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Some of my confessions about food

6/30/2015

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I have a confession to make...I scarf down my food. Yep, I do. I woof it down as fast as I can, like I'm afraid that it'll go somewhere if I don't eat it fast. Maybe it comes from being from a big family. There was never a shortage of food, but if I wanted seconds or thirds of my favorite dish I had better eat quick or there might not be any left. 

After a while it kind of became my thing, I eat fast, I'm a fast eater. Yep, it was one of the stories I told about myself. There was no savoring that went on, just scarfing. I also ate a lot and ate anything, so I became the girl that ate a lot of anything fast. I love food, but didn't take the time to really pay attention to it or savor it.

Confession #2, I cook fast, and until recently I considered cooking to be a chore. Cooking was a means to an end. I wanted to give myself and my family good home cooked meals, but I really didn't enjoy the process. It takes time to shop, prepare and clean up the mess and I viewed it at a chore. I didn't appreciate the act of cooking and although I appreciated eating good food, I didn't take the time to fully appreciate what I was eating.

Confession #3, I feel bad if I'm not eating food that I know to be healthy. I look at it as poison and I tell myself that I am eating poison while I am eating it. I tell myself that I am weak for not being more disciplined in my eating and in what I am feeding my family, that I am a failure.

A few years ago I started to realize the importance of not taking for granted the act of creating my food and the act of eating my food. I learned that our food is impacted by our intentions. This changed how I viewed my food, the process of preparing it and the act of eating it. 

When we eat, we are taking nature, the world into our bodies and we are changed by what we eat, and we in turn, change what we are eating. Food creates a series of relationships, it links us to other individuals, to nature, to animals. It's where we engage with these other creatures and with one another. Most of us, myself included, do it thoughtlessly right now.


If you haven't read my post about my rice experiment, I would recommend taking a minute to read it. It demonstrates the power of our intentions. Now when I prepare food, I intentionally infuse it with love and gratitude while I am working with it. I look at cooking now as an expression of love and an act of giving. I understand now that cooking is a profoundly sacred act and that by blessing it, by infusing it with love and gratitude that I can positively impact my food. Even if the food is not the healthiest choice, it can be positively impacted by my intentions. The cellular structure of the food can be changed, either positively or negatively by how I think of the food.

There is also power in eating. Michael Pollan has written several books about conscious eating. He states that eating is power, that every time we eat we have an opportunity to vote, to express our values. Do I choose pesticides or not? Do I choose local or not? Do I eat animals or not? He suggests that we be conscious about the choices we make and what we eat, because our choices are powerful, it expresses our vote. 

Michael Pollan's books talk about how many of our current problems are do to the collapse of home cooking. He states that on average we spend 27 minutes per day prepping food and 4 minutes per day cleaning up. Now anyone who has ever prepared even a simple meal knows that it takes a lot longer than that to prep and clean up, suggesting that most of the food is highly processed and purchased already prepared. He also notes that 46% of meals in America are eaten alone. 

Corporations are cooking our food and the industry doesn't cook very well. They are not interested in our satisfaction with the food or our health and well being, they are interested in our cravings for fat, sugar and salt. They engineer the food so that we crave it. 

Michael Pollan offers up the following advice on food that I love :)


-Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans.
-Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
-Eat only foods that will eventually rot.
-Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.

If you are cooking food you will be more healthy just due to the nature of cooking it yourself. When you cook and handle food you automatically become more conscious, more aware. I am working to be more mindful about honoring the food that I am making and eating. I take a moment to think about where the food is coming from and to be grateful for it and for the effort of those that produced it for me. 

Michael Pollan talks about how we've had a great forgetting in our culture. He suggests that we need to remember the value, the importance and the power of our relationship with food. What is your relationship with food, with eating, with cooking? Do you intentionally infuse your food with love and blessings? Do you savor your food? Do you intentionally vote with your food choices? I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas in the comments or in an email!
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How to heal an open wound

6/23/2015

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Do you have any wounds that are still open? Maybe it's a recent wound, someone stepped on your toes, made a hurtful comment, excluded you, disrespected you, you know the drill. Or, maybe it's an old one, a wound that you shoved down, buried deep, real deep, or maybe one that you thought you had moved past, that time had healed it, but then boom you are triggered again, your button was pushed. The anger, the hurt, the disappointment bubbles up to the surface. Your wound has been exposed, peeled open again, the scab comes off, it was never truly healed. 

How do we heal these open wounds? How can we move past something once and for all and not carry around the anger, the disappointment and the hurt? Sometimes we don't get the apology or the justice that we feel we rightfully deserve. What do we do then? 

Let's talk about forgiveness. Forgiveness is a decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward someone who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness. Fred Luskin, the director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, has spent decades researching and teaching about forgiveness. Luskin emphasizes that forgiveness is not about forgetting, as the old adage would have us believe, but about letting go. It is about choosing positive emotions over negative ones. It is not about condoning or excusing offenses. 

Forgiveness brings the forgiver peace of mind and frees us from corrosive anger, it heals the wound. As Buddha says, "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned. " Forgiveness isn't for the other it's for ourselves. It empowers you to recognize the pain you suffered without letting that pain define you, enabling you to heal and to move on with life. 

Forgiveness is also about the ability to make peace with the word "no". I wanted something that I did not get (respect, inclusion, acceptance). The essence of forgiveness is to be resilient, when you don't get what you want. After grieving, be at peace with not getting what you wanted.

We often think of forgiveness as a kind act, an act of mercy or compassion extended to someone who wronged us. Although that may be true, research over the past few decades shows enormous personal benefits to forgiveness as well. We've probably all heard that forgiveness is medicine. According to research, here are some of the most compelling ways forgiveness is good for us.

-Forgiveness makes us happier. Research suggests not only that happy people are more likely to forgive, but that forgiving others can make people feel happy.

-Forgiveness improves our health. When we dwell on grudges, our blood pressure and heart rate spike, signs of stress which damage the body. When we forgive, our stress levels drop. Studies also suggest that holding grudges might compromise our immune system, making us less resistant to illness. 

-Forgiveness sustains relationships. Studies suggest that forgiveness can repair our relationships before they degrade and dissolve.

-Forgiveness boosts kindness and connectedness. 

-Forgiveness increases spirituality.

Forgiveness is a choice, a practice, a trainable skill and it's a process. Forgiving doesn't usually happen instantly, it's a process. Depending on the circumstance, It can take time and effort to achieve. The more we practice it, the easier it becomes.


I've found that at times it's easier to forgive others than it is to forgive myself. I think that's true for a lot of us. We tend to have high expectations for ourselves and if we feel that we have screwed up then it's hard to let it go. We make a choice to keep beating ourselves up over and over. 

One tool that I've found to be helpful to me is to use a three direction forgiveness meditation. The three directions are to meditate on asking for forgiveness from others, extending forgiveness to yourself, and offering forgiveness for those who have hurt or harmed you. With each meditation, you spend time envisioning the act of hurting, seeing and feeling the pain, looking at it from all different perspectives, and then choosing to release the hurt and allowing for forgiveness. This tool has been useful to me as I practice building my forgiveness muscle. Some wounds require multiple meditations in order for them to thoroughly heal.

Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving your power over to the person who caused you pain, learn to look for the love, beauty, and kindness around you. Put more energy into appreciating what you have rather than attending to what you do not have. Remember that a life well lived is your best revenge anyway. 

I firmly believe that we each need to answer to our actions, good or bad.  If I've injured someone, I will eventually feel that pain in some way shape or form. I don't need to hold onto the injustice of someone's actions toward me. It's the Universe's job....God's job to take care of that, not mine. This helps me to let it go, to forgive so that I can live in the place of my choosing.  A place of love and gratitude, not one of anger and resentment.

Do you extend forgiveness easily to yourself and to others? How do you go about getting to a place of forgiveness? I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas!
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Your Shimmering Self

6/16/2015

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A few months ago I participated in a Beautifully Made Holy Yoga class taught by my friend Amy Hoyte. During the yoga class, as we were moving from one pose to the next, Amy read to us a beautiful piece that I refer to often and have shared with many. I was thinking about it again the past few days and decided that I wanted to share it with you all. Here it is, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.


Taken from The Sacred Romance by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge

"For what shall we do when we wake one day to find we have lost touch with our heart and with it the very refuge where God's presence resides?"

Starting very early, life has taught all of us to ignore and distrust the deepest yearnings of our heart. Life, for the most part, teaches us to suppress our longing and live only in the external world where efficiency and performance are everything. We have learned from parents and peers, at school, at work, and even from our spiritual mentors that something else is wanted from us other than our heart, which is to say, that which is most deeply us. Very seldom are we ever invited to live out of our heart. If we are wanted, we are often wanted for what we can offer functionally. If rich, we are honored for our wealth; if beautiful, for our looks, if intelligent, for our brains. So we learn to offer only those parts of us that are approved, living out a carefully crafted performance to gain acceptance from those who represent life to us. We divorce ourselves from our heart and begin to live a double life. Frederick Buechner expresses this phenomenon in his biographical work, Telling Secrets:

 "[Our ] original shimmering self gets buried so deep we hardly live out of it at all...rather, we learn to live out of all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world's weather."

On the outside, there is the external story of our lives.  This is the life everyone sees, our life of work and play and church, of family and friends, paying bills, and growing older. Our external story is where we carve out the identity most others know. It is the place where we have learned to label each other in a way that implies we have reached our final destination. Here, busyness substitutes for meaning, efficiency substitutes for creativity, and functional relationships substitute for love. In the outer life we live from ought (I ought to do this) rather than from desire (I want to do this) and management substitutes for mystery. There are steps to a happy marriage, five ways to improve your portfolio, and seven habits for success.

The inner life, the story of our heart, is the life of the deep places within us, our passions and dreams, our fears and our deepest wounds. It is the unseen life, the mystery within-what Buechner calls our "shimmering self." It cannot be managed like a corporation. The heart does not respond to principles and programs; it seeks not efficiency, but passion. Art, poetry, beauty, mystery, ecstasy: These are what rouse the heart. Indeed, they are the language that must be spoken if one wishes to communicate with the heart. It is why Jesus so often taught and related to people by telling stories and asking questions. His desire was not just to engage their intellects but to capture their hearts.

Indeed, if we will listen, a Sacred Romance calls to us through our heart every moment of our lives. It whispers to us on the wind, invites us through the laughter of good friends, reaches out to us through the touch of someone we love. We've heard it in our favorite music, sensed it at the birth of our first child, been drawn to it while watching the shimmer of a sunset on the ocean. The Romance is even present in times of great personal suffering: the illness of a child, the loss of a marriage, the death of a friend. Something calls to us through experiences like these and rouses an inconsolable longing deep within our heart, wakening in us a yearning for intimacy, beauty, and adventure.

This longing is the most powerful part of any human personality. It fuels our search for meaning, for wholeness, for a sense of being truly alive. However we may describe this deep desire, it is the most important thing about us, our heart of hearts, the passion of our life. And the voice that calls to us in this place is none other than the voice of God.

We cannot hear this voice if we have lost touch with our heart.

The true story of every person in this world is not the story you see, the external story. The true story of each person is the journey of his or her heart. Jesus himself knew that if people lived only in the outer story, eventually they would lose track of their inner life, the life of their heart.  



Have you lost touch with your heart? What is your external story? How many different coats and hats do you put on each day? What is the story of your heart?  Are you being your original shimmering self? Personally, I am working at being more consistently authentic and to live from the story of my heart. 


I would love to hear whether you enjoyed this piece, please leave me a comment or send me a message. 

Amy Hoyte's Beautifully Made Holy Yoga can be found at https://www.facebook.com/beautifullymadeyoga on Facebook or on her website at http://amy-hoyte.squarespace.com.
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Keeping my side of the fence clean

6/9/2015

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We all, on occasion, face the challenge of how to respond to drama, gossip, other people's choices, issues, challenges, etc. It's part of life, part of the human existence, part of the experience. It can be easy at times to get pulled into the negative talk, or to engage in analyzing what is "right" for a particular situation. We all have it around us, at work, at school, in the neighborhood, in our families, at our kid's activities, at church, etc.

Shit happens and sometimes shit even hits the fan. Sometimes it happens when you least expect it...you are going along minding your own business, doing your thing and working hard to lead a peaceful life, when BAM! you are all of a sudden smacked upside the head. Shit just hit the fan. It's in moments like this where we are faced with a choice, a decision on how to respond and how to react. 

My personal motto lately has been "To keep my side of the fence clean." That's really my main job anyway isn't it? I need to worry about myself and what I am bringing to the table, how I am acting and reacting. I feel it's my job to teach my kids to keep their side of the fence clean too. What someone else does or doesn't do is really none of our concern. As photographer and author Edward Weston observed in his Daybooks, "A lifetime can well be spent correcting and improving one's own faults without bothering about others." 

Maybe my job is to understand whether I play a role in it, whether there's a lesson for me to learn, maybe to exercise empathy, compassion and if needed forgiveness. The rest, well it's probably none of my business. 

There's a key question that my friend, Haywood Simmons, frequently mentions that you can ask yourself when it comes to any conversation, but especially when reacting to conflict. Even if you aren't part of the challenge, but listening to another person's frustration, ask yourself, "Does it improve the silence?" If I am going to say something right now, will it improve the silence? In other words, will it bring something positive to the conversation or will it be feeding the negativity? A friend of mine said, "We are given two ears and one mouth for a reason." If it doesn't improve the silence, don't say anything at all.

Keeping my side of the fence clean also applies to the challenge of the ego. We've all heard of the old adage...the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. This refers to the way we tend to look at other people’s lives and other things that we don't have through rose colored glasses. It comes from the idea of looking at a neighbor's lawn and seeing it as looking better than your own, when in reality you’re just ignoring anything negative about it and downplaying everything positive about your own. It's about coveting, about being envious. Keep my side of the fence clean, don't bother with what's on the other side of the fence. Chances are the grass isn't really any greener.

Gretchen Rubin posted a piece on her website titled, 7 Tips for Minding My Own Business, that I would like to share with you. Her motto is to "Mind my own business." To do this, she reminds herself of the following:

1. No one asked for my advice. Except in the rare instance when people specifically ask me for help clearing their clutter, raising their children, or deciding their careers, I should keep my advice to myself. 

2. I don’t know the whole story. It’s very easy to assume that I understand a situation and to form a judgment when in fact, I understand almost nothing about what’s happening. 

3. I only see things from my own perspective.

4. Just because something makes me happy doesn’t mean that it will make someone else happy, and vice versa. I often fight the impulse to be a happiness bully, but what works for me might not work for someone else. It's probably better to encourage people to trust themselves and to listen to their own inner guidance system.

5. Don't Gossip.

6. I’m on someone else’s turf. I’m puzzled by my mother-in-law’s habit of keeping her toaster unplugged. Why — why keep the toaster unplugged? Whenever I want to challenge her to defend her unplugged-toaster position, I remind myself, “This is her apartment and her rule. Unplug the toaster.” (I have to confess, I usually forget to unplug it. But I mean to unplug it.)

7. Find explanations in empathy.

How about you? Do you struggle to mind your own business, or to keep your side of the fence clean? What are some other ways of trying to keep your side of the fence clean?  I would love to hear your thoughts!


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Prayer Energy

6/2/2015

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Prayer, to be honest, I never knew how to do it. I didn't prefer the standard ritual type prayers, and yet I wasn't good at knowing what to say on my own, partly because I felt like prayer was asking for something. I felt like who am I to ask for something when I have so much? Now I look at prayer differently. I am by no means an expert on praying and prayer, in fact I very much consider myself to be a student. I have, however, learned some things the past few years that have enhanced my prayer life and have made that area of my life more meaningful. I would like to share some of these with you with the hope that it'll do the same for you.

Most formal definitions of prayer speak to petitions, a request to do something, that's how I use to view  prayer. Now I view prayer more as my line of communication to God. 

My pastor discussed prayer in a recent service. He said that prayer is just being with God. That prayer is practicing the presence of God. I like that a lot. I believe the presence of God to be that of love and I like the idea of practicing that presence. He also said that prayer casts/drives away worry and fear. I've mentioned fear in a number of my posts and I do believe in the power of casting aside fear and worry through prayer and surrender. I once heard someone say, "If you are going to pray then don't worry. And if you are going to worry then don't bother praying. You can't be doing both." My pastor also said that prayer causes change, so that we should put on our crash helmets when we pray :) He did not mean this in a negative way, he meant it in a very positive and powerful way.

Sue Monk Kidd, best known as the author of The Secret Life of Bees, says that prayer is the attention of the heart. What we give the attention of our heart to matters deeply. We become what we pay attention to. She also believes that anytime you are fully present you are in prayer. I found that to be an intriguing comment that I like to ponder.

In a previous post titled, Good Morning Soul, Who Am I?, I discussed my morning prayer routine. This routine is special to me and something that I do everyday. I always start out my prayer time with expressions of gratitude. Gratitude raises my vibration, gets me in a good frame of mind, and allows me to instantly feel connected to Spirit. Because gratitude raises my vibration I feel it also ramps up my energy source, which makes my prayer more powerful. As I've mentioned before, our intentions (thoughts, words, beliefs) are powerful. I believe that if my intention, my belief, is that this will expand my energy and makes the prayer more powerful, than that's what it will become. Similar concept to what Sue Monk Kidd refers to as the attention of your heart. 

I believe that the secret to prayer is to forget what we think we need. To turn it over and ask for God to show us the way. Not to pray for a specific outcome, but to pray for the highest and best good for all concerned. I surrender this, I turn it over, I let it go and pray for the highest and best good for me and for everyone involved. This sets the intention, brings awareness to the situation and releases it, opening up to creative solutions through surrender and through prayer. As Gabrielle Bernstein says, "E
ven just saying 'I surrender' is a prayer. That's enough to open the invisible door. We surrender what we think we know. When we pray for what we think we need, we block our intuitive power."

Now, in particular if I am faced with a challenge, instead of praying for a particular outcome, I pray for understanding and to find the lesson, if there is one. It helps me to sit in meditation with whatever the issue or challenge is and pretend that I am looking at it from above. Looking at it from all different angles and perspectives with the intention to better understand the situation. I look at it with curiosity. If it's a challenge I am having with another person, I try to look at it from their perspective and wrap it in empathy, compassion, and forgiveness. Then I ask for the highest and best good for everyone and surrender it. 

If a particular prayer is especially important to me, then I have a special technique that I like to use that gives my prayer some extra powerful oomph. Here's how I like to do it...I build up my energy and my vibration with gratitude and actually visualize it growing either around me or in a ball in my hands, that I grow larger and larger as my energy grows. Once I've grown my ball of energy, I set my prayer intention and then use the ball of energy through visualization and by physically moving the energy out toward the person(s) I'm praying for. Or, if the prayer is for me, I dump the prayer energy over my own head and body. I know, I know, it sounds a little weird, but give it a try! Grow your energy through gratitude, set you prayer intention, and then send out the energy or give it to yourself. 

Pamela Ashlay McPherson, a spiritual teacher, says, "Ask once and ask no more - When you ask through prayer or meditation; ask once and ask no more; if you continue to ask repeatedly, you are merely saying that you doubt that you are being heard or that life will respond to you." This was another interesting concept for me to ponder. I always thought that it was important to hold a prayer over and over to give it more intention. I'm curious what you think about this concept. Please leave me a comment if you have thoughts regarding this idea. 

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