One Week Into My Journey Semi-raw Kinda Raw Vegan for Sure-Here are some thoughts on which I gnaw!

I’ve spent my last two blogs telling you about what I’ve been eating. However just over a week into the journey I want to share with you some of my thoughts instead. Not really about how my body is feeling or what I’m thinking about the whole journey as it unfolds but just to pause instead for a moment and ask… WHY?

You see I kinda jokingly said it here and there and you can pick it up in my older blogs about last year’s journey but here is where I get serious…for once! You see here on my musings I kinda behave all footloose and fancy free dancing about everybody …you see my bhakti (love) yogic dance from over on my sister blog UCP-Universal Collective Prayer has been really getting the better of me more and more these days…that’s the reason why. So every thing is a dance for me you see! Of course it is very pleasing to me but I also wish to communicate here you see! And even over on UCP there are the times like here when I announced I was going to look at some gyan (knowledge) yoga and stuff too man so here it is the gyan yogic scoop on my current journey…scholarly hat on as I try to be like the character Owl from Winnie the Pooh instead of Pooh! As I think Pooh is a bhakti yogi and Owl a gyan yogi. So here it is me going all gyan yogini on ya!:

MOTIVATION BEHIND IT

This will still sound funny but it really was the teeth for me! I don’t know if the teeth are like some really important marker for the rest of the body like how some people say they check you hair and analyze it and can from that say what your general health status is? But ever since I’ve been on the journey even in the first few hours of Day 1 my teeth stopped feeling this kinda subtly irritating effect. It feels like the equivalent to when there is this slightly buzzing high frequency noise somewhere out there you but you can’t quite pick up where it is coming from…well that was how my teeth were equivalently feeling. And now they are at rest…so calm…

Also it was the desire to savour loads of fresh fruit and to celebrate vegetables. Seriously…on my first journey I got the idea after having an apple one morning about how lovely it must be to drink the water just at the surface of the apple that was slightly flavoured by the apple. I’m a big apple lover (it even makes up a big part of my fav perfume!) and on my good normal days I try to have at least one a morning! So I genuinely like fruits! But in the case of the vegetables I still don’t like to eat them just raw like that hence is why my journey is semi-raw kinda raw and vegan for sure. So I like to slightly cook the veges really it’s like more just warming then up a bit too. Also last year I was inspired by a fellow blogger’s journey into full raw although I can’t see myself there any time soon. But her creations really look delicious but seem to take a lot of time to prepare. I told her if she opened such a restaurant or started catering I’d be a customer for sure!

But these stints I’m on are my way of experimenting…finding out a bit more about this…taking some life notes…a lot like my experiment in UCP…where over there on that blog I try to explore this thing I call UCP-Universal Collective Prayer.

Hey that’s what life should be…exploring for me…everyone is an explorer not just me and not just those people on Nat Geo! So I see it as my responsibility to explore find out have all these lovely little journeys…like I explained on this blog…to me this is why we are here on earth!

The reason I’ve decided to get all gyan yoga on my readers is because one of them commenting on Facebook thought I was on ‘a diet’ and that I’m not. I know it must have led to a bit of awkwardness for her… as I really am not a very slim person especially not by fashionista standards but then most people aren’t! But also I can by medical standards lose some too…although I’ve not weighed in years! So yep I can do with losing pounds but I’m not on ‘a diet’ of course I allow myself in these periods to drop pounds if I do but I just enjoy it. So I’m writing this to also let her know that for sure she doesn’t need to be on a diet especially not on a Special K one! OMG! Hmmm...maybe she should be reading the beautiful Sarah Maria's book?

Now, if I was already very slim like this other friend who went fully raw well then I’d have to be careful to maintain enough calories not to drop weight but in my case I let it drop if it does…but it is just a useful byproduct of this journey. Hence my point is my intent is not to lose weight here but to explore a way of eating that I find can be more healthy and peaceful in many ways. Of course in exploring it I will get closer to my healthy weight range too because having a healthy weight and muscular tone etc is well part of being healthy hence the word healthy in ‘healthy weight’ so…so be it! It’s the same with my stepping and my pedometer …if I walk consistently and don’t over do it on the eating yes I will lose weight and build muscle and tone to some extent…but I walk to be healthier not to be a particular weight, shape or size. To me fat people are just as beautiful as scrawny people as beautiful as tall people as short and so too are people who are ‘just right’. But there is no ‘just right’…although there is a right fit for us all…I guess like how Goldilocks did…always in threes…one porridge too hot…one too cold…one just right…one bed too hard…one too soft and one just right! But it’s just about being me…I recall my theme songs: primary and sub-primary here! ...'I am the One and Only' by Chesny Hawks and 'Wonder' by Natalie Merchant...

So that’s it for the WHY??? really but here is just something too that I think overlaps into the whole healthy …in an overall way kinda thing. Apart from being healthy physically well…I guess here I’m getting all Deepak Chopra on ya …woo hoo!...the whole mind, body, spirit wellness thing. But it’s absolutely true really but you have to find it and discover it on your own. Like I’m already all happy dancing on my UCP blog so I guess that covers mind and spirit in a kinda way along with all the reading and general daily life experiments…like Winnie the Pooh …I think, think, think…on this blog as well. So I perhaps have the mind and spirit thing going on so it leaves the body for work…but you see the whole mind, body, spirit thing is suppose to combine just like all the yogic pathways to well give you something…BALANCE or HAPPINESS! SAMADHI even! ??? But really it doesn’t…none of it can really make you happy you know…happiness to me comes from just being really…it’s a lot like when I asked the question on Intent…Would You Choose Pain Over Non-Existence? And in that gyan yogic discussion the conclusion was that I should…just be…So I’m just being…however I am…But the think about the human spirit and nature is we then want to interact with other spirits you see and that is how we blend universally but here is where my other little gyan yogic discussion comes up…socialization and eating:

SOCIALIZATION

Some people say you must never eat alone…I do it all the time but hey I’m never alone really but I’ll leave that discussion for UCP. But in the gyan yogic sense I’m discussing here…two feet on the ground…us human beings need to interact with each other. One of the most important times it seems for doing this is over a meal. And when one is eating semi-raw kinda raw vegan for sure! Well one has to decline many a lunch/dinner invitation unless one can find something to eat at the restaurant or home of invite. And when it is just a brief experimentation well it’s tough to explain. Maybe I’ll just have to send them to this blog or let them look at my rumbly tumbly Pooh tummy and think…yea it’s a diet!:) I’ve been able to handle being vegetarian and teetotaller too all my life and work around it although even that sometimes depending on the other being can get all weird. I mean some people in some places and cultures still don’t get the whole vegetarian thing even! But it is generally well accepted and engrained here in Trinidad. So it’s no biggie…and I’ve had my whole life and family support to learn about that one…not to mention a whole religion behind me and a line of ancestors too!

But for raw for sure it would be tough! Is why I told my eating raw blogger friend a future business opportunity awaits her! You see and I know this is no big mystery I’m here to reveal but people who have busy lifestyles eat out a lot and they need places to get the food! I’ve been looking at my new follower on Twitter’s advice-RawfoodRepair that you should pack something. But really it’s not the same when you want to network and socialize…in fact I am in a must attend event on Sat where my veganess is going to be heavily threatened…it is why I said Semi-Raw Kinda Raw Vegan for Sure! As I figured I can at least stand up to the vegan bit for all of the three weeks…but I didn’t realize I had this charity dinner thing on during the period…but I realize that it is good too that this is going to be the case now…as this will be my ultimate challenge…being out and about in a setting like this to see how I’ll pan out…I hope I come out of it still vegan for sure! Look out to see how I fare my friends! Hmmm...will my purple elephant win? Tune in to find out... :)