body is the tasty testing ground proof, pt 2
the body’s nose, even when battered and bloody, knows when we’re lying and being lied to and doesn’t take it lying down
This essay is stand alone and doesn’t require reading the previous ones.
Part 1 here:
how now to know how the body is true beyond the need for truth or believe?
fractalated multi-year synchronicities and their strange attractors
Life is multifaceted (fractalated is likely the more accurate adjective) and that shows itself most powerfully in those ‘true’, truly life-changing synchronicities that seemingly come from out of those strange attractor blues. And even more so when you see that they have actually spanned years.
In the early stages of my yogic spiritual-by-passing that took my teeth into a biohazardous waste bucket — while I gleefully smiled at the tin-foil wrapped deservedness disguised as chocolate that saw me in the final stages of diminishing the size of my waist from 117cm (46”) in early 2012 to 81cm (32”) in early 2016 — I began a friendship with a recently hired executive at the large western Canadian telecom corporation for whom I worked.
Playlists
Spotify
YouTube Music
YouTube Talking
🙏 If this essay gives you some pleasure, and/or an ‘aha’ benefit, become a paid subscriber. 🙏
🙏 Thank you. 🙏
Late in 2014, almost a year after I initiated my yoga and began with it to happily spiritually by-pass my body using so-called spiritual-yogic mindfulness practices, a new customer service vp was hired by my corporate employer with great fan-fare in the manner of the MBA-fakir’s shear-the-sheep-show-and-yells. (The convid playbook had been well practiced for decades in the corporate business world.) The brouhaha included her work email announcement to all of us that she was an open door in order to begin to heal the horrific state of customer disservice that the anti-societal and often sociopathic bully-leadership’s practices had created within their deliberately siloed, isolated and often antagonistic departments while averring the opposite intention.
And with perfect timing in that same week I had the incredible experience of my neighbour being refused to be a return customer by my employer. Yes, ‘we’ refused to receive the money he wanted to give us and was even pleading with us take. He explained that he was unable to get the services from the competition that he needed to honour his commitments. So it was with great skepticism, verging on cynicism, that I wrote his sorry customer dis-service story to her. It had several more elements of disservice than my quick sketch here suggests and I enjoyed writing this story with all of its juicy twists and turns. Yes, there is no question that fact disguising truth is stranger than fiction-as-metaphor for truth.
I was very surprised to get a warm immediate response with the promise that it would be addressed. ‘Very interesting,’ I thought at the time. ‘Has the wormy apple been replaced?’ (And it was actually quickly addressed.)
And I was stupefied to also get, in that same response from her, her request that I write to her any time I wanted to because she liked very much my writing. Really? After that I did a bit more research on who she was, really, and found that, omg!, we had crossed work-paths at one point in the tiniest of ways. Back in the early 1990s, when I was an IT tech I had upgraded her computer when she was what the business press at the time described on front pages of magazines as the new breed of up and coming executive to watch. This remembrance was a little funny to me at the time because I don’t know why I remembered that. In those corporate IT-flush days I upgraded likely hundreds of computers. Although she was a rare executive upgrade and likely the accolades of her prowess and place had been recently pumped through the media enough that it had caught my ear. And I remember her big hair in the style of the time! She does not remember that at all, of course. We’ve kept in contact since then.
After several email exchanges we agreed to meet for coffee. And that began a routine of coffee chats a couple of times a month that extended into the fall. We talked about the spiritual path, mostly, in different ways. Sometimes that flavour extended into the perceived failings of the corporate world in a general way with profit-maximising, as an ‘ethical’ work-principle, being a kind of self-administered work and societal poison.
One day, without warning, all personal communication was cut-off by her. I stopped getting any response to my emails. My memory is a little sketchy here. I think that it was at around this time that, to no surprise to me, I read the muted corporate announcement that she had been parachuted out of the company because she actually had wanted to improve customer service and the CEO with whom she clashed had only wanted her to give the appearance of improving customer service. His profit-maximising goal was to get from ’customers’ their money without actually giving them much of anything in return. (Of which my customer disservice story might be considered as a kind of proof of how far he wanted to give anything by refusing to give space to accept a returning customer’s money.) And, in a weird ‘coincidence’, I was also ‘parachuted’ out in December after having accepted that year’s second round of an early retirement incentive program being offered — I had missed the first round by just one person. To everyone’s surprise the executives’ desire to rid themselves of the experienced useless overpaid old people was so strong that, for the first time in its long corporate history, two packages were offered in a single year.
And, just as suddenly, the executive re-appeared in my personal email and we met for coffee shortly thereafter. She apologised for the abrupt and long silence and shared that she had gone into an extended rehabilitation treatment centre for alcohol addiction. That initiated a great many more discussions around spirituality and personal responsibility and some of the ‘masks’ that addiction hides behind. And an engaging discussion around Jungian psychology and the like. (One of Jung’s clients was a co-founder of AA.)
There Are None So Blind As Those Who See Only Their Truth. Is There a Chink in My Hubris?
At some point she recommended to me that I attend a February online ‘conference’ hosted by Tommy Rosen, the founder of something called ‘Recovery 2.0’. I’d not heard of him or R20. Why would I have? From what she described, he and R20 are for recovering addicts. And it was clear to me — and by inference everyone around me, of course — that I wasn’t an addict! I hadn’t ever been drunk in my life beyond approaching the leading edge of tipsy two or three times. I had successfully stopped smoking when I was twelve, a few months after having actively started. I hadn’t smoked a joint ever and after seeing a high school peer’s psychology and behaviour become unstable after something hard, I had no interest in that stuff either.
Nothing to see here, folks, not even, or especially not, all of my teeth anymore! I had attacked them the previous winter and their death was not a result of addictive behaviour! Nope. Just bad luck and stupidity. Or maybe the stupidity of blaming bad luck because with all that yoga and losing weight and becoming a vegetarian I was … full of the foul hubristic shit of the worst kind. I was the proselytiser who had become the enchanted missionary in search of fixing that other person’s addictions. I was the enchanted by-passer, truly amongst the worst of human obnoxious beasts.
Often, I now understand, these foul beasts, of which I was one, hide and hide from themselves, self-destructive behaviours. From attending Tommy and his guests diligently for several years it became clear to me that it is very likely your 200hr certified yoga teacher is addicted to something and his/her practice is that of the most insidiously invisible spiritual by-pass. Marijuana seems particularly popular with the yoga-teaching group.
And so it was that I thought it odd that she recommended recovery to me, a non-addict. At the same time I respected her enough to give him a try. I had, fortunately, a little hole in the hubristic-truth armour just big enough to let in the smell truth and release at least some of my obnoxious gassing. Some part of me knew enough to know that I didn’t actually know enough to know everything even if I often wanted to delude myself into thinking that my thinking was sufficient. The conference was free. I thought that the worst that would happen is that I would be bored and consider it a waste of time and would turn it off. Although it was likely, I thought, that I would learn at least something.
I wasn’t bored. And I learned much. Well, I learned one thing from that conference that effectively paradigm-shifted in a quantum way all other learning in all the many previous years of study: I was an addict. Nope, I hadn’t seen that coming, especially after all those books of psychology and self-healing and all the many practices of various types that I had done diligently. Not the 1500 plus hours of yoga and the dozen ‘yoga’ intensives I’d done by then. None of them had been sufficient, either in clarity or in my ability to see them with clarity, to clarify the truth of my being an addict with such hubristic-smashing power.
I wasn’t the person I thought I was: I was and had been stuck in the frequency of addiction my whole life. And that, and my ignorance of that, explained a lot.
25 In 6 And My Body Of Truth Changed Again Enough That Through My Hubris Darkly A Little Light Entered
The Recovery 2.0 Online Conference began Wednesday in late February. Five one hour long guest dialogues that were repeated for the full 24 hour day. And then five other guests the next day and so on until Sunday night. Monday all twenty-five guests were open for repeat listening or to catch the one(s) that had been missed.
I’ve thanked Tommy for this before and I’ll do that again now. Tommy, thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for that particular event and thank you to the 21 or 22 of the 25 guests I listened to. From each of them I learned something and often I learned just how much I didn’t know. What you did for me was to open my eyes, well, more accurately you opened my mind to one of the deepest and thus unseen truths of my experience. And to the deeper meaning of Jung’s caution that the unconscious is really unconscious!
And with that I experienced the most important step into awareness of this spiritual journey as a physical truth. Now, some years later, I have confirmed that initial discovery, that body-truth naturally precludes the spiritual by-passing mindfulness green lights that, for me, most ostentatiously destroyed my teeth. And had been the source of my obesity. Both are forms of by-pass memento mori (memento, falsi spiritus?) for me. The body doesn’t lie. It lives in the moment and the moment is truth by default.
And more broadly I now see that this practice of ‘spiritual-bypass’ is especially prevalent among the so-called spiritually aware found in yoga studios, churches and temples of all kinds. And also it is especially common in the main stream media’s fads-of-the-day high valued virtue signalling movements that include the vocal and militant climate change, gender diversity and vegan activists, advocates and so-called warriors.
WTF?! I’m An Addict!? Okay, It Turns Out Pretty Much Everyone Is And The Gateway Drug is Processed Sugar
With this conference I was introduced to the gaslit denial of processed sugar as something in life that isn’t Pure, White and Deadly. I was yet to discover that particular book, the discovery of which would take another couple of years because of how well buried it is under the sugar industry’s bought off media and medical journals and in many alt-food gurus. And it provides yet another of those many long before convid practice-runs of destroying scientists, science and gaslighting the world. Those practices as used by the sugar (drug) industry are detailed in the fascinating book Yoshiko discovered, while visiting Dawson City Yukon in 2019, called The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes. After publishing Pure, White and Deadly the author John Yudkin was subject to character assassination by people and scientists that the sugar industry bought, and who then published fake science to assist the narcissistic gaslighting that created confusion about the so-called health benefits of processed sugar. The burying of Yudkin and his research was an elaboration of the sugar industry having bought the Harvard scientists in the early 1960s who published their papers that advanced fat-phobia and which were a turning point towards a junk food diet of mostly highly processed ‘fat-free’ or ‘processed-fat’ foods often rich in processed sugars.
For the curious/skeptical here is a source for and hint about the sugar industry as malevolent food influencer: "The Secrets of Sugar - the fifth estate" CBC. Original air date: October 4th, 2013.
~34:00 The amazing thing I learned from her [Kristen Cousins, sugar industry researcher], was that strategies that I thought that the tobacco companies had made up back in the 50s actually some of those the sugar people had done even before that." — Stanton (Stan) Glantz, the lawyer who won against tobacco.)
Introducing Ann Boroch and her Claim and Experiences of Candida Toxicity
That is a bit ahead of myself. From the 2016 R20 Conference I was introduced to Ann Boroch, a nutritionist who introduced us to her experience with a sugary processed food diet and how she turned a diagnosis of life with multiple sclerosis misery to that of health and vitality. As one of Tommy’s guests Boroch described how in her mid-twenties the cancer doctor said to her ‘Well, the good news is you don’t have cancer. The bad news is you have MS and will be in pain and misery for the rest of your life. And for much of that you will be wheel chair bound.’ When asked if there wasn’t anything he (western allopathic medicine) could do for her against MS he said ‘No.’ Although, without too much enthusiasm, he suggested that there are some experimental cancer drugs she could try, although he didn’t really hold out much hope for them.
She rejected that and began her own search for a cure to her health and came to realise that diet, the one thing most often ignored in Rockefeller’s allopathic illness practices, held if not the key, then certainly an important place in optimising her health. It would not serve Pharma for people to heal themselves with healthy food, of course, and so it isn’t studied by ‘doctors’ of health who learn to sell pills. With going on a no-processed sugar, low sugar food/fruit diet, the symptoms of her MS cleared within three years. After which she resumed her old diet and, on hindsight to no surprise, the MS symptoms returned. She went back to the low sugar diet and remained healthy until her death (under mysterious circumstances) in 2017.
If Food is Medicine it Stands to Reason that it is Also Poison: It is Dosing and Appropriateness that Distinguishes the One from the Other
Boroch’s presentation was simple, elegant, and eminently logical. The human digestive system has present in it, naturally and normally, a certain small amount of yeast called candida. Boroch explained that the vast majority of allopathic Rockefeller trained doctors are even more ignorant of that than they are of the link between diet and health. The standard diet of our age, following the sugar industry’s successful capture of food science, the FDA and the MSM, is filled with sugars that did not exist even a hundred years ago (for example HFCS), and in quantities that are hundreds of times more than were ingested even a hundred years ago.
‘Do this candida cleanse diet for 90 days,’ she promised, ‘and you will feel so good that you will not want to return to your old ways of eating.’ Bold words. And only 90 days! I had been doing a daily yoga and pranayama (breath) practice for more than 700 days by that time, and so 90 days was not at all daunting. Some of the other people on the conference were also impressed and one of them, using the conferences’ associated Facebook, organised a 90 day support group from it.
In my previous essay I described my physical symptoms of exhaustion, falling asleep at the wheel and at home, etc. It turns out I had some unseen symptoms, too. And so…
Getting Ready To Cleanse Candida Takes Caution
We organised ourselves and prepared to begin. Boroch cautioned against going no-sugar cold turkey as being very very uncomfortable because the resulting candida die-off in the digestive system would hit the liver very hard as a strong toxin and also because sugar withdrawal is painful. (Taubes cites studies on how sugar is far more addictive than cocaine, for example.) And, with amazing synchronistic timing, a friend in the previous year had shared with me that he had in fact experienced those harsh effects when he went sugar cold turkey after deciding to go on the paleo diet: he suffered three weeks of the worst physical and emotional and psychological hell that he had experienced in his life, a life that had included harsh physical experiences due to being born with a large cleft palate. He described the feeling as being so strong that he wanted to kill himself for about one week of the three tortuous weeks. And afterwards he said that he has never felt healthier than after quitting sugar and high sugary foods. (Podcast: Life After Sugar: Stories to Inspire with Netta.)
Boroch also strongly recommended, at least for the time of the candida cleanse, to eat some meat because it is more difficult for non-meat eaters to reduce the sugars enough to effectively clear the candida because legumes are starchy. She commented, paraphrased a little: ‘as a nutritionist looking at sick people I’ve rarely seen a healthy vegetarian and even more rarely have I seen a healthy vegan’. Of course, as a health consultant it was sick people she was going to see. She inferred that changing their diet had helped them regain health.
And, in another of those weird synchronicities occurring almost like a guide or support mechanism as I began to more actively move towards food and diet as medicine, it was around that time that I met my first fallen vegan at a one day yoga intensive. Of the fifty or so people there, somehow we were partnered up and talked about diet. She ‘confessed’ her reluctant return to red meat, although it was for just once a week, because all her other efforts to get well had failed regardless of how properly she followed this or that vegan protocol. Eventually, and with some desperation after her last last ditched vegan effort, she went looking for an ethical organic source of red meat. She now buys directly from the rancher a few ounces once a week of bison. She was surprised that that actually stopped her morbidity and was even more surprised at how much her health improved. After including even a tiny amount of meat she realised that for most of her vegan life that she had had poor energy and poor health.
And so, with Boroch’s recommendation and this story fresh in my ears, I chose to stop being a vegetarian for at least the 90 days recommended to clear the candida. And I did so in spite of my diet-changing experience of the Sudarshan Kriya just two years prior. Note: Boroch has a checklist of life events and eating practices that indicate without testing the likelihood and severity of candida overgrowth or toxicity. I was high for various reasons, including the 10 day stint of IV followed by 40 days of oral antibiotics at the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011. Serious ear infection and another experience of the body’s truth for another day.
In the 30 days to the start of the 90 day cleanse slowly I exhausted all the dairy from the fridge — ice cream, goat’s milk, yoghurt and cheese — and stopped the sugary fruits as they were used up — bananas, oranges, mangos, apples, etc — and I finished the last of my totally delicious homemade pasta and baked goods.
The Day Before Cleanse-Day I Bought An Organic Chicken
I am a good cook. The roast organic chicken stuffed with herbs, onion and lemon smelled fantastic. Looked fantastic. When it was cooked I plated it with vegetables and a touch of olive oil with lemon juice. I had decided to stop butter because it was dairy, despite Boroch having pointedly said that butter was fine. Being anal and a ‘purist’, it was proper for me to consider that no dairy meant no dairy. I didn’t know then that making butter separated out the ‘bad’ milk products and is actually a very good quality and healthy fat for most people. And so with that, not only was I going against the physical (genetic?) vegetarian change I experienced in 2014, I was now going totally against the revival tent dream of the 1980s when I had been fat free and dreamt that it was important for me to eat pork fat or butter. (For the details of that fascinating dream, see:
how now to know how the body is true beyond the need for truth or believe?)
And when I picked up the luscious drum stick and moved it towards my mouth I was surprised, stunned, shocked, that my elbow refused to bend enough to let me put the chicken into my mouth. I tried a few times. Then I tried to move my mouth towards the chicken and the distance would not close. That’s interesting, I thought. I set the chicken down, and wondered what I was going to do. I ate the vegetables and then went upstairs to my little library and pondered. What came to mind was eggs, one of the absolute best forms of protein. (Hint: if the FDA says an unprocessed food is really really horrific for you, most likely it is going to be really really healthy. As a Pharma shill, the FDA’s efforts are to make people sick and thus pliably pillable. And as measured by the state of America’s health, and the size of Pharma’s revenues, they have been successful.)
Once I thought of eggs I wondered at their being okay since the chicken wasn’t. How to know? Who to ask? Since I had about as much faith in allopathic medicine at that time — it had badly damaged me in the 1990s and had ravaged my ex throughout our years together — I certainly wasn’t going to ask them. I consulted the I Ching and got a very clear ‘Yes’. I went downstairs and made myself two poached eggs. And was satisfied.
Two Weeks Later I Knew I Wouldn’t Go Back to the Sugary Diet and, at the Same Time, I Got Gout
And it happened. My skin was transformed into something that felt magical, light, alive and I knew I wouldn’t change back to my old diet. That was it. In two weeks of no sugar the biggest organ of my body began to dance with a lightness and a joy I do not remember ever having experienced before. Very likely it was something akin to what a young child’s or infant’s skin may feel like. And a bit later I noticed that it had lost its hyper-sensitivity to sunlight. (A few weeks later I accidentally over-exposed my skin in a way I knew was going to cause me grief. And it did not. After the initial milder than expected discomfort, the following day the redness had gone without blisters and I didn’t experience any pealing in the following days!)
And at about the same time I developed gout, the ‘rich man’s’ disease from eating too much and too rich foods. What? I am on a vegetarian diet, with two eggs a day, no fat, no alcohol, no dairy and I have gout! Impossible. I have had experiences of gout off and on since the late 1980s. It is a disease I inherited from my father, I thought at the time. And gout had an unreliable way of showing up from time to time without really a clear solid rhyme or reason. I didn’t pay too close an attention to how it was associated with diet. Nor with my mental states. In the past when it did show up I would drink lots of water, reduce my beer to zero from two a week, and take the medicine. And it would quickly clear.
So, being anal I’m on a diet, a cleansing diet, that is about as clean of fat as a diet can possibly be. I am eating healthy organic vegetables and I have developed gout. Mild, fortunately. However, and frustratingly, the extra water and the medicine that had always worked before, wasn’t working. It simply wasn’t clearing.
After another two weeks I was almost tempted to consult the I Ching again. I stopped because I didn’t have a big enough imagination, at the time, to figure out how to formulate the question to get an intelligible answer about how to clear the gout. From past experiences with gout the two trusted acupuncturists I went to had both been totally ineffective in treating it, and so I didn’t consider that route. I thought of a naturopath. Before going that tempting route I found myself following, instead, my own nose to the internet and began to dig. In relatively short order I discovered something remarkable about vegetables. It was yet another very common food myth (lie?) that got busted and my beautiful fat dream gets vindicated.
🙏 Thank you for reading.
If this epistle gave you some pleasure, and/or an ‘aha’ benefit, become a paid subscriber. 🙏
🙏 Thank you. 🙏
End of Part 2
Part 3 continues, although I warn you here it does a dog-leg off track from food to expand instead, on the secondary theme of spiritual by-passing. Specifically my own discovery of my having spiritually by-passed around money and its consequences. It opens with a look at economics as our greatest religion and hence, is a near perfect definition, I now understand, as our age’s greatest spiritual by-pass.
Before I Out My Gout, I’ll Root About In My Money By-Passing
Playlists
Spotify
YouTube Music
YouTube Talking
Song of the Essay
Change on the Rise: Lyrics
Without the light Oh, the darkness comes Hold through the night The shadows will run [Pre-Chorus] Fend off the enemy Sing out the jubilee With all the fire we can breathe [Chorus] We're singing all day and you can't tame it High tide or low tide, you know Nighttime or morning time, yeah We're going strong Headed up down the river, oh Lord I feel the reveling I feel a change on the rise [Verse 2] What good's a man Who's lost his soul? Can't take a stand When his flame's gone cold [Pre-Chorus] Fend off the enemy Sing out the jubilee With all the fire we can breathe [Chorus] We're singing all day and you can't tame it High tide or low tide, you know Nighttime or morning time, yeah We're going strong Headed up down the river, oh Lord I feel the reveling I feel a change on the rise [Bridge] I feel a change on the I feel a change on the rise I feel a change on the I feel a change on the rise [Chorus] We're singing all day and you can't tame it High tide or low tide, you know Nighttime or morning time, yeah We're going strong Headed up down the river, oh Lord I feel the reveling I feel a change on the rise [Chorus] We're singing all day and you can't tame it High tide or low tide, you know Nighttime or morning time, yeah We're going strong Headed up down the river, oh Lord I feel the reveling I feel a change on the rise I feel a change on the rise
Another great essay Guy. Let us shout out stories like these from the rooftops to spread the word. After living in joint pain for most of my adult life and being diagnosed with lupus and fibromyalgia, having my spleen removed, put on bagfuls of tablets. Not one doctor EVER suggested giving up sugar, not one. Without sugar I am 95% pain free and apparently no longer have lupus, fibromyalgia, clinical depression, a weak immune system. Such is the strength of the drug that people will do almost anything else but stop their 'treats'. They say "I am so good most of the time I deserve to spoil myself" and I want to point out that language, 'spoil'. The conditioned addiction has gone on for over a hundred years, with the last half of that being ramped up by a deliberate money making campaign and it has weakened our minds and made us easily controlled. What a shocking fact. My life without processed sugar has a sharper focus, like going from a black and white silent movie to technicolour! Looking forward to Part 3.
Just a quick hi Guy. Waaaay to much for me to respond to, can't even get to comments on my own short post. Tokyo just finished its first and probably only snow of the year, and no sooner than it had melted, hay fever hit me hard. Early this year, can hardly keep my rheumy eyes open or nose dry. Will be back soon.
Cheers buddy!