Day 14 – Half Way … to MAY!
Weights and measures after 14 days fasting – 7 days juice, 7 days water
As you can see from the graphs above, there appears to have been a couple of plateaus in my body changes. The first was when I swapped from juice to water and my body was probably waiting to see what the trend would be. I’m not sure about the second one, however I feel that due to walking to work today (1 hour in total there and back) my weight will continue on the downward trend. Still, that’s a drop of around 7kg in 14 days, or 1kg every two days. We shall see.
Sleeping and Muscle recovery Observations
I’ve noticed another thing – it’s taking me a lot longer to fall asleep. I feel full of energy when I go to bed, and not fatigued at all, so my mind keeps working for perhaps 15 mins which is about 14 mins longer than it normally takes me to fall asleep. In addition to that, my muscles from doing sit ups and press ups the other day are still aching. I put this down to my body not being used to it and also not having all the resources to fix the muscles.
I don’t have any training scheduled over the next week or so, and I’ve decided to take this time to reflect and spend some quiet time, ideally in nature. I have a few exciting things to do, however I feel that I won’t have this chance again for a while so will get more in to my body and clear out any other issues that remain there. I’m looking forward to this very much.
Are you a Completion or a Process person?
When you start something, do you feel compelled to complete it, or do you just enjoy the process of doing it? Another way of looking at this is: when you serve yourself something from the fridge and you’ve put enough on your plate but a tiny bit remains, would you re-wrap it and put it back in the fridge or just put it on your plate anyway? your answer to this helps determine your tendancy either towards completion, or process – process people would put the small bit back in the fridge. Knowing what you are here is worthwhile as it helps you understand your behaviour so you can choose how to react as opposed to just living in reaction. I have a tendency towards completion … which means that finishing this fast is very easy, especially now that I’m past half way – the only problem I have is that the 28th is so near the 30ththat I’m going to have to extend a couple of extra days till then. I want to be able to know that I missed eating for a whole month!
Vipassana – 10 days of meditation for about 12 hours per day
To react or not to react? Last year I drove down south of Byron Bay to participate in the Vipassana meditation for 10 days. This is a an ancient technique rediscovered by Gotama Buddha over 2,500 years ago and considered a universal remedy for all illnesses. After arriving and being briefed about the process, the following day consisted of rising at 6am and taking part in meditation sittings of 1-1 1/2 hours at a time till around 7pm daily if I remember correctly. Having not really spent much time meditating in the past ( I tripled my amount in the first day alone!) I thought this would be a wise idea as I obviously like challenges. I have to admit that once I’d found a comfortable position, I didn’t really get any pain whilst sitting and the concept of observe but don’t react was taught intrinsically throughout the course. It is this concept which has really helped me lead a happier life since then as I now find it very difficult to react to people, events or situations as I know that this too shall pass.
It may shock some of you, and I do realise that there are potentially disease implications, however I no longer react to mosquitoes biting me. They used to be the bane of my life when out in the bush or rainforests and I had a rule that if they were on my turf I could kill them, but if I was on their turf, then I could only brush them away (I’ve since extended their turf over mine but minimise their presence with incense and closing shutters.) What I’ve found is that by not reacting to them, my body reacts accordingly and seldom do I come up in red itchy welts.
But why do you do that you nutter?
When we react to something in life, we get the pain of that moment, plus an internal knot is created within us. One of the key benefits of not reacting to something is that not only are you saving yourself the pain of that moment, you are actually untying a knot of something else completely unrelated. Remember the truism, How we do one thing, is how we do anything. If you live in reaction, you are constantly at the mercy of the life going on around you. If you have internal peace, you can take that anywhere. Hey, I’m no Buddha, but I do have so much joy in every day of my life and I seldom feel down or in negative emotions for more than a few seconds as I know they are simply messages indicating to me how I can behave in future.
All thinking is Questions and Answers … think about that
If you feel some truth in what I’ve just written about non-reaction, then learning these questions by heart and using them frequently for yourself and others could prove very useful:
- What do you want instead?- great if someone is complaining about how life or someone treated them.
- How is that a problem for you? - great if someone is moaning about someone else’s behaviour
- Who else do you expect to do it? – this is one I like and use on myself regularly. We all love it when someone does our work for us, so if something needs doing, just do it. My parents showed me this when they used to illustrate that the time I spent complaining and crying about doing the dishes (again) far outweighed the time it took to do them.
Be careful asking the question Why? If someone has done something they shouldn’t have and you want them to realise the implications of what they’ve done, asking Why? will get them to explain reasons which support their action. A better question which inherently creates ownership of our actions could be something like: Why did you choose to do that? followed swiftly by, What do you want instead? This gets people to focus on solutions instead of problems. (By the way, for fun try this with the cat photo and notice the difference in the way you and the cat would feel.)
Don’t use High Resolution videos to upload to Youtube unless you have a lot of time on your hands!
I’ve been sitting here all this time waiting for my video for today to upload and I think I chose too high a resolution. It’s only a few minutes long, but I still have about 100Mb to go!
I’m off to bed now and it looks like the video won’t be added till tomorrow when I get up – sorry for that, you’ll have to check back tomorrow.