60 Day Juice Feast – Day 23
Ahh tonight we had an INIPI! Soo powerful, wow. It was my third or fourth inipi here at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center – we do one every new moon, aside from a few summer months when we can’t light fires because of fire hazard. But oh are they amazing! For those who aren’t familiar, an inipi is a Native American sweat lodge, in the
Lakota tradition. We have a hand build small dome shaped ‘lodge’, and a fire is made several hours before the lodge is meant to begin. Inside the center of the fire they heat the rocks which are to be used for the lodge. We get ours from a river in Sedona – they are beautiful round, large gray rocks which have little holes, making them perfect for holding a lot of heat. We do a little ceremony before we enter, and then all file in. The lodge can contain about 34 people, although you are VERY squished. There is a pit in the center of the dome where the hot rocks are placed. We do four ’rounds’ during the duration of the lodge, engaging in something different in each ’round’ – it could be singing, or stories, or silent meditation. Between each round, more rocks are brought in. Water is poured on the rocks during the rounds to make it even more hot and humid. It is also completely black inside the lodge, when the door is closed – which is all the time, aside from between rounds when rocks are being placed in. The inipis probably get up to 150 – 160 degrees, although with the humidity it feels like much hotter. The inipi is known as an intense purificationof body, mind and spirit.
Wow, was it powerful to do an inipi on a juice feast! It was the most intense one I’ve done – several people had to leave and there were times I felt like I might pass out, but I stayed with my breath and I think my clarity and increasing health with this juice feast is what enabled it to be so powerful for me. Past sweat lodges I’ve made it through, but barely – and I was so uncomfortable and absorbed in my discomfort that I couldn’t really maximize the opportunity that a sweat lodge provides. This time, I was able to really sit in my discomfort and rise above it, for the first time I was really able to focus, the entire time, on what I wanted to release and heal in the lodge.
Today’s Feast, in order of consumption:
16 oz. water w/ 1/2 TBS MSM
4 TBS chlorella, bee pollen, and hemp oil **11/09/07 – Don’t do superfood pastes on a juice feast like I did!**
16 oz. spinach/apple/celery/carrot juice w/ 1 tsp MSM
32 oz. green juice w/ lemon, cayenne, turmeric and a pinch of himalayan salt
28 oz. apple/orange/canteloupe/green grape/purple grape juice w/ 1 tsp MSM
32 oz. green juice w/ lemon, cayenne and a LOT of turmeric
16 oz. grapefruit juice
20 oz. orange/apple/grape juice w/ 1 tsp MSM and 1/2 TBS Pure Synergy
To satisfy the times when I am craving sea vegetables, I’ll start using a little bit of celtic or himalayan salt.
I’ve definitely gone a bit off track with the bee pollen/green powder/hemp oil mix. Although I have no desire to go back to food, it is much better to ‘nip it at the bud‘. It’s been a good lesson in non judgemental observation. When I was first trying to go raw in 2005, if I’d mess up a little by eating some cooked food or sugar, I’d blow it all out of proportion and I’d spiral with guilt and before you knew it I was eating all cooked food. I hear soooo many stories of people doing this kind of thing. I expected complete perfection and no mistakes of myself. It wasn’t until I let go of this pressure, expectation and guilt and surrendered to my process that I was able to achieve an all organic raw vegan diet (which I have been for almost a year now). Beating ourselves up for mistakes is so counterproductive. For me, it has resulted in inconsistency and ‘yo-yoing’. So many of us take an all or nothing viewpoint when we start out on the path to radiant health. If we mess up a little we think the world is going to fall apart and we’ve failed. It’s a good lesson to have compassion for our process no matter what we’re doing in life, and especially when trying to change our diet or do some sort of cleanse. We can choose not to feel like we just messed everything up – its a process – we can just observe what has occurred and change it. Even better, we can take it lightly and have a sense of humor about it. We are not defined by our mistakes and our learning process is perfect in its timing and unfolding. It is a constant lesson to maintain a balance – we don’t want to be too lax on ourselves so that we never push and achieve anything, but we also don’t want to be so hard on ourselves that guilt is constantly tripping us up (I was always the latter). This is a really valuable lesson that took me several years to learn.
A juice feast is about healing with juices. So those of you following this, don’t do what I did! No more ‘superfood pastes’. Just put a bit of hemp oil and green powders IN your juices and chew a little bit of bee pollen ALONE.
Ahhh ready for a good sleep after that inipi – you always sleep spectacularly after something like that
Courtney