deep listening

Deep anything is about doing whatever you are doing more thoughtfully, more mindfully, focused on the task, not thinking about the past nor the future. You can practice Deep Living, Deep Speaking, Deep Playing or Deep Walking. It's like a doing meditation or a mindfulness practice. Deep Listening is listening to your partner with an ear to her story, her needs, her feelings. When you listen to someone deeply you hear where they come from, you open your heart to them, you respond to their needs. Here an example of listening and responding shallowly: You: "I just twisted my ankle." Me: "Oh no. You know, that happened to me last winter, and I went to the doctor, and the doctor....blablabla." In this case I am not tuning into what you just said, instead following my own narrative. This is Shallow Listening, something we all do all the time.

Here an attempt at listening and responding deeply: You: "I just twisted my ankle."  Me: "Oh no, that must have hurt. What happened? (pause to let you respond)  Is there anything I can do for you?"

The difference is a shift from the me perspective to the we perspective.  Deep Listening tunes 100% into your partner.  It really deepens relationships.

grass fed is best

I used to think that the most important improvement to our dairy consumption was to buy organic milk, butter and cheese, what with the grow hormones and antibiotics they feed the poor cows these days (and that make it into our body and into the groundwater). But I have had to adjust my thinking. Buying organic butter, and cheese and milk, only assures that the cows were fed an organic (grain - gulp) diet (which is unhealthy for the poor animals and makes them sick).  That meat from grass fed cows (their natural diet) is healthier for us than from grain fed or grain finished cows has gradually trickled into mainstream awareness (less fat, more healthy Omega-3, higher in various other micronutrients).

But the same is also of course true for milk, cheese and butter from grass fed cows - much higher levels of vitamin K2 and Omega-3 fatty acids, which actually promote heart health (yes, eat more of it!).   Studies have shown that countries where cows are mostly grass fed (Ireland, Australia) have much lower levels of heart disease!

Organic butter really does not buy you much, butter from grass fed cows does.

comforting rituals

Ritual is something that's "always done in a particular situation and in the same way each time," according to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary. Rituals that come to mind are daily rituals (getting up, taking a shower, going to bed), religious rituals (mass, prayer), and rituals connected to specific occasions (holiday celebrations, funerals, last day of school). My (almost) daily ritual is to shut the computer after a day's work, go down to the kitchen, and begin cooking dinner while sipping a glass of wine. Brushing my teeth as soon as I get out of bed is a ritual, too, because I do it every day, in the same way, with the same movements. But the rituals I really want to talk about on the cusp of this Passover/Easter week-end are the special ones for special occasions. Why do we create and need ritual? Ritual is reassuring, and we need certain routines in life. It is reassuring to know how, when and in what fashion to celebrate an occasion, instead of inventing it anew each time. Annual holiday rituals tie us to nature's cycles as well as to our ethnic culture and roots. Like the seasons that always come back every year in the same sequence, like the moon that waxes and wanes always in the same predictable way, rituals are grounding specifically because they don't change. There is reassurance in knowing what to expect because the rest of life is so full of change, adjustment, fluctuation and surprises.

It is especially comforting for children to learn and have rituals because it creates rhythm and it helps them to find their place in the world, in nature, in their culture, in their family. My Easter menu doesn't change much from year to year. It's always a leg of lamb, always asparagus and some other green springtime vegetables. Like a ritual I buy a white hyacinth every year a few weeks before Easter, and we all associate its smell, which permeates the entire house, with Easter and the beginning of spring. Each year about three weeks before Easter we bring up the Easter storage box from the basement to pull out the painted eggs and decorate pussy willow or other bare branches, which will start to sprout tender leaves by Easter. Same thing each year.  Here's to a new spring.

a new medical paradigm

What if it weren't necessarily the microorganism that made us sick, but that healing depended instead on the condition and resilience of our own immune system, our constitution, our circumstances and how our body handles strains to our wellbeing? Liise-Anne Pirofski, infectious disease specialist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, clarifies that a particular microorganism can harm one person and leave another unharmed. Too often, Dr. Pirofski says, we simply try to combat a certain microorganism with antibiotics or vaccines. Yet, we have not found vaccines against tuberculosis, malaria, herpes or fungal diseases. Instead, Dr. Pirofski suggests, as reported in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, researching how to strengthen the host. In essence, Dr. Pirofski proposes a radical paradigm change, away from the pathogen-as-culprit and towards understanding instead how to strengthen and heal the person. This goes against the grain of the Western medical paradigm that treats the perceived pathogen, and is more in line with the thinking of CAM, complementary and alternative medicine, that treats the whole person.

Ask not what makes you sick but how you can heal.

the past doesn't exist

In reality our existence is composed of endless consecutive Now moments, one after the other, and another, and another. We always exist in the Now, although our minds may be all over the place, spending a lot of time in the past and in the future. But the past does not exist, nor does the future. The past is just an accumulation of memories that live in our mind, while the future is something we are creating right now in the Now, but that has not happened yet. The past was Now at one time, but now that it's gone it's only a memory and no longer real.

In our minds we keep thinking about experiences from the past and projecting them into the future, creating fears and worries. We anticipate and expect that unpleasant experiences from the past will be repeating themselves in the future (and the more we do, the more they may). So then we worry about the future, and strategize and plan to avoid that projection from happening. Hence, we live in our minds, which live in the past and in the future - which both don't exist. Crazy, right?

If we simply lived entirely in the moment, in the Now, and left that non-existant past, and that not-yet-created future alone, there would be no need for fears and worries. How great is that? Think about it.

bad bad screen?

As a parent I know the predicament. Daughter on a screen again? Son on a screen again? "Read a book, go outside, do something else than this endless screen staring." Nag nag nag - and "When we were kids our mother sent us out after breakfast and we didn't come home until dinnertime," or something like that.        Fact #1: Times have changed. I used to spend hours occupying the one and only family phone speaking with my friends. Now, this happens on screen or on cell, and both are often the same device. We all wrote our homework by hand and handed a paper copy in. Now, the kids write their homework on screen and send it to their teacher via Google Docs. I used to look up recipes in a cookbook. My daughter looks them up on her cellphone and bakes with her cellphone for reference next to the stove. We used to go the movies, or rent one. Now the kids download it all. They never have to leave their bed. I still read a paper newspaper and paper books, but who does that anymore?

     Fact #2: Kids imitate their parents to learn and to feel grown up. And guess what they watch us do all day long? Typing on a keyboard and staring into a screen all day long, checking emails and social apps on our cellphones all day long, watching movies on our tablets at night, reading books on our Kindle readers, and using Google as an encyclopedia anytime and all the time (I love that part). Half of the population walks the streets with their nose in a screen and you hope they won't bump into someone or twist their ankle because they missed the curb. That's what the kids observe. That's what they want to do when they grow up.

drop the hammer

As a young manager I used to be stern, demanding and forceful because I thought that that conveyed authority. I still tend to say things twice in a row with different words when I want to get a point across to my children.  But I am beginning to learn that people get it even when I don't hit them over the head with a hammer.              As a matter of fact, we (and animals, too, by the way) get it even better when we formulate a request in the affirmative. How would you prefer to be corrected? "Stop yelling" or "I can hear you well?" I ask my daughter to use her "morning voice" when she speaks loudly at the breakfast table. She gets it.

I read that the universe doesn't understand the "not" part. We are similar, as are animals. We understand better what another person wants (and it sounds much nicer, too) if she says in kind words what she wants, instead of reprimanding what she is critical of. Instead of "don't be late" why not try "please be on time, we begin at 8AM sharp?"   Instead of "your table manners are terrible" try "fork in the left and knife in the right hand." Instead of "you forgot your homework again (grumble grumble)" try "it makes my life a lot easier if you hand your homework in on time, and I can give you a better grade, too."  Instead of "don't you scratch my couch" try "here is a great scratching post for you."

Drop the hammer, pick up a feather.

you do have a choice

               Oftentimes we don't realize that we have a choice, we simply react and do, because we are on autopilot. But we do. We have a choice of how to react to someone or to something. I was in a meditation class last night and another attendee explained how potholes make him very angry, and how they trigger the same reaction in him every time.  He gets so mad at the authorities for not doing anything about springtime holes in the road. It is quite liberating to realize that you have a choice of how to react. You could of course become angry every time you encounter a pothole, but that becomes silly after a while, and it's not of much use. You upset yourself and the pothole doesn't improve. You could call up the authorities and make them aware of a particularly large and deep pothole that endangers other drivers as well (I did that a few years back and they actually filled the pothole in question pretty quickly). That is empowering - but you can't call up about every pothole. Or you could decide that you no longer wanted to react to that emotional pothole anger trigger and just let it go. So what? It's just a pothole, big deal. Choices....

Some choices are more painful than others. When our head struggles with our heart, and when the head wins and the heart loses it creates even more pain. But the choice is still your's.  Consider taking a deep breath before reacting to an emotional trigger person, your mother-in-law or perhaps the noisy neighbor, then remember that you don't have to react with anger, that it is your choice. The ego is reactionary and wants revenge, but at what cost? Tit for tat, of course. The higher self will say "forget about it, it's unimportant, let it go, forgive." That's a more freeing choice.

no snack packs

Not sure why so many parents are at a loss for healthy snacks to give their kids for school, or when they return home in the afternoon (or for themselves for that matter). There is no need for a snack to come in a little packet. There is no need for a snack to be something ready made from the supermarket. There is no need for a snack to be full of sugar, salt and a whole bunch of unpronounceable ingredients. A snack can very well be something so easy and natural even your child can put it together in minutes and consider herself a mini chef. Case in point - apple sauce. I cook it in big batches and freeze it in glass jars. My daughter devours it. It is one of the easiest things to make and one of her favorite snacks. I also put it in her lunchbox in a little plastic container, and should you have leftovers (not in my house) you can serve it over hot cereal, and it is delicious on a piece of hot buttered toast. Teach your kids to make it: simply cut up lots of apples, a whole big pot full so it's worth your while, remove cores but leave the skin on (!), add lots and lots of cinnamon and a few tablespoons of water (just so the apples don't burn until they begin to sweat), put on low heat, simmer until soft, purée in a food processor - yum.

Case in point - vegetables with dip. I recently got a big bag full of snap peas from our food coop. They were sweet and crunchy, great to munch on like that, and they easily last several weeks in the fridge. We ate them with a dip made with Greek yogurt, paprika, salt, and caraway seeds, and also with homemade hummus (other case in point).

Snacks don't get much easier and healthier than that. Also look back on an earlier snack related post - there's no food - with more ideas.

on the cusp

Sunday a week ago it was around 36^oF or so, the sun was shining brightly, the sky was blue, and the ground was wet from all the melting snow.   People were standing around chatting and lingering on the local supermarket parking lot to savor that first glimpse of spring, that first warmth in the air, feeling the need to squint and smile at the same time, not wanting to get back into their cars. This in-between time makes everyone so full of hope that spring is finally piercing through that coldest of winters, that it will finally arrive. Then the week became cold, that Sunday a distant memory, more snow, more cold, tomorrow perhaps temperatures in the 40s, and more snow and sleet. Yet, yesterday I heard birds chirping. They know.

We are literally sitting on the cusp of spring, at the stage where the yin in the yang turns to the yang in the ying, the switchover point where you know that winter is pretty much past us, yet is lingering, and a late winter snowstorm is not impossible. It is a pregnant time, full of possibilities, ready to burst.