So it's been a little more than three months since we finished the Master Cleanse. I'm back to eating pretty much everything I did before the cleanse, but there are countless little differences.

I remain more sensitive, more attentive, more interested in what I eat. I think I've taken another quarter-step towards being vegetarian, vegan, and raw. I love all the wonderful foods, all the amazing creations we humans make from the ingredients of the earth; and I really love raw, whole, organic foods best.

In general, I notice that I eat slightly less of whatever it is I'm eating. Perhaps this is why the weight I lost during the cleanse -- about 10 pounds -- is still gone. Not sure, and not that I ever wanted to lose weight, but I guess this is my body's ideal weight.

I still make the spicy lemonade sometimes for breakfast -- I particularly feel the desire for it after a night of unhealthy eating/drinking. Water, lemon, maple syrup, cayenne pepper -- what could be better?

In summary, no grand big summary statements here. But I do believe that that month -- doing the Master Cleanse and coming off of it -- was one of the physically healthiest times of my life. I'll do the cleanse again, to be sure. And I recommend it.

Maybe I'll even write about it again here on The Relaxative!

Not sure what Daimian's retrospective is, exactly. For old time's sake, I'll leave you, kind reader, with the Famous Four Photos of the Healthy Victims of the Master Cleanse.

--tony

Thanks to everyone who celebrated with us at the Cook Something You Rarely Eat Celebratory Relaxative PotLuck. It was a time of tasting much, sharing much, loving much, from peanutty noodles to odd-discontinued-flavor potato chips to lemon scones to hom-hom-hominy.

Here are a few of the recipes of the delicacies from that day.

No doubt, Nicole's from-scratch from-lemons from-the-tree-at-her-house Meyer Lemon Scones stole the show, and then stole the bocce match at Dolores Park to boot.

Meyer Lemon Scones

2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda...

Click "Comments", below, for the recipes...

--tony & daimian

Day 14, baby! We did it!

We've celebrated here at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. The first meal of freedom in the dining room was salad, cous cous, and a vegetable soup. It was as if the bodhisattva spirits of Green Gulch themselves had prepared the meal for us: a raw salad, unseasoned easy-to-digest cous cous, and a soup not dissimilar from the one we'd made 36 hours before.

As always at Green Gulch, the first ten minutes of the meal were silent. The mindfulness and the quiet of the place accentuated our senses.

We took our first bites. The marinated red onions in the salad visited my taste buds like sweet cherubim whisking me from a hell I didn't know I was inhabiting. The spices in the orange-brown garbanzo bean soup recalled my debt of gratitude to my ancestors for evolving and passing down the blessed infatuation with diverse sustenance. And then the thimble-sized morsel of feta cheese I added to the salad, like an ivory dollop of the divine drug of Olympus itself, carried me away to an unimagined realm of ecstasy. Eating! It was good.

Adding to our delight, two beautiful souls -- Iris and Alexa -- journeyed up to Green Gulch to share our celebratory lunch with us...

Bliss and Chaperones:
Iris, Alexa, Daimian, and Tony Share a Celebratory Lunch
in Green Gulch Dining Room (audio highlights)

Exceeding all our expectations, Iris hand-made Certificates of Completion acknowledging us for completing "the Relaxative Master Cleanse 10 Day Fast with Integrity, Honor, Humor, Solidarity, and Community!" We made quick films of our silent ceremony receiving the Certificates there in the zen simplicity of the Lindisfarne atrium.

First Iris, then Alexa, after lunch, officially witnessed our accomplishments. Some video highlights...

Clip 1

Clip 2

Clip 3

Our gratitude to you two amazing women.

And our thanks to everyone who has read this blog at any time and lent support, consciously or unconsciously. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

--tony & daimian

View full slideshow

Another audio entry from the boys at Green Gulch. After a morning of solemn reflection and meditation, perched in a grassy bluff just above the sea, in a loud and gusting wind, they settle in for a calm discussion of the kinkier S&M side of Zen Buddhism, Daimian's amazing nap, and what Tony carries in his sole...

Daimian & Tony, Muir Beach Note: large gorgeous gusts of ocean wind make parts of this recording inaudible.

--tony & daimian

We were on the road, away from our keyboards. So we prepared an audio blog entry.

Envision us high in the gorgeous Marin hills, on our surprise 3-mile trek over the Dias Ridge to reach Green Gulch and celebrate our completion of the Master Cleanse. We're cresting a ridge and catching our first view of the Pacific. The gentlest misty rain is falling...

Daimian & Tony, Glimpsing Muir Beach, En Route to Green Gulch [MP3]
This is a high-quality recording.

--tony & daimian

Who knew that a diet of just water, orange juice, and grapefruit juice could restart the entire digestive system? I'm not even pouring the pulp of the fresh-squeezed juices into the glass. But it's true. After over a week of drinking nothing but lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper, and not passing a solid thing from my colon the entire time, this morning and again this afternoon, I had small, solid bowel movements.

And who knew that after 10 days of eating nothing and drinking only the spicy lemonade, my body could subsist happily for two days on just juice? More than subsist, I felt like I was banquetting royally when I was drinking exactly four 8 oz glasses of juice per day.

The full-size slideshow >

And then tonight happened. Everything changed. Day 12 is the day of the soup, and Daimian and I bought vegetables, marvelous, colorful, health-giving, health-creating, blessed, gift-from-God vegetables. We drooled over them (see photos), then cooked them into a soup according to the official recipe.

Finally, we dished ourselves tiny portions into mugs and sat down for the feast. The smell was the first delicacy, the aroma of the cooked vegetables mingling together -- the onions and the potatoes and the red chard and the tomatoes and the kale and the celery and the beans and the salt and cayenne pepper. A few sips of the broth was all we needed and we sipped slowly. With each spoonful, we picked out one flavor. First, we tasted the potatoes, commenting on them, noticing them, then with the next sip we tasted the onions, then the celery, and so on, in the order we had added the marvelous fruits to the pot.

And we went on. The mugs soon seemed like bottomless bowls. We took two rye wafers apiece as well, but neither of us finished these pieces of flatbread that contain only rye flour and sea salt.

We even chewed and swallowed some of the greens and then some potatoes. The teeth engaged. The tongue worked. It's hard to put into words the physical feeling as the messages of health sped to each and every molecule in my body. "It's a rush," said Daimian, grinning and sitting back for a moment. It felt like the most sublime drug was rushing through our veins.

And we haven't even really eaten yet.

Tomorrow we leave bright and early for our retreat in the sacred valley of the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. The day begins with more orange and grapefruit juice. We'll hike the area a bit, and then for lunch take more of the soup. Dinner will be vegetables, salad, or fruit, depending on what the culinary maestros in the Green Gulch kitchen prepare.

And then saturday will be the coup de grace, the celebration. For breakfast we will return to the spicy lemonade again -- for the last time. And then for lunch, oh splendid lunch, we will eat as we like, however we like, whatever we like.

Food, my friends, is an incomparable blessing. You don't need to hear this from me, but you are. Live and love your body and your nourishment, for it is how we physically create ourselves every day.

With love and gratitude.

--tony

Thinking back I am pretty sure it was yoga which motivated me to begin a new exercise. Thinking now, yoga probably actually just reminded me of sex.

Anyways, a couple of years ago while doing a push-up I realized that if you modify the motion and rather than the straight up and down robotic motion you instead simulated sex and moved in a much more circular motion, then all of a sudden the work-out becomes much more intense (and, no, not just that way). And, not only that, all of a sudden it is alot better and eases any potential difficulty with your back or your joints. A year of two after this discovery was when "Spellbound" (a stellar documentary about a number of kids competing for the National Spelling Bee) made it's way around the art houses. In the film there is this one extremely motivated Indian kid whom they show doing push-ups. I remember after having seen this some people I was with remarked "What the hell is he doing?", while I was thinking about what a smart kid he was to know the advantages on your joints and on the potential strength of your muscles.

However, what has gotten me to thinking about all of this again is that throughout this week I have been spending more time in front of the mirror (mostly naked). I think this probably started from waiting around to go poo in the morning and being in my bath robe. That and because it is fun. That and because I am also a little self-obsessed. Whatever, so in the morning I do these stretches (primarily the Sun Salutation, but also others) to wake up my body from laying around and trying to maintain some type of flexibility. A while ago I also decided that it was probably beneficial as well to prepare your body in much the same way as when you wake up, right before you go to sleep. By being more active in the pre-sleep process I assume your sleep becomes much more deeper and restful.

Well, I was stretching and then I started doing some strange stretches and, there we go, I wind up simulating a sex act. Besides just being enjoyable I am realizing how much it is giving a work-out to parts of my body (not just that part) that normally don't get exercise, and then a stronger work-out to all the parts which do. Now the two things I surmise from this are:

1. I really need to be having more sex and more "open/free/loose" monogamous sex

2. I bet there is someone out there who has a full "mock sex work-out" they already have on the market or are preparing to unleash onto the world (not necessarily S&M-based though. un-"leash"! Ha!). I am under the assumption it won't catch on right now, but as with most effective ideas society generally takes quite awhile to catch up. But have no doubt, before my generation is dead "The Sexercise" craze will have taken off.

Funny sidenote: My friend Nate Byerley is now also known as "The Juice Pedaler". Why this has come into being is because he modified a bicycle-powered blender to be much more efficient and attractive. For this bike blender, there is a convenient attachment to your X-tracycle (a bicycle with an extension) and a kick-stand which allows smoothies, margaritas and the like to be but a spin away. However, as I was originally going to his beta website one of the other top sites (which had an amazing name which I now forget) had a most interesting design for sale. I will recap the video to better illustrate the concept. So, you have this woman (pornstar? maybe. fake boobs? for sure) who is nude and is wearing a bike helmet. She then proceeds over to her bike which has a rather odd-shaped seat. It seems someone left a dildo attached to the seat. Well, she decided the best idea involved her just mounting the seat anyways and going for a ride. Let me tell you, it was quite a ride.

Poop!

--daimian

Orange juice. Now being from Florida I was surrounded by orange juice. From the groves around Orlando to the offer of free fresh-squeezed orange juice at every roadside attraction (full of all types of pecan logs, fresh florida honey, gator heads, shark's teeth and 3 for $10 t-shirts), orange juice seems to be part of Florida's identity. Thinking about all of this reminds me how odd it is that the primary place orange juice still holds a lore for me is in my memories of a Cuban/Miami breakfast. Now, as I am not so much an egg man (the smell turns me off), I am generally not prone to love a diner breakfast, so where my true love lies is in the memories of my youth in Miami. See, for awhile there when I was younger my family actually lived in Miami, and then all throughout my youth we kept coming back. Miami really is a beautiful place when you wind up on the beach, or on a boat drinking rum and cokes with key limes watching the sunset over the city. There is even a full community that used to be thriving in Miami bay called "Stiltsville". Born from all of the boaters in the area, Stiltsville was a number of houses and stores and a community that literally lived at sea. Now it seems there is only a bar left kept in business by all of the boating traffic.

However, the Cuban breakfast was one of my most significant memories, but, of course, whenever you are in middle school and get to have fries with breakfast it is hard not to be significant. But Cuban breakfast didn't only have fries, there was the fresh squeezed orange juice, guava and cream cheese pastries, plantains, cuban bread with butter, batidos (milkshakes, with my favorite consisting of cereal grain), and the wonderfully strong cafe con leche.

Now I am back in fresh-squeezed orange juice land; made by hand with my new juicer. Yummy! My stomache is still in the beginning of freak-out mode ("What, you think you can ignore my ass for a week and then I will just let your punk-ass back in?!") and is a littler gurgly, but mostly okay. I guess the intent of the orange juice (and I am still a bit confused by why orange juice specifically) is to start the digestion process extremely solely by first stimulating your previously dormant system with subtle new vitamins and liquids.

Thanks to Tony, I guess I will have to try some grapefruit (which is amazing if sweet, and traumatic if bitter).

Well, poop out!

--daimian

I just had the most amazing glass of grapefruit juice I've ever had. I hand-squeezed one and a half fresh grapefruits into a glass. I took my first sip slowly.

Surely it is the perfect substance -- its happy pink color, its delectable sweetness, its tonic, astringent, assertiveness. It must be God's own ambrosia. The taste of it on my tongue, as I stood on my deck in the midday sunlight, was absolute perfection. It's a soul-giving, dream-fulfilling, absolutely satisfying splendor, a festival of deep intimate nourishment, an entire complete sustenance, a fantastic blessing, a meal.

--tony

I've already posted some quotes from Stanley Burroughs' 1941 opus, The Master Cleanser, the treatise in which he devises the Master Cleanse, but I want to do a little more for the curious out there. His writings are definitely essential for anyone who's considering the Master Cleanse: he outlines an entire philosophy on being a physical entity on this planet. It's a cleansing philosophy, a meditation on healthy living as an internal and external lifelong journey, rather than as a diet. He writes of the natural way to live -- on a raw, vegan diet; and of the natural way to heal -- through cleansing the body and allowing it to heal itself, rather than through dependence on antibiotics, drugs, or other "poisons."

He writes of radical dietary consciousness and the possibility of a completely disease-free life; still, the things he writes, today, in the Bay Area, don't stand out as especially remarkable. But to realize he did his writing and investigating in 1941, before any of the modern health-food-store crazes or new age diets were even in embryonic form -- is remarkable and demands our attention.

I don't agree with everything he writes. But to be here, now, on the diet he recommends, taking in his holistic thoughts on health and wellness, I have to say, his words open up the possibility of living in an exceptionally powerful and healthy body.

Read for yourself, let me know what you think. I've posted his entire book (more like a pamphlet) here on theRelaxative:

The Master Cleanser, by Stanley Burroughs, © 1941

And here's a shortcut to the passage that details specifically the regimen of the Master Cleanse itself.

--tony