Drink your food, and chew your drinks....

This strange advise was given out my my yoga instructor today, so I looked it up...

 

Drink Your Food and Chew Your Water

Written by John Joseph Immel, Asheville, NC

All foods that are difficult to digest must be chewed with care. Insufficient chewing of food forces stomachs to break down larger chunks by acids. While an easy task for a tooth it takes time and effort for acids. In the hot, balmy environment of the gut, delays in digestion lead to fermentation. Hard to chew means hard to digest.

Dr. Lad Says, "Drink Your Food, Chew Your Water."

Chew food, even drinks, until it is completely mixed with saliva. Saliva contains enzymes that help digest food. Saliva also fights bacteria. Proper chewing alerts the tonsils and aimmune system to threats by bacteria.

 

What do you know? 

I told this to my 5 year-old, he got a kick out of it. 

t.

Making Soup...

This morning I woke up and was lying in bed thinking, "I'm going to make a huge vat of soup this morning, and let it simmer all day."
Then I opened the book, A Year of Living Your Yoga which read had today's reading...

A Bowl of Soup Lovingly Made Can Cure Many Ills

Living Your Yoga: 

Sometimes the simplest things give us the most profound comfort. 

Make some soup today and enjoy its delicious warmth with gratitude. 

So I did:)
t.

Like a fish tank...

Balancing Action and Reflection

Tapas (purification) and svadhyaya exist in mutual relationship, tapas being the means whereby we purify and refine our systems and svadhyaya being the means of self-reflection through which we come to an increasingly deeper level of self-awareness and self-understanding. 

By cleansing the vessel of the body and mind, tapas makes us fit for svadhyaya; by examining the vessel, svadhyaya helps us to understand exactly where we should concentrate our practices of purification. And thus, in this relationship between purification and self-examination, we have a natural method for discovering who, in essence, we are.

Polishing the Mirror by Gary Kraftsow

 Like a Fish Tank

I think of it like a fish tank. Every fish tank that I've ever owned starts off clean. It slowly starts to build up things floating in the water and the glass gets stained with moss.   Although this is true, things are still looking pretty good. 

That is, until the day when I decide to clean it out... Once I start rinsing the rocks and they release all of the build-up. The water turns grey.

This is kind of like the process of Tapas (purification) and svadhyaya (self-reflection). It is so hard to make time to sit down and reflect, because it is too easy to believe that my tank is just fine with its little bits of moss.

t.

On Patience...

I see patience as one of these fundamental ethical attitudes. 

If you cultivate patience, you almost can't help cultivating mindfulness, and your meditation practice will gradually become richer and more mature. After all, if you really aren't trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes care of itself. 

The Bloom of the Present Moment, Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Before writing this post tonight and before I started reading my book for inspiration for this post, I was thinking, "tell me something, help me figure this out." I was referring to the amount of anger and stress that spawned out of a car ride with my two boys and their friend.
Forget all of the yogi reading and practice, that flew out the window once the boys thought it would be a good idea to give each other "nuggies" and pretty much start an out-of-control brawl in the small backseat of our Prius.
Breathing, joined my patience that also flew away with the wind.
I tried my best to remain calm, and completely failed.
We got home and Elliott was whining about being hungry, and Aidan was mad that he just lost every dessert he had coming to him. It is now 9pm and we are all tired. The dog was ignored for too long, so managed to pull Aidan's School book out of his backpack and rip it to shreds (this "gift" that lay on the kitchen floor as we returned home).
So, what's the point?
I did manage to pick up the pieces (of the book and of our lives)... I talked to Aidan about what happened. I gave him a page of "What We Say Matters" that lists different kinds of feelings.
I had him circle that bad ones and star the good ones that he wants.
We cried and hugged, talked and said that we were sorry.
All in a days work. Not feeling too proud, but we'll give it another shot tomorrow.
t.

Wherever you go...Q1

By being with yourself... by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever my emerge, because it is there you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. 

This is the great work of awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies...

Intelligcnce is the door to freedom 

and alert attention is the mother of intelligence. 

Nisargadatta

In Wherever You Go There You Are

A New Idea...

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous,

and then dismissed as trivial, 

until finally it becomes what everybody knows. 

- William James

Sometimes much of what we feel and sense as a reality is more about our perception of the situation than anything else. I've been reading What We Say Matters by Judith Lasater. One part of this book focuses on Please and Thank Yous. She writes, 

"Think of a time in the last couple of days when you said something in irritation to someone close to you such as, "Why are you so late?" Translate your irritation into a "please" statement... 'Please hear how afraid I felt when you did not come home and you did not call me to say that you were OK."

Interesting how this works based on the fact that all humans have needs and when they aren't being met, it makes us upset. 

Roll with it...

As I was making fried rice tonight I was thinking about how funny life is. 

Just when you think you have it down, 

something changes to throw it off. 

I was thinking...

I'd like to believe that my life is stable but in reality we are living in a world in contant flux between (relative) stability and dynamic motion. 

It is best to not fight this, but instead roll with it. 

Who would have thought, all of this from fried rice. 
btw, I heard a report the other day that stated that people spend all of their time on social networks, texting etc... and there isn't time set aside to be bored. Yet being "bored" is the best time for "ahha moments." - this coming from a social blog, I get the irony:)

The Monsoon Crow...

Swami Satyananda Saraswati highlights the importance of meditation symbols through the story of the crow sleeping in a tree during a monsoon storm. 

During the night the tree is uprooted and floats downstream and out to sea. 

Waking on this floating branch, the crow sees no land. 

He flies to the East, West, South and North and still finds no land. 

 The crow realizes that he must rest and returns to his branch. Recovered he again searches for land but returns to the branch in between flights. It becomes his resting place and reference point until he eventually finds land. 

In meditation - and during stressful times- a symbol provides a similar anchor and resting point while you explore your mind.  1,001 Pearls of Yoga Wisdom, Liz Lark

A rough day at work, thing after thing couldn't seem to fall into place. The kind of day that you just want to go back to bed and try again tomorrow. 

To top it off, I lost my wallet. Because I work at a high school, the word "lost" can be exchanged with "my wallet was stollen." I ran out to my car, and then back to my classroom to turn everything inside-out and find it. Thinking in my head, "how could I trust them? " and "how could I be so stupid." All of the while I rushed past people, without a glance... All of this, just to find my wallet?!

So what's my point? 

I need to slow down, breathe and understand that we all have those moments when life gets the best of us. I'm going to give it another shot tomorrow.