Skip to main content

Bodies



For two weeks now I've been trying to stick to Ian Gawler's Healing Diet, and, I have got to say, more or less succeeding. It's a lot of bother. There are six glasses of juice to be made and swallowed daily, and apart from the one made of fruit, they aren't the sorts of things you'd swallow for the fun of it. There are three vegetarian - well vegan, really - meals to be made in a day, which has meant a radical revamp of the fridge freezer and pantry. Because the whole day's menu has a carefully planned balance, I've been sticking to the recipes, which is not the way I normally cook. I'm more of a lets get the vibe of this dish and amend it as we go sort of cook, but this way has taught me a lot of new ways of combining food which would be worth repeating even if you didn't have a bigger agenda for the meal.

It's been easy doing without meat - I haven't missed it for a second. It's been easy doing without the processed flour and sugar and all the fat as well. Last night, with a plate of cakes left over from a meeting held in the house, I ate one and immediately wished I hadn't. My body let me know in no uncertain terms that it was on Ian Gawler's side and what exactly did I think I was doing sending that muck down the chute. I won't be repeating the experiment in a hurry, and I'm not sorry about that either. Over the past fortnight and the one before that when I was not actually on the Gawler diet but was moving that way, I have reaped great benefit. About 4 kg of weight has evaporated. I have slept better and feel more energetic. Which brings me to my point for the day.

My body is not a thing, it is a process. It is a particular pattern of energy finding shape in an ever moving and changing stream of atoms; in much the same way that an ever moving stream of water finds shape in a seemingly permanent whirlpool. My body is a process, which means that diets can't be temporary. I will reap the benefits of a blanced healthy diet for just as long as that diet remains one of the processes which helps shape the pattern that is my body. Stop the diet and revert to the old patterns and my body will immediately revert to the way it was before. The healing diet is a temporary stage but it will be followed by a permanent diet based on the same principles, unless I want to continue as I was doing before - digging my own grave with my teeth.

My body is a process, an impermanent ever changing pattern of energy within which there is another impermanent, ever changing pattern of energy, my mind. These two are inseparably linked and each has effect on the way the other exists in a strange dance of mutual dependency. To effect my body I must make the requisite mental changes, but just as truly, to develop my mind I must be careful, repectful and gentle with my body. And lying within both, more subtle still, is that which gives rise to all patterns.
Labels:

Comments

Kathryn said…
Kelvin, I applaud you for your strength of will and I'm sure your body is thanking you too, for taking so much pressure off all your digestive processes.
It is wonderful that you are feeling so good, too.
I'm thinking that perhaps there is a lesson to be learned for all of us reading your blog. That maybe we (meaning I, of course), should be just as caring and gentle with our own bodies, even though we think we are healthy and feeling well. Who knows what is going on inside after all these years of eating whatever we please!
Thank you Kelvin, and may God bless you.
Kathryn :-)
20 November 2008 at 19:24
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more