Raw learning: Owning rather than being owned by Raw Learning

I've been struggling.

Not with inventing new raw food delicacies. Not with loosing weight or feeling great with this new approach to food.

It's about noticing my approach to learning anything new.

I jump in head first, then find myself in a school or study program and I'm mad as hell because I wanted to discover all these things myself and now the thrill if discovery is replaced with a time bound curriculum. This time I imagined myself at a raw chef school. Training to work in restaurants. This would involve thousands of dollars. Months away and thousands of miles away from home....and I'm pretty sure that I don't ever want to work in a restaurant. Then there are the home study courses. A lot of them. I think I found the best one. But still.......even though I was conflicted, I was even dreaming about the things I would learn, the food I would make. I woke up thinking about the shelf I would make to house all of those DVDs from the home study course.

Whoa! That was when I began to wake up and come back to my purpose. Oh, there was one other thing. Looking at the student kit for the Raw Chef school, I noticed that the chef's coats looked great on the 20 something men, but the women looked uniformly frumpy in their chef coats. Still in the grip, being OWNED by the idea, I researched chef coats, found some made for women's bodies and looked at them all. When I noticed that I was designing my own...the exact chef coat I would like that was not for sale anywhere, I finally stopped and wondered how the hell I had taken myself out on this limb. I had allowed myself, in my eagerness to take ownership of raw food preparation, to be owned by the idea of learning about it.

I'm no stranger to learning, or even to writing courses for degree granting programs. I know how I like to learn through exploration yet and I had immediately hopped on the learning train and off of my path.

It wasn't only with the food and learning. I did exactly the same thing with the technology behind this blog. I had begun the blog so that when I travelled, or even if I was in the kitchen, all of the recipes I had discovered and wanted to try again would be in one place. I hadn't really considered that others would read, and if they did, I was happy to share. Simple. So what did I do? Of course, I wanted to do the very best I could, so I enrolled in a course to learn about optimizing for Google, and so many other technical things I could do to optimize this blog it would take me eight hours a day for who knows how long to do everything I envisioned. it was a great course, but with so much of my creative mind going to learning a whole new way of relating to food, I just wasn't ready to take on the optimization of my blog.

That was the last time I wrote here. The day before I went on a learning binge and imagined myself into a completely different life with one part of my brain while another part firmly planted its feet and said fagetaboutit! I'm not going there.

So I've been stuck when it comes to using this little blog or writing anything at all. This didn't stop the discoveries in raw food. I think it may have intensified the walk along curiosity's path. At least I took photos. I have the evidence. I can re-imagine the dishes and write them down. I own them. As glorious as it is, this raw food inquiry doesn't own me.

I'm back on the path, one step at a time.

If you would like to home study or go to a fabulous raw chef school, here are the best I've found.

Russell James has a home study course that looks awesome. His dishes are as beautiful as they are balanced and delicious.

105 Degrees Academy has a seriously wonderful chef training program.

Crooked Brook is the maker of "The World's Highest Quality Chef Jackets". If you want mother of pearl buttons, embroidered flowers on the cuffs, organic pima cotton, that's be extra. Great fun to look at.

Ryan Nagy for reasonably priced teleseminars on internet presence, with tons of extra information to use whenever one is ready for it. Absolutely the best in the field.

OK...Now I'm ready to write about my food. The blog is simple and clunky without an index. I know what I should do to make it easier to use and look more beautiful but the food, beautiful raw food, is calling.