Articles

I present another brilliant piece of writing by Bryan Yamamoto. When I first read it, I felt an instant connection, this was exactly what I needed to hear. Since then, I've been coming back to read it again and again, and each time I felt uplifted and inspired even more. Like many raw foodists, after a while of playing with the diet, I arrived at a point where I experience the abundant raw energy, and sometimes too much of the good thing has been a problem. This article has equipped me with a better understanding of my experience.

What will you manifest with your raw energy?
by Bryan Yamamoto
(rawfood support forum)

As we eat vibrant raw foods, we find that our foods don't take as much energy to digest, and there is more energy available for healing. If we are lucky, our bodies use this energy to detoxify ourselves and to build a new body based on raw foods rather than the cooked foods that were used before.

But there is a potential dark side to this new abundant energy. With this extra energy, we can manifest whatever our minds desire. For a person with a healthy perspective on life, this means more health, feeling better, being happy. But this is clearly not the typical outcome of many who start the raw journey. In fact, for many their health gets worse or they become too sensitive on raw, and everyday ordinary things are too painful to tolerate and again the health degrades. Or in some extreme cases, where there is already a neurotic tendency in the individual, the person manifests their worst nightmares.

There seems to be different ways people choose to deal with this abundant raw energy. There is a group of people who channel this energy into physical fitness and athletic activities. Some of these people push the fitness envelope, creating a level of physical ability that seems exceed the norm. From what I can tell, this seems to work well for people who choose this technique and it seems to create a nice balance. On this forum there was Fruitarian One, and I've met others at some of Doug Graham's events. By the way, physical work also seems to be a way to ground the energies. When I do a full day of physical work, I have less energy at night to deal with.

Many people (myself included) will use foods to ground these abundant energies. This means eating heavy fatty foods to ground. For many this works, though there is a price to pay: sluggishness if you eat more fat or more food than your body can tolerate. Also, for some, eating raw fats will never ground the energy. So these folks are driven to lower vibration foods whose digestion will ground the energy. These foods could be cooked foods, or they could be fatty animal products. While this works for short term, long term it has health consequences, especially if there is overeating involved, and for many it is a ticket back to eating cooked foods.

Some people will channel their energies into their emotions. There are some that this will manifest as love and bliss and joy. I get this from time to time. But others will channel their energies into depression, anger, fear, anxiety, stress, worry, etc, and this leads to needing to ground the emotional energies with comfort eating, which might look exactly like eating to ground.

One way I use to ground the energy is to divert the mind. This could be watching a movie, or listening to music, or reading a book, or surfing the internet. For me, surfing the internet has become the mind diversion of choice. I am sure there may be health consequences to this (say like carpal tunnel syndrome), but I seem to be eluding these consequences for now.

But sometime I tire of my grounding techniques: I get tired of the Internet, tired of mental stimulation, tired of eating to ground. So then what do I do?

When I realize that I am trying to ground my energy, I play with consciousness. The first thing is acceptance. I accept that this energy is up, and that my mind wants it to go away, but that isn't going to happen unless I do one of my grounding techniques. Except I am tired of doing them, so I don't do them.

Then I play with gratefulness. I feel my heart, and I feel my body, and I feel grateful for the energies that I am feeling. Sometimes I will go into a meditation when I am feeling the gratefulness. Or sometimes I will start playing with breath consciousness, watching my breath, perhaps playing with the breath or doing a yoga practice.

But sometimes, when I am feeling grateful because the energy is up, what shows up is bliss. Pure bliss, born out of gratefulness, the energy of raw foods, my spiritual practices, and the divine. I cease thinking, and I just exist and experience and feel bliss. And sometimes I even become the bliss.

So what are you going to do with your energy?

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.
(Stacia Tauscher)

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
(Franklin P. Jones)

A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.
(Bill Vaughan)

Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
(William Stafford)

Children are one third of our population and all of our future.
(Select Panel for the Promotion of Child Health, 1981)

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
(Rabindranath Tagore)

In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.
(Thomas Szasz)

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next.
(Franklin P. Jones)

Children seldom misquote. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.

Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything.
(Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone Scelto)

Women gather together to wear silly hats, eat dainty food, and forget how unresponsive their husbands are. Men gather to talk sports, eat heavy food, and forget how demanding their wives are. Only where children gather is there any real chance of fun.
(Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960)

Anyone who thinks the art of conversation is dead ought to tell a child to go to bed.
(Robert Gallagher)

There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million.
(Walt Streighttiff)

A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer.

Acknowledgements: Maura (logo).
Quotes on raw foods by fellow raw foodists.
Other quotes from The Quote Garden.
Photos: Free Stock Photos