An Easy Meal for Busy People

I just finished a sweet little book called Sabbath Keeping by Donna Schaper. She says that we are “bored to death while being bombarded with stimulation” (p14). I don’t know about you, but I feel that way sometimes. As I get busy with on-going commitments and activity, my soul gets restless.

Our modern world never wants to stop. While it’s convenient that almost everything is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the demands on our time are never ending. We must run faster and faster to keep up, but soon realize, there’s no finish line. It just keeps going, and so do we.

In a world where breaks are not handed out and are often frowned upon, we have to carve out moments in our daily lives that feel unhurried and contemplative. We must guard our rituals and our down time as precious contributions toward our vitality.

One of the many things I realized while reading this book is that preparing meals is one of the ways I pull myself out of a packed schedule. When I get too busy to cook, I know I am in BIG trouble

No, I can’t always spend hours in my kitchen preparing elaborate meals. But, even meals that are quick and easy to prepare demand a certain amount of presence – the kind that allows the rest of the world to fall away as I chop and sauté my way through a few moments of peace. Even if the meal only takes 20 minutes to prepare, I consider this time a short meditation that I get to enjoy during my busy day.

So today, I’m here to share with you one of my quick-fix meals that is a breeze to prepare, but tastes like it cooked all day. So slow down for a short time and nurture your tired and restless soul. Your tummy will also thank you!

Gluten-Free Pasta with Beef, Sausage and Veggie Marinara

What you’ll need:

Olive oil

1 pound of pastured meat. I like to use ½ pound of grass-fed beef and ½ pound of Richardson Farms pan pork sausage. The sausage adds more fat and flavor.

1 jar of pasta sauce. I like Yellow Barn Biodynamic Pasta Sauce. It is sold in a glass jar and is very high quality in ingredients and taste.

1 package of gluten-free pasta. I like Cappello’s Gnocchi or Fettucine. This is a wonderful brand of gluten-free pasta that isn’t made from refined carbohydrates.

6-8 organic mushrooms, sliced

1-2 cloves of garlic, diced

1-2 organic zucchini. You will need a spiralizer. I like Paderno.

Fresh organic basil, optional

Begin by cooking the meat in a large pan in a dash of olive oil. In the meantime, boil a pot of water to cook the pasta. Once the meat is cooked, place it in a bowl and then sauté the mushrooms and garlic in the drippings left behind. When wilted and fragrant, add the meat back, along with the pasta sauce. Simmer on low. Cook the pasta according to package directions, and while that is boiling, spiralize the zucchini. In a large pan, sauté the zucchini briefly in a touch of olive oil over medium heat; just enough to heat it up. Strain your pasta and you are good to go!

Place the zucchini in the bottom of your serving bowls, followed by the pasta and then a generous topping of sauce with a sprinkle of fresh basil.

Now that you've crafted a hearty and delightful dinner, take a deep breath, light a candle and Eat in Peace!

What are some of the ways you find time to recharge during a busy day? Please add your comments in the box below?

Also, if find you have a stumbling block that keeps getting in the way to feeling your best, don't pass up your chance to ASK CHAR for help (see the first installment of our new column here). And make sure to SUBSCRIBE to our weekly email, where you'll get even more VIP goodies, articles and tools for reclaiming your vitality.

Using a “NO” as an Opportunity to Grow

We can all think of times when we were willing to take risks. Usually, there is a sense of wellbeing behind that. When we feel good, we feel like we can take on the world and when our vitality suffers, we tend to play small.

I’m not saying that we should aim to take stupid risks, like doing a back flip off a rock into a river with boulders. I am talking about taking a stand for what’s important to you…THAT kind of risk

In the past I’ve been so physically ill that I couldn’t take risks. I hid. Over time, I found a group of people who would accept me, and I put my efforts there. My nervous system couldn’t handle reaching out, so I played it safe.

Now, I am stepping into the virtual realm and seeking other, bigger ways of connecting with people. I am in the unknown, but these risks I’m taking are only possible because of all the work I’ve done to heal my body.

In that process, I experience rejection, and I have to develop a thicker skin. Simultaneously, I have to learn how to play in a new game, and games aren’t always fair.

Most people think that success is good, and failure is bad, but this is way too simplistic to encompass living an inspired life.

I’m sharing this with you because within the span of twelve hours, I got two emails rejecting what I had to offer. One said, “We regret to inform you that we are unable to include your proposed lectures in this year’s program.”

Damn!

And then a new client that I spoke with yesterday, canceled his appointment because he looked over my website thoroughly and found “no comment on [my] evidence of qualifications.”

WHAT?! That’s a first.

Now, if either one of these were isolated incidences, I might not be as triggered, but because they came on top of each other; I am feeling it. It hurts. And I really don’t have to justify my hurt either. Even one rejection alone would sting, but the double-doozey of rejection burns a little deeper.

I talked to a colleague the other day. She expressed how sad she gets when someone unsubscribes from her email list. Sometimes she knows them! “How could they not be interested in what I’m doing?” she asks.

We all face rejection. Right now, I’m talking about rejection in my career, but what about love? There’s a biggie – a hurt like no other.

On the one hand, bravo, you’re in the game – keep going.

On the other hand, you put yourself out there. You weren’t accepted. It stings. You took a risk, and it didn’t go as planned.

People have all kinds of unhealthy, unconscious ways to respond to rejection. They pout. They get mad. Some people pretend that it doesn’t affect them. They keep smiling and continue to go skipping through the imaginary field of daisies. Denial. Denial. Denial. Some people go out and drink alcohol or smoke a joint.

Shit, some people take prescription drugs because they’ve had years of unresolved rejection. Thousands of little things happen, or maybe a big thing happens, that we push down. I mean, isn’t that THE definition of depression, feelings of severe despondency and dejection?

My premise is this…let’s stop saying that these things don’t matter when they actually do! Then, these hurts don’t get suppressed, thus turning into something they are not.

Since my commitment is to live in a model of wellness, I’m going to share with you what I do. And it doesn’t involve replying with a nasty email or drinking a bottle of wine or smoking a fat doobie. All those things may feel good on the surface, but not so much in your soul.

#1 - I go on a walk. Yep, that’s right. I put on my shoes and start moving. Movement is a potent form of medicine for anxiety, anger and fear. If I’m walking with my husband, I may vent (God bless that man). Or I may visualize violence and destruction. “You’re an idiot!” And then a nice hit to my third eye with the palm of my hand. Ok. I feel better now.

Some people will say, “Oh, chill out, Charlotte. What’s the big deal? It’s not personal. You’re awesome and those people are morons.” Great. Thanks. Maybe that helps a little, but not really…because it is personal, and they aren’t morons. Something happened to me. It’s like a tornado isn’t personal, but when it hits your house it is! This is an important distinction. Rejection is personal and it’s not.

#2 - Give it some space. This is what we call a “Tincture of Time” in holistic medicine. Time does heal. There is a time to move and then just to let it be. Watch. And see what emerges. What unanswered questions remain? What’s unresolved?

#3 - I may employ a few of my favorite herbs to help support my nervous system. Sometimes rejection hits, and I can recover. Other times, I need help. The beautiful thing about appropriate plant medicine is that it can help bring you back to yourself. What I mean by this is that when life rattles me, and I get that hit to my solar plexus after reading an email - BOOM! I don’t need to stay there in that rattled state. I can turn to an herbal ally.

In this case, I make some homemade Mood Juice! It includes equal parts of these four herbs: Schisandra, St John’s Wort, Skullcap, and Damiana. I based this liquid blend on MediHerb’s tableted formula Nevaton, which is available through qualified healthcare professionals. These are just some of the many herbs that support a healthy nervous system. The real point is, you have herbal allies to help you along your path to wellness. If you still feel a little lost or resistant to buying herbs, check out my blog post, Herbal Knowledge is Power.

All of these herbs are nervine tonics, working together to calm and restore nervous system function. This formula promotes my ability to live in the present moment and conserve my energy. It is important to remember that herbs normalize function, so this is a vital tool to both feelings of being revved up and in the dumps. I have noted that this formula is particularly supportive to the grieving process, which is exactly what we are talking about here: loss.

#4 Once I have put my rejection in its proper place by honoring my emotions, moving, giving it some time, and then leaning on my herbal allies, I consciously choose expansion. I choose learning. I choose inquiry both within myself and the other people involved.

So I start looking: does my new website reflect my years of education? Is there a grain of truth to this person’s perception that I am not qualified to help him? I emailed this particular person and wished him well. I hope you find what you are looking for.

Then, I move on to the other issue. Could I have done a better job at submitting my speaker proposal? What can I do differently next time? Who can I talk to who has done this before? This way, I start the process of resolution around the rejection - with my integrity in tact.

When we move beyond the pain to a place of humble curiosity, rejection is a mighty teacher.

I remember that we sit in a very large matrix of life where everything is connected, so I trust. I trust that I am not supposed to work with this client, and that I am not supposed to speak at this conference.

I also continue on the never-ending journey of discovering who I am through who I am not. Sometimes, it is uncomfortable when the locus of control is outside of yourself, but life is constantly talking to us, saying “This, not that.” It’s beautiful when you can dance with your intentions AND also with what the Universe communicates to you. Doors close that you thought would be open, and doors open that you thought would be closed.

Herbal allies hold my hand along the way, and reinforce my connection to all that is good.

And most importantly, I stay in the game, and I am stronger now. I might get a massage, which is a reminder that I am safe in this world. I find another conference to submit a speaking proposal to. I take good care of the next client who shows up. I do the next right thing to bring the conversation of vitality into this world, and affirm what it means to be fully alive.

I hope you are all able to move through the pain of "no" and find a little light in the darkness of rejection. To learn more ways to boost your vitality and get insider recipes, articles and newsletters, Subscribe to my website!

Eat in Peace and Live in Peace!

Love,

Charlotte

5 Ways Social Media Healed My Soul

“For every hour spent with technology, one needs to spend an hour outside in nature.” -Richard Louv

Healing is never just about one thing. The progression of chronic disease involves numerous factors and so does healing from it.

I teach wellness because I want to give people the holistic tools to feel more alive. I like to think of eating real food as a gateway to a more vibrant life, not the end all, be all. Taking care of your body is the first step towards fulfilling your destiny.

As Stephen Pressfield says in his book titled Turning Pro, “The physical leads to the spiritual” (p103).

The thing that kept me going through the ups and downs of my own healing process was that I wanted to contribute something to the world. I think we all do. It’s difficult to feel motivated in a body is that is sick. I know because I used to have bouts of inflammatory-induced depression to the point of sobbing on my bathroom floor, wondering what this life was for.

Suicide would cross my mind. I just kept going through the motions, hoping for more. My spirit was trapped in my body that just wanted to lie in bed all day. In fact, that’s one of the questions I ask my clients: what will you do when you feel better? What will you do with newfound energy?

Well, I will tell you about one of the things I did after coming out of my last round of depression…I started using social media as a creative platform.

I just turned 40 years old, so my generation didn’t grow up with email and the internet. I had my first email account in college, along with my first laptop. When social media started showing itself, I just wasn’t interested. I was “too busy for that shit.” I signed up for a Facebook and LinkedIn account and never participated.

Shortly after giving birth to my son in 2012, I literally deleted these two accounts. Bye. Bye. If I got one more insincere happy birthday message from my Facebook “friends” I was going to scream. I was disgusted with it. As an outsider looking in, I saw only the dark side: people depicting nothing but the “happy, happy joy, joy times” of life or their latest accomplishments, along with their beautiful faces or hot bodies. All the while, observing people unable to look each other in their eyes in real time. I did not want to have anything to do with any of it.

If you know me, you will feel my passion for life (that’s the thing that got me off the bathroom floor), but that passion has another side to it - righteousness. I like to think that I have educated opinions about topics that I study, but I made a mistake with social media. I had an uneducated opinion. I thought I knew the “right way” but I didn’t.

One potent form of healing is admitting when you are wrong.

I started to realize that I had made a mistake when a colleague told me to read Tribes by Seth Godin. I didn’t purchase the book until I went to a functional medicine conference, and I heard about it again. Fascinating read about how the world has changed and that this “thing” that I hated with all of my being was here to stay.

Ha! Well, that book and a few conversations with colleagues lit a fire under my ass that isn’t burning out anytime soon. Thank you, Universe!

Up until recently, my motto had been Go Local. Now it is Go Local AND Go Global.

Three years into motherhood I was ready to enter a bigger game. I set up numerous social media accounts, checked them out and decided to put my efforts into Instagram as eatinpeacewc where I now have 3,000+ followers, which means nothing and something at the same time. While I hope my posts are useful to my readers, my journey with social media journey has changed me in a positive way. It has literally healed my soul on an unexpected, deep level. Here is what I mean by that:

#1. I am getting more comfortable living with fear and a sensitive nervous system. I am learning to trust.

When I got involved with Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, I was so scared that I came up with a plan. I would pay Drake’s babysitter to post my content. That way if something sucked or offended someone, while I may have created the content, hey, she posted it. It took about a week to realize that this thing called social media was safe to explore! And yes, I have stepped into controversy at times. I have stirred the pot. I have made mistakes. I have learned something. And I am still here – alive and well.

In his new book How to Be Here, the author Rob Bell says this:

“If you are working on something, about to deliver it, moments from opening the doors, an hour from everybody arriving, a week from the release date, two minutes from getting the results back, and you have butterflies in your stomach, be grateful. You are in a wonderful place. Nerves are God’s gift to you, reminding you that your life is not passing you by. Make friends with the butterflies. Welcome them when they come, revel in them, enjoy them, and if they ever go away, do whatever it takes to put yourself in a position where they return. Better to have a stomach full of butterflies than to feel like your life is passing you by” (p106).

YES!

#2. I have reignited my love of sharing ideas and connecting with people, and that’s the upside of social media.

I enjoy networking and consider myself a perpetual student. Now I get to do this on the world- wide web, expanding my reach far beyond the people I am physically with. One of my first virtual friends was the Forest Wyfe. She’s a wonderful herbalist! Her family gave up the city life to go live in the Appalachian Mountains, and she’s documenting this transition for herself, writing of falling in love with the land and the seasons. Her Instagram account is amazing. I wouldn’t know her if I wasn’t here in the virtual world. Reconnecting with old friends is great, too.

Sure, social media has a dark side. EVERYTHING does. You see what you focus on. Some things I witness on social media astound me. I ask myself: how can that be useful to anyone?! Delete. Some people do the same thing to my posts. GREAT! I want to find the people who are truly interested in vitality and wellness.

The ability for the small business owner to promote their product, services and ideas on social media blows me away. I feel like a kid again. My sense of awe for life is returning through this technology that I used to make fun of! Isn’t life funny?

#3. Posts turn the ordinary into art.

If you’re not familiar with Instagram, it is based on pictures. When whatever I’m experiencing strikes me as being worthy or beautiful, I snap a photo and then I say something about it. I don’t always know what I’m going to say, but if I just sit with it, something comes and sometimes that something blows me away. Wow! I didn’t see that coming. I am accessing a part of myself as a creative being that I didn’t know I had, and it’s so much fun to watch it unfold.

I got a call the other day from an old friend following my Facebook account and she said, “Who are you?!”

I said, “I’m me! You are seeing my internal world that I keep hidden. And there’s this creative force moving through me that is so damn fun.”

I just started a book titled Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madsen. The author takes all the wisdom she has learned from improvisation and applies it to life. Brilliant book. She writes this, “You don’t need to do anything at all. Trust that the gift is already there. Then discover what it is...Ideas, songs, poems, paintings come through the individual but are not thought to be of him. In Bali everyone is considered an artist. Art is simply what one does, not who one is” (p39).

Is this thing called social media really ART, instead of the demonic force that I thought it was? I think it is probably both, as it reveals the best and worst of mankind. It turns out I’ve been prejudiced against social media; lumping it into a category of uselessness and excessive vanity. What a turnaround for me.

#4. I am so over perfectionism.

One time when I was in college, I called home and I told my mom, “Hey, can you do me a favor and bring me a shirt that’s in my closet when you come to visit?” She agreed and I said, “Ok, great. When you go into my closet. Turn to the left. Third stack of clothes from the right, there should be a peach shirt, second from the bottom.” She said something to the effect of, “Shit, Char, are you a serial killer?” I said, “No, I’m just a perfectionist.”

I thought perfectionism was noble, but it is really fear, in disguise. I had to get over the desire to be perfect in this realm of social media. I take a picture. I say something about it. I hit the post button. Later, sometimes I realize that I needed to say it differently. Sometimes I make mistakes.

People are more forgiving than we think.

Most people are too busy with their own lives to care about yours. They may have a fleeting thought, but then they move on. As one of my mentors used to say, “Everyone’s worried about what their neighbor thinks. Trust me. He or she isn’t thinking at all. Thinking is hard work.”

#5. I am finding my voice in the world.

There are a lot of issues that are important to me, like how we feed our families, childhood vaccinations, how we birth babies, getting people to understand the value of sleep, the value of a fever during acute infections, how food allergies are a causative factor in many chronic diseases…I could go on and on. Many of these topics are controversial and need a voice. Bottom line: I am finding my voice, and it feels soooo damn good.

It feels so good that I am writing a book titled Eat in Peace to Live in Peace: 7 Secrets to Claim Your Vitality. Writing a book has been a long-term dream of mine that didn’t find me until I reached a new level of vitality.

I am starting to see that art comes in many different forms and has the potential to expand the artist’s consciousness. Participating in art and the creative process, rather than just being a spectator, can make you a better, more compassionate human being. At least, that’s what has happened for me. I feel less judgmental of both myself and others.

I am sharing my passion with less righteousness.

I could say to myself, “Oh, wow, I have been missing out all these years!” But the truth is that I have been doing exactly what I needed to be doing, and so have you. We are always where we need to be until our souls desire another level of expansion.

So here I am, folks, in this strange and welcoming virtual world where every post and every blog is like throwing a pebble into a pond and watching the water ripple out, never knowing who I am going to reach and how my writing will affect them, but trusting that I am doing exactly what I need to be doing.

Thanks for being here with me! And if you know someone who judged social media, like I did, pass this on to them (print it if you need to). Healing can come in the most unexpected ways, even through technology – hope to see you on Instagram. Once again, you can find me at eatinpeacewc!

And please sign up for my newsletter, so that you can keep learning and increasing your vitality.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for my next post where I will talk about holistic ways to deal with rejection. Once you start putting yourself out there, your coping mechanisms for rejection will define you, not your successes.