Lizz is off this week but I miss her and so I can feel the impulse to channel something that is about food and nurturance.
With fall closing in, and with all the natural (and man-made) disasters swirling around the globe, it seems a good time for an anchoring stew, something that might tether me to the present. Therefore, I offer you Brazilian Black Bean Vegetarian Stew, courtesy of Vegetarian Times . Yum!
— Amy
Brazilian Black Bean Stew
6 servings
30 minutes or fewer
Here’s a quick vegetarian version of the Brazilian national dish known as feijoada. This stew entices the eye with the colorful contrast of black beans and sweet potatoes and pleases the palate with nourishing ingredients.
1 Tbs. vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped
2 medium cloves garlic, minced
2 medium sweet potatoes (1 to 1 ¼ lbs.), peeled and diced small (1/4″)
1 large red bell pepper, diced
14.5-oz. can diced tomatoes
1 small hot green chili pepper, or more to taste, minced
1 1/2 water or less (try 1 1/4 next time)
2 16-oz. cans black beans, drained and rinsed
1 ripe mango, pitted, peeled and diced or Frozen OK too
¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro
¼ tsp. salt
Meal plan:
In large pot, heat oil over medium heat. Add onion and cook, stirring often, until softened, about 5 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook, stirring, until onion is golden, about 3 minutes.
Stir in sweet potatoes, bell pepper, tomatoes (with liquid), chili and 1 1/2 cups water. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer until potatoes are tender but still firm, 10 to 15 minutes.
Stir in beans and simmer gently, uncovered, until heated through, about 5 minutes. Stir in mango and cook until heated through, about 1 minute. Stir in cilantro and salt. Serve hot.
Categories
it’s time to pick all the blackberries
Everything feels cluttered lately, as if all the shelves, nooks, closets in my home are swollen with Things. Objects. Items which are symbols for feelings or status or power or appreciation or function. So many of these Things are beautiful, useful; they add value and pleasure to my life. But of course, so many of them don’t.
I tend to be neat, to nest and decorate and sculpt my home, but I also come from a family of collectors. Sometimes I need reminders to really pause with an object and consider if it needs to take up physical space in the my house, and psychic space in my mind’s inventory of What Is Mine.
I keep a give-away box tucked in a corner most of the time. When I find something I just don’t need, I toss it in there. I (like much of the US) devoured The Live-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, illustrating the konmari method, and I go through phases of applying that concept to everything — does following this person on Twitter spark joy? Does looking at this art on my wall spark joy? Does this unconscious habit of mine spark joy?
Right now, I feel a desire to clear, to clean, to declutter. To purge all the cobwebs and really look at what I have. Sometimes I even ponder the question what would I keep, if I only had 100 things? Maybe it’s because we are back-to-school which, as someone who has always oriented to the academic calendar, is the beginning of the year. The witch’s new year comes up at the end of October, and the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, is in just a week or so. The calendar is resetting — how do I want to start anew?
Plus, it’s the harvest. Time to bring in all the fresh tomatoes and make another batch of 67 pints of salsa (like my aunt just did), or pick all the blackberries within reach and freeze two big bags for winter pies and smoothies and compotes (like my boy just did).
It’s time to digest last year and take in what is ripe right now.
For me, that has been a home purge: cleaning off my altar and bringing new symbols down to focus on, peeking in the closets to see what has accumulated there, moving the furniture to get all the cat hair this time. It’s been a digital purge: what are all these things on my desktop? Why is everything in my download folder? It’s been a nutrition purge: beginning a 3-month restriction to reboot my digestion. It’s been an intake purge: I muted the words “white house” and “president” on Twitter, because I’ve just had enough for now.
I’m making room for ready for something new. Readying to push my edges a little bit. Do something daring, maybe even dangerous (with the right kind of training!). Stretch. Manifest one of those tickling desires that is still there in the periphery. Gather the fruit up into my open, outstretched arms, bugs and stems and scratches and juice and all, and take them home.
— Zed
Thanks to Mark Michaels & Patricia Johnson! Follow their work at tantrapm.com
We especially recommend their book Tantra for Erotic Empowerment
Music: Grateful to Little Dog Big Ears for their Creative Commons licensed music She Sees Mice (intro and outro). Make sure to subscribe in iTunes or Sticher! And give us a 5-star review in iTunes, it really helps us out.
Categories
Mindfulness has a downside?
I always cringe, just a little, when I hear someone speak seriously about “mindfulness”.
What they are saying makes sense. It is important to be present in, well, the present—rather than the past, the future, or some story inbetween. But there is often another layer of meaning in their serious talk, often unconscious, that can easily slide down the slippery slope towards narcissism, self-involvement, and a kind of spiritual hoarding.
We tried to talk about this in the “4th Chapter” of the coloring book: the whole point of embodiment is to increase your capacity for connection and resonance with others.
Take a look at this recent Washington Post article by Thomas Joiner and see what you think about where things might go wrong. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
xo,
Amy
Categories
Eat, taste, smell
The summer has been hot and dry and hard and amazing
The eclipse happened and is still happening
Mama earth continues to provide incredible smells, tastes and sights
Our bodies moan, writhe, cry and explode
Sometimes I feel so damn good!!!!
And other times, well….
What’s bringing me so much undeniable pleasure is making things in my kitchen-Pickling, dehydrating, steeping, drying, soaking, …what else?
Here’s a few of my favs right now:
1.Refrigerator “pickles” out of any vegetable growing: Recipes from my
new favorite cookbook: SIX SEASONS: A NEW WAY WITH VEGETABLES
by Joshua McFadden
https://www.joshuamcfadden.com/sixseasons/
2. Cassava tortillas: Grain-free, gluten-free, nut-free.
The Guide to Allergen-free Baking by Cara Reed’s cookbook:
3. Zucchini Chips: Some of us have zucchini growing out our ears.
Here’s something to do with them…
http://glowflowchefs.com/blog/dehydrated-salt-vinegar-zucchini-chips
4. White Peach and Kombucha Ica Cream Float. Holy Yum!
I have not tried this yet but am dying too.
Sending love and yummy mouth pleasures,
Lizz
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Fire season
This is fire season in the Northwest. Heat, smoke, and fire press on the mammals, landscape, and water ways. When I was a Ranger working the forest service, part of my job was to explain the positive benefits and health value of fire in a forest. Clears out the old, opens to the new.
Fire in our belly combusts and changes organic mater into the nutrients that are food for our cells. Emotionally and psychically, the solar plexus burns the inner flame of vitality. When our heat gets turned up, we can take action with ferocity. Or sometimes it can leap up and start burning the heart center. Anxiety, heart burn, and ulcerated tissues are forms of the flame. When the flame burns low, our life force diminishes.
Play with the fire! — it is essential to vitality. Recently my fire has burnt through my gums so strongly that my dentist stated, “This is the worst I have seen your mouth.” In the inquiry about my flame, I ask: where is this heat coming from and what it is doing to my body? Clearing out the old for the new to open? Or just too much heat produced from hormones, toxins, stress? Being aware of my heat is the first part of the inquiry … but many more questions follow.
How is your flame during this fire season?
Burn on …
Alex
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What’s the point of coloring?
“What’s the Point of All This?”
In the last chapter of the Wonder Body coloring book, we tried to articulate why something as seemingly frivolous as coloring might actually be important, critical even, in these challenging political times. With all that has happened this past week, this question seems as important than ever.
Here is what we spoke in the coloring book. See if has resonance for you now.
The body as a tool of connection
The mass of cells, science, and spiritual principles that we call our body is alive. We are complex super generators of sensation, energy, emotion, cognition, and intelligence. Bodies are mechanisms of engagement, the vehicles in which we participate in living. Our alive individual self only exists in connection; living is a process of engagement and exchange, whether we are aware of it or not.
Individuated and interdependent
Resilience—the ability to spring back into shape after impact, loss, and severing—keeps us alive. It is through awareness of interconnection that resilience thrives. Awareness and tuning of your whole body fully primes your engagement with the world. Yes, bodies are amazing resources for pleasure.
This pleasure is important—essential even. And bodies are also hypersensitive tools of connection. Part of the joy of living in a body is not just knowing our own individual experience but also in having the capacity to be in resonance with others, to sense—through our bodies—their pain, love, and hope and how it mirrors our own. Our embodied intelligence and attunement can heal wounds.
By coloring these pages you have fine-tuned your awareness, including the awareness of your body and the priming of its capacity. Treat it like the gift that it is and share it, ensuring this magical potency continues to grow.
We encourage you to feel into the web of connections. Be generous with yourself and others. Be a place of refuge of safety and compassion because…
…you’ve got superpowers now!
xo,
— Alex & Amy
Categories
light yourself on fire
“Success is not a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.”
— Arnold H. Glasgow
How do I light a fire under me? How do I get back to the fifteen projects on my to-do list that I started a year (three years) ago and haven’t gotten back to? Or do I let them go, cut them, decide they are as done as they are ever going to be?
It’s hot here. August can be brutal. I’m in tank tops most days, forgetting to put on some sort of bra. It feels exposing. Sloppy. Unheld. All of the fire dials are up to red, all of the parks say “no smoking!,” the Berkeley hills caught on fire a few days ago and spread for acres. The dried out golden grass catches easily.
But I don’t catch easily. Sometimes I wither. Sometimes I’m that obnoxious green that is so dense it’s almost impossible to break it or rip it.
I keep waiting for someone else to set the fire. For deadlines, for some sort of external motivation that will ‘make me’ do this work. But it’s not going to just happen. It’s not flowing in the morphic fields waiting for me to step into it. It’s me — I have to do it. I have to set myself on fire.
— Zed
Show notes:
Pleasure Lab Episode 3 of season 3 includes an interview between Betty Martin and Zed Meade.
Betty Martin’s work can be found at BettyMartin.org, along with lots of information about the Wheel of Consent.
Books and inspiration mentioned in this episode are:
Full Spectrum Sex by Isa Magdalena, and more of her work on isa-magdalena.com
Science for Sexual Happiness: A Guide to Reclaiming Erotic Pleasure by Caffyn Jesse
Sexual Intelligence: What We Really Want From Sex and How To Get It by Marty Kline
Our lovely intro and outro is “She Sees Mice” by Little Dog Big Ears, borrowed under a Creative Commons licensed music
Categories
A combustion of words
A poem, an offering
This delightful poem speaks of combustion, our planetary theme for August.
Enjoy!
—Amy
Combustion
Sara Eliza Johnson
If a human body has two-hundred-and-six bones
and thirty trillion cells, and each cell
has one hundred trillion atoms, if the spine
has thirty-three vertebrae—
if each atom
has a shadow—then the lilacs across the yard
are nebulae beginning to star.
If the fruit flies that settle on the orange
on the table rise
like the photons
from a bomb fire miles away,
my thoughts at the moment of explosion
are nails suspended
in a jar of honey.
I peel the orange
for you, spread the honey on your toast.
When our skin touches
our atoms touch, their shadows
merging into a shadow galaxy.
And if echoes are shadows
of sounds, if each hexagonal cell in the body
is a dark pool of jelly,
if within each cell
drones another cell—
The moment the bomb explodes
the man’s spine bends like its shadow
across the road.
The moment he loses his hearing
I think you are calling me
from across the house
because my ears start to ring.
From the kitchen window
I see the lilacs crackling like static
as if erasing, teleporting,
thousands of bees rising from the blossoms:
tiny flames in the sun.
I lick the knife
and the honey pierces my tongue:
a nail made of light.
My body is wrapped in honey. When I step outside
I become fire.