By now it should be no secret for the readers of my blog that I am a raw vegan. At this specific moment I have more than 6 month of eating only raw, unprocessed and uncooked food. My health has improved dramatically over the last 6 months. I lost 14 kilos in the process and I sleep like a baby. I had a nail problem at my left hand, a tiny exfoliation that started to slowly aggravate in the last 3-4 years. Never knew the reason, just observed helplessly that my nail started to lose consistence. In the last 2 months this condition has been completely reversed, my nail is practically complete again. During May last year I had a horrible cold, with more than 5 days of high fever (40 degrees Celsius). I never had the tiniest cold since I started the diet, although I was exposed to viral contexts.

The main reason for that dramatic change in my “physical layer” is my diet, without any doubt. It’s the way I eat that improved my physical health in such an incredible way.

Overloaded With Toxins

After more than 6 months of observing my body reaction to my raw food, I can affirm that my main improvement area is in the toxins speed elimination. I can feel that my body is having less toxins than before, and when it happens to have more than normal, it eliminates the extra toxins much faster. I can’t explain exactly how it does, I can only tell you that I experience states of lightness and elasticity. I feel like I’m cleaner and more functional than before. It’s not only my weight and my body elasticity, it’s like my whole body mechanism is functioning at a better rate.

Our divine machine, the body, it’s a sublime project. We humans could only aim to create substances as complete or as functional as our human tissue. When we can create something good, we do it incompletely. Every food supplement out there, a part from providing you with a list of  allegedly needed ingredients, insert into your body loads of incomplete, toxic structures. Each thermal modification of our food (apart from allegedly making it available for more time) fundamentally affects its base molecular structure. Every “improved” food contains in fact much more harmful substances, making your body working extra hours to eliminate them. And this extra stress weakens your sublime machine that you call your body.

I guess there is some point from where we don’t feel this effort anymore. After this point we’re actually overloaded with toxins. Our body surrendered and it’s only a question of time until the weakest link will fall apart, creating an illness. I’m not a doctor nor do I intend to pose into one. I can only speak from my firsthand experience on this topic and this is what I do.

A Raw Food Diet For Your Soul

Well, the other day I had out of the blue this thought: what if my emotional layer would also be fed with only raw, unprocessed emotions? What if I impose a raw food diet on my soul? What does that actually could mean? What would be the obstacles? What would be the expected results?

Without claiming that I already started such a diet, I will try to write in this post my possible answers to all those questions from above. So, let’s start it:

What Are Raw Emotions?

In my opinion, raw emotions are genuine emotions, not mixed or not “cooked” by external factors in any way. I’m talking about genuine joy, genuine anger, or genuine sadness. I don’t make any polarization here, don’t think that one category of emotions is “good”, as in joy, for example, and we should all experience dumbly only that types of emotions. I’m talking mainly about the quality, or freshness of an emotion, being it “bad” or “good”.

I think that the main cause for “processed” emotions is social constraint. How many times you faked a smile, for social reasons? A smile should be an expression of genuine joy, not something that you could come up with any time. How many times you faked anger in front of your kids, just to make them understand that you are “really upset”? Those are processed emotions and processed stuff is toxic stuff.

If you look at a kid, you’ll see that he has no need to fake anything. If he’s joyful, he laughs, if he’s sad, he’s crying. The emotional body of the kids is totally healthy. All their emotions are raw, unprocessed emotions. They’re not allowing any genetically modified emotion to penetrate their system. And yes, they are happy.

Emotional Toxins

How many toxins we already have in our emotional body? How many times, in need for the tiniest sign of positive emotion we took the whole package, with all the incomplete, toxic emotions? How many times, in search for a sign of compassion we accepted the violence, the aggression, the anger, the irascibility or the annoyance?

All those processed emotions are harmful. Our emotional body needs to eliminate the extra toxins in order to function normally. Otherwise we crack up. We fall in depression, we embrace chronic boredom or various form of plain dumbness. Our emotional body can’t cope with the detox process. I do think that all of our psychological imbalances are in fact signs of an emotional intoxication.

Being Emotionally Raw

If this is the cause, what we should do in order to avoid this intoxication? How can we prevent the overload of our emotional system? Well, by allowing only raw emotions, of course.

Are you looking for compassion? Then allow into your emotional system only genuine compassion. Don’t mix it with guilt, with compliance, with social taboos. Don’t process it. Let it flow in a raw form. Be authentic. How could you do this? I found at least 3 ways of doing it, but I’m still searching. As soon as I find more, I’m going to tell you about, but until then, here are the first 3:

1. Be Honest With Your Emotions

Don’t process your emotions. Don’t pass them through your mind. Don’t cook them in order to make them more appealing to somebody else. Just acknowledge that you have that emotion and let it flow. Don’t put a moral label on it: you can have negative or positive emotions, and that’s ok, as long as they are genuine. Don’t avoid or reject the negative emotions just because they are social taboos. So it’s cooked lunch. I managed to have 3 salads instead of a lunch and I’m doing great.

Processing your emotions means most of the time passing them through a number of filters. Some are coming from your family, some are coming from society, some are coming from your own experience. For instance, you’ve been hurt before if you loved somebody, and now you “process” your emotion: you only allow to feel good around a person after you make sure you won’t be left anymore. You put first the condition “don’t leave me” on the love.

It shouldn’t be like this. You shouldn’t process your emotions based on any previous experiences. You’re living only in this moment and this is everything you have. Bringing emotional filters from the past is not going to make the present more alive.

2. Expose Yourself To Honest People

Honest people can be very uncomfortable sometimes. So it’s raw food. It’s not always tasty in a general sense of good food. But it has this precious quality of being honest, unprocessed, without toxins. By emotionally honest people I understand people who can express their emotions openly. Even when they’re not liking you, they’re saying it out loud. And if the next second they start to like you, they say it.

Being honest in exposing your emotions is incredibly difficult. This is why people with a high degree of honesty don’t have much of a social life. They tend to be rejected because of their honesty. The only exception to that is again in the kids realm. The most emotionally honest persons are kids, of course, and they tend to have a normal social life despite of this. They can express their feelings without the tiniest genetical modification. They are angry: they cry at each other. They are happy: they laugh and play together.

3. Ignore Processed Emotions

The vast majority of processed emotions are generated by mass media. They are like the fast food of emotions. News is generating mostly negative emotions like aggressiveness and fear, while the majority of television shows are playing with the sensitivity chord, trying to raise joy or dumb happiness. Those emotions are like hamburgers, you take one, feel the taste for a second and then you forget about it. This is why media needs to reinvent itself, because you forget the feeling instantly, it doesn’t have any consistency at all. Even more, with that emotional hamburger you get a lot of processed fat and other toxins like greed, faking and emotional emptiness.

As a raw foodist I don’t fight processed food. I ignore it. It’s a fundamental difference. It moves the focus from what you don’t want to happen to what you want to create. I’m not evangelistic with that, I understand that what is good for me could not be good to you. And even if I would believe that would be good for you, I respect your decision. It’s your decision to eat what you want. I didn’t make it 6 months till here by fighting raw food, I just started to ignore what wasn’t good for me. And it can be the same with processed emotions: fighting them would lead nowhere, ignoring them will make room for your new, raw unprocessed emotions.

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As I told you, I’m not doing this already, it’s just a blog post. Right, you just read a blog post about a raw food diet for your soul. I might be trying an experiment with this, after I will get a deeper understanding of what it really takes and I will blog about it, the same way I did with my gratitude experiment.

But it’s not that important if I’m doing something, It’s not important if I’m doing anything at all, in fact. What’s really important is: what are YOU doing?