What do you think about the decision of the court in the case of Daniel Hauser?

Nuts and seeds

Yesterday I tried raw unsalted pistachio nuts and loved them a lot! I know only one place in Moscow where they are sold, and not that cheap (165 RUR per 0.5 kg, 1 EUR ~ 43.5 RUR). We ate the 300 gr too quickly =)
Something is wrong with the white sesame I bought. I put it to soak, but today it smells bad and doesn't start to germinate after enough time for this.
After I started to soak all seeds I don't like them dry anymore. They change their taste after the crucial moment of waking up due to water.

Sesame / Sprouts / Weekend Market

Sesame seeds:
Yes! After 2 days they started to germinate. I am content. So sesame milk is going to be my daily drink for the coming weeks.

Really living food:
More sprouts of all kinds when they are up to 1 cm long and wheat grass up to 10 cm. This, the wheat grass thing, will be my next step. Already know where to order and when.

Weekend market:
Hurray, sweet cherry from the Tashkent region (Uzbekistan)! At affordable prices (350 RUR a kilo, 1 EUR ~ 44 RUR), in comparison with the cherry sold at Azbuka vkusa supermarkets (750-1500 RUR a kilo). And strawberry that smells strawberry, from Krasnodar greenhouses.

Soaps / Sesame / Ekadashi / Mum

Soaps:
I like natural soaps, love to choose them for presents =), but it's not easy to find one without animal fat or glycerin. So I am happy now as a wonderful savon d'argan artisanal came to me as a present from Morocco (soap with argan oil by Coopérative Marjana, à 14 km d'Essaouira sur la route de Marrakech). If you have never tried it you don't know how pleasant a soap can be!

Some recent changes:
The colour of my skin is getting whiter and pinker. I noticed it only today looking at my hands and I really like this change! Since several days ago I have been feeling cold. I know this is usual for many people who just start switching to raw foodism. In my case I felt wonderful in September-October, slept with a fully open window with 13C. But now it's 20C in my apartment, and I am wearing a sweatsuit.

My weight is low but stable (obviously, the BMI shows I am underweight). My mum's weight has changed considerably but gradually and smoothly, minus 10 kg since December (~5 months). She didn't limit the amount of food nor restricted the number of products. Just ate everything she wanted, raw, with a bit of salt, then sea salt, black pepper, some oil; during the last 5 months she had, besides raw food, some thin Armenian pita (лаваш), bread, several times she ate boiled potatoes, braised vegetables, stchi (Russian cabbage soup, щи) and puff pastry patties (слоёные пирожки), some cheese, milk, coffee. It was a drastic change in eating habits for her, but she feels much better with her current food preferences, which makes me happy as well. She perceives it as a temporary diet, but how suitable is the word "temporary" when she is going to keep to it for the coming year for sure? =).

Sesame seeds:
Read they are all treated with some alkalies in order to remove a specific taste of their hull. I don't know if to trust this info, but yesterday I put some seeds to soak to see if they are alive. By now none has started to germinate.

Ekadashi:
Still try to follow it twice a month. Yesterday it was ekadashi, but I did eat, so I am having a dry fasting today, on dvadashi, instead. My mum joined me today.

A post with pics

La-la-la, my mum has just returned from Morocco and brought me 3 types of dates and several oranges. In such countries oranges are usually not treated when they are for the domestic market, and you can see that they are different from what is sold in supermarkets in countries-importers. They are not that clean and the orange-peel colour is not homogeneous. The taste is superb.

Tomatoes:
One of the Azeri tomatoes I bought at the weekend market contained no seeds! I couldn't eat it. The rest were ok and tasted good.

I read a comment (#11) by somebody whose tastes coincide with mine :)

My fridge can look like this sometimes:

Black sesame "milk":
Yesterday I prepared it for the first time and I loved it! Surely I'll buy some raw white sesame seeds and try them this way as well. Sesame is a wonderful source of Ca as Ca from it assimilates best. For me sesame milk is a way to drink more water without making myself do it.

Grocery shopping / Emotions, habits, traits of character

My monodiet development:
Fruits separately. Sprouts (wheat seeds and mung beans in germination) separately. Vegetables and root crops both separately and mixed, but already minimizing the number of ingredients per "salad". Dill, parsley, green onion, coriander and similar both separately and cut into "salads". Cucumbers, cauliflower, marrows, sweet paprika on their own. Tomatoes with garlic or with radish, or guacamole (tomatoes with avocado, garlic, lemon juice - could be without lemon juice). Korean style carrots.

Bananas: I guess the majority of bananas nowadays are GMO, and when I learned this I even avoided them for a while. But as for now I still do love them, and it's not good to suppress one's wants for a long time =) So I've been buying and tasting every brand I came across. Now I find tasty only one type of bananas, those with Gold Sun Ecuador sticker. I hope to enjoy a lot bananas somewhere in southern Europe when I'm there in late August (if I'm there...)

Tomatoes: I remember the pleasure I got from tasting Turkish tomatoes in Istanbul after my long Dutch experience. It was a drastic change then. Turkish tomatoes sold in Russia are really bad, and the tests by Roszdravnadzor (a governmental agency for health and all kinds of safety issues) show in many tomatoes a very high residual chemicals level, above the standards (but still they are on the market - it's Russia...). These are actually the only tomatoes reported to contain a high residual level of fertilizers on the market. I doubt it, as there are tomatoes from Spain and Holland which don't smell or taste like tomatoes. We avoid them. The tomatoes that taste good are imported from Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, and the prices range from 150 to 250 RUR now (1 EUR~44 RUR) while other tomatoes cost 100-120 RUR a kilo.

Young garlic: just wonderful. Smells nice, contains much more water than late summer garlic. Yes, it's possible to eat several cloves in a monodiet way =) But usually I squeeze it on tomatoes.

Weekend market: summer is coming and the choice is bigger and bigger, and finally there is radish (it's not common to have radish in winter here, only at some supermarkets, looked at as very "artificial"). They all claim on their price-tags it's from Krasnodar (the most southern region of the RF), and I believed them. The second time I came to buy radish I saw some small Israeli packets with radish beyond the counter lying in the same place where the very big packet with what they called Krasnodar radish. They just opened the small packets and put the radish into the big packets from which they eventually took it to weight for the customers. I don't have anything against produce from Israel (I am not very familiar with it, usually it's not bad, their sun gives it all its love). But I try to minimize my chemicals intake =) so my first choice is produce from the countries of the ex-USSR. When I commented my finding to the seller, she just asked me with a sigh if I was taking that or not. I felt offended and went away. A women at a stall nearby was honest with me and said her radish was from Poland. At another stall radish looked different and I was told that that one yes was from Krasnodar.

Changing the character and my reactions: everything is changing automatically, with all I've been reading and watching. But many of my traits of character and reactions need intentional and deliberate efforts to change, and it's hard. By now I have found the most important issues, not through a meditation, but through a systematic deep contemplation, have written them down and realized that I had never seen them so pronounced in me before nor has my mom. I believe learning oneself is the most interesting thing on Earth (the second interesting thing is exploring Nature). The most destructive emotions and habits are as follows: feeling shame (испытывать чувство стыда), censure (осуждение), envy (зависть), pity/compassion (жалеть, жалость). I know that according to the standard modern paradigm it's good to feel compassion and shame. According to many healers it's not as it is self-destruction on the energetic level which passes on to the physical level (physical health, life in the material world), so the way to improve the energetic level is to change the habit from feeling pity etc. to shedding love to everyone. I believe the healers. Their words are in line with Hinduism and Christianity. But although I understand what to do many of my reactions are changing extremely slow.
I have also started to realize what my fears are. An enormous amount of work is ahead. Every time I learn something new about the world and about me I am happy for a while but then realize that there is even more to know. And the world is getting bigger and bigger! A wonderful sensation!

Impressed / Babies

My good friend from Krasnoyarsk is going to become a father in September! And most of my classmates have already married or are getting married this year. 24-26 is the age by which the majority have their first child. Incredible. I am not ready yet even if I had a fiancé. I was brought up in a culture where a good wife is supposed to cook well and I had been learning and was considered to be good at it. And in my dreams I was planning to open a restaurant. Now, with my raw foodism, it turns out that it's been in vain. I will be searching for a husband among raw foodists and even if he is not a raw foodist but a vegan, I won't kill food =)

I was so impressed by the news from my friend that went to take a look at the shelves with baby stuff at a supermarket and the prices. Poor things! They are fed with tinned soup with beef since 12 months! sold under "борщик с говядинкой" where bold letters are diminutive-hypocoristic suffixes as if everything related to babies should be "small" (in every sense).

It's really a pity that nowadays babies are not put to nurse if mother doesn't have enough milk but are fed with artificial milk formula. It's a pity many young mothers choose not to breastfeed even if they have enough milk. And more and more young mothers lose milk because their own food is too artificial (like coke and potato chips) and lacks uncooked ingredients.

O tempora! o mores!

Habits/Affirmations

It's so hard to change habits. For example, I want not to feel anger anymore, but the society has been showing me that a right reaction to certain circumstances is anger. So all my life I have reacted accordingly. Now I want to stop being influenced that much and want to think myself. It's such a new idea to me =)

While wandering in youtube I came across a nice interpretation of positive affirmations. Check this out:

Korean carrots recipe

It's been a while now that I stopped using salt or pepper, or oil. But today I saw a wonderful almost raw version of "Korean carrots" salad and understood how much I missed it. Ssso. This is the post which seduced me =) (in RU). They say this salad integrated into Russian cuisine when many Koreans were moved by force within the USSR during the Stalin era.
I want to share it with you, because it is easy and quick to prepare, tasty, a bit spicy, wonderful as an appetizer. Your dear ones will appreciate it.
My version:
-Good fresh carrots, washed and peeled: slice (better grate) them into spaghetti-like strands, some 5 cm long and 1-2 mm wide.
-Black and red (cayenne) pepper: cayenne pepper, together with garlic, is what gives the whole thing such a special taste.
-Several cloves of (young) garlic: cut in small pieces or squeeze.
-Oil: sesame, or olive, or sunflower. Just a bit.
-Freshly squeezed lemon juice: just a bit, 1 lemon for a medium bowl.
-Sea salt.

I added black sesame seeds and used a spoonful of olive oil.
Mix everything very well! And place into the fridge for 30 min - 1 hour.
I couldn't wait that long and 10 minutes were enough to marinade. I ate the whole bowl with pleasure and am feeling fine now :)

Bon appetit!
PS: this is not my pic, I found it on the web

My mango experience %)

Wow! I already eat much less than a month ago! For example, today I had 2 apples for late breakfast, 2 apples for lunch, 3 ripe bananas when I was in the centre in the afternoon, "super intense salad" (tomatoes, dill, red onion, green onion, a lot of squeezed out garlic, a bit of lemon juice - what a mix! just wanted something bitter) for dinner, a small Thai mango for late dinner, a glass of water during the day. Yesterday it was just several big apples and about 1 litre of water and "infusions" during the day. This is a change, the next step =)

I got a small sum of money quite unexpectedly and, to pamper ourselves, I went to the most expensive supermarket (can't help but mention that their website is so badly translated into English) and bought 3 small Thai mangoes. They are sold only at one chain (to my knowledge) and are expensive (~200 RUR each, 1 EUR ~ 44 RUR). I'd been wishing to taste the Thai variety since I first saw it in a supermarket in winter, but the price ... Now, done! It's delicious! very soft and exquisite, with almost no fibres. The colour is nice, entirely yellow, with no green or red parts. The next variety to taste on a special occasion is Australian (there are not many Australian varieties on the Moscow market, so I am generalizing). I saw it the first time today, in the same supermarket. It is ssso big! and it is even more expensive than the Thai one (850 RUR a kilo, so 1 item would cost ~500 RUR). Mmm

Music Therapy / Water / Thought

When did you use a cassette the last time? Me, yesterday. In the last years of the USSR the borders opened for commerce, trade of consumer goods (before it was largely restricted to metal, oil, wheat and similar). This cassette of mine is of 1991. It is called "The Way of Life" and is based on the Chinese theory of the 5 elements Yi-Ching. The traditional Chinese music you hear in their restaurants is based on the same principles, always combining yin and yang in their striving for harmony. A cassette is not practical nowadays, so I decided to download some Yi-Ching music, in lossless, of course - this is the type of music where no moment should be lost while recording and converting, so the best quality available for the moment. I found out that there is one prominent Chinese music therapist who produced, compiled and arranged a series of albums. His name is Wang Xu-dong.

Modern American music therapists, unlike ancient Indian and later Chinese healers, believe that "All styles of music can be useful in effecting change in a client or patient's life". In the orient only calm and harmonious music is considered suitable for healing purposes (actually, they recommend to avoid all other styles, as these have a negative impact on the cells). Well, the notorious experiments of Dr. Masaru Emoto showed that water exposed to the music of Argentine tango also produces beautiful crystals, so it's not only Tchaikovsky or mantras that influence water positively, while hard rock produces ugly shapes, in accordance with the oriental beliefs. (Emoto's results have not been obtained by other researchers though. I believe in the power of thought so I accept his work with gratitude).

Everything, literally, is vibration, each and every cell vibrates at a certain level, frequency. When this level deviates from its best level it becomes unwanted for the whole organism, and it tries to cure it and then, if it was not successful, to kill it. Good thoughts improve the frequency of an ill cell to its best natural level.
(uf, haven't finished the idea, have to shut down the system)

Hatha Yoga etc.

It's amazing how many different things are stored in my flat! Recently I've found a copy of somebody's experience with Hatha Yoga physical exercises and breathing techniques typed on an old typing machine with some paragraphs marked with a pen. My granny had a typewriter, and I remember her using it in my childhood. I don't know if she ever followed the advice from that copy telling us about how the life of a 60-year-old Soviet man, chronically ill, changed when he started to practice several simple physical and breathing exercises every morning, in combination with tempering and using the power of intention. This story dates back to the middle of the XXth century. And by now nothing has improved in this field. Vice verse, in general people are much farther from Nature than 60 years ago.

No physical exercises in my life now, tempering is somehow neglected... I am focused on forming my intentions the right way, attempting to work with my subconscious consciously; water&infusion&juice fasting; eating products separately; not overeating; understanding the non-physical roots of my physical ailments; rethinking my life. It occupies me fully.