Gaaaaaah -- I can't believe it, after days and days of 80, 90, even 100% raw days, my April tally only averaged out at 69%!! How the freak did that happen?! So I petered out at the end, and had a day or two of, like, 10% -- after so many days of acute rawness, I am frankly baffled that two or three days could pull down the whole average so drastically. Looks like I'm donating money again this month; this time it goes to earthquake victims in Tibet.
Why Tibet specifically? Because it was a Tibetan retreat that I went to this past weekend. I only stayed for one day; it's not my style and I got very little out of hours of chanting mantras in a foreign language whose meanings are shaky to me. (And yes, I managed to take raw food for lunch, no problem.) The Empowerment ritual itself was interesting; but afterwards, I don't really feel any different. But I like the monk who teaches, and his area of Tibet was devastated, so they profit from my laxness.
This same monk is a highly trained healer in their tradition, so I went today to get a "pulse" reading. This entails the monk taking my pulse from both wrists, and diagnosing from the subtle feelings. I'd had it done last year, and was eager to see if much had changed.
No, not much. I still have low blood volume, still shouldn't eat sweets or drink coffee (see, he knows his stuff!), and still had back pain. This time, however, he added that my uterus is weak and I have a slight "wind" unbalance. Well, at least it seems my lungs strengthened up from the last time, when he gave me medicines for it.
The problems are, though, that he comes from a heavy meat-eating culture (there are no vegetables in Tibet for half of the year -- it's practically like living on a glacier, for Pete's sake), and that's how they traditionally cure low blood volume. He also recommends milk and eggs for my condition, and here's the corker: low fruit, and almost NO RAW FOOD!!
So on the one hand, I could say, Yaaaay, no more of this stupid experiment, the doctor says so!! Get-out-of-jail-free card!
But on the other hand, much as I like and respect this Rinpoche (teacher), I'm not about to start eating factory-farmed animal products unless it's truly life-or-death (my life, that is). But whom do I believe about the raw aspect? I certainly have not been my twinkle-toed best when it comes to energy on this diet. But I have reduced gas pain, a bit of joint pain, have better skin, and have fewer Moontime symptoms.
Yet a large part of that could simply be from reducing refined products, not so much just rawness. If I could go a month truly without any refined junk in my "free" 25%, that would be a good way to test if my body responds better to high-raw-with-a-little-crap, or to med/high-raw-with-no-crap. I've already started May off with a cooked binge, because I got really freaked out about money again and have been trying to plan and organize like a fiend, not able to spend a lot of time around food. But it's still early enough that I could try this little experiment-within-an-experiment. Sigh.
So much as part of me would love to abandon this project and just examine what a third of a year's results look like, I feel I want to go on with it. I am not Tibetan, and do not really understand what things like "too much wind" mean; I think it works well for them and I admire that, but I'm not quite ready to shift to a foreign healing system mid-stream. Maybe next year.
I also spent a whopping $567 on food in April, up from $433 in April. This is not good. Again, a lot of it multiplied when I ate out several times in the last few days; the wonderful Chinese glut in Seattle alone was about $30, which is more than my electric bill was for the month! Why do all the raw "experts" keep insisting that this gets cheaper? Nothing costs as much as organically grown produce and nuts, and I have yet to notice any reduction in the volume I desire. If that's a difference between 100% and 75% (or 69%), so be it.