Category: Uncategorized

By Joyce

A few weeks ago, when I returned to work as an on-call interfaith chaplain at Harborview Medical Center, Tita, at the front information desk, exuberantly welcomed me back. It had been three years since I last saw Tita yet her spirit shined as bright as ever. Some staff at Harborview practice medicine. Tita is medicine.

Traditional Chinese medicine understands a person’s shen or spirit as integral to health; when shen is strong, eyes are bright, radiating spiritual and emotional well-being. Tita, stationed at Harborview’s ground floor entrance, not only shares information and directions, she, a practitioner and leader of laugh yoga, also shares joy, love and compassion. And, of course, laughter is thrown in for free.

Tita described her daily self-cure practices to me: When I wake at 4:45 in the morning, I spend five minutes expressing my gratitude. I say, “Thank you God for this new day, bless my day; it’s going to be a great day.” I look at the sky and say, “Thank you for the beautiful day.” When I take a shower, I laugh. When I drive, I laugh. When I am at work, I laugh. When I am in the bathroom, I laugh. You don’t have to have stress. You don’t have to have other emotions. You just have to celebrate life everyday.

I can attest from personal experience, Tita’s methods work. During my chaplain residency, I often joined Tita at Harborview’s weekly laughter club. At first, I felt awkward and silly, forced even, as I participated in the goofy group exercises. Soon enough the awkward silly me was cutting loose, my goofball self laughed like the most practiced in the room. Not hard, really. At the time, those weekly laugh-ins became a self-care practice; an antidote to daily grief and trauma exposure.

We know laughter is an upper but beyond enhancing mood, there is also research showing laughter offers pain relief, immune cell activation, stress reduction, blood sugar regulation and blood pressure reduction. When I’m at Harborview, I inevitably gravitate towards the information desk and get in line for my daily dose of Tita.

Join Tita at Harborview’s Laughter Club on Fridays at noon in the resource center.

…read more

Read more here:: DailySelfCure

By Joyce

This weekend, I did the unimaginable: I switched sides of the bed with my husband. Traditionally, I sleep on the right side of the bed, he, on the left. Every two years or so, it becomes evident, when neck, shoulder or arm pain arises, we’re both ready to make the switch. It’s baffling why my sleep position can become as static as some books in my nightstand, especially since sleeping in the same position, night after night, year after year, will obviously impede blood circulation and compress nerves. Waking up to my habitual sleep patterns is so difficult because getting into bed grants me permission to drop all conscious self-monitoring, letting the unconscious autonomic nervous system do the work of restoration. Yet sleep, that delicious still yin time, can be a silent minefield of somatic bombs waiting to detonate if I don’t pay attention to my body’s signals. That slight tightness in my neck and that insistent ache in my elbow and upper arm, all on the right side, are the signals telling me it’s time to unpin myself from the bed.

After changing sides of the bed, cleaning up every other part of our passive nocturnal den became an active imperative. The dust under the bed: gone. The pillows that make us sniffle: gone. The previously read books and journals with no entries on my nightstand: gone.

Last night, while comfortably left lying on the left side of the bed, I resisted yearnings to turn back to my old right sided ways. I reflected on how the yin-yang symbol isn’t a mere philosophical abstraction, it is a how-to diagram from one of the most ancient instruction manuals, giving direction for turning the knob on our life experiences. If we are stuck in chronic self-harming patterns, in pain or polarized – switch it up, be flexible, and make changes.

This morning, waking up on the wrong side of the bed never felt so right (or, do I mean left?).

…read more

Read more here:: DailySelfCure

By Joyce

At KUBE 93fm’s Haunted House, we three not-so-brave souls, Margaret, Machelle and myself clung to each other as we made our way through the Georgetown Morgue, a wicked chamber of calculated terror. When the first mutilated woman jumped out at me with no forewarning, I smacked her in the nose, which only made her rear up again like a ghastly living nightmare. Continuing to walk through dark corridors, we found floors collapsing under our feet and threat at every turn. We took turns being in the lead, pushing through dead bodies bundled and hanging in plastic body bags only to have to squeeze through rubber cots with bloody body parts splayed everywhere. We recoiled from blood–smeared morticians, crazy clowns and tragic characters like scary mothers with dead babies, sick people in wheelchairs and disgruntled crime victims. The whole time, we screamed our lungs out – so much so that my sides hurt. The continuous raising and lowering of my diaphragm, the unchecked shrieking and laughing, the clutching to the friend in front of me–all of it felt wicked good. At the end of our tour, when a zombie goon chased us with a running chainsaw into the November chill air, we had to catch our breath. For the next few minutes, we laughed, coughed, spluttered and spit. Our lungs had a real workout. Who knew terror was such an excellent expectorant?

…read more

Read more here:: DailySelfCure

By Joyce

Borgenola, that’s the name of my new favorite raw breakfast. It’s named after my trusted advisor, Danny Borgen, because it was his brainchild, but like all inventions with a good original formula, it evolved.

Originally, Danny turned me on to his after workout snack/lunch, which was a combination of flax and pumpkin seeds. As his nutritional trusted advisor, I subsequently recommended chia seeds to replace the flax and later hemp hearts. He, continuously fascinated by the science of food, added raw cacao nibs.

Finally, after all this talk about his combo, I tried it, liking it enough to incorporate it as a breakfast food myself. To his Borgenola, I added raw sunflower seeds. The gelatinous chia mixed with crunchy sunflower, pumpkin and cacao nibs offers tasty granola-like textures. Because of the high amount of protein in chia and hemp, it satisfies, not to mention stabilizes blood sugar levels, but it is light, unlike oatmeal or other grain based morning cereals. Both chia and hemp seeds are also high in essential fatty acids, which give them anti-inflammatory properties. Hemp contains all the amino acids which build protein and aide in developing lean body mass and muscular repair, making it an ideal after workout food. As for the other seeds, sunflower most notably offers vitamin E, selenium and folate while pumpkin offers magnesium, zinc and manganese. Cacao nibs, besides its desirable chocolate taste, also offers a significant yield of magnesium, manganese and copper. All with more nutritional merit than mentioned in this post, these superfood seeds united feel so right mixed together. Check out the nutritional data for yourself.

Depending on the season, it can be eaten as a warm or cold meal. You can add fruit, jam or sweeteners, or not; chia, neutral in taste, harmonizes well with very little or no sweetener. It’s a clean, simple, high nutrient, non-allergenic, non-inflammatory, raw breakfast or snack that lends itself to infinite permutations. Try it.

Borgenola Raw Breakfast Recipe

3 Tablespoons chia seed

1 cup water (hot or cold)

3 Tablespoons Hemp Hearts

1 Tablespoon raw pumpkins seeds

1 Tablespoon raw sunflower seeds

1 teaspoon raw cacao nibs

Optional

1 Tablespoon shredded coconut

Berries, pear or apple slices

1 tsp. maple syrup, agave or honey or fruit jam

Instructions:

Add 1 cup heated or cold water to chia seeds and stir. Wait 15 minutes until gelatinous. Stir again and add remaining ingredients.

…read more

Read more here:: DailySelfCure

By Joyce

I hadn’t made collage art in many moons, but when I saw a stack of LIFE Nature Library encyclopedias and a star chart on my neighbor’s curb, I snatched them up for the quiet weekend ahead.  Sorting through images and delving into non-verbalized waters was just the kind of immersion I needed.

On Sunday morning, I found myself surrounded with books and magazines, flipping through pages, reading here and there, and searching for images; I was casual, comfortable with the mess, until I would see something and then out came the scissors.  The open-ended process would suddenly turn into a narrowed down chase. Cutting pictures out, sometimes requiring the X-Acto knife for precision, became my sole pursuit.

I continued to roam randomly through my materials; savagely tearing whole pages out of books and with four snips of the scissors out came graphic images of words too. My hands were busy, and my piles of pictures grew, but nothing was coming together, not in my mind, or on the page.    I threw my Man and Space encyclopedia down.  Useless! Outdated!  A half hour before, collage making felt so purposeful, so easy and relaxed, but with nothing showing for my efforts, doubts started arising. Was I creating meaning or just wasting my time?

Then it happened. The self-doubt gave me access to stronger feelings. With some force, I tore the star chart off its cardboard background; a layer that I had felt inexplicably bound to.  After having thrown off that constraint, my collage quickly came together:  A muscular old lady in a standing pose, carrying a candle on a backdrop of a seasonal star chart.  It clearly expressed my recent reflections on my own aging, and the necessity to keep working my body through all the seasons of my life, and at the same time, carry my own flame, my spark, to keep me moving.

Making art is always revealing.  And unpredicatable.  It is a reliable remedy, bringing to the surface what we are ready to see.

Read more here: DailySelfCure

By Joyce

Friends and neighbors, Claudia and Jackie, joined me today for stair climbing on this fine, and increasingly rare, sunny morning at the concrete stairs tucked in at intersection of S. Cooper St. and Waters Ave. S. in Upper Rainier Beach. There’s nothing better, in between breaths, than talking about books, gardening and local beautification efforts to take my attention off this demanding, sweaty form of exercise.  All of us carried backpacks with varying poundage (5lbs – 20lbs) of rice or other bulk foods to make it more of a load bearing exercise.  As middle-aged women, we need to keep building lean muscle mass since women tend to lose 5 -7 pounds of muscle a year if not doing weight-bearing exercise.  And besides building strong bones, weight-bearing exercise keeps your metabolism fired up because having more muscle generates more metabolic activity, which burns fat.  At fifty-four years old, I’m all for it.

I would have never imagined that I would voluntarily walk up and down stairs carrying weight, but after my backpacking trip to the Sierra Nevada Mountains this past summer, I can’t think of a better way to stay in shape and partake in my local landscape.  While descending the stairs, one is treated to wide screen views of Lake Washington, a performance stage for precipitation and light.  Mist, rain and fog can seem so miserable when exercising indoors but can actually be the very elements to invigorate the senses when experiencing them outdoors.

Finally, what gets me out of bed so I can climb the stairs, three mornings a week at 8AM, is I feel stronger and better for the effort. If I feel stronger, I feel more self-confident.  If I feel more self-confident then I doubt myself less.  If I doubt myself less, I feel better about my life.  If I accomplish nothing else than climbing stairs in a day then I have indeed done a good amount of cardiovascular work.

All the work, all the sweat, is so worth it, and so much more bearable if I have company.  There’s no denying it – I am a social climber.

Please join me on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8AM at the intersection of S. Cooper St. and Waters Ave. S.  If you want to do load-bearing exercise, use a backpack with a waist belt so the weight is well distributed.  Increase load gradually.

Read more here: DailySelfCure

By Joyce

Months before our epic John Muir Trail hike last summer, I experimented with making homemade energy bars; the goal being to bring along tasty nutrient rich snacks that could fuel us on our calorie burning days. I scoured all the energy bar recipes on the web and closely inspected the ingredients lists on the huge array of protein/power/nutrition/ raw bars sold at my local food coop. I was most interested in what manufacturers were using as binders to hold bars together.  After my research and experiments, I found what worked best for me was using a combination of dried dates or apricots, chia seeds, honey, nut butters, apple sauce and coconut oil.  Because I favor raw foods, I used a dehydrator instead of an oven to retain the most nutrition, and preserve the energy bars.  Be assured that the chewy texture was not compromised from being dehydrated.

As we prepared for our hike, I brought along samples of my energy bars for my hiking partners to try out on our training hikes which helped me refine my recipes. Although I wasn’t scientific about calculating their carbohydrate, protein and fat ratios, they were definitely satisfying.  I can attest that once we were on the John Muir Trail, these energy bars did fuel me up all the mountain passes and kept me going on long mileage days. They traveled well in high heat, held their shape and performed admirably on a caloric level, so much so that we ate far fewer of them than anticipated.  Whether you are hiking or not, it’s handy to have these bars around as snacks or additions to lunches.

The following recipes, although all yummy, are listed in order of popularity. Use my recipes as a guideline for proportions but make substitutions for different protein powders, nuts, seeds or dried fruit if you have a different preference.  Store them in glass sealed containers or, if traveling, you can vaccuum pack or keep them in Ziploc plastic bags.

Sprouted Buckwheat & Carob Energy Bar

The sprouted buckwheat offers a nice crunchy texture and Carob satisfies chocolate lovers.

1 cup dried dates (soaked)

1 cup almond meal

1 cup whey protein powder

1 cup walnuts

2 cups sprouted buckwheat groats

½ cup Chia seeds  (soak ½ cup chia seeds in 1 cup water)

¼ cup carob powder

½ cup cacao nibs

¼-1/2 cup honey

pinch salt

Instructions

Sprout  your buckwheat groats.  I place my grouts in a colander to sprout so it is easy to rinse.

Soak ½ cup chia seeds in 1 cup water.  Wait ½ hr.

In Cuisine art, pulse walnuts into small chunks.  Put aside

In Cuisine art, pulse soaked dates into a paste.

In mixing bowl, mix together all of the above ingredients until they all stick together. Transfer and flatten mixture to ½”-5/8” on dehydrator trays covered with either parchment or non-stick dehydrator sheets on them.  Use a pizza cutter to cut energy bars into a grid of whatever dimensions you prefer, but don’t cut all the way through so you can easily flip it later.  Set temperature on dehydrator to 115
Read more here: DailySelfCure

By Joyce

Chop. Chop.  Time to harvest and preserve the kohlrabi.  I had a hunch kohlrabi would make a good ferment because as a brassica it is sweet, similar in color, and crunchy like cabbage, but this outer-worldly looking vegetable is even more versatile.  In this ferment, I added Hungarian hot wax peppers to give subtle spice, and indeed, the combo created a delicate balance of flavors.

Below is my recipe, such as it is.  The fermentation process lends itself to experimentation and variation.  I change it up based on what is available from my garden or on sale in the grocery store, usually making just quart size containers at a time.  Having a few different ferments bubbling away on the kitchen counter or in the refrigerator allows me to serve several small side dishes (Korean-style) alongside main dishes at dinner.  The variation at the table not only stimulates interest but the digestion as well.

In Vegetable Fermentation Further Simplified, Sandor Katz gives the lowdown on how to ferment any vegetable.  If you are looking to get into fermentation, follow his guidelines and you’ll be making very original side dishes and manufacturing your own tasty probiotics in your kitchen in no time.  I’d love to hear about what you are fermenting.

Fermented Kohlrabi

3 – 4  kohlrabi

2 Hungarian hot wax peppers

2 teaspoons salt

Peel skin off kohlrabi and shred in cuisine art or mandolin.

Place shredded kohlrabi in bowl and sprinkle 2 teaspoons of salt over kohlrabi.

Wash hands and massage kohlrabi until you’ve squeezed out as much liquid as possible.

Mix in diced hot wax peppers

Pack vegetables into a canning jar.

Pour liquid over the top of vegetables.

Fill plastic baggie with enough water to weigh down kohlrabi so it is submerged under liquid (usually just 1/2 cup of water).

Place on kitchen counter in a bowl.  As it ferments it will bubble up and excess will spill into bowl.

Wait 3 – 7 days, or more.  Taste often until flavor appeals to you.

Cover with a lid and place in refrigerator.

Read more here: DailySelfCure

By Joyce

Strong as a boulder, small as a pebble, that’s how I feel after returning from a twenty-day backpacking expedition on the John Muir Trail (JMT) in California.  My three trail companions and I hiked over 200 miles from Tuolumne meadows to Mt. Whitney, crossed seven mountain passes over 11,000 feet, and earned a total elevation gain of 46,000 feet during the course of this magnificent, everything-worked-according-to-our-plan trip.

Even though there are enormous health benefits to daily load-bearing exercise, drinking 2-3 liters of water and massive bowel elimination, it was being in the mountains that felt most therapeutic. Most of our days were spent in dry sunny high alpine zones where we walked by pristine lakes and rivers, through boulder fields, talus slopes and scattered granite outcroppings while mountains, dramatic rock cathedrals, either surrounded or beckoned us forward on our southward route.

Of course, it was physically rigorous, and consumed all my attention, to climb and then descend the switchbacks on every mountain pass.  Each step up the mountain, the rarified air, brought me closer to the dizzying cerulean blue sky and dazzling panoramic views.  It’s the kind of high one can’t get from smoking or imbibing; elevation elation comes from hard-core effort.  However, the subjective significance of all my efforts shrunk to pebble size compared to the import of the geologic forces that both built and eroded the Sierra Nevada mountain range.  It was obvious: me, my time on earth is puny; I too will erode. My insignificance in the scheme of things wasn’t a negation of my existence, just a perfectly calibrated dose of reality, and that is exactly the kind of medicine the mountains delivers.

Being in this vast sparse rocky land, I found the spaciousness and silence in myself to safely make my way without much self-commentary given how the wilderness wholly absorbed me. I spent entire days observing the shifts in light, the pecular and wonderful rock formations, the coursing of water through streams, the emerald and turquoise lakes populated by trout, and the ever changing vantage points which convinced me that I was beholding the most beautiful sight in my entire life, only to cancel that thought ten switchbacks later when I would again be forced by sheer awe to make that proclamation all over again.

Now as I re-enter my life in Seattle, I am not just noticing natural beauty in my surroundings, I am stopping more regularly, and opening up space and time in myself to really experience it. This morning as I stood in my kitchen washing dishes, I looked out to the backyard and observed water evaporating and swirling into an ethereal mist off our canvas chairs from the previous night’s rain; pausing, I engaged in this very quiet transitory moment. Allowing myself more time to concentrate on each moment as it arises requires an internal stillness. My mentors, the mountains, modeled how to hold steady and poised while in the flow of
Read more here: DailySelfCure

By Joyce

Many years ago, we were introduced to Italian Giardiniera when our roommate at the time, Tommy G., would “mule” gallon jars of giardiniera from the Italian section of his hometown Chicago.  Even though this particular giardiniera was cooked and pasteurized, and used cottonseed oil as the main oil, we still loved it every time Tommy G. returned home with it.

When I found this raw recipe for hot Italian giardiniera, my attraction for this pickled food swelled into adoration.  Why?  Because it makes a gorgeous not to mention tasty antipasto, side dish, or sandwich/cracker condiment.  And because it’s raw  it also offers all the benefits of eating nutrient rich and detoxifying food.  If you don’t include jalapeno peppers, it can also be a cooling food in the heat of summer.

I like this recipe because it always comes out well even if I adjust the ratios of vegetables based on what I have in my refrigerator. Be creative and make substitutions for the vegetables listed below – for example, use any and all colors of peppers; tender green beans and broccoli are great additions too. My own preferences are for a moderate level of spicy hot so I use only 4 jalapeno peppers and leave out the carrot.  I use my cuisinart to slice up all the vegetables and usually double the batch because it is really beautiful summer food and we like to have it around.  Enjoy!

 Hot Italian Giardiniera Recipe

Recipe from www.allrecipes.com

2 green bell peppers, diced

2 red bell peppers, diced

8 fresh jalapeno peppers, sliced

1 celery stalk, diced

1 medium carrot, diced

1 small onion, chopped

1/2 cup fresh cauliflower florets

1/2 cup salt

water to cover

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 tablespoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1 (5 ounce) jar pimento-stuffed green olives, chopped

1 cup white vinegar

1 cup olive oil

Directions

Place into a bowl the green and red peppers, jalapenos, celery, carrots, onion, andcauliflower. Stir in salt, and fill with enough cold water to cover. Place plastic wrap or aluminum foil over the bowl, and refrigerate overnight.

The next day, drain salty water, and rinse vegetables. In a bowl, mix together garlic, oregano, red pepper flakes, black pepper, and olives. Pour in vinegar and olive oil, and mix well. Combine with vegetable mixture, cover, and refrigerate for 2 days before using.

Read more here: DailySelfCure