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Food as Medicine: Almonds

Leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food. -Hippocrates



During Jehangir Palkhivala's workshop last month, I mentioned that my foot was cramping in a few of the poses and he suggested I eat 3 almonds, three times a day. I did it and the cramping stopped on the fourth day.

Almonds have protein, vitamins, and minerals such as calcium, potassium, magnesium and phosphorus and my muscles got whatever they needed through a steady, three times a day dosage with no adverse side effects.

I've mentioned this in my yoga classes and decided that this was a great way to get the recipe out. If it works for you, please let me know. At the very least, you'll find a delicious new snack (with a higher nutrient content than the canned nuts). I'm also using a sesame seed recipe for bone building and juicing cilantro for my parents to cleanse and strengthen their arteries. After several weeks, my mom has cut her blood pressure medication in half and my dad's blood sugar level has gone down.

I know, it's not hard science and purely anecdotal evidence at this point, but it's all real food, in small portions. It's certainly given me greater appreciation and respect for unprocessed, unadulterated food: generic goodness!

Sharon Warren, of Warren Botanicals, wrote down Jehangir's recipe as he prescribed it to her and kindly shares it with us:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees
One cup raw organic almonds
Juice of 1/2 lime
Real good salt* (amount is according to your taste)
Mix lime and salt into a light paste and rub almonds well with this mixture.
Spread almond mixture out onto a baking pan
When oven has reached 350 degrees put almonds into the oven and immediately turn oven down to 200 degrees
Roast for 20 minutes
Remove and turn almonds over and return to oven for 5 more minutes
When finished roasting, cool almonds and store in a glass jar
Eat 3 almonds three times a day before each meal to eliminate muscle cramps

If you have any questions or are interested in receiving remedies for other ailments, let me know. It's all in good health.

Photo: University of Toronto
*Such as unrefined sea salt.

Closing the Gap Between Work and Play

What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another.
-Harold Kushner



I've had several conversations in the past few weeks tossing about the subject of a healthy community. (What defines it? How do we encourage its growth?) I had a few paragraphs written here when I came across a link to a passage attributed to Lao-Tzu and I erased my attempt to explain what he says so gracefully:

The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.

That about sums up the reason why I'm re-starting my Prenatal Yoga classes. I remembered why I love teaching that class so much and it's something I can do immediately to help foster a healthy community. It was right there on my mat: my work and my play and the community that has formed around Kona Yoga (that would be you).

I'd like all pregnant women who would like to add yoga to their prenatal health care to be able to attend. A weekend class will hopefully make it easy for those who work or attend school and an open fee structure should make it affordable for all. There's more to come. I expect it.

What about you: is there a distinction between your work and your play?

Photo: Scott Herman

Know, first, who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly. ~Epictetus


This weekend, I had fun gathering photos for a Mother's Day video for my mom. My brothers sent some current pictures and I dragged and dropped photos from old files in storage, resulting in a four and a half minute piece with 69 shots. Set to music, Johnny Mathis singing Because You Loved Me, I thought it would be the perfect way to show and tell her how much she means to all of us.

I have only experienced one mother in my life and have been the mother to only one person and my reflections and sentiments are, well, pure Hallmark material. But I was reminded of the multiple interpretations of mothers and motherhood, in talking to the women in class on Saturday. Our mothers are/were as different as we are.

Later, I happened to see a performance by Sarah Jones, who transforms on stage into eight different female characters with uncanny precision. She utilizes their varied accents, mannerisms and belief systems to underscore a single theme: self-invention. When do we go beyond our cultures and experiences and begin to self-construct?

While watching her amazing acting ability I thought: "That's one woman playing multiple roles while motherhood is one role played by billions of women and therefore, no single performance can ever be duplicated ." It's a vital, critical, often unrehearsed role that's handed to a woman when a child is borne.

As my completed video streamed pictures of my brothers and me, our families and friends, I could see the separateness of my mother and her role. We are blessed because of the person she is, not by the person she's supposed to be.

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Watch Sarah Jones: One Woman, Eight Hilarious Characters. (TED: 21:00)

Photo: Sinful Eyes on Deviant Art

Out of Box Condition

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.-Friedrich Nietzche



"Return your computer to Out of Box condition" was the choice I decided to make last Wednesday after three days of unsuccessful log ons. I faced the choice twice before making the final leap and will spare you the technical drama played out in boot menu, the number of restarts, etc. Near the end, I thought about the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they are at the edge of the cliff with a river below and a posse closing in behind them. Sundance would rather fight than jump because he can't swim:

Butch: "You can't swim?"
Sundance: "I can't swim!"
Butch: "Hell, the fall will kill you!"
Then they jump.

So after a similar internal dialogue, I pressed start and wiped out three years of memory, byte after byte after byte. When it was over, my computer's personality was altered completely and everything that I once expected it to do, it didn't.

The beauty of it all, shines through the inconvenience of having to reload programs to run my printer, back-up my Blackberry, edit and reprint yoga schedules, ad nauseam. The beauty of it all, is that the fall didn't kill us.

My computer works better than it has in months, even before all the virus problems began. I too, had to return to the out of box state in order to communicate with it and I'm enjoying the chance to use different programs and set-ups. It has me thinking about my own memory and operating systems and once again, I find possibilities in yoga:

While memory is indispensable to progress, it can also be an obstacle, or screen, to perception, because it is linked to prejudice, cultural conditioning, and our own desires. According to the tenets of Ayurvedic medicine, memory's wellspring is in the heart. The more one loves, the better one remembers. Thus we say, 'learn by heart'.(1)

Photo: Achieve-Master

Sources:
(1) The Essence of Yoga by Bernard Bouanchaud, Rudra Press, Portland, Oregon.