(Don’t miss parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of Cate’s “Sacred Anatomy” series. This is the final article in the series.)
Dear You,
Ah, Lesson 6. The party is almost over.
I’ve had a few conversations with party-goers that it’s been a good party. Jokes were told. Conversations got heated. Worldviews shifted. My work here is almost done.
And of course, if you don’t want the party to end, you should sign up for the Sept.2015-May 2016 Living Ayurveda Course.
It’s a powerful course and a powerful posse of compadres.
Let’s begin today’s lesson with a postmodern super-heroine story.
Once a time there was a woman. She started to go to yoga class. She discovered parts of herself she never knew. She tapped into depth. She gained access to witness awareness.
Her vocabulary expanded with her discoveries. And her discoveries expanded with her vocabulary. She started to learn Ayurveda, and moved even deeper
into her sacred anatomy. She became more sensitive, more articulate…and unfortunately, more self-absorbed.
What? Self-absorbed?
What was this? What was happening? The path of Yoga was supposed to lead to bliss, to freedom to enlightenment!
For this woman, it was leading there… but it was also leading her being a little too particular about her self-care program.
It seemed like the bar for her self-care enlightenment program kept rising – and thus, was always out of reach. She had cultivated great daily practices, she had detoxed, she only fed herself the best foods for her constitution. And yet, at her core, she found herself involved with friends in really the most small-minded conversations.
The conversations would go something like this:
“I read that green smoothies really aren’t Ayurvedic.”
“Oh, is that so? Well, I like they are great for me. With just the right combination of fresh ginger root and fennel, i don’t find they aggravate my vata at all.”
“Huh. They make me bloated. So I’ve started to have a lovely chia seed porridge with gogi berries for breakfast. I have SOOO much more energy now.”
And so on and so forth the conversation flows into personal digestive oblivion.
And after, both parties feel a little more self-righteous about their personal dietary choices and how they are on the path to awakening.
And yet.
And yet this feeling creeps up within the anti-green smoothie woman, that she isn’t really awakening to depth. Yes, sure, she is no longer bothered by her monkey mind while meditating. But, the feeling that her practices and her specific dietary choices aren’t going to be enough. Perhaps without knowing it, she has hit the ceiling of her self-development path. The growing edge looms ahead.
She feels like one of those superheros in the movies who is on a top-of-the-skyscraper chase. She must leap from one building to the next. She knows she isn’t ready… and senses that she’ll never be ready. She senses that there is no readiness for this leap – there is just a sense of no where else to go.
So she leaps. And lands.
In this new territory she is no longer so concerned with her customized boutique dietary regimen. Yes – she knows what to feed herself to run a clean, clear energy. She knows what will sink her ship quickly or slowly. But, the difference is that this doesn’t occupy much of her day or much of the dialogue she propels into the akashic field.
What a shift! She is propelled by a larger worldview. She feels a fire stronger that her digestive agni, which her yogic sensitivity enabled her to connect with.
She is fired up by dharma. Sure, dharma or her sense of purpose and right place was always there, but in the past it was lurking in the background.
She uses her yogic powers to sense deeply into how she can show up as evolution in action. She uses her six sense to listen to the better conversation that she can
instigate and shepherd into existence. A conversation that is based on the inkling of a better vision. A conversation that has the seeds of a positive action plan.
And all the while, she powers the dharma with her solid yogic and Ayurvedic self-care wisdom. She’s no longer quite so obsessive and instead… she uses her wisdom to fuel a true shift in her community. Her practices fit into the larger context of her life, her dharma, how she shows up in the world. And how the world becomes a better place in every way she used her wisdom and her power for positive impact.
The end.
But this really isn’t the end. The question is – what did our post postmodern super-heroine actually do? What purpose did she serve? What change did she instigate, escort, and evolve?
Because this super-heroine yogini was deeply affected by her own path of discovery around a healing diet, and because she so deeply disliked not knowing which foods in her favorite local eateries were genetically modified and which were not… and because one of her besties ran a local CSA farm… and another one of her besties was an acupuncturist who prescribed herbs imported from China and India… and another one of her acquaintances was a local botanist employed by the forest service, she decided to generate better conversations on what they all had in common. She developed a nose for dynamic synergy.
Instead of having the “raw vs. cooked” conversation, she had the “let’s change our local and global food economy” conversation. Wow. What dramatic leap our super-heroine took when she leapt off the rooftop of self-absorption.
And how did she create this conversation? Well, honestly, she just did. She starting by thinking of herself as someone who could “Be Useful”. She didn’t have to be perfect or do this right, she just needed to Be Useful. She took out a pad of white paper without lines and some fancy colored pens. At the top she wrote 3 inquiry questions:
Then, she started doodling.
She knew she knew a lot about how to feel great. What makes bodies feel great… and what sinks ships. She felt the most traction in conversations with her besties mentioned prior. And she was really bummed out about genetically modified foods. Why hadn’t someone taken care of that problem yet? How annoying.
Just from doodling she could feel a deeper, cleaner fire flowing through her veins. She was becoming on purpose. And intuitively she knew that this was the next marker of health. This was where agni plugged into dharma and dharma activated agni. Wowsers.
And here is what happened next.
She talked to her CSA friend after yoga class and found out that “More than 80% of the foods you eat in restaurants and buy at the grocery store are GMO food.” Her blood began to boil with furry. She learned more:
“Ninety-three percent of Americans polled say they want foods that contain GMOs to be labeled, and significantly, 53 percent of Americans say they wouldn’t eat GMOs if they were labeled. Now the major food companies in the United States have already removed GMOs from their European brands because of a tipping point of consumer rejection that occurred there. If they see that Americans are going to remove their brands from their shopping carts over GMOs, then these companies would rather eliminate GMOs than admit that they use them. So the moment that labeling is required is a watershed moment in the struggle.” FoodRevolution.Org
She also found out about the GMO tipping point. The GMO tipping point is the amount of people who insist on GMO labeling that causes the food industry to cover their ears and change what food they want to buy to manufacture into their products. She found out that only 5% of US shoppers avoiding GM ingredients are predicted to make the GMO industry tip and … topple.
Five percent, she thought?
That’s not really that much. And there are so many really awake fired-up people creating online petitions and generating non-GMO shopping guides. She started thinking of all of the people that couldn’t take action this issue. She thought of children, people without time, internet access, education. The list went on. She knew that she could be useful. She could take action. So here is what she did:
Each night before bed she wrote a question on her doodle pad. And then she let her awareness take over and do what it does best – create connections. One night her questions was, “Why does my acupuncturist friend need to import her herbs from China?” As she started thinking about that she wondered if there was a way her friend could be sure the herbs were really organic, and really not genetically modified, and really good for the people who lived on the other side of the planet. She decided to ask her acupuncturist friend about this the next day.
Her acupuncturist friend assured her the herbs were of the highest potency and quality and really good for people. She next asked the acupuncturist, “Are there any plants that you could use for your patients that might grow well here?” Her friend said she would have to think about that.
Our super-heroine said, “Great!. I’ll send you an email so you don’t forget to tell me what you think of.”
Her friend got back to her later that week. It turned out there were 20 plants that would grow easily enough in her ecosystem. But where could she buy them in a way that was easy to buy and easy to resell to her clients?
Our super-heroine started to grasp that their were huge holes in her local food/medicine economy. No wonder the GMO industry was having a field day in her local grocery stores and restaurants. Her local community was clueless about how to create a better healthier local food economy.
That night when she was doodling her question, which was,”How can I get help?” she remembered the tale of Indra’s Net. She remembered that The Net is built into who we are …and that as we get connected to our larger self-sense… we shimmer like a gem… and we start to rely on the net. She doodled a gorgeous spider web with gems at the intersections. She put names of people in her community who had a shared interest in healthy food, the local economy, food growers, healers, doctors, and concerned citizen in public office into the gems.
She got totally engrossed in her spider’s web doodle that when she raised her head and looked down, she saw a natural network. The network was there – in the realm of the subtle. She remembered her yoga teacher teaching her how things evolve in a natural progression from subtle to gross. Subtle to gross. Ideas to reality.
It was happening!
The next day our post-postmodern heroine got on Facebook. She created a Group and named it after her town and the concept that held the interested parties together. Nourishing Newtonia. She wrote a simple mission for the group – An open group to dialogue about our desires for a healthy local food economy. She looked at her web doodle and sent invitations to the peeps in the gems. She asked people to share. She started posting questions on the group page, and people started chatting.
Chatting!
Her yoga teacher offered the studio for a meeting. The CSA friend brought carrot sticks. The acupuncturist brought tea. The school teacher got everyone to sit in a circle and ran the meeting. It wasn’t perfect – but it was a good conversation. It was the beginning of something great.
Our heroine noticed at the end of the month she wasn’t at all interested in the raw vs. cooked conversation. She had stimulated a series of micro-economies that were having the most interesting conversations. The acupuncturist had hooked up with an herbalist who had hooked up with the CSA grower. They were starting a coop of natural medicines available in CSA shares… and at the farmer’s market… and available through the local healers and healthfood stores in Newtonia.
The local newspaper has gotten wind of Nourishing Newtonia, and had an article to inform and grow the Facebook group. Newtonians were circulating the Petition for Food Safety in their newsletters and tweets.
The local Land Trust was talking with the herbalist about invasive weed management alternatives to using toxic petrochemicals. The local landscapers, permaculturalists, gardeners, and nurseries decided to generate and proliferate a local info campaign on growing low maintenance high-yield native edible species in the yard. The permaculturalists gave recipes for using local invasive weeds that show up in the yards of Newtonians.
The conversations were getting better.
The local hospital created a series of panel discussions, not debates, between local doctors, holistic doctors, and practitioners on some of the bigger health issues in the community. The local online “paper” decided to record the conversations and post them on the blog under the new Nourishing Newtonia column. The local health food store helped publicize the talks by putting posters on their doors, and reminding the checkers to remind their customers of the talk that month.
And on and on the web was spun.
The End.
You, we, I am capable of being a post-postmodern super-hero or super-heroine. Let’s have a better conversation than the raw vs. cooked Ayurveda. It’s all good. It’s all about people and plants and the planet. Let’s all take an oath to generate a more progressive dialogue and become a more powerful change agent. Capisce?
And remember, if you want to wake up to your sacred anatomy, you sacred chemistry, your sacred impact agni and your dharma… join my Living Ayurveda Course. It’s the most progressive conversation on the Ayurveda of the future happening globally, via teleconference for 9 months.
It’s a powerful course and a powerful posse of compadres.
Thanks for listening. Please share if you find it worth sharing — and connect with the friend you shared with. Be the web.
Cate
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