by Lisa Marie Lindenschmidt

I host a raw vegan potluck at my home each month. To shake things up a bit, I’ve been trying to schedule speakers to come and give talks on subjects that are a bit on the outskirts of the raw vegan community. As my first speaker, I thought it would be appropriate to invite Daniel Vitalis to come and speak about elixirs. It was fitting, of course, given that he often gets touted as “the bad boy of the raw food world.” Outskirts seems to be his forte.

We first got turned onto Daniel’s work in April when my daughter and I attended the Superhero Seminar in York, ME. Daniel was one of the featured speakers alongside David Wolfe and LivingStone. At the time, he was talking about spring water and I was convinced: OK, that’s logical. We need to get on spring water. But during the event, I was tooling around, checking out the booths. One of my friends came up to me and pointed to Daniel’s ElixirCraft course that was for sale, said, “totally worth it,” and then walked away. I stared at the CD – a course that explained how to make tinctures and cordials, among other things – and realized that I came here for this. Kind of one of those weird loopy moments where you think something that you already knew. So, I bought the course, listened to all of it… and began making our own homeopathic medicines. Within a month, Jim quit his asthma meds, I cleared out the medicine cabinet of all conventional medications, and we converted to homeopathy 100%.

Since then, we’ve found a local spring and have been drinking only spring water, have taken Daniel’s other course, Invincible Health Mastery, and have watched all his videos on YouTube. I’m making him sound like a guru, aren’t I? Either that or I’m one of his most fanatical followers. Well, he’s not and neither am I. But you have to really listen to what he’s saying and watch how he presents this information. He’s not saying anything we don’t already know (again… that weird loopy feeling): the reason we’ve forgotten our ancient wisdoms (and, yes, there are more than one) is because we’ve allowed ourselves to become domesticated, to become disempowered.

Which brings me back to the potluck. You have to know Daniel’s work on the four Elements (Air, Earth, Fire, Water) to appreciate Jim’s wanting to have him do his talk out in our Grove’s fire pit in the backyard. My husband is a Reiki Master and one of the most powerfully magickal men I know. He really resonated with Daniel’s concepts of the Elements and how each play into who we are and how we relate to the world. Jim intuited that Daniel would be into giving a talk by a fire out in the middle of the woods in the dark… and he was right.

I found that when you ask for a talk about elixirs from Daniel, you’re not going to just get some bits and bobs about how cool elixirs are. There’s a journey involved. He has to show you the starting point – which has absolutely nothing to do with elixirs – and the end point – which is really not the end of anything. All of us had gathered around the fire. Some of us sat perched on the beautiful benches Jim had made, some were squatting on the sides, and the smaller ones played in the dirt around the fire ring. After a brief introduction, Daniel, in Vibram Five Fingers, a kilt, and a Hobbit cloak, started talking.

What you immediately sense from Daniel is that while he’s talking, he’s listening. This was odd for me. I couldn’t quite figure it out at first, but then I started to see that he was listening to something deep within himself, listening to the forest around him, and listening to all the people feeding back at the fire. Everything was of equal value, everything was information that could be assimilated. What was happening here? I tried listening to what he was saying while employing “bigger listening” – to the energies around the fire, the environment around me – and got bombarded with too much information. Is this what Daniel keeps referring to as domestication? Was it possible that this type of tuning in was a common thing in the past? I don’t believe that Daniel has any special superhuman powers, but I do believe that he’s tuned in or more “awake.” I want that.

There has been a lot to unpack from his talk – things he said, things he didn’t say, things I felt – that I need to incorporate. It felt like he simply showed me that I had a key for a door I didn’t know existed. And I’m not so sure that I would have been able to appreciate his talk had I not done all my introspective work over the years. I don’t believe in gurus; I believe in people coming into your life because you’ve called them there to point you in the direction you intuitively know you need to go.

**Lisa Marie Lindenschmidt is a raw foods chef and teacher and owner of Rite Food and Company, which offers workshops on intentional and joyful eating. Lisa Marie and her homeschooled daughter, Mo, record a weekly podcast – called Sweet Peas Podcast – chronicling their raw foods journey together.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 3:49 pm by Lisa and is filed under Events, Food for Thought, Homeschooling, Inspiring Families, Interviews, Organics, Raw Food Recipes, Raw food, Transitioning from Cooked to Raw!, Wild Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.