Beautiful Quote


Here's an awesome quote I found in an issue of The Sun magazine. It's relevant because many people, when they transform their eating, come up against difficult emotions and self-worth issues.:

"So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear. Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful."

—Etty Hillesum

Jubb's Coconut Orgasm Soup


Folks, this is not only the yummiest raw soup recipe I've ever come across, it's the yummiest raw FOOD recipe—period! Seriously. It's from Lifefood Recipe Book – Living on Life Force, by Annie Padden Jubb & David Jubb, and I hope it's okay to put it here on my blog. It's more free advertising for their book than, y'know, um, plagiarism!

We (me and my ravishing wife, Carolyn) have tried three recipes from this book so far and they've ALL been amazing. This is my and my wife's favorite raw food recipe book ever. (Plus, I've heard many interviews with David Jubb and Annie Jubb, and they're both very fun and informative to listen to.)

It takes my wife and I, double teaming, about 30 minutes to make (but then we also double the recipe). Without further ado:

• 3 medium organic tomatoes, thinly sliced and halved
• ½ onion, sliced and chopped
• 7 ½ cups water
• 1 c. coconut meat (fresh or dry shredded)
• 6 tablespoons miso
• 1 carrot, finely shredded
• 5 tablespoons Dr. Bronner’s mineral bouillion
• 1 zucchini, finely shredded
• 3 – 4 tablespoons raw tahini (or ½ c. ground sesame seed)
• ¼ cup dulse, cut into small pieces
• 3 – 4 tablespoons almond or flaxseed oil or coconut butter
• ¼ teaspoon cayenne powder to taste
• optional garnish: raw goat cheese

Directions:
Combine all ingredients in a pot on stove. Never use aluminum pots! Use a fork to mash the tomato and onion into the soup to release their flavors. Warm slowly over medium flame for 5-7 minutes. Stir your love into the warming soup. When warm, remove and serve at once. The soup should be warm to the touch, but NOT too hot to put your finger into (if it’s too hot it will destroy the enzymes and many other nutrients). Onion should still be raw and crunchy.

Our observations, after making it four or five times:

• Some of that water you use should be the coconut water. This adds a nice sweet undercurrent which is highly yummy. We found the amount of water listed in the recipe to be way too much (like, by 4 times) for our tastes (we prefer it nice and thick, like a hearty raw stew). I'd recommend starting with just 2 or 3 cups, and then, if you want it more brothy, you can add more.

• Coconuts – you may need to open a few until you find one that has fairly thick meat. Scoop it out onto cutting board and chop it up a bunch, like it’s almost shredded. The "dry shredded" option listed above sounds pretty gross to me. The coconut makes it. For opening instructions, click here, or here (if those aren't enough, punch "how to open a young coconut" into Google; you'll get a zillion options).

• It’s much easier to make this soup if you first put your liquid (water and coconut water) in the pot and dissolve the miso, tahini, bouillion, and coconut butter (or whatever oil you choose). Get that dissolved first (otherwise it’s hard to mix it all up and you can end up with a glob of miso in your mouth). Then dump in all the other stuff.

• Soak the dulse for 15 minutes or so – it’s like any seaweed, which is hard and crumbly, so you soak it first in some water and then cut it up on a cutting board.

Also, our co-op doesn't carry Dr. Bronner's Mineral Bouillion, but just ask someone at the store for something close. We've used different vegan bouilliony things.

PS A million thanks to my pal Sheila for typing up a ton of this recipe. I'm a plodding hunt & peck typist. Maybe she'll share my jailtime for copyright infringement! We can do Sudoku's together! Maybe our friends will bring us this soup with a file hidden in it! A raw file!

You Are Energy

On my website I have several free articles originally published by small health newspapers in the Twin Cities area (I wasn’t quite as tight an editor back then, but I think there’s still some nifty stuff in them). Check ‘em out. Below are a few excerpts from one called, Cultivate Your Energy Body. Enjoy!

“…by eating lots of raw, or “live” foods, we literally consume bioelectric life force. The enzymes in live plant foods have been shown to be little reservoirs of life force. In addition, the water in raw foods has a unique “colloidal energy” known as zeta potential, having to do with positively charged particles in the water. Actual, hard-science instrumentation measures a potent electromagnetic field surrounding and permeating raw foods. For reasons like these, many raw foodies say that eating raw foods is “eating sunlight.”

…In his book, Biophoton: The Light in Our Cells, researcher Marco
Bischof says, “The biophoton light is stored in the cells of the organism, and a dynamic web of light constantly released and absorbed may connect cells, tissues and organs within the body.”

…cultivating an energy body is about cultivating a body that is clean and light. This is a body with clean lymph, pristine extra cellular fluid bathing all your cells. In this body, cells shine. Energy flows freely. This is why people who eat rejuvenative diets gradually eat less and less food, often only eating two, and sometimes one, light meal per day. Their bodies are clear, light and beautifully efficient. They’re living more on energy than on food.

… If our bodies are organized by and in energy fields, then our vision of dietary health must go far beyond mere concerns about, “this vitamin” or “that antioxidant.” We must begin to learn about conducting energy, or light. I believe that the most profound levels of conducting energy must involve a deep process of emotional opening (which, of course, is not the topic of this article). But the most foundational level—that’s all about what we eat!”

Gabriel Cousens Quote on Emotional Eating


Today I have a quote for you from Gabriel Cousens. His hefty book, Conscious Eating, has been one of my nutritional "Bibles" for years. Here's a passage from that book:

“For many people, eating may be a mechanism for suppressing a variety of feelings, avoiding sexual tensions, and/or avoiding certain painful aspects of their lives. Some people eat in an attempt to make themselves feel good. Others may eat in order to deaden themselves to their feelings or their lives in general. Some overeat in a conscious effort to self-destruct. For others, eating becomes an addictive way of handling life. Some are so afraid of their inner life that when God calls, they would rather reach for another plate of ice cream than heed this call. Overeating is a way of numbing oneself to life…

“For many people, overcoming their food transferences and food issues can require intense and difficult work that takes them to the very core of their psychological beings…"

All I wanna know is, who eats ice cream on a plate? You KNOW you're a health nut when you don't even REMEMBER how normal people eat ice cream! (The plate of ice cream comes, I presume, after you've had enough spoons full of pizza...) ;-)

I kid because I love!

Phasers


About 20% of my clients are “phasers.” Not the Star Trek weapon, but people whose healthy eating phases wildly (even though they “know everything” about nutrition, and might even be professionals—chiropractors, nutritionists, etc.). They eat super clean for a couple months or weeks and then they eat nasty for just as long.

If this is your pattern, there are plenty of things you can do in the domain of ACTION—foundations to build, habits to put into place, all sorts of little “tricks of the trade.” But the real change in this phasing-pattern comes PSYCHOLOGICALLY. I observe that there are essentially three keys to inner-transformation. Applied to this issue—phasing with healthy eating—they go like this:

1) Intention—Access the clear intention to SEE what’s really going on with you, psychologically, with your on-again-off-again eating. Really WANT IT.

2) Not Knowing—Dare the humility of really NOT KNOWING why you play out this pattern. If you’ve done a bunch of therapy or read some self-helpish books, you probably have a lot of theories as to why you vacillate with your eating, but if you REALLY knew, the pattern would shift. So free-fall into “I don’t have a CLUE what I’m up to with this pattern!” As Zen Master Seung Sahn Said, “Only don’t know.” (It’s the title of one of his books, too.) This disposition is porous and open and available to see and learn new things about why you do what you do.

3) Consciousness—Those two—Intention and Not Knowing—lead inexhorably to becoming CONSCIOUS of what your pattern is all about, what you’re “playing out” and so on. There are LEVELS of seeing. You can see something in your psychology in an abstract, intellectual way for YEARS without REALLY seeing it at all. But when you see some inner pattern in a deep, direct, visceral way, that pattern absolutely will shift (or your realtionship TO it will shift, with the same end result—powerful change).

What To Do About Unhealthy People Around You

It’s common for a person who’s just started eating healthy to try to make their kids or spouses eat healthy, too. This is a profoundly bad idea. Doomed to failure.

It’s a little like with the airplane masks on an airplane. The instructions are: Secure your own mask before helping your kids on with their’s (you won’t help them very effectively if you’re unconscious). Same with healthy eating. First get yourself firmly, rock-solidly grounded in rejuvenative eating. Live it, for real. Get to the point where you’re shining with vibrant energy and glowing with deep cellular vitality. They’ll see your radiant eyes and skin, they’ll notice your increased energy, your clear mind. You’ll even smell better! Even little kids (actually, especially little kids) will pick it up energetically.

And when do you finally begin preaching, “educating,” and reforming your housemates? Well never, actually. You’ll only help them discover the power of regenerative eating by attraction and example. That’s it.

I know it takes preternaturally healthy boundaries to do this (for more on this, check out al-anon literature and meetings!), but ATTRACTION really is the only thing that works. If it’s in their “karma” or “destiny” or whatever, they’ll be drawn. But the more you seem self-righteous or judgemental or ANYTHING weird or unhappy or complicated about their eating, the more you create a power struggle—polarized resistance, defiance and so on. In other words, eat and let eat.

(Of course, if your child is young enough that it works to just tell them what to eat, and your spouse agrees with you, and you’re good at making healthy stuff yummy to a child’s palate, then there’s no issue there.)

Potent Quotes from Cheri Huber

I think that, for anyone in the amazing process of transforming how they eat, the wisdom of Cheri Huber is indispensable.

“Most people hold an unshakable belief that the primary reason they are ‘good’ is that they punish themselves when they are ‘bad.’…The process of self-hate is so much a part of the average person that we don’t even recognize it. We think we’re just doing the things that will insure we’ll be good. It’s normal, we say. Everybody does it. Or should.”

“Any time a voice is talking to you that is not talking with love and compassion, DON’T BELIEVE IT!…If the voice is not loving, don’t listen to it, don’t follow it, don’t believe it. NO EXCEPTIONS! Even if it says it’s ‘for your own good,’ it is not. It’s for its own good, not yours. This is the same as when parents talk to you in a hateful tone of voice ‘for your own good.’ It’s for their good. It makes them feel better. It does not make you better. (And it does not make you behave ‘better’.)”