Friday, December 14, 2007

Juice of the Day Continued!

David on the sleigh ride to B.C.
Snow, snow, snow! (It will most likely not be snowy in B.C., only on some parts of the drive. Winter camping anyone?)
Hello All!

Well, here we are getting ready to head up to CANADA!! One more sleep, and then off we go, I am so excited to see my family and my beloved ocean.

I just wanted to drop a quick note to say that because things have been so busy around here we are extending our "Juice of the Day" contest. So, be sure to get your juice recipe into us for a chance to win a 30 Day Membership to Juice Feasting.com. For more information see "Juice of the Day" entry below, or just send your recipe to us at nutrientdense@gmail.com.

That's all I have time for right now, will let you know how our chilly, winter road trip went once we arrive in B.C.

All Love,

Katrina Rain.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

New "Juice Feasting" Emerging as Phytonutrient-Rich Disease-Fighting Nutritional System

Leap for Joy!

Hooray! We are so excited that our friend Mike Adams loves Juice Feasting as much as we do!

Check out what he has to say about it here:


And be sure to listen to his podcast about his experience with the magic of juice. We are just listening to it right now and it is fantastic, entertaining, and very, very smart if we may say so.
Get really excited people, juice is gonna soak the place, and oh what a delicious, sticky, HEALTHY, yummy cup of bliss we will all be in together then!
OK, after another long day in Tucson, it is cuddle time. It has been snowing intermittently all day, yes, even Southern Arizona gets snow!
Juicy Love,
Katrina Rain.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Non-Fear

When a cloud is about to become rain, she is not afraid
Hello!

I have been enjoying so many wonderful and diverse blogs recently, and I just wanted to extend a heart felt thank you to ALL of you who are leading the way by being healthy, happy, and inquisitive, journeying forever towards the light.

David and I received a beautiful love note today on the Juice Feasting Forums that I wanted to share with you all:

"Today is Day 20 of my Juice Feasting, and I felt a strong desire to honor this website. I charged headlong into the most exciting adventure of my life because of the support of this portal to a new dimension. I am transforming so fast I can't keep track of it all, and that makes me very grateful. I specifically thank you David for giving me the phrase "a hero's journey". It explains precisely how I feel. I feel no temptations to "eat" right now because of that journey.

Interestingly, because I share the house with extended family, there is cooked and raw food around me constantly, and yet I am literally untouched. In fact, I love to smell it and observe the change in my response to it. Raw foods that didn't appeal are taking on a new life; I look forward to meeting up with them next year! And cooked foods that used to seem so wonderful, are setting off tiny little alarm bells; the voice of my organs can actually be heard now "Please, not that... we just can't take it anymore."

The beauty, strength, and rightness of Juice Feasting is proved to me by the amount of energy and focus I have. This despite that I commute 6 hours a day four days per week, and have a busy schedule outside of work. I have gone from 339 down to 310 in this time, but I'm not dieting. I'm not even struggling. I'm retraining. I'm cleansing. I'm being blessed with the break from "food" that I needed to reset my whole being towards harmony with the gift of food.
My contribution/tip: Once a day I try to remember to have a tablespoon of olive oil, hemp oil, borage/flax oil, or coconut oil. It's wonderful to mix in with tangerine juice. If I forget, certain foods begin to dance into my thoughts; I am beginning to recognize my need for dietary fats.

Keep up the good work David and Katrina!"

~anonymous on the Juice Feasting Forums.

Wow, this note made our day! And the truth of it is that it is all of YOU that are taking the magic of Juice Feasting and live foods out to the world, giving every one you come into contact with the amazing gift of non-fear. It is through your blogs, and day to day journeys that we are showing everyone what our potential as human beings really is! Soon, people will no longer say "WHAT! Juice for 92-Days! NO WAY!" but "Oh, of course you can drink juice for 92-Days. My friend just did it and has seen amazing results, I want to do a Juice Feast soon too!" And this is because all of you, Juice Feasting right now, are setting such an amazing example! You are teaching people they need not be afraid, that there is a magical solution, and that it is as simple as drinking juice, and then moving on to eating nutrient dense plant foods! You are all adding invaluably to the consciousness shift by being bright and shining lights! The more of us that do it, the easier and easier it will become for those more mired in things holding them back to move forward.

So, we want to say thank you to YOU! We admire all of you greatly. You are all Heroes off on an epic Hero's Journey!

Thich Nhat Hanh on non-fear:

"When a cloud is about to become rain, she is not afraid. She may even be excited. Being a cloud floating in the blue sky is wonderful, but being rain falling on the fields, the ocean, or the mountains is also wonderful. As she falls down as rain, the cloud will sing. Looking deeply, we see that birth is just a notion. Nothing is born from nothing. When we touch the cloud deeply, when we touch our grandmother deeply, we touch the nature of no birth and no death, and we are free from sorrow.

Nirvana means extinction, above all the extinction of ideas- the ideas of birth and death, existence and nonexistence, coming and going, self and other, one and many. All these ideas cause us to suffer. We are afraid of death because ignorance gives us an illusory idea about what death is.

We don't have to attain nirvana, because we ourselves are always dwelling in nirvana. The wave does not have to look for water. It already is water. We are one with the ground of our being, once we touch God or nirvana, we also receive the gift of non-fear. Non-fear is the basis of true happiness. The greatest gift we can offer others is our non-fear. Living deeply every moment of our life, touching the deepest level of our being, this is the practice of non-fear"

~ The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh

As we and many others have experienced, clearing toxic foods and thoughts from our lives gives us access to the flow of beauty that is here, waiting to join into the lives of all who welcome it in. GO FOR IT!
--------------------------------
As you can imagine, our house has become an epi-centre for citrus juice after our Tucson citrus harvest! David just wandered over to the counter and said, "yum, that orange juice was SO good this morning!" so I think it might be time to make another batch!

Don't forget to send us your favorite juice recipe and give your self the chance of winning a 30 Day Membership to Juice Feasting.com! See post below called "Juice of the Day" for more information. Oh, and by the way, if you already have a membership, please do send us your juice recipe and if you win, we will upgrade your membership for an extra 30 Days! Sound good? Then let us know your favorite juice!

So far today our house has been A Complaint Free zone! Hooray!

Love to all,

Katrina.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Computer Angels and A Complaint Free World

A Complaint Free World

Well, I think the computer angels are finally coming back to us after three weeks of yucky computer struggles. Computer problems are SO frustrating! My baby mac is still at the doctors, we found out that the hard drive died (very unusual), so I am hoping beyond hope that they will be able to recover all of the data. I have some very special things on that computer, and it will be sad if I have to let it go....computers are an interesting experiment to be sure. The work done on a computer, or here on the Internet, is nothing like, say, growing a garden and harvesting fruits. Computer work is so detached from the earth, so dependant on temporary phenomena like electricity and cheep oil....once those things start to go, computer days will be few and far between. For us though, there is an interesting tie in for technology to the "to the land" movement, in that it is such a valuable educational tool. I love using blogs for my daily news! The things that I have learned from the Internet have helped me to transform my life in magical ways, and reminded me of the importance of eating naturally, among other things. The Internet, when used correctly, can be such an exciting, inspiring place. So, the trick is to use the amazing world of Internet and computers while we have it, and then get ready to gracefully let it go when we need to.

While we were in Tucson dealing with computers, we also got to harvest about 40lbs of fresh off the tree oranges and grapefruits from our friend's citrus garden! Wow, what a treat! I am really feeling a lack of garden time, living out here in the desert, so it was really nice to kick off my shoes and climb up into a tree and pick and pick and pick! Happy monkey girl.

We also got to harvest a load of veggie oil for Pegasus, who will be driving us up to B.C. SOON! I am so excited to be home with my family I am just quivering!

So, the day in Tucson was shaping up to be a really crabby day, after weeks of computers not working right, spending FAR too much time trying to fix them, fuses were a little short. At the beginning of the day I resigned myself to have a crabby day, and I even decided to not even try to avoid the crabbiness, it felt like too much effort to stay happy, so I was going to just let myself be crabby. BUT, it didn't work! I have reached a tipping point of positive thinking, and now the positive naturally over-rides the crabbies even when I am not trying at it! And it should have been a very easily crabby day, to discover we had to spend even MORE on computer programs, and that my mac baby has a dead hard drive, traffic was horrible and we had a terrible time finding parking and drove around for 15 minutes almost everywhere we tried to go just looking for parking, it seemed extra hard to find food that we could eat, and nothing was going smoothly.

What I found was that I couldn't avoid feeling giddy with happiness while picking oranges and grapefruits, and that pulling veggie oil was so satisfying, and that at the end of the day these happinesses out weighed the rest of the frustrating day.

And then, after the sun had set, we went into a book store (following our tradition of "may no visit to Tucson be book store visit-less), and I just couldn't help but feel so HAPPY! And I ran into a book that has passed in front of my consciousness before, in some magazine or someplace, that is a little gem of positive thinking. A Complaint Free World is a book that is taking the world by storm, and if you ever wonder at the power of positive thinking, or feel sceptical, please check out this book! The idea is simple, to go 21 days without complaining. The results are impressive, good things will happen for you in abundance if you can just leave your grumbling behind. The book's author, Will Bowen, has said that going 21 consecutive days without complaining, criticising, or gossiping, and in so doing you form a new, positive habit. By changing your words, you can change your thoughts, and then begin to create your life by design. People have shared stories with Will about relieving chronic pain, healing relationships, improving careers, and becoming an overall happier person, just by not complaining! Consciously striving to reformat your mental hard rive is not easy, but believe me, it is SO WORTH IT!

Now, I think that I have generally been a very positive person, but it is like entering a whole new planet when you begin to be very mindfully positive, and very mindfully avoid negativity. Many great teachers have taught this, the importance of mastering your thoughts. Now, here, in their footsteps is a very accessible concept: to just stop complaining!

From the book: "Complaining is talking about things you do not want rather than what you do want. When we complain, we are using our words to focus on things that are not as we would like. Our thoughts create our lives and our words indicate what we are thinking. Let me repeat that, because if you get nothing else from this book, please let this be it: OUR THOUGHTS CREATE OUR LIVES AND OUR WORDS INDICATE WHAT WE ARE THINKING. Put another way: "What you Articulate, you Demonstrate!"

Reading things like this always feels like striking gold to me, confirmation of what I know to be true! I have for so long felt the power of words, and known what a strong effect they hold on ourselves and those around us.....I lived for seven years with a chronic complainer, and yes, I loved him, and in order to relate to him I would often find myself complaining too. Every time I made an attempt to curb complaining in our house, it seemed to fizzle before my eyes, and I would be ridiculed for being "too sensitive." Perhaps I was not as skillful as I could have been...I feel I understand much better now the means by which a person can be skillful and loving in the face of anger and hurt, but I was embroiled in it at the time. Now that I have left that relationship, I understand even deeper now the importance of words and mindfulness, for living with loving, happy words, and a mindful soul mate is like night and day after living with words that so often made me feel stressed out, unhappy, at-odds, and often lead to tears.

So yes, lets all take the 21 day complaint free challenge! I'm going to give it a try. The more I focus on bringing happy thoughts into my life, the harder it is for my mental hard drive to get fried! As the book says: "To be a happy person who has mastered your thoughts and has begun creating your life by design, you need a very, very high threshold of what leads you to express grief, pain, and discontent." In other words, to get upset over mal-functioning computers is not necessary, bad traffic, ha! Happiness requires a rolling gracefully along with life through all of its ups and downs.

"You can help create a Complaint Free World. Do it for those around you. Do it for your nation. Do it because it's a powerful first step towards world peace. Do it for your children and their children yet to come. But mostly, do it for yourself.

Do this for myself? Isn't that selfish? No. There is nothing wrong with doing something so that you will benefit. As you become a happier person, you raise the overall level of happiness in the world. You will send out vibrations of optimism and hope that will resound with others of similar intent. You will create a network of expectation for a brighter future for all."

One last note on complaining: “Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so that it can be put right. And to refrain from complaining doesn’t necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior. There is no ego in telling the waiter your soup is cold and needs to be heated up—if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. ‘How dare you serve me cold soup…?’ That’s complaining.”—Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

So, get ye to www.AComplaintFreeWorld.org, order yourself a little purple bracelet, (or use an old elastic band and save on resources), and see if you can go 21 days without complaining, and see what magic comes in when you put out only happy words!

Here are some happy words for you: WE LOVE YOU!

Love Katrina and David Rain.

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Juice of the Day

Hello All!

Another Arizona day coming to a close....we are still experiencing computer troubles but they will (we hope) be over very soon! We contracted a virus while trying to watch the latest Harry Potter movie, and are still trying to re-sort everything out. That naughty Harry. It has really made us realize how much we value our computers, thank you for good computers!

We just had a lovely visit with Cain and Julie, who are working at the Tree right now. They drove over in their little golden bug (VW), and they borrowed the cat! Yes, that's right, our cat is in high demand, he must be the most well loved cat I have ever known. He is the only cat I have ever known to have his own human visitors (while we were in Houston we hear he had a very busy social schedule, with Tim and Michella, and Cain and Julie all coming over to our house to spend time with him.) So Seneca has gone to spend the weekend with Cain and Julie to see if he can sort out their mouse problem for them. I think he will do just fine.

In other news:

Win A 30 Day Membership to JuiceFeasting.com!

So, we are working at putting a Juice of the Day on every day of our 92-Day Program....if you have a recipe you would like to contribute to be forever eternalized in the pages of Juice Feasting, please let us know! We like juices with lovely names and little stories about the juice, how you came up with it, where you were when you first tried it, why it is your favorite juice, etc. Please email your juice recipe to nutrientdense@gmail.com with "Juice" as the subject and David and I will pick three lucky juicies to be added as members to the site. If you are already a member and would like to contribute a juice anyways, please do! We love your juicy creations, and you will be helping to create a very juicy experience for all those following you on the Juice Feasting path.

We will announce the juice winners on this blog next Friday, December the 14th, so be sure to get your entry in before then!


One of our favorite juice recipes: What-Amazing-Right-Now-Wheatgrass! Take some fresh, Hippocrates grown, (or your own seaponically grown) baby green wheatgrass and put it through the juicer. Don't bother with a cup, drink right from the spout, it really is that good! We have never had such sweet wheatgrass!

Ok, David has just made my favorite tomato/basil/garlic soup for dinner so I must go and join him at the True Home Cafe.

All my love to all you loves,

Katrina.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

The Animal's Lawsuit



My new favorite book, The Animal's Lawsuit Against Humanity, is a story that is over 1,000 years old but still so very current. The animals in the story are given eloquent voice to communicate their feelings about the ways in which they are used and abused by mankind, including a speech from Sheep: "If you could see with your own eyes, our Lord and King, how they steal our infants and young, separating mother from child in order to drink our milk; and how they bind up the legs of our children and carry them away to be killed; how our young are beaten and left hungry and thirsty, crying and moaning in suffocating fear. If you could see how we are slaughtered and our skins stripped away and our bodies cut open...Then in their markets, there are merchants selling meat cooked in pots, meat roasted on spits, meat baked in ovens or fried in pans- why that's us! Its our bodies they're cooking and selling!"

Sounds horrible doesn't it? I am so glad that I don't eat meat while reading this book, or anytime really.

It is full of all kinds of gems, including an understanding of the perfection of each and every creature, made the way it is for very special reasons, just like each and every one of us! Mule explains, smiling, about his friend Camel: "Notice that the length of its neck corresponds to the length of its body, so that it can pick up grass from the earth yet maintain its balance. It also enables the camel to extend its mouth to every place on its body in order to scratch itself. Similarly, the trunk of the elephant compensates for the shortness of its neck. And its ears drive away flies and gnats from its eyes and especially from its mouth, which is always open because of the tusks. And the tusks were made to serve as weapons. Then again, to compensate for its being thin-skinned and tiny, the ears of the rabbit are large so that it can hear the slightest sounds around it, and thus its hearing provides an extra sensitivity to and awareness of its environment beyond all of ours. And so it is with every living creature. God made us all with the limbs and part that are most beneficial to us and that keep us safe from harm."

In one of my favorite lines, Mule is trying to get all of his friends to join him in calling to the Spirit King, a wise and noble spirit who knows the value of justice. Mule spoke to his friends "Let us call to the spirits! Let us call together in one voice! Everyone! Shout with your heart through your lips!"

And may we all call together, shouting with our hearts through our lips, to the beautiful spirits who will bring us to harmony on earth!

Enjoy your juice while loving all living things!! Oh, and don't forget to shout (lovingly) with your heart!!

Love Katrina Rain.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jog!

Houston, Texas

Shangri-La

Well, we are home again after a lovely visit to Houston, Texas.
I have to say I enjoyed Houston a lot more than I expected to, although I do believe what I was exposed to was very selectively chosen by my tour guide David. What I experienced was a city full of trees and stately old neighborhoods with children playing in the streets, bird sanctuaries, Bayous and tropical weather right into December. David's hair became twice as curly in the moist, tropical air!
It was wonderful to get to know my mother and father in-law better, and we were all sad to see our time together come to an end.
Trip highlights included:

~Not getting constipated on either flight. Hooray! In the past I have quite quickly become constipated if I sit in travel all day, but not this time. I don't think I did anything differently, my digestive system is just getting better and better the longer I eat RAW!

~Watching intense cooked food cravings come up (while eating out with the parents at an amazing smelling, cheezy, bready, old-Katrina favorite kinds of foods restaurant) and then watching them pass. I realized again the importance of protecting your senses while transitioning into raw, because that stuff is seductive! Both David and I had a beautiful spinach salad and enjoyed it fully.

~Seeing the house where David grew up, and visiting the elementary school that he attended, walking down halls that have laid eyes on his five year old self.

~Going on warm, damp walks through the neighborhood with the parents and Zoe the Dalmatian.

~Visiting with John Rose, the man who introduced David to Juice Feasting and told David he must stop cooking his food in order to get well. Thank you John!

~Decorating the Christmas Tree and seeing the family history as told by years of collected tree ornaments, from places travelled to, and years past.

~Going out for seaweed salad for David's birthday.

~Dressing up and driving down town to the Ally Theatre for a stellar performance of A Christmas Carol. It even drew some tears from my eyes! I find I am so quick to tear up with emotion since cleaning up my diet, all emotions are right there at the surface coming through strong! The wonderful part of this is that happiness is the most prominent. I even teared up in the airport watching a man eating his lunch alone. This is something that has always made my heart ache, watching people eating alone, but I don't remember ever actually tearing up over it!

~Making a giant Christmas salad to have with the parents on Sunday night.

~Togetherness.

We went a whole week without green smoothies, bee pollen, vitamineral green, spirulina, a high speed blender, or MSM and I can report that we are just fine. Although that green smoothie piled high with spirulina tasted and felt like heaven this morning!

We watched a movie called Lost Horizon while in Houston and the story it tells is very important to all of us seeking a better way. In the movie, a group of people end up in a place called Shangri-La, a heaven on earth, where people eat well and live to be hundreds of years old, no one works for money but for the good of the community, children play freely in the gardens and parks, food grows in the fields, and there is no crime because there are no haves and have nots. What do you think happened? Most of the people who had come to this place did not like it! They could not see it for what it was because they were looking to get out and go back to the world they had come from. They didn't have the vision to recognise where they were. I think this happens to many of us here on planet earth. When we have lived a life that was less than the best for ourselves, it can be very difficult to change our vision and see the Shangri-La that we inhabit, for of course we all have the option of choosing Shangri-La. I have found that raw plant foods, straight from the gardens of the earth, have a huge role in shifting visions to be more Shangri-Laish and lovely. Try it for yourself!

Try making a Shangri-La Green Smoothie, or a Shangri-La Green Juice for yourself at least once a day for a week and see how Shangri-La you feel!

Shangri-La is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton. In the book, "Shangri-La" is a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains. Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia—a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world. The word also evokes the imagery of exoticism of the Orient. The story of Shangri-La is based on the concept of Shambhala, a mystical city in Tibetan Buddhist tradition. - Wikipedia.com

With Love and Shangri-La-La-Ly kisses,

Katrina.

ps. I promise I will post elopement photos SOON. Thank you.