“In this earth, in this earth, in this immaculate field, we shall not plant any seeds, except for compassion, except for love.”
~ Rumi
Isn’t food love? Love to us from Mother Nature, Life, and the Great, Great Mystery. Love with an infinite possibility of tastes, fragrances, textures, colours, shapes and forms. Love to our palate and pleasure, not alone for the infinite benefits and medicinal properties.
Have you ever stopped and started thinking about how our food and seeds have evolved along our own evolution and how they perfected themselves through resilience, just like we did? They are perpetual reminders of the complexity and diversity of life on earth. Seeds have been cherished and transmitted from so many different lineages and traditions all over the world, from generation after generation as they adapted to climate changes and different landscapes. It is just amazing how we can benefit from them today! They truly are precious and of inestimable worth. They are the seeds of life and are directly related to food freedom and to our health.
The quality of our food depends on the quality of the seeds and the soil in which they grow. As the new science of epigenetics shows that the environment influences genes, agro ecology and ecological farming, not “industrial farming”, are finally being recognized around the world and by institutions of the United Nations, as the basis for the future of our food. Small farmers produce more, and seeds savings has spread all over the world. Gardens are exploding everywhere!
As I sit to eat my food, I remind myself to connect to my breath and feel my emotional state before I start eating. Digestion starts with the brain’s sensory experience of seeing food, smelling food and anticipating food. When we eat unaware and speedily, we trigger the “fight or flight response” and bypass our food’s sensory pleasure. Our digestion shuts down biochemically and neurologically, and therefore our ability to burn our food as fuel, and to absorb our precious nutrients is being altered. When I approach my meal with mindfulness and with an attitude of gratitude rather than with mental preoccupation, I enhance my relationship with food and its beneficial nutritional and medicinal effects.
According to John Robbins, the author of The Food Revolution: How your diet can help you save your life and our world: “few of us are aware that the act of eating can be a powerful statement of commitment to our own well-being, and at the same time the creation of a healthier habitat. Your health, happiness, and the future of life on earth are rarely so much in your own hands as when you sit down to eat.”
“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”
~ Albert Einstein
RECIPE OF THE MONTH
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Buddha’s Garden
One of the seven pearls toward health is eating natural, organic foods as much as possible. They are more nutritious as they contain more nutrients […]
INSPIRATION OF THE MONTH
Dr. Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., is a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. She is the founder/director of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. She has received numerous awards, and honorary degrees including the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize. In 2011 Forbes named her “one of the 7 most influential feminists in the world”.
“We need once more to feel at home on earth and with each other.”
~ Vandhana Shiva
Again, I want to thank each one and every one of you for reading my newsletter, for your interest and support. I find myself of service in this big picture of life, where to understand our own health, it is often valuable to understand our place in our surroundings, living consciously, with an awareness of our own nature and of the world around us, how it affects us and how we, in turn, affect nature and the world. My goal is to help each other to make informed choices for ourselves, our families and loved ones. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve as a guide and facilitator toward empowerment, helping you in developing the necessary tools and confidence to take your health and happiness into your own hands. Furthermore, I want to express my sincere gratitude also for the possibility to share, for each one of you in my life, and for the precious and endless teachings that I receive from each and every one. We are truly interconnected!
In Health, Love and Joy,
Denise
“Man surprised me most about humanity.
~ Dalai Lama X1V
Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.
And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present;
the result being that he does not live in the present or the future;
he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”