Resting More While Watching the Hillary Flap

I'm down to 131 which is a loss of 9.5 pounds so far. As I mentioned yesterday, the greatest losses occur early on and then taper off as the fast proceeds. This scares me some since I still have vivid images of my Dad when he was in the final stages of his colon cancer before he died.

I asked the doctor how much more I could lose. He said ten more without any problem. Then he asked me to guess how much he weighed after his fast. He and I are about the same build, and he bottomed out at 88 pounds! So technically I could lose another thirty pounds - but he does not advise that. He'll stop my fast much sooner. He now knows from his own study and research that he fasted too long.

I'm feeling the need to rest more and more. I've been taking a quiet walk around the motel in the evening to get some fresh air. It's time to let that go and spend more time in bed. The greatest challenge for me is to have patience to quietly wait while the body does it's amazing work. The more I read, the more I appreciate how truly magnificent our bodies are - perhaps the most complex and wise (physically not mentally) organisms on the planet with the possible exception of the dolphin family which has been shown to have more complex nervous systems than humans.

Doing more tube time than usual, I'm following the Hillary Clinton - Jean Houston flap in the press. This comes as a setback for the "intuitive way." What Jean did with Hillary is a classic technique for helping a person get in touch with The Intuitive Self. It is a variation on the Gestalt method pioneered by Fritz Pearls at the Esalen Institute. I wouldn't for a moment hesitate to use it in class with my students. The press and general public seem to be so ignorant about anything with a deeper meaning that it's discouraging at times.

I met Jean in the mid 70s when I started working with the left/brain right/brain ideas. I attended one of her weekend workshops and met with her for an extended lunch time chat. Jean was most interested in and encouraging about the work I was doing. She is an intellectual giant although it looks like she may have screwed up at the practical level with the thing about her PhD degree. She and her husband Robert Masters have done path breaking research on mind and consciousness. I had a couple of their books on my bookshelf for years before I passed them along to the library.