Meet the Littlest Bird

I have successfully combined this and my previous blog into a new and permanent space called The Littlest Bird. I realize this seems like a lot of jumping about but I feel good about this new move. My apologies to any who were just settling in here, but being adventurous and wanting to appear somewhat professional: I have cut through the jungle (yeah, real professional) and created a new little village for myself. All my posts are there in their entirety: All. New and previous. So please (again, sorry) update your bookmarks, RSS feeds etc. and come on over to the LB! Look forward to seeing you there!

Confessing Jacob

Of Isaac’s two twin sons: Esau’s name means hairy – and Jacob came out clinging to his heel (his Achilles’ heel, the weakest point on the hero’s impermeable immortal body). Esau was First Born and slated for inheritance and blessing, whereas Jacob’s name means deceitful, thief, or usurper: one who grasps at his desires by his own power at whatever the cost through his own individual will and might. Now as twins, they were conceived together so how are we to understand this – To me (if Torah is meant to be used as a teaching tool; not just history but more about the nature of the human soul then) this is a story about the consequences of the first stage of returning to God and our divine co-natures after the Fall, e.g. one must recognize that the Ego (the twin activate present in a material body) clings to the physical, it’s twin reality and usurps the birthright of the Soul to “know” the Father.

So what do we see Jacob, our thief, our Ego do? He tricks his father Isaac to bestow the blessing on him, and Esau, being likewise angered wishes to harm his brother and so Jacob flees. We know he marries, we know that over the course of years Jacob becomes father to 12 sons. He has achieved all that he has desired through his wit, through his cunning, and because he did this without divine solidarity, he finds that this life of his has become a struggle; we often think of Jacob as a survivor, and marvel at his consequence and his accomplishments but we must remember that survival is not a word that connotes a sense of God’s majesty or the highest goal of living a good life.

Remember, the Ego toils under its own weight. All desires (save one) produce an element of suffering. There is only one true desire that can fulfill the longing of the soul … and we see Jacob come to this point (Gen. 32) in the wilderness. He is waiting for Esau, now years later. His actions are now coming towards him, he is at a moment of judgment, of being held accountable to his higher nature and his family and his life for all the scheming and usurping, he is his choices. And so he has arrived at a moment of Crisis. He has sent his wives, his belongings and all his children across the river ahead of him to hopefully appease his wronged brother (should he ever be able to follow), and he stands alone in the desert. Where non can be save for testing: in the Bible, one is always sent into the wilderness to be tested. For there are no distractions and it symbolizes that point of no return, when you have hit the wall or the bottom of some spiritual impasse, and you may not move from this spot until you have mastered your choices.

Now Jacob has, at this point, already had the Dream of the Ladder moving Angels up and down from Heaven – so he has glimpsed his future and seen that the Lord has approached him, he vowed long beforehand to participate in this moment but a promise is much different that following through. And it is only in the Wilderness that the Ego (our Jacob) must confess his actions and allow the Soul to be transformed into something beyond the mere physical.

He is told in Gen 31:13 “I am the God who appeared to you in Bethel, where you anointed a memorial stone and made a vow to me. Up, then! Leave this land and return to the land of your birth." Leave this land that is full of things densely foreign to you, return to the land of your fathers, the land of spirit, who made you. Do not cleave to the material, come back Home. The Prodigal son is a story told over and over in the Bible, it is here in the Torah and is the same in the Gospels. We (the collective Human soul) are The Prodigal Son.

Here in Gen 32:25 we read that, “Jacob was left there alone. Then some man wrestled with him until the break of dawn, [and] when the man saw that he could not prevail over him, he struck Jacob's hip at its socket, so that the hip socket was wrenched as they wrestled” (and it continues through Gen 32:28). Now this is an interesting thing that just happened. And more interestingly, there is no description of the man with whom Jacob wrestled actually was. Some say he was an Angel (very popular interpretation by fine artists
over the years) or Jacob’s shadow, an ordinary man or even God himself; here he is alone in the Wilderness, he has arrived at a point of crisis and he knows he can no longer go on doing what he has spent his life doing, because it never comes out the way he planned exactly. Something is amiss, missing, ill fitting, incomplete.

So he has arrived at this moment and the next thing we read about our Jacob is he is wrestling with some force that the Book does not decisively name. And then the man says, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” And what is good to note here is that neither could best the other. They were in a stalemate, they were equal somehow, but this is Jacob’s only hope, he says: “Not until you bless me.” And this is what the Man/Angel/God replied: “What is your name?”

As if to ask: who are you really? I don’t think he was asking in the same manner as someone signing an autograph: “er—who do I make this out to?” But who is asking for the blessing?

In this Jacob has to be honest. He has done everything up until now on his own cunning and it has left him at this convergence point…

When I was in Jackson a couple of weeks ago, I was invited to attend church by M’s mother, and the Pastor was speaking of this same passage, and he says that at this moment Jacob, here, must confess who he really is. And I agree. Jacob must come clean to himself if he wants to transform, he must be sincere in who he has been until now: The thief, the usurper. In order for us to be free of our Ego, we must not only confess, but recognize that we have let it rule our lives and thoughts to this point, and ask for Blessing from the Man, the shadow or the Angel so that we may move on, evolving into what true Humanity was created to be, soulfully Free.

And so with Jacob’s confession we come to verse 29: “Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be spoken of as Jacob, but as Israel, because you have contended with divine and human beings and have prevailed.’” Now, the word Israel or Yisrael if often translated at “wrestling with God,” and we see this interpretation in the verse, but, it also names the one true & correct human desire: to go straight to God. It is a verb and a path, both. And so Jacob, or the Ego is purified and corrected by Awareness and Grace. And this is a bright story for us on our travels if we seek or rather find ourselves in the Wilderness, that we must not look at ourselves as victims of circumstance but a soul brought to the edge of opportunity for transformation. Like any other moment in the Torah (and even later on, in the Gospels), all we need to do is ask with all our heart, for when we do then we will find the Wilderness Transformed and perhaps we find ourselves not in a place but a state of mine: imbued, alighted, and filled, our mission and our humanness appears: “Thou hast anointed my head with oil; my cup runneth over/surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” (Psalm 23:5).

BIll Hicks

A Farmer's Redemtpion

Ye shall cherish and protect the weak, and those who are oppressed, and all creatures that suffer wrong. Ye shall work with your hands the things that are good and seemly; so shall ye eat the fruits of the earth, and live long in the land.



thank you to Compassion in Action, for bringing this beautiful and sweet story to my/our attention.

MAKE SURE TO CHECK OUT THE DOCUMENTARY "EARTHLING" Narrated by Joachin Phoenix. is a feature length documentary about humanity's absolute dependence on animals (for pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and scientific research) but also illustrates our complete disrespect for these so-called "non-human providers."

It is this kind of thing that makes many uncomfortable... because it challenges their ideas of responsibility, accountability and ethics. It is important to remember, there is always karma... for every decision. There are consequences (good or bad) for ever action AHIMSA. AHIMSA; be harmless.

Other links for more information concerning Religious and Spiritual ethical approaches:

Animal Rights in Spiritualism , Spiritual Campaign Material, Religion & Ethics, All Creatures Org, Jesus Veg , Early Christian Vegetarians, Judaism & Vegetarianism

A Hero's Job is Never Done

Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,
what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again

in a new way
on the earth!
That's what it said
as it dropped,

smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches

and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing

under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,

and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment
at which moment

my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars

and the soft rain -
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.

-Mary Oliver, from What Do We Know

So, question: What has the rain been saying to me (and it rained for two days here, so the poem and theme is justified)?

Answer: My body likes juiciness, it likes rawness much better than cooked-ness.

What has been so interesting is the anger. By Day 4 of juice, my emotional detox had begun... and it continues. For those who don't know, I am one of those few who actually has a thyroid condition. I have blogged about this before ... and so, no matter what I have done for the past year, my weight doesn't really budge much. The juice makes me feel lighter and more flexible but weight is slow to move. And it's very frustrating. Here's why: I eat better than anyone I know. And there is a fury in me that wants to be normal, to eat whatever I want (cooked or not, meat being entirely excluded on all accounts) and be happy and healthy. But my body, which has always been sensitive and spiritually inclined is pushingpushingpushing to raw and the energy of Mother that I am so good at pushing out. And the raw thing, I know is good, I know that raw is good for me, and even Gabriel Cousens' book Conscious Eating, says that being a Kapha/Vata person (which I am and he is himself, actually), do best on 80% raw. And when I read that, I KNOW it's true and correct, but...

it doesn't mean that the addictive emotional turmoil of past food foibles surrenders easily or even willingly. It's hard. And the anger and hurt I am feeling, I KNOW is emotional because all I want to do is just stuff my face like I have in the past to quell emotional pinches that I would rather numb out, than deal with. Well, now I am having to deal with it. It's hard, but I also know that it's good. It's just hard.

As soon as I have some cash, I am booking it to the Tree of Life and get my RAW on.
*sigh.

Here's to dreaming of Patagonia.

Our Space

** The following quotes the opening passages of the book, The Place Where You are Standing is Holy: A Jewish Theology on Human Relationships, by Gershon Winkler & Lakme Batya Elior, which has got me thinking...

"Make me a sacred space, and I shall dwell amongst you... Exodus 25:8.

In the creation myth of ancient Judaic mysticism, God creates the universe by a process dubbed tzimtzum, which in Hebrew means a sort of stepping back to allow for there to be an Other, an Else, as in some one or something else. The Judaic notion of a world of Free Will (Babylonian, Talmud, Berakhot 33b) is deeply rooted in this concept, in the understanding that in creating life, the Eyn Sof or the Endless One, subdued the omnipotent, all-embracing Presence for the sake of realizing the Divine Will that there be other beings (Etz Chaim 1:1:2). Our world, then, is the sacred space that the Great Spirit gave as a gift to us, a space in which to be as human as divinely possible and as divine as humanly possible. A space to err, to fall, to believe, to doubt, to cry, to laugh. Our space, created by the simple motion of stepping back, the humble act of honoring the separate reality of an Other."

I guess this related to the idea I blogged about yesterday, re: HaMakom -- or The Place. That one of the ways to understand God, is "The Place." Now, here we have God's Place and the space He/She made for us by withdrawing his presence from it, with-held the glory to make a space where God's presence wasn't. Is this what you are understanding from the above, too?

It also makes me reflect on a blog my Rabbi did (yes my Reb blogs, how cool is that??) about the Progression of the human soul, which I have lifted, nay Borrowed: indicated below. He says that according to the Jewish Path, there are five levels/aspects tot he human soul:

"1st* NeFeSh is the physical soul that returns to the earth with the body. It becomes one with the spirit of the earth as our body becomes one with the matter of the earth. Some might refer to this as becoming one with the ‘Gaia spirit’.

2nd* RUaH, the wind spirit aspect of our soul. My reb says his father spoke of this as anonymous immortality. Imagine that you share some important life lesson with a friend. That friend is moved by your teaching. S/he shares it with others in your name. They share it with others and so on. But during the passing of the teaching, your name disappears from the story. The story lives on and in this way you live on in the realm of RUaH but your name does not; anonymous immortality. The stories and lessons that we share regarding our parents, our teachers, our ancestors keep their RUaH, their wind spirit alive in our realm. This is why tribal folk keep an oral history. The tribe lives on in the oral history and in the actions based on that history. When I tell stories of my parents and grandparents, or when we tell the stories of Sarah and Avraham, Moshe and Miriam, Ester and Mordecai, their RUaH feeds us, feeds the tribal RUaH.

3rd*NeShaMaH, which is the breath of our soul. I envision a tiny, invisible silver thread connection to the Wholly One of Being. Since all humans have this connection, the picture is of a spider web of inter-connection between us all and with G. Our joys and sorrows strengthen the web connection of NeShaMaH. Each of us from the greatest Tzadik (righteous one) to the most mean spirited Rasha (evil one) is part of the web. On our computers we see WWW/World Wide Web but that is a pale shadow of the greater WWW that connects us to the Wholly One of Being. Ignore it if we will, it is always there. I remember a story of a Bar/t Mitzvah who said: “I don’t believe in G!” The Rabbi’s response was: “Don’t worry about it. G believes in you!” The World Wide Wholly One of Being Web (WWWOBW) is always connected and no virus can create a disconnect.

4th*HaYah, which can be translated as life and sometimes as a hungry wild beast. But here it refers to longing. We may long for more money, more stature but this is a deeper form of longing. This is a longing to elevate ourselves into a oneness with the Wholly One of Being. “Oh G, how I long to be with you, to feel you in my life!” HaYah is the holy longing. “Oh G, I am hungry for your presence!” In prayer we are in Hayah. We are, as Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heschel might say, in longing to be part of that which is greater than the self. We are in preparation and in longing for the final level of soul, of soulfulness (which leads to the fifth...).

5th*YeHIDaH refers to being in total oneness. In Hebrew there are 3 words having to do with ‘One’. There is YaHaD in which I am one with… My belovedest and I are one. We are one made of parts. Indeed everything that is of matter is one, made of parts. All matter can be broken down into smaller parts. The next level is EHaD as we find in the Shema. EHaD is one without parts, impossible to dissect into aspects. Maimonides speaks of G in this way. G has no parts, G cannot be separated, broken down into components. G is the Wholly one; G is the Wholly One of Being. And the third level of ‘one’ is YeHIDaH. Not only is it one without parts, it is one alone. There is nothing else. There is not even a ‘nothing else’. The image is of G before creation. YeHIDaH is the oneness without parts and without ‘the other’. My mind has trouble wrapping itself around the concept. And yet that part of our soul is us yet not us it is a part of the One Who has no parts. On this level of soul, we do not exist as other than G."

So what happens Aharei Mot, (after death) after the passing of our physical? My Rabbi wrote that, "according to this paradigm, our NeFeSh returns to Gaia spirit. Our RUaH lives on in the souls touched by us in our journeys in this realm. Our NeShaMaH is wound back to G; our HaYaH disappears completely. For there is no longer longing as we become YeHIDaH, enfolded into the total oneness of the Wholly One of Being."

So what is my question?

Here: If the beginning quote is correct, than we exist in a space uninhabited by God... he had to make space for otherness, meaning he could no be there, which, frankly: is not my experience or "belief" (I hate that word) about the Nature of God and our human connections. I am more drawn though to my Reb's progression of the soul -- because it describes the manifold process of being as "human as divinely possible and as divine as humanly possible." We are, after all, both at once. Otherwise, how could we exist and continue on being?

I had a Prof. in undergrad who took that same quote above in Exodus, re: the tabernacle in the Sinai desert erected for God to dwell... but he also mentioned that the Hebrew word for amongst (I think this is right... its been a few years) is also within -- which, with this interpretation means that if we build for God a sacred space within our body-soul-heart i.e. our space, our human Other-ness; he will then dwell inside of us, too.

Somehow that just feels heart-ful, spiritual, and very real... to me. That "the Place" where God is, is Me.

Into the Woods

Here I am.

So much has been happening and so little. I am getting married in roughly 90 days and spring is here and we had our first official thunderstorm and downpour, last night! And yet...

Something is amiss.

I feel completely unwound by it all. I can't seem to get my head clear, I feel like I have a lot of repenting to do -- and so I am going to begin my own little Juice Feast beginning today, I will finish up with the March 92 day-ers and may go a bit beyond them. We will see how the body fares, but I really regret not starting the feast; considering the emotional download I was dealing with I didn't know if it (at the time) more detoxing was something I could handle. But I am having non-buyers, no -- coward's remorse. And so I posted this lovely little bit of Art by Alan Lee, mostly because I can't tell where I am in the picture -- am I still in the tower? Am I the tree encircle by the salamander? (Heaven forbid, the Old Man??)

What's that line in the Torah, where God asks the whereabout of Abraham? And he answers: Here Am I. Here, no where else. I want to be Here. Even whern there is fear. And there is fear in me absolutely. I have been told that t age 27, I still don't know who I am. My rabbi says I am on a Spirit Quest... Oh! I almost forgot: I have started taking Hebrew classes. That's new. So is the fact that my doctor told me that my health issues stem from a waaa-aay (!) under-active thyroid and the fact that my adrenal system is taxed out; that I have been surviving basically on adrenaline fumes for the past six years. No wonder I feel stressed out. So I am taking things to remedy that. Other than that -- he says I am in great health; I have a fantastic heart (as in organ)!

But back to Being. I have a problem with being Present. I have heard it as a mantra almost my entire life, and I often espouse the benefits of Being there... But I rarely make time to do so myself. I rarely pay attention to my breath any more -- I call myself a spiritual person and rarely make time for being in Spiritual practice. Oh shame, shame, indeed. What I am learning in Hebrew (besides the alphabet) is the metaphorical complexity of an ancient language and it takes my breath away. It's beautiful. Besides Sanskrit (at least in my opinion) there is no language I have encountered that has anything on Hebrew. The actual relationship to God is powerful and there is a concept within the language that has me reeling... that is HaMakom, which is a title for God (like Hashem, Adonai) but it means The Place. God is a place. A landscape of Being. And for some reason, that has really put me into a perspective I can experience. Its not any place I can go -- but it is somewhere I can arrive. Here Am I.

So today, I am packing my bags; going on a Juice Feast. I start today! Hurray! Thanks in advance to David & Katrina Rainoshek for their bountiful information, check them out here!

What do you all do, to regain your sense of "Here Am I?"

P.S.

I have finally bought a 9-tray Excaliber Dehydrator! I already own an Omega juicer (the good kind) and a Vitamix (all purchases since October of last year). I have also purchased books for recipe ideas, including: Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine, Ani's Raw Food Kitchen, RAWvolution, I Am Grateful: Recipes and Lifestyle of Cafe Gratitude, & Everyday Raw. (I am a very good Amazon customer *wink).

I am finding it hard to transition slowly in Raw. I find that I keep backsliding and am notoriously hard on myself -- any tips for someone looking forward to high-100% raw?

Light is Light

Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that's been our unifying cry, "More light." Sunlight. Torchlight. Candlelight. Neon, incandescent lights that banish the darkness from our caves to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators. Big floods for the night games at Soldier's Field. Little tiny flashlights for those books we read under the covers when we're supposed to be asleep. Light is more than watts and footcandles. Light is metaphor. Light is knowledge, light is life, light is light. ~Diane Frolov & Andrew Schneider

I was told sometime ago, and again recently about our false perception of the dark universe. Namely, that it isn't dark at all. Physically speaking, there is so much light (star matter, light bodies) in the galaxy, there is no "real" room for dark matter. The darkness appears to be so because the "body" is "facing away from us" and so it seems to the human eye to be dark. If we could actually perceive the light of the universe, it would blind us.


When I see photos like these, I get a sense of the majesty that is this world; that any sense of darkness is but a perception of being "turned away". A shadow cast because of the light.

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within. ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul. ~ Plato

Hey Zeus Commentary: Annunciation (3/25)

(I know this is a little late for Annunciation, which was on Tuesday... but better late than never.)

When we are told to take something on Faith -- it doesn't mean that we must or should blindly accept as Truth whatever it is that's being asked of us. But, seeing as what is called "faith" actually relates to our perceptions of the Light (G!d, etc). Then, an act of faith is a reaching out, a seeking of the Truth as a sensation within us -- not based on an intellectual idea or belief, but an inner knowing, a perceiving.

Perceive means: to obtain, to gather, to take in entirety and literally to receive or collect. Faith means to take into us as a whole -- to grasp it thoroughly -- There is no room for mindlessness, or passivity. Faith, like G!d, is a verb. It is active.

And this is why Jesus tells Thomas {in John 20:29} "Because thous hast seen me, thou hast believed; blessed be those that have not seen and yet believe."

The interpretation of the word Believe did not come into practice as related to Creed or I believe in _____, until the 16th century. Before that, it meant one, or any combination of the following three things: 1) To hold dear, to love, 2) to be like, to be in like desire to, or 3) to have trust in G!d. * Notice, none of these are a mental practice.

So when Jesus says blessed are those who without seeing, believe, he is saying to us: to trust fully in the Christ and the Father... thereby seek to be in like desire (or Will or Intention) to G!d, even without your senses, but in Faith (actively, sensing the Divine Presence which lies beyond any capacity of the corporeal senses) Be -- in full perception of the intention behind the request.

The World Should Take Sips

In addition to being Easter Sunday, yesterday, it was also World Water Day 2008. And as I was looking through my RSS feeds this morning I found this article on Treehugger.com

And I suddenly found another instance where my life is at odds with the day to day experience of most of the world. Case in point: as I was reading the article at 8:20 this morning, I did so as I was feasting on a breakfast of leftover meringue cookies, fruit salad and custard. Whew. Yeah.

So if you can't read the little color key (as it is in French) the orange means that less than 65% of the population has access to drinking water... How's that for perspective?

I Want to Be

Now that I am transitioning from being Lindsay B. into Lindsay Young , I get to completely reinvent myself. What I will leave behind is my depression, and arrogance. What I will take with me is my original, strong, healthy and athletic, slender body, my compassion, my art, my endurance and spark for life, my education on all levels, my heart and every other aspect of myself that is in my highest good.

I will be a new person. And it has already begun. This is why I am fearful, because my ego and attachments know that when I change my name, like every good magic, I get to choose what I want to take with me and build into a newly birthed & begotten Self and also what I may leave behind. Aha, the wonder of transformation…

Further, I would become a preserver of stories, of people, places, & spirit, indigenous cultures, Diaspora, & displacement, rectification, & religion. (India, Maya, Guatemala, China, Thailand, Japan, Aborigine, Maori, Hawai’i, Mexico, Hopi, Navajo, Lakotah, etc. But also, Ireland, England, France, Amsterdam, Americas, Tibet, Nepal, etc.)

I want to be a writer – thereby capable of making commentary on anything. Life-stories, travel, spirituality, environment, education: like Annie Dillard or Elizabeth Gilbert, Bill Bryson, Emerson, & Thoreau, etc. Or write stories for children or tell tales about faeries or giants or mountains… or about me.

I will continue to learn about herbs, light, spirituality, and living naturally. These are all things that I want and imagine Lindsay Young to be.

It Must Be Felt

I, along with my mother and millions of others, am reading Eckhart Tolle's book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. It happens to be Oprah's new Book Club Selection. Not that this is the reason I picked up, nonetheless, I am currently within the first fifty pages.

This book is the inspiration for this space of mine.

First let me explain what is Soma. The word soma means Body. You have probably seen in use in terms of the Somatic. But, furthermore, it is the degree of being-ness when the material or the physical turns into God. In kind with the final desired outcome of Alchemy, it as a state of conscious- ness. Soma is also the name of the Vedic God of Bliss. *Bliss is: blithesomeness; gladness; the now, the highest degree of happiness; blessedness; exalted felicity; heavenly joy. And the way that these two identifying definitions combine in mind is the outcome that I am looking for.

I have spent the last (nearly) nine years struggling with The Body, it's physicality, it's spirituality, the trust it demanded from me, the faith in my intuition that I was unwilling to give, as well as an obsession with purity and health (not that purity and health are inappropriate things to be desirous of, but anything that becomes obsessive has already crossed the line of both). What I did not realize was that I was missing a sense of connectivity to my own life. I abused my body with food and thought and then would become malevolent with it for doing what I was (indirectly) telling it to do. I detested the fact that I was girl... in fact I still have trouble admitting to myself that I am a (gulp) woman. I was afraid to be because I was afraid of being myself. I have done everything I could to try and stack the deck in (what I thought was) my favor... but for all the "winnings" and accolades that came with that path, it has only further severed my ability to recognize who I truly am, and furthermore: I'm exhausted. Thus, I have named this new space: Somatique (a french version of somatic, or the body) because I intend it to be a documentation of a new understanding into a journey of seeing and experiencing My Body with a blissful attitude.

Aha. Back to Tolle. On page 38, he begins to tell the anecdote of "The Lost Ring" and it goes as such:

"When I was seeing people as a counselor and spiritual teacher, I would visit a woman twice a week whose body was riddled with cancer. She was a schoolteacher in her midforties and have been given no more than a few months to live by her doctors. [...] One day, [...] I arrived to find her in a state of great distress and anger. What happened? I asked. Her diamond ring, of great monetary as well as sentimental value, had disappeared, and she said that she was sure it had been stolen by the woman who came here to look after her for a few hours everyday. She didn't understand how anybody could be so callous and heartless as to do this to her. She asked me whether she should confront the woman or whether it would be better to call the police immediately. I said I couldn't tell her what to do, but asked her to find out how important a ring or anything else was at this point in her life. You don't understand, she said. This was my grandmother's ring. I used to wear it every day until I got ill and my hands became too swollen. it's more than just a ring to me. How can I not be upset?

The quickness of her response and the anger and defensiveness in her voice were indications that she had not become present enough to look within and to disentangle her reaction from the event and observe them both. [...] I said, I am going to ask you a few questions, but instead of answering them now, see if you can find the answers within you [...]. I asked, Do you realize that you will have to let go of the ring at some point, perhaps quite soon? How much more time do you need before you will be ready to let go of it? Will you become less when you let go of it? Has who you are become diminished by the loss? [...] When she started speaking again, there was a smile on her face and she seemed at peace. [She said] The last question made me realize something important. First, I went to my mind for an answer and my mind said: 'Yes of course you have been diminished.' Then I asked myself the question again, 'Has who I am become diminished?' This time I tried to feel rather than think the answer. And suddenly, I could feel my I Am-ness. I have never felt that before. If I can feel the I Am so strongly, then who I am hasn't been diminished at all."

Tolle goes on to say that this is the "Joy of Being." And that you can only "feel it when you get out of your head." He says: "being must be felt."

The woman then says, "I now understand something Jesus said that never made sense to me before: 'If someone takes your shirt, let him have your coats as well.' [Tolle then says:] That's right. It doesn't mean you should never lock your door. All it means is that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on."

I have for too long held on to things that are not real. And when I say that they are not real it is because I have created them out of fear. The old saying, "there is nothing to fear but fear itself" is powerful. Because fear is the great immobilizer, it clings to irrational rationalizations and convinces you that there is no hope, you are alone and ultimately you are about to die (more on this topic in the next post). A wise man in my life recently took apart that word for me: rationalize. And by doing so, we discovered that the word ration is tucked in there, slyly in plain sight. To rationalize is to do things or place things into portions. In other words, you are never able to see or experience the bigger picture, the kit-and-caboodle, the whole enchilada.
Fear removes you from seeing what is true and real about you in any particular moment. I have fought the present moment for years, even when I know better.

Tolle does say that there is one thing we do know, that: "life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment."

So there it is. This new journey you are embarking on with me is due to the realization that Being must be felt. And so I intend to do so. I intend to Be.

I highly recommend reading the book

*If you are interested in more of the background to all this, although I'm sure pockets will get filled in here or there, you can visit my old blog Somewhere in the Body-Life.

The Last Bite (From the Body-Life)

I have become very annoyed by seeing that every cookbook on health begins with Hippocrates. “Let Food Be thy Medicine and Medicine, Thy Food…” It always appears somewhere, usually in the first twenty pages, if it wasn’t the opening quote. This concept attributed to Hippocrates, was what drew me into food and nutrition long before I knew who spoke the words. This goes to show how true and natural concepts become pervasive, especially when one is looking for it. And I know that this is a truth. That food heals. But so do our thoughts… and it has gotten to the point that no matter what I put into my mouth, I am in judgment about it. I rationalize, polarize, and vacillate into extremes out of the need to control something! Let me have control over one tiny part of something… let me get out of this fear that unravels and twitters behind every thought, every action: nothing is sincere anymore, or at least, sometimes, it feels this way.

Food has become so many things for so many people. It is not merely what provides sustenance, for many it is comfort, love, acceptance, a drug, an obsession, another means of control, another way to abstain from any sense of being, a numbing shot against pain or grief, pornographic gastronomy... of which, all I am guilty of, I'm sure. And then there it was, on the top of page 30 in Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions: my ultimate issue.

“The desire to abstain from animal products, found so often in those of a spiritual nature, may reflect a longing to return to a former, more perfect state of consciousness that was ours before our souls took embodiment in a physical material plane […].”

I find myself in this struggle of what I relate to in my spiritual sense and my fear and buffering against the joy and the sorrow of the physical body. The compassion for all living creatures, the love in their eyes and innocence, mixed with my craving for animal protein. Most of the time, meat tastes dead to me. But then I can remember a bacon-wrapped date that dissolved in my mouth with such exquisite sweetness, such tender, melt in your mouth, salty, crispy sublimity, it had a density which made the tongue giggle all on its own. And I don't even like pork. But there was such attention put into that meal, that night, in Marin County, under palm trees and lanterns, sharing wine amongst friends.

It’s not that I think raw food is not of benefit to my body, but I have developed so many food-rules for myself, that I feel like I am just using raw as one more way to control what goes in my mouth. I have a very bizarre eating disorder. I’m not bulimic, although I have made myself throw up …more in the last 2 years than ever in my adolescence. But I definitely have a binge-purge pattern going on, especially when I look at my food journal. I didn’t think I starved myself… but some days, I eat hardly anything at all… and wonder why I am so maniacally famished into downing too much pasta or potatoes the next: my body is screaming for quick glucose. I am realizing that I have royally screwed up my relationship with my body. I stopped seeing it as sacred: it was the enemy.

Whenever it comes to food, thoughts about said bacon-wrapped bounty are always essential (in what way, who knows?) … But I think it is also what thoughts and intentions I use in preparation. One of spiritual my teachers, a small Indian man with a gravelly voice would stand over his pot of rice or sautéing ginger garlic onions, and say: “You are so beautiful. You are the most wonderful onions. Look at you, look at how beautiful you are.” The tomatoes blushed in response. The same man also said that whenever you truly enjoy something… not out of craving-aversion-lust-compulsion: but genuinely enjoy – it all turns to soma. And no matter how healthy something else is, if your body is in judgment or in fear-hate-compulsion about it, it becomes ama … undigested matter = dis-ease.

Somewhere between nineteen and twenty-six years old, I had developed a love-hate relationship with food. A need to stuff myself with the most sublime things, coupled at other moments with anything that would do to make me numb, send me into a carbohydrate induced coma, just anything to not feel. Now, to be clear, this was not fast food or ice cream. I was a health foodie, all-organic everything. Whole grain, (spelt, buckwheat, barley, brown rice, quinoa) what’s-it and every manner of vegetable. I had an adventurous palate, within reason (no chicken feet stew or sweetbreads has made it past my lips, and I’m pretty sure that won’t change). But then again, organic pasta was always enough to send me down that dark spiral, where the fog rolls in on the east coast of consciousness and nothing but the blur and heft of fullness can be felt. Here, I didn’t have to think about school or sex or the unfairness I always associated with be female, I could just disconnect from any sub-sensual method of being alive and slip away into a useless stupor; a drug just as powerful as anything you could inject into the bloodstream, by needle, and almost as fast. I was addicted to not feeling. But like any addiction, it never really makes you feel good for very long, and when the fog cleared, the sun always rises the next morning and the pain (which I had pushed so deeply into my sinews, my feminine parts, places I knew that at least, I would never look, into cavernous brokenhearted hotels, muscles, curvaceous fatty deposits that I had never had before) was still there. I am a self-admitted food snob Spiritual egoist, South beach (tried it), Zone (tried it), Macrobiotics (tried it), Ayuveda, Vegetarian, Vegan(tried it), Raw food(tried it): glutton(tired of it). And am so sick of all the labels.

Someone recently asked me, have I ever tried just letting my body have whatever it actually wants? No judgments no second-guessing and after really thinking about it… no I haven’t. I have never actually let my body, not my neuroses, pre-programmed food-abridged rule induced conceptualized intellectualized rationalization, make a single decision in my life. I am beginning to suspect (har) that my issues with food will not go away with being thin or healthy, because they are 100% of the mind.

M has been on this wonderful kick of picking “intention” cards for the week – one of these for me was : I Love My Body.

…maybe I should just try that for awhile. And talking to my mom, she says: wow. I think you think too much. And she says, whenever I start to think too much, I should just breathe. Whenever you see yourself spiral into old thoughts, trying to find someplace in the head where its safe... just breathe. Ok. I will. I'll breathe. Love and Breathe.