Naked Living: Saying Goodbye to Our Old Stuff

Take a moment to imagine this scenario: You have eliminated all emotional bandaids from your existence. You are no longer avoiding real life or distracting yourself from feeling your emotions. Wow. Whoa. Wait a minute here. I don't do that, you might say. Well, let's take a closer peek, shall we?

What might this new life look like?

Probably something like this:

No more relax-me alcohol. (Yes, this includes wine and craft beers.)

No more soothing cigarettes.

No more junk/comfort food. (Even the organic and/or gluten-free kind.)

No more pick-me-up daily coffees. (Even the organic and Fair Trade kind.)

No more recreational drugs. (Even the organic, homegrown kind.

No more prescription drugs. (There are definitely alternatives to nearly all of them.)

No more television. Get rid of that thing!

No more video games. (Including apps.)

No more overly-obsessive activities. (Exercise, sex, work, shopping...and on and on.)

No more self-sabotage. Tough one.

No more drag-you-down hold-you-back relationships. 

(No. More. Facebook? I'm still working on minimizing that one...and keeping myself limited and to the point when I am on there!)

Boring, right?! 

But just wait...

This new life might also look something like this:

Just feeling happy. Even joyful!

Lots of amazing friends!

Socializing as yourself. Just plain old you. No more masks.

A clear and healthy mind.

Just facing your issues. Then forgiving everyone involved. Including yourself.

A clean, strong, and well-functioning body.

Communicating your needs and feelings clearly.

A strong sense of spirituality.

Pleasant (or even awesome) relations with family members. 

Time to prepare amazing, nourishing, healthy food.

A loving and supportive partner. (If you desire to meet one.)

Lots of time in nature.

Time to partake in your passions and follow your heart.

This is a lot like what our lives look like right now. It may sound boring to some but to us, it feels anything but that. It feels like a gigantic blessing. Everysingleday. You can live this way. Just make the choice. It's all in your hands. No more excuses.

How and why did I choose this way of living? 

Mostly out of self love and respect, I believe. Also, I have a strong desire to love others the same way that I love myself. To accept people for who they truly are underneath it all. Beautiful spirits. To truly know people for who they are on a soul level. To know the truth of how it feels to be a human without any adulterations. 

Has it been challenging? 

You bet! It's been super challenging, at times. I have done everything on the first list (except smoke a cigarette. I haven't done that.) But all the others have been challenges and obstacles that I have overcome. Some more than once. Some still creep in from time to time. Like snacks! Who doesn't love a good ol' cookie or some chips?!

I went to a liquor store today to find some empty boxes. When I walked in, all I saw was colorful flashing signs and clever, artsy labels that were reminiscent of a toy store, or candy shop, but for adults. Promotions and gimmicks like free beer cozies or tee shirts. I am often baffled by the collective consent of our world. "Drink alcohol friends! Everyone does it. Wine is classy!" Numb your pain. Forget your worries. Pretend that your marriage is just fine. What debt? Cool dudes slam back a cold one after work. Let loose. Forget life. Relax a little. Blend with the crowd. Alcohol is just one small example of this insane collective consent that our society calls reality. 

With those empty cardboard boxes, we are once again paring down our material possessions. I have shed my personal stuff twice before almost completely. Once in 2004, at age 21 when I moved to Alberta from Pennsylvania. All I took on the flight was a small carry-on sized suitcase. My mom shipped me some memorabilia a few years later. You know, some photos and such.

Then again in 2011, at age 29, when my partner of 8 years and I separated, I only took with me a car, a bed and pillow, a yoga mat, a bike and some clothes. That's all. Not a nic-nac or painting or fridge magnet. What are they for really? Memories? That's why we were gifted a memory as human beings. To collect and learn and remember the past but live in the present.

Stuff is one more thing that keeps us all weighed down. Energetically, mentally and physically. It's so easy to accumulate things. It's often much tougher to become unattached from them. We sifted (again) through a pile of totes of stuff that we had just sorted through six months ago before we left to travel. So we have decided this will be the final sifting as long as we are a "mobile wellness team". We do not want the invisible energetic tethers to our heap of belongings pulling at us from around the globe. 

There are often many emotions attached to a lot of stuff. So it forced us to feel these emotions, smile and/or cry, and move onward. After 3+ hours of sorting dishes, clothing and various household items (about 3/4 of our total stuff) we both laid down in bed and felt a mountain of totes lighter while drifting away into dreamtime.

We are on day four of a liquid fast of mostly herbal teas (some cacao drinks) and coconut water. Cleansing our insides and our outsides simultaneously feels amazing. Realigning our bodies, minds and spirits after a long journey. And now we begin to prepare ourselves for the next phase of the One World Wellness road tour.

Truth Warriors are Us

I'm finally taking a sweaty moment here to start this new blog post while we are pulled over in the baking mid-day sun at a state border stop between Nayarit and Sinaloa. The guards informed us that we can't take any fruits into this state. We have been existing on a 80% fresh fruits diet for quite a few months, so to us this was very unwelcome news. So when they tried to open up our car and take it all to the trash can, we sat here instead, for at least a half hour eating mangos and bananas. We also splurged and purchased our first jumbo jackfruit this morning. I didn't even get to take a photo of it. We dug out a knife and cut it open just to try a taste before handing it over to the fruit police. They explained that there are too many pests and fungus that can be spread to all of the fruits in Sinaloa. Fair enough. I think that most people conform and hand over everything and just drive away. Not these two vegan fruit fiends! In the last week alone we have tried three new fruits: Starfruit, jackfruit, and guanabana (which I have seen all of in Asian markets in Canada but never tried). Not to mention fresh cacao fruit and seeds. Yum. The sheer acreage of plantations and the heaps of fruit on the Pacific coast has been completely mind blowing.

Thousands of forests of coconut palms. Miles of mango trees. Fields of piñas, papayas and lime trees. They are trying to feed a very hungry planet here!

So now that I wrote that all down, let me back up and recap some really beautiful and intense experiences. Some of the more intense days of this entire 5 month road trip, actually. 

Our next stop on the South Pacific coast of Mexico was Puerto Escondido. We had some cacao ceremonies booked at a healing and wellness retreat center there. We were also asked by the owner to see how his new team of volunteers was doing running the place. The long and short of it was that the team was having a tough start. This place requires a lot of time and dedication. It also requires, like everything that we do everyday, clear communication with others. 

There was a second round of intense waves slamming the whole pacific shoreline those first few days that we arrived in Puerto. It felt a bit reflective of the energy in the wellness center. People getting tossed to and fro in the waves of miscommunication.

We recognized that possibly a cacao ceremony for the team and the three guests might be a useful tool to create more openness and unity. So the eight of us convened on the beautiful rooftop palapa one afternoon and for several hours we created a sacred space of connection and communication. It was like magic. People arrived all flustered and exhausted. They left uplifted and full of gratitude. Mid-ceremony, a funny little seed blew onto the floor in front of me. It was like a disc of clear rice paper with a small heart-shaped seed in the center. It was a tiny confirmation for me from the universe that these cacao ceremonies are planting seeds of love across the planet. We are all planting seeds each moment. With every interaction. More love seeds, please. 

We really enjoyed the team at the healing center. They were from Mexico and Canada. Such awesome young people full of passion and hope. We enjoyed sunrise meditations and early morning yoga each day that week. We shared buckets of mangos from the street outside the house. We shared vegan recipes and then ate more mangos. At the Saturday market we were able to purchase our first fresh whole cacao pods! So pretty, and tasty too.

I really appreciated the conscious manner that team meetings were held at this wellness center. One person spoke at a time without interruptions. We all encouraged each other to speak the truth and to express our truest feelings. It was very tough for some of the group to share openly and to receive what others had to say. There was some major intensity but also major growth for all involved. Including us. So after a week of these morning meetings, we were dubbed the Truth Warriors by the staff. I accept that title, as one of many, and plan to continue assisting others to bring out the truth for the betterment of all of humanity. 

After a week in Puerto, we drove to Acapulco. It was a pretty neat place with lots of VW beetles and a huge mercado in the early morning as we departed after our quick one night stay. They had so many flowers at this particular mercado. Beautiful. 

We then headed to Zihuatenajo. It's a beautiful city. We googled a vegan cafe where we planned to stop and rest while we got an oil change for our Truth Mobile. It was not a cafe at all but an amazing woman in her lovely home who was a raw foods warrior. Patti invited us in and made us raw vegan pizzas made with local and organic fruits and veggies. So amazing. We got that oil change and so much more. We were invited to stay at Patti's home after we saw the sprouted cacao beans on her counter. The cacao chat began and the rest was history. She took us to see our very first cacao tree just down the block from her casa.  We held a cacao ceremony at her home and shared many special moments there. We departed early the second morning and Patti was up making us vegan raw burritos to go for our road lunch. Wow were they amazing!!! I thought mine were amazing but hers were out of this world. It continues to amaze me at how dazzling we all become when we are living our true calling! When life calls you, answer! Don't take a message or screen your calls. Don't say you'll call back when it's more convenient. Just take the call and enjoy it!

We were stopped at checkpoints several times in Michoacan.  This is the state with some of the highest level of unrest because of drug cartels. We decided to trek through despite all of the negativity that we found online. We have heard so many negative opinions of Mexico and Central America since we began announcing that we were taking this journey last fall. We have not encountered a single situation that I would call dangerous or scary for over 5 months. Michoacan was heavily militarized and there were many checkpoints where we had to get out of the car for inspection and questioning. Which usually resulted in laughter.

The best part of these stops was that the soldiers would dig through our car asking what things were and we got to give them some free healthy living lessons! It was awesome. This state was also one of the most wild, uninhabited and beautiful that we have seen. High cliffs overlooking a blue wild ocean. Thick lush jungles covering winding roads for hours shaded us from the sun. We saw dozens of giant white butterflies flapping huge floppy, white wings and giving us the feeling that they were our tiny guardian angels. Two more days to go in magical Mexico. Magical.

"The destiny of the world is in your hands."

Somos Mariposas

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia. Thanks wiki! They were too elusive for me to get on "film". 

I had a brief but very clear dream about a month ago. In the dream I was instructed by a voice to collect three yellow swallow tail butterflies. I remember feeling confused and frustrated in the dream. I said to the voice "What? Why? Does that kind of butterfly even live in Guatemala?" I hadn't seen any there. In fact, I hadn't seen that type of butterfly in over a decade, since I lived in Pennsylvania.  Fast forward to San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, a month later. We were staying at a lovely little hostel in the city run by a very friendly couple. It was called Casa Vegano Sol, and as the name implies, it is a vegan hostel. Pretty sweet. So we were sitting in the back garden eating our breakfast of fresh fruit salad and a yellow swallow tail butterfly floated into the garden. No way! I just laughed to myself and I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be at that moment. In the following few days, two more came to visit. Only three. No more. I knew I wouldn't "collect" them per-say, only with my eyes and my heart.  I don't really know what to make of it all, other than the fact that butterflies are amazing. They make incredible journeys and transform from an egg, to a caterpillar, into soupy imaginal cells and then finally a perfect butterfly. Incredible. 

So we mentioned to the hostel owners that we would like to host a cacao ceremony. They made us a poster in Español and copied a hundred copies and then posted them all over San Cristobal. It was so kind and amazing! We had a great ceremony. We had the assistance of a few translators since our Español is limited. Half way through I forgot we were using two languages. The energy of everyone was on the same level. It didn't seem to matter much which words were being used. There were guests from Chile, Mexico, Argentina and then us. Two Canadians with Guatemalan cacao to share. What a special experience. The hostel owner said to us at the end of the ceremony "You two are healers. You took the information from the stars and shared it with everyone here." 

Maybe it was just the Spanish language sounding all pretty but it brought tears to my eyes. What a beautiful confirmation for two people doing what we love to do. 

Speaking of cacao, again, we have a new blog up that is all about CACAO. It's pretty awesome. Check it out at www.cacaoconnection.blogspot.com 

Our list of potential ceremony locations is growing by the day. We are so excited to see what unfolds. A man from Chiapas was so disappointed that he and his family missed the ceremony in San Cristobal that he is trying to figure out how to meet up with us somewhere else in Mexico later on. I told him he's the first to know if we are coming back to Chiapas! 

We had a tough time leaving San Cristobal. It was so beautiful in every way. The people, the architecture, the nature, the art. The people. We feel so grateful for all of the exceptional spirits that we continue to connect with every single day. It's almost surreal. I just told a friend in an email that I wish I had a giant bus so that I could invite them all to stay with me forever. I never thought I would say this but email and "face" as they refer to it in Chiapas, are a gift when used with care and limitation. I have recently gotten messages and emails alike from people who I have had little to no communication with in the last decade telling me they they are so inspired by our journey and writing. I am so happy that I am reaching people at a heart level who are thousands of miles away from me. I will say though, that I am just like everyone else, except somehow, my spiritual information highway channel is wide open and I am very aware of this. I have been gifted this special assignment to write and to expand minds and open hearts. It's not always easy but I wouldn't ever trade it. 

We enjoyed our day-long trip from the cool, crisp mountains of Chiapas to the steamy Pacific coast of Oaxaca. Through the mountains we saw many butterflies. Mostly yellow, but several massive ones that were black with turquoise patches. Stunning! 

We went through several miles of mountain valleys that were covered in passion fruit vineyards. We stopped in the sweaty jungle for a sandia from a friendly goat farmer. I don't know who was happier. Us getting a watermelon or him watching.

Same thing happened when we crossed the border from Chiapas to Oaxaca. We came over a mountain and we could see orchards below in the distance. It turned out to be many thousands of mango trees. We stopped at a roadside mango oasis in the heat of the afternoon. I had a nice chat with Miguel, the landowner and mango expert. I told him that good mangos in Canada are expensive. A luxury for many. He said yes, the yellow Atulfo variety get exported to Canada and sell for the most money. He sliced us up a few samples and we were in mango heaven. We were so excited and Miguel got quite a laugh out of the mango juice dripping from beard and hands. I have never seen so many mangos in my life. Every shade of the rainbow except blue. Baskets and crates of mangos lined the streets of each pueblo for hours on end after that. Everyone was just overrun with mangos. So amazing. 

 

We arrived at the coast around sunset. Papaya plantations dotted the hillsides. We noticed that these papaya trees were different. They were only about 5 feet tall and loaded with fruits. Super handy for ease of harvest.  We had amazing papayas in Guatemala and they were loaded with seeds. The ones we have experienced in Mexico were more often than not, less tasty and had almost no seeds. We cut one the other day that literally had one seed in the entire papaya. One. Creepy. Sterile fruit? Monsanto? Is that you? We will continue to inform ourselves...

We stayed one night in a sweaty cabana on a cliff with a stunning view of the wild waves crashing below. There has been a freakish swell of giant waves along the pacific coast of Mexico and the USA, referred to as Mar de Fondo, in the last week and a second round is here now. Streets were flooded and sand is everywhere. It was amazing to walk the beaches and see the power of the ocean. There were amazing patterns of black sand all along the beach. Not sure what that was from but it sure was pretty. 

We made our way to the yoga school that we thought we were going to attend back in March in Mazunte. We met the instructor and had a great chat with him. He returned our full deposit which was so wonderful. He thanked us for sending two wonderful students in our places and said it was the best group he's had yet. 

We have we been really enjoying sunrise yoga on Mexican rooftops the last 10 days. Yowee! Ohmmmmmmm....

To be continued...

From the Inside, Out.

2014 is off to a leisurely start for the two of us. Lots of trail hikes through the lush forests of Vancouver Island, playing with friends' kiddos and lots and lots of time for reflection and contemplation. 

After our two-month "road food" road trip we ordered a liver cleanse kit for us to clean out our systems. They finally arrived last weekend. We noted our completely blank schedules and decided there was no time like the present to start a new year off with a clean slate!

Let's step back to July for a moment... I had a great phone call with my mother-in-law (she's really more like a dear friend) and she had just completed the first of three of these liver cleanses. She had such good things to say about it. I was feeling a little "off", so I did one then too. It was a stretch for me, as I had never done any cleanse for 6 days before. Afterward, I felt amazing. I felt lighter and happier and more like myself. Not to mention, my liver was probably pretty happy. Bonus: my jeans fit better. 

So, back to the present. We just completed the 6th, and final, day of the cleanse and this time around I felt compelled to document the experiences I / we had through the process. 

In addition to the liver tonic and supplements, this cleanse involves eating only certain fruits for breakfast, and a salad or simple veggie soup for lunch and dinner. This was all fine for us, since we eat a very clean vegan diet. The hard part was no snacking.  We were both a bit on the grumpy side later the first day. When we realized it, we had a good laugh. What a great opportunity to observe our habits. How many of us snack because we are stressed or pressured or anxious? It happens to the best of us. 

Interestingly enough, the weather was extremely rainy all week, so we spent most of the cleanse cooped up in the moHo reading and resting. We didn't feel like we were missing out on chances to hike.

By day 3 we were both feeling a bit of muscular weakness and we were also on the tired side. A big change from how we were feeling on our daily hikes down forest trails that we enjoyed for the last few weeks. We both found that we were restless in the middle of the night several nights. The massive down pours of rain on the moHo roof didn't help us to rest. 

Something about cleansing and having the discipline to be hungry and not botch the cleanse by snacking, creates a state of raised consciousness and body awareness that clears the mind and spirit. We both had moments that we described as "out of body". Moments where we rose beyond physical discomfort and remembered that we are not our bodies. We just reside in our bodies. Since I only get one body in this lifetime, I choose to nourish it daily. 

On the afternoon of day 5, I got a humongous headache. It was the worst headache I have had in years. I must have accumulated a fair amount of toxins throughout our travels. Certain smells made it much worse and sounds and movements were painful. I took a nap for a while and was thrilled to find that it disappeared when I awoke. I was so glad because the night of the 5th day was a crucial time to finish taking the final ingredients to complete the liver flush. I didn't want to get this far and then not complete the cleanse. 

Both times I have done this cleanse, I had the same physical symptoms on the final night. A bit like a flu. But just a one-hour flu. I barely slept much. My abdomen was grumbly and the rain was so loud that it sounded like we were parked under a waterfall. 

However, I woke this morning (day 6) feeling wonderful. My mind and body feel clearer. I feel refreshed. Once again, my jeans fit better. 

We are both so glad that we took the week to cleanse our bodies...and minds and spirits.

Another positive side-effect: 

We both agreed that after a week-long coffee detox, we are better off without the black magic in a mug. Sure, it's tasty, and everyone's doing it. It is one of the most widely traded commodities in the world. We just don't want to wake up and rely on coffee to give us a jump start every morning. Our love for life is enough to get us out of bed each day. Coffee can be for special occasions.

If you are interested in reading more about the cleanse itself, here is a link.  It describes the products, the cleanse process and much more:

http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/liver-cleanse-kit.html