Rebekah and I got back from a 4-day Shalom Mountain retreat yesterday and I am in very fine shape. Started the polyphasic sleep again with the early morning shift and will be going to the yoga bootcamp group that I founded in a bit. My Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) officially ended yesterday with a strenuous 25 minute jog up and down hills. The inability to do strenuous exercise is the simple test of CFS. CFS is a bitch and it needs to be handled with great discernment, willpower alone definitely won’t do it. In fact, CFS is a disease of excessive willfulness and insufficient surrender.
Shalom Mountain was amazing. Completely back in agreement with Rebekah again after a very painful two week separation. Surely problems will arise again, but this is a totally new stage of our relationship. What she wants from me, which is greater presence and attention on her and others, is what I want for myself also. I just need to balance that with my internal developmental needs (writing, visioning, business activities). There is no conflict, they are two dimensions of the same thing. She calls me to greater presence. We also got excellent feedback from the other participants that we occur very powerfully together, that our complete transparency in all our craziness and our love is very inspiring to people.
I had amended the introduction to this site a few weeks ago to say that the polyphasic sleep experiment has been dramatically successful in terms of consciousness development, but not particularly useful for productivity. Now I think I may be ready to have both.
I had small amounts of caffeine over the weekend, with very powerful effects. This is another issue that is going to require extreme discernment. The powerful creative and euphoria-inducing effects, even from just drinking tea, are very obvious and compelling, but also very dangerous for my ongoing focus and mood. I am not going to declare now how I am going to handle this – I don’t really know yet – but in general I think that taking any caffeine on a weekday schedule is a very bad idea. To use it from time to time as a recreational drug, when I have a little slack in my schedule, may be Ok. Right now I have no slack at all in my schedule, but we’ll see.
(A bit later)
The first day of Yoga Transformational Bootcamp was a blast for me. Two people showed up, one more is expected tomorrow and another one next week. We did some yoga, a little meditation and a check-in / intention setting and it was great. I believe that this model (every week-day 6-8am, body+mind+emotional support) could be an incredibly powerful structure for generating personal transformation. It’s also honing my skills as a group leader and it’s a structure I need for myself to keep functioning and motivated anyway. It’s a total no-brainer, actually. I am currently running a pilot program in Abington at a nominal cost and I have contacted two local yoga studios to sponsor an ongoing program around here. I intend to make a flyer and hand-it out at some job-seekers support groups that I attend. This is really perfect for job-seekers or anybody encountering stressful times in their lives and needing to stay happy and functioning.
