Can you be better than a Pitbull?
I woke up this morning feeling exhausted in a way I hadn’t in a very long time. There was a chill in the air, and I felt lethargic. I wasn’t too thrilled about this situation, as I like to be happy, upbeat, energetic and alive as soon as I open my eyes, except on some days when I’ve basically given so much the previous day that I haven’t been able to recuperate my spiritual energy overnight.
I laughed as I realized it wasn’t me that was exhausted, but the body I was in! This may sound a bit strange to you if you aren’t in states that I have been, where it’s absolutely clear to me that I am neither the body nor the mind. Spiritual exhaustion takes a whole different form than physical exhaustion. When you’re exhausted spiritually, you cannot sleep. You have to stay awake as only in the conscious state will you be filled up spiritually. The physical body though, is happiest when it’s asleep.
But what does it mean for the body to be asleep — does it mean the body is unable to perform its normal functions? No, it just means that the body is able to do everything it must without making a noise. It’s silent.
The body is a physical entity and as such, all noise in the body is expressed in terms of physicality. Twitching, uncontrollable motions, shaking, quivering — these are all symptoms of a body that isn’t able to fall asleep.
As I watched the Olympics highlights this morning, the body started to ask me for energy. This takes a lot of forms. Eating is one way that you basically pour your own love into the body. Many people believe that the way we get energy is by eating food, but the way it really works is that we are the source of all that is, and we fill up the body with life energy when we feed it food we love.
In other words, if you love what you eat, then the body will get that energy from the food. If you don’t love what you eat, your body will basically waste energy processing something that doesn’t have any value to it. I have been on many different kinds of “diets” in my life — not as a weight-loss tactic, but simply as a matter of surrender — and it didn’t really matter what I ate so long as I loved it. My body was fine no matter how much fat I consumed, sugary stuff, whole grains, fruits, coffee (decaf!) — it didn’t complain, even though it did get very fat on sugary foods! So, does it not matter as to what you eat?
Food, Glorious Food!
If you look across countries in the world, you’ll find that every country has its own special recipes, ingredients, favorite foods and so on. Here in the United States, salads aren’t very good — they tend to be dry and full of lettuce as opposed to real fruits and vegetables, leading people to drench them with oil, vinegar and dressings, not to mention heavy ingredients like grains and meat. I’ve made salads at home using whole foods and they were spectacular — juicy, flavorful and barely containing any salt or seasonings. On the other hand, sandwiches are where the United States excels — almost everywhere you look, some kind of sandwich is available in the stores, either pre-packaged or fresh-made. I myself am partial to the Italian Caprese, although I don’t know if it’s Italian. But who cares — it’s delicious!
If people across the world can eat all kinds of food and be healthy, why is it that everyone is so worried about it? Well, for one thing, people don’t actually understand that the food you put in the body affects the body in a specific way. For example, heating spices will make the body fiery, causing issues if you go too far, while cooling foods like spinach will make the body come down in temperature. These kinds of affects are only good in very small amounts, like medicine. Unfortunately, certain cultures have taken this way too far, especially on the fiery side, as people try to get more fire into their bodies in order to compensate for the lack of sunshine in their lives.
By the way, butter and fat are actually fiery in nature — you don’t have to just eat chillies (hot peppers like Serrano).
So, what should you eat? Eat what you love, what else! Or more importantly, love what you eat. Because you may not always have a choice, especially in urbanized areas where fresh food is actually quite difficult to find.
But if it’s important that the body be energized by the food we love, is it important that we select foods that can actually be loved? Actually, yes. I don’t have a good word to describe this in the English language, as basically I am talking about ingredients that make themselves available to you more easily than other ingredients, so I’ll just call it Bio Availability.
Bio Availability means that the food you’re consuming is amenable to being loved!
Do you know how this works? The more alive an ingredient is, the more easily it is amenable to being loved. This actually holds true for both people and things, but let’s stick with food for now. I love food — it’s never been against me!
When you eat something that’s alive, it responds to you by yielding to your life energy very quickly and completely. And the more alive something is, the more easily it yields to you. The less alive it is, the more you have to struggle to love it. All of us know what foods are more alive than others — they are the ones closest to the state they were in while they were on the vine, in the water, on the land, in the air. In other words, fresh food: fresh vegetables plucked off a vine, fresh fruit fallen off a tree, fresh-caught fish, freshly killed chicken, etc.
I absolutely love the fact that California is fabulous for fresh fruit. Everywhere I go, there seems to be a farmer’s market offering fresh fruit that was grown just a few miles away, in San Luis Obispo, for example. I can find milk that’s also local, and meat butchered but not frozen. Heck, I can even find wine made locally, even though it’s more a fun thing than a food.
A serious misunderstanding of the way we love food is causing the whole world to look at it wrong, create solutions to problems that don’t exist and waste a lot of time, energy and money. We need to eat local, but that means it needs to be taken off life-support as recently as possible — it has nothing to do with economics. I don’t need wild-caught lobster flown in all the way from Maine when I am in Los Angeles! I am very happy with the local fish — the Halibut makes an excellent fish and chips, although I’ll give the ‘Best Fish & Chips’ award to freshly-caught Cod I had on the coast of Ireland. Yum!
And so it happened that I found myself stopping by the Trader Joe’s on Hyperion Blvd in Silver Lake as I bicycled on my way to Glendale.
As I wandered around the aisles, I wasn’t sure anything was worth a damn when I saw a bag of pears that looked, well, amazing! You know, I have a sense for all these things now — I can spot a really good tomato in a sea of tomatoes. And when I looked at the bag of pears, it stood out even more than the loosely sold pears above it. I picked it up without a second thought and made my way over to the express lane, where a beautiful girl was checking out another person’s groceries.
“Bag?”, she said.
“No”, I replied, simply pointing with my thumb at my backpack.
She and I were dancing, to be honest around this checkout counter. As she moved fluidly to check out my groceries, I was fluidly pulling out my phone and getting it ready to pay. She smiled and said something about the way I was moving.
“My body is in surrender, you know — I don’t have any say over it”, I tried to help her out.
“That’s good, gets you out of bed.”, she said.
“Gets you out of bed?”, I questioned, not getting her drift.
“It’s good for the bosses you know — they expect you to come to work every morning”, she said, sadly.
“Oh, I don’t work for Corporate America.”, I shared. “I am a spiritual writer. I love, actually. That’s all I do, everywhere, all over town. Whoever’s with me, I give them my life energy.”
“Oh. I wish I could just go do something like that.”, she said.
“Come with me now then. I write for teenage girls. I don’t know how old you are, but you’re welcome to.”, I joked. There’s no way I would actually invite someone to come with me — my life is too hard for most women to endure. But I was happy to let this woman know she was welcome to join me.
“Oh, I am not a teenager”, she said, disappointed.
A shock went through her system, as she realized there was actually someone willing to just risk it all and love whoever was in their midst. She stood there, frozen. I said goodbye and left.
As I started to approach my bicycle, my senses told me she wanted more love. I turned around without hesitation and walked straight to her counter.
“I’ll share one more thing before I go”, I said, as she looked at me, relieved.
“I was just thinking about our conversation”, she said.
“You know, I used to work for a big American corporation. I was made to — it wasn’t something I wanted. All I did everyday was love, love and love. And I would tell me teammates ‘I pretend to work, and they pretend to pay me’. Everyone thinks their company is paying them, but it isn’t that simple. Money, like everything, comes from another source.”
She had come around to where I was standing. Listening, enraptured, abandoning her post — much to my chagrin, and delight. No one wants to get someone else in trouble, but she was so damn hungry for love.
She just stood there like a schoolgirl, wide-eyed, listening to every word I said. I seemed to have validated a whole bunch of truths she knew but hadn’t acknowledged. I’ve seen this before and I will go as far as I can to pour my life into her while she’s interested. But her co-worker came by, and I knew it was time to let her go.
And then, before I could say anything, she said something about giving love that I had to address before I left.
“So, it’s not like give and take?”, she asked. She was asking a very profound question about relationships, where she believed a woman must be willing to give love as well.
“No, you need to receive it. You can’t give it. You’re a woman. You cannot give love. This is the biggest thing I am communicating in my writing. If you try to give love you will be exhausted because you don’t have any such capability. What you’re doing now is exactly what you must do whenever I come by. Just let me give you my love and you just receive it. Now, go.”
“I will”, she said. I noticed a new-found spring in her step as she went back to her grocery checkout counter.
Happiness.
If you’re a woman, your greatest responsibility is to simply receive the love you’re given. Most of you have no idea how little love you’re given on a daily basis, even though you’re hungry for it, because you go looking for it in all the wrong places. Which brings me to The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf.
As I walked in, I sensed the place was really busy. COVID-19 has created staffing issues for the service industry and many shops like this one don’t have enough people to man their stores.
The manager was running the show, but also handling orders and fulfilling them. I watched her as I waited in line, seeing a high-speed machine in operation that simply didn’t have the time for anything, it seemed, but work.
“Iced decaf Americano, please”, I said when it was my turn.
“Do you want something to eat? A croissant?”, she smiled and asked. Already she had relaxed a bit.
“Do I look hungry to you?”, I joked.
She laughed, forgot all about the order for a second, then collected herself and went back to the order. I thanked her and stood next to the cooler — away from the line — where I could cool off from my intense bicycle ride.
“You can stand over there if you want.”
She’d come over to heat a sandwich and was looking at me intermittently, wondering if I was ok. I was swaying in front of the cooler, happily.
I don’t think most people in Los Angeles know what a happy man looks like.
“I am just cooling off”, I shared, and then continued, “Are you short-staffed today?”
“We are just short-staffed. And you know we don’t have just in-person orders. We get a lot of online orders now. And sometimes they have 10 drinks.”, she complained. “But it’s really hard to hire right now. People come in, they try it, and they decide they don’t want to work here anymore.”
“It’s stressful, but that’s the service industry”, I said. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to girls in the service industry and I’ve heard some really difficult stories, but the one thing that always stands out to me is just how desperately girls want to do a good job when serving. It’s a feminine thing.
You know what makes the service industry the hardest industry to work in? Receptivity. That’s what it takes.
All day, every day, people come in and they give you their trash, because they don’t have much love to share. Even if they’re polite. Combine that with the fact that most women don’t have any idea how to handle human beings in general, and the experience of working in the service industry is akin to being assaulted. All the time. And at the end of the day, you feel like you’re covered in garbage.
And it takes a huge toll on everyone around you, because no one wants to see women be treated poorly. No one.
But the real issue is that women don’t understand they are in charge of how they want to be loved. As I described in The Future, a woman’s responsibility is to communicate how she wants to be loved. Most people don’t have much love to give in the first place, but if they don’t have clear instructions on how to love you, they’ll give you whatever the hell they can. And it often happens to be whatever they’ve picked up elsewhere. Bad energy they’ve gathered elsewhere that they’ll dump on you, and anyone else in their path.
If you’re in the service industry, you’re expected to say yes to everyone. All the more reason for you to be in charge as to how you want to be given energy from other people!
Instead of learning to do that, many women have decided that they’d rather be closed off, unreceptive, unlovable.
Unloved.
The girl at Trader Joe’s stands out in my life experience so far, because she literally abandoned her job in order to receive the love that I was willing to pour into her. That’s what I want to see in my girls — a recognition: here is someone that will love me if I let them. And then, do whatever the hell you must to receive it. Little children are absolute masters at this.
So are dogs! I was recently accosted by a Pitbull that molested me ravenously as I laughed and gave her everything I could. She just wanted to be loved so much I couldn’t say no.
Can you do better than a Pitbull?
