Fast--Day 2

It is said that day 2 is the hardest.  Hormones increase like grhelin, which signals hunger, and cortisol, which raises blood sugar to deal with stress.

From the chart I read in a blog, by Dr. Jason Fung, a Toronto nephrologist, Ghrelin and cortisol is highest in the morning of day 2.  I certainly felt that this morning, but by 8 a.m. it seems to be passing.

I expect about three really strong waves throughout the day.  But I've been learning a method for dealing with them over the last month.  Don't fight it. Dial anxiety down to curiosity.  Recognize that the hunger is a fact. Sit with it and notice what if feels like in every part of the body.  Get specific with the notations. Sometimes I even time it.

Then, notice how it feels when it passes, which it always does.  Than hunger doesn't last is also a fact. What I'm trying to do is make that more intuitive.

The brain adjusts.  It pulls the energy it needs from stored fat.  It's been built to do this, and it may even suffer if it never gets the chance to exercise this mechanism.  There's a time to grow, and a time to decompose.

This is the theory behind fasting for health.

Later

Interesting article on how fasting can re-boot metabolism.  Interesting in terms of my post-traumatic growth theme:

Belief

From my morning practice journal:

It's hard to live with less thought, less belief in the storylines constantly being built in my heard.  But I get up every morning and meditate because I believe in something. I believe that cultivating calm leads to happiness. I believe in happiness. I believe that happiness is possible for all. I believe in the power of equanimity.  I believe that my peace can benefit and impact others.  I believe in the same way that my parents' hatred impacted me, my love can impact Ben and everyone in my life.  So I mediate and I write.
  What do I believe about writing?  I believe that it is a technology that can have a positive impact on life, and a negative one. I believe that it can make communication possible, that it can contribute to a conversation that will keep us sane and peaceful. That writing, optimized, can bring us to happiness. I believe.  So I write.  I get up every morning and I write and I hope that my clarity of mind will express itself in these words.  That my fine motor skills will develop into some kind of satisfying flow of mental effort. That this effort will encourage others to put effort into their lives.  I believe in the breath and in the fundamentals of life.  So I write because I hope that it is the expression of a clear mind an an open heart and an emerging wisdom and I hope that this wisdom will be useful to others.  I hope that I can be anchor so I want to see how this ritual will be an anchor for me. 

Deep Work

I'm feeling better now as I finish the second week of my cleanse and the last week of my digital de-clutter. 

I've started processing a lot of the agitation that I've been using food and streaming to avoid. I feel like I have more clarity at work.  Sometimes that means that I'm able to see that I like people, and they like me more than I think.  Sometimes that means I'm better able to see where my ego is sabotaging things.  I feel like I'm starting to re-discover the pleasures of deep work. 

So the plan now is to limit my digital activities to books and podcasts.  No streaming for at least a few weeks. I will do one more week of dietary cleanse and try to retain the habit of healthy breakfast and lunch.  Then the next big project will be cleaning my home. The hope is that in a body and environment that supports focus,  I will be able to make better decisions with how I use my evening time.

I'm reading Cal Newport's book on deep work.  I want to find better ways to guard my mind from shallow distraction. 

Transmutation

This morning I felt the fear at the core of my ego.  I've been struggling with feeling alienated from the people I work with, and I wanted to solve it by going to an event where I'm not sure I'm needed or wanted.

Instead I sat with my terror of being excluded.  I could feel it, deep in my gut, near my spine.  It was solid like a post. Then it transmuted. Suddenly I was bolstered by a strong feeling of vitality and ease. Both a lightness, and a feeling of power. 

I could go to the event, I could not go to the event.  I chose not.  I chose to stay home with whatever suffering happens today.

Liberated by my most destructive habits, video streaming, crappy food, I have no choice but to face these feelings.  And I have not choice but to get better.

Eating for happiness

Interesting article in NyTimes this morning about the effect of eating a diet high in vegetables on your mood. It is certainly my experience that eating a balanced diet has made me feel better.

And I'm a believer in this healthy gut stability.  Let's see what happens again after a few weeks.

I know today I'm feeling moody and a bit paranoid.  At least I hope it's paranoid.

I'll check in in a week.

Day 5

So the decision to keep fibre low for first few days is working.  I'm quite amazed at how I've been able to do full work days and even travel during what is usually the most difficult days in the cleanse. I felt kid of achey last night, but then I realized this morning that I hadn't been drinking water, and I didn't really have the opportunity to eat many greens. 

Today I'm at a conference, so I'm going to load up on whatever salad they offer. Going to eat a lot of fruit fro breakfast, instead of croissants.  Going to stick to the herb tea.  Going to check now to see if they have special menu for via.

Day 3

These things seem to be working to minimize the usual side effects from day 3:  drinking lots of club soda, being careful about fibre, getting some exercise, hot bath.  Okay, yesterday I skipped the hot bath, and I have a long work day today, so I might relax the rules a bit.  I'm also on the road for a couple of days, so maybe not the best decision to do it this week.  But I can adapt.

I can keep off the caffeine.  I might end up eating some gluten.  I can stay vegetarian. I can definitely give up sugar.  I may end up having a beer.

Or not.  The goal here is awareness.  I'm still in the grip of so many compulsions.  But this month I feel like I'm making some progress in letting them go and in building a more stable and resilient mind.

It helps that I've given up Netflix for the month, that I've done some work on my feelings, that I've been thinking more deeply about my values. The only thing I'm detaching from now is food.

Cleanse again

It's been two years since I did a cleanse.  Two years! 

So, yes, I'm worried about how it's going to start. Reading over my previous journals, I have a few ideas for how to minimize the muscle tension and pain of the first few days.

First, watch out for overloading on fibre.  I'm really going to make greens the foundation of my diet this time.  Lemon, garlic, green onions, cucumbers.  Be careful with the apples. No beans until I'm over the hump day.  I'll get my protein from nuts and nut butter.

I'm going to drink a ton of water, and eat a lot of miso soup.  And I'm going to try and be okay with hunger for while.  I haven't done a cleanse, but I did eat that light vegetarian diet during Vipassana, so I'm not that riddled with toxins.

I hope.

I think I'll also do a lot of standing and walking to get the circulation going.

Right To Play

I sit here at the beginning of a work day watching my pride play. This weekend I gave a presentation with the Canadian-based NGO, Right to Play, and I’ve been thinking very much about the work-play balance in my life. Things are going well in my career, but as is so often the case I’m having a harder and harder time trying to maintain my self-nurturing rituals. I got on the scale this morning and, well….

I am an animal, and I know, according to the Sapiens books I’m reading, that once we didn’t think of ourselves as better than animals. But we do now. And we’ve created this crazy thriving mess of a shared story. Part formal religions, part quasi-religions, like humanism and capitalism. I wonder if at any point it will really alchemize into a promised land. I think of Pico Iyer after his years of traveling making the decision to spend the rest of his life sitting still in Japan. I think of my own exploits in consciousness. Sitting here feeling the energy play in my body. Expanding, contracting, floating around like a balloon. I am tired, but I’m also elated, in a grounded and creative way, not in some hypomania, trapped in my head way. I am surfing a very interesting spiritual dynamic in my body these days. For the first time in a while, I’m able to stop my thoughts at will. I’ve had this power in the past, but I didn’t think of it as a power and then I lost it. It is the power to think of the future and past as what they really are, wispy nightmares and dreams. And because of this the power to stop thinking of the past and the future.

This is not power in the way that we have defined it in our liberal humanist society as the power to cure disease and stimulate economic growth. It is power over our own mind. It is not the power to craft long-lasting stories about our historic achievements. It is probably closer to the way it has been defined by formal religions, as the power to maintain a spiritual balance in the body. As the power to nurture those things that may be truly sustainable and renewable, wisdom, kindness, compassion. May I build this psychic muscle, stretch it, keep in working. Throughout the nerves of my body. May I taste my self-aversion every day and I know that I can watch it dissolve bit by bit over time. May I spend the next while living off the fat of my body until I become lean and healthy. May I discover once again the pristine consciousness that is and will always be home.

fear factor

Day 4 of this cleanse.

I started this cleanse in large part because I was becoming more conscious of my kidneys. I'm starting deep breathing into the part of the diaphragm that extends through my lower back.

I'm sure I've read many times that kidneys are as important as the heart in chinese medicine. But I've never really used my kidneys in a way that has made me conscious of their importance.  For the Chinese they are the source of vitality and the main filtration system not just for physical waste, but for fear.  I read this a few days ago in Bruce Frantzis's book, but I didn't really feel it until today.

Terrifying dream last night. I was on a bus with a group of terrorist/assassins.  Fortunately I was sitting with a woman with a gun, also some kind of assassin. She was able to shoot some of them, but we had to make a run for it. We ended up in some kind of building, maybe a school, maybe a YMCA, and we found ourselves hiding in a sort of long shower with sliding doors.  By this time my assassin companion was limp and naked. Now I had to take over and take care of her.  But it was hopeless. I was trying to take care of this woman, but there was no way I would be able to save myself if I didn't leave her behind. This was heartbreaking because she had saved my life.

I woke up feeling all the fear that could be felt in my kidneys.  I tried meditation, but could barely sit for twenty minutes.

It's still there as I write.  At the same time it's exciting, because I've never been so conscious of this raw fear and where it lives in my body.  It's so clear why I would want to do everything I could to numb this feeling. It's a particularly resonant feeling for me because I suffered from two kidney infections as a child, and I remembering how terrifying that feeling was. That lying in bed in agony.

I'm not in agony, now on day 4.  Rather, I'm in a place of awareness. Starting to understand how all the puzzle pieces fit together.

The Secret of Saliva

I'm on day two of dietary cleanse.

Started the day feeling the usual symptoms of de-tox, headaches, fatigue, muscle pain. And did the usual things to soften them, bath, water, standing.

Then I read something mind blowing.  I'm reading a book called Gut: The Inside Story of Our Most Underrated Organ. One of those Amazon Kindle 1.99 things, that makes me think back to that remaindered book on Zhan Zhuang I found almost twenty years ago.  It may be one of those books that changes things.

In 2006, it says, scientists discovered a natural pain killer in human saliva, opiophine, six times as strong as morphine. In studies so far it acts as both a pain killer and an anti-depressant. And if that weren't cool enough, it's non-addictive!

This makes so much sense in both my sitting and standing practices, especially in recent months when I've been experiencing what Shenzen Young calls "the taste of purification."  I've also known and sensed that the mouth and tongue have powerful nerve endings. The idea that our suffering can be relieved simply by becoming more in tune with our saliva is really exciting.

At any rate, in the last few hours that I've known this my de-tox symptoms have almost evaporated.

Fascinating!

Cleanse

I'm on day 4 of another cleanse.  This one is much easier since it's only been three months since the last one. I feel a little achey this morning, but nothing like the agony I usually find myself in.

I started the cleanse because I felt myself returning to old compulsions, deep cravings for chocolate bars, soft drinks and binge eating. The weight is creeping up again and it's not just the weight I'm concerned about, it's the emotional well being beneath it. I need to get this book deal and I'm not going if my mind is dull.

Still, it's hard. In some ways harder because I don't have the physical pain to distract me from the emotional pain that surfaces when I go on a cleanse. If I don't unpack these emotions though, I'm going to find myself back here again and again.

So I set my intention. To continue unhooking from these food and emotional compulsions. To continue the process of purification. To continue making this strong, clean energy a permanent part of the life I have left. To continue to pray that it will have an impact on other lives.

The Future

I'm in the last week of my cleanse.  So it's time to start imagining the better future that I want to have as the result of unhooking from my compulsions.

I know I feel better when I'm eating simple nutritious vegetarian food.  I always have, I always will. So I need to start seeing myself make that shift.  I need to see myself reading the books that support that shift. I need to see myself as someone who has made that commitment.

I need to start seeing myself as part of the vegetarian community and imagine how much more stable and satisfying my life would be.

It's not a solution to all my problems. But it's certainly a important step towards the risk of obesity in my family. And it's an important step in becoming an activist for a kinder more compassionate world.

Loneliness

I read somewhere once that we should treat loneliness like a cold shower. A shock when we feel it, but energizing if we have the courage to really feel it and sit with it.

Now that I've had the courage to feel the hunger, I realize what's holding it in place. This loneliness. This loneliness that I've felt all my life.  And this loneliness that I may feel for the rest of my life simply because it's human. But it is loneliness and I need to sort out the natural loneliness that arises just from having this useful tool, the "self." And the self-created loneliness that is the result of my habit of withdrawal from life and people.

And I need to strengthen my belief that there is a way out.  I need to acknowledge that I need community and that there is a way to create it.

The problem with technology is that we can use it to do both.  We can use it to create genuine community, to find like minded, generous, active local people, to create refuges that support our humanity.  Or we can use it to numb loneliness and find escapes that make us feel even more lost.

It's really about intention.

I can use food to feed my loneliness and make it worse.  Or I can use food to create celebration and bring people together, and nurture my soul.

Hunger, my friend

I have it in me to heal this hunger.

Last night I spent 90 minutes in meditation doing the purification rituals of the Ngondro path. We imagine a guru with the power to purify and clarify our perception. The goal is not to purify the self, since in buddhism, the core self is already pure, we just don't see that with our muddy minds.  The goal is to wash away the mud that obscures our vision. Midway through we dissolve this imagined guru into ourself.  We project our best self onto the guru because it's still too much for us to believe that we have that same potential power.

Once I completed the rituals, I felt liberated and empty.  I sat in this strong sphere of equanimity.  I felt like my body would burst with it.  And then gradually it contracted into that core, or what feels like a core, of hunger, restlessness, desperation.  All the things that drive me to my chronic habits of escape. I sat with the hunger for a long time. This hunger for a life I've always wanted.  To be pretty and loved and accomplished and admired, and pure.  And young again.

This morning I went back to that hunger again. I felt remorse for all the bad habits I have that feel so entrenched in me. But I also realized the delusion of that. The "bad" in me is not as solid as I think.  It's just muddy perception. The dullness of that feeling is very grounding. If I could become more familiar with this hunger and cultivate the habit of seeking it out, being with it, instead of trying to make it go away. If it could become as welcome to me as a stiff muscle that I know I can work out with a little massage. If I could make friends with my hunger.  Make it a daily companion.  I could heal all the anxiety and addiction that surrounds it and keeps it in place.

Hunger

Today I'm very conscious of the hunger that lies beneath the hunger.  The excitement of having this clean energy is winding down, and now I have to deal with the emotional hunger that drives my overconsumption of food, information and entertainment.

Sitting with that raw emotional hunger is very difficult. I can do it, but I don't want to. It feels so insoluble. How do I cultivate the will to do this regularly?

I have to engender a deep, core motivation to feed it with what it really needs, this pure life force that is always available to it, than can never be overindulged.  I need to see and feel and experience this hunger dissolving into equanimity.  And I need to make that second nature.

Information Cleanse

My overconsumption of food goes hand in hand with my overconsumption of information. I eat while I read about the world. And this overload makes me lethargic and dull.

So this week I'm going to pay attention to this. What are the effects of too much screen time on my mind? Now that I have my food choices more under control.

My meditation time gives me a barometer of how sharp and vital my mind is. If I've overeaten, or over indulged in screen time, I know it in how distracted my mind feels when I wake up.

Meditation also gives me an alternative to screen time. It feeds the hunger that I think I'm going to solve with overconsumption.

Nectar of The Path

I'm now into my second week of this cleanse.

The plan this week is to start replacing my compulsions--food, and emotional--with Ngondro purification rituals.

Yes, this means chanting.

I am very, very self conscious about adopting spiritual rituals of any kind. Last night I was convinced that the Ngondro audio tape I was listening to was disturbing the neighbours, and of course if I chant they will hear me. Or will they? I'm not that loud.

But I imagine that they will than then what? They will think I'm a Buddhist. That's a very vulnerable feeling, because having a religion of any kind leaves you open for persecution.  It doesn't make me feel safe. The whole point of Ngondro practice is to find refuge.

And yet, the starting point of refuge is that feeling of vulnerability. Without acknowledging our vulnerability, there is no motivation to seek refuge.

Paradoxically, it's this vulnerability that prompts us to seek refuge, and the refuge that keeps us safe and, thus, less vulnerable.

So, perhaps the key is to take refuge in this feeling of vulnerability.  It keeps us open, it means we are learning, It keeps the compassion flowing. It keeps us strong. It is courage. And it takes courage to set out on this path.

But it's the way

From Anger to Anxiety

Cleanse day 7.

Physically I'm feeling much better. Lighter, cleaner, less compulsive.  Hungry, but in a good way. Emotionally things are a little shakier. Yesterday I was in a combative mood.  Today I'm feeling that layer of anxiety beneath the anger.

I feel it in my gut. Or do I. When I try to locate the anxiety in my gut, I actually encounter this kind of numb void. Like there's a black hole and the anxiety I experience manifests like shooting stars through my body. That metallic taste of terror in my mouth.

By the time I've actually found the anxiety deep in my belly, my energy has already started aligning itself though my heart, my breath is already starting to flow in to relieve.

Is this how anxiety is my friend?  That if I were really to find and listen and understand my anxiety as simply awareness. As awareness it ultimately leads me to the exact spot where pure awareness is rooted.

What if the very thing I don't want to feel and be with is really the straightest path to liberation?

Emotional Detox

Something I don't think I was conscious of the last time I did a cleanse. That once the physical side-effects have subsided, there's a new level: emotional side-effects.

Looking over my last journal, I see that as soon as I lived through the physical aches, I found myself confronted with the other addictions, but I'm not sure that I saw what the trigger for those addictions were. Anger, anxiety, remorse, all the things that rise up when I'm not using food to numb them.  If I'm not using food, television, computers, I'm going to have to sit with those feelings and feel them.  I'm going to have to live life. My own life.

So, what's the plan?

This time around it's this Ngondro practice.  I'm going to sit with these emotions, and all the the power that I have from my Tergar community.  And I'm going to feel and release those emotions for my benefit, and for the benefit of everyone my life touches.

But it's not going to be easy.  Because I have a lot of anger and combative energy to sit with. There's an awful lot to clean out.

I will try to remember that there is also a lot of power in this practice.  I have allies in this project.