"You're momma's so fat..."
After he had agreed that I could give a lecture and teach a class at the Yoga & Raw Food Expo, Mark Becker started to get worried that I was going to start ripping all the old-time yoga and raw food “experts” a new one, as in asshole, and his feeling seemed to be that he was trying to develop a Kumbaya-singing choir over a bunch of people with buttocks that looked like Swiss cheese. I assured him that I wasn’t going to put anyone down. Of course it was a lie but it was the only way I could get in there and cause some yoga terrorism. It’s a good thing that the yamas, the ethical principles of yoga that includes satya or “truth,” don’t apply to me.
Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda was about a young Indian boy who left home to seek enlightenment and all his adventures, including the different people and teachers he met along the way. My favorite section of the book involves a pundit, one of the so-called “intellectuals” who are really just memorizers, who came to see his teacher. He started to talk on and on about all the holy books, from the Upanishads to the Vedas, the Old Testament to the New Testament, the Baghavad Gita to the Diamond Sutra.
After a long time, Yogananda’s teacher looked up, almost as if he hadn’t heard a thing the pundit had said and asked, “When are you going to start talking?”
The pundit was dumbfounded. “I’ve been quoting all of the holy books and the masters for the last half-hour!” he cried out.
“But what have you brought to the teachings? How have they affected you? How have you put them into practice in your life?” In rebel yogi terms, “You can memorize a bunch of words but you still don’t know shit!” In example, to quote “Jesus said, ‘Only one like a child will get into Heaven,’” is useless. How have you been like a child? How are you bringing that child-like innocence into your daily life? Without doing that work, it’s like quoting, “Master Health Guy said we should all drink a lot of water to be properly hydrated and to flush our body of toxins,” and then when asked how much water per day do you drink you respond, “Well, only a couple of eyedropperfuls.”
To put someone down follows the same principle. “Master Health Guy is really a jackass and doesn’t know shit.” What’s the use? Is it helping anyone better his own health goals? If it only serves to put someone down then it is as useless as quoting the Buddha’s secret to inner peace while you live your life a miserable, tense prick.
In my talk I did challenge some of the conclusions drawn from people big in the field of raw food and health. This was less because I thought their conclusions may b wrong but because I wanted to challenge each individual to think for himself and draw his own conclusions based on personal experience or intuition. For if you are a slave to the Dr. Medical’s slash, burn and poison philosophy or you are a slave to Master Health Guy’s superfoods philosophy—you are still a slave. Who cares if you have a view of the mountains past the cotton field?
Why is it bad to eat cooked food? Ask anyone whose read a raw food book or attended any lecture with a raw food “expert” and she will respond, “When you cook food above 112 degrees you destroy the enzymes in the food.” Bravo, you’ve parroted very well. Have you ever heard any health food expert say that the enzymes in the food are designed to break down the food itself and not to be used for the thousands of processes in which enzymes are involved in the body? And have you heard these experts tell you the obvious—that when you COOK food your pot or oven becomes essentially a second stomach where you have already started the BREAK DOWN of the food OUTSIDE of your body?
And even the health experts who advocate taking enzymes to replenish the depleted stores in the body—and there is much science behind what this can do—are recommending a much higher, concentrated dose of enzymes than you are going to get in a stalk of broccoli. I’m not saying that ingesting cooked food is good for the body; I think the most damaging thing cooking does is destroys the energetic life force of the food. I just think that we are human beings and not parrots and to repeat “Polly wants a cracker” doesn’t educate us or help our health in any way; it just keeps us in a small cage shitting on newspaper below, making us at best a cute parlor trick.
I have heard a couple of experts that I admire very much say that when you eat cooked food your body has an immune system response. The insinuated conclusion is that this is therefore bad for you. If you looked into my body after I had a weightlifting workout, you would see a body that is showing a stress reaction. Yet if the stress is not beyond the capacities of the body, the body will adapt to the stress and make changes in the form of bigger, stronger muscles with a better ability to handle the same stress in the future. As a Master Herbalist I know that the plants that have the most difficult environments, whether because of weather or bugs or competition, always have the highest medicinal constituents because they have adapted themselves to survive such stress. Once again, I am not saying eating cooked food is good for the body or what the body is designed to consume; what I am saying is that a conclusion that cooked food is bad for a person based on the fact that an immune system response occurs on ingestion is not scientific. Let’s leave the bad science for the medical and pharmaceutical industries.
Many in the raw food world are obsessed with blended drinks. How else could you eat the recommended five batches of spinach and kale and dandelion greens, oh my, per day but to put what would not only take all day to eat but would require the equivalent of a marathoner’s endurance for the jaw and a chess grandmaster’s mental strength to chew and swallow without subduing to complete insanity into an electrical whirling dervish and break it down into a green mush that can boastfully be called a “green soup”? How many of the experts tell you that a blender puts out 100 times more electromagnetic frequencies that a cel phone that is off and four times the amount produced by a jet engine? I have a VitaMix, which is a $400 blender that is so powerful that you can throw metal nails into and out will come a blended silver soup. Can you see how there is a chance that this may be like eating food under a power line—it tastes great but your testes can now only produce sperm that glows in the dark and has a tale that look like fusilli? Has ANY raw food expert shared this thought with you?
Or have any blender fanatics shared with you how chewing food not only exercises your teeth, jaw and all the muscles involved in chewing, but also stimulates the acupuncture meridians that are connected to each tooth? Or how when you chew your food, it starts to send information to help the body prepare for what your mouth is preparing to send down the chute? Let me guess: no.
For dinner tonight, my main course was a shake made with six bananas, a full bunch of dandelion greens and the water and meat from a young coconut. It was delish! But just how when I ate vegan cookies from the health food store, I would never pretend it was “health food,” blended foods are designed for babies (not really, only breast milk is designed for babies until they cut their eye teeth) and geriatrics who have nothing in their mouths but gums and a tongue—great for giving blowjobs but not for biting into an apple.
You have to soak your nuts. Dr. Vivian Vetrano, a medical doctor and raw food expert says you don’t. So how can you repeat this “fact” with such certainty? Have you tried it both ways and noticed a difference in your body in how it digests the soaked nuts versus the dried ones? Unless they mean soaking your balls in some soapy water when they look as dirty as some freshly dug up potatoes, how can you “know” for sure that soaking your nuts will do anything but make them wet and wrinkly?
Instead of quoting the Gospels, it’s come to the point where I hear people quote the raw food “experts” as the word of God—never doing the personal research for themselves to make such a statement anything more valuable than, “Jesus said, uh, something about mustard seeds and how they’re, uh, good on salads or something.” So David Wolfe may say his Elements of Life company is not a multi-level marketing company but instead call it a “multi-opportunity growth” or some other bullshit, but calling a smokestack a tree doesn’t make a person who thinks for himself want to sit under it or take a big breath of its excretions and say, “Now that’s good air!”
The role of an educator, a Master, an expert, is to empower you—not to think for you. And it is our fault when we let our mouths open and close like a ventriloquist dummy and let the words of the experts appear to be generated from our own wooden minds.
On Sunday, I attended Mark Becker’s class on fine-tuning your asanas, the physical postures of yoga. If I had to summarize what Mark taught in a line it would be: “Unless your yoga teacher is giving you physical adjustments, then he is a bad teacher and you should find another.” In the yoga class I taught on Saturday night, I didn’t give a single adjustment to any of the students…yet they all voiced how much they not only enjoyed but also gained from my class, less so in just a physical way and more so in regards to applying the principles of yoga in their day-to-day life. It sounds like Mark was dishing out more put-downs than this badass rebel yogi, yet I’m the one on the yoga terrorist watch list.
On Sunday night, I was putting on my skates and getting to roll home from the New Yorker hotel and the Expo to my patiently waiting dog at home, who was probably feeling like she was playing the scene from “Mommy Dearest” where she had to pee and I was like, “Hold your water, Cybil!” and besides feeling the pain and angst of holding onto her pee, she didn’t know why they hell I was calling her “Cybil” when her name’s Abandon.
Mark Becker had passed by in a rush, as whenever you organize anything you are always in a hurry; when I pray to God he usually responds, “Can you hold onto that thought—I’ve got to be somewhere in 15-minutes!”
He asked me, “Did you like my class?”
I said yes and he responded with a word like, “Really?” which coming from someone who has studied with many heavy-hitters in the yoga world and has been teaching for three decades, this had the strange ring of insecurity. And it also made him human—which I liked.
I told him, “Yeah, I had a good time,” and he smiled and rushed on.
His class was more a “How To Teach Yoga” class than a workout. I had been hoping for a workout but I managed to stay in my peace and even met a nice girl named Stephanie. I could have responded, “Not really my bag, Mark. And after how you so clearly defined what makes a “good” teacher and what makes a “bad” teacher, if I weren’t so secure in my Self I would think I was a shitty teacher who had no place sharing what I have to offer with others.”
But I’m not a George Washington cherry tree fable and a slave to the truth, especially if it can not serve in sharing peace. If I was Georgie boy I would have told my father, “I came here and the cherry tree was just lying on its side. Strange, huh?” And I am also not the King of the Put-Down, despite my royal reputation.
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