Living On Purpose

My friend Siona from Gaia informed me that today is Blog Action Day. She gave the acronym BAD on the subject line and that piqued my interest enough to open the email! So to break form from my regular posts about developmental levels, meditation, healthy eating, the mood food connection, and purpose, I’ll take today to post about the BAD topic of the day: Climate Change.

Every THING is interconnected with everything else. In fact, when I saw Bernie Glassman speak, he stated that his definition of enlightenment is to realize the interconnectedness of all things. So, here is a blog post about my take on climate change:  intimately interconnected with personal growth, purposeful living, and everything else!

I truly believe that intentional communities of earthships are the way to go when it comes to saving resources, reducing toxic emissions, reducing dependence on foreign oil/drilling. A couple of earthship communities may not solve some of the widespread infrastructure problems that large cities come across in the event of natural disasters, but as for me, my dream purposeful life consists of building my own earthship, and heck, not just one, but a whole village of ‘em, and teaching/learning about sustainable living, as well as our own bodies’ ability to turn the nutrients we eat into energy (thus my interest in the mood food connection.)

As temperatures on the planet change, weather patterns change, and even our own coastlines change. Look at a Mandelbrot fractal to see the never ending variation one coastline brings. Sudden landscape changes either destroy or damage structures not built with this in mind. The infrastructure built up by the modern world is dependent on oil. If there is no access to gas, oil, and plastics, then the everyday routine we depend on comes to a grinding halt.

I admire the earthship design because it is its own mini biosphere. If climate change ends up knocking out power to entire cities, people with the earthship’s solar and wind energy collection systems will not even feel the loss of power. If climate change ends up driving the price of crude oil, then even the food you buy in the grocery store may become an expensive luxury because nearly all of it has been DRIVEN there in gas powered trucks.  The earthship’s internal greenhouse design enables owners to grow their own vegetables all year long.

The earthship design has several self contained systems: water collection and treatment, electricity production, food production, and stable interior climate without the use of heaters/ac.

I love the idea of being sustainable, independent, and off the grid. Climate change is forcing current consumeristic society to redesign itself. Visionaries like Gunter Pauli of Zeri are on the leading edge of testing new designs. He says he’s built an entirely biodegradable factory! If society can follow his example of redesigning business structure around sustainability, then not only could humans slow down current rate of climate change a bit, we could empower even more humans to be able to lead a sustainable way of life.

Purposeful thinking brings about purposeful change. Let’s lead this frothy wave of evolution with integrity to mother nature.

I have recently found the author SARK, which is an acronym for Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy. So many people who participated in the call where I met her were raving about how she changed their lives; so I decided to go to the library to check out her books. I found two: Transformation Soup and Succulent Wild Woman. She’s authored plenty more, and all are hand written (that’s right, handwriting! She didn’t choose a font, unless someone decided to turn her handwriting into a font and call it SARK) with little drawings interspersed through the pages.

If you are on a healing journey in your life, I’d recommend her book Transformation Soup: Healing for the Splendidly Imperfect written in 2000. It starts out:

My mother is no longer the problem…now what?

And SARK explains about how she dedicated her early life to blaming her mother for her problems. She experienced abuse as a child and spent 9 years in psychotherapy on her own healing journey. At one point her therapist suggested that she stop talking about her mother during therapy! Her response:

I felt like I’d fallen out of a plane without a parachute, and finally managed to say, “What will we talk about then?”

Transformation Soup then goes on to explore the different healing modalities SARK has come across as she describes them with wit, wisdom, humor and pun-ny drawings. This book will help you during your own healing journey, for sure.

Succulent Wild Woman: Dancing with Your Wonder-full Self from 1997 is a book about exploring your creativity from all angles, but there are bits of everything in this book, and it’s quite hard to say what it’s about! Journaling, love, self-acceptance, erotic robots, feeling safe, being alone, how to paint, healing, motherhood, body image….this book really is an exploration.

On the call from thewomenmasters.com, SARK said, “All growth comes in spirals and layers.” That’s what I was aiming for when I designed my spiral shell wallpaper. (Use that link to go to the main wallpapers page and scroll to the 2 with shells on them: the 3rd and 4th from the top.) SARK clarifies what self-love is: you loving you so you can love the world more. Also, she said she supports people learning about their biochemistry as a way to heal oneself.

That’s what I was going for when I wrote Sad For No Reason. People go to therapy for years and years; some show great progress while others show little to none. Why? Is it the extent of the damage done in the first place during tender formative years? Or is the lack of progress due to biochemical deficiencies that short-circuit our brains’ ability to heal iteslf and accomplish creative problem solving? This is what I explore in Sad For No Reason. What I found astounded me and I hope it will astound you, too. When given the appropriate amino acid supplements and when the diet is cleaned up, the very people who struggled with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, or irritability for years with no progress during psychotherapy, could suddenly make leaps and bounds of progress in counseling.

Back to SARK! She has now become the self-proclaimed master of re-framing problems; so much so that she jokingly said her next store will be called “SARK’s ReFrame Shop”. You stop in, tell her your problem, and she’ll re-frame it into some kind of opportunity. That’s the trick; to find the opportunity within your current problems. So, say your creative dreams out loud, hug yourself daily, use her web site PlanetSark and her daily inspiration telephone line (1-415-546-3742 for a recorded message from SARK) and continue your journey to becoming a Succulent Wild Woman (or man).

I’m going on a lark here, and I’ve decided to share a report I wrote in the sixth grade. “What the heck could be so special about a sixth grade report,” you ask? This particular report recently surfaced in my life, and I was surprised and proud to re-read it.

As you may know, I offer the ebook Sad For No Reason: How to Use the Mood-Food Connection to Banish Depression Naturally. I came to write this book because I love the subject of natural health care, and I believe deeply that everyone needs to be educated about the types of foods that will help or hinder their health.

I found the following report in a box of old school papers. It confirms that I have been interested in this subject nearly my whole life. The teacher, Mrs. Mills, let us pick any subject we wanted to research, and she probably gave us a month to complete the work. I would have been eleven or twelve years old when I researched and wrote it. I’ve typed it exactly as I wrote it, and I included (sic) after my original errors. I could have stopped after chapter one. I have no idea what drove me to add chapter two about deadly mushrooms. I suppose I wanted to give a well-rounded view of wild plants; some are edible and some are poisonous.

The Wild World of Edible Plants

Please use this link to scan the report. I typed it up and included scans of the illustrations and a handwriting sample to show that even in the sixth grade, I gave one hundred percent to the subjects I was interested in. I tended towards perfectionism, and went above and beyone the teacher’s expectations. That’s the kind of effort I put into my ebook Sad for No Reason.

I had the opportunity to see the documenary, “Processed People.” The message is simple: to have good health, eat food, not food-like things, and exercise.” And oh, how hard that advice is to follow in today’s society!

Just look at the line-up of DOCTORS who were interviewed for this film! Processed People: Experts

The obesity specialist doctor has observed that when people are put into a controlled environment, namely his clinic, and they eat a healthy diet and exercise every day, then health problems disappear. Cholesterol drops. Blood triglyceride levels drop. Diabetes goes away. Cardiovascular health returns. How completely simple: eat a plant-based diet and exercise to be healthy. Yet it’s difficult to carry out!

Experts in the film also noted that every system in the body is improved by a proper diet, including one’s MENTAL HEALTH. Depression is often cleared up when processed foods are removed from the diet.

A processed food is one that has had all the natural nutrients stripped out of it, and then synthetic vitamins are added back in. That would be anything bleached, like white flour and white sugar. And that would be anything pasteurized, like commercial milk. What does that leave us with? What can we eat now that 90% of our daily intake is now no better than poison?

That leaves whole foods. Yes, to reduce your depression, or even to make it disappear, you will help your therapist greatly if you just eat whole foods. Then you will be thinking clearly, free of false moods brought on by nutritional imbalances and deficiencies, so that your therapist can help you make real progress! I have a deep feeling that just like judges who say, “I hope to never see you in my court again!” therapists also will be happy to help you through your problem with a send-off like this, “I hope you don’t have to come back! Have good health!” (Although I can’t vouch for all therapists. I would hope they got into the profession to really HELP people move through problems)

Here is a quote from Processed People that I thought was eye-opening:

You either spend time exercising and eating right, or you spend time in the health care system trying to treat the problems that resulted from you NOT spending the time to exercise and eat right.

To your strong will power!

p.s. I almost forgot to talk about the reason I named this post “trends in medical care.” The movie made a point that our health care system has failed us.  It is now nothing more than a disease care service. It does nothing to educate the public how to eat right and exercise. It promotes taking pharmaceuticals to cure all ails, but doing that is simply treating the symptom and not going to the root of the issue and really curing the illness. Doctors, especially the big disease specialists, are getting rich off of doing procedures, not from giving goodwill classes to educate their patients how to live healthy. It is up to each individual to take charge of his/her health and health issues through research and knowledge.

Life has been hectic, overwhelming, depressing, maddening, lovely, beautiful, and blessed. Amidst it all, I became inspired by my friend Centria to actually go outside during winter. I used to be an outdoors girl. I could hike all day with a 50 pound backpack when I was 19. But now, in the middle of all my domestic worries, I rarely even walk my dogs anymore.

So this weekend, I decided to take our tiny miniature pincer out to the dog park. Since it was nice outside – that is, not snowing, raining, hailing, or freezing – there were a lot of people with the same idea that day. We met a lot of big dogs who intimidated our tiny one. But in a moment of serendipity, I got my camera ready just in time for the unplanned meeting of two dogs of the same breed, in the same color sweater. I really never expected this good fortune. They looked, during the moment I snapped the picture, like they belonged together, like they called each other up in the morning and asked, “what are you wearing today?” “Let’s be twins!” Mine has the leash and the sweater that says, “Tease.”

It is easy to let yourself be down, especially in winter. Sometimes all it takes to perk us up is a little trip outdoors. You know, your body makes vitamin D with as little as 15 minutes of exposure to the sunshine. Vitamin D helps all systems in the body to fight off disease and bad moods.

And plus, I found a rainbow and didn’t even know it until I saw this shot on my computer. Look. A rainbow in the mud at the bottom of the picture. I used to live in both Seattle and Honolulu, and both places are rich with rainbows. It rains a lot, but there is usually a reward for suffering through the rain if you just look up. Here in my photo, the amazing thing is you see the rainbow in the muck. The muck of our lives, if we just keep on going through it, can actually bring us rainbows if we only look for them.

Okay, enough philosophizing for today! Just step outside, and see what you can see.

I have been deep in research for my upcoming ebook. What I’m finding is that our moods are intricately involved with our food intake, normally known as “diet”. Did you know that women with the worst PMS symptoms typically eat over 200% more sugary foods in their diet than those who don’t experience PMS? Sugar gives us a temporary feel-good state of mind, but then it can crash your system and you find yourself yelling at your children or spouse for unknown reasons. You become more irritable and cranky with more sugar in your diet. And yet, we’re hooked, aren’t we? Sugar is akin to morphine, and as addictive.

“Addictive” simply means that you suffer withdrawal symptoms if you don’t ingest the substance. If you get a headache at three in the afternoon and the only thing that helps it is a candy bar, you know you’re hooked. If we could just break free…we would see…life is freer and happier when there are no bad-side-effect addictions. (we like being addicted to being in love, don’t we? Why else do teens date so much? It’s the endorphins…the rush, similar to eating chocolate but much more intense!)

I am extremely alarmed at the rates of obesity in the USA. The very core of our lifestyle needs to be changed to combat this “killer at large.” I have a feeling that we as a nation are running on autopilot, and only do what is convenient. Another problem contributing to obesity would be the way so many people have to work several jobs to survive, leaving them with no time to cook or exercise. But it’s time to wake up from autopilot and bring some attention to our health, through our diet.

Did you know that our mental state – that is, whether we are stressed, depressed, or anxious, – is a reflection of the foods we are or are not eating? To get to the core of our purpose, we must put attention on the physical pillar of life. Our mental health and physical health are intertwined!

Here is the press room for a documentary about the nation’s obesity problem. It’s called “Killer at Large” and I learned of it from the second link, a blog about the possibility of rating junk food advertising to kids.

Killer at Large Press Room

Rating Junk food advertising to kids

CDC obesity. Men approx 31%, Women approx 33%, children 2-19 approx 16%.

One of my “day job” responsibilities is to edit a wellness guide. Whose bright idea was it to put a second index in it, anyway? Indexing for a book is time consuming. While I was spending all that time marking products I wanted to index, I was also learning, and forming ideas about how we as Americans in industrialized society live our lives.

I found out, for example, that by including a supplement very high in antioxidants, particularly from grape seed extract, you can lower your chances for developing at least 90 health conditions. That is to say that in this book, 90 of the conditions listed, from Acne all the way to Varicose veins, mentioned that adding antioxidants will help the condition.

This fact alone staggers me, and it takes a while to sink in. “You mean that if I ate more fruits and vegetables, which are naturally high in antioxidants, I’ll have better health? You mean that eating fruits and vegetables not only makes my body stronger, my immune system stronger, but my mental capacity stronger as well?”

Blueberries? yes. Grapes? yes. Oranges? yes. Kale? yes. Collard greens? yes.

Health is about lifestyle. Of course, there will always be the lady/man who is the picture of perfect health, who exercises and eats lots of salad, and still ends up with cancer or heart disease. There are more pieces to the puzzle of good health than diet and exercise alone. Some other factors are heavy metal exposure, pesticide exposure, biotoxins like black mold, and an improperly aligned spinal column (yes, really. All the nerves to all your organs go to your spinal column. If the nerves are compromised, disease is the result).

What is one of the side effects of mercury exposure? Depression. What is one of the side effects of vitamin B deficiency? Depression. What is one of the side effects of DHA deficiency? Depression.

Our mental health is important, right? How else can we live out our purpose, if we don’t have clear thoughts? Our bodily systems are interconnected. Please don’t be surprised to know that what we eat or don’t eat affects how clearly we can think!