Breakthrough

The sciatica that was keeping me up all night is now gone.  Turns out I was pre-menstrual. Usually on the first day of my cycle, I would feel drained and exhausted.  But this morning I'm feeling a really nice core of vitality and clean energy. The kind of energy that is going to motivate me to keep this cleanse up for the whole three weeks.  I'll break a little today for lunch with a friend.  But the cleanse is about "avoiding" those things.  So I'm sure I'll find things on the menu with some healthy greens.  Maybe I'll eat something first so that I'm not over ordering.

I had a very pleasant stand.  Twenty minutes of second position.  Then some exercises to open the channels.  Then I just stood in first position, felt the energy in my belly and allowed it to create its own direction.  It started moving first in the right side of my body, lifting my arm, filling my leg and eventually moving up to my head.  The left side of my body seemed to become completely empty. I "leaned"in a way on the right side energy.  Allowing it to simply take me over and hold me up.  Then eventually the left side started to fill up too.  As my palms became parallel, I could sense the energy moving back and forth between them, like a ping pong ball.

I'm going to keep to that practice this week.  Just let the energy do its thing.  And watch what happens.

Liberation

Last night a broke slightly from the cleanse.  Went out for Indian food with friends.  Had a spinach paneer with some cheese and vegetable biryani.  One onion bajhi.  But overall, compared to what I would have normally eaten--butter chicken, fried stuff, big beer--- it felt good to go out and not overeat.  At the end of the meal I really had a strong sense of satiety, not just foodwise, but psychologically.  It feels good to see the possibility of be liberated from all these compulsive food choices, motivated to eat by authentic, not emotional hunger.
  Had some insomnia last night because I'm still having problems with the back pain.  I'm not sure if this is because I haven't been running as much, or something to do with the cleanse.  It could also be this large uterine fibroid I recently discovered.  It's part of the reason I'm keeping up with the cleanse. I wonder if bad habits have built up to grow this fibroid.
   I know I've always stored a lot of tension in my back.  It may be that now my body is going in to deal with that.
  Here's hoping it will pass. While I feel these aches and pain, I'm also feeling a growing energy.  It's as though this energy now allows me to deal with the foundation parts that have always been too weak.
 Time to rebuild.

Over the hump

I read yesterday that day four is usually the "hump" day in a cleanse. If you get past this day, then the rest is easier.

It was the most difficult day.  I felt back pain, bloated, blocked up. Almost flu-ish.  This morning I'm tired and I still have a backache and I feel like I'm still waiting for the sludge to clear.  But I definitely feel more energy and a more solid sense of what I need to do to keep this cleanse going.  Eat smaller portions of beans, for one thing!  Maybe keep them to one meal.

Last night I felt some cravings. I felt that sense of emptiness and disconnection that continues to haunt me, even after all these years.  I couldn't eat, so I stood.  Obviously I felt much, much better from standing than I've ever felt from parking myself with some food in front of a video.

This morning it was so clear to me how I have literally been feeding my suffering. Whenever my suffering calls out I give it a snack.  No wonder it's so big and powerful.

If I could reprogram this loop so that my suffering is greeted with natural opiates instead of food and distraction, then logically is should just gradually diminish on its own without me trying to work so hard trying to diminish it.

Let's see.

The Crappy Feeling

Day 4.  I was not expecting this.  Yesterday, it really seemed that I was going to have this relatively painless transition to a clean body and brain.  And then last night something started to hit me.  It started with back pain, and full body cramps.  This morning I feel bilious and vile.  As though I'm now paying for every pizza I've ever eaten in my life.
  One possible explanation for this is that I'm not drinking enough water to flush out the "toxins."  So today I'll drink some water and try and remember to put a lot of chia on things for water retention.  Maybe it's the peanut butter?  Am I possibly allergic?  I don't know, but I'm going to cut it out.
  At the same time, I'm feeling a good building energy behind this crappy energy.  Something that's telling me that it's worth it to live through this. And I'm also noticing that I'm a little less addicted to food.  That when I feel a craving it feels a little more manageable. Not so compulsive.
  For now, though, dark day of the body.

The Silky Feeling

Day 3 of my cleanse. Yesterday I started with some stiff muscles and not much else. Slowly over the course of the morning, however, I began to feel glimmers of a natural energy. My friend Jeff Warren wrote a piece for the New York Times about an intensive retreat he did. He spoke of a day, after a particularly dark night of the soul, when he started to feel this "silky" energy all around him.  I've started to feel that.  But it's intermittent.
  I feel it for an hour or so, this feeling that I'm back in touch with my natural opiates, and then I get a headache, or fatigue sets in.  Yesterday I dealt with the fatigue by putting some chia seeds in a smoothy.  Today, as I drive my parents to the airport for their trip to Israel, my adrenaline will probably be coming from my lack of sleep. Woke up early this morning around 3 a.m.  Monkey mind crawling around.  So I meditated for about forty five minutes. Then read some Pema Chodron. It was a chapter about the in-between state.  The place that meditators have to live in for a long time until they grasp that the uncertainty is actually a stable resting point.
  I feel right now that this cleanse is something of an in-between state.  I feel ready to start giving up my addictions and facing my suffering.  As Chodron writes, pizza and videos are no match for suffering. So better to just face it and let it build the strength and wisdom it can nurture.
  Around 6 a.m. I went back to meditating.  It went better than yesterday.  I do feel a certain energy building, a sharp feeling in my gut that if both painful, but also a familiar starting point of natural pleasure.  And around me, the "silky feeling".
  It's the tender place that Chodron talks about. The place of bodhichitta  It's the place I want to protect and cultivate, for myself and for everyone in my life.

Cleanse

Today I'm on day 2 of a dietary cleanse.  I'm cutting out sugar, alcohol, caffeine, gluten, and animal meat for at least a week.  Maybe longer if I feel inspired.  I'm doing this mostly because I've accepted  in the last few weeks how much my poor eating habits affect my morning practice.  I hope this tan tien energy that I want to build, and make a permanent core in my body,  would be much stronger if there weren't so much sludge for my liver to deal with every evening.
   I started yesterday and began immediately to feel the effects of my caffeine addiction and whatever else it is that I can't seem to stop myself from consuming. I literally felt the same way I used to feel back when I was routinely trying to quit smoking.  I felt all these toxins in my body fighting to stay alive. I felt dirty and headachy.
  Two things helped me quit smoking.  First my tai chi practice made me protective of my breath. And second, I moved.  Not associating cigarettes with my cues in environment made it much easier to quit.
  I'm feeling hopeful that this is the same process that is happening with my food addictions. I'm feeling protective of my gut. And you can't care about your gut and eat and drink things that make it feel lousy.  With my gut in better shape, I hope I'll be able to make better food choices more instinctively. I'm going to be moving in the next months, so this is a good time to set up a new environment.  It would be such a relief to my psyche to be finally liberated from these constant food cravings, in the same way I've been liberated from my nicotine addictions.
 Today though I have to deal with side effects of getting off these things.  I feel less trashy, but there are definitely going to be feelings to deal with.  This morning in practice I could feel the muscle tension.  I didn't know this, but caffeine works by creating muscle tension, so when you get off it, your body needs a lot of time to learn how to relax naturally.
  The other thing I'm feeling is fatigue.  Obviously.  Caffeine keeps the cycle going because fatigue becomes the trigger.  One thing I learned through quitting smoking is to reframe triggers as symptoms.  Fatigue is a symptom of caffeine addiction.  It's not going to go away with more caffeine, it's going to become entrenched.  So today I'm going to have to take it easy, live with the fatigue.  Maybe try and get outside to get some oxygen and whatever natural stimulants I can find.
I don't feel like running, but if I run hopefully I'll sleep better.
  Journaling helps to entrench a positive cycle.  It helped with my smoking.  It will help with my eating.

Patience

I've had some interesting and exciting experiences this week as the energy in my tan tien starts to build.  I've connected with the warm liquid center.  I've felt the pulsating electrical energy outside of myself as a living breathing presence.  I had a moment where all my suffering disappeared and I was just bare awareness of the profound peace and abundance in the world.  And I heard a voice telling me that this was now a permanent part of my life.  This happiness.
  But this morning, just a mundane practice.  The impatience builds, wanting to feel the deep satisfying  state of peace and joy.  The impatience that I am coming to learn is the worst block to my progress.
  Impatience means that my desire is coming from the wrong part of my body.  Mostly the desire is in my head, in some place where I conceptualize what happiness is: a mystical state, a constant permanent state of thriving.  And happiness may very well be these things.  But it's not achieved by conceptualizing.  It's achieved by achieving.  Impatience is the vision becoming more important than the work.
  So I bring the desire down to the core loop in my belly.  This is the place where desire will be most quickly and productively satisfied.  But I resist it because this desire, the place where this desire comes from has been so problematized by my life and the culture I come from.  Real healthy desire feels a lot like sexual desire and in my celibate, single mother life, that desire connects me with a place of sadness, fear and abandonment.
  So I go back to visualizing, rather than feeling what happiness is.  It's safer.  It's more comfortable. And my impatience protects me from having to go back there.
  Babysteps.  The smartest thing to do is to bring my awareness for brief moments, brief sessions to that place again and again.  Don't look for the explosive clearing house, orgasmic moment of revelation and transcendence.  Just get used to living, feeling, wanting from that place.  Regularly, throughout the day.
  The goal is not a mystical experience.  The goal is a mystical life.  A regular, habitual connection to this vital, healing, empowering energy, that I hope to share with as many people as I can.