it's blowing

Now that our air-conditioning is finally back, the wind has shifted (that’s what Mary Poppins said - she was going to stay until the wind shifted). It's blowing outside and it's blustery, although day temperatures are still warmish, but the nights are all of a sudden much cooler, the days are noticeably shorter, and I switch the outside lights on much earlier now. The vibe is definitely shifting into fall.   Nice change to put something long-sleeved on.  

What I like so much about the seasonal weather differences is that it causes a change in the wardrobe (less white and bright, longer sleeves and tighter shoes), a change in cooking (less raw, more cooked), beverage (less rosé, more tea and cocoa) and food patterns (no more peaches and apricots, instead squash and late season tomatoes), a change in activities (done with beach and swimming, more hiking now), a change in overall mood (less bright and light, more melancholic and a bit dimmer).  And soon I won't have to protect my garbage can from the bears by strapping it shut, and the bird feeders can go back out, although that's still a bit away.

The seasonal weather changes make my life so much richer, so much more diverse, so much more interesting.   It’s like a new mini start, a bit of a new beginning, a creative impulse. I look forward to the winds blowing, pulling out my sweaters, cozying up with tea and a good book, or taking a long bath.  Here's to fall, which begins officially tomorrow.

stress help

We all lead busy lives, times are complex and even confusing - yet some people remain calm and deal with it, others not so much.  Do you get stressed or are you taking life in stride?  

Tieraona Low Dog, MD and herbalist, explained on Nick Polizzi's new nine-part series on herbalism, The Sacred Science that we all deal with busy lives but can only eliminate some, not all stressors.  Dealing with stress is instead mostly about resilience, the better way of adapting to the busyness of modern life.  Yet, some of us could use some gentle help, and not of the pharmaceutical kind.

We are discovering, or rediscovering, potent botanical remedies without side effects, that in some cases have been used for hundreds and even thousands of years, but have fallen by the wayside because they were supplanted by pharmaceuticals (that are costly and have side effects).  None of the botanicals have side effects, all of them can be taken long term, none of them are exorbitantly pricey, and you do not need a prescription, although it may pay to see an herbalist in more complex cases.

Adaptogens are herbs that promote resilience and reduce cortisol levels, the fight or flight response, over time.  The most well known adaptogen is perhaps ashwaganda, but there is also tulsi aka holy basil, ginseng, maca and some others.  Ashwaganda root can easily be taken in capsule or tincture form, and is slow acting, so takes effect over several weeks and months.

Then there are the nervines, botanicals such as valerian, hops, skullcap and kava kava that quiet the monkey mind. Kava has been made into a milky beverage in the South Pacific islands for ceremonial purposes for hundreds of years.  Now that people are discovering the beneficial and calming effects of it, kava bars are sprouting up in many places.  Its preparation in tea form is a bit lengthy, hence better suited for get togethers than perhaps everyday supplementation. But it’s also available in capsule form.

The new darling CBD Oil or cannabidiol, which doesn’t have the psychoactive substance of cannabis, besides relaxing, is also used for many other ailments from anxiety to epilepsy, pain management and more.  For those more complex ailments, dosage should be prescribed by a knowledgeable healthcare professional.  However, to take the edge off stress or anxiety, CBD Oil can safely be taken, in order of effectiveness, vaped, under the tongue, or rubbed on the skin.

Homeopathy is another gentle and effective way to help with stress, but self-medication is not recommended. Determination of the best remedy is more complicated and should be prescribed by an experienced homeopathic practitioner, and taken in the proper dosage.

the elephant in the room

Recently, I was not only asked to do some writing for producer Dena Barnett's upcoming documentary, Spiritual Healing: A New Frontier, but also to contribute a statement regarding the elephant in the room.

Which elephant, you may ask.  Well, if Spiritual Healing promises such good results why does it have such difficulty finding acceptance, credibility and traction?  The answer is two-fold and lies in the elephant so to speak.  

First, Spiritual Healing is low-tech and low cost - it costs nothing beyond the practitioner’s time, and requires no technology or other salable “props.”  Hence, if Spiritual Healing became widely accepted and gained traction, it would dismantle parts of the medical-industrial complex, which relies on people being ill, and the enormous reoccurring revenues from doctor’s visits, procedures, and pharmaceuticals that come with it.  Our culture is more profit than wellness driven, and there is enormous resistance to this shift from a financial perspective. 

Second, Spiritual Healing operates within the unseen aspect of our earthly existence, that of consciousness, and consciousness has thus far been science's, and our general cultural underpinning’s, "elephant in the room.”  Science, and the medical establishment in particular, has as yet not been willing to openly investigate the connection between consciousness and illness, and how the mind influences the body’s well or ill being.  Consciousness is the elephant in the room that scientists don't dare to mention for fear of being discredited.  

When we turn this tide, when the scientific and medical establishments openly acknowledge that consciousness influences matter, and not the other way around, that healing and ill being happen on the mental plane, it will be a momentous paradigm shift in human consciousness evolution so big we can't even predict all the implications to our way of life.

Here a related earlier post on healing eras and energy medicine.

an agricultural act

What you eat is of course closely linked to your health because your body transforms what you eat into energy, and the better the quality of the food (less pesticides and nutrient rich soil), the better your energy and your body's ability to repair its cells and self-heal.

But eating, as Wendell Berry, the great environmental activist and poet, said, is also an agricultural act.  As such it is just as closely linked to the health of our environment through the way we practice agriculture, as it is to your own health.  So what you eat has vast implications.  

You may think that on an individual level eating a conventional versus a sprayed pear may not make much of a difference.  But think about the implications of what 325 million people, the current US population, eat. It makes a difference if you grow your own pears, buy conventional (sprayed with pesticides and artificially fertilized) or organic pears (more natural ways to prevent pests and enrich the soil).  Last year the US produced 737,500 tons of pears.  Growing all of those pears is a huge agricultural act.  And even if less than 10% of those pears are not sprayed with poison, not subject to chemical fertilizer, it does make a difference.  And if the percentage of organic pears produced and purchased each years keeps growing, it makes the world a healthier place. And you are part of that difference.

the kindness virus

My heart melts and I so want to help when someone is kind and comes to me with a big smile and open eyes.  Kindness, that great companion to compassion, is what we need lots more of.  We need kindness to each other, kindness to our Earth, kindness for people we don't know, kindness to animals, all of it. Kindness is uplifting and even healing. 

If love is the ultimate healing energy, then kindness is the little healer. Kindness promotes expansion, brakes down barriers, makes things easier, facilitates communication, fosters cooperation. The great thing about kindness is that it's contagious, as CNN reported recently.  Wouldn't it be great if we all got infected by this lovely virus?

seasonally unadapted

We have been without air conditioning for a bit over a week and it may be another week until the replacement part makes its appearance.  Besides slower thinking, general sluggishness, clumpy salt and chewy crackers, the heat has had an immediate effect on my cooking, or rather lack thereof.  

Summer is always the season of lighter meals, but air conditioning permitted me to still do a fair amount of cooking - just because I could.  Not now!  Raw food diet - salads and more salads, some precooked legumes from the freezer for protein, an egg here and there (doesn't heat up the kitchen too much to cook an egg), a lot of Caprese (mozzarella/tomato) and lots of fresh fruit. And my endless thirst for hot tea all day long has given way to glasses and glasses of cold water.  Perhaps I should have tried out that raw food diet I experimented with in February of all months, when I was looking to reboot my system rather - see a post on it.  But with the heat I just don't have the energy to experiment wildly, and my cooking adventurousness and eagerness to try out new recipes has slowed with rising temperatures. 

It's amazing how quickly we lose touch with the connection to nature when we live in an artificial environment.  The effect and character of the seasons flattens out.  Diet and cooking flatten out, the biggest contrasts between summer and winter cooking diminish.  On the other hand, my connection to these last few hot days of late summer has increased. 

Unfortunately, our business oriented culture is relentless and does not permit us a slower paced summer. Business must go on.  Yes, we are gaining comfort with air conditioning, we are gaining the ability to conduct business no matter what it's like outside, but we are also losing connection to nature and the seasonal differences, and the starker contrasts that come with it.  

as above, so below

The other day I was newly setting up my calendar on my cellphone, having previously only managed appointments and events on an agenda book that's sitting in the middle of the house where I walk by many a times a day and peek into it.  What struck me as I was setting up the virtual calendar was that it automatically pulled up event locations as I typed them in, which then automatically would enable me to obtain directions, call the place up, email it, or look at their website for more information.  Many of you are already operating like this, but I was struck and realized something else. 

We may not all fully accept a collective subconscious or the interconnectedness of all beings on the non-physical plane yet, although scientists are coming around to that - see Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass and similar botanical research I covered in another post. This complete interconnectedness with via the cloud or the interweb is intertwining us via technology and informs how we interact and organize in our physical environment.  

From there it is just one step to fully realize, "As above, so below." "As above, so below" is a spiritual tenet that originates in the hermetic tradition and says that what's happening on a micro level is also happening on a macro level. The technological interconnectedness seems to me like a mirror reflection of this other interconnectedness, the one Larry Dossey, internationally known physician, author and speaker, refers to in his latest book One Mind, the universal consciousness that ancient and newly revived or developed healing modalities also tap into.

The complete interconnectedness of almost the entire human population now through cloud computing and the internet/interweb physically mirrors the complete interconnectedness we have with all of life on a consciousness level.  As above, so below.

new right-brain culture

I so love the new values.  I can feel it in my bones that a more meaningful culture is lurking underneath all this mess and morass.  Already in 2005 Daniel Pink wrote in his insightful and very readable A Whole New Mind:  Why Right Brainers Will Rule The Future,  "We've moved from an economy built on people's backs to an economy built on people's left brains to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people's right brains."

The Age of Creativity!  You probably remember, at least by title, the book Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, that taught drawing intuitively rather than intellectually.  The right side of the brain governs our creative-emotional aspect, the left our rational-analytical.  Neither can function without the other, or rather both sides inform each other to make us human, although we're not necessarily perfectly balanced. In general terms many really creative people lack a bit of rational-analytical, and many sciency, techy or businessy people lack some creative-emotional.  Others seem perfectly balanced (my daughter can navigate both complicated scientific details and concepts, and she is very creative at the same time).  In addition, more women are slightly right brain heavy, while more guys are a bit left brain heavy (that's what that other fun book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus was all about).  Here a link to a good article that compares the two sides of the brain.

Pink is saying that we're moving towards a more creative, empathic cultural and economic model.  That is also the reason why the humanities are on the rise again. Corporations are finally understanding that people who have learned to think, to look at broad cultural patterns and ideas, and who are creative, will do well in many different business environments because they think laterally and out-of-the box, instead of linearly within their field.  Right-brainers can make connections between seemingly unrelated fields. Waldorf Education has always taught to make such lateral connections, and speaks to this cultural shift (Rudolf Steiner, its founder and a brilliant visionary, was way ahead of his times.  We're only now catching up to his many ideas.).  

So, are you well balanced between both sides of the brain?  More left brain?  Or more right brain?

your body, your creation

"Your body is your creation......it exists solely to serve you."  What a cool and empowering quote from Mike Dooley's inspirational book Infinite Possibilities.  I know from experience how you can sort of feel stuck in your body.  

If you reflect on how you dress it's easy to see how your clothes and accessories are an expression of who you are and how you think about yourself.  You want your style to reflect who you are.  It's not that different with your body.  Your body is also an expression of who you are.  But in contrast to the clothes you step into and out of, you can't extricate yourself from your body, at least not until you leave this lifetime. 

From a spiritual perspective your body is not you, you merely inhabit it for the duration of your stay here on Earth to enjoy and experience your time here in the physical.  But realizing that your body is an expression of you over which you have a lot of control is a freeing realization.   Your body clearly reacts to what you put into it, what you're exposed to environmentally, how and if you move, and what thoughts you feed it. And just like your style changes over the years, your body changes over the years too.

If you modify the way you nourish yourself your body will change - think weight change and better or worse general physical health. If you decrease or increase your physical activity level, or change the type of physical activity you do (say body building versus dancing), your body changes -  think toned muscles, increased energy, flexibility and endurance versus loss of muscle mass, energy and stamina.  Changes in your exposure to environmental toxins influence your body - think better physical health versus respiratory ailments, nausea, headaches or perhaps even cancer.   Your body even changes if you change your thoughts - think more exuberance, charisma and positivity, which will make you look younger or more  radiant versus depression or anxiety, which will show up in your physical demeanor. 

You and your body are a team that's joined at the hip so to speak.  The closer you work together towards a mutual goal the more your body will reflect who you want to be.

so much more fabulous

It's alive!  Nature, I mean.  You may have known it all along, or perhaps you're stumped when I say that. The rock under your feet may seem inert and dead.  Crystals are pretty and that's just that.  The trees are doing their growing thing and that's nice because we love shade and timber.   Or you may be on a different path.  If you have animals you know that they have a soul, feelings, character, and you love your pet as if it were your child.   Perhaps you've experienced crystal healing, or you talk to your plants and nurture your garden.

For several hundred years scientists could not have ventured to say something about Nature's inherent intelligence without being discredited.  We deemed indigenous people, who always believed in Nature's sacredness and aliveness, beneath our scientifically oriented "enlightened" mind. 

But science is only true science if we ask all questions and leave the answers to our inquiries open instead of trying to prove what we want confirmed because it conveniently fits within our thinking.  Things shifted a bit with James Lovelock's Gaia Theory in the 1970s, but now the tides are really turning.  "We are transitioning into the reality where everything's alive," author Charles Eisenstein noted.   When your houseplants thrive because you talk to them, maybe it's not an accident that they look beautiful and lush.  When you harvest steadily, Nature picks up on it and produces more, summarizing the gist of Robin Wall Kimmerer's scientific research in her book Braiding Sweetgrass.  Trees are not only connected under the earth via the mycorrhizal mushroom network, something of a botanical nutrient and information internet, they also nurture, help, send information, cooperate, and protect each other, as  Smithsonian Magazine explains in an article about the work of tree researcher Peter Wohlleben.

Nature's intelligence imbues everything, is all pervasive, and we're part of it, not apart from it, as Fritjof Capra and the Francesco Varela/Humberto Maturana team have maintained for years.  Recognition of this intelligence that's all around us and in us, is us, leads to a greater respect for nature, a spirit of cooperation with it, awe for its beauty and perfection, and openness to learning from it and being inspired.  We thought we knew (almost) everything.  But the more we open our mind to Nature's miraculousness and intelligence, the more we discover that we still know so little, that there is so much more to discover, and that life becomes more fabulous the more we pursue this direction.