I love this woman! Writer, teacher, longtime meditator, woman who has traveled far and lived to tell her tale to lucky us.
I’ve been reading Sally Kempton’s latest book, Awakening Shakti, for the past couple months on and off (it’s a great book to dip into now and then), and I have to say it’s really helped me to cultivate goddess energies that I know are in there (within myself) but that I don’t often work with.
In my early dippings, I focused on the happy sunny goddesses – Saraswati, then Parvati, and of course Lakshmi. I skipped over Kali and Durga not to mention the headless crone whose name I don’t (ha ha!) even know yet. Then, I was so fortunate as to do a plant initiation with Maha Devi herself, Tulsi, who told me that there’s really no need to fear nor steer clear of the spicy intense seemingly messier goddesses (birth family training on my part). Instead, get to know them – they are aspects of yourself that you can learn about, understand more fully and rely on when needed. Durga has come in very handy for me now that I’ve gotten to know her. I hadn’t been aware of how much I needed her strength, grace under pressure and wisdom.
Last weekend my good buddy Bonita and I dipped into Sally’s workshop at Kripalu. It was delicious, and what can I say – I love this woman! Every sentence of her book Awakening Shakti is packed with turns and meaning.
Brava!
I also recommend Meditation for the Love of It – a great book for starting or deepening your meditation practice.
As I pull the down comforter out of storage, give it a fluff and feather our nest, I’m reminded of Robert Herrick’s beautiful poem…
My favorite stanza
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
– Robert Herrick
Here’s the whole poem…it’s worth a read.
To the Virgins, to make much of Time
Flower are still out yet there’s a chill in the evening air. Not too late to gather and dry a few herbs and flowers to add to your bath thorough the cold winter months.
Last year I dried English mint and flowers, and this year I’m doubling my efforts – for those of you familiar with my spring explosion when my face peeled off (a cautionary tale to those with sensitive skin…I had a case of phytophotoreactive dermatitis…pretty disconcerting), dried flowers seem a very very safe bet. I am staying away from making oils and tinctures this year. Sticking with dried flowers and flower essences.
So, – gather, gather, gather. I find it a very relaxing and reconnect-with-Gaia experience, and hope you do too.
You might also enjoy:
Deepen Your Connection to Gaia
Morning Rituals
Herbal Waters
What are you gathering from nature now?
Just sent out my monthly newsletter. This month, I wrote about three talented healers I’ve recently encountered who are all offering creative ways of dealing with the environmental crisis. I’ll be posting about it all month, and hope to hear from you. It is a challenging issue, but it’s high time we all do what we can to show up for Gaia – mother earth.
Here are a few ways to deepen your connection to Gaia:
- As part of your morning ritual, say good morning to the trees, stones, grass and flowers outside.
- Do a breathing exchange with a tree or plant.Here how to do it:
- Head outside, and choose a tree or a plant to connect with. Trees are powerful choices!
- Take a few moments to find your breath, find your center.
- Then, take a few moments to appreciate the plant you have chosen. Notice how lovely it is!
- As you exhale, become aware of the tree or plant inhaling CO2.
- Become aware of the plant exhaling O2 as you inhale.
- Do this for a few minutes.Thank the plant for the experience.
- Have a conversation with a tree or plant. I found, once I got more connected with plants, that particularly with the trees, I spent a lot of time apologizing to them. That was helpful! I apologized for the times I was unaware, an the ways I did not stay connected to the world around me. That helped with my own grief at the impending extinction.
Check out my recent post on Kripalu’s blog, Thrive. It’s called Observing Weight through Witness, and it’s about how we can use the power of pause to help us deal with those nasty food cravings (it’s never spinach and tuna fish we’re after, is it?), and other tricky times for the natural healthy weight seeker.
I know I’ve been away from my blog – it all began with a vacation where we didn’t have internet, then I got the plague which I am now recovered from. So, back to the conversation!
Blessings!
Here is the article from my January newsletter, which was sent to my newsletter tribe a couple weeks ago. Read this and all my key monthly articles first by signing up for my newsletter.
The inward season
Nature’s movement stills now, and moments of deep quiet are most plentiful. It’s as if you could inhale stillness and feel the coolness inch through your being. Why not go with the flow this month and spend more time in silence, taking a cue from mother earth and rest, look inward and listen?
Lately I’ve been writing and thinking about intention and our ability to clarify and energize our intentions for our lives. This auspicious first month of the year is a natural to reconnect with, clarify and deepen this powerful energy of intention.
One way of weaving your intention into your life is through ritual.
This is a season where daily routines are helpful, and it’s a lovely time to launch a daily morning ritual. Taking even 5 minutes to set your intention for the day, to give thanks to the divine for these fascinating lives we get to live, and saying good morning to the nature around you can take you into the day in a relaxed and positive way. I find in my own experience and with others, that the details of the morning ritual are less important than the power of daily repetition. So, beginning with something easy that you can stick with tends to bear the most fruit if you are just getting started.
Here are a few tips for launching your morning ritual:
Make the intention to commit to a morning ritual. Can you commit to 5 minutes each day for a week? If not, make it easier. If you have the fire for a bigger commitment, or already have a morning ritual, is there an invitation to recommit or deepen it? What might that look like?
Create a bit of sacred space. Making a space or marking your time as sacred can be a simple process. What’s important is your intention to be open to spirit. You might light a candle, pull together a few objects that have meaning for you, spritz some water or plant preparation (I use things like rose geranium o tulsi hydrosol). Put on some quiet music that you like.
Create your morning ritual. Again, this can be simple. It can be 5 minutes of conscious breath work or meditation. It can be the chanting of a mantra (shanti shanti shanti is a place to start). It can be a sun salutation yoga flow in each direction. It can be 5 minutes of unstructured conscious movement with the intention of checking in with your physical body.
The power of practice. As the days go by, if you skip or forget, forgive yourself and get back to practice. Get fascinated with your practice. Get fascinating even with missing your practice: why was it too difficult to maintain or just how did you let yourself off the hook? How might it be easier or more appealing? Resist the temptation to be hard on yourself, and instead get curious and learn, coax and invite.
What is your morning ritual and how does it impact your life?
Be well!
Annie
Part the fascination (and frustration) with food and nutrition is that it’s always changing. But if you look around, so is our world. This year I’ve been blessed to have the opportunity to dive deeper into two traditional models of health – Ayurveda at the incomparable Kripalu School of Ayurveda, and the shamanic work of plant spirit healing with the wonderful Pam Montgomery. As someone with a foot in both worlds (biochemical and spirit-integrative) it’s a fascinating time of convergence. I think the overarching theme of the year, nutritionally, is that our personal choices have global impact.
Here are my top five nutrition memes for the year that was (and is for a another day or 2):
1. Microbes rule: even more than we think.
We have more bacterial cells in our lower GI than all the other cells in our body combined. As it turns out, your ‘bugs’ are most of your immune system, are critical to the health and functioning of your digestive tract, and have a hand in the regulation of your whole body.
The Wall Street Journal’s health blog is atwitter with how our gut bacteria may influence our weight. This year I’ve seen stories on our microbiota’s influence on risk for cancer, our psychology and personality, and nearly every area of preventive health. I’m grateful to be working with digestive diva Kathie Swift MS RDN who has been talking about the bugs in our gut and their ramifications for health and how to balance them for some time now. She’ll be busy in 2014!
2. Is neuroscience nodding to shamanic and tantric wisdom? Yep.
Functional MRIs, until relatively recently, were only done in animals. But now we’re seeing scans of humans brains and the story that’s unfolding seems to come straight from shamanic or tantric philosophy. In shamanic tradition it’s thought that you become the vibrational result of everything – absolutely everything including your own mental internal dialouge, food, friends, work – you surround yourself with. The work of Mary Dallman and others has shown us how sugar and stress activate the amygdala (the emotion center of the brain), and how yoga and mindfulness rebalance by activating the pre-frontal cortex (the executive functional center).
But back to vibration. This year I’ve read the biophoton work of Fritz Popp (a German physicist), and heard about how his ideas may be part of the bridge between science and spirit. His theory is that all communication within cells comes down to biophotons – light vibration. He also talks about coherence – that when vibrating entities (and we are all that) resonate with each other, it amplifies their vibrational frequencies. His work offers a mechanism to explain how I can connect through my heart with a plant – as I learned to do this summer. This work dovetails nicely with The Heart Math work and Lynn Mc Taggert’s work on the human energy fiend and intention.
Fascinating exciting, and early stuff. For me right now it’s more about the direction of thought that the confirmable quality of the science. I do think confirmation, and high quality work is and will be done on these issues of physics and bioenergy and that’s an investigation I’m excited to follow in 2014.
3. It’s the food, the whole food: supplements don’t optimize and what’s good for the planet is good for you
Colin Campbell’s new book, Whole, is the just the latest offering to question the use of supplements. While high quality supplements used with skillful moderation can be powerful medicine to a person out of balance, for most, they’re useless at best. Overused, they are the ultimate processed food.
Use supplements under the guidance of a licensed nutritionist. Generally, they are best used for short-term treatment of a specific nutrient compromise or to treat a symptom. I’m a bigger fan of using herbs and spices for wellness.
Cambell’s book is also another argument to curtail the meaty version of the paleo diet. When I evaluate a diet, one measure I use is – what happens to the earth if everyone on it follows this diet? For plant-based diets, clearly the planet thrives. For meat-heavy, dairy-heavy and refined diets, it’s a planetary disaster.
Plant-based diets are in balance – personally, globally.
4. The end of trans fat? Yes!
The FDA has recently sounded the death knell for trans fats. Trans fats are those artery-clogging artificial fats used in refined foods – hydrogenated fats and the like. They are the result of trying to make cheap oils into something that acts more like butter and lard in baked goodies and other processed foods.
No timeline yet, though industry has known that it laid an egg (that contributed to a whole lot of suffering) with this one for some time. Center for Science in the Public Interest CSPI is pushing for a 6-month deadline, and their work will keep the FDA and the food industry on task.
Very very good news.
5. Metabolic individualization and intermittant fasting (what’s old is new again – again)
The functional nutrition movement has focused on the concept of biochemical individuation for a while now, and in my therapeutic nutrition work, clearly, this is the case – everyone is different on the physical – biochemical level. Then if you add in emotions, mental self-talk, energy – well, everyone is even more unique. This sounds hauntingly familiar to the dosas in Ayurveda. Are the doses genetics? Maybe – certainly they are a old thread that leads to what genetics tells us today.
Another ancient idea that happens to be a hot area of nutrition research is intermittent fasting. Mimi Spencer and Michael Mosley came out with a book- Fast Diet – this year based on this research that proposed a 5:2 plan – to eat as you normally would for 5 days, then take only 500 calories on 2 non-consecutive days. Here’s an article on the idea.
May your 2014 be filled with good food lovingly prepared and eaten with people you enjoy. I look forward to our year together!
