What were you doing on April 30, 2011?

Did you know the last Saturday of April is officially called World Healing Day? Over the years, it has been called several things: Tai Chi Day, Qi Gong Day, World Yoga Day, or World Peace Day. Whatever you call it, it’s brillant! Hundreds of thousands of people around the world all focusing on healing and peace all at the same time, all day! Fantastic, count me in!

Resources say that the idea of World Healing Day grew out of a Princeton University research project that found on days of national or international crisis there was a measurable difference in computer functioning. They were originally looking at the tradegy of Princess Diana and the world’s collective emotional response. The grief, anger, shock, disappointment, and disbelief, believed Princeton researchers, caused the energetic fluctuations.

From that research and other days of tragedy grew the idea of focused emotion, or collective consciousness to positively affect the world’s people and events. The idea is simple, What if a large number of people around the globe all focused their energy on Peace and healing for a whole day, could we possibly make a difference?

In reality Jan and John Price held the first World Healing Day on December 31, 1986. According to their website over 500 million people participated around the globe. Unfortunately, the Price’s study subjects and seminars are a bit too esoteric for the ‘real world’ and their original concept has been highjacked by the new World Healing Day.org. But thankfully, for us, the idea has stuck and each year participation in World Healing Day increases.  Hopefully we can make a difference in the world. Nothing but world peace will do.

This year I attended a Qi Gong conference in Orlando, FL. called, “Qi Revolution”. Jeff Primack is the mastermind behind the 4 day convention that just may revolutionize Qi Gong and healing in the West! He has set up a foundation called Suprmeme Science Qi Gong. They teach Qi Gong and food healing to large groups of people across the world. For Earth Day (April 22 annually), David Beaudry, one of the foundation’s Level 3 Facilitators, attened an event in Los Angeles. He taught Qi Gong to 6000 at risk high school students. It was such a hit, LA county is discussing how to incorporate Qi Gong classes into the school district’s curriculum. Go to http://www.iqigong.org/Home.html to learn more about the fantastic work Supreme Science Qi Gong is doing around the globe.

I don’t know how to tell you about my experience at the convention. It was amazing, grounding, moving, and very spiritual. I spent 4 days devoted to self reflective movement, stress reduction, and Qi building. I listened better than I have ever listened. I did the best yoga I have ever done, the most fluid, flexible, and open yoga. And I felt more internal heat and energy movement than I have felt beofre. It is amazing to enter a room without furniture, just yoga mats, with 2000 like minded people, quiet your internal dialogue and hear everything! You can actually feel the words and the music sink into your body. I wish I could do it everyday! You have to try it yourself. Hopefully one day I can help organize and lead such an experience. Would you come?

Next year World Healing Day is April 28, 2012. What will you do?

Qi gong is the Chinese martial art form of moving, collecting, and storing Qi. It is more static than Tai Chi, which is one of the slowest moving of the martial arts. In any Qi Gong class you should expect to stand still for most of the class, feet firmly grounded into the earth. This grounding is actually part of the way you assist Qi building within your body. I will be writing a series of articles to introduce you to Qi Gong and it’s healing abilities. Look for new articles to learn more about how you can help yourself become more healthy and vibrant than you ever expected.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” – Old Greek Proverb

Spring is in the air! Everything is seething with life and energy! Limbs are filling up with vibrant green leaves, flowers are poking their heads out of long empty stalks, and the birds’ squawking is like a new year’s celebration. Spring is the season of Wood. The Wood Element belongs to the Liver and Gallbladder. Its color is green, taste sour, sound shouting, direction East, it feeds the tendons and moistens the eyes. The Liver represents planning. The Gallbladder houses decision making. Together this Yin/Yang pair propels us forward; as does the Spring bring forth the shoots, buds and flowers.

Spring is the birth of Yang energy, the reawakening after Winter. Wood energy is forceful, vigorous, warming and expansive. It is the activating energy that overcomes inertia. Its movement is upwards and outwards. The Wood element brings a sense of hope, renewal, transformation, new beginnings, rebirth and reanimation. When Wood energy is healthy you are patient, forgiving, insightful and relaxed.

You’ll know when your Wood energy is out of balance when you have one sided headaches, stiff neck and shoulders, heartburn, muscle twitches or joints that feel out of place. If you are feeling overwhelmed by time constraints, pressure to complete your list, or angry because things aren’t going as planned, sit on a park bench, take 10 deep breathes, counting each inhale and exhale with your eyes closed. Open your eyes and soak in the colors around you, the noises of nature and the scent of spring. Tell yourself that all is as it should be and there is plenty of time to accomplish everything. Do this as often as necessary.

Wood energy is healthiest when there is balance between today’s decision making and tomorrow’s vision. Visualize yourself in 5 years, laying out a broad course of action to get there and making decisions each day to bring those ideas to life which is the secret of Wood energy. The power of Wood energy is the ability to manifest your dreams. See yourself as you want to be, be creative, plan, and the energy of Wood will carry you towards your destiny.

We had our first spring rain today. The month of March was exceptionally dry in the Tampa Bay area. Today’s rain has washed away the pollen that has stained the cars, the tree buds that have draped the windows and the dirt that has coated everything for the last 30 days. It makes me think about the element Wood and what Spring has to teach us.

The emotion of Wood energy is hostility. Hostility is expressed as impatience, cynicism, competitiveness, self-centeredness or an exaggerated response to challenging situations. However, anger and depression are the most common emotions attributed to the Wood element. Hostility, anger, and depression are the most harmful emotions to the body, the organs, and related systems. Impatience, expressing anger or getting upset about uncontrollable circumstances activates the flight or fight response and release cortisol into the body. Prolonged excess cortisol levels weaken the body’s ability to regulate itself. Research involving patients with various autoimmune diseases is showing that cortisol dysregulation just may be the beginning of the autoimmune response. Healing these emotions begins with managing your control issues and releasing your attachment to outcomes.

The lesson of Wood is patience. If you learn to lessen the pressure of time constraints, develop empathy for others, practice smiling and even laugh at yourself, you help your body control cortisol levels, promoting a healthier you.

So, next time you find yourself tapping your foot, losing your temper, about to yell at the person behind the counter that doesn’t care about the last 10 minutes of your lunch hour, take a breath, smile and laugh, just a little, at yourself, let the person behind you go first and trust that everything will be okay. Not only will you feel better, but your body will be healthier!

Reuse. Reduce. Recycle. OK, we get it. We buy local and organic. We walk, ride our bikes, or take public transportation, and always carry our own shopping bags.  How else can a yogi honor Mother Earth? How can we cultivate a harmonious environment within our yoga practice?  And how can we utilize the tools of our practice to help change the world around us?

We begin within ourselves.  Try turning everything off, including the chatter of the mind.  We de-frag our computers and sync our iPhones, try doing the same for yourself.  When we meditate, our blood pressure and heart rate lowers.  We decrease our stress levels which helps to balance hormones and decrease insomnia–so right there we’re happier and healthier.    Meditation is for everyone, it’s just harder for some of us.  It may require more practice and patience if you are the person whose brain screams “Get up! We’ve got stuff to do!” during Savasana.  Mantra meditation gives the mind a mantram (word or phrase) to concentrate on, helping to channel your focus.  For Earth Day, try Om Sri Gaia Ma, Purnatva Gaia Ma.  Beautiful, Abundant, Benevolent Earth Mother, You are the Fullest Perfection, Divine Earth Mother, as sung beautifully by Katrina Ariel at  http://www.youtube.com/embed/Gh64Ii8iY2k

Another technique yogis use to honor our commitment to creating a peaceful world is pratyahara.  When we go within and learn to practice Pratyahara, the of withdrawl of the senses, we can change any space we inhibit. We create our own nirvana, our own place of peace.  This Earth Day, take your yoga mat outside.  Sit quietly.  Close your eyes and feel the sun on your face.  Quiet your thoughts and hear the neighbors’ dog, smell the freshly mown grass and cultivate a sense of peace within. Practice radiating this energy around you.  Work on expanding your peaceful area everywhere you go.   A yogi creates their own harmonious environment and  honors Mother Earth by learning to find stillness, peace and beauty, in the chaos.  Remembering to honor ourselves as a manifestation of the Divine, as we honor Mother Earth, as we honor each other is a true yogic practice that can only empower, heal, and grant us all peace.

Happy Earth Day!

Blessing of Love and Light–

Terra Kula

New Article by Guest Author: Michael “Green”wood

The most important element of a garden is the plan.  Without a good plan the would-be gardener is inviting disaster. Everything the gardener plants is out for itself.  Your sweet potatoes won’t hesitate to invade . . . well, everything.  The same goes for squash and pole beans.  Your tomatoes have no reservations about toppling over their trellis and smothering whatever is in their way.  Despite thousands of years of selective breeding the law of the jungle still rules.  In other words, your cucumbers don’t give a damn about their community (the garden); they just want to set fruit and spread their seed.

The wise gardener takes this into account in his plan;  He uses this selfish vigor to his advantage without being drawn into the futile exercise of actually fighting it.  If you fight against these natural impulses you will loose.

Someone I can’t remember once compared a garden to a contest between Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos.  At the beginning of the season order reigns, but as the months pass chaos comes increasingly to dominate.  The gardener must accept this.  We are never in complete control.  Without a good plan we have little or no control at all.

I usually start planning my garden in late January. You cannot plan it too early. The more time you have to get supplies together and do all of the necessary preparatory work the better.

One of the most important elements of the plan is soil preparation.  This includes any amendments to the soil to improve texture or add nutrients, as well as building raised beds or grading the soil.  You don’t want to rent a tiller with the plan of preparing the soil and getting everything planted in one day.  Getting the soil ready a few months ahead of time, if possible, will make your life easier.  Unlike planting itself, soil preparation can be done any time the ground is warm and dry enough to work.  Sometimes this is preferable, as some soil amendments are more effective if they are allowed to interact with the soil for a period before planting.  I will go into more depth on the subject in a future post.

Something else that needs to be considered is weather or not you want to buy “starts” or seedlings, or buy and start your own seeds.  For a small garden the extra cost of buying starts is negligible and can save a lot of effort.  For a larger garden the cost can add up quite a bit.  Buying your own seeds not only saves you money, it gives you orders of magnitude more options;  Only a small fraction of the most popular varieties are available at local nurseries.  Occasionally you will get lucky.  If you have access to a local nursery that offers unusual varieties of vegetable, all the better!  Also, while I prefer trying out unusual heirloom varieties or less well known vegetables, there is nothing wrong with the common varieties offered at most local nurseries.  The point is to figure this out ahead of time so that you can plan accordingly.

Seeds and other supplies can be bought locally or through catalogues or online.  I prefer to get my seeds online, as this gives me the greatest variety to choose from.  To save costs I try to get my seeds from as few places as possible; I also try to support companies that are working to preserve older varieties.  Here are some of my favorites:

Terroir Seeds at http://www.underwoodgardens.com/ . An amazing selection of heirloom seeds.

Territorial Seed Company at http://www.territorialseed.com/. Also a great selection of heirloom seeds and supplies.

Outsidepride at https://www.outsidepride.com/. A great selection of cover crops and green manures.

Gurney’s at http://gurneys.com/. A good source for more conventional varieties of both seed and plant, as well as a few heirlooms.

I prefer to get as much of my supplies as possible locally.  Unfortunately, many of the tools and amendments I need simply aren’t available locally.  Some of the best tools for the small-scale horticulturalist aren’t even available in the country.  This is the inevitable result of a food system centered on large machinery and synthetic chemicals.  Fortunately, things are changing, and more and more products for the organic grower are available all the time.

I’ve been on this 108 yoga class journey for a while now.  I’ve done a lot of downward facing dogs and honestly haven’t loved or mastered all of them.  After one challenging class, I pulled myself aside and did a little self-study.

Why was the class so hard for me?

Was everyone else struggling?

As the questions came, I focused on my breath and allowed the answers to come.

I made the class hard.  I silently complained, judged, and ridiculed myself throughout the 90 minutes structured to uplift, open and rejuvenate.  My inner dialogue had closed me off the the beauty of my own breath, the power of my own practice, the integration of my mind and body.

As a yoga teacher, I am trained to recognize this self-sabotage in my students.  As a yogini, I am challenged to recognize when I am stumbling down this destructive path, and without judgement, align with the Divine.  This is why I practice.  We are the cause of our own misery,both on and off the mat.  Our yoga practice presents us with the opportunity to pull ourselves out of our misery.

Every class I go to, the teacher has their own way of reminding us it’s OK to fall out of a pose.  It’s OK to rest in balasana, child’s pose.  The challenge is to re-align with my own divinity when I’m having a bad day.  To rest when I need resting, to  pull myself out of the pose, to go deeper into it.  The challenge is to remember my worth when feeling worthless, to connect to the universal when feeling alone.  As one teacher said, “It is OK, brilliant even, to be full of it.”  In this case, the “it” is you.  Being full of yourself does not make you a bad person, it makes you a yogi.

Blessings of Light and Love,

TerraKula

Cheese and Ice Cream and Butter, oh my!

Shortly after my son was born, we discovered that he was intolerant to cow’s milk protein. That meant that for as long as I chose to nurse him, I would have to be completely milk free. Problem….No cheese, No ice cream, No butter, Oh my!

What would I eat?

What was left?

I quickly became an obsessive label reader searching for the hidden milk in my favorite products. If any of the following words appeared in the label, then it was out of my diet:

• ammonium caseinate
• calcium caseinate
• magnesium caseinate
• potassium caseinate
• sodium caseinate
• casein/caseinate
• rennet casein
• curds
• lactate
• lactose
• delactosed/demineralized whey
• lactoferrin
• lactoglobulin
• milk derivative/protein/fat
• modified milk ingredients
• hydrolyzed casein
• hydrolyzed milk protein
• lactalbumin
• lactalbumin phosphate
• whey
• whey protein concentrate

I carried a cheat sheet list of no-nos while shopping, checked online at such websites as www.godairyfree.org and just generally ate less processed food for fear that my son would break out into a rash with a distended, gassy belly! What I discovered while going through this process is that by cooking with fresh, locally, organically grown food and not eating out I felt better! I lost weight (a lot of weight!) and I was shaping the way my children would eat for the rest of their lives.

I am no longer nursing and I have begun to add dairy back into my diet, but only a little and very judiciously. I continue to keep processed foods out of my family’s diet as much as possible and am very happy with the results.

Next up: What my family actually eats now!

Grab an apple, steam those vegetables, and spread some hummus!

After 4 years of living in Florida I have finally found a Kula.

Sometime in November, a friend introduced me to IRB Yoga studio. She had not practiced yoga before, but was looking for something new and challenging. Three of my coworkers/employees/friends and I started going on a regular basis. I practice in a class every Sunday, but they practice as often as they can manage, thanks to the monthly unlimited pass. Since attending their first class in November, the three of them now practice yoga three or four days a week, sometimes taking two or three classes a day! Now that’s enthusiasm!

Next month my daughter will turn four…just in time for spring! To honor this special day, she is allowed to share treats with her classmates at preschool. After much thought I’ve decide to green up her birthday by providing each of her classmates with a seedling starter kit!

Each goody bag will contain a starter pot (cowpots.com has ingenious and affordable biodegradable poo pots), potting soil, radish seeds (small radishes will germinate in 3-5 days and can mature in 3 weeks) and instructions for getting those little hands dirty!

I am so excited to be “giving” spring a head start this year! Why not give it a try yourself?

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The following article was written for TheEcoDivas by a guest blogger and my friend, Mike “Green”wood.

The holidays are over. Snow blankets the ground and the frigid mid-January air is more ruthless chomp than nip. Just as I have for the last several years, I am spending much of my free time working on my garden.

Well, I’m not in my garden – not much anyway. I am sitting in my living room making calculations, drawing up plans, ordering seeds and supplies on-line and taking time to visit the local horticulture supply or hardware store. Having a garden changes your relationship to time and the seasons. Some believe that it brings us into a closer relationship with the natural world. Compared to a typical urban or sub-urban life, I have to agree. But the horticultural revolution that happened thousands of years ago presaged something far different – it was the first step on humanities’ long path to subjugating nature. Well, attempting to subjugate nature.

The hunter-gatherer moves from place to place, using the resources available and then moving on. The gardener takes a piece of the natural world and separates it, declaring it his own kingdom even building fences to keep others out or domesticate predators like wolves and cats to patrol his realm. I doubt our hunter-gatherer ancestors had ranges which they claimed as their own. It was the gardener who first built permanent settlements and walls. The gardener laid the foundation for civilization.

Many of us yearn to bridge that very divide. While few wish to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we sense that something has been lost. We romanticize nature. We think dualistically about it: Nature is everything pure and innocent, while we are everything corrupt and debased. Alternatively, we view the natural world as brutal and unpredictable, and see our world as both reliable and just. We are alienated, not only from the natural world, but from a part of ourselves. In our psychosis we both glorify and vilify nature.

In the garden we confront the divide between humanity and nature at its foundation, a divide that extends even into our own being as “mind-body dualism.”  Gardening is a kind of time travel. We walk to the edge of that great divide and find that while it exists in our culture and psyches, nature does not recognize it. We can come to the beginning, when man was at the mercy of nature, seeming capricious and cruel yet beneficial and kind. But we bring to this place a power our ancestors lacked; we are in many ways only at natures’ mercy to the extent that we hold back this power. We can bring in great machines, chemicals, even enclosures of plastic, glass and steel while taking little notice of the seasons. We bring with us our modern mentality. Many of us do not often fear nature – and perhaps this is a good thing; but we often hold nature in contempt, an attitude I believe to be unjustified and even dangerous. Above all we survey nature and we believe we can do better.

Can we? Across the wide spectrum of gardening philosophy and practices there is a universal assumption that we can do better, from accelerating and augmenting natural processes to replacing those processes entirely with synthetic chemicals and machines. To assume we cannot improve on nature, at least for our own selfish benefit, is to abandon gardening entirely and become foragers. Even planting food bearing crops in the wilderness and then leaving them to themselves is an attempt at an “improvement.” Can we make such “improvements” respectfully, without contempt? Perhaps more important for our survival, can we make such improvements without being idiots?

How each of us negotiates the relationship between our world of artifice and the natural world determines how we garden – and gardening is an incredible opportunity for constant re-negotiation of that relationship. We encounter nature directly, which incurs choice between antagonism and partnership.

From year to year my gardening values don’t change much. On one hand, I want to grow the most productive, nutritious and flavorful crops as sustainably as possible, while being as cheap and lazy as I can get away with. On a more subtle level, I seek an honest communion with the natural world without the need or desire to pretend that it’s any more or less than what it is.

In a few weeks, I will be starting my habaneros, followed by peppers, tomatoes, then on to sprouting sweet potatoes . . . The frenzy of spring feels as if it’s almost upon me.  I couldn’t be happier!

The above photos are of Mike’s lovely garden.