Cathartic Revelations...and other waking nightmares

I've been undergoing a detox for about four days now.
It's been prempted by some yucky feelings. Bit of self-loathing going on and a bit of soul-mining, which can always be a little painful. I consider this when I look at an open-cut mining operation and think 'surely this hurts Mumma Earth?'. Just laying bare the layers and exposing them to the elements...things are going to get blown away as dust and detritus...obviously.

This morning after a relatively normal night of sleep-wake-sleep-shuffle-sleep and then the pitch *down* into the subconscious, I found myself having the most purgative experience.

I was in a kind of meeting place, where my children were 'off' with someone else, or a group of kids doing some activity. It felt like a municipal building...like a library with a 'kids play room' or 'facility for learning activities' (or other such inane name for and inside learning place). The decor was dark, royal blue carpet, 'panels' for walls and that aluminium stripping on the connections. Doors with glass inclusions so no-one can do anything without being watched...that kind of place.

I was very, very sad. Not the sort of depression that is from dysfunction or trauma, but a deep apathy, a soul-wrenching ache and a longing to be free of it. I wasn't usually like this, I was angry at this moment.
A lady walked up to me and said "Well, she's like this because you never TAKE her to the Yeronga centre, and she never gets to be with....", she'd kept talking but I'd just put my hands over my ears and began to weep while walking swiftly away. (Yeronga is a suburb in Brisbane where there are colleges and schools, and maybe I've associated this with 'corrective learning')

Then *zip*, and I am in a circle group setting. Other parents are lighting a pizza topped with oil and making the flame go around on top of it to the delight of the kids and adults. All this frivolity and 'learning' about flammability...chemical reactions...oooh the technology... yet I am sitting in the corner so deflated. I am a person who has no air. I am a mother without her children around her. I can't see them. I can't feel them. I can't even sense where they are. My eyes weep tears and I have no control over it. I can't smile I can't even muster a smile or a mask. I am laid bare. Open to the elements around me.

My gaze travels around the group and I meet some concerned eyes, and one woman with dark hair and the sort of face you meet in counselling sessions grabs my focus. She is full of empathy and so worried. The emotion scares the hell out of me but I don't even flinch. I move my gaze onwards and then fall back onto a pillow, weeping from my gut, wrenched out sobs that eventually wake me up.

Oh god, the utter emptiness I felt when I woke.
Near to tears for real and wondering who that sad woman was.
I sense my past and realise I've let a lot of fear go.
I used to be depressed. Clinically depressed. I used to wear a mask and it damaged me.
I used to be that poor poor woman, and she knew what you were thinking of her.

I breathe deeply and pull up the covers. Across the room my little girl shuffles and sighs. I hear my baby boy in the next room wake his Daddy up with a cranky demand and then hear the patter of feet up the hallway.
"MUM! Is morning NOW! MUM! IS MORNING now!" he says, and then snuggles in before saying, "Mummm, get out mine bed! my turn in 'ere".

Smiling, I shift myself out of his bed, and begin the day. Life is good, even if you're woken up in this manner.

The New Reality

We had an eclipse yesterday, and it was a slightly odd day...amongst the mundanity, there were moments of 'ooooh...something's happening' happening. YKWIM? The dreams last night were immense. I think I had the most lucid ones early in the morning ... as usual.

First one I remember is flying like a helicopter, over the cerulean blue ocean and headland...onwards to a futuristic building, lots of glass and glass and glass, shiny shiny glass and metal structure with stone steps and paving. Manicured gardens and hedges, all 'nice' and 'tidy'. But massive, I'm talking on a BIG scale like an enormous hotel complex.
Once inside I was with a child who may or may not have been mine, and we were faced with getting to our room. Strangely, it seemed like this place was one huge 5 Star rated refugee camp, designed by those smart Scandis at IKEA. The travelator / escalator was intimidating, like the moving stairs at Hogwarts, you jumped on and then had to jump off into a selected 'drawer' which had railing on it to stop you falling out. Then the drawer would 'float' up to an area on the wall where a mechanism would pop open the panelling to reveal a kind of lift, then 'swoosh' in went the person on the drawer 'thing'...obiviously up to an apartment I expected, or knew.
I was getting a little vertigo just watching the people doing this then a couple of odd things occurred. One line up to get onto the drawer/lift thingy had people queuing with shopping trollies full of food, and the other line had people with small hand luggage. SO I realised I'd been standing in the wrong queue with my child...and moved. We ended up receiving help to get onto the travelator thing and then the dream ended as we were going inside the 'wall panel lift thing'. Blooomp. Stop. I expect that was because we'd 'made it' to wherever we were going ;)

The second dream was staged at my Gran's house, (I often dream of this house as I spent a lot of my childhood there, and now it isn't in the family anymore, and I don't physically go there, but I am often astral visiting it)...but it was different of course. For one thing there was an enormous stuffed stingray mounted on the wall that would have been above her stove, but in the dream it was a fireplace with mantle...and the enormous stuffed stingray... It gets odder. I tried to get rid of the stuffed stingray by squashing it all up and flushing it down the loo...but only succeeded in making my sister roll her eyes at me, and so I retrieved the stingray and re-mounted it on the wall above the fireplace. My brother and I were reminicing about the nice bedroom we used to sleep in when we visited our Gran, and I remember in the dream that my brother and I spoke quite easily with each other (which doesn't generally happen in real life).  If this is a New Reality, then it would be a confusing one ;]

I liked my first dream better. Much less frustrating. :) I always love a dream where I fly of course ;} And it is a much easier dream to interpret...
I love freedom and that was the flying part, out over a beautiful ocean. My life at the moment is constricting my sense of freedom but instead of feeling bad about the suburban way of life I've seen it as a comfortable and neccessary sanctuary at this time of my life. This is I think the symbolism of the neatly ordered refugee hotel complex where some of the structures and processes are intimidating but ultimately I am doing this 'thing' with many others and we are all making our way 'to somewhere' of our own.

Looking forward to maintaining a place for myself and my babies in this world, where there is peace and freedom and safety. In perspective, I have this now, already, so in effect I will enjoy furthering this towards more independance and ease of life...yeah, more cloudwatching, gardening and reading books :) That'll be 'the life'.

Happy dreaming xxx
Nette
 :)

Vegan and Gluten Free...otherwise known as VGF (verygoodfood) - Part 1

Hi!
Been a while...its now 2013 and its February...how time flies.
Quick update...Chinut is gluten intolerant...oh yes indeedy :\
How does one 'find out' that they are gluten intolerant? It begins with denying the fact that every time you eat bread or similar, you experience awful wrenching pains across the diaphragm, up the esophagus and get a smashing headache and sweats to go with it. Yes, for a while there (a long while actually) I'd considered that it must be eggs, or butter, or a combination of eggs and toast with butter, so I'd try 'no butter' and still get a reaction...so I tried 'no eggs' and I still got a reaction. Finally (oh dear me, yes, it takes a while for the light to dawn...) I tried 'no bread', but I told myself it was so I could actually lose some extra flab because admitting that the pain was caused by bread was like telling my best friend they were a bad influence on me...just a hard thing to do.

So bread was eliminated and I went on to feel marvelous. I lost a stack of weighty flab from my bod. I felt so much better! The peri-oral dermatitis I'd had flaring very very badly even went down. These subtle and not-so-subtle indications of my body's massive internal imbalance, helped me to stay bread free for some time. Though, contradictorily, I did not want to admit I had gluten intolerance. It seemed like a weakness to me. It seemed to me that I'd have to admit 'something was wrong with me'...

I ate oats, and with minimal reactions and the actual goodness of oats, I was able to 'feel full' after a meal of them. Three years down the track from my wonderful pregnancy with Angelina where I'd done all the bread-free work, and I'd slipped back into old habits. I can bake bread really well, and its a source of pride for me to produce this for me and my family, so it was difficult to bake this gorgeous smelling stuff and not sample some too...you know what I mean. Out of the oven comes a hightop loaf of wholemeal or tray after tray of vegetable Cornish pasties and it turns into Drool City. When I would see my babies all heartily tucking into the goodies I baked it made the world seem right. Baking tends to lend a certain atmosphere of comfort to a home.

Zipping forward to the pregnancy with Jeremy and I've again established a massive flare up of peri-oral dermatitis. Its awful. I feel like a baboon's arse, my face is red, inflammed, itchy and cringefully ugly to me. I desperately try every known trick I have and ask informed friends for their best take on what to do. Time and time again we return to pro-biotics and pre-biotics as the indications all point to massive internal imbalance. I even go so far as to try out MMS (water cleaning) treatment, but it was a little to much to take. What does help is the pro-biotics. I used Kefir milk. It's sour and zingy, creamy and wholesome. I like it but I don't like having to drink it. 'Consistency' is not my 'thing'. I help this by also using a pro-biotic vegetable powder (In-Liven by Miessence) but its made with greens that contain gluten, so I end up having my skin blow up from that. I go back to Kefir. Better. At this point, I am still eating bread (yeah! can you believe it?!) and having the pain reactions to it, but being pregnant and sometimes very hungry, I choose the quickest option and 'make a sandwich'. (this does cause me pain but I can explain it as indigestion of pregnancy...nice'n'tidy) In fact, we all can see, its not a quick option and not even the lazy option...that would have been a pear or an apple, which is what I did during Angelina's pregnancy.

Along comes Jeremy, birthed at home into water, and he's just beautiful. I enter this stretch of Motherhood with conscious foreboding. I look at him on the first night and shake my head, say to myself 'how am I going to do this when I feel like 'this'?', and we end up just 'getting on with it'. That's what I am good at. Perseverance. I persevere. If nothing else I am the Energiser Bunny...I'll just keep on keeping on. A couple of weeks in and we all know something is definitely wrong. A baby, any baby, shouldn't be able to produce this much wind. Its just in.sane. And me too! I can't get over how much bloating and wind I have. Its uncomfortable and unsociable. I read all I can about babies, gluten intolerance, dairy intolerance, and colic being a convenient way for us all just to keep on eating a standard western diet and dose our infants with colic mixtures. Tidy,...again. Society seems to enjoy tidiness.

Jeremy around four months old, and me ;) still sort of bloated...we've found gluten free bread, but I don't think it helps one to stay slim... ;\

This is like a red rag to a bull in my case. 'So I should just dose my bubba and hope it works?'. Like fuq I will. I know there is a solution, but it will be a difficult one for me to get my head around. I make no bones about it now. I am a product of conditioning from the society I was brought up in. I'll get past that too though,...one day soon. I try one week without dairy, and little effect (because I'm still eating bread) and then the next week with no bread. Well. After one 24hr stint of no bread Jeremy sleeps for four hours, peacefully, in the morning. I conclude, 'I am gluten intolerant and so is my baby'. Tah-dah!

Without gluten I become calmer. My skin clears up and I 'handle' stuff better. Now, all I need to do is get this bod into gear and balance the internals, because, yep, we've got thrush on a massive scale. Both baby and me. We clear it away with liquid and gluten free pro-biotic (Fast Tract from Miessence) some organic extra virgin coconut oil, a little colloidal silver and lots of fresh food. I am still on this particular 'journey' and this bacteria or parasite or whatever is stubbornly refusing to fuq off out of my system or at the very least calm down enough to be undetectable...so we are in a kind of def-con 5 situation with this little 'bastid' (or could that be 'blasto'?)...I'm starting Pokeroot Tincture in the coming week so will keep you posted on that little experiment too.

I notice from now on, that when I have a milk tea that Jeremy gets bad nappy rash. It manifests like his bowel is on fire..poor little chap gets red blistery like things around his anus...and so again I can conclude that at least for Jeremy 'my baby is dairy intolerant'.  I also observe that eggs make me feel queasy. They give me a pep of energy via the protein, but from what I am researching about gluten intolerance, it lends credence to the theory or research so far that gluten intolerant people seem to have difficulty processing certain proteins.

It is at this point I now know that Vegan and Gluten Free is going to be my future. Now starts the de-programming from a life so far of breads, standard grains, dairy and egg. Honey! omgoodness...I'll have to give up honey! damn. Then I discover maple syrup. ok!...its all ok again... ;)

More to come on my amazing Vegan and Gluten Free Journey in future posts! Stay tuned for amazing insights into Almonds, Cashews, and Brazil nuts (yum). The glory of Tahini. Wonderful wonderful Maple syrup and the joys of dried fruits and bliss balls. Banana and Spirulina smoothies, fresh organic herb teas, stacked green salads to make your mouth water,Chia Seed fantasticness and more :)

Blessings! xxx