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What a long, strange trip its been
Frank Ferrante allowed a film crew to record his transformation from obese drug addict to clean, serene grad student. Now he’s coming soon to a theatre near you.
Before the café, the elder Engelharts had created a board game called The Abounding River. The colourful board is divided into six regions: creation, abundance, generosity, gratitude, love/acceptance and work. The die is rolled, and you move your pieces the appropriate number of spaces and grab a card from the deck that corresponds to the region where you’ve landed. Each bears a question you answer aloud to the group, which offers feedback you jot down in your logbook. Each card is different, but all ask you to make the negative perceptions you harbour positive.
Intended to inspire meaningful discussions, the game was designed to be an accessible way for Matthew and Terces Engelhart to share their philosophy: that we can manifest our own realities, that everything is unified and that money and resources are abundant. They wanted to start a restaurant based on this idea, and having recently adopted a raw food diet, the couple combined the two concepts.
Even though Café Gratitude has added coffee (and beer and wine) to its menu since Ferrante first wandered in, the eatery is far from being a typical restaurant. The walls are covered with art; garlands of tangled Christmas lights sag off the roof; the tables are equipped with the Abounding River game; and white lettering on the picture window asks passersby, “What are you grateful for?” The distinct smell of steamed grains and green vegetables mingles with savoury scents. Servers are widely noted in reviews to have a “spacey” air about them, and their demeanour adds to the overall strange vibe.
Just take a look at the menu. For one thing, the “seafood” in the sushi bowl is algae (nori), and to order it you must affirm to your server, “I Am Accepting”—yes, that’s the name of the dish. If your server says, “You Are Mahalo” while putting your food on the table, you’re getting pizza with pineapple on a buckwheat-sunflower seed sourdough flatbread crust. By stating “I Am Cherished,” you’ll cause a slice of sweet cheesecake to be brought to your table—only the cheese will be made with cashew nuts. If you’re not in the mood for affirmations and praise, you should probably find a different spot for lunch.
In addition to organic, raw, vegan cuisine, the café’s defining feature is its question of the day. During one of Ferrante’s first visits, customers were asked what they wanted to accomplish with the rest of their lives. During those initial meetings, conversation between the fiftysomething Ferrante and the twentysomething Engelhart turned to Ferrante’s desire to fall in love again—a goal he felt was unrealistic given his weight, his terrible body image and the fact he felt like death was just around the corner.
Long interested in doing a sort of reverse Super Size Me, in which an unhealthy person is healed through good food and a spiritual practise, Engelhart realized he’d found the perfect test subject and invited Ferrante to be transformed. Vulnerable and feeling intuitively that this might be the answer he was looking for, Ferrante agreed. “I really didn’t think much about it,” he says. “There was something inside of me that just said, ‘Go for it.’ I just trusted them.”
Using The Abounding River Personal Logbook—a book version of the Engelharts’ board game, which promises transformation in 42 days to the “abundance view of life” through daily affirmations, writing exercises and activities (including laughing aloud)—they set out to make their movie. First step: Acquire a video camera. “Nobody knew what they were getting into,” Ferrante recalls.
To get an idea of what’s in the Logbook, take a look at Day One. We’re asked to explore what inherited beliefs about money might be inhibiting our feelings of abundance. We’re asked to “give some form of supply” (such as time or money), remembering that giving and receiving are the same. We’ll practise being responsible for our experiences by repeating a mantra about this with a partner, and write 11 times before bed that we take responsibility for “being the creator of” our own experience. And of course, we’ll laugh.
During filming, the guys decided to feed Ferrante a diet of mostly chlorophyll to cleanse him of toxins. Ferrante recalls, “The food was good. But there were things like the wheat grass that I despised with a passion. They would say things like, ‘Well, the reason it doesn’t taste good is because it’s a reflection of the level of toxicity in your body.’ And I would say, ‘Well, I’m surprised I’m not f***in’ dead considering how bad this stuff tastes.’”
Eventually, though, he got used to it.
“The essence of it all is that people transform when they’re being unconditionally loved,” Engelhart explains. “We’d start calling Frank out on it whenever he’d diminish himself in front of us or in public.” Frank interjects, “Oh man, it was so irritating.” But it was working.
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Send link to the movie trailer. Lole
posted by Lole on 8/12/2008 8:02 am