1 (1.5); – ; M: 101 ; C: 64 ; P/U: 50 ; W : 3.5mi
Alright, my weight is heading south again. Today I begin the Plant Paradox 3 day cleanse. This will roll into another 21 days of phase 2. There’s no beer on this program, so I’m unlikely to have another one until late October. Beer and I will remain separated for a while.
Health R.O.S.
- Weight: 214
- BMI: 28.9
- Fat %: 22.2
Last night I watched football at a friend’s house. He and another friend of ours, a fellow guitarist, and I enjoyed the long awaited beer, cheese, and chocolate sampler. There were three pints of beer in total and the beer itself was on the stronger side. The IPA was 7.7%. As a result, even drinking a meager 1.5 pints got me a little buzzed.
Once I was a little buzzed, I wanted to get more buzzed and considered having another couple of beers. Using R.A.I.N. I was able to stop at 1.5 and was able to avoid “sampling” an open bottle of wine lingering on the kitchen counter upon arriving home later that evening.
As I mentioned yesterday, I was nervous about last night. However, I am feeling more confident now as the self control daily meditation has endowed me with grows stronger with each passing day. I wonder if there will come a time when I will never want to drink again. We shall see, but it appears that my thesis of using meditation and related techniques to reduce my addiction and use disorder tendencies appears to be working. Time will tell, but I’m encouraged given what I’ve gleaned from this book:
Desperately Seeking Separation
On this morning’s hike, I contemplated my closed heart. I considered times in my childhood when I was let down or heartbroken. And I examined some of the behaviors that sprung forth from these formative experiences.
One behavior kept coming up. It is separation. At the cusp of every new chapter of my life, I strove for separation from the past. In college, I separated from high school people with few exceptions. Upon graduating from college, I moved 2,600 miles away from everything I knew to live with my girlfriend. Once married, she and I moved 90 minutes away from her family. With every change of job, I’ve left my co-workers in the dust and allowed my network to atrophy. Shoot, I’ve even changed industries seven times! Different industries means different conferences and new professional networks. There’s really no need to keep the old network fresh.
And while you might be thinking, “Well, of course, that’s normal,” in every case I mentally slammed the door behind me and intentionally created distance.
This got me thinking about separation holistically. I realize now that everything in modern human society is built on separation and being separated – both physically and mentally. Whatever language we speak is itself a separation construct. Language labels and separates everything into smaller and smaller buckets: me/you, he/she, us/them, Christian/Hindu, African/American (even African-American, Irish-American, Somali-American, Italian-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American, etc, etc…), democrat/republican, left/right, with/against, etc. Think about it, how many different types of domestic dog are there? None of them natural. All of them invented by humans. It’s crazy!
Separate Nothing
We all live in our own little boxes (houses, apartments, flats) and within these little boxes are doors that separate us into even smaller boxes (rooms, bedrooms, in-law suites).
Money is a separation construct. It compartmentalizes all of us: have none, have a little, have some, have much, have much more, have a lot, have way too much, have more than you’ll ever need in a million years. As we go up, each compartment gets progressively smaller and more exclusive.
Money entices us to advertise our separation with cars, homes, and other purchases. Even if we don’t have a lot of money, we are tempted to over extend ourselves to appear to be in a higher financial box than we are. We are suckers for appearances.
Our society separates us from food production, the environment and the myriad other beings that populate it. Yet all of this separation is a construct created by language and powered by money and culture. But it’s all an illusion.
Nothing is separate. Nothing. All things derive from a common source that manifests itself into endless packages of infinite variety. This implies separation where there is none. In fact, in a healthy world all of these supposed separate things recombine to create unity. Humans label such unity an ecosystem, a human body (the bulk of which is comprised of DNA that is not yours!), a climate, schools of fish, herds of buffalo, flocks of birds, and a billion other things.
We emerge from the oneness when we are born. We live all of our lives separately. And we finally return to oneness when we vacate our bodies (we die). But it doesn’t have to be this way.
All of my drinking. All of my pot smoking kept me separate. It separated me from my true self, from loved ones, friends, joy, and happiness. I’m am ready to rejoin the oneness while I still have life pumping through this body at this time. I am convinced this is possible.
You don’t have to search for love. Love is here because God is here; the force of life is everywhere. We humans create the story of separation, and we search for what we believe we don’t have. We search for perfection, for love, for truth, for justice, and we search and search when everything is inside us. Everything is here; we just need to open our spiritual eyes to see it.
Don Miguel Ruiz – The Voice of Knowledge, A Practical Guide to Inner Peace