Day 5: Silence as Ceremony

How’s everyone feeling? Are you feeling more inward? Are you slower today? Are you clearer? Are you energized? Are you headachy? Constipated? Within reason, everything is fair game. We are all going through a different process of cleansing. Yes, we are cleansing together, but we are all at different stages of our life, navigating different emotional challenges, learning, growing, changing. Each experience is unique. Each experience is important, exactly as it is.

I mentioned in yoga today about the importance of silence. Explore extending your meditations or breathing practices. Rather than just finishing the practice, let it evolve into a phase of silence before moving on with your day. When you are doing abhyanga, notice when the mind says its time to move on, and then stay a little longer, in silence. Try eating a meal in silence, or just weaving in moments of silence. In that time, observe. What tastes do you notice? How is the process of digestion happening? Are you breathing? These mindful moments of deepening awareness are HUGE! I cannot express that enough.

Also ghee….have you all deepened your relationship with this beautiful golden medicine? Yesterday we touched on warm water opening the channels. Ghee is working in partnership with warm spiced water to not only dilate the channels but to “unstick the stickiness”. Think of how leaves get stuck in our gutters. They dry up and adhere themselves to the inner walls of the gutters, and are extremely difficult to scrape off. Ghee works as an internal scraper, cleaning the channels of that sticky substance, ama. In addition, ghee is an anti-inflammatory, an antioxidant, almost entirely free of lactose, increases HDL (the beneficial cholesterol), rich in vitamins A, D, E, and K, and has one of the highest smoking points for cooking most everything. I can go on but I think you get the point :) Add a teaspoon to most every meal or drink it in warm water. Enjoy!