Day One of Thirty

Hi.
The next 30 days I'm going to be doing a juicing cleanse...and I've been told journaling is a great way to help explore what exactly transpires while doing so. While I'm fairly sure inducing carpal tunnel syndrome will certainly help curtail my fingers desire to shovel food in my mouth, I'm not at all convinced sharing it with others will have any effect on you or on me. Perhaps I'll improve my communications skills, and hopefully along the way find some folks who inspire me to keep going with this idea of mine....
I realize cleansing has a rich history in the eastern philosophies, and though I could do far, far worse than simply spending a month cleansing, my aim goes a bit beyond giving up solid foods and treating my body to a long holiday.
Having been a jockey for 19 years has meant a lot of things to me, one of the most impressionable being on a diet 9 months a year, 6 days a week...and over the years I've had to accept how dieting has helped to shape the kind of person I am today. For better, and often, for worse...Thanks to my chosen profession I've become something of a walking contradiction. I eat salad for dinner 5 nights a week, grapefruit for breakfast, yet I started smoking 20 years ago as a feeble way of dealing with hunger when I first started having to lose weight. I spend hours maintaining fitness as a means to be fit and as a way to keep weight off, yet for the past 8 or 9 years I've also had on average 4 drinks a night, 6 days a week.
The past year or so it has finally dawned on me I wouldn't in fact ride races for the rest of my life. Ridiculous, I know. In light of this revelation, I slowly began to see the destructive ways of my life as a steeplechase jockey...4 years ago I began practicing yoga, and it began a sort of seismic shift in my world view, and how I fit in it. My desire to smoke and drink as a way to deal with the pressures of being hungry for hours a day, 6 days a week changed...I could feel a small part of me grow to something larger, this awareness that had been percolating for years in me slowly grew to a voice I could no longer ignore...
You see, while I was dieting all these years, I developed a defense mechanism, one which enabled me to be successful in both losing weight and winning races. It was accepting this notion I had to. I had to run on days I felt like shit, I had to practice yoga even though I wasn't sure if I was riding the next weekend...and when riding races, there were places you rode that demanded a certain style of riding if you wanted to win, plain and simple. I was lucky enough to learn this lesson a long time ago, and use it time and again to win races. You simply cannot win a race at Nashville if you're more than 5 lengths off the lead at the bottom of the hill, you will not win a race at the Gold Cup if you move too soon, and on and on it went...I kept revising this with each horse I rode, each year that passed. As anyone will tell you, I can be a prick when it comes to my convictions. Unwavering. And most of this stems directly from being one who listens to horses...I didn't arrive at my knowledge for being a good jockey due to dumb luck. I listened. And over the years, after thousands of horses and races, my intuition became something of a second nature...and when something becomes second nature, it can come across as rather arrogant when you combine the comfort of knowing something in your bones with a loud mouth.
I digress. Fairly certain I'll be gettin' back to that point from time to time.
So I allowed myself to fall under the illusion it was alright to smoke if it was the price to pay so I could ride...of course, most folks would tell you it's called addiction. Not me. It was just what I did. The past 4 years has seen a lot of different schools of thought come to me...buddhism, Landmark, yoga...and they're all amazing, in their own way. Slowly, ever so painfully slowly, I began to see how I had this default place that justified my smoking and drinking...
And frankly, I'm using this cleanse as a test pilot so to speak. I'm going to test the various theories I've come to admire. Choice. Forgiveness. Openness. Sangha. Meditation. Being present. And I'm going to see if I can finally kick tobacco and drinking out of my life doing it this way...oh, and vomiting on anyone who happens to be reading this. Apologies in advance.
If it makes any difference, this sharing will not consist solely of lamenting what it feels like to be hungry, though I'm sure there will be enough of that...I do hope with all my heart I can share in a way someone will find worthy of reading.
I wonder if the power of choosing is as powerful as it is made out to be. I wonder a lot, so hopefully you can deal. Ha.