2010s These are heady times...

It is the end of another Julian calendar year... it was the ending of the year for my own personal calendar year back in September. My decade also started earlier. I will explain more on this later, if I don't forget, or if I still feel inclined.

Hey! The year is ending! It's an exciting time, always has been for me. Mostly because symbolically the first of the year, any year has always suggested a clean slate, and a starting over. It's a hopeful time.

Still.

This is the first of many years where I feel and wish a continuation of things from previous days. I know I am going to look back on this time years from now and know beyond any doubt that, indeed, these next years are going to cement and guide my future years like nothing else in my life. A keystone is metaphorical in so many ways, and perfectly suited for what I am feeling.

Life is interesting. 2009, 2010, has been a tremendous time for me. I think life is interesting because for so many of us, when someone says that they are happy, giddy with excitement, bursting with love with light, and with good humor for their own lives and the world around them, people tend to either think that these people are deluded, misguided, or just brazenly lucky in life.

I am here to suggest that none of these things are true. I am here to suggest that YOU, and ONLY you can make the argument, (it is not an argument in any case), for your own happiness, your joy, your well being, your general mental homeostatis. You and no one else.

The corollary is just as true. Only YOU, yourself, by your own unwillingness and ignorance can make yourself miserable, cowardly, insecure, unconfident, unhappy... It is not in your cards that you were handed, nor in some silly astrological chart, not in the way your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, mother, father, brother, sister, neighbor, teacher, boss, other human outside of your self treats you...

Your happiness or unhappiness has nothing to do with what is found in your back pocket, your bank account, your job, your lack of job, your love life, your lack of love life, how fat you are, how thin you are...

Your happiness/unhappiness have only to do with YOU and how you respond to life's monkey wrenches and curve balls. Only YOU.

"You are the author of your own health, of your disease."

If you don't like where your year has gone, your decade has gone, your entire life has gone, act NOW AND CHANGE YOUR OWN COURSE.

We are blessed with a wit of a clean slate, and this can happen, anytime! It doesn't have to be at the end of the Julian calendar.

My clean slate began in May 2008, and I haven't looked back since. It has been a heady whirlwind of a journey. I closed so many doors and brutally excavated memories buried deep within the crevases. I cleaned my house and cleared out. It was a heady time. Scary, but heady. And what ultimately started as a painful process quickly turned into something unbelievably exciting and then, every door, every window opened and continues to open...

Amazing!

People think I am lucky. People think I am happy because I have things come easily my way. But it has nothing to do at all with luck! When you start flowing with what your nature intended, you find yourself easily in tune with Nature with the capital 'n' and this is when things start to happen... Good things find you just as the "bad" once found you and followed you like a bad debt. It is such a simple and straightforward equation; and not at all complicated or esoteric.

Things do start to happen, believe me! Of course, not all things, are necessarily good, in the conventional sense. But you also start to notice the yucky things happen less and less, and when they do happen, your responses are also different. I met with a pretty serious accident earlier this year and totaled my brand new car. An industrial ladder was left in the highway, taking up two lanes, it was dark, rainy and the snow was just starting to clear, I saw it too late... Nothing bad happened to either me or the person driving the truck that I crashed into head on, and I now drive another new car,  but still, yucky business nevertheless. I escaped unscathed and did not shed a single tear. I have only to thank my vipassana and peaceful disposition for that serenity during that crazy car episode.

I am only using this example to illustrate that even when you start living a life connected to your inner chi and effortlessness, "bad" things can still happen. Nothing in life is guaranteed. The deer can still get eaten by the lion, but it still goes on, alert and active, not in the least bit sad, depressed, or angry, in the forests of the world...

Yet, still:

Life is so beautiful. In its entire capacity. If you want a good year, you have to make it happen! If you want love, you have to be that love! If you want whatever it is that you want, you have to make the effort, and also make it effortlessly! Ha! This is the koan of my life. Effortlessness...

I wish all of you much peace, love, joy, and happiness for this coming year. May you work hard, be ever mindful, always practice compassion, and share as much love that you can muster with the rest of the world.

A very happy New Year and Metta to all. May all beings be happy!

Refeeding...

“The lion is most handsome when looking for food”
- Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Where to begin. I can't even begin, I don't know how. It's been so long. It's better to start in the middle, then. So I shall. I wanted to change this blog, I never write here anyway, but I don't have the luxury of time or even the necessity to do so right now. I only wrote one other entry, and so far, I still dig the name of the blog. We are all waiting for Kalki, in one way or another... even if we don't know whom that quite is, yet.

What a year. A decade. What a life. So much has happened.

I am so filled with gratitude these days and usually so moved with awe by the most minutiae of things. I sat in awe this summer watching an earthworm painstakingly crawl from one side of the hot blazing pavement to the safety of the cool grass and earth waiting on the other side. I picked him up, placed him along on the cool grass and thanked him for his gift of cephalization to evolution. Without him, where would we be?

It was also the FIRST time in my life I handled a worm on my own volition. It's interesting, my old fears keep falling by the wayside. When I go for my blood tests and check ups, I stare right at the needle going up my vein. I was never able to look at blood or anything related to blood directly. These days, nothing the human body produces bothers me; nothing the animal kingdom produces disturbs me. I have an enormous sense of respect for how we operate biologically. When I am meditating, I breathe as much oxygen as I can into every cell I have in my body. I breath into them as much love and gratitude as I can, for each cell, because every cell in our body works so hard for our well being, for a stable and unencumbered homeostasis. They are so brilliant!

It's no surprise then, after each intensive viapassana sit that I veer away from foods and substances that run contrary to the maintenance of my homeostasis. This last time, however, I had an even more overwhelming urge to fast and rid my body of all the toxins from my years of bad choices. I wanted to do a total water only fast for forty days, but I have decided to do half of the forty days with water and the other half with fresh juices.

It has been very, very, very intense. And it continues to be... I probably will not feel the full effects when all is said and done until mid 2011. And I know it will be so brilliant. Today, I am so happy to be drinking juice and soups.

My water fast of 21 days was pretty brutal. Initially, I felt great and swam about a mile for the first week I was fasting. I can normally swim two miles with ease while eating, but of course I started to notice that I could hardly do ten laps by the seventh day. After the eighth day, I was just plum tuckered and didn't want to do anything but take catnaps in the sun. And well, the tenth day on, I had my detox. And it was pretty severe. My cells must have cannibalizing on all the fats and toxicity from my past lives that were left over in my body, and it caused me a great amount of discomfort, to put it mildly.

But I meditated often and focused on my work and school, which made it a bit more bearable. My thoughts on food, I found, were so interesting. Initially I craved vegan tortilla soup, I was not hungry, I just craved it, and so I bookmarked a million recipes for it. Good grief the amount of food porn! And then my cravings filtered down to the foods I ate as a child. My ultimate comfort food. My parents always used to tell me that I was such a healthy kid and would only want the good food and would reject anything processed or unnatural outright. Which meant candies that most kids love. I never used to like them, and opted always for fruits. Which is so interesting to me. I think it was the way I was as a child that has saved me from disease and illness as an adult, because believe me, I have made so many rotten and unhealthy choices on my own after my teen years.

In many ways, vipassana has healed any wounds I have had and removed layer upon layer to bring me closer to my self. Before I self- damaged, either with my choice of foods, friends, work, or relationships. Somewhere along the way I had lost faith in my cells and in my own self-regulating homeostasis... or maybe it was that I was too overconfident? Could be either and or both. Who knows. All I know now is that the further I move from what is good for me, the further I move from being happy. The closer I am, the happier I am, the stronger I am, the more fearless I am...

So not only has vipassana reintroduced me back to my self before I self sullied and self sabotaged but it has also refed me my mental and spiritual nourishment. And now fasting has brought in the food component. I feel like a naked canvas. Paint me so many colors that are vibrant and beautiful, feed me, nourish me. I constantly feel reborn.

I think food has a very real connection to emotions. I also think that the fats in the food are what keeps old emotions adhered to your system. Which is why temporary solutions always fail. It's proabbly a giant leap, but I'd posit that you can grow tumors and cancers from the emotions you keep locked up inside, even if you pretend to yourself and to the world how wonderful everything is, disease, illness, digestive irritation, imbalance, etc., seem to be all the proof one needs to know that there is something else buried deep within, where it is only a matter of time before it surfaces, leaks out, in many myriad neuroses. Anyway, it is just an intuitive theory of mine. It could be completely baseless. For me, in my own experience, I have noticed, the more my body has rid itself of toxins while fasting, the lighter I have felt, and it hasn't only been the physical lightness. It has been emotional as well. It has been amazing. Old emotional wounds that I have carried with me like a pack rat, are long gone. And my mind empty. My heart full once more.

I feel so clean inside. Like my body is a temple. I have been given a second chance in life to fill it with only the fresh, the delicious, the beautiful, the fearless, the kind, the intelligent, the generous, and the loving. I can't even begin to imagine filling myself up with junk. There was a time I used to write that I always felt so "suspended" from everything. I used to even "play" being in a relationship with an ex, even while we were in a relationship, (surely it confused him to no end, poor guy). I could just never connect with everything that I had one hundred percent, either with anyone or anything. Always hanging suspended, looking in.

And today, I connect. Oh, how I connect with me. Connecting with my refeeding... I taste everything. It is delicious, brilliant! It has been an incredible journey. I am so happy and feel so clean and so alive. I feel truly fearless and tears are always welling up inside because I feel so grateful to be alive and vital and vibrant and of the world.