[A24]A Day In The Life Of America

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Raw Food Summit which can be found at http://rawsummitarchives.com. In this excerpt, Happy Oasis shares more on her experiences living with tribes around the world and attitudes and relationships with foods. She always shares insight into what a day is like for her living at the Happy Oasis Retreat.

Raw Food Summit Excerpt with Happy Oasis, the founder of The Raw Spirit Festival.

Kevin: Okay. It's pretty incredible. With the people that you? ve been talking about, what is the belief about the day? Like what are their beliefs around food? What do they eat and then what are their beliefs about the day?

Happy: Well, there's this feeling of sacredness and not a sacred necessarily of seriousness like that we have to be Protestant serious, this is a somber situation. It's a sense of a joyful, deep reverence like a wonder and awe.

This feeling of gladness that become some kind of heavenly habit that we just begin with and end the day with this feeling of life, of joy, of celebration. A friend of mine just sang a song for me just before this interview and his words are ?rejoice, dance, and sing. Celebrate everything.? And so, I think it's the attitude of embracing everything, even embracing moments of sadness and moments of pain.

And for example, here I'd like to say that our relationship with food mirrors our relationship with life. And so that, if we can learn to close the refrigerator when we're feeling sad or angry or fearful, and open our heart instead to reach into heart, you just breathe. So, just feel what's there and to accept it into a very quiet, silent way to just give ourselves a huge hug to feel the love that is in the ambience.

You know, somebody was asking me the other day about Jasmuheen and HRM who are coming to our festival and they're known to be ?breatharians.? Now, they don't really call themselves breatharians. They're more in the solar gazing and into spirit embracing. However, the the question is, ?what really is a breatharians??

For years, HRM and Jasmuheen have all concurred that breatharians are every one of us because food ? let's face it, it's just a snack. It's just a supplement that all day long, we're breathing. All day long, we're inspiring. We're inspiring our self, we're becoming inspired and then we expire if we relax and this gives us space to take in new energy and calmness and clarity. And so, a breatharian is one who is conscious of breathing.

There are conscious and unconscious breatharian, of course. But to be fully conscious of every breath and to see what is happening as a result of that breath because for example, as a meditator, we know that the inhale creates very different thoughts than the exhale. It takes a different speed, a different quality, a different color of thoughts.

Our relationship with food can also relate with our relationship with breathing. We'll notice that if we're grasping and clinging onto food or being repulsed by food, there might be a similar response happening with our lungs and if we can calm our lungs and allow the oxygen and all life-force and what's behind and beneath and inside the oxygen and the other elements that comprise the air, which is actually the love vibration. If we can embrace that in a great gentle way, then we are embracing our entire existence and existence itself in that very tender and sacred and precious.

Kevin: As you're talking about getting up in the morning and as you with the people that you lived with and you have this awaking sense of just wonderment, what is...is the next thought food? I mean I don't know. I want to completely understand, you know, the day of someone who doesn't have any Westernized anything. That to me is just so fascinating.

Happy: It depends on each culture. It depends on each day. Certain cultures, they will pray for hours in the morning.

Kevin: Really?

Happy: Hours and just as certain people believe that it's really important to deserve our food through exercise; other cultures believe it's so important to deserve our food through prayer and that prayer can take many forms from chanting outwardly to chanting inwardly to climbing a mounting, to dmaking love with their beloved, to caring for their children in a way of massaging their children, to going out into their garden, to lying in a hammock high up in a tree in the forest, to chasing after the only ray of sunshine by climbing the tree deep in the forest and placing one's faith right in the sunlight, to going out on a pond and singing to the divine,to just creating the most spontaneous and delicious and driving story that they can.

So, and it depends on the individual. But for example, the Khasi of Bangladesh, when they greeted me and knew that I did not speak a word of their language, they all went into silence, started a fire, and we sat together and we gazed into each other's eyes for hours.

And I always remember those flickering faces and everybody laughing on each other and everybody having such honor and respect for me that they didn't speak a single word of their language to each other just so we could get beyond language and be deeply intimate soul to soul around that fires together.

Kevin: So, it's fascinating. Now, when they're praying, is it for food or is it for life? I'm still western here so I'm like trying the grasp this. I want to get the full understanding because it's fascinating. It's amazing.

Happy: It's actually not for food. It's not for life. It's giving back. It's like in the west, people pray because they want something. Many tribal people, they have kind of a dog-like devotion to service, and it's that just vast appreciation to the being or to the essence of creation and just wishing to give back directly. They never miss a sunrise and secondly as soon as they wake up, they're in joyous chanting. And the sweetness of some of these people's voices as people who lhave lived near people who live in Ashram can contest. They have the sweetest voices on the planet and that sweetness is a result of that devotion to nothing that we can grasp to life itself to the sunrise, to the morning to the very essence of the air as if we could hug and embrace and kiss the air with such gladness.

In fact, the people who live here at the Happy Oasis retreat we all in our own way commence the day with this feeling of devotion to the divine. For example, I wake up often before sunrise and the first thing I love to do and the last thing I love to do, is to gaze up into the stars and to just say good night and good morning to the stars. This morning, for example, I woke up before dawn and cuddled with my beloved and went out by myself and ran eight miles and went over its deep boulders and into the canyons and I have this game that I played with myself. I live out here in the wilderness and this game is that I can never take the same path twice. And then, I go into this pool and there's a waterfalls.

My crown chakra is being splashed upon a torrent of living water that would just pour down from the crowd. Yesterday, we're having the monsoon season here in Arizona now. And then I go swimming. I take baptism, and this water is so clean that I can drink it while I am swimming.

So my body is drinking. My mouth and the feeling of oneness with the water ? it's a really holy feeling and it makes me really happy. And to stand the first two or three hours of the day doing this and then come home, and start work at nine o'clock and being of service to the world and going out first of all into the garden.

Yes, so I collected my breakfast in the wild from yarrow plants. So for example, this morning, I had fresh oak leaves for breakfast followed by yarrow which is dynamite for the liver. And then, upon running home after the baptism, I went into the garden and munched on parsley and nasturtium and nasturtium flowers, arugula, chard, duck, parsley, and clover.

I had this fantastic salad on my hands and knees before you even enter the home. So, how could somebody be any less than happy with the lifestyle like this? And then all day long for the next eight to ten hours, the Raw Spirit Festival for us is happening every day of the year.

And so, we are so privileged and delighted and really amazed by the people who contact us from around the planet every day and just inspire us and delight us in bringing us to a new level of communion with humanity. So that's my day every day.

Kevin: It's fantastic. It sounds like an amazing way to go through the day. It sounds a lot easier than some people's days, yes?

Happy: It's really beautiful and it seems that one of my definition for wealth is that do not get in the car for an entire day is wealthy. Something else, it's really important. A very important part of the raw vegan diet and for optimal health is fasting. So, as much as we love food and we love to eat and it sustains us, and we go for the yummiest food we can get.

I advocate minimizing fruit as much as we can and eating as many dark leafy greens as we can including seaweeds including blue- green algae and what I love to do is take the pond scum off the ponds and the streams hat are right near my house.

Nothing fresher. Each life is fantastic; however, there's nothing better than your own backyard.