Lucky Foods for the New Year 🍀🧧🤞😉

Happy New Year, everyone! I wanted to have a little fun with this blog, so I am sharing some 🍀lucky foods🍀 to bring in the New Year. 

Enjoy!

Black Eyed Peas

 📸 Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@jasmine_waheed

Because black eyed peas resemble coins, they are believed to bring prosperity. To ensure extra luck, some people add corn kernels because they look like golden nuggets. This is a tradition in the south which demonstrates frugality and promotes prosperity in the new year.

Buttered Bread

 📸 Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@rodolfomarques

New Years Day in Ireland is also known as “Day of the Buttered Bread.” Tradition says buttered bread placed outside the door symbolizes an absence of hunger in the household for the year to come. I will be serving this one for sure. Who doesn't love the simplicity of delicious, hearty bread and butter?

Raisins

 📸 Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@andreas_haslinger

Tradition in Spain says 12 grapes or raisins eaten before midnight (one at each chime of the clock) will bring good luck for all 12 months of the coming year. Provided you finish all 12 before the stroke of midnight, you will be all set.

Greens

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Because of their bright green color, hearty greens like kale, spinach, and collards resemble money. Belief has it, the more you eat, the more prosperous you’ll be (and healthier, too). Greens will be served in my home, for sure!

Pigs

 📸 Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@fraumuksch

In some countries, (including Cuba, Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Austria), pigs symbolize progress. Some say it’s because these animals never move backward. In my book, foods shaped like pigs (chocolate figurines, perhaps) count, too. This vegetarian girl will pass on the real thing!

Unbroken Noodles

 📸 Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@jckbck

Signifying longevity in Asian culture, a stir-fry of unbroken noodles is a tradition believed to bring good health and luck in the New Year. Anyone who can eat at least one long noodle without chewing or breaking it is said to enjoy the longest life and best luck of all! In China, Japan and other Asian countries, it’s customary to eat long noodles, signifying longevity.

Lentils

 📸 Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@bettysubrizi_

As lentils resemble tiny coins, the custom of enjoying lentils in the New Year is a common Italian tradition said to bring wealth. Going deeper into the myth, when cooked, lentils plump with water, symbolizing growing wealth. Lentils are also considered good luck in Hungary, where they’re preferred in soup.

Cornbread

 📸 Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@ralppie

Golden yellow and delicious, cornbread is especially popular in the South. Because its color is similar to that of gold, this bread is enjoyed by those hopeful for a prosperous year. A favorite throughout the year, cornbread is especially served as a New Year’s treat. it's fun and easy to make, and delicious too.

Clementines

 📸 Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@diaduit

Round fruits, such as clementines, are enjoyed on New Year’s Day as their shape signifies the old year has come to a close, and the coming days hold the promise of a fresh start. Clementines resemble coins and symbolize wealth. This is something I will be adding - I love the flavor and the bright, gorgeous orange color.

Whole Fish

 📸 Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@gregor_moser

In Chinese culture, serving fish whole (both head and tail intact) symbolizes prosperity, abundance, and a good year to come (from start to finish). According to Doris Lum, a Chinese cuisine expert, the Chinese word for “fish” sounds like the word for “abundance,” one of the many reasons fish has become a go-to good luck food.

I am wishing you a prosperous, healthy and happy new year, to bring you all the joy, adventure and love your heart can possibly carry. ❤️‍🩹😍💪

 

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Does anyone want better sleep? 🙋🏻‍♀️😴😊

Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@kstonematheson

Seriously, what a question! 😂

We all have natural biological clocks and rhythms. Following a 24 hour cycle, these rhythms respond mostly to light and dark. This process affects our health, involving our hormone release (including melatonin), eating habits, digestion, and body temperature. Things that can interrupt this rhythm are jet lag, time differences (including daylight savings time), electronic devices, and dramatic life events. Once our circadian rhythms get off kilter, it can difficult to get back on track without a conscious effort to realign ourselves. As it turns out, there’s more than one schedule to follow, according to our chronotype. 

So, what’s a chronotype? 

According to Dr. Michael Breus, a clinical psychologist and sleep medicine expert, chronotypes are genetic. The theory is it comes from our species’ need for survival, with different individuals needing to watch the fort at night, and others during the day. There are four chronotypes, the Lion (morning person), the Bear (daytime person), the Wolf (a night owl), and the Dolphin (who has difficulty creating a schedule and is more prone to insomnia).

Here are the four types, along with some relevant tips (a link below is provided for you to take the quiz, but can you guess your chronotype first?):

🦁Are you a Lion? 

A Lion is a morning person, typically waking up naturally as early as 4am or 5am. For this type, it is best to eat breakfast within an hour of getting out of bed in order to synchronize the body clock to the day. As Lions are at their peak in the early morning, this is the time they should be doing their most productive tasks that need top focus. With lots of energy early on, they tend to wane after lunch, and should be doing lighter cognitive activities thereafter. Exercising late afternoon (between 4pm and 6pm), eating dinner afterwards, and then binge watching TV at night is great for their chronotype. An early evening shower is best in order to relax and get a good night’s sleep. Typically, Lions are high energy, are very interested in their health, are organized, and have a list for just about everything (or in my case, a spreadsheet). 

🐻Perhaps a Bear? 

The Bear’s schedule is tuned into sunrise and sunset. They typically get up at 7am, and go to bed around 11pm. Lucky them! This makes the 9am-5pm workday perfect for their chronotype, and gives them enough energy throughout the day to get work done, and ease into the evening. Bears do well to start their day at 7am, then follow up with breakfast within the hour, followed by a cool shower. Their peak performance time is 10am - 3pm, ideally getting a nap in at 2pm. Lighter tasks are recommended thereafter until 6pm. Exercise and dinner at 7pm, followed by binge watching TV works best for them in order to unwind. Bears like, and need, 8 hours of sleep, so the proper wind down, including an evening shower after dinner, works best. Bears get the work done, are affable and fun to be around, and make great friends.

🐺Or maybe a Wolf? 

Wolves are night owls. They wake around 7am (or later), and go to bed at midnight (or later). No surprise, their peak performance time is late afternoon into late evening. If at all possible, a nap around 2pm is perfect. Doing research, making plans, and memory recall is best after 6pm. Exercise is best around 7pm. 9pm and later is their best time for socialization. A hot shower or bath is recommended late evening, before bedtime, so they can wind down and get a good night’s sleep. Wolves are intelligent and creative - often artists, musicians, and authors, and most are risk takers who don’t follow traditional norms.

🐬Or somehow a Dolphin? 

Dolphins are the insomniacs and have a difficult time with any sleep schedule. Because they are light sleepers, they have irregular sleep patterns. Being very sensitive to sound and light, they are easily awakened. As they naturally get less sleep, it is recommended they get out of bed around 6am, and then take a morning run and cold shower to get invigorated to start their day around 7am. Eating breakfast at 8am, or shortly thereafter, works for them. Dolphins are most productive starting at 3pm, with exercise at 6pm. A hot shower or bath at 9pm winds them down for a midnight bedtime. Dolphins are intelligent and perfectionists.

All chronotypes, except Dolphins, do best to eat within an hour of waking, followed by a nap at some point in their day. All four archetypes are advised to stop eating two hours before bedtime, taking an hour to unwind lets the body know it’s time to wind down and get ready for sleep. This routine sets our body clocks, and prepares us to greet the day. People who follow their correct chronotype schedule have said they have gotten better sleep, lost weight, and feel in sync with their bodies.

To find out your chronotype, click here to take the quiz. 

For more in-depth information (and to change your life!), read Michael Breus' book: 

“The Power of When: Discover Your Chronotype--and the Best Time to Eat Lunch, Ask for a Raise, Have Sex, Write a Novel, Take Your Meds, and More” by Michael Breus. 

It has helped me a lot, and a few surprises have worked in my favor, happy to say! 

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Relationship Clutter. Weeding out Your Garden of Love. 🌺🌱🍅🥕

Relationship clutter - we all have it. People in our lives who knock us down, compete about everything from silverware to vacations, and are skilled at giving passive aggressive, hurtful, and underhanded comments.

I believe it is always a good time to look at the people in our lives, and take an honest assessment by asking ourselves, "Is this person loving, supportive, fun, and most importantly, can I be myself in their presence without thinking about every word I say and every thing I do?" The key is to be ourselves, knowing we will be accepted as we are. 

For the garden reference - year after year, I witness friends preparing and spending much of their time getting ready to plant their gardens. It takes an inordinate amount of effort, heart felt focus, planning and maintenance. This work is done over and over, every day, for a long while before they see one bud, before they can count on one sprout, one peak of color, one promise of the season. Yet there they are, out there day after day, supporting the effort of growing their garden. Some years are better than others, some crops will surprise them with their abundance, but one thing is certain, they have to know what they want the garden to look like. So why don’t we put this much effort into the one thing that probably affects us the most as human beings - our relationship garden? What do we need to nourish, what do we need to weed out?

Letting go is sometimes healthy and necessary, and really good for us. Keeping unhealthy people in our lives can keep us obsessive, upset, off balance, and endlessly trying to figure things out (been there, done that!). Then we can’t enjoy anything outside the relationship which is good, healthy and fun. Much like weeds will strangle a garden.

The good news is we can look at our relationships and decide what we want them to look like, by looking at some current not so great ones to decide what and who we can let go of. Then we can be in an agreed upon relationship including love, support and respect. We can decide which ones are worth saving and savoring. 

May your relationship garden grow to the heavens with love and support!

 

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Summer Season Ending - Change, Acceptance and Moving On. ☀️⛱🌬🍁

Labor Day marks the end of summer. Many people view this with sadness as it represents the last days of long weekends, extended hours of sunshine, days at the beach, ice cream and shortened work weeks.

And what we overlook is the beginning of Autumn, which is one of the loveliest and most colorful times of the year. Who could argue smelling the crisp air and seeing vibrant fall colors brings new life to the stillness of summer? 

For many of us, it’s tough to let go of the freedom summer provides, with going back to more structured schedules. We don’t like that we have to give it up, forgetting that life is going to move on regardless of wether we decide to accept things as they are or not. 

Going through many, many transitions, a big lesson for me is that things are going to change. Some of those changes have been glorious, others not so much. It’s about navigating and working through it, even when I don’t want to. People leave us, we leave them. We age. The economy goes up and down, businesses change, end, and begin, because what people need also changes. We move, we need to say goodbye (and hello!). Illness happens, healing happens. People sometimes unexpectedly change their minds. 

I’ve navigated almost every life change you can imagine and I've been able to move on by looking back in order to move forward. I treasure every moment I can, knowing it may end, and allow myself to be in a place of gratitude, acceptance and navigation - still wondering what the next season of life is going to be like for me? 

I also look back. I have this obsession with tracking things. All kinds of things. Crazy things. I just love seeing where I’ve been and what it created. It helps me understand my state of mind at the time, as well as what I could have done differently, to be in a better place. I can then plan what needs to be done in order to move forward. The clarity is what aids in the momentum, and helps maintain perspective. This gives me amazing clarity, since all too often what we think we are doing is different than what it actually is.

Foresight and insight are very close cousins. In order to somewhat predict (because we never know) what will happen, or what will be needed in the future, we need the foresight to see patterns, pay attention and act accordingly. The insight comes from using that knowledge to get an accurate and intuitive understanding, so we can then pivot and be who we want, and live as we choose in the future, given all the facts. Throughout it all, believing you absolutely CAN AND WILL DO THIS, will propel you.

 

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Spiritual Sovereignty 👑 . Living authentically and not living for what others will judge us for.

Being concerned with what other people think can be an important part of socialization and inclusion, and it can also hold us back. Being overly concerned about other’s opinions so that we no longer hear or trust our own instincts, is dulling down our senses and intuition. We live in a web of interactions which is designed to keep the system going. There will be those that profit or are kept in charge, those who work very hard to get nowhere and keep the powerful powerful, those who become enraged with the system and commit violence, and those who will give willingly only because they were told to. In this script of life, there will be good guys, bad guys, and people pointing out who is who. Until it switches upside down. 

This happens in families (who is really in charge?) many times, not the ones most vested in keeping the family safe, cared for and together. It happens in business (the hierarchies of unjustified power, backstabbing, favorites, and pacts), in schools (a system that longer works, but no one questions it), and in social interactions (a self nominated “leader,” and everyone willingly falling into a certain role, keeping their place). Call it dynamics or call it the Matrix, it exists.

When we back away from our own sovereignty in order to belong, so we don’t get attacked, stolen from, shamed, or even worse, abandoned, it keeps our higher selves from acting and being in accordance with our own sense of what we know. It takes courage, fearlessness and readiness to face the opposition. All while not being too attached to it all. As we grow in life, we realize it all changes anyway.

Spiritual Sovereignty is not the same as being stubborn, refusing to be open to other ways of looking at life. It is about being one within self, and being open to explore what we may not know. The next time you are in a situation or have an opinion that gets questioned and you are shaken, ask yourself “why is this rocking my world?” Perhaps have a real conversation as to why the other person sees things the way they do. Listen with empathy, an open heart and a curious mind to perhaps alter your opinion, teach you another way of looking at things, or give you another view that might not ultimately change your mind, but opens you for listening nonetheless.

If not wanting to confront someone, read an article that opposes your current situation or your view. Travel to a culture that is different than your own. Ultimately, if you have the courage, ask yourself  “What if everything I thought all along was right, is actually wrong?” 

Then take a minute to really let that sink in, allow yourself to become humbled and connect to the universe knowing we are here to grow and then recreate the grandest version we’ve ever had of ourselves. We have to first see the whole wide world and then decide. And then we can live as we are, as we grow.

 

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What my blog is about and why I am here. ❤️

This is my blog on my daily life of holistic, spiritual living. I will share routines, insights and lifestyle ideas which keep me grounded, hopeful and sane. Perhaps give a different perspective while attempting to put together the puzzle pieces that have intrigued me for as long as I can remember. 

My goal is to bring together fundamental principles from several spiritual modalities, integrate them, and mix in some crazy life stuff - while trying to make sense of it all. The good, the bad, the ugly. It all means something. All while we exist on a big, beautiful blue ball spinning on its axis, shining brightly in the ink black, never-ending sky. The sun shining a bright spotlight on it all, giving us light so we can see - and the moon safeguarding us, hidden in the background (sometimes out of sight, but always there), keeping us all planted firmly on the ground, whispering in our ears.

I hope you find my posts inspiring and uplifting ✨🙏🏻

 

If you would like to see more, please subscribe to my blog by sending an email to HolisticSpiritualLiving@yahoo.com. 

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