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Chew Your Way to Love
Ready to spice up your love life? We all know that chewing is an important part of healthy digestion. But did you know that how you chew can affect the quality of your relationships as well?
Chewing not only improves your digestion and reduces risks of illness and disease, it can also boost your sexual health and deepen the intensity of your relationship. This is because how you absorb foods impacts your sexual vitality. Here are 5 eating-related lifestyle adjustments you can make to improve your digestion and revive your sex life:
1. Eat at regular times
A regular mealtime schedule brings rhythm and balance to your daily routine. When your digestion functions on a predictable cycle, you are in harmony with the natural order, and your relationships with people, animals, food, and yourself are more nurturing.
2. Sit down to eat
The stress of eating on the go–running, standing, driving, doing business, concentrating, and reading–can lead to ulcers and poor digestion. Sit down to eat and avoid multi-tasking. Mindfully eating allows you to fully enjoy your meal and your partner’s company without distraction. This simple step not only improves digestion, but also cultivates gratitude for your food and relationship.
3. Chew more
Digestion begins in the mouth. Amylase enzyme in saliva breaks down carbohydrates so the body can more easily absorb them. The more you chew, the more complex carbohydrates (like brown rice) are converted into simple sugars and become naturally sweeter. Chewing foods 50-100 times not only improves digestion, it also allows you to more easily embrace the sweetness in life, including being with your partner.
4. Eat a moderate volume of food
Skipping meals, dieting, overeating, or under eating can all weaken your digestion, which becomes overworked and exhausted. Eating a moderate amount of food restores digestive function and boosts sexual vitality as you absorb more nutrients and energy.
5. Stick to whole foods
Over time, eating rich, heavy, or greasy foods, such as meat and hydrogenated oils, burdens digestion and blocks sexual function. Cooked whole foods, like leafy greens and grains, nourish digestion, help cleanse the body, and revitalize your reproductive organs.
Healthy digestion not only strengthens your body from the inside out, your relationships will become sweeter as well. Happy chewing!
Eat Well While Dining Out
All four elements were happening in equal measure – the cuisine, the wine, the service, and the overall ambiance. It taught me that dining could happen at a spiritual level.
~Charlie Trotter
Too many people just eat to consume calories. Try dining for a change.
~John Walters
Want to stick to your holistic meal plan and eat well while dining out? If you already eat vibrant, exciting foods that give you more energy, you may wonder what to eat when you’re out at parties. Even dining with family who may not understand your food choices can be frustrating.
So, what kinds of choices can you make from what’s being served on the table? Here are some things you can do to nurture your body and soul at parties:
1. Come out of the holistic closet
Here’s an opportunity to speak from your heart. Before you go to a party, tell your host that you are choosing healthier foods to eat at parties. Tell him or her about your new lifestyle and offer suggestions for substitutes, such as using whole grain bread for stuffing instead of white bread. It’s a chance for your host to incorporate healthier versions into the meal and learn more about healthier ways of eating. Often at gatherings, people will prefer the healthier version over the regular holiday fare.
2. Take a plate of food to share
Besides making sure you have something to eat, sharing a dish says, “I made this and it’s a part of my new lifestyle, and I’d love to have you try it.” People are open to new ways of eating, and they’re excited to try new foods. It’s a chance for you to share something of yourself in the spirit of the holidays.
3. Eat before you go
Sometimes bringing food is not an option, such as when you are eating at a restaurant. Having a bite to eat before you leave the house helps you eat less at the party and gives you more time to socialize, instead of worrying about what food to eat. This is a stress-free, healthier alternative to eating what will be served at the party.
Instead of being limited by food choices when dining out, you have many opportunities to eat well during the holidays. You can even become a catalyst for helping other people make healthier choices. You are a positive force for change; it all depends on the attitude you bring.
Are you ready to boost sexual vitality?
Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.
~Lao-Tzu
Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.
~Hunter S. Thompson
Are you ready to ignite the passion in the bedroom? Want to activate some sexual healing? Nurturing an intimate, loving relationship with your partner begins with your health. When you are whole in body, mind, emotions, and spirit, your love life also becomes more fulfilling. The best way to spark your love life is by eating healthy whole foods.
Whole foods, like vegetables, contain vital life force energy or “chi” which supports and nourishes you on all levels. This chi is what revitalizes your overall health.Whole vegetables include all portions of a vegetable: the greens, center, and roots.
1. Leafy greens
Collards, kale, and dandelion greens have upward growing, expansive energy that supports the upper half of the body, like the heart. Leafy greens help you open up to love and joy and improve social communication.
2. Round vegetables
Round vegetables represent the balance point between the root and greens. This is the center of the plant, which has stabilizing energy that nourishes the middle organs in the body. Foods with centering energy are round vegetables like squash, cabbage, and onion. These foods are naturally sweet and allow you to embrace the sweetness in life, like enjoying being with your partner.
3. Root vegetables
Root vegetables grow downward and have grounding energy. This strengthening energy nourishes the lower half of the body, including the reproductive organs for increased sexual vitality. Examples of root vegetables are carrot, burdock, parsnip, and kuzu root. The hardy nature of root vegetables brings an enduring quality to your relationship.
Whether you want to improve communication or boost sexual vitality, eating whole foods can activate bliss on many dimensions. When you are whole on all levels, your love life improves as well.
Healthy Relationship Tip
Expressing your feelings to your partner helps him or her understand your perspective while opening up lines of communication. When expressing your feelings, use the “I feel” technique.
The “I Feel” Technique
- Begin by stating how you feel. Remember to focus on expressing emotion (“I feel . . . “) rather than belief (“I feel that . . .”).
- Be specific in describing your emotions. Instead of using words like “upset,” use descriptive emotions like “angry,” “sad,” “frustrated,” or “irritated.”
- Identify the situation that is a trigger. Instead of blaming, state what it is about the situation that is creating the emotion. (“I feel frustrated when you . . .”)
The first step is to express your emotions and validate your feelings. This is the beginning of discovering what your story or belief is about the way things “should be” that triggered your reaction.
The Aphrodisiac Twig
While sensuous aphrodisiacs like rose or chocolate take center stage on date night, twig-like burdock root has largely been ignored. Growing deep in the earth, burdock’s downward gathering energy nourishes the lower half of the body, including the reproductive organs. But unlike stimulants that activate the adrenals temporarily, burdock provides healing benefits that are long lasting. When your reproductive organs are healthy, so is your sex life.
Adding meat-like flavor to this beautiful kinpira dish, burdock root is cut into brown matchsticks.
Deeply strengthening to the intestines, kidneys, and reproductive organs, burdock root is also used in the macrobiotic diet to purify the blood and cleanse the liver. Its meaty flavor enhances sautes, stews, soups, and gravies. A traditional Japanese healing dish called kimpira uses braised burdock and carrot. Because it contains volatile oils, saute burdock a few minutes to allow oils to evaporate before adding burdock to a dish.
Burdock, Carrot, and Caramelized Red Onion Kimpira
Serves 6
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium red onion, thinly sliced
1 cup burdock root, matchsticks
3/4 cup carrot, matchsticks
1 pinch sea salt
- Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a heavy skillet over medium heat. When oil is hot, add red onion and saute until caramelized. Remove onion from pan and set aside.
- Add 1 tablespoon olive oil and burdock and saute over medium heat 5 minutes, stirring often.
- Add carrots on top of burdock. Add enough water to cover the bottom of the pan. Bring to boil, lower heat, and simmer 20 minutes, covered, or until vegetables are tender. Add water if necessary to prevent pan from drying out. Season with salt. Continue cooking, covered, 2 minutes. Remove cover and cook until water is evaporated. Top carrots and burdock with caramelized red onion.
Whether you are feeling lethargic or just want to improve your sex life, burdock is a natural way to increase youthful vitality in all the right places–without pills or surgery!
Nourishing the Spirit
This pleasure, appears as poison in the beginning but is like nectar in the end, comes by the grace of Self-knowledge.
~ Bhagavad Gita
Love is the energizing elixir of the universe, the cause and effect of all harmonies.
~Djalal ad-Din Rumi
How would you like to transform ordinary food into healing elixir Ambrosia? Like Greek gods and goddesses, you have the power to transform everyday food into nourishing nectar through the healing power of intention. More than its biological effects on the body, food contains divine essence, your source. A loving, meditative awareness of food, when consciously cultivated, becomes a bridge to Mother Nature, the Divine, the mystery that is life itself.
Spiritually imbued food is food that has been transmuted with loving, healing energy. Your thoughts and state of mind directly influence other living beings, such as soil, plants, and animals. Likewise, you can transfer energy within your own system into your food, changing it from one form to another.
Spiritual ceremonies (chanting, rituals, prayers, cooking) initiate this transformation of energy from one form to another. By viewing food preparation as a sacred ritual, you can use loving intention to improve the quality of food for healing. In his book Messages from Water, Japanese scientist Masuru Emoto had amazing results in his experiments on water. He discovered that water exposed to limiting thoughts deformed crystals, while water exposed to loving thoughts created beautiful crystals. Does this inspire you to set your loving intention before cooking?
Like a divine offering to the gods, food transformed by love provides nourishment for the spirit. So, when you sit down to eat, say a prayer to acknowledge the contribution of all living beings to the food: sun, wind, rain, soil, plants, farmers, animals, friends and family. After all, much love went into transforming your food into Ambrosia!
Cultivating Universal Energy
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
~George Washington Carver
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
~Kahlil Gibran
Did you know the natural state of your heart when unblocked (no contractions or distractions) is unconditional love? Unconditional love radiates naturally throughout nature and the universe. Cultivating universal energy helps you open up this pathway of giving and receiving. Then unconditional love can shine from your heart naturally; the radiance of the sun mirrors the radiance of the open heart.
Reasons to cultivate universal energy:
- Good health
- More energy for deeper self-reflection
- To realize your unity with nature
- To clear away mental and emotional blockages that prevent you from realizing your source
Mother Nature is balanced. By connecting with her, you can rebalance yourself. Walking barefoot on the grass is a fun and easy way to do this. An acupressure point on the bottom of the foot, called Bubbling Well point (K1), is where you kiss the earth, give love, and receive vitality. (An alternative is shoes with leather or cotton soles to make a direct energy connection with Mother Earth.) By allowing your whole foot to embrace the earth, you become a natural conduit for universal energy. Can you feel a thread of energy traveling from the earth, through your body, to Heaven? Your body is where Heaven and Mother Earth join in you.
This flow of energy begins to accelerate throughout your body to open your heart. When you cultivate universal energy, your heart naturally opens in state of unconditional love. As natural radiance of heart begins to manifest, you connect more deeply with the Divine. How open is your heart today?
Health is Wealth
The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience. Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around…. Throughout history, “tender loving care” has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing.
~Larry Dossey
The founder of macrobiotics, George Ohsawa, said that it is very easy to cure a disease with macrobiotics, but it is much more difficult to cure the person. He meant that just by following the principles of macrobiotics and eating healthy foods, the person will cure her illness, but if she holds resistance in his body, she will go back to old habits and the dis-ease will return.
Let’s look at the underlying cause of dis-ease, which is the belief that you are separate from the whole. You must be willing to undergo a transformation on all levels for healing to occur. Because thought is the catalyst for action, it is a your thoughts that manifest dis-ease, and if these thoughts are not changed, you will continue to be stagnated.
Your thoughts have the power to affect your choice of food to eat. By managing limiting thoughts, you can make better choices in terms of food and lifestyle, change your eating habits, and achieve a healthy body. Eating energetically balanced foods strengthens your aura, which in turn helps you continue to manage your thoughts. In this way, healthy food is the foundation for spiritual thinking. For example, in Hinduism, those who meditate avoid eating garlic and onions, because these foods carry a certain energy which agitates the mind.
Energetically balanced food is important to keep your body strong to achieve all you want to accomplish. Your body is a tool, which will manifest your ideas, if you take care of it. If your body is healthy, your mind will be healthy, as well, since the energy of body, mind, and spirit are merged and influence each other. When your organs are healthy, your emotions will also be balanced. Spiritually speaking, food carries the essence of the universe, which nourishes you on many levels. When one level is imbalanced, it affects the other levels, and you become unable to function wholistically. Thus, you may see yourself as a victim, choosing to become dependent on others to make choices for you. However, when you are healthy, you can make decisions for yourself and participate in the growth of society.
Besides providing important nutrients, such as protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals for healthy organ and immune functions, the role of food in health is important in maintaining overall energetic balance of the body. Cooking is an alchemical process, so you can adjust your cooking styles to balance the constitution and condition of your body to prevent and recover from illness.
You can also eat according to the seasons, which imbue food with certain energetic qualities that nourish your energetic body. As each season unfolds, plants absorb the energy of the sun and environment. This seasonal energy is incorporated into the leaves, which is then transmuted into your aura when you eat them. Just as miso is aged for two complete summers to produce the full enzymatic activity necessary for fermentation, plants contain the activity of all the seasons.
Your energetic body is fluid and changing in response to the subtle frequencies of the universe. This energetic body manifests as your physical body. So, if your main channel of receiving universal energy is blocked, then growth of your body is stunted and illness develops. Healthy food and loving thoughts help unblock your meridians and nourish your main channel (spine), so that you can receive universal energy and live in harmony with nature.
When you forget or choose not to listen to your intuition, you rely on information from outside sources for guidance on your food choices. When your energy is out of alignment with nature, your body can become weak and vulnerable to attack from viruses and bacteria. But when you live in harmony with the environment, you can learn to listen to your intuition. An energetically balanced diet allows you to receive energy from the universe so that you can communicate with your inner guides. By listening to your intuition, you can regain health by eating foods that balance your constitution and condition and your immune system and organs clean up cancer-causing toxins and pathogens.
Your awareness of your Oneness with nature becomes clear when your universal antenna is open. Eating food that is balanced and avoiding extremes allows you to be grounded, while aligning our energies with that of the universe. By eating food that is clean of toxins that create stagnation, your body is able to receive universal energy to manifest health in the wholistic sense. This health and wholeness is true wealth, because it is not achieved through any material object. So, remember to include some good old fashioned TLC in your cooking!
Keep Your Motor Running
When it comes to living a wholistic lifestyle, a change in diet is oftentimes the hardest part of the transformation. I know that sometimes nothing tastes better than a Big Mac, but our bodies naturally crave something much more nutritionally balanced than cheap meat topped off with random condiments and out-of-season vegetables. So if it is not enough for you to think of all of the advantages you can get by eating a better macrobiotic diet, think of all the disadvantages you can avoid by making some simple dietary adjustments and becoming one with nature and with yourself.
