What if every day of your life was a treasure hunt? What would you be searching for? Money? Connections? Pleasure? Relief? Love? Beauty? Those are just a few ideas, but we are all wired to think of “treasure” as something worth getting and that something is different for everyone. But it is a set up isn’t it? Because if we have defined success, or getting the treasure, as something, like feeling happy for example, then what happens when we have a day that is full of grief? I mean, life happens right? So does that day of grief get labeled as a “bad” day in our minds? Often, it does. And we are socially conditioned to do this, to label our day as a “good” day or a “bad” day. And let’s be honest, but isn’t a “good” day just a day that happens to go our way?
How about just experiencing whatever day we are having and letting go of the label of good or bad? What if, every single day, no matter what is happening, is a treasure hunt, and that treasure is simply, peace. In other words, how can we find the peace in every day? Being at peace with what is happening does not mean we are passive about things that upset us or need changing. It does mean being at peace with our own response to that particular day. If there is something upsetting in the news for you that day, then there is a choice. You can think its “bad” and therefore you will have a “bad” day, or you can accept what you are feeling (not so much thinking) and use it to get to know yourself more deeply, and build compassion for yourself. What are you feeling when you are upset by the news? Sadness? Disappointment? Anger? And then under the anger, is it fear? Powerlessness? Empathy builds when we acknowledge the feeling that is present without judging it as bad or wrong or trying to fix or solve it. First we allow the feeling to be present and recognize that it’s likely pretty normal to have such a response. Next we can ask ourselves the question, “what do I need today?” Here are some ideas to help you find your way.
It could be the guidance you received from your self investigation, leading you in a new and enlivening direction. Or it could be the simple awareness that something does need to change, even if you don’t know what that is just yet. The good news is you are listening now, and not leaving yourself behind in your efforts to attain some idea of success (more money, cleaner fancier house) or someone else’s expectations of you. You are living your life and letting that deepen into something more enriching than before because every part of you matters and exists for a reason. Even the tired and irritable part. We need only be willing to listen and hear the underlying message. Life becomes more complex and stressful when we don’t allow ourselves expression to be the full spectrum of who we are as human beings. We simply cannot afford the luxury of suppression any longer. This doesn’t mean we can explode with abandon. In fact, emotional explosions tend to be the result of long term suppression. It does mean we take stock on a daily basis, and work to surrender our agenda for our lives, or the day, and open up to the bigger picture of who we are and what life might have planned for us. It’s not easy. But it can be magical to set aside all the ways we attempt to control ourselves and our day to day. What happens then? Well, go ahead and see. And share with me about it, if you want, in the comments.
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Food is a basic, primal, essential component of our lives.It plays a role in our personal and cultural history. It informs our biology and genetic expression. It triggers powerful memories and holds negative and positive associations. It has a strong place in the rituals of our seasons, and our day to day lives. Food provides us with a wealth of sensation, pleasure, creativity, nutrients, health, energy, and metaphor.
The choices we make around food are powerful indicators of our relationship to self, namely our attunement with our own needs, our sense of self-worth, our sense of lack and security, our experience of empowerment or disempowerment, and even our relationship with our mothers! Our behaviors around food can highlight the inner experiences, beliefs, or feelings that are driving us. Most of the time, these are unconscious to us. Food is primal and has been apart of our lives from the beginning. Literally as our bodies were forming within our mothers’ wombs we are being nourished by the foods she ate and those flavors and nutrients and even smells were coming in through the placenta and building a foundation for our own relationship with food. Breastmilk by mom is mutable and shifting to meet baby’s needs from morning to night and throughout the months of nursing. Formula is not mutable, but static in its composition, only the amount given changes for baby. Solid foods are introduced in the container of our relationship to our caregivers and family of origin. Are meal times pleasurable for baby? Or stressful? Is baby given appropriate foods at the appropriate developmental stage? The stress of a meal can be internal (too much food, too complex, too soon; or not enough food) or it can be external (is there tension in the family? Does it feel safe to baby to explore food with mouth and fingers?) Family meals can lay additional foundations as children grow up. Is there enough food? Is poverty an issue? Do family members get along? How is food viewed in the family? Is the family mindlessly eating in front of the television and not talking to one another directly? Is there a shared meal from which everyone partakes? Is the children’s food separate from the adults? Is the food beautiful? Tasty? A celebration? A chore? The culture has its role as well. Eat more of this, less of that. This food will kill you, this food will save you. Lose weight. Gain weight. Try and attain an ever shifting and impossible ideal by controlling your relationship with food and your body. Women and men are subjected to this onslaught. We are all told to be beautiful according to media’s standards, which have nothing to do with being healthy, or culturally diverse. As we grow up we experience life and as a result of our experiences we make decisions. We decide whether we are lovable or not, whether we are safe, whether we are worthy of love and kindness by others, whether to hide our bodies or exploit them to get what we need, whether we belong or don’t belong and how we feel about all of it. This is normal, to make such decisions. We are human. Life is messy and we are all doing the very best we can. One day, though, you can begin to take stock. You can begin to reflect and notice your behaviors and investigate what decisions you did make about yourself. And sure it may have seemed logical at the time. But those limiting beliefs are not serving you anymore. Believing you are unlovable, leads only to being unlovable. When we can forgive ourselves for believing that, with understanding and compassion for how we drew such a conclusion, then we are free to investigate being lovable. And if we are lovable, than it follows that we are also worthy of great care and consideration. The person who can best supply that care and consideration? It’s you. Here are 8 key points when it comes to using food as a gateway:
It is so easy right now to look at the state of the world, or the current reality and see problems that need fixing. Politics depends on this viewpoint; all the candidates rallying on the fact that things are terrible and will only be better if “I” am in charge. Now, I am all for being realistic and making practical changes. However, I’d like to invite us to look under the surface of action, at mindset. Our mindset refers to the state of our minds, or perspective, as we look, assess, or make sense of things. Mindset is how we approach a situation. It includes our biases, our personal filters, our cultural lens. Without digging too deep into this rich territory, let’s keep it somewhat simple and talk about a very common mindset, which is the mindset of judgment. When we judge we decide, often automatically, if something is right or wrong. Judgment is great friends with black and white thinking.
Now it gets confusing, when folks want to argue that some things definitely are wrong. Like child abuse for example, or animal cruelty, or poverty and homelessness. Again, I am for positive action and change to address such things. However, I am suggesting that we can be more productive in transforming reality, when we are willing to drop the judgment that things are not as they should be. Indeed, whenever we want anything to be different than it currently is, we create suffering for ourselves. This happens easily as we look at world affairs, but also at the state of our relationships, marriages, health, bank accounts, physical image, wardrobe, cars, homes, the list goes on and on. We are encouraged to compare and come up short on so many things, because then we get motivated to buy things, do things, vote in order to address our own needs for change. But what if change happened more readily when we first can simply accept what is? Accept the current reality, whatever it is. I’m not saying you have to be happy about it, or even love it, but just accept it. It’s what’s happening. First and foremost, when we engage with anything by first accepting, rather than immediately wanting to or trying to change it, we are first present, and able to connect more authentically with what is. Coming from a place of always trying to change a thing is exhausting and limits our ability to see clearly from the get go. Again, we are so encouraged to do this and to see deficits and deficiencies everywhere. We get a sense of identity from it, an identity that cares or achieves or advocates. It can be really scary to consider dropping the mindset of judgment, because we might be afraid of losing a battle, or losing ground, or being seen as apathetic, passive, or uncaring. Consider that we can put all of our caring and education to work and make positive changes from a place of acceptance. We can be at peace first with what is, and then move forward from there, from a place of inspiration and hope and loving, rather than anger and judgment. Our actions then become nourishing and fulfilling actions, rather than a depleting and ongoing fight. In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle puts it this way: “Don’t look for peace. Don’t look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.” It is a nourishing act for ourselves and all of those in our reality to choose into a loving approach, and let go of the fight. Fighting begets more fighting. Loving begets change. Complex issues appear to need complex solutions, but I am going to suggest the opposite is true, that lasting change results from simple interventions. Taking a break before an argument escalates, doing what it takes to “cool down” from heated interactions, giving yourself the gift of a pause. Reminding yourself that you don’t have to convince anyone of anything. You can let go. You can let go and continue on doing what you know you need to do, following your inspirations and dreams. Ultimately, you can just be yourself, and in that process discover how dynamic and evolving you can be. Freedom lies in change, not in rigidly holding onto our positions about things, but in cooperating with what life hands us, and using everything to grow and lift ourselves up. The disturbing things in life often provide us with the most momentum for our own growth. We just need to be willing to be present and accept our own reactions first, to better understand ourselves rather than trying to change something or someone else. That kind of self-reflection can make all the difference between feeling empowered and inspired, versus feeling like a victim and depressed. Consider that everything in your life is helping you to wake up to a new level of loving that is inside of you. Consider that there is more to what we see than we can possibly know. Consider that there is a greater process going on, and that process also includes you and your own growth. Here are 5 steps that can take this deep process and make it something doable in our day to day. These are things that I do to shift myself out of judgment and back into loving, back into acceptance so that I am doing my very best to live from that loving place and not perpetuating the “fight” inside of me, or out. Ultimately, when we talk about healing, this concept is very core. This is changing from the inside out. This is stress management. This is about creating positive change for yourself without having to make anyone or anything else different. 5 Step Loving Plan
Ok, let’s talk about fat. This topic, whoa man. Things are changing. We are coming out of three decades of being told that fat is bad for you. We were told that eating fat will make you fat, and give you heart disease. And as a result of this, food companies came up with hundreds of fat-free products. They took unsaturated fats and hydrogenated them to make them solid like saturated fats. Margarine was born. And around the same time, obesity rates, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses began to rise. Which, in part, is why many doctors and nutritionist are taking another look at fats. Because the logic should’ve followed that if we reduced fat in our diets, than heart disease and obesity rates should decline. However, they have risen. And we are starting to understand much more about the science of nutrition, specifically what happens to fat in the body.
Because fat has been such a scapegoat in our culture, it can be difficult to discuss this topic with open neutrality. Anyone who fears heart disease, or gaining weight will especially be resistant to what is becoming known now about fats. That is, that fat is pretty good for you. And if the right kinds of fats are consumed within the context of a nutrient rich and healthy diet, than many of the health risks we fear (such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease) can actually decline! Even TIME magazine has caught up to the research that is breaking down the myths that fats and cholesterol are bad for you. Breaking down what a fat is, can help us return to a more neutral perspective on fat, rather than looking through a lens of good and bad. Ok, put your science hats on. Chemically, fats are comprised of one acid molecule (glycerol) and three carbon and hydrogen chains. Imagine the letter “E”, where the glycerol is the vertical line and the three horizontal lines are the chains. Those chains are referred to as fatty acids. Now, the chains are important because that is how we can tell if a fat is saturated or unsaturated. Basically, the carbons are bonded to other carbons in a long chain. Since carbons have four covalent bonds, then there are two bonds left which is where the hydrogen come in. Now if you can imagine carbons bonded to each other with hydrogen molecules bonded on the top and bottom of those carbons, that is what we would call a saturated fat. It is simply saturated in hydrogens. This creates a denser substance, which is why saturated fats are more solid at room temperature. These include butter, lard, tallow and coconut oil. Saturated fats have been very demonized by our culture, but new research indicates that saturated fats have health benefits. Medium chain triglycerides (found in coconut oil, a saturated fat) have been shown to slow and in some cases reverse the effects of cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients. Our brains are particularly happy to use medium chain triglycerides (MCTs) as a source of optimal fuel. In addition, essential, fat soluble vitamins, like vitamin D and vitamin A are found in saturated fats such as lard, egg yolks, butter and cream. Now, if any of those carbons have a double bond to each other, than that results in a space left open where a hydrogen could’ve been, since two bonds were used between carbons, rather than one. The result is a chain with less saturation of hydrogen, or rather, an unsaturated fat. These fats are typically thinner or less dense, and therefore liquid at room temperature. These include fats, like olive oil or fish oil. Where those double bonds occur on the fatty acid chain also indicates if a fatty acid is an omega-3, omega-6, or omega-9 fatty acid. Both omega-3 and omega-6 are considered essential fatty acids (EFAs) because we need them and must get them from a food source. Our intake of omega-3 EFAs needs to be higher than our intake of omega-6 EFAs, around a 1:1 ratio. It is estimated that our standard American diet puts that ratio way out of balance, with omega-6 fats leading 25:1. Basically this results in too much free radicals, called oxidative stress, which leads to chronic inflammation, which leads to chronic illnesses, such as autoimmunity, and brain related disorders. OK, remember how we mentioned that in the 80’s unsaturated fats were hydrogenated to act more like a saturated fat? These are what we call trans fats. Actually this experimentation began back in the early 1900’s, but became highly promoted in the 80’s during the low-fat and fat-free craze. Trans fats are unsaturated fats that have been blasted with hydrogen molecules to make them act like butter or lard. Possibly a brilliant idea, but trans fats have proven to be so unhealthy that in 2015 the Food and Drug Administration has finally issued a ban on trans fats and all companies need to remove trans fats from their products by 2018. Until then it is very wise to avoid eating anything that says partially hydrogenated or hydrogenated oils. The body is actually very efficient at using fats for fuel. Fats are broken down into ketones by the liver and the brain is able to use those ketones for fuel. Our brains are about 60% fat, and fat is essential for the myelination and communication of our neurons (brain cells). Not only that, but cholesterol, for example, is a building block for our hormones and brain health. And we all know that balanced and healthy hormones are a beautiful thing (think healthy skin and hair, normal blood sugar and weight, fertility, strong libido, energy throughout the day, ability to deal with stress, and so on). So, it’s time to change our mindset about fat and consider incorporating more healthy fats into our diets. Additionally, just adding more fat isn’t going to make you healthier. Check out this article on the best healthy fats to include. And, while you are including more healthy fats, go ahead and limit all that sugar laden, processed, packaged, and refined food. Increasing healthy choices only works if we are decreasing all the unhealthy stuff too! So enjoy some delicious grass-fed butter, coconut oil, or olive oil. Just use it to cook up with some nutrient rich vegetables! |
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