Today I simply share this. A poem by Oriah. I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of love I seek in my life. And then someone recited this to me.

I found it interesting to read the poem as a message to myself, rather than as something I impose on to an “other”. It’s always better to do this when you stumble across something that strikes a chord….

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.

As regular readers of this blog probably know, I recently decamped from Sydney to the Byron Bay hinterland. It was a temporary thing. An experiment. To see how it felt. In the interim I lived out of a suitcase and left my stuff in Sydney.

But this week I’m actually moving my stuff up north.

My health still ain’t great. And up there/here it’s easier for me to be well. I get my food from farmers nearby – unprocessed, chemical-free – , I can sink myself each day in the ocean, it’s quiet, things are simple. I’m pulled less. I push less.

I like myself more. I unfurl.

And then I head to the city each fortnight or so for work and it’s great and it’s busy and I see my wonderful friends (and have sleepovers) and I burn myself out a little because that’s what I do. And then back to the quiet.

I’m not sure why I’m explaining things like this…but I know a few of you have been curious….

So. The move is going to entail:

Another week, another “study” that shows we’re meant to be eating this instead of that. Yeah, I tire of them. But I found this one on the best and worst foods for healthy weight quite interesting.

It found yoghurt was the best food to eat to lose weight.

Below I’ve outlined the gist of the study, and then shared my favourite ways to eat yoghurt.

via pinterest.com

The study was based on three trials over 20 years. It found

• The quality of food matters more than calorie count!!! So eating organic makes you lose weight.
• The top five most fattening foods were sugar-sweetened beverages, red meat and processed red meat, each associated with half a kilo of weight gain every four years.
• The most fattening food of them all?

I haven’t done a AI post for a while (and if you’re new to this blog you might want to catch up on some previous posts here). Which is not to say that I’m traveling swimmingly with my particular version of the disease. Nope, it’s up and down.

via pinterest.com

I’m still learning what flares things up. To be honest the biggest, lingering issue is inflammation. Which is no surprise. AI is all about inflammation. Healing AI, as well as treating it, is about reducing inflammation. Reducing flare-ups. And then de-exciting them smartly when they do happen. Which they will. I find this management process so frustrating. I flare up – which is to say I get inflammed – 2-3 days every week. It drives me mental.

my right side goes puffy, and my face and both feet. You’ll see photos of me where one day I look one size, the next a good size or two bigger. I can’t wear shoes.

my lips burn (the other day they swelled so much they split) and strangely, the skin of my stomach does, too.

I get brain fog. And can’t face talking to people.

I get super sensitive – to noise, light, EMFs, smells. I can’t cope with perfume or the smell of detergent. Even thoughts hurt.

and my digestion stops. In it’s tracks.

Below I’ll update with what I’m doing now to reduce the swell. (And remember: if you don’t have AI, the info on inflammation is key to good health in everyone!!!) I also thought it would be good to share this article by Dr Mark Hyman on ways to treat inflammation. It’s a good backgrounder on the inflam/AI link:

• Inflammation is connected to almost every known chronic disease: from heart disease to cancer, diabetes to obesity, autism to dementia and even depression…as well as AI.
• Autoimmune diseases now affect 24 million people and includes rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, thyroid disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and more.
• Autoimmunity occurs when your immune system gets confused and your own tissues get caught in friendly cross-fire. Your body is fighting something — an infection, a toxin, an allergen, a food or the stress response — and somehow it redirects its hostile attack on your joints, your brain, your thyroid, your gut, your skin or sometimes your whole body.

This week in Sunday Life I’m strategically incompetent

by Kyle Alexander

Confession: I get off on productivity porn.

I’m only a recreational voyeur, mind.  Late at night, in the lonely privacy of my bedroom, I like to peruse sites like 43Folders and Getting Things Done (GTD) e-courses, you know, to see how other people “File Tax Receipts in 5 Easy Steps” or “Focus like Steve Jobs, Now!”. But, I’m not a full subscriber. I mean, I’m no productivity pervert. Some of that Extreme Colour-Coding Your To-Do List stuff can get pretty gonzo!

Anyway, as a “productivity connoisseur”, I’ve noticed the biggest issue in this murky neck of the interweb right now is “waiting for” items. If you’re a productive list-making type you’ll know the list system comes unstuck once a task requires follow-up from a second party. For example, to get your report completed you need a statistic from a colleague. You email them requesting the data and delete this task off your to-do list. Done! Because you trust the item is now headed for the other person’s to-do list. BUT – oh dear – if said colleague isn’t a list person and doesn’t follow up, then the task disappears into the unproductive ether, un-accounted for Un-ticked!

“Waiting for” items drive me to distraction. They leave me in a permanent state of “there’s something I’ve forgotten”-ness. Only to interrupt me in the middle of a shower (and I have to bolt out, dripping wet, to my to-do list: “chase bloody Roger about that invoicing issue”). It’s frustrating. Doubly so because the fact the other party feels completely entitled to let a task slip so easily, while we remain vigilant, is …unfair.

So this week I set out to find a salve to such a quandary. I scrolled my favourite sites and found two ways out.

I’ve been thinking about this all week since seeing the Happy! movie (it’s screening over the weekend in Melbourne at five locations…definitely catch it if you can). You see, in the film, there’s this Danish guy who used to be rich and fancy and he volunteers at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying (which is just such a blunt name for a place…no softening the blow!). He stays 17 years.

Every day he feeds dying, infected men. Just keeps them comfortable until they die. Every day. You can tell he used to be fancy. But you can tell he’s also, now, inordinately happy. His face radiates a settled, sorted, determined joy.

Anyway, at the end he says something like this:

“This life we’re given, it’s a loan…we’re given if for 80 years as a loan. How good is it to be able to pay it back…with interest?!”

Every bit of myself agrees with this. We’re not handed anything permanent. We step into our lives briefly, ride it, then leave. You can choose to take this as a free ride – use and abuse and dump at the end. Or you can choose to see a purpose. I think we all seek a purpose. Every happiness study says this is key. The key. We need to know why we’re here, we need a framework so that we know how far we can spread ourselves out.

And this week I’ve been thinking it could just be to pay back the generous loan…with interest.

I’m starting to look around for some volunteer work…see what pops up naturally…not forced…any ideas? Help me out here…What are some of you doing to pay back some interest which also brings you joy?

I need to share this story. So. Three people over the past three months – one of my best mates Rosie, my new friend Kazzie, and Maria from Brainpickings – alerted me to scientist and “shame” expert Brene Brown.

By Mati McDonough (via Brene)

You might recall my “three signs and I act” theory?

So. I read her book The Gifts of Imperfection. And saw her on TED.com (see below). Was stupendously inspired. And then contacted her to see if we could do a Skype interview down the track for my Sunday Life column…about shame and some other wonderfully rich ideas she has studied on wholeheartedness.

And whattayaknow…!? She’s in Australia, in Sydney THE EXACT SAME WEEK that I’m going to be back in Sydney. I love it. It’s perfect. It just is.

I know I come across as open. Few defenses. Willing to discuss my bowel habits and my sadness with tens of thousands of strangers. But I’ve had to realise lately that this brazen openness is actually a defense. A boring one. For me, anyway.

by Sarah Hermans

Do you tend to point out your faults loudly when you’re nervous? Because you figure it’s better to get in first, before someone points them out for you? Yeah. Me too. Openess can be like that. It works like this: Before you challenge me on my boundaries, before you hold a mirror up to my intimacy issues, how about I barrage you with my brazeness, then you won’t have a leg to stand on!

Well, this approach has kind of got stale lately. It’s not serving me too well. When I do it now I cringe.

As it happens I read on DailyOm last week a little metaphor about trees shedding their bark. It’s fitting:

Trees grow wider with each passing year. As they do, they shed the bark that served to protect them but now is no longer big enough to contain them. In the same way, we create boundaries and develop defenses to protect ourselves and then, at a certain point, we outgrow them. If we don’t allow ourselves to shed our protective layer, we can’t expand to our full potential.

This is a quick post, just to alert you to a resource for buying fish because I think many of us feel in the dark as to which are best to buy and why.

via pinterest.com

The Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) have developed the first online sustainability guide for seafood consumers in Australia. It was developed in response to growing public concern about overfishing and its impact on our oceans and their wildlife, and is designed to help you make informed seafood choices and play a part in swelling the tide for sustainable seafood in Australia.

The guide lists fish according to ‘better’ option, ‘think twice’, or ‘no’- which basically means don’t eat it if you have a conscience.

According to the sustainability guide, some of the well-known ‘better’ options include

• sardines,
• whiting,

I think I mentioned, I chaired the Happiness & It’s Causes Conference in Brisbane on Friday. I know a few of you were there. It really was very special…Big minds, big hearts, grappling with all the stuff that counts. Lots of stuff on using our minds for good, chimps and peace (ergo the cute-as pic below).

There were a few highlights…things that got me thinking.

On creativity…

Matthieu Ricard (the man known as The Happiest Man in The World) sat with me in the Green Room, leant over and said, “I find this idea of ‘creativity’ weird”. How so? “There’s no Tibetan word for creativity…it’s a peculiar Western obsession.” He didn’t say too much more on this. Basically, he was saying that it’s odd that we separate creativity from the act of giving. I guess it is funny that we have this need to…to think we must delineate our creations, rather than just offer them.