder and feel and smile in and about all the possibilities of a full and wonder-ful and aware and love filled and happy life.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Life on Earth ::: Slow Sonoma
for the last two essays.)

TALKING TO JESUS

Me: Hey, Jesus, what do you think of this Christmas thing?

Jesus: This is a trick question, right? I'm supposed to say it's too commercial and ridiculous and way off from the simple, "give all your worldly goods to the poor and follow me," kind of thing I'm purported to have said.

Me: Well, what did you say?

Jesus: Love your brethren. Love your neighbors. Love your enemies. Love God.

Me: Some people get into a loving spirit at Christmas time.

Jesus: Well, I was kind of hoping for an all life commitment. As in loving your neighbors on Christmas day and on the Fourth of July, whatever that is about, and in traffic jams, whatever they are all about. What is this world all about, anyway?

Me: Making money and looking good in someone else's eyes. I think that's kind of what turns the wheels. And being comfortable, if you are in one of the rich nations.

Jesus: We didn't have so many nations back then. We had the Romans, kind of the Big Guys and everyone else, in that part of the world, didn't count for much. Seems like your country is kind of like the Romans, eh?

Me: So. Our country should give everything away to the poor?

Jesus: You know. Back in those days, I knew everything, but it was just some villages and Pharisees who didn't understand the true meaning of love and living a God-ly life. Now, you guys have created such an amazing mess.

Me: But are you all powerful and whatnot.

Jesus: Doesn't look like it, does it?

Me: But God is supposed to be omnipotent.

Jesus: Well, there's the whole: let them have free will and make as big a mess as possible and maybe they'll turn to God and find a way out. But, you know, the Osama Bin Laden people kind of think the same thing: destroy the modern world because it has strayed from God. Which it has. But the solution isn't God and destruction, it's love.

Me: Don't you go for that I am the Way thing anymore?

Jesus: I'm the Way of love and healing and accepting all classes and women and poor and lepers and prostitutes, and worst of all, tax collectors, and that's the way. It's not about getting on the Jesus team.

Me: You mean Buddhists might get into heaven?

Jesus: They go for rebirth, don’t' they? So they really don't need heaven.

Me: Where do all the extra people come from if there's rebirth.

Jesus: I'm not a Buddhist. Ask them.

Me: So do good people go to heaven?

Jesus: The whole eternal life promise. That's the big lure, isn't it?

Me: It's not what you offer?

Jesus: Well: it's not working very well to get people to love the guy next door and to stop blowing up the people in some other country. This after you die, heaven is going to be your reward thing, gets people out of the now.

Me: The now's my thing.

Jesus: The Kingdom of Heaven is within. When you get there, you are so Now, there's nothing left.

Me: So, do you have a message for people on this Christmas Day of 2006?

Jesus: Don't drink and drive. Listen more than you talk. Be quiet for awhile every night and morning. Think about the vastness of the world and the miracle of life. See if you can make a difference. And… love yourself and your neighbor and your doggone enemy. And God.

Me: What is God?

Jesus: God is the waking up to now and to love and the way you are when you are so easy with yourself and kind to other people you don't have a care in the world, and you feel great to be alive.


(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Life on Earth ::: Slow Sonoma
for the last two essays.)

OVEREATING AND CHOICES:

Self-attack, self-love, curiosity.

These mean that I have options. Options mean I am free, I'm a real human being, I'm not stuck, I can learn and change and enjoy my life even if I'm not perfect or things around me aren't perfect.

Now to the eating thing.

One of the weird and wonderful parts about eating a raw/ living foods way, is that you can eat tons and tons of food and never gain weight, and never be sick. One of the downsides, though, is that you can eat and eat and get a very full stomach that aches and pains you in the middle of the night.

That's what I had last night, my yummy-too-much-to-eat-at-night, too full and aching stomach complaining bitterly of my abuse of it.

I could have gone into the "I should not have eaten so much story," which seems true enough on the surface, but after you've done the Byron Katie work for awhile you realize that these "shoulds" always carry an undercurrent of implication: you are wrong. There is something wrong with you. The should is a shaming word, as are all the should nots.

So, what am I to do?

Love what I am in the ache. Sense myself deeply and love and appreciate who and what I am right then. Just to do that is to begin to relax and the pain then has a better chance of healing away, since my poor overstuffed body now isn't constricted and can use its energy digesting.

Love that I have a chance to be curious about what to do with this "eating too much at night" habit. What variations can I try on it? Eating with more attention at night would help, since lunch is the meal Marlie and I sit down together and pay happy attention to food, and night is kind of a get this and that a enjoy while reading a book or watching a video.

Hmm. That would be a nice shift. And I can chant before I eat.

Or eat standing.

Or ( and this is great, if, if, if I remember) sense myself, taste each bite and follow my breathing as I eat.

Or do yoga after I eat so I will want to be light in order to do the yoga.

Or do the Byron Katie work before I eat, in case I'm filling up some sort of emotional holes.

Lots to be curious about and explore.

Which is a way of loving myself.

So these are the choices:
1) To go into a war: Thou Shalt Not Eat This Way any More. This is dreary and it doesn't work.

2) To invoke curiosity and self-love, slowing down, shifting habits and upping awareness. This seems like a good strategy to me.

Happy solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah and all the rest.

( Note: I'm back on a one a day essay/ thought/ contemplation/ posting per day,
and
am rotating them through (roughly in this order)
slowsonoma.com,
then wakeup-feldenkrais,
then taichiyoghealthweightloss,
if that interests you.)

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

What a concept, eh?

Is it really possible? The boys come in with mud on their feet and wreck the floor you spent hours cleaning, and you still have to love them?

Your wife talks all night on the phone, making jokes about how fat and stupid you have become, and you still have to love her?

The guy runs off with the twenty year younger secretary. Love anyone?

The borrower blithely purchases luxuries you would never grant yourself, and then just as blithely, "forgets" to repay, and then acts shocked when you ask for your money back. What a good excuse to not exactly love this one, eh?

Well, that's that lot of it. We're a bunch of selfish and thoughtless and oftentimes mean scoundrels.

Hard to love.

Hard as hell to love.

And how hard is hell to love? I don't know, but there are a lot of places on earth right now that could give that phrase a go for its money, and just to realize how great it is not to be living in Sudan or Iraq or some slum in Brazil/Africa/ Chicago/ Mexico City/ anywhere, is to begin to see that maybe things aren't so bad when the hubbie runs off with the hottie.

But to love him, the scoundrel? Love her, the bitch? Love them, the selfish and thoughtless one? Love It, the Mean Thing?

Well, well, well. A deep subject, as a former friend of mine used to say, a friend who won't speak to me and whom I love. From a distance of necessity. And joy. Loving her while she's still got a bug up her ass is a lot of fun.

That's a weird concept , but try it out.

All these people that fill the shadow edges of our phone books, who we don't really want to talk to, who we can't feel good inside when we think about them, what if they were a source of joy rather than the kind of undercurrent grind of dissatisfaction that they are?

This is the hoot of unconditional love: you don't have to wait around for the impossible, for the liar to be honest, for the scoundrel to be straight, for the rat to be unselfish. You can just love and enjoy your loving while they are still waltzing around in their lives of small minded slop. Or worse. Large minded larceny. Whatever. They are the mean and the selfish and the unfaithful, and that's their job in life.

And we ARE NOT THE MARTYRS. NO. NO. NO. NO.

This isn't about suffering. Suffering is not unconditional love. Love is really digging and appreciating them as they are, in a way that feels good inside us. We feel good.

Now, another thing here, and this is the rathole down which many people send their minds to avoid this brave new world of unconditional love. This other thing is that unconditional love does not mean condoning something you wish to stop. If someone is abusing a child, you can love this person, and separate them from the child. Call the police. Talk to them firmly. Wrap your arms around the child.

And love this person.

Yuk.

Well. So be it. Hate the person, and how do you feel inside and what good does that do anyone? Perhaps it shows the child it's okay to hate, which gets tricky, since it's fine to be angry, if you are a child and you are being pushed around unfairly. Or if you are an adult being pushed around unfairly.

It's just not fair to your own life to allow that circumstance, as an adult, get you pushed out of your happiness. Change the circumstance. Leave. Say no. Call the police. Put up your voice and strength to stop something that needs to be stopped.

And still: keep loving.

How?

Well, that's a Byron Katie essay, which this isn't, and here's the good news: you don't keep loving by Trying to love, or by Being Good, or Being Full of Love. You keep loving by doing the Work and discovering : this is who and how I am when I hold to my thoughts of condemnation, and this is who I am when I see and love What Is, for being What Is?

Is that still complicated?

Yes. It is.

This is one of the most complicated and wonderful things in life, this chance, which comes from the work of Byron Katie, or the work of being purely present, or the work of not grasping and not avoiding (sometimes called Buddhism) or the work of loving your enemies (sometimes called Christianity), this chance to not fall into misery, sorrow, resentment, angry, victimhood or hatred, just because someone else has decided to play out the not so wonderful side of human nature.

For now though, this: this is about making choices, not about being good. It's about feeling good for the love of ourselves and the love of life and the love of feeling love, and not letting other people set up the conditions for when and how we can shine and glow and be free from within.

This is about freedom and the glory of being alive and having awareness and making choices.

Wow.

And it's about now.

Full Spectrum Lighting

.....
For health and happiness and keeping up the winter spirits and reconnecting
what we really need as human beings,
it may be very important to feed our eyes and minds
real light.



Pathway in garden I designed in Sonoma. See bottom of sidebar for longer story.
Photo: R. Dale


FULL SPECTRUM LIGHTING
If you are feeling a little blue this time of year, part of it could be the sugar overload
of "the season,"
and the last essay in here will help break that habit.

Part of it is all the expectations to do all sorts of things that other people
think you should be doing,
and that requires some
sweet and delightful work of the Byron Katie sort.
Either see thework.com, or
do a search of my other sites for Byron Katie for numerous essays.

And, it may be a light deprivation, too much time indoors and that indoor time your mind and self being fed by artificial light that is a big offshoot from the real light with which the human species evolved for millions of years.

Worst of all, living your days under fluorescent lights, and you know, at least at some level what that is doing to your mood. Guess what? It's also undermining your health.

I'll give you some web addresses, including one that right away starts to give you lots of information.

And that's it for now. Just think about it. Remember when you were a child and how free and happy you felt when you got to get outside into the real light. That child may well be starving now.

Go outside more.

Get yourself full spectrum lights.

Enjoy.


Here are a few sites. You can google all the more that you wish.


natural lighting

full spectrum solutions


Mercola reports. Starts off telling about this and that, as per below, and then has lots more::::

BENEFITS OF FULL SPECTRUM LIGHTING:
• Improved mood
• Enhanced mental awareness, concentration and productivity ...
• Superior visual clarity and color perception ...
• Better sleep ...
• Super-charged immune system ...
• More energy ...
• Reduced eye strain and fatigue with a glare-free and comfortable reading environment ...
• Greater learning ability and intelligence ...

Sunlight Starvation Starts in Your Brain

To begin with, when light enters your eyes, it not only goes to your visual centers enabling you to see; it also goes to your brain's hypothalamus.

The hypothalamus is so important to the body's functioning that it is known as the brain's brain. This means that it controls the part of the nervous system regulating automatic and metabolic processes in the body. The hypothalamus controls body temperature, hunger and thirst, water balance and blood pressure. It links the nervous system to the endocrine system.

Read more at: Mercola reports