Janine (mother) has me doing this lemon cleanse with her right now... This is nothing like the lemonade diet or the master cleanse of which I am sure you have all heard. No, this is nothing like that... You begin each morning with a small glass of pure lemon juice made from the tiniest lemons you have ever seen. They are green, not yellow, they look similar to a key lime but have a distinct lemon flavor. The cleanse follows a simple pyramid program in that you begin day one with one lemon, then day two with the juice of two lemons and so on until you reach 10 on day 10 and then you scale back down to only one lemon. This all sounds well and good and I buy that it probably helps restore proper PH balance within the body due to the alkaline effects lemon has once ingested. But it doesn´t stop with just drinking the lemon juice...nope, you have to actually rub the rind all over yourself after you are done juicing. Yeah, I do that everyday and then I walk around with little bits of lemon crap crusted to my body while Janine and I practice yoga and drink tea. Afterwards, I shower and go about my day as a normal person... totally normal, right?
On Sunday, Janine (mother), her youngest daughter, Sofia, Sofia´s friend, the shaman, his family (wife and three small kids) and I all piled into Janine´s 5-seating SUV and headed for Pacacamac. Here Janine has a sanctuary/retreat type of place there are a few small cottages, loads of hens, a goat, geese, gardens, an orchard, a freakin heard of dogs who are only interested in getting all up in your business or trying to eat the new baby kittens. After lunch, the kids busied themselves by chasing the kittens around with the dogs until one got stuck up in a tree and they had a new task of attempting to remove said cat from the treetop with a long stick...safe...
While the kids were occupied preserving the sanctity of the sanctuary the adults began to prepare to make an offering to the earth and God asking for safety on our trek to Ausangate next week. Now mind you, the shaman and his wife basically do not speak English and while I currently can understand some Spanish, my spoken word is pretty much crap. So at this point I really had no clue what was to go down and was mildly terrified that this "offering" was to be that lonely old goat I had seen around lunch time. Fortunately for me, I was pleasantly surprised to find that is consisted of many prayers, blessings from the shaman as he smoked the sacred tobacco pipe, loads of flowers and other benign components completely unrelated to animal slaughter. All in all it was a very interesting and intriguing ceremony. I am grateful for the opportunity to have experienced it.
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