Soft corn tortillas make the perfect base for my raw choc orange spread as I have just discovered after making my self yet another treat in my efforts to procrastinate writing morning pages. And of course the effort is directed in the opposite direction, to attempt to entice myself to write them – here, have your breakfast, make yourself a smoothie, even a little treat to go with it, all ready now? No more distracting desires.
Last day at my Texas home, probably the last time chilling on the garden swing bench for a while – leaving on that much awaited RV trip tomorrow! I just realized I have to stock up on my chocolate supplies and use up some ingredients to make it easier to pack. I wonder if I should buy some protein and raw cacao before leaving for Italy, who knows if I can obtain that sort of stuff there in northern Italian countryside. Probably not, but then again, maybe I won’t need it?..
I freaked out today when I saw the contours of my six pack (actually 5 pack) returning, and to think that just the other day I have dedicated almost entire pages to lamenting my diet and weight gain. My attention is a massively powerful force that’s for sure. That and proper meal planning and evening suburban hikes. A protein smoothie before meal definitely does the trick of preventing me from totally stuffing my face as I do. And the Slim&Sassy essential oil blend was not only the absolute best chocolate flavoring but makes the water I drink fill like a meal – weird but true.
I am also learning to chew! It is now one of my daily reminders (oh yet another practice I need to blog about) but I haven’t made it a habit yet. But like any change process – first I notice something needs to change, then catch myself after not doing/doing whatever I decided to change, next step catching myself in the process of it so I can consciously affect the change, and finally, with enough attention and conscious repetition, it becomes a new automated habit that I no longer need to monitor and think about – voila! I am at step 2 with my need to chew – catching myself AFTER a meal that I forgot to chew.
Came up with a new smoothie recipe – coffee, protein, frozen banana, cinnamon, huge heaped spoon of raw chocolate (it goes pretty much into everything), cayenne pepper and couple drops of stevia (my new best friend). It’s a perk’n’fill-me-up – very efficient and tasty!
Even though the instructions insisted that there is no right or wrong way to do morning pages, I have a sneaking suspicion that I am managing to do them the wrong way. They are coming out way to polished, coherent and most certainly audience-addressed for something that is meant to be an unfiltered stream of consciousness. But hey, I let an unfiltered stream of consciousness come out in my late night video yesterday, where a more polished, concise and audience-addressed presentation was probably more appropriate so that’s just that – I don’t have a clever metaphor to round this up with, it’s just an observation.
I couldn’t help making self-satisfied noises again yesterday during my walk, I am in such state of gratitude and amazement at my phenomenal life whenever I stop to think about it. And paradoxically enough, it is when I walk that I seem to mostly “stop to think about it”.
I am having lots of fun exploring the wonderful forest I have discovered in the middle of suburbia here. Yesterday I climbed some trees, found yet another hidden section, found swings (yippee!) and watched a huge red apple of a sun sink behind the horizon. Also stalked my fear for a bit and used the technique from the free short Get Bigger Than What’s Bugging You e-course I have done recently. Amazing how walking through the forest before sunset is full of wonder and adventure and walking into the exact same spot in the dim twilight filled by body with fear. First I thought of taking the outside path (aka running away from it), then rationalizing it away (“it’s the same bloody forest, it’s only darker! You, feeling, don’t make sense!!!”) but then recalled learning from the e-course that feelings just don’t respond well to that. I followed the steps of rephrasing and addressing it differently and sitting with it and at the end was able to enjoy a totally different atmosphere of the dim forest, listen to the sounds of nature preparing for sleep and marvel at how the mind perceives darkness. It was an excellent first hand experience of the fear of the unknown – where an hour ago I was marveling at the contours of the trees, now I am intently peering at them while my mind is making up all sorts of scary shapes and noises. But knowing rationally it is the exact same spot was like “Wow, my mind does really screw everything into an “enemy” which it can’t fully grasp. I wonder just how much of life’s other beauty I miss with these filters on”. And of course I can’t be mad at it, it’s a psychological trait which has facilitated our survival as a species.
And that is the problem I keep having with a lot of the teachings which advocate putting trust in the body and the feelings . Body reactions, emotions and instincts are based on all sorts of triggers, personal and collective filters and past experiences, etc and are NOT a reliable indication of the present reality. I am sure the mind has even more rubbish obscuring our view, probably more than any other point of perception within the complex construct of a human being, but giving one authority over the other isn’t the answer, the answer is in some democratic approach of letting each one be fully heard. And even the approach of “well the reality just IS no matter how we choose to perceive it so just attempt to remove all distortion and focus on what IS” isn’t sufficient either. Indeed stuff just IS out there but we aren’t out there – we are in here, veiled and wrapped in many layers of perception and we came here to perceive that IS’ness through our special unique flavor of filters. I change my world through changing my layers of perception. And if everyone was to do that the world at large would change. The way to stop people raping and pillaging each other and the planet is not to pass punishment laws, corporate policies or shine a spotlight and film documentaries of the resulting devastation, but to shift the individual perceptions of the world from lack to abundance, from hate to love. If one perceives that one lives in an abundant and loving universe, then there is just no need for many of the aggressive and greed fuelled behaviors of today. Omg I think I finally fully understood Einstein’s quote – “The most important question you’ll ever ask is whether the Universe is a friendly place.”
Whew, that was some heavy ass philosophy. Probably needs some editing to be more digestible which I am not used to doing, and which is not actually part of the morning pages! So we’ll see, I’ll re read it later and decide whether it’s digestible enough to go up as is “raw”.
Ps almost double the morning pages! I certainly made up for missing them yesterday morning.
Haha, now there ain’t no stopping me, just want to keep writing. I just realized one of the possible ways of how to write any standard advice/how to article while I was trying to name this one. Picking the “how to change the world” title I thought “but there’s all this other stuff here and there, kind of misleading, especially if someone doesn’t bother reading to the end” so maybe the way to write standard “themed” articles is to write up a brain dump like this one, then just copy, paste and polish (or outsource the polish part) the various topics out of it into their own posts with a sensible title. Or alternatively highlight parts of it for my own personal recollection (do I ever go back and re read anything – NOOOOO…) and to provide the gist of it at a glance to others, while retaining the whole of the thought stream intact. Or install a community highlight plugin to allow others to highlight what’s important to them. Oh the possibilities.
What do you think? Keep the whole of the thought train in here or edit and leave only the carriages that contain something of possible value? Or highlight? Or post a full and an executive summary version? Feedback please!