Recently I volunteered at a raw vegan holistic retreat, Hippocrates Europe. I was put in charge of organising the seaweed baths and received a massage daily. The actual participants were there for treatment from illness, mental or physical (although others were just there for a detox and casual therapy). It wasn’t really my business why each individual was there and far more interesting was seeing the participants grow over the week of juice diets, group therapy, relaxation, yoga, sexual awareness sessions, daily enemas (no joke). I gathered from the other volunteers that there is a large community of ex-addict-vegans who keep their body as clean from chemicals, parabens, meat, dairy, general animal produce, any negativity, alcohol and obviously drugs. The man behind this, who set it up and who took some time out to let me interview him is Darren Maguire. I met him on a Thursday at the Dublin Food Co-op where he does his weekly shop.
When did you first start getting into, not just veganism, but raw vegan diet?
I started touching on the raw vegan in 2004 when I was starting the program. When I was running smaller retreats. Way back when I was a chef I was very focused on nutrition, you know, so I was always researching, studying that- the nutrition end. So that's when I started really experimenting with it myself.
Had you been vegetarian before?
Yeah I started off with the vegetarianism and then slowly went into the vegan and then into the raw, yeah.
Five or so reasons why if you can?
Why? I mean you feel fantastic, fantastic energy, clarity, complete change in skin complexion. It makes sense... it makes sense. The other thing is all illness goes away, you don't get colds and flues or anything like that, or teeth problems.
Could you describe more about it 'making sense'?
For me, as a chef, I like to study things scientifically. When you research into it it makes a lot of sense in terms of disease free living, high energy living that kind of way it makes sense. Aay an example- when you eat meat it takes a lot of energy in our bodies, a lot goes on in our bodies to break down the meat to extract the amino acids. If you're using the meat as protein the body has to break down the amino acids. Whereas if you have protein in a raw vegan form it's straight amino acids, so your body doesn't have to break it down. That's something that's quite new. The bio-availability of nutrients. Before we talked about how something was nutritious and now we talk about how bio-available it is. So things like wheat grass go into the blood stream straight away and things like sprouts. That makes a lot of sense. Your body's working less. Also there's a lot of by products when your body has to work to break something down and your body has to clean that up. So your bodies not cleaning that up.
I thought there might be an ethical side to it?
For me? Well, you know, like I said I was a chef and I was a very passionate chef. I was very into animals. We used to serve meat on the menu and I was into organic meat and I was into how many days it was hung, all this kind of thing. So definitely ethical was not on the agenda at the start but interestingly enough when I got into raw vegan I became very moral and ethical... about it. Which is very interesting. There was just a shift, because I suppose, in a spiritual and philosophical way, they'd say you’re more grounded and connected with the earth when you're eating this way. I suppose that's kind of what happened I just became more connected to the earth and now I'm completely against it. It's interesting.
Could you talk about your personal working schedule, in terms of the year and what you do?
I'm full-time working for the program which is Hippocrates Europe and under Hippocrates Europe there's a number of projects. One is Tribal Dance which is a project in itself but it's also a fund-raising form for Hippocrates Europe. What we try and do with the space is to bring the dance community together with the twelve step people which has not been done before. We promote an alcohol free dance space which is a safe space. It's set up in a particular way and we attract a lot of people who are in recovery from addictions and obviously people who have come through our program but particularly people who are in addiction recovery. A lot of the dances out there for those particular people are very intimidating so we felt that Tribal Dance was filling a gap there because it's kind of like a bridge for them. We meet them where they're at. With the house music, ‘cause Tribal Dance is predominantly house music (and reggae) but predominantly house. We try and bring in consciousness, different exercises that we bring into the dance, the opening and closing circles, and also we have a lot of staff there who are very experienced and very present. We hope that allows people to feel a lot more safe and just be themselves because a lot of the time if we go to a dance [check that who he's referring to here are people in recovery at dances, clubs, etc aimed at people who drink alcohol, take drugs], we're intimidated and we don't feel particularly feel safe. We go to a place we call an ‘ego place’. So it's a place where we're not particularly in our bodies because we're on high alert. So we're not really being ourselves we're not really expressing freedom because we're kind of in this protection mode and we're being somebody else. It's an Ego state. So with Tribal Dance that's why we have a lot of people who are therapists, who are able to make eye contact, they're grounded. It’s a safe space energetically.
Could you explain more about the opening and closing circle?
The closing and opening circle is basically, again, to allow people to feel safe because a lot of the people may have never danced before or they may have never danced before while clean and sober. So the opening and closing circle is about them coming together as a community and saying their name, saying how they're feeling. Just by a small thing we're encouraging people to connect to their body, identify their emotional state and then say their name. Which we know makes a huge, huge difference to them in their night. Because if I say 'I'm Darren, I'm feeling nervous' there's a shift and it changes the whole night for people and people feel connected, people feel part of [the Tribal Dance] and this is the whole thing- to be connected, conscious. So that's the idea of that. That's Tribal Dance. A lot of work and time goes into that it's one of the projects. The other project is Living Food which does the food for all the different events. That's very time consuming. We’re the only dance space in Ireland that has only raw organic food, juices and teas. We’re promoting and educating people around that as well.
Is that it's own catering company?
Yeah, and then there's next step recovery which is the five aftercare groups we run every week. So people who come through the program come to an aftercare group and then we have some people who haven't been to to the program yet but they come into the group anyway. That's just like a therapy group. We've five of them going every week.
It's a commitment [for the participants], they don't come and go they have to commit and come every week. Some stay for a year, some stay for two years. With Hippocrates Europe the after care is so important. There's a whole community of people, hundreds and hundreds of people who have come through the program who participate in the after care and they participate in the dances and the yoga and the message and things like that. People who've come down to the program then offer discount massages for the people. We check in with them, how’s their relationships? Are you getting enough touch, massage? How’s your sexuality? Are you able to express your femininity because it’s such a life force? We check in on all that and then we encourage them to touch base with the massage therapists and the raw food. The seven day program is just a platform.
When I was volunteering at the retreat I heard that there’s two different twelve step groups and that there’s a sort of ‘tension’ between them...
The tension I know about is, eh, one is CA - that’s cocaine anonymous - and the other is NA. They’re both twelve steps but the tension between them is because they approach it differently. We’re not affiliated with them obviously, we do promote people to get involved with twelve steps.
Is there a big difference between your groups and twelve step programs?
Oh yeah, what we do in the groups, it’s psychotherapy. It’s two hours every week and it’s a deep process, working on emotions, what’s trapped in the body but we encourage everybody to get involved in twelve steps.
Tribal Dance -
Outhouse - Nov 10th
Twisted Pepper - Sunday 25th Nov, and ongoing once a month on a Sunday
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