Bios up close and personal with JOYce Hi and welcome to the “it’s all about me” pages … ok, okay, the dance of life is seldom totally alone and it does takes a whole village to accompany a child to adulthood, so join me in meeting a few key “village” persons that have held their lanterns up to light my path and help be unfold towards the timeless universal. I was born into the name Jovanka, a classic Serbian name, but it didn’t take my parents long to exchange their cultural identity, or point of reference, with an anglicized version based on the doctor’s recommendation that an immigrant name could be a hindrance to my future. So, I’ve remained Joyce throughout my days in hope that the Canadian souvenir name sake upholds its promise of being the “merry one”. I’ve recently rewritten the letters in my name to JOYce – so that I can be in continual reminder to connect to what upholds the joy in my life. I was the second born of two children to European immigrants. Our father wasn’t content with central Canada as a nesting ground and instead decided to ignore his instinct and subject himself and his pregnant wife to the annihilating cold of prairie life. Both my brother and I were born in Saskatchewan. He three years earlier and I one and half pounds heavier with longer birth feet. I was first my father’s daughter and my universe revolved around him. Then when he left the planet I shifted my focus to my eight-year-young animated fireball brother. I transferred my unconditional love to him and he gave me his unwanted meal portions of animal parts and cooked fare in exchange for most of my fresh fruit and vegetables - Darwinianism in action or Montezuma’s revenge which ever way you want to look at it ... Our mom worked days, evenings and weekends to ensure all of our needs were met. Growing up was tough, intense and included bouts of loneliness and hardship but having each other made it slightly easier. an architect, a mom, a hygienist At the ripe age of 20, I escaped the sunny days and cutting cold of the prairies on the shirt tails of love as I followed my mate eastward. He was embarking on his new career in the telecommunication industry. I enrolled into an Interior Design Program for one full year and then switched over to complete a five-year undergraduate degree in Architecture. I practiced health facility architecture for a decade until we decided to exchange the sunny cold of Canadian winters for the rain and cloud of the American Northwest. Due to common law differences between the two neighboring countries, the move initiated a union ceremony and so prior to our departure we were married. It was both humorous and perfect to be able to tell my Catholic mother-in law that her youngest son and I were married by A. Pope (the real name of the Justice of Peace). So our 15 year young romance brought me spousal status and two years later motherhood. Our first American born child arrived at the crack of dawn and into the name Zoran (“zor” in Serbian meaning Rising Sun/Dawn/Bringer of Light). Well boy-Z brought me swiftly from the realm of narcissism to the reality of unconditional motherhood. The shift, from meeting primarily my own needs, to meeting his was overwhelmingly challenging and life altering. It is at this point in my life that I awakened from what I can only describe as a dreamy state of unconscious exploration to one of total and utter presence of the moment. This awakened awareness led me to re-evaluate every practice that I had adopted thus far. My brother was the first key player in awakening me to health. He first encouraged me to purchase a juicer and then a blender and then over the years he intermittently deposited tasty raw foods onto my plate. So for ten years I unknowingly and gradually was gradually transforming my cellular make-up. In that time period I started from a Mediterranean diet then moved to a organic lacto-ovo vegetarian one and the last half of the decade I was eating primarily an organic vegan one – food preparation from scratch using mostly whole ingredients. But it took the arrival of boy-Z to snap me into my instinctual drive of nurture and protect to fully engage me into the next health shift of my life. So I went through pregnancy feeding my growing baby and my body vegan foods. Then boy-Z was born after five hours of labour and a few major tears. A big boy with a full head of hair. Oh what a joy to see and hold him … The next health reality came banging at my door as each evening Z screamed for hours bent over from painful colic. I felt helpless holding him each day for hours as he suffered in debilitating pain. Because our son’s food was breast milk only, it only seemed logical to look towards my own eating habits as shedding some light on his pain. It is then that I decided that I was going to turn my back on my skillful cookery habits and worry about the details later. This translated to “out with all” vegan processed and heated foods and “in with all” fresh, whole and non-heated plant foods. When I took this leap of truth I literally shed my ego-suit and totally surrendered to the universal order of life and creation. I had no idea intellectually what I was getting into but I realized that if I wanted to rise above my own unconscious personal suffering and put an end to the transference of suffering onto another innocent sentient being I had to chance the re-attachment of myself to an order that is timeless, powerful and vast. I joined myself in the reality of each moment and left myself ego-self to gradually dissipate one meal at a time. As Herbert M. Shelton so aptly captures it, “Sensation is wo/man’s protector and educator. To deny the importance of the senses is to deprive oneself of one’s greatest means of self-protection and almost one’s only means of education. Without the five senses, mind fails to develop. Pain and attention call our attention to things and circumstances detrimental to our well being. To disregard pain, to smother it, is to deprive ourselves of one of our most useful means of self-protection.” I struggle with the words to describe the fullness of the experience that profoundly changed the course of my life … and it would take a lengthy focus to totally capture the thought and feeling perceptions that passed through me. But in essence, because I replaced both my unconscious inherited and learned practices towards feeding my body with only conscious, instinctual and lead-by-my-senses ones, little did I know that I was also altering my perceptions of everything and everyone around me. My body responded so overwhelmingly and desperately to embracing this lively fodder that I’ve likened it to a longing to reconnect to one of the universal laws and truth of life - a timeless and original life-bond. It was profoundly noticeable how without hesitation my body grabbed so vehemently onto all the raw food that came into my body that I could literally feel the “fog” lifting from within. Within days our son went from six arduous hours daily of buckling over in screaming pain to a happy and pain free baby. He was sleeping through the night at two months. After I caught up on some sleep, I then shared my miraculous experience with others. Those in the “know” said yes of course and those who had no idea about the connection of raw food and wellness planted seeds of doubt. They left me with, “but doesn’t colic eventually go away on its own? So how do you know that the colic just didn’t leave by itself?” Instead of trusting my instinct and personal experience as being authentic I turned my back on raw food several more meals and without skipping a beat our boy broke into screaming pain each time the cooked meal comprised my breast milk. I swore that I would not harm him or myself any longer and I stopped following through on external doubting chatter. Then after four years of raw plant eating I was with child once again. I wanted our new child to be born at home this time since boy-Z was born at a birthing centre. The naturopathic doctor I aligned myself with had had many vegan patients but I was her first raw food vegan mom. To shorten a very long story, I purposefully ran my self through a battery of blood and nutrition tests throughout the entire pregnancy so that I could reassure my alternative medical care givers that I was not a risk pregnancy. As an aside and a bonus, I have all the medical tests in hand and hopefully will reprint them in the not too distant future for all mothers struggling to connect with themselves through the path of raw food eating. I gained less than twenty pounds during pregnancy and my midwife kept telling me to eat more but my body spoke against this advice. Our daughter came to join us in 2002. She was born within twenty minutes on our bathroom floor and just under 7 lbs in weight. She spoke a quiet squawk when she arrived. I held her long body and breathed in her peaceful nature and I still remember how complete I felt at that moment when I witnessed that She was she. The arrival of our she-child has reconnected me to the ubiquitous feminine spirit – another gift from Creation. After ten years of connecting to the unchanged/unadulterated food matter of the natural world, on a molecular level, I have moved closer to my natural authentic self. I spent the first year as a raw food vegan eating Living Foods (Ann Wigmore’s path) and gave it up short of a year of complete dedication. Part of the Living Foods program included the eating of sprouted and fermented foods including grains and legumes. On this raw diet I felt so bloated and heavy so I again responded to my body cues and gave up grains completely. The feeling of relief entered my body once again and I finally freed myself of the discomfort and inflammation. After the Living Foods raw food experience I intuitively fell into the practice of Natural Hygiene. It wasn’t until later that I discovered that there was a school of practice called Natural Hygiene and so I studied T. C. Fry’s Life Science Course, which is a lengthy compendium of lectures all about Natural Hygiene. This health and science based education is the most profound and dense intellectual study on the topic of raw plant eating. In closing, I sit here with my words gazing back at me as a reminder of a journey that had a plethora of vagaries and vicissitudes. Metaphorically speaking, I’ve re-attached my umbilical cord to the universal order of all living things. My pure energy/spirit/breath has found its true connection of “self” and its true home in the arms of Creation. I hope that I can perhaps touch a chord in each of you, that made it through the read thus far, that if you want to directly connect to Creation, or our natural beginnings, the path of eating an all raw fresh diet will reveal through one’s own body vessel a vitality so pure and authentic that you be inspired and rewarded with ample “will” to start living harmoniously and peacefully once again. heartfelt gratitudes … Thanks doc Nikica for all that you are and all that you give unconditionally and tirelessly. You are the catalyst that gave me the strength to walk this path of truth. The deepest thanks go to my husband Mark who stood by me through all of my phases of detoxification and hormone adjustment – he is the rock of Gibraltor in my emotional life. Big thanks goes to my son Z, who if he didn’t come when he did, I would have gone on through life thinking “if it is not broken, don’t fix it”. Our daughter Alexa continues to bless us daily with her level of universal empathy and compassion – needed attributes to help us through the rest of our journey together. Last, but certainly not least, my Mom Ann, or as our children call her Nana – humungous gratitude her way. My mother’s journey was the hardest … both her and my father had the courage to escape their motherland in search of a better environment to discover freedom and prosperity. They escaped their country of birth on foot ending up in a refugee camp for two years in Austria before they made it to Canada in 1958. The boat ride over the Atlantic took months. They finally found hope and freedom from the chains of civil and world wars that they were raised in. To these courageous kids from the former Jugoslavija my gratitude is very high. Without their unrelenting will to seek a better life and move outside the pattern of suffering I may have not had the light or will to do so along my own path. In health and gratitude, JOYce
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