Diego and Marcela have been leading the Macrobiotic movement in Colombia for over 27 years, during which time Diego has annually attended the residential Winter Seminars held in Sao Paulo, Brasil under the direction of Tomio Kikuchi, a contemporary of Michio Kushi. At over 90 years of age, Tomio gave his final 40^th consecutive seminar in 2017, entitled Hopeful Competitiveness. He died in 2019.

Here is the introduction to a recent seminar led by Diego and Marcela in Bogota.

Destiny is the consequence of our daily drama of life and death. Our destiny is determined by our daily lifestyle, by our decision at every moment. And it is with our words and thoughts that we control our lifestyle and our destiny. That is why we need to train for a more lively, more correctable, more understandable, more reasonable word of mouth to develop a greater capacity for self-correction, self-transformation, self-awareness, self-determination. Education is key. 

All our problems are a consequence of the inversion of the proportion between the necessary main part and the desired complementary part of our physiological lever. We need to develop a lifestyle more in harmony with the laws of our internal-external nature, to avoid falling victim to the growing crises of commercial systems (hospital medical system, mass consumption system, religious mystical systems) that are increasingly manipulating most of our lives. The Centro de Auto-Educación Vitalicia de Colombia, proposes a practical theoretical strategy with which to train to transform our lives permanently, as much in the physical level, as the emotional, mental and spiritual level. Let’s seize the opportunity to educate one another!

Their projects in Colombia include horticulture with local people in the mountains outside Bogota, collaboration with indigenous people and their wisdom, rice growing in the lowlands, tofu production, an aikido school, a nature reserve in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, with Diego’s eldest son and, under the guidance of Marcela, a traditional macrobiotic restaurant, and now a downtown gourmet vegan restaurant popular with students, ReverdeSer. 

Diego runs a small specialist building business.

In 2010 I participated in lecture tour in Colombia. With representatives from Brasil and Peru, we experienced all the above activities, including in universities, a rural primary school and we gave a seminar in a women’s prison in Bogota, which was quite an experience! I felt privileged to be included. 

My favourite past Kikuchi Seminars:

• Vicissitude – Fatal imagination – vital perception
• Coherent paradox – Degenerative easiness and evolutive difficulty
• Blood – Master-key of human destiny
• Hopeful Competitiveness – evolutionary use of the progressive crisis and the final 2017 seminar, here the link.

Diego attended the final seminar where everyone was encouraged to continue their activities, including the organic garden at Escola Musso.

We were very fortunate to enjoy the company of Diego and Marcela in London in summer 2019.