I'm feeling great concern for my friend, May, tonight. Her partner, Jon, has the unenviable and unthinkable task of deciding whether to keep her on life support-- she is not doing very well at all. Yet the doctors urge him to wait -- there are certain signs indicating that she is quite cognizant, even though she appears unconscious and her heart rate keeps plummeting to dangerous levels.
Her problems all started 24 days ago with a fairly routine gall bladder problem. One crisis after another led to her being unconscious, and the experts cannot tell her partner why this happened, nor do they know exactly what to do heal her. They really don't know why she is unconscious! I know the hospital has already made at least one mis-diagnosis of pneumonia that caused her to become much sicker and have to go back to the ICU, but now Jonathan and I suspect they may be covering up yet more errors. Well, we likely will never know, so I must just focus on meditating upon her well-being and return to consciousness.
Life is precious!

Every so often I just have to give myself (and those around me) a good jolt of PURPLE! Don't believe the hype: purple is not just for 'old ladies.' It's the color of creativity, love, passion, joy, spirituality and fun. What's not to love about purple?!?!! */*

I'm seeking to get back to a more natural way of doing things. Keeping a fasting record and counting the number of days, I realize, can lead to tension and an unnecessary amount of frustration, and also an unhealthy preoccupation with living up to a false standard that I set for myself, instead of just going with the flow and living naturally. So I'm going to try to just juice fast when I want to juice fast, and eat when I want to eat, and dry fast when I want to dry fast, and so on.
Sometimes setting a goal is really important and helpful. Right now, going with the flow seems more important, as I seem to have lost touch with my inner rhythm somewhere along the line while doing this long juice fast.

Two of my posts disappeared. They were here last night, but this morning they're gone. I wonder what happened!
Another cold day, and I just don't have it in me to go play in the subway when it's like this. I can't wait for the weather to moderate-- it's supposed to be warm again tomorrow.

Oh! I almost forgot---
I just posted that my day was rather uneventful, but in fact, my friend who is in the hospital had a second procedure done (after the first one done yesterday failed to accomplish its goal) and this one was quite successful, so it was a great day!
So nice to see a comment from my friend WY here tonight. :-) I love the feeling of connection I have to my friends in the rawfood community and now on my Facebook wall. Also a couple of 'angels' -- N. and J.-- whom I regularly correspond with via e-mail. Strange that I seem to bond easier with my cyber-friends than the ones I meet in the street sometimes. I'm such a visual person that I think when I'm talking to someone face-to-face there is too much going on-- my visual senses get overloaded... something like that. Online I can relax and feel the essence of the individual. That's it; physical appearances cloud over the contact and connection with impressions and misapprehensions about one another.

I accomplished almost exactly nothing today-- at least to all appearances!-- but it was just that kind of a day, and I had to go with the flow. I just had to upload one of these gorgeous images I've been putting in my 'Art By Others' folder tonight. They are so inspiring.
Peter max takes me back to a time I cherish, having been a hesitant child of the '60s who only embraced its treasures as the whole wonderful spectacle was winding down in the late 1970s. (I was definitely a late bloomer.) It's his colors that completely entrance me. Actually, they floor me! Loud, neon-bright, maybe, yet there's something so new and fresh and exciting -- even now, decades later -- that looking at many of his works makes my heart beat almost race sometimes with creative excitement and inspiration.

Br-rrrr. An unseasonably cold, moist day today. No rain, but the cold seems to seep right into your bones. I was supposed to play music in the subway tonight, but I'm tired and under the weather, and playing for three hours in the cold subway is out of the question tonight, so I went back to Harvard Square tonight and told Sergei, who as I write is playing his guitar for 7 hours (!) today, that he can go ahead and give the evening slot to someone else. I could use money, but it'll have to be another day.

Once again, feeling so grateful-- I was worried about my friend who is having a major health crisis, and this afternoon I was feeling really frustrated about how I could help her, wishing I had applied myself more diligently in my study and practice of spiritual healing over the past few years. As I lay there meditating, letting these feelings of anxiety and helplessness wash over me, I asked the Universe to help me see how I could help her. Suddenly-- not right away, but within a few minutes-- there was a shift in my consciousness, and I was suddenly seeing the spiritual truth shining Its light into the situation. I perceived my friend's perfect, eternal Being and felt a tremendous release from all the pent-up sadness and fear, into joy and Light. I know now that she can be healed, no matter what the material picture is.

I'm so grateful, on the one hand, for the gifts of nutritional and metaphysical knowledge that have been handed to me, allowing me to sustain my health and wellbeing without recourse to doctors, medicine and medical procedures. I'm feeling pretty sad, on the other hand, because a very close friend of mine is fighting for her life right now, in part due to errors made by hospital staff. She's in surgery to have a stent put in some duct in her gut, in hopes that an infection that's raging in her body will exit (??)... no, I don't get it either, but that's what they're doing to her. She's been unable to speak or open her eyes now for a couple of weeks, and is on a respirator and feeding tube. She put me on a list of people who are allowed to get updates from her boyfriend about her condition, and also visit, but she's too sick to receive visitors. She's an extremely psychic and receeptive individual, so as my thoughts have been with her this week, Jonathan and I have both 'felt' her presence here in the house with us, even though her body lies inert in the hospital. Lights are flickering and burning out, electronics are glitching and burning out, and there is just this strong feeling of connection.

I have two healing groups-- both of which do 'distant' spiritual healing-- helping her. Jonathan lights candles every night and we meditate. When your loved ones are in the clutches of the medical labyrinth, it's a little hard to let go of material considerations and 'what ifs,' and just lift your consciousness beyond words and thoughts (and worries). But that's what I have to do, because the very thought of hospitals and surgical procedures fills takes me to a pretty dark place.

A.K. Mozumdar (http://www.mozumdar.org)/says it much better:

"When our mind is spiritualized by the contemplation of our permanent Being-- the Conceiver of our conceptions-- it manifests a spiritual quality. The more spiritual our mental habits become, the more we manifest the permanent quality of calmness, which is natural. Through calmness, the conscious aspect of our mental life is attuned to our Super-conscious aspect, which is the Power with Its potentiality, or the Power-to-be-conscious. By the conscious identification of ourselves with our Self, we become conscious of manifesting that which is latent in our Self, and which is ours to manifest. Prayer, or the mere wish, or the proper mental attitude serves as a direct connecting link with that which we desire to bring within our mental experience, in accordance with our own Divine plan or pattern."

I've been steadily pondering away over the past couple decades regarding the best way to understand the higher truths and-- more importantly-- actualize them in my day to day reality. [Actually, this is one of the reasons I love juice fasting: it clears the cobwebs and makes things clearer to my understanding.] Yesterday I ran across this little template that I drew up in my notes a few months ago:

TEMPORARY BEING/

human mind:

mental realm = human suffering

---disease, discord, misery, affliction, lack----

'Mass Mind" in the world

PERMANENT (ETERNAL) BEING/

'I AM Presence' Mind:

spiritual realm = perfect pattern

---well-being, calmness, harmony, joy,

fulfillment, abundance

'REALM OF TRUE FORM' in the Inner Kingdom

I dry-fasted for 24 hours, and stopped it with a huge glass of orange/strawberry juice. I had hoped to go a bit longer, but I have to take Jonathan to the gym today and do some things, so that's okay too.
I am so grateful that I have learned at a young age about the importance of taking control of our own health and not putting much stock in allopathic medicine. I have a close friend who is in the ICU at a local hospital and nearly unconscious right now, in part due to mistaken diagnoses and mistakes made by hospital staff. I feel so bad for her and her boyfriend, for whom she was caring, as he was quite ill. But now he must attend to her, even though he needs to be resting and taking care of himself. Sometimes you just wish you could wave a magic wand and help people. Well, in truth, we can help a lot: in this case I turned to a distant healing group and asked them for help for both of my friends.
Today I will drink a little more juice, and go for a long walk while Jonathan's at the gym. Tonight I'll do yoga. I canceled my music practice today; didn't feel like a priority right now.

I've been on another juice fasting 'journey,' and as always happens on my juice fasts after awhile, I started really tuning in to what's important in my life, and I'm feeling more ready to let go of things that get in the way of my living that life. I made a brief list of the things that are most important for me right now:

1. interior listening

2. periods of silence

3. cultivating good habits

4. making choices based on my highest goals and priorities

5. developing a coherent spiritual practice

6. conscious Surrender

7. sacrificing superficial values and pastimes

8. loving service to others

9. cherishing simplicity, order and harmony

10. practicing patience and poise

Of course, the question is, will I begin to manifest these changes? Inner progress seems so slow sometimes! But as my good friend Jodi often says, "Onward and upward!"

A large component of the secret of learning to rely less and less on material substance and food, and to begin more and more to assimilate prana and invisible life force, is the cultivation of LOVE. I am not sure yet if prana and Divine Love are identical or simply so closely aligned that the cultivation of love attracts prana into one's field.

The sense I get is that if you consciously cultivate a massive amount of love and compassion, and you are striving toward a breatharian mode of living, you won't need to practice sungazing or a lot of intense breathing techniques to reach your goal.

This is so important, vital to both longevity and spiritual evolution:

The reason people can only fare well on a metaphysical and/or raw food path until they hit their 50s or 60s-- at which point they often start to fail or just live nominally and deteriorate at a rate closer to the norm for mainstream society-- is that at this point in life, their chi (life force, prana), which they had naturally stored and used, begins to wane significantly.

The path of hci acivation is vital to sustaning health, well-being and true longevity.

Many raw foodists lose their glow and their health when they get older, because raw food is only part of the process. They are still incomplete.

Similarly, any metaphysicians and practitioners of spiritual healing lose their vitality and well-being and beauty as they approach the 'golden years,' because they have not cultivated the inner elixir of life, and their life force has begun to recede and diminish.