This week in Yoga class, our instructor read out a couple of paragraphs from a book on prosperity meditations by the musician GuruGanesha Singh. This one has stuck with me all week, so I thought I'd reproduce part of it here:
GUIDING PRINCIPLE 2:
Do Something That Is True To Your CoreDo something that you have no duality about. Do something that every one of your 72 trillion cells believes is good for the entirety of existence. Then, it has to be good for you. Do something that you truly believe is in the best interest of your divine self and of the whole planet…
There is a difference between being in love with a job and recognizing that you are doing something that is true to your core, something that is in harmony with your inner integrity. Whatever it is you are doing you need to be excelling at. I’ve always been a subscriber to the “s#*t or get off the pot mentality.” Don’t hang around in a state of duality. You do not serve yourself or the people around you.
If you do not have conviction in what you are doing, then you’ve got to find something else, take the risk and make the switch.
I am one of the fortunate these days, because I believe in what I am doing, when I am working at my job. As a palliative care nurse, I care for people who are terminally ill, and oftentimes I am relieving their pain, if that is what they require. That sort of caring is true to my core, and I'm honoured to be able to serve in this way. Of course, there is a lifetime to everything. My job cannot last forever. And who am I, what am I, without it?
I wonder about my hobby time, when I'm at home baking bread, and blogging about it. I love bread, and quite clearly I am addicted to it, because from the very first I called myself an exorphin junkie. I do try to make it the healthiest way I know, and the three plus years I've been blogging about my bread I have also been educating myself on what that means: "healthy bread." I know many people would call that an oxymoron. And I know there is this duality about grain (and bread in particular) in my life: I know I overdo it, I know I eat far too much of it; and from what I've learned about it, I can't say with conviction that this much of it is good for humans to eat. Many of my blog postings have outlined my ambivalence. I've examined both pros and cons of wheat and other grains.
I don't consider myself particularly unhealthy -- I haven't been off sick for years, and I can't remember my last cold -- but whether that is due to my vegetarian diet or clean living <ahem>, or dumb luck, I don't know. I've seen lots of people who live clean lives die before their time, and we all know that in the end death is the result for all of us. As radio show host Dr. Joy Browne often says, "none of us are getting out of here alive." And yet we can stack the deck in our favour if we eat right and exercise: then, there is less chance that the cancer or heart disease or other chronic ailments will take us too early.
As far as grains go, I believe we need them, as a species, to continue to have this many people on our planet; but I cannot unequivocally say that we humans thrive on grain. There are many good things about wheat and other grains -- but there are also some detrimental things about them. Some of these things are known, some of them are guesswork. I like bread, but that doesn't mean that it is all good.
Without the 100% conviction, according to GuruGanesh Singh, I should "take the risk and make the switch."
So: in the next little while, I'm going to be buying a juicer and trial a 21-day fast, to detoxify. Whether I will come back to bread or not, I'm not absolutely sure. Perhaps if I detoxify I will break my bread addiction. But if not, I'll come back to my sourdough loaves knowing more about myself.
I assume I'll make at least a couple more blog postings with bread in them before I get organized with the juicer and sourcing the organic veggies to feed it. But then there may be something of an hiatus in the blog while I juice. Or I could use this blog space to chronicle my bread-free detoxification period, if anyone is interested. What would it be like for the exorphin junkie to go off bread cold turkey?
Meanwhile, until I decide on a juicer and buy one, here are a couple more breads. Business as usual.
1. "Capelli-inspired Sourdough Built Bread.
Once again, I made the bread that I keep calling a "Capelli" bread, even though it contains no Capelli ingredients, nor does it follow the official Capelli Sourdough Bread Building Technique, but rather it used my own oversimplification of the Capelli technique. As I've made it here, it is merely a slightly slower building of the sourdough in the bread, nothing more.
The only thing ingredient I changed this time was, I added the wheat germ. And I changed the method somewhat: I had to work, rather than stay home and bake, so for the final bulk fermentation and proofing, I set the dough covered in a bag in the cool garage, and baked it 14 hours later.
It still turned out a nice loaf, although the gluten wasn't developed enough because I didn't have enough time to knead it before work.
2. 20% Rye with Smokey Tomato Sauce
The other bread today was a 20% rye bread, with some of our homemade Smokey Tomato sauce.
I've used the sauce and stuff related to the sauce (leftover pulp) in bread before, and it went well. But this time I wanted to see of our "B" grade sauce would make a nice loaf. And it did.
I call it "B" grade sauce because the first batch of sauce we made this past harvest, we used the wrong wood smoke. The result was a somewhat bitter sauce. But it works fine in the bread.
- 200g rye
- 800g ww
- 750g water
- 200g sourdough
- 50g wheat germ
- 236g Smokey Tomato Sauce
This was a tasty bread, and was good with cheese. The bitter notes in the rye perhaps were heightened by the bitterness of the B-grade smokey tomato sauce; but after the long fermentation, you really didn't notice it all that much.
Notes to Myself
- I've recently watched a couple of videos that have inspired this detoxification idea: one is "Hungry for Change" where I first learned of Kris Carr. After watching her entire interview (an extra on the DVD), after the documentary, I found myself extremely impressed with this young woman, so much so that I had to find her own movie, "Crazy Sexy Cancer." In that movie, at one point Carr gets a blood test, and the tech who draws her blood shows her the improvement in her red blood cells after she gives up grains (which she had been eating for some time on a macrobiotic diet) while on her juicing detox.
- Since fasting a couple of days a week, I've lost some weight. Several people have commented on it -- perhaps I have lost enough that it is noticeable, perhaps they think I am sick. I am, however, still at the higher end of normal, according to the BMI. And I know I'd have more energy if I exercised more. The fasting has been no problem for me, despite my supposed bread addiction; but perhaps it has inspired me to fast from bread even more, and consider this detoxification.
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