How Our Eating Rituals Impact Digestion and Vitality - And What to do About it!

Every time I sit down to eat I light a candle, even if I'm alone. This is a practice that I have maintained for years. A candle symbolizes that something sacred is happening. In this case, it's a meal!

I believe that our culture is too casual about eating. What you eat literally creates you. Check this out…the word eat is in create! Your body is sacred ground and while you may be paying very close attention to what you eat, you might not think much about how you eat it.

Do you stand on one foot while eating off the cutting board? Do you eat in the car where your biggest concern is not dropping food on your lap? If you considered your body a temple, you wouldn’t just run through the communion line, gobble up a handful of crackers, slug down some wine while playing Candy Crush and throw the pastor a peace sign. Laters!

Unconscious eating is like arriving at a destination but we can't remember how we got there...even when we drove!

If we don't pay attention, we miss the experience entirely. Some people realize how disconnected they are around mealtimes when they try to keep a food journal but honestly can't recall what they put in their mouths that same day!

We voraciously devour information so we choose plants that were grown without harmful chemicals and are harvested at the hands of workers who can earn a living wage. We pay extra and shop locally to choose animals that were raised in open air and slaughtered using the most humane technologies. So why can’t we also choose to honor ourselves by sitting our asses down and making mealtimes sacred?

When we invite special guests to eat with us the first thing we do is set the table, light some candles and pop on some nice tunes. Maybe this is just the kind of ritual we can all do for ourselves and our families to show how much we care.

We honor our bodies and the foods that arrive to our tables by taking the time to appreciate the smells, tastes and textures of each food as it nourishes our bodies. If we don’t, we are missing out on the final stage of all that thought we put into our food choices. Creating rituals around eating also prepares your body to receive food, kind of like the Pavlov dog effect. Your digestive juices will start flowing just by association.

Mealtime rituals actually improve digestion and since we know that health and vitality begins in the belly, the simple act of lighting a candle and turning off the T.V. can improve our overall wellness!

So for every meal, I set my table and light a candle; a ritual that makes even a simple meal feel special. A candle also symbolizes the power of the digestive fire. Fire is a symbol of transformation. Fire takes wood and turns it into ash. It also takes your food and turns it into energy and building blocks for your body.

And of course, as I sit down to eat, I say a silent prayer of thanks and tell my body that it is going to know exactly how to handle what I am about to digest for the highest good. I hope you too can set your table, take a seat and light a candle to Eat in Peace...

Love,

Charlotte

What Can Herbs Really Do to Help Me Feel Better?

The possibilities are endless when it comes to how plants can affect your life. One of the beautiful aspects of herbal medicine is the intention that goes in to herbal formulations, both on the part of you as the client and me as the practitioner. We decide together what herbs can do for you (within reason of course)! Ultimately, I use herbs to increase vitality.

Vitality is defined in the dictionary as:

1. The peculiarity distinguishing the living from the non living.

2. Lively and animated character.

3. The capacity to live and develop.

4. Physical and mental vigor.

On a more personal level to me, vitality is waking up each morning happy and eager to start my day. Sometimes the vitality gets blocked, and energy does not flow smoothly. It is almost as if the body forgot how to do something. Herbs can remind the body of how to function again. Sure, like any tool, herbs have limitations, but when they hit the right button, long-lived physiological patterns can dissolve, and you feel full of life.

Another way of looking at it is that an herb asks the body to do something. This is why they work best in combination with changes in diet and lifestyle. If the resources are lacking in the body, herbs will not perform as well, or maybe not at all. This is why nothing can compensate for a poor diet, an unrecognized food allergy, chronic sleep debt, or unhealthy thought patterns.

Very often we are not sure how they work. Scientists like to look for the active constituent in an herb: let’s discover exactly what is responsible for this herb’s action. This is the origin of many pharmaceutical drugs. Sometimes we will discover the active constituents in a plant and be able to study how we think the plant works, but very often the identified constituent will not have the same effect as the whole plant in the human body.

Herbs contain unidentified numbers of constituents that work together synergistically, and for this reason, do not fit into our reductionistic model of thinking. They work best in their whole plant form, gently nudging the body back into balance.

As previously described, herbs create movement where there is stagnation. Exactly how herbs do this is beyond me, and I am humble in the face of Mother Nature and the human body. Very often, it is not the herb doing anything anyway; it is the body’s response to the herb that is responsible for its effects. One drop of a bitter herb such as gentian on the tongue does not do anything, but the body responds to the taste by up regulating its digestive function. The person may notice increased saliva production or appetite, if it was lacking before.

What we can be sure of is observable phenomenon. When an herb shifts your physiology, you will feel it. Herbs do not want to be intellectualized, they want to be experienced and felt in the body, just like food. For this reason, eating and herbal medicine is more of an art, than a science.

When Doctors Fail : Ensuring Your Best Health in a Broken System

For decades, we have looked to doctors and other professionals who went to school for a long time to fix our ailments. The problem is that much of their training is based on creating patches for broken systems, rather than reconfiguring the whole sytem to eliminate the problem at its root.

Thirteen years ago, the medical system failed me. I had been sick for over a month, put on multiple rounds of antibiotics and finally admitted to the hospital with the prospect of surgery to have my gall bladder removed. $2500 worth of tests later, they discovered that I had a mononucleosis infection at which point they cast me aside and said, "Go home, sleep, drink lots of water."

That's all they could offer me. If they had a drug for Epstein Barr virus, they would have given one to me. Someone else might go to the doctor and get an antibiotic for a bacterial infection, and they celebrate their swift recovery - behold our modern medical miracles. Yes, pharmaceutical drugs have their place in the world but the context desperately needs to change.

A true professional in that hospital could have sat on the side of my bed and had another conversation with me. Maybe something simple like this: "Hey, you look and feel like crap. I can see that. But here's what you need to understand: 98% of the population carries the Epstein Barr virus but not everyone gets acutely ill from it. Why is that? Well, it's about how well you live your life. Your body became hospitable to this bug. I bet you haven't been sleeping. Maybe you have a stressful job and then you eat lots of sweets to get some energy. Bottom line: look at how you landed here. This doesn't happen by accident. Let me give you a business card for a naturopath down the road who can teach you about your body and how to care for it." Sound ridiculous? Maybe. But how wonderful it would be.

When I got sick, I was sleeping 4 hours a night, eating an obscene amount of sugar, exercising like a maniac, and had a stressful job managing a busy restaurant, and I didn't really know any better. It's rarely about the virus or bacteria, instead it's about making your light shine so the dark riders can't take hold.

You can't afford to be a victim and to be uninformed about how your body works. Vitality is your birthright. The ownness is on us now. We have to be the systems analysts for our own bodies and seek out those who can help us reconfigure our bodies holistically. Take a stand for it - you're worth it.