new beginnings

The same way I used to redefine myself when I moved from one country to another as a teenager and later a young woman,  spring cleaning used to be an annual house cleaning ritual to start afresh and signal a new beginning.  

Well, our bodies can use it too.  After a winter of heavy comfort foods, it is good to give the body a chance to reset.  At home, we have come to adopt my cookbook author and nutritionist friend Marika Blossfeldt’s spring and fall cleanses around the time of the equinoxes.  The well cooked root vegetable purées proposed for the spring cleanse ground the body, breakfasts consist of green smoothies, the lacto-fermented vegetables, so simple to make at home, bring beneficial probiotic bacteria to the gut to promote good digestion and boost the immune system, the lemon water before all meals rids the body of toxins, and the vegan and grain free core cleanse period allows the body to shift energy from digesting to healing, and “purging toxins and metabolic waste.”

After the cleanse your palate will be more awake, you’ll be more sensitive to sugar and salt, and your taste will be brighter.  Your head feels clearer after having eliminated all alcohol and caffeine for a few weeks, you may have shed a pound or two or three, and you will newly look forward to the lighter and fresher spring foods that are starting to appear at the markets.

A spring cleanse signals a new beginning to body and mind, something we can all use after a living through a pandemic year and a lonely winter, many of us cooped up working from home without much social interaction. Let’s start afresh with new hope and new health.

giving back, and then some

A system is considered sustainable when outputs are offset with at least as many inputs.  As a culture, we are entitled and used to taking.  In the long-term, however, that doesn’t work, not with people, who burn out, nor with nature, which deteriorates. 

Every year for the past three years we have planted hundreds of native conifers, deciduous trees, and shrubs we’ve obtained from the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation to restore the havoc the construction of our house caused.  We feel compelled to replenish and heal this little spot on earth that we are now stewards of. Trees and shrubs were removed where the driveway was cut in and the foundation was poured.  Wildlife habitat was disrupted and destroyed.  Now, however, free lay stone walls we built all around the property over the past years have created new habitats for lizards and snakes.  The new shrubs we planted everywhere are creating new places for birds to hide, and their roots ameliorate the poor clay soil as they expand underground to a wide web, while the flowers we add to the garden each year attract bees and other insects.  Each year we see more wildlife as we give back, make the soil better, add and diversify the plantings.

Healing means balancing by adding back what has been removed or is missing.  Elsewhere I wrote that you ask in German “Was fehlt Dir?” or “What do you lack?” when someone is sick or out of balance.  We knew what we took from the land and what was missing, and we are putting it back and then some.  Try this exercise with anything or anyone that’s out of balance.  Just ask “What’s missing?”  Then you can give back, and then some.

easing in and out of the day

Recommendations about shutting screens and phones off an hour before going to bed and leaving the devices out of the bedroom have become louder in recent years.  We live in stressful times, Covid or not, and are on overload in general because our days and calendars are filled to the brim. The need to produce can be overwhelming and sleep is repair time.  Tossing and turning before finally going to sleep, missing the deep sleep phases, or waking up a few times during the night, all interrupt and hinder the body’s self-healing ability.

I don’t know about you, but the pandemic has not been a particularly productive period for me, more like living under a pillow and incubating.  I’ve had a hard time fitting meditation, walks or exercise into the beginnings or ends of my weekday work schedule.  Instead, I have perfected the art of easing in and out of the day to avoid going from high to low, frenzy to sleep in an hour.

On a normal weeknight cooking is my end-of-day bridge, sometimes sipping a glass of wine while I chop, assemble, set the table, and prepare something simple but from scratch.  After dinner, I take it another notch down, having tea and a piece of chocolate with my husband. I would feel rushed and interrupted in my slowdown if I had to leave for yoga or the gym now.  And even once I snuggle into bed, I don’t shut the light right away but read a bit until my mind is ready to say goodnight.

The reverse process in the morning takes me from making and having breakfast in my pajamas, to the next transition zone, sipping my tea, maybe even having a second cup, and scanning the news to reconnect with the outer world.  Then I get dressed and ready for work, and it’s action until evening.  

Of course, you have to find your own best way to dial down the day’s energy in order to have a good restorative night’s sleep.  If you sleep deeply and wake up refreshed, you have found it.

taking charge

Our cultural approach to health and healing tends to be mostly reactionary.  That means that we wait until something happens, and then we act to counter the symptom.  It’s a simplistic way to look at healing.  Actually, that is not healing but treating.

So many people seem to be frozen in fear until they’ve had their Covid vaccine.  Sure, the conversation around this virus is complex, and everybody has a different and personal risk level (and it’s good to be aware of yours).  On the other hand, we give up control over our health when we keep believing that we are powerless without a vaccine, powerless without outside intervention, powerless on our own.  It also gives others control over you.

The proactive way to health is not symptom treatment oriented but strives to maintain a healthy body and mind through ongoing preventative maintenance measures, call it self-care.  It involves movement, sorting through your thoughts, beliefs and emotions, a good diet, boosting your immune system, feeling purposeful, being socially interactive, maintaining loving relationships, and being intimately connected to yourself, your body and mind.  Hence, health and healing are complex processes that are always in flux and involve our mental disposition (thoughts and beliefs), individual body chemistry and constitution, and how we interact with our body and mind (food, movement, awareness). Thus, a one-treatment-fits-all approach doesn’t work too well, besides letting you off the hook instead of being invested in your body and mind. 

The key is to participate in your health and healing, to be involved and invested in your mental and physical topography,  to take charge.   So much of it is in your own hands. It may be tedious, it may be time consuming, you may need to deal with emotional fallout. But the alternative is potentially more painful.

making magic tonight

How do you cook?  Mapping out, prepping and precooking on weekends and having a plan for what it’ll be on Tuesday or Thursday?  Shopping and cooking recipe specific, knowing you’ll eat eggplant parm sometime this coming week?  Buying what’s fresh and on sale without knowing what dishes will come of it?

My process is of the latter kind and I usually fly by the seat of my pants when it comes to making dinner, although I do keep a lot of basics, my meal building blocks, in pantry and freezer.  Whether it’s food coop or other bulk shopping, local CSA produce during the growing season, the magical Misfits Market box I customize according to our preferences, or spontaneous fill-in shopping when I stop by the supermarket for a few stray things, I always fill fridge, freezer and pantry with well priced and fresh building blocks, but no particular recipe in mind.  The only half-organized meal planning is removing fish or meat from the freezer ahead of time, or soaking and cooking beans and quinoa in bulk and freezing it in small portions to have on hand when inspiration strikes. 

Other than that dinner gets decided spontaneously based on what I find in the fridge, what’s perishable and needs to be used up, what ideas pop up (or not), and how late it is.  Around 6pm I’ll stick my head in the fridge to figure out what we’ll have for dinner.  If it’s early enough I might transform a pile of produce into several vegetable dishes in one night, creating enough leftovers to play with for dinners down the road.  For variety I work with international flavor combinations such as miso, dried mushrooms and tofu; coconut milk, curry, lime and cilantro; tomato and peanut butter; coconut oil, cumin, brown mustard seed, onions and garlic.  Can you guess the countries? Sometimes I’ll make individual quick “pizzas” on thin tortillas with leftover vegetables and other toppings (sundried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, whole egg, olives and capers, mushrooms, what have you) and whatever cheese I can find (feta, goat, other).  Friday nights we sometimes do no-dinner dinners, such as a cheese platter with dried or fresh fruit, some nuts, toasted tortilla or bread, and a glass of wine. Or perhaps a big nachos platter.  

As long as I have lots of meal building blocks the possibilities are endless. And always, always, always it’s quick, simple, flavorful and made from-scratch, using more plant based ingredients than animal protein.  If you think of cooking more like playing with ingredients and flavors it becomes a delicious game of “let’s explore what magic we can make tonight for dinner.”

your choice

Although it’s much easier to use a positive experience as inspiration – perhaps becoming a compassionate, kind and encouraging teacher because that is what you learned from your home environment -  any negative experience can become an inspiration as well.  

Take Malala Yousafzai, the young Afghani activist who the Taliban shot when she was 15 in an effort to nip her fierce advocacy for women’s education, which was threating their supremacy, in the bud.  She could have withered during her grueling recovery period but instead the experience propelled her onto the world stage. In 2014 she became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize recipient at age 17 and a louder and more passionate advocate for women’s empowerment through education than she could have ever been in her small village back home.  Or take the many sexually harassed and abused boys, girls and women who are speaking up publicly in ever greater numbers.  They are taking so much pushback from those who want to hide their vile actions that have been condoned for too long.  Nevertheless the #metoo and #metooincest movement has snowballed in such a short amount of time thanks to these courageous people who turned a negative experience around to spread awareness and prevent such behavior from being pushed under the cultural rug any longer.  

It really is about what you make of the experiences life throws you.  You can take a crushing experience high or low, you can wither or thrive, you can come out in the open or keep it all under the rug.  In the end it’s less about the experience itself than what you make of it. Up to you.  It’s a choice.

dialing back

Fancy foods, those that are expensive because exotic or rare, and thus considered valuable, wouldn’t be that if we had access to them all the time and weren’t pricy or difficult to obtain.  Those foods still mostly fall under the animal protein category – caviar, oysters, foie gras, expensive meat cuts or types, lobster and what have you.

Besides meat, sugar and spices were also among foods during medieval and Renaissance times that could only be enjoyed by the upper classes.  Mincemeat pie is one such strange dish, originally a mixture of lamb, dried fruit and spices, from which we have since removed the lamb to make it more palatable to our modern taste.   In the not so distant past, we prepared Sunday roasts and ate little or no meat during the week because meat was expensive.

Besides the now accepted health considerations of eating too much animal protein and too little vegetables and fiber, what we can’t afford every day becomes special, while what we eat all the time becomes routine.  

January is a perfect month to dial my holiday indulgences back as a reboot and to shift what may have become too much of a routine.  Dial the alcohol back, dial the meat back, dial the sugar back, dial quantities back, dial the weight gain back. Last open bottle of wine will be consumed tonight as January will be dry for me.  I will reduce my portion sizes starting tomorrow in order to lose those pandemic pounds, at least some of them, and swap the meat for greens and vegetables. I also promised myself to go for more walks to dial my energy up a notch and clear the Christmas cobwebs from my mind.  

What about you?

collecting the pieces

Many years ago, my husband and I traveled through Europe for six months.  After a while the experiences became a blur, we could no longer remember what we did three and four weeks ago because it became too much to take in. It was time to return home to integrate and process the travel impressions.  

During very busy times it seems similarly that I become fragmented, losing bits of myself here and there along the way.  When the busyness subsides, I need to collect and ground myself to bring all those scattered fragments back under one roof.  

The English meaning of collecting oneself  has to do more with composure, while the German expression sich sammeln, which translates identically, has more to do with reintegration after this kind of fragmentation.  Reintegration for me consists of quiet time by myself, puttering around without agenda or an appointment looming, reading a book, cooking something, or drinking tea and reading the newspaper.  A good night’s sleep can do wonders but may not be enough.  Regular meditation is a good way to ground yourself but is not for everyone. Walking in nature, going on a vacation, coloring or working on a crafts project, taking a bath, making music, are all ways to bring yourself back home because these activities inactivate the rational-analytical left side of the brain and make room for the subconscious to do its work.  The effect can be compared to tidying up a messy closet so you see again what you actually have and can find everything easily.  

You can’t go a mile a minute all the time without disintegrating, starting to coast and going on auto-pilot. Depression is actually an advanced form of loss of connection to self. Being aware of this need to push the stop button periodically and reintegrating is helpful and you can do it any which way that fits your personality and lifestyle.   

trusting yourself - silver lining #11

How is your trust in your body and yourself?  This novel virus will likely be around for the next few years and may present us all with a unique opportunity in regard to that question.  

The Western healing model has become somewhat dogmatic, stale, and authoritative.  Meanwhile, complementary and alternative therapies have made vast inroads among those who appreciate a broader healing conversation.  With the advent of so much free information on the internet, for those who trust their judgement, intuition, and body, healing is becoming more of a cooperative effort between them and their healthcare provider.  That requires engagement, research, and trust, trust in your ability to discern what’s relevant to you, and your body and mind’s needs.

When things open back up, this exceptional situation will present us with the option to remain fearful about contact with others for the next few years until a vaccine is available, something many believe is the only way to protect them, or to approach this situation more holistically, by also strengthening your mind and body, and supporting them in doing what they’ve been made for – living in coexistence and mutual exchange with the natural world.  After all, we are part of nature, as is the virus, not apart from nature.  

I am neither belittling that this virus can be nasty, nor that we should rely on nothing but prayers, or forego handwashing and face masks to protect us from it.  Moreover, we are collectively paying with weakened immune system for the toxins and pollution we have dumped into our environment.  But cancer, for example, while not transmittable in the same way, is also a really terrible disease, and with over 600,000 cancer deaths in this country every year against the 50,000 US Covid-19 deaths, it seems that we have come to accept cancer’s prevalence in our culture. On a related point, I have been criticized for suggesting the potential merits of the Swedish approach to creating Coronavirus immunity.

Your ability to vet information, something that can be learned, and discerning rubbish from a valid piece of information even when the majority seems to veer elsewhere, takes confidence and trust.   Deciding how best to protect your body, and understanding how your body heals, takes trust.  Read an interesting and much lengthier interpretation on that in Planet Waves.  Soon enough your body will encounter this virus. Will you live in constant fear, which weakens your immune system, and makes your mind vulnerable to manipulation?  The alternative is building trust in You, your body, and your ability to navigate this new reality. 

the human touch - silver lining #6

We can learn by example or by lack.  Growing up in a household where food was important, where we always ate homecooked meals and my parents entertained a lot, this culture imprinted itself on me.  I learned by example.  Growing up in a family where love was inferred, not so much expressed in words or by physical touch, I learned through lack.  I hug my children a lot, and I always tell them that I love them.   

Our world has become exponentially more virtual in our homebound little Corona world than it had already been before this crisis, now that so many of us study and work and meet virtually.  We conduct business via Zoom, partake in online exercise classes and museum tours, see our doctors via TeleMedicine, and organize virtual cocktail hours with friends.  

Temporarily that may be acceptable, useful and even necessary.  However, often after a crisis certain social changes don’t revert back to the way they were before (and that may be an opportunity for conscious change). Think of the increased surveillance, paranoia and airport security after 9/11.  It never really left us.  

Post Covid-19 we really need to be aware of this.  Screen relationships, meetings, consultations, workshops, and classes lack something essential.  They lack not only touch but also direct eye-to-eye contact.  Have you noticed that you can never look a person directly in the eyes on Zoom or Skype or Facetime?  The satisfaction of meeting someone for a cup of coffee, of getting together for a glass of wine or dinner with friends, celebrating holidays with your extended family over a wonderful meal, just cannot be replicated virtually. 

Because Covid-19 prevention precautions demand social distancing, the take-away could easily become that we must fear human contact because of potential pathogen transmission and that a virtual existence is safer.  This crisis is teaching me by lack how crucial personal touchy feely eye-to-eye in-person contact is to my emotional wellbeing and general satisfaction with life.   We have increasingly become fearful of life (see a previous post- live a little - on that).  Life itself is not totally safe as we must interact with people, pathogens, plants, animals, the air, the machines we create and travel in, lest we become emotional robots housed inside and existing in a virtual world.  And in the end we still all die no matter what.

How do you want to live the rest of your life after this virus crisis is over?  Your choice is to get back out into the world or live a virtual shadow of a life.  Feeling safe requires strengthening your own inner resources, your immune system, your mind, your body.   Will you live in fear or in love, with people or without?  This crisis is an opportunity to question how far we wish to take the virtualization of this experience we call life.