greetings,

i'm porter. musician, raw foodist...

Saturday, May 17, 2008

infinite potential

so how about that for something esoteric? i have of late been writing a lot of music dealing with BIG things like LIFE, GROWTH, and other below-the-surface matters.

i am currently in yoga teacher training, finding myself in poses, thinking "wow, who knew i could do that?!" i was in one of those the other day, when i started to think: my body has a limit. there's only so much more flexibility i can attain before i'm "grown" as a yogini. the body is quite obviously FINITE. it has limits. it has a beginning and an end. a start and a decay. but space is infinite, the mind is infinite, the soul is infinite... because they are one in the same i suppose.

in any event, i started to think of the things in my life that had the potential to foster infinite growth. i realized that my raw food journey was one them.

i think when i started i assumed that one day i would be the "perfect" model of health. i would never get tired, i would be in a constant good mood, never smell, eat very little food, live to be 400 years old (hey, it could happen!)... you know, the usual stuff.

the more i go through this though, the more i realize that i have, yet again, complicated my life by choosing the self-reflective path, rather than blindly following societal norms, which make it possible for most humans to surf the wave of precedent.

on the upside, i no longer feel disconnected from my body. if i have a stomach ache now, i know what caused it, what will make it worse, and i have faith that if i take the right action it will just go away. i have faith that the body heals. it's what it does. i know because i choose to notice.

when i had horrible acne in college and i was eating cupcakes, salami, and packets of refined sugar (ok, not exclusively!), i felt that i was not IN COMMUNICATION with my body. it seemed that an alien force had conspired to make me ugly, and it made me upset with myself. in reality, i was not paying attention to what i was eating, to how much i was eating, and what effect it was having on me.

how could i have known about cause and effect, when i remained clouded in the BAND-AID world view? to tackle a problem we cover it up. we treat the cough, but we don't prevent it. we electrocute the murderers, but we don't clean up the environment that created them.

it is amazing for me that i could go from someone who had lost total connection with her body, to someone who wonders how she could disassociate herself from herself. how can I hate MYSELF? i AM myself!

all this to say, that i know what it is to be raw. it is a base assumption (we are naturally built to eat living, growing food). it is not a great height. it is not a ladder to perfection, because that doesn't exist. raw doesn't shield me from infection, worry, sadness, death... it doesn't END somewhere when i become 100%, or fruitarian, or breatharian even. there is always room for growth.

i think the challenge of this journey is NOT that i had to give up so many attachments to food, or that i had to deal with people's reactions, or my own cravings for pasta (for example), it is that the process NEVER ENDS.

eastern philosophies (older world philosophies) are a lot more comfortable with the concept of infinite growth, which is probably why this conversation started with yoga.

namaste,
porter

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