Michelle Conaway

Welllll. . .I may have boasted about the ease of this cleanse a teensy bit too much yesterday.  Wow!  Day three did kick my booty for sure!  But, even though the temptation was almost insurmountable, I did NOT eat.

So, what happened?  What happened to my NOTICING but not ATTACHING onto thoughts?  What happened to ALLOWING whatever is happening to happen? I’m not completely sure, but I did notice around 1 p.m. that I began a downward spiral into being pissed off that I couldn’t have anything to eat, as if a gun were being pointed to my head.  Sometime when I was making lunch for the boys the thought “this looks good” coupled with the rumblings in my belly and the hint of a headache at the base of my neck turned things haywire in my brain.  “This looks good” turned to “It’s not fair that I have to cook this when I am fasting” to “Why do these darned kids have to eat anyway!”  I forgot to nip the thoughts in the bud at “this looks good”.

What I noticed as my thoughts began spiraling into a downward dive is that my body did as well.  I had aches and pains everywhere and I noticed that I was really focused on them.  I couldn’t seem to just allow them and go on, I had to get a little irritated, a little mad at everyone and a little sick of the fast.  I wanted to BLAME the fast!!!  I wanted to BLAME, period.  I forgot that this was a gift to myself.  I forgot that it was really healing my body.  I just wanted a bite of chicken, darn it!

Things simmered down a bit when I went to take myself a long hot bubble bath.  I took with me some herbal spearmint tea.  I soaked.  I allowed.  And, I felt much better.  I remembered the reasons for starting the fast.  I remembered that I love myself enough to abstain from food for a few days.   I thought about the benefits and how giving up would be having to start all over again.  I read anarticle about fasting and it’s benefits.  I re-motivated myself.  My thoughts simmered down.  I made peace with the fast again.

On day four, I plan to nip thoughts in the bud before I start following them down the seductive trail of despair.  I am a mom and my kids DO have the right to eat and they have the right to eat healthy meals.  I am the one that prepares them.  I MUST be around food during this fast.  That’s “what IS”.  That is what I am going to accept on Day four.  And my “thoughts” about “What Is” really mean nothing.  I AM doing this fast.  I AM giving this to myself as a gift.  My thoughts about it really have no relevance, so why follow them?

Day 4

Today was great!  I felt good and surprisingly, I didn’t feel very hungry.  I noticed I would begin to think about food but I would easily move my thinking to something else.  The body sensations were not bad.  I would notice rumblings in the abdominal area and I felt weak a couple of times but I didn’t resist them.  I allowed my belly to rumble and when I felt weak I drank some more lemonade for energy.  I pulled to the foreground of my mind the parts of my body that felt good, even great, and focused on that.  Very quickly, the symptoms that some would call adverse passed away as quickly as I noticed them.  Yea!

I cut my usual 3 1/2 to 4 mile evening walk down to about 3 miles. . . my 10 year old son that was walking with me had a sore throat and wanted to come home early. . . funny how an excuse to conserve my energy was conveniently provided.   I kept up with my daily duties and wasn’t tempted even one time to eat anything.  I even stayed up until midnight and watched a movie with my husband and read for a while before going to sleep. I felt energetic, wholesome and very healthy today.  Lighter, I would say, even though the scale says I lost only one pound as of bedtime.

I have tried the cleanse in the past.  A very long time ago, when I was in high school in fact, I did the cleanse with my late mother.  We lasted, I think, for three days.  It felt like an eternity to me then.  We quickly got off of it together on day four and made a soup with everything we had on hand.  It was the most delicious food I ever tasted at the time.  A raw green bean looked good to me that day.  Looking at a raw potato even looked divine.  I don’t know if I still lacked the maturity to realize what the cleanse was doing for me or if I was just doing it to please my mom, but I only lasted three days.

I tried it again about three years ago.  I lasted not even a day and by the end of day one, was cooking a big dinner for myself.  Don’t know what happened there.  Guess I needed to do the soul cleansing first.

In in case, I feel great now.  I can already feel the benefits of giving my body a break.  The energy that my body usually uses to digest the southern cooking that I love to create is being used to cleanse.  The creative energy that I so often channel into cooking is now being utilized for my writing and painting and of course, creating the best fasting lemonade EVER!!!  ha!

I am looking forward to day three.  I am not dreading it at all.  It is as much a test to the power of my thought patterns as it is a bodily cleanse.  For now, I am passing both with flying colors as far as I am concerned.  We’ll see what Day three brings.

Day Three

I was thinking today about this cleanse and what it represents for me.  I realized that for the past couple of years, I have done so much healing, releasing of old thought patterns and beliefs and generally cleaning up my life that it only makes sense that my body follow.  This cleanse for me is about having in alignment for myself mind, body and soul.

I realized before starting the cleanse that I would need to have my mind as my ally in order to get through it.  Hey, I like my food as much as the next girl, but I knew that my focus would need to move from eating to healing and releasing more junk from my life, in this case toxins and waste that have hung on for dear life in my physical body.  I realized that I would need to focus on the positive and not focus on the hunger pains.

I decided to give this cleanse as a gift to my body and to see it as such.  Just as the old thought and emotional patterns held on for dear life and DID NOT want to die, so it would be with the toxins in my body.  So, just as I healed emotionally and spiritually, I knew that I would have to allow the “pain” as the toxins died off,  and not resist it or focus on it so intently.  I just had to notice.  I just had to be present with myself and present with my body as it did its thing with the cleanse, knowing that the “pain” I might feel was just a feeling.  It was a release of the old and a renewing within the depths of my cells.  I had to embrace whatever came and make peace with it.  I had to refrain from complaining about it because I know that the complaining just feeds the thoughts, just as a donut would feed the toxins.

So, with this understanding, I have started the cleanse.  I told myself that I would stay on it for two days. . .but now I am thinking I will stay on it one day at a time.   Who knows?  I may make it the entire ten days.   I am feeling alive and energized and I am almost done with the second day.  Sure, thoughts of food dance through my head every once in a while, especially when I am preparing meals for my two boys, but I don’t let my focus linger too long.  I have felt weak a couple of times but when I ALLOW it and don’t resist it, it passes almost immediately.  I am happy to say that at the end of day two, I am feeling VERY good.  Mind, Body and Spirit are quickly aligning and it feels good.  It feels like life in its truest form.

For several years now I have been practicing Present Moment Awareness.  Eckhart Tolle has been a huge facilitator of this in my life along with many other present moment awareness gurus.  Meditation is another resource that can bring me back to the NOW.  If I meditate every morning, before anyone else gets up asking for stuff, I do well.  Or. . . as well as can be expected for a mom that home-schools and has her 23 year old daughter back at home.  But I try.  I really try.

I have had the great realization that NOW is the only reality.  Now is where we experience life.  But somehow I lose hold of this truth during my busy days-schooling, chauffeuring, healing, counseling, cooking, grocery shopping, taxiing kids to practice and helping out elderly parents.  Somehow, I seem to lose sight that there ever was a present moment to begin with.

Sometime in the hectic chaos of the day I will stop to notice my 5 senses (that is if I can remember what my 5 senses are).  This helps a lot when I can remember that we experience life through sight, sound, smell, touch and taste.  But a lot of the time I find that I have forgotten my 5 sense all together.  I suck the blood off of my cut finger steaming forward with the flash card drill for my oldest son.  I gulp down the breakfast as I drive my kids to this activity or that.  I tune out the beautiful song of the bird outside my window as I rush to finish the lemonade day sign for my youngest.  I don’t even notice that it is a beautiful day outside as I take down my elderly fathers grocery list over the phone.  I don’t notice the fragrant flowers growing in my back yard as I try to figure out the problem with my squash plant shriveling up.

Why is it that I can’t seem to just stop and smell the roses?  With Mommy this and Mommy that (at the same time no less) how am I to be present with each child.  They deliberately compete for my attention.  How do I stay present with each one, giving them their due full attention?

But . . . sometimes I do.  Yes, sometimes I do.  Sometimes I remember that I have 5 senses and I stop and check in with what is happening NOW in this moment.  It is bliss.  Nothing else matters in the world when I am able to do this.

My search for enlightenment is deterred at times by Mommy hood it seems.  But maybe Mommy hood is brought to me to give me practice.  When I practice this (and I have been able to for a whole day at time) everything around me seems to change.  Everyone else slows down as well.  It makes me wonder if they are just acting off of my energy.  Maybe they are looking to Mommy to gage how they should spend THEIR present moment.  When I stop and notice, stop and enjoy, stop and breath it seems that everyone else does too.

I want to do this more.  Life is richer when I am here and now.  Life is more fun when I am not thinking about my next step.  And you know what?  The next step always presents itself without my thinking about it.  It always does!  When I am living in the present, the future always takes care of itself and usually much better than I could have planned it.  It seems that things kind of rearragne themselves in order to conspire to the good for all.

Today, I plan to be here NOW.  I plan to consciously choose to be present to the life that is presenting itself NOW.  No fears about tomorrow or even later today for that matter.  To be present with me and those around me.  And to see that the children and my busy life are here to provide practice.  Practice at living my life through the five senses that provide my experience of life.  I plan to question the thoughts that arise telling me it should be anything different than as it IS NOW.  It is all perfect in this moment.  It is precious really.  Because it is the only guarantee that I have for life.  There are no guarantees that I will still be here 5 minutes from now, so I seize this moment to be present, to be happy and to enjoy what is around me and to turn my experiences, ALL of my experiences into  joy.  I can do that with my mind.  I can do that with my thinking.  And I can do that by being present to and in acceptance of what IS.

Day One – Master Cleanse

May 16, 2011

Today was fine.  I started out with the salt-water flush and then drank the lemonade and water throughout the day.  I caved at lunchtime, making my son pasta salad and automatically popped a bite in my mouth.  Aside from that I followed the Master Cleanse to the letter.  The key was not to beat myself up after that little habitual popping of my kid’s food into my mouth.  I forgave myself quickly, then guzzled another glass of lemonade.

I think to do a cleanse of this caliber requires more mind management than anything.  After reading several blog posts of people doing the cleanse, I realized that we do not die if we don’t eat for a few days.  Moms are doing it.  Over weight people are doing it.  If they can go 10 days without food, so can I. . . or at least I think I can. . . here on day 1.  Check back at around day 5 or 6 and see what tune I am singing at that point. . .Ha!

But seriously, I believe that it is only our THOUGHTS about what our body is doing during a cleanse that causes major problems and leads us back to our toxic eating and drinking habits.  We “think” we can’t take it.  We “think” it’s too hard.   We believe that the temptations around us are too great. And if we THINK it, it becomes our reality.  We can’t take it and it does become too hard and the temptations are magnified in our experience.  But if we can turn our thoughts around to beneficial thoughts, if we can love ourselves enough to KNOW how good we can feel if we release not only the toxic body fluids and who knows what else from our physical bodies but also the toxic thoughts from our minds, we become whole.

I think I have my mind around this.  I made hamburgers, chips and pasta salad for my kids for dinner and I took my mind elsewhere as I cooked, smelled and served the luscious meal to my boys.  My mind was on healing.  My mind was on the benefits that I AM ALREADY FEELING from this cleanse.  And guess what?  I wasn’t even tempted to smell the food, much less eat it.

I have read about many people who struggle the first few days on the cleanse, but I feel great tonight already.  Great energy.  I feel as though my body is lighter.  I feel the whole, natural benefits of a body that is cleansing itself.  How miraculous that with a little help from the mind, our bodies will heal themselves.  My mind is focusing on the abundant energy that my body wants to produce for me and not on the lack of food.  I’m counting on this attitude to sustain me during this cleanse.  It’s all in my mind in the first place.  My experience will be whatever my mind wants it to be.  Hopefully I will choose healing.

Day Two

Why I’m Doing it