The boy with divine powers.

This is a documentary on Discovery Channel about the Buddha Boy who meditates for months without water or food. He disappeared in the jungle in 2006 and reappeared this year in November.

This is a really good movie. The trailer below doesn’t do it justice. I saw it at a free screening in Portland.

The movie is about a young Indian boy raised in the slums of Mumbay, who gets to be on “Who wants to be a millionaire” on the Indian television. It is a really good story.

Official website:

Sumdog Millionaire

Trailer:
 

I just finished a 10 day course Vipassana meditation at a center in Washington, one and a half hour away from Portland, Oregon.
This experience changed me forever. It was tremendous hard work to get up at 4 am and meditate for 10 hours a day and go to bed at 9 pm. We were not allowed to talk during the 10 days at all, literary, only briefly with the instructors to seek guidance.
This experience was unbelievably tough and such hard work. I was locked in my own body for 10 days, not able to express my feelings to anyone. I believe I can only associate this to solitary confinement.
However, this is not what the course is about. The reason we were not allowed to talk is to develop the mind awareness to be able to practice the vipassana meditation technique.
The first three days, we concentrate on the area of the nostrils and observe the breath going in and out. This is to sharpen the mind. After 30 hours of doing this, one certainly sharpens the mind. The fourth day of the course, we learn to do the actual vipassana meditation technique, which is the scanning of the body, meaning moving your awareness (mind) over the entire body constantly. This is to prove insight into how impermanent this life is. We all know from theory that life is impermanent and everything is constantly changing every moment. Doing this meditation technique proves this. Meditation is not an intellectual thing; it is a mind and body experience that one has to practice. You can only understand this and get the knowledge of it if you go through the course and do it. It is tremendous hard work, unbelievably hard, but what a rewarding and insightful experience these 10 days proved out to be.
Experiencing the impermanence of the body and mind, one realizes how life truly is. Therefore, we should not get attached to daily events that happen in life. This meditation makes one realizes that everything passes and goes. Just like practicing the vipassana meditation, observing the sensations that arise and go away. Pretty much this sums up life, everything changes and arises and passes away. We should not get attached to them, not cling to them, or else we create negativity for ourselves and this is the reason of our misery.
In vipassana meditation, one observes the sensations as one scans the entire body with awareness. These bodily sensations arise and pass away. Everything is impermanent. What the technique discovered is that our own thoughts and interactions with the world through the senses create sensations on the body, which if we react to them generate sankaras, and these sankaras are responsible for our miseries. We are supposed to look at everything with equanimity and not get tangled up in sensations and thoughts and cling to them, as this is the cause of our misery. Only when we cling to sensations and thoughts we will react to them and generate negativity for ourselves or the people we are in contact with. If we cut the link of these sensations, observe them with equanimity until they go away, and we understand the impermanence of life, we will look at everything objectively and with equanimity and live a balanced life.
Practicing vipassana, eliminates the negativity in our lives as we develop equanimity to all events in our lives, we do not cling to thoughts and only observe the truth, the reality as it is.
I know it is hard to take 10 days off and go through such an intense and hard experience, but this is something that everyone should try. What a life changing experience, and for the better.

Link to Vipassana meditation:

Vipassana meditation

This is where I go to practice my yoga postures. Near East Yoga is situated in NE Portland at Broadway and 7th Avenue. The studio teaches Ashtanga yoga, primarily the Mysore practice, and the same one that Shri K Pattabhi Jois teaches in Mysore, India.
The yoga studio can get rather stuffy on a busy day, but in the weekday evenings when it is not so busy it can be very cozy. The two instructors: Charisse and Casey, a couple that owe the place, are very knowledgeable and they spend time with each student to show them the right postures. They are very nice and friendly. I believe they both traveled to India and studied Ashtanga yoga in India at the Shri K Pattabhi Jois ashram. The Mysore practice allows each person to practice the Ashtanga flow postures series at their own pace and at the instructor will guide each student individually.

Shri K Pattabhi Jois website:

Shri K Pattabhi Jois website

Please visit Near East Yoga website for more information about the yoga studio and the yoga they teach:

Near East Yoga website

So, it’s almost election time…
All of us women supporters of Hillary Clinton, should put the hurt aside and think hard… we do not vote color, race, or sex, but the future of this world. If you are a strong believer of Hillary Clinton, you will do what she wants you to do and that is to vote Democrats. You know that old expression: “there is nothing worse than a woman scorned”, but let’s prove that this is not what this election is all about, so vote Democrat. Trust me, I am just as hurt as all the women out there whose voices were ignored when Hillary lost and Obama picked somebody else as his running mate, but as a strong woman I know how to make the right choice and put the hurt aside. Remember you are not voting color, sex, or race, but the future of this country and what the democrats can do for you. So let’s vote Democrats and have a better future!

The Beloved Festival

Beloved Festival website

We went to the Beloved Festival near Eugene on the weekend of 15 of August. The festival was located on someone’s property in the Siuslaw National Forest. It was a 3 day music festival and camping. The bands were really good, however the music seemed to be repetitive as most of the new age bands who sing kirtan kind of perform the same songs over and over again. There were lots of hippies, amazing vegetarian food, lots of great music, beautiful people and lots of fun. Unfortunatly, there were not enough portable toilets, so by the end of second day the toilets were in a very aweful condition. In all, the festival was amazing.

Enjoy the pictures on my website:

Beloved Festival pictures

Bhagavan Das

This is an amazing 3 day fair. We went to this fair last weekend, July 13, near Eugene in Oregon. The fair was so amazing: full of hippies, lots of originality, many vendors, plenty of unique shows and very talented people. Thousands of people gather every year in this fair to celebrate summer or just living in Oregon. You really have to be there to understand and experience the laid back, hippiesh, free, exciting, very diverse and entertaining atmosphere. The food is amazing: organic, fresh vegetarian and non-vegetarian diverse cuisine. People put on costumes and parade around in the fair which loops around the forest. There are so many vendors that sell art, clothes, shoes, unique items, etc. The fair has something new at every corner: a show or just someone in a costume or even naked singing or parading around. The shows are very entertaining: singing, dancing, plays, etc. It is a very original fair and something you should not miss if you live in or just pass by through Oregon.

My pictures from Oregon Country fair

Oregon country fair website

It’s over. I’m a quitter. I just couldn’t resist the hunger, diziness and nausea that I felt this afternoon. I have been pretty good for breakfast and lunch with juicing, but my body start shaking at about 4 o’clock pm. So I stopped juicing and had a salad for dinner.

Well, I will still juice as much as I can, but I think I need some solid food too.

If you want more information on the Juice Feast follow those sites:

Angela Stokes is a raw foodist, who used to have diabetes and lost 160 lb on the raw food diet. She followed a 92 days Juice Feast in Costa Rica and she was pretty happy with it. I guess being in a hot climate with lots of fruits and vegetables is a lot easier than to do a juice Feast in the mid 80s temperature.

Juice Feasting website The entire 92 Juice Feast program. I don’t know how these guys do it. I cannot immagine it. After 2 days and a half of Juice feasting, I got the shakes, nausea and felt dizy.

Watch Angela Stokes on youtube breaking her 92 days Juice Feast:

Watch how this girl is going crazy after 14 days of Juice Feasting:

After a whole day yesterday of drinking and eating nothing but fresh fruits and vegetables juice, I woke up this morning feeling really good. The afternoon it has been pretty rough as the cravings kicked in. I had to be really strong not to give in the temptation to go eat something solid really yummy like a veggie burger with fries or a rice bowl, or a vegan pizza. But I didn’t.

So, this is what I had today:

Lots of water
20 oz of master cleaner (lemon water with agave and a pinch of cayenne pepper)
20 oz of orange/pineapple/mango/kiwi juice
32 oz of green leaves/parsley/cilantro/carrots/red bell pepper/zucchini/beats/cucumber/celery juice/kiwi
16 oz of blueberry/grapes/ginger tonic juice
32 oz of pineapple/orange/coconut water/apple/kiwi/celery/strawberries/carrot juice

I am off of work for the next 8 days, so I decided to go through an 8 day detox Juice Feast starting today. That means that for the next 8 days I will only be drinking juice from fruits and vegetables and lots of water. Wish me luck!
The Juice Feast has become increasingly popular to detoxify the body, lose weight and just feel great. To do the detox, one has to drink about 1 gallon (4 liters) of juice and about 1 gallon of water every day. I am not sure if I can take that much liquid in my body daily, but I will try. Enemas are also highly recommended during a Juice Feast to clean up the body, as the body will not eat solids and it is harder to go to the bathroom and do #2. I have been doing #1 a lot today, and I feel like my bladder is always full.
Today, I have been feeling kind of cranky, but I do feel thinner already. I slept through the afternoon, because I have been feeling really tired but that might be because I got sunburn yesterday at beach. We spent 4 hours soaking up the sun at Cannon Beach on the Oregon coast, which is about one hour and forty minutes away from Portland.

This is what I had today:

20 oz of carrot/ zucchini/cucumber/ kiwi/apple/celery/green leaves (kale and chard) juice.
1 Quart of carrot/ beats/ green leafs/ apple/ kiwi/ zucchini/ pomegranate/celery juice.
16 oz blueberry/ginger/lemon juice
20 oz lemon water
20 oz carrot/celery/green leaves/kiwi/apple/cucumber/orange
20 oz water