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.