tending your inner life

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari mentions that we have lost our ability to dream, and with it the realization of how important dreaming is to the integration between inner and outer life. We forget to dream, literally and figuratively.  

Dreaming while asleep is the mind’s way of processing what hit your mind during the day and you haven’t had a chance to digest on a mental level yet.  Our fast paced life doesn’t encourage inner life self-care and training ourselves to remember our dreams and pondering their meaning. You might keep a dream journal by your bed and write down what dream shreds you remember as soon as you wake up in the morning – a lot of dreaming happens during the lighter morning hour sleep just before you wake up.  If you tend to wake up in the middle of the night you could keep a journal in the bathroom and write down your dream bits. Dream journaling sends a message to your subconscious to remember your dreams, and with time you’ll remember more and more so you can work with the messages.

Dreaming in the other sense is imagining what you might want - to do, to be, to have.  Wouldn’t it be nice if…...? Ohh, I’d love to do……………..It’s creative visualization, and that is a way to manifest what you want (as long as you actually know what you want – not what you don’t want).  This too often gets drummed out of us as a waste of time in this oh so material world that is often oh so rational. But if you can dream it you can manifest it.

Dreaming is good for you because it brings your internal dialogue into awareness.  

food as a portal

Food is an amazing portal in so many ways.   One of the games at our children’s birthday parties was to blindfold them and offer them small bites to taste.  Then they had to guess what they’d eaten.  This got them to shift from identifying the food by sight to concentrating on taste, texture, and smell.

 In the most basic way, food as the provider of energy, is an existential requirement.  But our relationship with food would be limited and limiting, and so much less meaningful, if we saw it as nothing but fuel.  Even our pets appreciate diversity in their diet, and no gorilla eats the same thing every day.

 From a basic biochemical aspect, mineral rich and nutritious food promotes cell growth and cell regeneration.  Watch a wound close much faster if you eat superior foods, or your skin clearing visibly when you drink a green smoothie every day.  It’s a direct relationship between inputs and outputs.    

 All food comes from the earth.  Food is thus our direct connection to nature.   When we have a sustainable relationship with the environment, it’s easy to grow beautiful, tasty and nutritious food without depleting the environment.  Healthy food is the basis for good energy, good digestion, good mental health and a vigorous body. When the soil your carrot, apple or grain comes from, is healthy and mineral rich, you in turn will be thriving.

Food contributes to celebration.  It connects us to our cultural heritage, something those who celebrate Passover or Easter surely appreciate this weekend.  Through the special holiday dishes from our traditions we celebrate and enact the culture and geography we come from.   The stories behind Harozet or Easter lamb are what fills the dishes with depth and meaning, not the ingredients themselves, and participating in such traditions ties us to the web of life.

Cooking together and sharing a meal is a great way to connect with friends and family.  Food simply tastes better when shared, and the experience surrounding a shared meal is wonderful.

Food can be indulgent and imparts a deeper connection to our senses.  You can derive so much pleasure from the different tastes, textures, colors, temperatures, sights (Instagram!) and smells of food.  

 Food in its many ways is a connection to and celebration of life!

be nice to yourself

How’s your relationship with yourself?  Do you take good care of yourself?  Do you love yourself?   Or perhaps you haven’t given it much thought.

Last night I watched this delightful episode of Queer Eye (love those guys) S03E01 in which they helped Jody to see her inner beauty by transforming her outer self.  They said something like, “When you recognize your inner beauty, it reflects on the outside.”  I just made that up but it’s the gist of what they said.  Jody truly shone and sparkled after they helped her to express her inner beauty without making her into someone she is not.  The transformation was so subtle yet so powerful.

Taking care of yourself means appreciating your inner beauty, your inner worth,  loving yourself, and expressing that love through the attention you pay yourself.  Selfcare can take many forms, or all of them:  

·     More sleep, because you know you can’t run on empty, and sleep heals mentally and physically.

·     Eating nutritious food, because you know that food can heal.

·     Wearing clothes that make you shine, because you feel good when they reflect your inner self. 

·     Moving your body, because you love your body and want to take good care of it so it looks and feels its best.

·     Maintaining a healthy weight, because the best weight for your body type is a good base for your health in general.

·     More me-time, for time to just do what you love to do.

·     More reflection time, because when your inner life remains uninspected and ignored a part of you remains unreconciled. 

Many women are selfless, taking good care of all others in their inner and outer circle, but forgetting themselves along the way.  Many guys were raised to ignore their inner life and to disregard their physical appearance beyond the exercise part.  Where on the spectrum do you fall? How nice are you to yourself?

reboot time

After a bit of soul searching (guilt?) I gave my daughter off from school yesterday.  She was dragging for various reasons, had a test ahead of her, and a big first event  at her accepted college coming up, and I just knew that she couldn’t give her best without some R&R.   That same morning I received my daily Note from the Universe, Mike Dooley’s awesome, witty, wise and humorous emails I find in my in-box (I always wonder how he has been able to come up with them for all these years…).  It read, “What if it was your downtime, your lounging-in-bed-too-long time, your walkabout time, and your blow-Friday-off time, that made possible your greatest achievements?  Would they still make you feel guilty?  Or would you allow yourself to enjoy them?”  It was a confirmation that I had made the right decision.   

 We need in between downtime, not the big vacation time, but instead boring time, nothing time, rest time, decompression time, staring-in-the-air time, sleep time, meditation time, a walk in the woods, a day off, or doing-something-creative time.  This time serves as a germination period, time to collect yourself, time to reboot. It settles down the mental dust, reshuffles our outlook on priorities, and gives us back our energy. 

 Nature has its wintertime to begin the growth cycle from scratch again each spring. We can’t wait that long, and we can’t take off that long (although it sure sounds enticing). And please enjoy that down time before you get worn down, that way you can truly savor it instead of nursing your cold in bed feeling lousy. Here an earlier post along those lines.

micro enjoyments

The thrill of a new car wears off quite quickly.  A new house becomes routine after a while.  The charm of material acquisitions, big and small, fades into the background after a bit. Remember that new screwdriver or box grater you bought a year ago?  Of course not!  It’s not only expensive to create oxytocin rushes by buying stuff, especially big stuff, we also don’t always need more stuff.

 So what else makes your life enjoyable? What sparks a spontaneous smile?  What makes you feel good?

 Experiences are what creates enjoyment and meaning, and I think here too there are two kinds.  Epic experiences, such as our vacations a few years ago to Italy or Alaska.  Remember when?  Those live in me forever.  However, those big ones are few and far in between, and involved and costly.  But then there are the little experiences, the ones that come and go many times a day and simply make your life a bit more pleasant.  Perhaps it’s the smile across your child’s face, the burst of intense taste from a ripe piece of fruit, the sun peeking out from behind a cloud, the beautiful white and pink spring blooms that are popping up everywhere right now, or the gentle word of encouragement from your partner.  The heart on a latte makes me happy every time, as do my cats’ wet nose snuggles, or feeling the soft and warm grass under my bare feet on a beautiful summer day.

 I try to train myself to notice these micro enjoyments and not take them for granted or rush past them.  We only exist in the moment, and if that moment is a pleasure to experience, it makes it all worthwhile.

global food combos

People are on the move more globally than ever before, travelling, emigrating, fleeing, or simply moving to a new place halfway across the world.  Our cultures are no longer homogenous, and food combinations reflect that mobility as well.  The melding of food cultures across borders is nothing particularly new as emigrants have always brought their traditions and recipes with them.  Catherine de Médicis jumpstarted French cuisine as we know it when she moved from Italy to France to become queen, and the Irish brought their soda bread, corned beef and cabbage with them across the ocean.  Pu pu platters and Tex-Mex dishes are more recent pop culture crossover foods, as is pineapple pizza.

Salad of Asian Napa cabbage, Italian radicchio and North African pomegranates

But now we're jumping much more crazily across the globe, and that produces zanier combos yet. Several years ago, we went to a high end Chinese- Peruvian restaurant, a food combination I was unable to imagine, but that turned out to have been one of the most amazing food experiences ever.  I regularly make hummus, the traditional Middle Eastern chickpea dip, with any legumes I have on hand, whether lentils, white, black or kidney beans - unconventional for Middle Easterners to say the least.  Hummus mixed with avocado is another recent combination that reaches all the way to Mexico from the Levant.  Quinoa and vegan sushi are newfangled New World interpretations of the Japanese raw fish and rice classic.  Asian flavors in general have infiltrated international cooking everywhere, and a dash of soy sauce in my French vinaigrette transports me to a place almost diametrically opposed on the globe.  Asian tofu has settled in for good in the Western world thanks to the spread of vegetarianism and veganism where it’s become a welcome and versatile protein addition.  

What zany cultural mixes happen in your kitchen?  You may have to think twice because we forget how globally we’re oriented.

what does it mean to be human?

Artificial intelligence and technology are weaving themselves into our lives to the point where we don't even realize how dominated we already are by it.  Already much of our lives happen in or behind the computer or smart phone screen.  Already most of our work is software based or supported.  Already much of our leisure time activities are brought to us through Facebook groups, apps such as Meet-up, and online event calendars.  Even the yoga class get's scheduled and paid through an app, and you can make the restaurant reservation through another one.  People's cellphone home screens look like a stamp collection.

 Most corn, soybeans and cotton in the US is genetically modified, a technological process that allows the introduction of genetic features from a different species, even animal, in order to force certain features on the organism, such as insect or drought resistance.  Animals can be genetically modified as well and supposedly GMO salmon will soon enter the market.

 In utero testing during pregnancy allows verification of the existence of genetic diseases, with the option to abort.  Last year, a Chinese scientist was rebuked by the international scientific community for going a step further.  With the help of the gene editing technique Crispr he altered a gene in two Chinese twin embryos before implanting them in utero with the goal of making the girls resistant to HIV infection.  

 This of course raises the question where we're going with this, a question Yuval Noah Harari eloquently explores in his books, 21 Questions for the 21st Century and Homo Deus.  Is the next step the manipulation of human genetic material, not to safeguard us from hereditary genetic diseases, but simply to make us better, super humans of sorts? Are we then not approaching what we so condemned about the Nazi regime?  Will this create a super human class for and of those who can afford such interventions with the rest of us left behind in servitude?  

 Perhaps the question is bigger yet.  What makes us human?  Is it our flaws and foibles, our complete individuality, even our mortality?  If so do we have to accept the good with the ugly? Will we become less human if we seek technologically manipulated superiority?  Will we seek immortality?  Is immortality on the physical level even achievable?  What role does consciousness play in the definition of humanness?   

Will we ultimately have to realize that the answer to our humanness cannot be found on the physical plane, in technology and artificial intelligence, and that immortality already exists, albeit on the spiritual plane?  How far will we take this experiment to find out our true humanity?

what will you do?

Jeremy Rifkin, the socio-economic visionary, has been saying for years now that technology and automation will eventually get us to a place where we may only need to work about four hours a day to earn a living.  That is incidentally the amount of time indigenous people spend on average to collect food. Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus that we have been pretty successful at bringing famine, plague and warfare under control, issues that have kept us sleepless and busy for millenia.  

 Over here in the US we are overworked and often required to be available 24/7 via cellphone in a corporate world more driven by perceived busyness than true focused productivity.  But Sweden has experimented with a 6-hour workday (although it's apparently not conducive in an entrepreneurial environment), Germany is on a 35hr week/7hr day and is currently trying a 28hr week/5.5hr day.   So experimentation with the best work-life balance is underway in the more forward thinking cultures. 

 But what will we do with ourselves as we are evolving beyond being busy with fire fighting, at least in industrialized countries. As we look at the shift in our Western culture, we see the answer already emerging - the pursuit of happiness, as Harari points out!  Between a vastly improved standard of living and not worrying about an early death from famine or warfare, and the slow shift to a shorter work week, we will have more time to take care of our inner life.  Perhaps we will focus more on the quality of life, the quality of our free time.  Perhaps we will take more time to reflect on how we eat, how we grow our food, how we think, how we treat the environment, how we treat each other.  

 It's a process and it's not happening by tomorrow, but the seeds for a shift are germinating.  What will you do?

it made me smile

Usually I don't work with music.  However, due to various background noises the other day I switched my Pandora baroque music track on  - and had to smile spontaneously.  Not having listened to baroque music in in quite a while I had forgotten how healing those frequencies are.

 Brooke Nelson wrote in Reader's Digest that classical music lowers blood pressure, opens you up emotionally and fosters social relations, can help you fall asleep, decreases pain, boosts intelligence and improves memory, relieves anxiety, and increases productivity.  Wow! What's not to smile about with a long benefits list like that.

Brain World Magazine explains that baroque music's characteristic 60-beats-per-minute pattern is the magic ingredients because it activates both sides of the brain equally. No wonder they play this soothing music in the Port Authority bus terminal in NYC. It calms you instantly.

nature's ingenious wrappers

If you still pack a lunch for your children, or perhaps even yourself, this is probably not a new realization.  But I am always wowed and amazed by nature's ingenuity.  Nature has produced a whole bunch of little portion size foods that come with their own natural protective wrapper.  These are ready to eat snacks that don't require washing, just remove nature's packaging and enjoy. 

On the fruit side there are of course bananas, mandarins and oranges, but also scaly lychees and fuzzy rambutans.  Kiwis, avocados, and passion fruit need to be cut open and scooped out with a spoon, but are just as transportable transportable and small enough in size as a one-person snack. Creative people invented that criss-cross mango cut to make them edible out of hand. Edamames, or soybeans, are also little nature protected morsels that are fun popping and eating when precooked in salt water.  Pistachios and peanuts come to mind as the only nuts that can be "unpacked" without a nutcracker.  And let's not forget that nourishing egg, which in its hardboiled form can be transported safely to lunches and picnics, and unwrapped aka peeled, when you're hungry.

Can you think of others? Did I leave any out?