body is the tasty testing ground proof, pt 1:
body is the tasty testing ground proof, pt 1:
how now to know how the body is true beyond the need for truth or believe?
One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression¶
¶From ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ by William Blake.
And yet who of us here have not sought with great diligence the one dietary law, or supplement or cleanse or protocol or food-guru that will rescue us from the torments of bodily prison-hell?
~00:05 I know a lot of you struggle with frustration with your body. And it was something I struggled with too. And the problem is when we’re hating on our bodies we’re actually hating on ourselves and that causes us a lot of distress and slows down our chronic illness recovery. … I’ll tell you what to do to start making peace with your body. …
~00:58 I felt like my body was a prison. I treated my body harshly - harsh exercise and dietary practices (from ‘Finding Peace with Your Body: Chronic Illness and EFT Tapping with Rachel O’ with a small paraphrase by me).
Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion (from ’The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ by William Blake, Plate 8).
And, ultimately, in some way we demand that that rescuer is to be of the highest ethical standard that we have the imagination to imagine. And we thus begin to build our bodily prisons and/or brothels from dietary laws and religions. I was certainly one of those. Who could I turn to who would give me bodily panacea with stuffings of the mouth, either in the form of ingestibles or via the subtle alchemies of verbal-mantras and/or a-verbal meditations? Preferably without the need to change my actual preferred and, perhaps mostly, ethical diet.
And of like mind are most of the people within my circle of yoga-centric friends and acquaintances who are predominantly imprisoned by ethical choice to a diet that excludes meat, either as vegetarian or vegan. And most often this yogic circle is somewhat officially linked to the Ayurvedic principles that food is medicine. Please, where can I buy this or that certified Ayurvedic this or that? Or attend an Ayurvedic cleanse? I smile with fond food memory of struggling to find the money to dip into the treasure trove of those vials and rueing my lack of resources to ‘properly’ cleanse while eating what at the time I could not imagine was medicine, even if I with solemn platitudinous hypocrisy mouthed those a-caloric, a-pranic words: ‘food is medicine’.
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I remember talking with co-workers, once, in a full car as we were travelling to a multi-course lunch at a top quality Vancouver Chinese restaurant in celebration of some work-related thing. The conversation turned to food and the ‘problem’ of fat in the diet. This was near the time of fever pitch fat phobic dietary ‘law’ into which I had been suckered into obeisance a few years earlier. I had adopted a near zero fat fruit-centric vegan diet largely founded on (pseudo) ethical grounds within which was constructed a circumscribed highly suspect food-logic that was largely in denial of ‘natural’ human physiology because the body could not be trusted to know what is good for it, which is what the vegan proselytisers taught.
And, following the nature of my nature, I was very rigid in my practice. I had me an ethically clean and fully sanctioned diet. Yes! Snoopy dance everyone because I think that I’m happy and have been fooled that that is joy. Oops. Wrong again. I had unwittingly become my own victim of premature elation.
Yes. My body was young and I was happy. In my mind only, and that means I was an addict to something I was not seeing. Awareness of my living in the frequency of addiction was to come about thirty years later.
And So Trusting To ’A Pattern That Others Made In The World I Followed The Wrong Diet Home And Cursed My Form’.¶
¶Adapted from ‘A Ritual We Read to Each Other’ by William Stafford: ‘… a pattern that others made may prevail in the world/ and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.’
And then I had a dream. It was a simple dream, a dream of reckoning from my unconscious at the behest and in defence of my untrustworthy body. I was in an Arizona movie-style desert looking for a revival meeting in a tent. With wind blowing the rolling sage brushes I found it, old with tatters flapping in the dusty breeze. I went inside and saw a few dozen folding metal chairs, mostly empty. Less than ten people were sitting near the front. I sat at the back as is my practice. When I looked up a man was now on the wooden platform I hadn’t noticed when I walked in. He looked at me and said with a firm voice ‘Guy, please stand up.’ And so I did. ‘Guy,’ he said, ‘I want you to eat this.’ And he gestured with his right hand which was heaping full with what I somehow knew was pork fat, glistening and white. ‘Or,’ he added, ‘you can eat this.’ And he gestured with his left hand within which was a heaping pile of bright golden butter. ’This is better,’ he said, gesturing with the right hand to indicate the pork fat. ‘But this is okay too,’ he then gestured with his left hand.
One Diet To Rule Them All, One Diet To Starve Them; One Diet To Shame Them All And In Their Darkness Tame Them.¶
¶Adapted from the inscription on Sauron’s ring in The Lord Of the Rings by JRR Tolkien: ‘One Ring to rule them all, One ring to find them; One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.’
I woke very puzzled. I’d not had that kind of dream before. I was keeping a detailed dream journal with the beginning of my exploration into dreams via the psychology of C.G. Jung. And a great book at that time that significantly advanced my interest and skills with the power of dreams was Living Your Dreams: Using Sleep to Solve Problems and Enrich You Life by Gayle Delaney. For unknown reasons I had come to trust my dreams as troublesome aides to healing my broken life. I was struggling even then to understand that life equals body. ‘Troublesome’ because they are difficult, which is one of the reasons they get dismissed by official yogic practices. Despite, or perhaps because of this difficulty I had decided to embrace dreams and followed my curiosity and fascination with the way that Jung had of seeing and invoking dreams as the individual’s own spiritual guide or psychopomp or power to … To what? Truth of life? Spiritual awakening? Enlightenment? Simply to make life joyful and alive for me? For others? All of those? I wasn’t sure and I wanted to know what I would find with them and my disembodied Self.
The Human Who Never Alters His/Her Diet Is Like Standing Water, And Breeds Reptiles Of The Gut-Brain¶
¶Adapted from ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ by William Blake: "The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind" (plate 19).
Healing is not just about rebuilding our bodies. It’s about rebuilding our relationship with our selves [and with that the body becomes central.] And that only really became apparent as … I got further into the self-healing process. I realised that to heal was to embrace my body and myself as I was and to show myself compassion and kindness to really support recovery. Because I was so focused on trying to heal to recover my former physical abilities and appearance I really ignored the signals my body was sending me. It was really trying to tell me something important and I wasn’t listening (‘Finding Peace with Your Body: Chronic Illness and EFT Tapping with Rachel O’ ~1:34 slightly edited, my emphasis).
With a little reflection I realised that the ‘pure virtue signalling diet’ I had diligently adopted with ‘good karma’ and ‘ethical points’ was without any fat, as demanded by the sanctified protocol aligned with the sugar industry’s bought-off Harvard scientists’ falsified reports who began fat phobia and initiated the explosion across the world of diabetes and obesity. (Of course time-line association does not equate to causation! For more on this and more on the causal relationships between sugared diets and diabetes around the world see, for example, The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes.)
The revival tent meeting was telling me that my diet needed an intervention, a dream intervention comprised of physical fat. And remarkably it was, ostensibly, very unethical in its direction by pointing me toward the consumption of animal fats as my right source of physical revival instead of the ‘good’ organic vegetal or nut fats. And from that day forward I knew absolutely that I was an omnivore for life because my body had used a dream to relay to me that unethical ‘truth’ that my anti-body ideological mind-self had refused to attend. (Later research confirmed that low or no-fat long term diets are often very unhealthy for most people although they can be great for short term cleanses or to jump start a healing effort after a life-time of ‘unhealthy’ eating practices. Over the next few years in odd circumstances I met ex-vegans at yoga classes who had acquiesced very reluctantly to their vegan diet as having been killing them softly.)
And so it was for about thirty years. And it was so as I became obese after about twenty years. And it was so when I withdrew from obesity leading up to my taking up ‘proper’ yoga for the first time in January 2014.
And then in the summer of 2014 the unthinkable happened: my body changed my diet after my dedicated efforts in the completion of a multi-day yogic pranayama (breath work) intensive. My being at such a thing is a story of an impossible to dream panoply of synchronicities that overtook reason — a story to be told another day. On day one of the intensive we were asked to follow a vegetarian diet for the duration of the course that spanned five days. Two of the days were a full eight hours, the balance being three hours in the evening after a normal work day. No problem, I thought, I’ve done that before, not eating meat.
When the course was done I was also done being an omnivore: I had been reborn as vegetarian. It wasn’t an ethical choice or a considered one. It didn’t come from a book or a video guru. It had simply happened with/from my body during the course of the course. Most likely the culprit was the powerful Sudarshan Kriya that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar of the Art of Living developed and taught. (Note: Sudarshan Kriya was the breath practice that inspired the recent look at breath by James Nestor in his book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.)
And so I was now vegetarian. I hadn’t seen that coming! That wasn’t in the plan because I hadn’t chosen that dietary path. My body had decided that path on my behalf as the result of some kind of magic-like transformation that happened with having done a strange breathing technique. That pranayama, or kriya, was taught within very powerfully presented yogic ethical principles that did not make any direct reference to food beyond the general statement at the beginning of the course that food is one of the five primary sources of our life energy and that vegetables are a higher form of that pranic energy than is meat. The others being exercise, sleep, breath, and healthy companionship. And the mind-, or egoist-, form of Guy was shocked that the body housing me had made a choice against the directions I had understood as ‘permanent’ thirty years earlier after living a revival tent meeting dream.
Thus Men Forget That All Diets Reside In The Human Breast of Each of Us¶
¶Adapted from ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ by William Blake: ‘Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.’
And with the softness of a kitten’s feet learning to hunt, yogic hubris, aka spiritual by-pass, had slunk into my mind. And with mindfulness, which I now understand is actually often a form of blindness, or perhaps, blinkered-ness at best, I dove into a practice of dietary good-intentioned self-abuse hiding behind ‘good’ yoga.
I began a vegetarian diet and continued to shed the last few remaining pounds of obesity. I was becoming thin. I practiced yoga and Sudarshan Kriya every morning for the forty continuous days as had been asked by the course teachers. For the first twenty-seven of those days my ego (aka mara) presented me with an array of creative arguments as to why I was stupid to partake of that silly trio of breathing practices. I acknowledged the words of mara and replied, gently, ‘You may be right. I promised my teachers I would do the practice for forty days and after forty days we’ll see if you are correct. You may go back to sleep now until I’m done.’ And of course, the voice wasn’t correct and stopped hounding me after only twenty-seven days. And hasn’t said a bad word against my practices of yoga in the various forms they have taken since.
And yet, I wasn’t listening to my body, besotted as I was in my recently discovered feelings of joy that would bubble up, with being effortlessly thin, with having, supposedly, conquered mara, although I wouldn’t know the name ‘mara’ until several years later.
The body calls Yeah, the body, it calls out It whispers at first But it ends with a shout. from The Body Breaks by Devendra Banhart
The Body Calls/ Yeah, The Body, It Calls Out/ It Whispers At First/ But It Ends With A Shout¶
¶From ‘The Body Breaks’ by Devendra Banhart.
A year after that spontaneous vegetarianation my body was still inflexible and in pain sitting or kneeling in most yoga postures despite the daily practices that typically lasted for 60-90 minutes. I remained very stiff and inflexible and very kyphotic. The morning was filled with yoga and pranayama before work that created energy and life. However, in the afternoons I became increasingly tired as days turned to months to the extent that I was in jeopardy of falling asleep during my fifteen minute drive home from work. By late 2015 I was unable to stay awake once I was home and driving had become a horrific and dangerous struggle.
Upstairs, safely away from my partner I found energy in writing and in eating the expensive chocolate my elevated state entitled me to enjoy. Sometimes I could feel my teeth crying out to me, and I ignored them, as I stuffed that chocolate into my mouth with a weird self-satisfaction of deservedness at my wonderful changes. Later I would associate the screaming from my teeth that I was smugly ignoring with the Tooth Fairy Creatures of ‘Hellboy II: The Golden Army’ as they chewed the deep state agents to the bone.
At night before bed I would be absolutely exhausted and in the mornings I struggled to wake up enough to defog my brain before dragging myself upstairs to begin my sadhana practice. In an effort to drop my very high body acidity I had stopped coffee, by ‘chance’, a few weeks before I entered that diet transformative breath class. That too, is another story for another day. I had become yogic and could do no wrong because after the morning yoga I was bright and alive and on my bypass to a bright light that I couldn’t see was a delusion.
Out, Damned Teeth; Out, I Say!—One, Two, Five: Why Then, ’Tis Time To Do’t. Toothless Hell Is Anon¶
¶Adapted from ‘Macbeth’ by Shakespeare: ‘Out, damned spot; out, I say!—One, two: why then, ’tis time to do’t. Hell is murky.’
In late 2015 I returned to my dentist after a longish absence. I had what I thought was a minor irritation. She was horrified. I had developed ‘rampaging caries’. That was her description. ‘You will be lucky to save any of your teeth,’ she told me with her straight Romanian face. And in that sitting yanked a couple of them out. She gave me a very strict protocol to follow which meant that I carried with me everywhere dental gear including a strong over the counter fluoride rinse and was to clean my teeth as quickly as possible after every bite of anything. And with my anal nature I did as directed and with that I managed to reduce the yanking to five teeth by early 2016. And she was surprised at that.
And I managed to see the humour of Life because the teeth yanked were all on the bottom stage-right and all on the top stage-left. And so my chewing efficiency was severely compromised by a dearth of opposing teeth. I had fucked my teeth and they had fucked my ability to properly chew. Hmmmm. And because of my financial situation and the relatively poor coverage for dentures, and the abysmal coverage for implants, I went without a partial denture until 2022.
In early or maybe mid 2015 my teeth had begun to scream with the chocolate factory and I had been deaf. And now I have daily a reminder of my obliviousness and total disregard for the body which all my mindfulness practices had failed to properly honour and respect. That is truly spiritual by-passing.
And as I wrote that I remembered another body hypocrisy that I had embodied, one that I didn’t realise I had enabled until now: I had dismissed Buddhism in the mid-1980s after reading a book that described serious ascetic practices that resulted in everyone at the monastery developing bad haemorrhoids because of what and how they did meditation. At the time I realised that the Buddhism I had been reading about had an almost identical disrespect for the human that practicing Christianity did. It wasn’t until 2023 that I read that Gautama, in contradiction to the religion named after him, was adamantly against ascetic practices as being adequate to create in anyone enlightenment. However, at the time I had in my memory the disparately sourced descriptions of that dis-enchantment of bodily physical reality from Robert Bly and from Morris Berman.
"The French Priest Bossuet, writing at about the same time as Descartes, expressed in this passage one of the more prevalent Christian attitudes towards nature: 'May the earth be cursed, may the earth be cursed, a thousand times be cursed because from it that heavy fog and those black vapours continually rise that ascend from the dark passions and hide heaven and its light from us and draw down the lightening of God's justice against the corruption of the human race.’ … "This attitude was acceptable to the Church Fathers and to developing capitalism. When we deny there is consciousness in nature, we also deny consciousness to the worlds we find by going through nature” [and that includes, perhaps especially, the body] (p9 Robert Bly ed. News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness. San Francisco: SierraClub Books, 1980; my slight edit).
“William Blake tried to show the blindness of this [Newton’s] orientation to nature; and nowhere did he say it better than in his verse letter to Thomas Butts (1802):
Now I fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me; ‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulah’s night And twofold always. May God us keep From single vision & Newton’s sleep! (pp 122-3 Morris Berman. The Reenchantment of the World. Toronto: Bantam Books, in conjunction with Cornell University Press, 1984.)
End of Part 1
Part 2:
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Songs of the Essay
from Life is Long by David Byrne Everybody says that the living is easy I can barely see 'cause my head's in the way. The Body Breaks by Devendra Banhart The body breaks And the body is fine I'm open to yours And i'm open to mine The body aches And that ache takes it time But you'll get over yours And i'll get over mine And the sun will shine And the moon will rise up The body calls Yeah, the body, it calls out It whispers at first But it ends with a shout The body burns Yeah, the body burns strong Until mine is with yours Then mine will burn on My flesh sings out It sings, "come pour me out" The body sways Like the wind on a swing A bridge through a hoop Or a lake through a ring The body stays And then the body moves on And i'd really rather not dwell on When yours will be gone But within the dark There is a shine One tiny spark That's yours and mine
Thank you for sharing this journey with me, and your learning and humility. It's been quite the trust-fall!
Excellent Guy. Thank you 🙏