Raw Food: Green Tomato Salsa Recipe

This is what I'm up to this evening...mmm...it's a great recipe for using up all those green tomatoes that are still on the vine and about to get frozen real soon: Green Tomato Salsa Recipe: Recipes: RecipeTips.com

Here's a reprint of the recipe for your convenience:

Prep Time: 15 minutes Serving Description: makes approximately 2 cups Ingredients - 6 green tomatoes, coarsely chopped - 1 jalapeno, large, seeded and finely chopped - 6 green onions, finely chopped - 1 1/2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil - 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice or red wine vinegar (I'd suggest substituting w/ apple cider vinegar) - 1 teaspoon kosher salt freshly ground black pepper, to taste - 1/4 cup sweet onion, finely chopped

Directions

Combine all ingredients. Cover and leave at room temperature for 2 hours before serving.

The thing I like about this recipe, other than the fact that it's delicious, is that it's all raw food, which is the direction I have been moving these days in terms of the way to eat in general. Leigh Ankrum is the genius local Tulsa Osteopath who assists me with medical issues and physical problems that are beyond the scope of my general practice doc. What Leigh does when she lays her hands on a person is miraculous, and it was her suggestion that I start eating raw. I'm taking her up on it, and suggest that anyone out there who has chronic unresolved physical issues do the same.

Setting Intentions for Your Body

This is from Patricia Moreno, at her Sati Life "I love my body" Warrior Body Facebook page, and I think it is good enough to share, plus, I like it because she gives us specific tools for creating and using intentions.  I also really like her translation of Lao Tsu, below:

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Subject: Sati life "I love my body" 9.19.09 Feeling good?

My intention is to feel good all the time. To feel energized, lean, healthy and better and better with age.  What's yours?

Setting intentions help empower us and guide us in making more conscious choices in our lives.  Living a Sati or mindful life is about remembering it is the choices that we make today that all add up to how we feel and live. We are living choice at a time, one moment at a time, one day at a time.

Lau Tzu reminds us that the journey of a thousands miles begins with one step. It can also be  phrased "even the longest journey must being where you stand"

Writing your intention for how you want to feel, live, and be is a powerful and very important first step.  It is your map, your guidance and your source of energy.

Take just a moment and close your eyes. Take a few long deep breaths. This helps you connect to your heart, your inner guidance.  Then ask yourself, what is my intention? How do I intend to feel today? How do I intend to treat myself today? How do I intend to nourish myself today?

This will help you make your choices today from your heart instead of your head. When we choose with our heart we connect to an infinite strength, power and wisdom. Often when we choose from our head we choose from our judgements of ourself or from feeling guilty or ashamed of what we have done in the past. For instance if you are feeling badly about what you ate yesterday you might be angry at yourself and if you make a choice from anger or hatred or any negative state you can only create more of the same.

Bring love into the equation and lead with your heart.  Intend your life to be what you want it to be. Intend your good health, your improved energy, mood and attitude.  You are the one walking.  Which direction will you choose to walk today?

Let your heart lead the way. One step at a time.
Love,
Patricia

Photo credit http://denverlibrary.org/programs/january/index.html

Want more time in your life? There IS a way, read on:

10 Ways to Take Time

This is a FANTASTIC article about how to get more time in your life, which is one of the top three things that clients complain about when they come to see me, and which all of us are complaining about constantly.  Want more time?  This is the article I wish I had written.  Great job Melissa Karnaze!

Art by Sebastian Proost.  Original found here.

Posted using ShareThis

Answers to Life’s Worries, in 3-Minute ‘Speed Shrinking’ Sessions

NYTimes.com: "“I’m engaged and I’m about to move in with my boyfriend,” she said. “I’m a little commitment-phobic. I just don’t know about being with the same person 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I really need to talk to my therapist about this.”

Ms. Tang, a 40-year-old librarian from Astoria, Queens, had an even bigger problem: Her therapist was on vacation. “Whenever she’s gone, I struggle with feelings of emptiness,” she said.

So Ms. Tang took her troubles to the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in SoHo on a recent Wednesday night — but not to look up advice in a medical book.

Instead, Ms. Tang went to talk about her fears with a panel of eight psychiatrists and psychologists offering three-minute sessions of what was billed as “speed shrinking” to those whose regular therapists were on vacation or to anyone else needing a very fast dose of advice."

Would you come to a Speed Shrinking session in Tulsa if one were offered? Contact annie@a-quiet-mind.com to vote yes or no, or leave a comment here.

"Once this bill passes, I own it!"

That's what President Obama told Steve Kroft today on CBS, and told us, the American public.  He is speaking of his willingness to take responsibility for making this bill work.  He is saying that since he is writing it he will be living it and living up to it, as well.   Love that ownership.  Way to go, prez.  This also empowers him when the bill works in his favor, naturally.  And it says that if things don't go as planned, he will be the one who will step up to amend things as well.

Obama is modeling for us what it could look like to take ownership of the circumstances of our lives if we believe that we really are the ones writing the script.  To extend the image into the rest of life, we prepare ourselves for experiences of empowerment when we treat everything that unfolds around us as if we are own it, because once its in our life, we do own it, in fact.

It's a cool way to live.  More powerful than living as a victim of the circumstances.

How to Deal with Pain? Become a Lake

An aging Hindu master grew tired of his apprentice complaining, and so, one morning, sent him for some salt. When the apprentice returned, the master instructed the unhappy young man to put a handful of salt in a glass of water and then to drink it. “How does it taste?” the master asked. “Bitter,” spit the apprentice. The master then asked the young man to take another handful of salt and put it in the lake nearby. Once the apprentice swirled his handful of salt in the water, the old man said, “Now drink from the lake.” As the water dripped down the young man’s chin, the master asked, “How does it taste?” “Fresh,” remarked the apprentice. “Do you taste the salt?” asked the master. “No,” said the young man.

At this, the master took the young man’s hands, offering, “The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains exactly the same. However, the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things . . .

STOP BEING A GLASS. BECOME A LAKE."

From Mental Health Marketing blog

This very much goes to the same idea as my previous post, which discussed things like the velcro effect, which is another way of saying that we see what we want to see.  We experience that which we focus upon.

Whether physical or emotional pain, when we stop focusing on it we stop concentrating it in our consciousness.  When we stop concentrating it we stop tasting it at those strengths and start allowing it to fade to the background, along with everything else in the tapestry of our lives.  Not more important or meaningful than anything else, but just in there along with everything else, all of it to be dealt with until the day we breathe no more.

Since life will always be a serious of both moments of bliss and moments of hardship, it behooves us to figure out how to deal with both.  And since our focus is a matter of our will as much as anything else, we benefit by choosing which stuff to focus on moment-by-moment.  Be a lake.

PS.  I slept all night last night.  That really helps.  :-)

Photo credit: http://www.microsoft.com/nz/windows/bliss/default.mspx

How do Faith and Trust Work with Radical Personal Responsibility?

I find myself talking with clients often about having faith and trust, yet we are also fully engaged in dialogue about personal responsibility and what that might mean. It seems like the two might be antithetical to one another--how can I let go into a place of trust and faith about a problem I might be having in my life, while also taking 100% responsibility for it at the same time?

Author Marianne Williamson says that the most powerful way to show up for self and others is in a state of surrender to God, which she claims is also a state of complete responsibility. She refers to God as a power that is in you but not of you, and that can do for you what you cannot do for yourself.

Williamson is referring to the force for good that is both in the world around us and is within us all the time. When we talk about the power of possibility and about acts of manifesting, we are talking about aligning ourselves with that force.

Our thoughts and feelings about situations are what ends up creating our realities about them. When we choose to align with fear and resignation, for example, what we will experience from life are the products of that mindset and its concurrent emotions. It’s like that old saying about the hammer and the nail: if you are walking around with a hammer in your hand and that is the only tool you have for fixing a problem, you are going to hit everything that looks like a nail, and alot of things that aren’t nails are going to start looking like nails simply because that's the focus.

Another way of looking at this is what I call The Velcro Effect.

Want to know more about The Velcro Effect and how to manifest what you really want in your life, no matter what your current conditions are? Read the rest of this post here.

What Would Jesus Do About the Health Care Debate?

Please check out this recent sermon, The Sublime and the Ridiculous, on the health care issue, from the wonderful preacher Robin Meyers, at Mayflower Congregational Church in OKC. Listen to the audio download here and if you are in the Oklahoma City area on a weekend, please go commune with this group, shake Meyers' hand and tell him how happy you are to find such a powerful, progressive voice in our great state. Meyers has also written five very good books, including a lovely book of sublime poetry, Morning Sun on a White Piano, and his terrific new read, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus.

My favorite quote from this recent sermon, a' la Stephen Colbert:

Nation, the word is truthiness. That's something that sounds true without being at all encumbered by the facts.

This was Meyers' comment upon his observation, just after his returning from a mission trip to serve the poor in Nicaragua, of American citizens screaming misrepresentations and scare tactics at our nation's recent health care forums.

Health care for everyone is not only an economic and political issue, it is a serious moral issue, and is, as Meyers says, "the mother of all policy debates". Our current health care system is completely broken and is even immoral in that we are living in the richest country on earth, our recent financial woes notwithstanding, and we have people all around us who are suffering while in buildings and offices all around them there are cures, fixes, aids, and tools for ending or at the very least, greatly ameliorating their suffering. It is immoral to stand by and withhold from our fellow human beings that which we know can help them. This is the cause to which Meyers has given his life, and this is the cause to which I have given my own: the gift of tools for ending suffering.

Meyers points out that the people screaming at each other in those town hall meetings are most assuredly self-identified as Christians. Meyers asks them to consider their own 'bracelet message': What Would Jesus Do? Christians have a moral responsibility to heal people, as modeled for us by Jesus. As he illustrates in this message, Jesus' life and ministry included four themes: free healing, free food, a free and open table (which Jesus himself presided over), and the creation of safe spaces for marginalized people to receive the free blessings of God.

Meyers reminds us that Jesus forgave sins, touched and healed the diseased, fed the hungry, and then told his followers to go out and do the same thing. Please follow the example of Jesus and tell your members of Congress to support President Obama's plan for health care reform so that all of our fellow human beings can be given the same opportunities for health and wellness that those of us enjoy who are currently insured. And if you oppose the plan, study it again, look more closely. There is nothing in this plan that threatens your independence and liberty. Nay, it may set this nation free.