For those of you who stop by from time to time, and who are looking for inspiration for leading an integrated healthful life, let me know what you want!
Of course, there’s a prize for participating – I’ll be randomly drawing a winner and sending along a signed copy of BOTH my books to anywhere in the US of A.
Please give 5 minutes to let me know what you value and what you value not as much. It will make the blog more effective and interesting for you. I will be publishing results from the survey here, describing our little community.
The survey will be running the month of February, and you’ll be hearing about results (and who knows…getting a call with books) in March.
Warm Regards,
Annie
Pinterest
I love the holidays. I come from a big family with classic Christmas celebrations filled with kids and board games and beauty and fun. My family still loves to gather. But now, I choose one of the fall/winter holidays (and Thanksgiving is so great for gathering) to be in the frenzy, and let the rest of the season be quieter – reflective.
As the wheel of the year turns, this is an auspicious time to reflect on 2015 and dream of the year to come. My newsletter this month focuses on that process – sign up this week to get it.
But first, how do we find time during the shopping and gathering to be reflective? To take stock of the year that was? Or, to just enjoy the moments of social fun that happen over these holidays.
In my world it only works with deliberate simplification – to cull extra travel, pass on finding the perfect gift and sending out the perfect cards to absolutely everyone, accept fewer cool projects, even minimize gatherings to those I really want to attend. I hold off on entering the holiday bacchanal of food for as long as I can…so even though I love a little soy nog in my coffee, and make a truly killer sugar cookie, I’m in no great rush to jump in. Believe me, it’s coming, but my strategy is to delay the sugar! This year decorations are minimal, and mostly things I gather from outside.
Meditation is the key! Daily meditation practice is the anchor that keeps me out of the swirl of the commercial holiday season.
For my morning meditation this month, I plan to practice reflection on 2015. I’ll work on receiving the gifts I’ve been given, embodying ways that I’ve grown, and reflecting on times that I missed the mark or things did not go well, and learning from and clearing those experiences. I think of it as a process of putting the year to bed. Of digesting, clearing and completing.
There are certainly other years that I dive squarely into the center of the holiday frenzy, and that’s great, too. Certainly one way of doing the holidays is not better than another. We can each choose to what degree we’ll participate in the frenzy – and use the barometer of enjoying the season to let us know how we’re doing.
Are you aiming for a reflective holiday this year? How will your holiday unfold?
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a program at Kripalu that I am leading with my friends and colleagues Aruni and Lisa called Self-care and Mindfulness through the Holidays. It launches the night before winter solstice and runs to Christmas eve. If you are interested in doing the holidays mindfully, this will be a few days of prayer and ritual, joy and laughter. We’ve planned a collection of activities to help us find our own way of marking this auspicious time of year. So regardless of your past or current holiday traditions, here is a place to come together to practice, reflect on the holidays, and have a great time.
I love Thanksgiving, and our ancestors for marking a day when most of us pause, feel the love and express our gratitude.
I’m grateful for anyone who takes the time to read these blogs, my books, or studies with me – this work is a container that reflects the light of others – so thank you.
For those who show up for others in this life, thank you. It’s not easy nor often appreciated, but I am awed when I see it and I see it all the time.
For those who sing their song, true and clear as you can, regardless of who hears or how others respond, thank you.
For those who meet the dark in themselves and others with light, thank you.
For those who create beauty, thank you.
For those who have been in my life in countless ways, large and small, kind and mean, thank you.
Thanks for all of it. Thanks.
Is there an inner path to environmental change?
I believe so – Yes and Yes. If there is an inner path to outer change, including healing our very planet, who better for the job than those who have navigated their inner landscapes for years, decades? Yogis to the rescue. Let’s save the planet the inner way,
In May of 2014, during a Kripalu “shutdown” (when we don’t have guests in the house so that we can build, revamp and make a lot of noise), I traveled to Southern California to visit friends and attend an Imagination and Medicine Conference at Pacifica Graduate Institute. That’s where I met Stephen Aizenstat, Chancellor of the Institute, and developer of Dream Tending, a method of deepening awareness of dreams as a means of more fully awakening to our own consciousness.
Dr. Aizenstat spoke on the last day of the conference. I was mesmerized by his stories of how we have all witnessed environmental degradation: he described how the grass used to stay green in Santa Barbara while now grass is a memory replaced by brown dust. He described working with gifted local youth who, after hearing recent news such as the oceans will be devoid of life within the first part of their lifetime, have dropped out, cancelled college plans – why bother?
So many of us are in deep grief and deep denial about what is happening around us. Might working with our dreams to expand our consciousness be a way forward?
Aizenstat has a lot to say (and do) about this.
“To develop a respectful and sustaining relationship with our dreams, we must return to a more “indigenous” sensibility, one that is informed by the psyche of nature—an awareness that our own essential psychological spontaneities are rooted most deeply in the psyche of the natural world. We are born out of the rhythms of nature, and to ignore these rhythms is, ultimately, to deny our psychic inheritance.” – Stephen Aizenstat
As he described how tending dreams helped these young people suffering nightmares (and I’m afraid children everywhere share these nightmares), I thought – here is a practical tool for an impossible problem.
If more of us can awaken more deeply to our dreams as a means of becoming more creative, can we back away from the tipping point of environmental degradation?
So, I invited him to Kripalu. Then I spoke to my colleague and gifted scholar of yoga and consciousness, Stephen Cope, who agreed to be involved and signed on to spend time during a weekend. And Dreaming the Earth, Tending the Dream was born.
Save this date: April 29-May 1, 2016. Come to this one.
Please join me in this psychic global experiment with the modest aim of coming into balance with the planet.
A Materia Medica is a library of medicine, usually botanicals. Herbal books and websites often have an area where the health and medicinal qualities of particular plants are gathered. Likewise, many cookbooks have a section that focuses on the use and perhaps benefits of particular ingredients. Herbalists and cooks have great respect for the qualities of each plant.
My recipes use whole food plant based ingredients which are naturally healthful. Certain foods and plants carry specific health and healing gifts, and by knowing who you are, and who your ingredients are, you can surround yourself with delicious foods that keep you in balance.
Over the next year, I’ll be building my materia medica of botanicals and plants with particular healing gifts. I will include a roundup of Western literature, as well as herbal and folk wisdom, and the plant-spirit energy template of the plant. Plants have so much to teach us, and we can heal so deeply from getting to know them as individuals and arranging them in choruses as recipes.
For your pleasure! Enjoy the journey!
The book is on bookstore shelves across the country. We’ve been hitting the airwaves and the blogosphere too, lots of interviews, lots of excitement for the science of yoga and the book itself. Stay tuned!
The design is beautiful, the flows are great, and if you or someone you love has diabetes, here’s a guide that will help you get started, no matter what the medication or issue you’re working with, from fatigue to peripheral neuropathy to gestational diabetes.
Here’s what Stephen Cope, bestselling author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self had to say:
Yoga & Diabetes is an extraordinarily accessible book, and there are no two better guides than Annie Kay and Lisa Nelson.
Get your copy and please write a review – at the ADA site (if you purchase it there it will most benefit the ADA – a great organization), on Amazon or where ever you travel online.
If you don’t see it at your local bookstore – ask for it!
If you are a health professional and want to get a copy for your office, or tell your purchasing manager about it, here is a sheet to help:
Product details
Spiral-bound: 250 pages
Publisher: American Diabetes Association; 1 Spi edition (June 23, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1580405576
ISBN-13: 978-1580405577
Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.2 x 0.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Big big thanks to all of you who supported Lisa and I through the process, and to those of you helping us get the word out.
