Innerdance’s Weblog

Remember the time we didn’t have to work for food?  We just had to float in maternal fluid, waiting for nutrients to flow into the simple delivery chute we call the umbilical cord. 

 

There is no one precise process to ascending from your dependency on complex physical nutrients towards freer energy. It is not a simple A,B and C process, but rather a zig-zagging labyrinth that will have you cross-eyed and delirious before you even get past the first difficult turns.

 

The labyrinth walk’s origins stem from Mesopotamia, and it is still connected to our digestive system.  The early Persians modeled the first labyrinths from our intestinal tract.  Ironically, maybe that’s why we call it our “guts;” surely, it will take quite a handful of guts to walk the labyrinth we like to call, “life.” 

 

It is easier to get stuck in one particular corner of the labyrinth than to push towards our center.  Whenever we feel our consciousness is about to turn inwards, we look for the next movie or the next friend we can send a text message to, rather than leave our emotional digestive process undistracted.

 

The first challenge to elevating our diets is in putting up with the loneliness and the other discomforts that come up when we begin the inner work in solitude.  This is the stage that follows any kind of awakening.  It is called purgation.  It is almost as if the simple act of focusing our attention on a pinprick of light for but a brief moment can shake up the dust and the darkness that clouds our awareness of our truer reality. 

 

Try just half a day of lightening your diet.  You will feel weak, and you will owe this weakness to your lack of food.  Before shoveling hamburgers into your mouth, you might alternately try to ask yourself if the weakness is due to lack of food, or to the fact that your body has begun to work out a process it hasn’t had much quality time to devote to – healing.

 

Your first real challenge, thus, is to break the thought that you are like an automobile that requires gasoline to run.  You are not a car.  Nor is food your fuel. Place your faith in that you are made of spirit, even as your mind tells you that you are made of physical parts only.  The more physical food comes into your body, the more you become aware of yourself as physical being only. 

 

Think of it this way.  Your enzymes do two important things.  They digest, as well as heal.  When enzymes are digesting your food, they are like janitors and maids inside you, ever cleaning your body of waste material, even as you sleep.  When they aren’t digesting, the same enzymes are like nurses and doctors that go to the parts in your body that needs the most healing.

 

Most living things contain enzymes.  When you expose these to heat, the enzymes die.  Live food such as raw fruits and vegetables contain its own janitors and maids.  It is like eating food that cleans up after itself, leaving your body’s own enzymes free to keep focused on the arduous task of keeping your whole being on the path to higher evolution. 

 

But your mind resists this.  Even with the slightest discomfort, your body balks at the skin rashes that come out, the mental and emotional depression that comes with your physiological withdrawals of the toxins you have accumulated over the years you have spent on Earth.  You cannot stand for the weakness that takes hold of you.  You aren’t trained to allow for this weakness. Ever must you feel strong and in control of mind and body, even as you helplessly watch your soul constantly stray from your futile attempts to grasp it with your will.

 

Myself, I am, by character, weak.  I have many friends who have transitioned their diets through pure will. Rather, I used to be at the mercy of whatever food is placed in front of me. In a way, I was sort of addicted to food.  If you take away what an addict is addicted to, he develops anxiety and looks for whatever it is he is addicted to.

 

When I left my life, first walking around Mindanao, I had to give up most meat, by condition.  When I began to live with poor farming and fishing communities, the universe, at least, controlled the conditions I was in.  These families couldn’t afford meat, and thus, I became a vegetarian, by condition.

 

It was around this time that the universe dropped some readings on my lap, regarding entire communities that subsisted on the simplest foods, such as bananas, raw vegetables, coconuts only.  I remember that light bulb on the top of my head flipping “ON,” as my paradigm of the world inverted itself practically overnight.  Having come from the midst of metropolitan Manila, I had long pondered on why we had to devote our waking life to so much egoistic suffering just to ensure we had our three complex meals a day.

 

But it wasn’t as simple as realizing this.  As I watched myself understanding and believing in this inverted world that subsisted on free energy, I also saw that my body didn’t readily agree with these newfangled concepts.  As my spirit guide kept insisting that I urgently look for the beach I regularly see in my dreams, it wasn’t long until the light bulb illuminated the other parts of me that were still in the dark.

 

If I couldn’t control myself, I could at least control the conditions I lived in.  If I lived in a beach that had no pork chops, and was thousands of kilometers from any McDonald’s Drive-Thru, I had no choice but to eat what was available.

When I finally had a grip on the conditions – finally getting myself stuck in an empty beach, my next problem was vertical.  The food was there, but I had to work to get it.  Being born on the beach and learning to climb coconut trees at the age of 10, while your body is still nimble, is one thing.  Spending most of your life in the city, then one day having to learn how to climb a coconut tree at the age of 28, at the point where you are still transitioning your diet and have constant dizzy weak spells is another thing altogether.

 

The dilemma was in simultaneously doing battle with two (or three) daunting fears.  How could I use my fear of dying of hunger to propel me upwards as I conquered my fear of heights – and fear of falling down from fifty feet high up on a swaying coconut tree that is God knows how far from any decent hospital.

 

At first, I tried to be clever.  I invented contraptions using long branches, rope, and metal things that got washed up on the shore. I tried to lasso coconuts and pull them down, if it would save me from having to go up there to get it.  It was difficult but possible to do this, but every time I succeeded, the coconuts broke open, and I lost most of the juice contained in it. 

      

After a few days of this, I practiced climbing the smallest tree I could find.  In the beginning, even just a few steps upwards can be so overwhelming.  My knees were literally knocking against wood.  My only consolation is that nobody was around to watch me give up countless times, before I was able to inch my way to the top.  But then, this wasn’t the end of the problem.  I didn’t realize just how difficult it is to detach coconuts from the tree, especially those that are old enough to contain meat in it.  Young coconuts that contain only water proved easier to detach, but did strange things to my stomach.

 

There are several tricks to this.  The best, and safest way is also the most difficult and dangerous to learn.  You have to pull yourself through the branches and lift yourself upwards so that you will end up at the top of the tree.  If you are able to do this, you can use your feet to just push the coconuts below you with your feet. 

 

The easier way to learn is also the more dangerous.  While clinging onto the trunk of the tree, you have to rotate the coconut enough to twist the branch that it breaks off.  It seems easy, until you learn often enough that geckos, ants, squirrels, fruit bats, and even snakes can sometimes be found lurking in the branches – the last things you would want to encounter if you’re dangling on one hand with the other twisting a coconut.  Most times, the coconuts grow so thick and are bunched up so tightly that they are difficult to turn even just a few degrees.

 

The previous caretaker of the beach took care of a dog that was brought there years back when the owner of the beach still lived there.  He was aptly named Bilbo. A guy named Etoy also brought me a three-week old kitten from a fishing community at the far end of the large island, called Pulan Bato.  The cat was named Ming-Ming. 

 

These two pets had no choice but to survive on what I was subsisting on.  Bilbo lived on old brown coconuts (niyog), which I would peel and crack open for Bilbo, which he would have the uncanny ability to shred with his teeth.  Ming-Ming doesn’t like old coconuts.  She only ate young coconuts.  Everyday, I would climb a few trees, higher ones as the months passed, to gather a couple for myself, one for Bilbo and another one for Ming-Ming. 

 

The problem was that they knew what I was up to … I fed them on the spot, and so, they knew the careful formula that me climbing tree plus coconuts falling from the heavens is almost certainly equal to food. But they always waited in anticipation right below the tree.  I would have to wait for a few minutes before they get tired of waiting and walk away.  If you are dangling high up there, ants starting to crawl down your shirt, you too wouldn’t be in the best of moods.  I would shout myself hoarse to get them to walk away, but beach pets in the wild like to defy logic rather than to be agreeable.

 

Lastly, given all those challenges, the one thing that can definitely hinder you from gathering a single coconut at any given time, is rain.  One time during my first months in the beach, I was nearing the top of a very wet tree right after a whole night of rain, when I slipped. The only way I could break the fall was to embrace the tree tight to my chest.  I would rather scrape my skin silly for the two feet of breaking gravity than let go and end up on the sand below with two broken legs.  I was scarred for a month, but the lesson stayed with me much longer.  Even in the hottest of days, I learned to be aware at all times, eventually loving the art of climbing trees which once terrified me when I first lived on the island.

 

My good friend Gilda Coredero-Fernando published The Soul Book, a beautiful compendium of our ancient forebears oldest myths. I remember it speaks of surviving legends that describe a long-forgotten time when bountiful food would fall to the ground and we just had to gather them. 

 

Nowadays, we have to clock in hours of putting up with jobs, traveling time, and stress to gather heavily processed food devoid of life-giving enzymes which most of us think we need to survive during this particular stage in our people’s evolution.

 

We think we have cut off the umbilical cord that once had us dependent on our mother for nutrients.  That umbilical cord is now attached to your TV set, your romantic other, your car, your house, your ATM card, and most especially, your breakfast, lunch and dinner.

 

It will not always be this way.  Sure, there will be awesome hindrances blocking our perspectives and right action on nutrition, government, economy and health that makes total wholistic sense.  Indeed, it will be just like climbing a very tall tree. 

 

I haven’t climbed a tree in more than a year now.  I miss the ants, the act of climbing up afraid and later ending up on top of the tree while a heady wind is swaying the pristine world around me.  I remember being on that tree again, looking at the deep Palawan blue.  I have no fears, not even of falling down.  I am making a choice, in between staying on this beautiful island or moving back to the world of people.  I have since then, made the choice and now live with people.  I am making a new choice. I am moving back to the beautiful island one day, but this time, the beautiful island is in my mind, and it will be big enough for the world of people.