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Coconut oil...another superfood

9/29/2015

I don't know about you, but it can be challenging to know sometimes what's healthy, what's not healthy, why something is recommended over something else, etc. One question that I get a lot is why I use coconut oil and why it wasn't recommended that we use it in the past? Well, I'm certainly no expert, but I do love my coconut oil and I wanted to share some info with you on why it's my favorite oil.

Coconut oil has been used extensively in tropical countries and has recently become popular in the United States, but what most of us don't realize is that it had also been popular in the United States until the 1970s. A strong propaganda campaign was initiated in the 1970s by the corn and soy oil industries against coconut oil. Coconut oil was considered harmful for the human body due to its high saturated fat content until this last decade when people began to question the claims of the propaganda. The claims against saturated fats have been determined to be false and thus coconut oil's popularity has increased again.

Coconut oil is one of the richest sources of saturated fat known to man, with almost 90% of the fatty acids in it being saturated. However, new data is showing that saturated fats are harmless. Many studies that include hundreds of thousands of people prove that the whole “artery-clogging” idea was a myth. Also, coconut oil doesn’t contain your average run-of-the-mill saturated fats like you would find in cheese or steak. Instead, it contains Medium Chain Triglycerides which are fatty acids of a medium length.

Most of the fatty acids in the diet are long-chain fatty acids, but the medium-chain fatty acids in coconut oil are metabolized differently. They go straight to the liver from the digestive tract, where they are used as a quick source energy or turned into ketone bodies, which can have therapeutic effects on brain disorders like epilepsy and Alzheimer’s.

The health benefits of coconut oil are numerous. They include boosted immune system, weight loss, stress relief, hair care, skin care, cholesterol level maintenance, proper digestion, regulated metabolism. It also provides relief from heart disease, kidney problems, high blood pressure, diabetes, HIV and cancer, while helping to improve dental quality and bone strength...whew!!!

Almost 50% of the fatty acids in coconut oil is lauric acid. When coconut oil is enzymatically digested, it also forms a monoglyceride called monolaurin. Both lauric acid and monolaurin can kill harmful pathogens like bacteria, viruses and fungi. So coconut oil has antimicrobial, antioxidant, anti-fungal, antibacterial and soothing properties.

So all of that is really super cool, but how do I use coconut oil in my everyday life? Here are the main ways that my family uses coconut oil.

1) Cooking - I use coconut oil in place of other oils or butter in my cooking, especially anytime I am sautéing anything. I also occasionally put a small spoonful of it in my coffee or tea. Ingesting it aids in digestion, weight loss, immune system function, etc.

2) Skin care - Coconut oil is a great natural moisturizer and also helps with wrinkles and aging skin. So put away the lotions filled with harmful chemicals and give it a try! It can help fight off athlete's foot and diaper rash too and can be used as an effective sunscreen.

3) Hair care - My two girls and I love to use coconut oil on our hair. It's one of the best natural nutrients for your hair. It's an excellent conditioner, moisturizer for your scalp and helps to keep your scalp free from lice and lice eggs. We rub a small amount on the ends of our hair after washing and/or rub a small amount into the scalp area.

4) Dental care - Coconut oil helps to develop strong teeth and stop tooth decay. I take a small spoonful and let it melt on my tongue and then swish it around in my mouth for 10-20 minutes. The hardest part for me is letting it melt in my mouth. For some reason it just feels kind of gross. It can also be melted by putting it in a cup and running it under warm water first and then use it like a mouthwash.

Next up I plan to make my own homemade deodorant using coconut oil as the base. I've heard that coconut oil with baking soda, cornstarch and essential oil is a nice replacement for store bought, chemical filled options. I'll let you know how it goes!

These are the main ways that I have incorporated coconut oil into our household. There are many other ways to use it and many many more benefits than what I've included in this post. I would love to hear how you are using it. Please leave me a comment or send me an email.

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Create more white space

9/22/2015

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In my post a few weeks ago, I brought up the topic of dying and whether we have unfinished business, things to take care of in our lives. In this week's post I want to follow up on that idea with the concept of creating more white space. What does your schedule look like? How does it get filled in? Do you set the priorities or does the calendar get filled up all on its own? What are your priorities? Are they in sync with your values? These are questions that I want to explore today.

Do you sometimes feel like you need to jam pack your schedule in order to feel productive, or as busy as the next person? Does having a "full calendar" make you feel important and give you a sense of value? I have to admit that there have been times where I felt like I wasn't very valuable or important if I didn't have a crazy busy schedule to rattle off to someone if asked. A lot of times though the items that were on my calendar were not necessarily things that were a priority to me or that I felt passionate about. I was just dong them to avoid having to say "no" to someone, or to make myself feel important.

I believe that in our current culture, we are trying hard to eliminate the "white space", to be efficient, to get things done, to demonstrate our value. We push ourselves to cram in as many projects and activities as we can. We value ourselves based upon how many tasks we have to accomplish on our schedule. We almost feel embarrassed if we take time for a priority other than work or volunteering.

What if we created more white space? What if we sat down and determined what our priorities are, what we truly value, what we will regret if we died today and didn't do? What if we filled our calendar first with all of our priority stuff? Including, first and foremost, all of our personal priority items. Building our schedule around our priorities. Scheduling your priorities and then build your year, your month, your week, your day around them. Hold them as sacred and non-negotiable. As Steven Covey says, "Don't prioritize your schedule, schedule your priorities."

What if we said "no" to things that we are not passionate about leaving more room on our calendar for our priorities? It can be a hard thing to do, especially at first. The more you practice saying "yes" to your priorities and "no" to things you are not passionate about, the easier it becomes.

Let's also consider looking at white space differently. Instead of seeing white space as a negative, let's view the white space as the place where our creativity resides. Sometimes we need to be inefficient for a while in order to be more effective, more creative, in the long run. View the white space as your time to allow your ideas to marinate. The white space is where the creativity is, it's where the idea can marinate and grow and expand and develop. Wander around for a bit with the idea. Allow your ideas to breathe. This doesn't mean holding onto them until they are perfect. We are not striving for perfection, just time for the creativity to happen. As Elizabeth Gilbert calls it, "The power of finishing. I don't want it to be perfect, I want it to be finished."

Let's also consider viewing the white space as time to breathe, time to just be, time to reenergize, to rejuvenate, to reflect, to reconnect. It's opening up time for flexibility, space for flex if we need it. Time for a loved one who may have an immediate need, time for you if you have a need. It allows us space for adapting to shifts and changes that arise.

What are your priorities, your values? Do you schedule them first, hold them as sacred? What do you think about creating more white space? Have you tried this concept? What has worked for you?

As always, I would love to hear your feedback. Leave me a comment or send me a message.

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I need to tell you something important

9/15/2015

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I just want to take a moment to say something, to acknowledge something...you are AMAZING, you are an INCREDIBLE person, you are ENOUGH. YOU are kind and caring and lovable and generous. You are a REFLECTION of our creator. Yes, each and every one of you is truly AWESOME!

No matter how you feel at this moment or what is going on in your life, just pause and take a moment to let those words sink in...to FEEL them.

REmember that we are good, that we are a spirit having a human experience, that we need to be gentle with ourselves and with the other kind, loving, gentle souls that we interact with in this lifetime. We are ALL one. We are ALL here learning.

You, at your core, are deeply good. You don't need to operate from a place of fear. You are bigger than that, your light is brighter than that, you are more powerful than that, you KNOW within you a better way, it's called love.

Don't be quick to judge...be quick to listen, to empathize, to be compassionate, to apologize, to forgive, to love.

Don't be quick to be right...be quick to understand, to hear another perspective, to be open to a different way, a different thought, a new direction, to love.

Don't be quick to bully, to manipulate, to control, to compete...be quick to collaborate, to compromise, to respect, to partner, to love.

You don't need to be those things, you are okay, you are safe, you are enough. Take the time to pause, to connect to your higher wisdom. Be gentle with yourself and be gentle with others. You may not know the state of their life and the impact, either positive or negative, that you may have on them.

Create a ripple, but let it be a positive ripple. One that emanates outward and creates more beauty, more love, more empathy, more compassion, more forgiveness along the way. There is enough harshness in this world already, spread more softness. You can never be too soft, too loving. Harshness creates more harshness.

Spread more of who you are into the world this week. Open your heart wide-open and share with the world your incredible spirit. Be gentle with yourself and be gentle with those other incredible spirits whose lives you will touch this week. Your heart, not your mind, is your greatest source of intelligence. Operate from your heart.

Go ahead and shine your big, beautiful, bright light. Be the reflection of God's light and love as you journey through this week.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this post. Please leave me a comment or send me a message.

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What if you died today?

9/8/2015

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Not to be morbid, but what if? What if you died today? Do you ever think about it? Do you ever visualize what your funeral would be like? Who would show up? What they would have to say about you? What would your eulogy be? I don't think about my funeral anymore, but when I was younger I would occasionally play it out in my head. This would generally happen on nights when I was struggling to get to sleep.

What unfinished business do you have? Is your house in order? I'm not talking about your house being cleaned and organized, or even that you have your will updated, I'm talking about your relationships and the state of your life. What feels left undone to you?

What about your bucket list? Do you have a bucket list? What regrets would you have if your life ended right here, right now? Have you fulfilled what you came here to do? Are you satisfied with what you've accomplished in this lifetime so far?

Should we spend time giving heartfelt thought to the 'state of our life', to where we are and where we desire to be, to what our heart is telling us we need to do, to feeling good about the status of our relationships, to how much love and light we have spread in this lifetime? I don't think any of us want to be on our deathbed and have regrets, at least not significant regrets anyway.

How are you doing at balancing your life right now? Are you prioritizing the things that are most important to you? How about your relationships? Is there someone that you need to forgive? Someone you need to tell that you love them? Someone you need to express gratitude for? What is holding you back from doing it?

I think these are important questions that we sometimes don't take the time to ask ourselves. We carry on with life, running on the hamster wheel, too busy, too consumed with the daily tasks of life to give attention to where we are at and where we are going.

Now that summer has ended and we are entering into a new season, let's all to a moment to reflect. Reflect on what is going well and what we want to change. Darren Hardy poses this question, "If you died today, what are 3 things do you wish you would've done, gone, become, tried and risked? Just 3 thoughts, jot them down. Then do something today to move on one of those ideas, even if only in a small way."

There is a thought-provoking piece that I read several months ago that I refer to often that I would like to share with you. It's a piece by David Brooks called, The moral Bucket List. Here is an excerpt from his piece.

About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.

When I meet such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often have a sadder thought: It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.

A few years ago I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those people. I realized that if I wanted to do that I was going to have to work harder to save my own soul. I was going to have to have the sort of moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness. I was going to have to be better at balancing my life.

It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.

But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.

So a few years ago I set out to discover how those deeply good people got that way. I didn’t know if I could follow their road to character (I’m a pundit, more or less paid to appear smarter and better than I really am). But I at least wanted to know what the road looked like.

I came to the conclusion that wonderful people are made, not born — that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.

If we wanted to be gimmicky, we could say these accomplishments amounted to a moral bucket list, the experiences one should have on the way toward the richest possible inner life.

There are no guarantees, life can change in an instant. We all know it, and yet most of the time we carry on as though we have all the time in the world. Sometimes we get a wake up call. Maybe we hear of bad news that happened to someone we know, or maybe we have a close call ourselves. Usually for a period of time we act on that wake up call and take care of a few things that we've been ignoring. What do you need to take care of? Can this post serve today as a wake up call for you?

I would love to hear your feedback on this post. Would you have any regrets if today were your last day in this lifetime? What 3 things did you jot down? Leave me a comment or send me an email. If you would like specific guidance on this area, please let me know. Our Happiness Untangled and Own Your Higher Purpose workshops are a perfect compliment to any work you are doing in this area.

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You are a lightworker

9/1/2015

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Do you think of yourself as a lightworker? Have you really given it much thought? I know that there was a time where if you asked me I'd be like, "sure I'm a lightworker", but I wouldn't have necessarily given it much prior thought or consideration. I also know that there were definitely times where I felt like my light was being dimmed, or stolen from me, or that I didn't feel like I could shine it bright. At times I would let circumstances or others determine how bright my light was at any given moment. Sometimes, I would struggle to pull myself up out of the hot mess and shine bright.

You know the familiar song that you may have learned in church, "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine"? The bible references light in several areas. In John 8:12 it says, "Then spoke Jesus again to them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." God created us all with light and we are all one. I believe that we are all lightworkers.

I also believe that no one can steal your light or take your light. Only you can dim your own light. As Gabrielle Bernstein says, "Be a mirror reflection for the light, rather than a sponge for the darkness. Your job is not to soak up and absorb the negativity, your job is to stay grounded and committed to the light. Do not try to fight the darkness, just stay committed to the light, to forgiveness, to love, to nonjudgement, to compassion, to empathy."

I love this concept of staying committed to the light and not fighting the darkness. I'd rather focus on what I want, rather than focus on what I don't want. I'm a big believer that thoughts, feelings and beliefs become things, so if I focus my energy (my thoughts, feelings, beliefs) on the darkness than I'm creating more negativity for myself.

I actually don't prefer to focus on the concept of 'fighting' at all. Focusing on fighting, even if the ultimate goal is admirable, in my opinion brings forth more fighting. The war against drugs, for instance, will bring about more of a battle to fight against drugs. I would rather focus on what I do want, peace, health, love, etc.

I don't like to focus on evil, the devil, or satan either. I often hear people referencing and giving energy to the devil, or to evil, and needing to fight it. I personally just don't prefer to give any power, energy, thought or feeling to darkness. We energize what we choose to/want to energize. I don't prefer to energize the darkness. I prefer to stay committed to the light.

Do we sometimes live in fear? Living in fear keeps us from the light, it keeps us from shining our light as bright as possible. I strive to eliminate the things that are not light in my life, like fear and limiting beliefs.

We are human and sometimes we may sink into the darkness, but our goal should be to live in the light with just moments of darkness versus live in the darkness with just moments of light.

All it takes is a spark, one spark to bring forth the light. You are a lightworker and I am a lightworker and the world needs us to radiate our light out to each other. Choose to shine yours, choose to shine it bright. Focus on reflecting the light versus absorbing the darkness. Focus on the thoughts and feelings that cause your light to illuminate greater...love, forgiveness, compassion, empathy, gratitude. Let your light glisten and shimmer and dance out across the world.

I would love to hear your feedback on this post. Do you consider yourself to be a lightworker? What do you do to stay committed to the light? Leave me a comment or send me an email.

“If you look deep within, you will find a brilliant light. To many, far too many, squint and turn away from the shine. Let your eyes adjust, and bathe in the radiance." ~ Unknown

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Coconut oil...another superfood

Create more white space

I need to tell you something important

What if you died today?

You are a lightworker

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