Si's Matters

I've been thinking about food cravings a lot recently.

Whenever I talk to people about the raw food thing, they invariably immediately say "Oh, I couldn't live without my pasta/coffee/whatever." It's almost offensive for them to even consider it.

I've always found this pretty interesting. I figured "Well, thank god I'm not like that!" Food's never been more than fuel for me, and that's about it.

How wrong I was. Turns out I'm just like everybody else - quelle surprise! *laugh*


There are several reasons for food cravings.

Chemical imbalance
A week or two after I first went raw, I got enormous KFC cravings. I figured "Ok, let's see what this is about" and tried some. One bite in I realised two things: 1/ it was disgusting, and 2/ it wasn't the KFC I craved, but salt.

Scientists have been able to directly connect the cravings of pregnant women (pickles & peanut butter?) with specific nutritional lacks in their bodies that would be sated by the foods they desire. Often our bodies make us crave specific foods, because at some level they 'know' that we can get the nutrients we need from those foods - hence the desire for a meat pie after a hard night on the town.


Attachment to the effect
Some foods affect us in obvious ways. Coffee/sugar makes us hyper, alcohol makes us less inhibited, and so on.

Often we don't want the food, so much as the effect. It's common for hard pushing type A personalities to crave pasta or bread, simply because the carbs will slow them down - it's a way to ensure they get a rest they desire, without having to consciously admit that's what they actually need.

Avoidance
"Self medicating" with food is well known.

Caffeine & alcohol are two obvious (legal) ones here. Feeling lethargic? Have a coffee. Sick of your life? Have a beer. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. I've done this pretty much my entire life.


Emotional craving
The commonest form is when the food has a strong emotional attachment for us. Some examples:

For years I associated caffeine with productivity & reward - if I had a coffee it was because I was about to be productive, or had just achieved something (and so rewarded myself with a coffee break).

Fish & chips - although one of the blandest food combinations known to man (basically just salt+fat), was dear to my heart for years. Why? Because as a family that was one of the rare treats growing up. It was about the only time we "ate out" - getting a huge portion for the family to curl up on the floor together & share. In fact, we actually had a photo of us as kids, lying in front of the TV, watching CHiPs & eating chips (the height of sophisticated humour for an 8 year old).

Bread, particularly thick white chunky bread covered in butter and peanut butter.. YUM! Why? After church we always used to drive home past a local dairy (corner store) and buy a couple of loaves of unsliced white bread. Then we'd come home and have Sunday lunch (nick named "bread and..") which consisted of huge slices of bread covered in anything we liked. Another obvious positive association of the entire happy family sharing food together.

Of course, once you find the reason behind these cravings, it's trivial (using eft/releasing/whatever) to break these connection and gain a little more self-control.


So what is the upshot of all this? I like to think of these things as exercises in free will. While we are being dragged along by our impulses, we're losing our ability to choose. If our instinct is telling us we must have this or that food, we are no longer in control of ourselves. We are, in some sense, less than human. Of course, it's up to each individual whether they want to accept this in their lives, or, little by little, step further into the light.
[edit: I understand this paragraph to be offensive to some. It's just my opinion & not something I've expounded on properly yet. Feel free to read the rest of the post and ignore it. cheers]

The key difference, ultimately, isn't what you eat or don't eat. It's whether you consciously choose any given food, or whether it's chosen for you.

So, a month ago I started a challenge to try and minimise my thinking, and my breathing. Or at least, slow my breathing, and meditate an hour a day.


Well, the not breathing thing? Turns out that's HARD. Who would have guessed? *laugh* Anyway, the biggest problem was remembering to do it. Frankly, at this, I sucked. The good news is, I've got astronomically more peaceful (more on that later) so I'm probably breathing slower as a result of that anyway, even if a deliberate conscious attempt more or less failed.

Now, the meditating thing. That was easier, but not much. First of all - when did life get so busy? That's crazy. I did learn the following:

1. It's best to do the following: wake up, drink some water, go to the bathroom, THEN meditate. Nothing else before then
2. It's best to do it sitting up somewhere, NOT lying down or in bed (heh)
3. It's easy(ish) to find half an hour to start the day with, but a full hour is very hard indeed
4. It's an amazing way to find incredible insight into your life. Just start by asking a general question, then quiet & let the answer come to you. Works VERY well
5. Releasing any thoughts as they come up both keeps you clear, and gets rid of the thought permanently (win!)
6. It's very noticeable how much better your day goes if you do it

When I was in a rush, I tended to use the time to tap, instead of meditating, but I figured this was still appropriate, and for more or less the same outcome.

The key question: will I keep doing it? Well, everything else aside, I think spending even half an hour a day emptying your brain is definitely a very valuable use of time. So yes, I will. Trick is going to be finding time to do it as my life gets busier and busier (as it is & will further with the move to NY).

There was an interesting article in NY Mag recently, on walking. Specifically, how because of shoes, we walk in a way that is seriously damaging us. By age 40, 80% of us have some muscular-skeletal foot or ankle problem. By 50-55 that goes up to 90-95%.

Basically, because we're used to wearing shoes, we walk such that our heel hits the ground first, which sends massive shock into our ankles, knees & hips. Ideal would be to be barefoot and walk properly, but this is hardly practical in a city.

One of the possible solutions they do mention is the Vivo Barefoot. It looks like this:

It's basically a fancy schmancy moccasin. Puncture proof 3mm thick kevlar sole, extra wide (so you can use your toes when walking), so light & flexible you can roll them up.

Walking around Manhattan in my boots for 6 hours at a stretch resulted in me having pain in my hips. For a guy my age, this is somewhat disconcerting. It got me thinking more seriously about walking.

So, when I was in London, I picked up a couple of pairs of these shoes. On, they look like this:

('scuse the filthy mirror)

I wore them around town today, and the first few blocks, I've gotta say, it HURT. I felt every step as my heel slammed into the ground. Even more interesting was watching my body roll around, trying to figure out how to move itself so the pain would stop. Within half an hour or so, I found myself instinctively fox walking (longish but interesting article on learning to walk). I need to practice more, but so far it resulted in near zero impact of ANY kind on my heel or ankle (in fact, my ankle just kisses the ground), and a definite feeling of using my calves, abs and thighs.. but then, that's what they're there for, right? Once I'd settled into it, the immediate tactile feedback was very like getting reflexology with every step. Can't wait to see what THAT clears.

In other news, I bought some fruit & veg today:

hot damn I can't wait to dig into that lot.

I figure that should last me 3 or 4 days. I'm also keeping track of my calorie count (a concerned friend in the UK was worried I wasn't taking enough in & insisted I track it for a week). That should be interesting too.

Today I went for a bit of a walk in the countryside.

( I did mention it was a beautiful day for a walk, right? [pic heavy 659k] )

So. About this place we're staying in (The New York Palace). They have obviously spent a LOT of time thinking hard about how they do things.

I very, very much appreciate it.

Here are some examples:

phone by the toilet (so if it rings, you don't have to get up)
privacy button by the bed that flicks a "do not disturb" light outside the door
button by the bed switches off ALL lights in the apartment (including in cupboards, etc)
auto-lights in both wardrobes
key access to the minibar (I guess so if you have kids they won't get into anything)
tissue box in the bathroom (a little thing, but still)
massive magnifying face mirror in bathroom
comfortable stool by the bathroom vanity, so if you're doing makeup, you don't have to stand up)
both wired AND wireless internet (and you can use both at once)
oh, and best yet - a CURVED shower curtain rail (it starts at bathwidth, then curves outwards). Why? So the shower curtain doesn't stick to you.

.. and yes, it's one of those double curtains so the water doesn't drip off it all over the floor.

this is beyond the "hey, we just included this to be helpful" list, which includes: lots of writing paper of different sizes, lamps everywhere (rather than just nasty overhead lights), hair dryer, iron+board, shoe horn, umbrella, bathroom scales, tie rack & full length mirror in the wardrobe, plenty of power jacks, spare slippers, gorgeous bathrobes (towelling inside, silky outside), enormous tv, bed, etc etc.

oh, did I show you this?

(yes, they're complimentary, you just have to ask)

Anyway, I love attention to detail. Seeing so much of it in one place is pretty much heaven. It's rare I see a business that have their act THIS well together. It's damn inspiring.

So, its my birthday coming up (I'll be in my prime. I'll let you guess which one), so a couple of days ago I thought we should probably do something funnish for it.



So ( we have. )

... well, as much as possible, at least.

Gala's running a thing called the iCiNG Transformation Challenge (iTC). Basically, a chance to spend a month, focussing in a couple of areas of your life to bring about real, valuable change.

Well, I pretty much do that every day, so what could I possibly do that would be radical enough to be worth the effort?

I did seriously consider not eating for a month, but the universe seemed to have other ideas (eventually I listened).

So I sat and thought about my life.

First, not breathing. Well, breathing much, much less. This is good for many reasons:
More oxygen into your body
Slower heartrate
Calmer
More peaceful.

What does it involve? Well, there are a TON of meditation techniques involving breathing. So, something like taking 3 seconds to breathe in, then 3 to breathe out. I'll do that as much and as often as I remember.

The not thinking?

Well, it comes down to distraction. I realised that the biggest crimp between me and achieving the things I want to is simply that I get distracted. In lots of easily justified, perfectly reasonable ways. Doing important, necessary tasks. Informing myself. Even just talking. All forms of distracting. It's the curse of modern life.

So, for the next month, I'm going to work my way up to spending an hour a day doing absolutely nothing. Just sit there, eyes half open, thinking, doing, nothing. I'll allow myself that if I am going to think anything, I'll positively visualise - since that's helpful, but other than that, nothing.

We'll see how it goes.

I'd always kinda known that the space around earth had a lot of junk flying around it.

Particularly since last year, when the Chinese did this:


which resulted in this (1 day later):

adding 10% to the total debris around the planet.

But this is what the entire picture looks like.


Or, showing only the debris that is 4 inches (10cm) or bigger (the Chinese effort is in red):

This, of course, is only going to get worse as more things get thrown, whole or in pieces, into space.

How on earth do they successfully launch anything without it getting destroyed on the way up? INSANE!

So, our local ISP is IINet.

Here are some reasons I like them:

24 Mb/s downloads. Yes, that's megabit. Our connectivity isn't as great as my neighbours (we're on different exchanges). He regularly gets over 1000 kBytes/sec speeds. We still hit 400 kBytes/sec all the time though.

I get this performance for the same price as I was paying for 256 kb/s in New Zealand.

There's no charge for traffic to/from the ISP - which just happens to include full mirrors of debian, ubuntu, and tons of other stuff (games, movies-on-demand, etc etc etc). So yes, my linux systems are kept up to date at super high speeds, for free.

Caps are 20G peak and 40G offpeak, with shaping once past that. This isn't as great as all-you-can-eat that's common in Europe/USA, but we're also not connected to the world except by lots of water. In this part of the world, that's very generous.

In the past two years I've been with them, I've had to reboot my router twice. We've had a single outage of a couple of hours (when big chunks of the city went down due to telephone exchange failure).

They have a very sexy toolbox that shows up to the minute bandwidth usage, allows you to tweak your speeds, and a whole host of other nifty functions.

We have VOIP (ie, our regular phone goes out over the internet) that's as cheap as Skype for a third of the cost of a regular phone.

And the thing that brings about this post - we just upgraded to a higher cap plan - having overrun our limit slightly. Because both Gala & I work from home, slow speeds (even for the last week of the month) are particularly painful. While on the phone to them we begged and pleaded for a bit of extra bandwidth to get us over the next week. What did they do? They pushed us up to the maximum cap plan, for FREE, until the end of the month.

Oh, and they told us it would be done within an hour.... it was done in three minutes.

I LOVE companies like this.

I've been eating a salad a day for almost 4 months now. My policy is pretty much "grab random things and chuck 'em in a bowl.' As such, I'm pretty sure I haven't eaten the same thing twice. It's pretty cool, it works for me.

Today, however, I think I outdid myself, and, since there's nothing more interesting* than reading what someone else had for lunch, I thought I'd share it with you:

*Ok, I might be exaggerating a little

broccoli
cherry tomatoes
pickled gherkins
swiss mushrooms
radish
purple beans
green capsicum
fresh basil
sundried tomato
mixed nuts
sunflower seeds
and a big dollop of horseradish cream mixed into it all.

CRAZY! (but delicious).

Hmm. Now I think of it, this salad would be been several notches weirder if I hadn't cut any of the ingredients up (yum! whole radishes!), but in the interests of full disclosure, I must admit I did.

Ok, you may continue with your lives now.

"It's such a giant leap that there's so much resistance to that paradigm shift":

more here.

Ahh, slowly slowly. *smile*

It's been windy before.

The thing is, we're pretty used to it. We're high, it's windy down low, so super windy up here. There are many days it's only advisable to go out on the balcony for "windswept fun" (ie, not for pleasure).

Today is a little different.

The outside of the building creaking, hey, no problems, that's a typical day.

Today though? uhh, the inside walls are creaking. I'm getting seasick, and I NEVER get seasick. I found myself swaying back and forth while standing in an inside room with no windows.

I was wondering how best to capture this on static film:

those window blind cables normally hang straight down (gravity, see), right next to the window frame on the left of the picture. The far cable is normally completely visible, about 2-3cm clear of the couch. There's no wind inside, and yes, they are swinging about 10cm off vertical. This shot was a little scary to get, as the glass directly to my left (right by my head) was flexing 1-2cm in and out with every gust, as the door buckled with the pressure.

Did I mention we have internal doors that are swinging back and forth by 3⁺cm?

This is the time where I add in the fact that our wildly incompetent property managers just happen to be the same company that built this building.

I'm pretty happy to admit that the whole thing is fairly scaring the shit out of me. Still, sure beats being bored! :)

[this post is primarily aimed at Catholics & ex-Catholics, but if you're not and you feel a resonance, hey, that's cool too, just go with it, heal away]

Catholicism is a very interesting religion. It is an immensely powerful organisation with an incredibly flat hierarchy (only 5 layers from Pope to you). It's run from the Vatican, one of very few city-states, thus having both diplomatic as well as religious protection. It's also been listed as the 3rd biggest money laundering centre in the world (more here, here).

It's not a huge leap to propose that perhaps this body doesn't always have you, the (ex) parishioner's best interests at heart. Perhaps not aggressively or directly maliciously, but certainly in terms of more control of you = more money & power to them.

Now, this isn't a rant about Catholicism. If you've done any research or serious thinking in this area, you've possibly reached similar conclusions. Regardless, the Vatican & the Catholic hierarchy are very welcome to behave any way they feel is right (that's their business, not mine). This isn't about them. It's about you. You want to clean up the mess left behind.

There is an additional important distinction. That between the church, and God. The church is made up of humans (regardless of whether they declare themselves infallible). The church is NOT God, God is not the church. The Catholic church does a really good job of blurring that line. What they say is what humans are saying, not what God is saying. "Believe me because I say so" is lousy logic.

Let me be brutally clear. God is Good. Jesus is a righteous dude. It's the teaching of the Catholic church itself that results in problems.

Oh, and if reading what I've written below results in you feeling strong negative emotions? That's actually a good thing. It makes these issues much easier to heal. Use whatever tool works for you, but if that emotion is close to the surface, then you'll know when you're making progress. Of course, if you're not interested in healing in this area (which is perfectly ok too, most people aren't), I do suggest stopping reading. My intention is not to upset you, or appear to criticise your beliefs.


There are several key areas that the Catholic indoctrination will have affected you that warrant attention & healing.

Guilt
This is the big one. I had a competition with a Jewish friend at a party once - whose family was better at making us feel guilty. He won, but it was a close battle (at least, until he started telling me about the stunning skills of his grandmother).

1. Guilt only makes you feel bad.
2. Feeling bad doesn't achieve anything (other than, well, make you feel bad)
3. On the other hand, actually doing something to correct your error does achieve something.

In short: Don't waste time feeling guilt. If you've done something wrong (now, or in the past), DO SOMETHING TO FIX IT. Guilt about it will only damage you. How you feel about yourself, how you view yourself, how you treat yourself. Any guilt you feel? Heal it.


Regret
This is a close cousin. This is you guilt tripping yourself.

1. Regret is in the past
2.You can't change the past, only the present (and thus future)

If you regret something, either DO SOMETHING, or let it go. Continuing to beat yourself up about it is only killing yourself (slowly).


Sin
Ever heard that saying, "Love the sinner, hate the sin?" Stop to wonder why that is only ever applied to how we treat other people?

1. Yes, you have (probably) made mistakes in your life. That IS OK (natural even, it's a great way to learn).
2. That doesn't make you a bad person ("a sinner" is the catch all phrase)
3. Viewing yourself in a negative light adds nothing positive to the world

Imagine you're the parent of a child & she's learning to ride a bike. She's not very good yet, occasionally hits a tree, or falls off. Would you be angry at her? Tell her she's a sinner (or evil, or equivalent) that she will never be "forgiven" unless she leads a life of self induced misery and servitude? No, of course not. You'd be what? Loving. Understanding. Patient. Caring. Your heart would break every time she made a mistake. You'd be there, gently helping her back on, encouraging her every pedal of the way.

So why do we get the idea that God (our Father) doesn't view us, treat us, love us exactly the same way?

Go easy on yourself. God Loves you, you should too.


Deserving
We're taught that we have to deserve things. We're allowed into heaven only IF we act a certain way. We don't deserve forgiveness (or God's love) unless we repent, and so on.

Jesus never taught that. He taught "God loves you", end of story. No ifs, not buts, no conditions. God IS unconditional Love. It's (unfortunately) the church that puts all those conditions in there, not Him.

If you feel like you don't deserve something, anything, that's conditioned behaviour. You've been taught that.

Do you honestly think that God, a being of pure Love, actually wants you to suffer? To be in pain? Would you want someone you loved more than life itself to suffer? For ANY reason? Of course not. All those excuses clamouring in your head as you read this? That's just rationalisation, your brain talking. That's not Love. Not big-L, God Love.

No excuses, no exceptions, no conditions. God Loves you, unconditionally.


Forgiveness
It's pretty easy to forget this.

We're taught to "forgive others" - yet, did you ever stop to ask what that means, in raw, practical terms? Surely, harbouring no negative emotions towards them for that incident, right?

Oh, here's a minor point - why do we so easily forget to forgive ourselves?

"Forgive us our sins, as we forgive others" - so, if God has forgiven us, why the hell don't we let go of it too? Do we honestly think we know more about this than He does?


New vs Old Testament
When Jesus turned up, he came with a simple message. When he was asked, "Which is the most important commandment?" he said (paraphrased) "First, love God. Second love each other." [Mark 12:28-31] That's not so complicated, is it? Because philosophy, morals & ethics are such slippery things (what is "good", what is "love", etc), if you want to keep it simple? "Don't be an asshole".

He also said to pretty much ignore the old testament (the God of hellfire & vengeance) that God was actually loving. Like a father.

He came with clarification, and simplification. "God is Love". Only love. Not love-and-anger. Not love-and-violent retribution. Just Love.

If this is the case, then why is so much of the teaching of the church (hell, it's not even in the Creed!) attached to the old, superseded, vengeance and fear model of God? Why the guilt, the fear, the shame, the recrimination? An obvious answer is "frightened, miserable people are more easy to control". Either way, Jesus didn't come down and say "do this, this and this or God will hate you, punish you, make you suffer". God just doesn't work like that.

Don't listen to me about this, listen to what Jesus said. God is Love, he loves you, love each other.


How to unravel it all
If you're feeling negative emotions inside you? That's not Love. If you feel negative emotions towards others? That's not love. But most importantly, if you're feeling negative emotions towards yourself, that's not love either.

Unfortunately, Catholicism teaches us to increase, not decrease, these negative emotions. All perfectly rationally, all perfectly reasonable, all explained away with good reason, of course. None of it helping you, none of it Love, God, or helping you live a better life.

Here are some examples. If any of these resonate with you, they're beliefs that are contrary to Love. Beliefs that if, and only if, you want to move closer to God, to Love (or alternatively, want to get that ex-Catholic crap out of your life), you should heal.

"How can I possibly forgive that person? What they did was SO bad"
"I'm a sinner"
"I must suffer for my sins"
"Sure, I've forgiven them, but I'm still X them" (where X=negative emotion='angry at', 'hate', 'can't stand', etc)
"I don't deserve X" (where X=anything)
"I regret X" (where X=anything)
"Only God can forgive me"
"I deserve to suffer"
"I'm a bad person"
"Unless I'm good, I won't go to heaven"

I'm sure there are many more. The point is this: God (the universe, whatever) Loves you. You should too.

In case you haven't seen this yet.



Have a play with the search engine if you like, but when you finish that, click on the Hubble Showcase, select any picture (bottom of the screen), and zoom in a bunch of times.

So beautiful it almost made me cry.

That's your Universe. You're part of that. It's just waiting for you to explore it, embrace it, connect with it.

Raw works like this:

1. The more raw the better. If you eat a little of anything else (meat, fish, dairy, whatever) - particularly while you're adjusting, that's FINE. The raw movement is NOT like militant veganism. Just do what you can. It's VERY tolerant. Basically - the more you do, the better you'll feel. If you want to start at 10% raw? AWESOME! Most people aren't even that. It all helps.

2. It's best to be raw vegan (so no dairy either), since 70% of people are dairy intolerant, your sinuses, breathing, stomach gases etc will (likely) be MUCH better without dairy.

3. Some people do eat meat/fish/whatever raw, but given how much bacteria there is on meat products, & how careful you have to be with raw fish, I really, really wouldn't recommend it. The best thing is to listen to your body. Once you get into it, it'll be really obvious - You'll feel bad if it's bad for you. I eat: seeds, nuts, fruit, veges. I snack on raw mixed nuts (chew lots!) and dates.

4. Transitioning can be tough in places (old habits/conditioning mostly - unless you have tapping, then it's a doddle), so it's recommended just to eat what you can. Say, start with a single raw meal a day, replace junk snacks with raw snacks, cut your meat right back (pref to zero), then -gradually- work towards 100%. The hardest thing is overcoming cravings (eg, I associated coffee with productivity & achievement). Just tap them all out.

5. Key points: eat as many dark green leafy vegetables as you can, and CHEW (most people don't). Little known fact: Most food processing actually happens in your mouth. Food spends a very very small amount of time in your stomach, and most of its time in your intestines.

6. Drink LOTS of water. I had a period where my body was seriously clearing, and I was drinking 8+ litres a day.

7. Expect to detox. Your body will heal itself. This means you wil probably feel various levels of crappiness for the first week or two (depending on how aggressively you get into it). This is GOOD. It's your body flushing rubbish out - physically, mentally & spiritually. Your body will keep healing after that, but the first couple of weeks are the worst (first few days are obvious physical stuff, then some emotional - random unexplainable anger, etc).

8. It's probably worth getting a decent multi vitamin, particularly while you transition. Raw vegan diets tend to be low in B12 (with no easy answers that I'm currently aware of), and in NZ/Australia (which have poor soils), you won't get enough selenium either (Brazil nuts are a good source though). More info here, here, and here.

9. The only thing we've bought is an $80 blender (we got a decent one). I generally have a smoothie for breakfast - which is "anything yummy and fruit like, with a bunch of dark green veges, all blended". For dinner I have a salad, which is "anything yummy and not-fruit, all cut up". We spend about 60% of what we used to on food.

10. I'll repeat this. Raw is NOT about beating yourself up if you slip. It's about eating as much raw as you can.


Frankly, I'm probably about 95% raw. I still occasionally eat dark chocolate (which IS vegan, but not raw, I think) now and then, have things like balsamic vinegar on my salads occasionally. I don't care, that's close enough. I may drop it out in the future, but I consider myself, to all intents and purposes, 100% raw (after all, really, who's counting? Is there a pop quiz I hadn't heard about?)

Also, when we eat out, if we can't get raw, we just eat vegan.. and failing that, vegetarian. It helps a lot to be reasonable about this stuff. We are finding that regular food just tastes boring and disgusting though, so there's a natural tendency away from it. Frankly most vegetarian food we've eaten at restaurants is pretty boring compared to a good salad - but there's a point where you stop being all crazy about it, and just go "Hey, let's enjoy a good night out, we can always eat extra well tomorrow."

Some good sites (this is major overkill, but in case you want LOTS of info):

http://www.giveittomeraw.com (great community)
http://goneraw.com/
http://www.kristensraw.com/raw_recipe_books.php
http://www.welikeitraw.com
http://theyliketo.giveittomeraw.com (a whole bunch of RSS feeds for raw blogs)
http://rawmodelcom.blogspot.com
http://aniphyo.com/

(so, browse to your heart's content - however, the points I've listed should be enough to get you started - at least while you settle in. I've only ever looked at the first of those sites, and only a couple of times, and I'm fine, so don't sweat it if it seems over-whelming)

and if you're looking for motivation (this is only the physical side. From what I've seen, EVERYTHING gets healed, so you'll feel better all over):

http://www.shazzie.com/raw/transformation/
http://www.welikeitraw.com/rawfood/2007/10/anthony-before-.html
(both "2 second look" sites - just pictures)

plus, of course, I'm here, and happy to answer questions.. I have some other crazy, crazy stories to tell, but I really can't recommend raw enough. That plus EFT is kicking my entire life into some kind of insane overdrive. It's AWESOME. *grin*

The thing is - it's actually very, VERY simple. The 10 points above are more than enough to get you started.

The Short Version: go easy on yourself, eat as much raw as you can, chew lots, eat dark green leafy stuff, drink water, and expect a detox (see: go easy on yourself).

I went out with Gala's folks last night to a rather fancy restaurant. There wasn't anything even vaguely raw on the menu, so I thought "ok, if I'm going to bust the raw thing for a night, I might as well go the whole hog".

So I ordered eye fillet.

Now, after giving life a lot of thought, I decided perhaps the best way to proceed was to follow the Native American's approach - which essentially comes down to thanking the animal for giving its life so you can eat. Not that different from the Christian tradition of saying grace. Just a little more focussed.

An interesting back story. We went to a raw picnic a while back, and met some long term raw foodists from Canada. One of the things that is common when you first start on raw is that you detox. Your body starts healing you, and spits out all the rubbish that you've collected over the years. This detox is both physical and mental/emotional. For a couple of days I had out bouts of completely unprovoked, extremely atypical anger. It would flush up, and then die away again. It was.. both bizarre and confusing. So when we met these Canadians, I asked them about that. They said that it was the emotion from the animals I'd eaten, coming out of me. Now, I really don't know what I think about that, but it seemed as likely an explanation as any. I left undecided, but still curious.

So I'm sitting in this fancy restaurant, eye fillet steaming on the plate in front of me, trying to remove this emotion from the steak before I eat it. Dunno if it's going to work, or what will happen, but hey, I'll try anything once.. So I sat there, tried to imagine the cow, and thank it. This is where everything got extremely weird, and not a little surprising. The amount of anger, and fear, that came pouring off that animal took me completely by surprise. Frankly, it knocked me on my ass. It took a good five minutes at least to clear it. Additionally, it utterly sapped me of energy for a couple of hours (until I figured out what had happened, and could sort it). Now I don't know what I expected, but I definitely didn't expect that.

But then, I had a look at how cows are killed. They get a metal bolt to the forehead (called stunning). Theoretically this renders them unconscious, except an EEG shows massive pain right after stunning, and often it takes two or three goes to get it right. This is after they've been shoved up big long chutes that apparently scare them so much that broken backs and legs are common. Oh, and a lot of the time they end up bled, stripped of all skin, and still alive & conscious.

So perhaps it's not quite so surprising.

Although the steak did taste pretty great, I'm not sure it's worth the effort required to remove all that pain. I'm also not sure that another being should suffer that much just because it has to die so I can eat it.

I do believe that there is a definite food chain, and humans are at the top of that chain. Other creatures die so we can live, and so on down the line. I'm not convinced that modern factory farming is as low risk or good for us as we're lead to believe. It's also worth noting that growing a kilo of potatoes requires 500 litres of water (soybeans 4 times as much), whereas a kilo of beef uses from 20,000 to 100,000 litres (depending on who you ask). Yes, that's 20 to 100 TONS of water, for three steaks. Given the ever growing water crisis in much of the world (Australia was recently declared in permanent drought), it's worth considering. The benefits (physical, mental, spiritual) I'm seeing from eating raw speak for themselves - even just from a "screw the environment, what about me" point of view.

In other food news, I found this. Really quite amazing:

[edit: more info here]

Frankly, this doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

[a follow-up to this]

There is another part to every relationship - other than how you feel about that person... it's how they feel about you.

Now, while you can't heal someone else (well, you can, but it's unethical to do so without asking first), what is important to heal is your energy towards them, and your understanding of how they feel towards you.

In short: "What is stopping them from deeply, completely, truly loving me?"

Ask that, heal the answer, and repeat until done to clear out the other half of any junk between you.

I've been more or less totally raw for a couple of months now, so a bit of an update.

First of all, boy, I wish I'd done this years ago. Historically, I'd always been pretty bored with eating. It was something I did so I had the energy to do the things I really wanted to do, but that was about it. Now, I'm getting a LOT of joy from food. So, you know, that's nice. Interestingly, I've been testing myself by going back and eating "regular" (ie, cooked) food. It's pretty much consistently been disappointing, even dishes that I used to adore (some Japanese, Thai).

More interesting is the other effects that I can feel raw starting to have. I'm beginning to understand why raw foodists tend to come off as a little over-enthusiastic about what should be just a a choice of what you shove in your gob.

The first thing is efficiency. As long as I chew reasonably well, by eating raw, my digestion is working a LOT more efficiently. Umm, I'll leave it there as I don't want to gross you out. You get the picture. Point is, this means I'm getting the nutrients I need with far, far less effort. Apparently up to 30% (avg around 10%) of our energy is spent simply digesting. Less effort spent there means two things:

1. More energy for me to do whatever-I-want-with
2. More energy for my body to heal me

But what's to heal? I'm already in perfectly good, fighting fit health.

Well, this is why it's interesting. I don't believe that this raw food thing is simply helping me heal physically. I believe it's detoxing me emotionally, and spiritually too. I do realise how ridiculous this probably sounds, but I can only explain how it feels to me (which aligns strongly with what I've heard from long term raw foodists, 4 years+). Please don't take my word for this kind of thing - get your own data points. Try it yourself, then get back to me and we'll compare notes. For me, I'm aware enough to see that it's not just my physical body that's getting healthier.

So that's interesting.

I also realised something else recently. While EFT (with the mild exception of this, or this kind of approach) is primarily problem focussed - ie "what's wrong? Let's fix it", eating raw is primarily solution focussed. In other words, rather than worrying about what might have been historically wrong food-wise, you just get on and go "ok, let's be healthy now" - focus on the solution, not the problem.

This creates an interesting synergy. Of course there's the advantage of being able to tap out any residual cravings (or other food limitations) while transitioning to a raw diet. That helps. More importantly, since they both heal physically, emotionally and spiritually, they overlap and complement each other. The more raw I eat, the easier I find to clear stuff out using EFT (or other energy healing). The more stuff I tap out, the easier it is for the raw food to do its thing.

This has netted the result that I seriously feel like my life is spinning into hyper fast motion. I'm accelerating into my own personal singularity (more on the regular S later). What I'm able to clear out in 5 minutes now without even lifting a finger would have taken weeks or months of concerted effort when I first started tapping, almost two years ago. A lot of stuff I feel just naturally lifting off by itself.

It's a damn interesting phenomenon to watch, and I'm more than a little curious where it's going to take me. I really started this journey as a "Hey, let's try to get better at coding" exercise, but I feel like I'm being pulled into something much, much larger.

Relationships are the centre of life.

You have a relationship with everyone and everything.

From the slight (say, with the lamp by your bed), to the more significant (the company you work for), to right at the top of the heap.. your parents, your family and yourself.

So, it's probably worth getting these sorted out. Aiming for an end goal of complete, unconditional love, I've discovered some nifty tricks beyond my last post on the subject.

Specifically, while that methodology is useful and fast, it requires intuition and a lot of attention. It's also a bit tricky to nail those last, niggly little details.

Here's a way that's more powerful, faster, and requires a lot less experience or attention to work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it continues from this discovery.

For every relationship in your life (in any order, totally up to you), ask yourself:

What is stopping me from completely/deeply/truly* loving this person?

See what pops up, and heal** it. Rinse, repeat, until you end up with the answer "Nothing", and a deep, permeating feeling of joy whenever you think of that person.

That's it.

* Use whatever word resonates for you with that person
** For whatever value of 'heal' works for you.

A few notes.

1. If you don't feel that joy, but can't think of anything, heal on "even though I don't know what is stopping me from completely/deeply/truly loving this person". It's very common that we hide things from ourselves. It's just our subconscious trying to protect us. After all, who really wants to admit that they hate someone close? It's ok, and it is safe, just break the barrier, then heal anything that comes up.

2. Heal anything that pops up, no matter how ridiculous it seems. In fact, particularly if it seems illogical or ridiculous. Some personal examples "because he's a dick", "because he's f'ing asshole", "just coz" etc etc. Just get rid of it, whatever it is.

3. It's worth healing relationships with any major entities in your life. E.g., the company you work for. I found many interesting (self-limiting) things doing this. Also any other "body" that springs to mind.

4. When using EFT to heal, I recommend loving & forgiving yourself, AND loving and forgiving the other person. Yourself for not loving them, them for their behaviour/attitude. Also, a good phrase I've found is "Even though I can't possibly love X because...".


In the space of a couple of nights, I've managed to wade through the vast majority of my past hurt regarding my parents (this technique, more than any other I've tried, has released some very surprising things, very deeply buried). I've also cleared out (far as I can tell at the moment) everything with regards to myself (still letting that settle, twas intense). With more minor, but troublesome relationships, I've cleared everything out ridiculously quickly (think, after months just tapping normally, I've cleared everything in under 15 minutes), and yes, been left with a feeling of deep, peaceful bliss towards them.

It's all.. too good not to share. (more later on why I've been so aggressively chasing this theme).

[part 2 here]

Over the last few years I've really struggled with one question. Why is it that so many people are so happy to swill around in their own muck, and never really do anything about it?

Which translates roughly to: Why are so many people so afraid (of change, of themselves, of the world)?

.. or so I thought.

I recently had a bit of a Matrix marathon, and watched all three of them. One of the key philosophical discussions in it is the debate between determinism and existentialism.

Crudely summarised, determinism says everything we do is predetermined (the architect of the matrix universe declares that he sets the initial parameters, and everything just plays out more or less exactly as he planned).

Existentialism says we are in control of our own fate (Neo: "I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life", and when asked why he keeps fighting, ".. because I choose to.")

What I've realised is, personal lack of serious action goes deeper than mere fear. It goes to the very nature of belief about existence.

Most people are simply determinists. If they don't believe they really have a choice about their lives, why waste time trying (and inevitably failing) to change things? Now, of course, intellectually, many people will argue otherwise, but I'm not talking about their brains. I'm talking about what they truly believe at their deepest core. I'm talking about what their actions are telling us, not their words.

Most people just don't believe they can significantly, materially change their existences. The fear that limits their life is simply a side-effect of their determinist belief.

I, I have realised, am very firmly an existentialist. I have to say, I'm with Morpheus & Neo on this one. Here's the entire conversation:

Morpheus: Do you believe in fate, Neo?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Why not?
Neo: Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life.
Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean.