photo via trendsters

Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions

Sally is the co-founder and president of the Weston A Price Foundation, and this cookbook is a comfy, organic bible for anyone wanting to live a truly nourished, mostly paleo, sugar-free life. It’s the real deal. The lovely Jo Foster got me my copy and I pore over it regularly.

I love the sub title (“The Cookbook that Challenges Politcally Correct Nutrition and The Diet Dictocrats”. Right on, Sally!), the detailed nutrition tips all the way through and the fermented vegetables, sprouting and “how to make your own yoghurt, whey and kefir” sections. You can buy the book here.

Deepak Chopra’s Perfect Health

The best introduction to Ayervedic healing, hand’s down. I mostly live by the Ayervedic approach – which is to say I eat according to my dosha. This style of living is about healing through food. I’ve written on this here. Chopra weaves the Indian traditions with our western thinking, showing what types need to eat more root vegetables, more oil, less salad, more bitter foods etc. You can buy the book here.

Stephanie Alexander’s Cook’s Companion

This is the cookbook I keep going back to. Why? It orders recipes by the ingredient. Which is the logical way of going about things when you eat according to what’s in season. I buy fennel when I see it in season at the markets. Then I consult this tome to see what I’ll do with it. I believe that’s how we should cook, for ethical, environmental, economical and taste reasons. You can buy the book here.

Nora Gedgaudas’ Primal Body Primal Mind

The nerdy side of me loves this book. It answers all the questions I’ve had re the grain-free, sugar-free way of eating. It’s not draconian, it’s not fad-ish. It’s just the science and a really sensible path through the middle of it all. Be warned, though. It’s dense reading. Go to it with a highlighter and a pad and paper. You can buy the book here.

Nina Planck’s ‘Real Food for Mother and Baby: The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two, and Baby’s First Foods

Andrea Beaman recommended this one to me. I read it in one sitting. Anyone wanting to get pregnant will very much benefit from this read. It makes sense. You can buy the book here.

What about you? What do you swear by for healthful eating?

photo by edina csoboth

So, here are five reads I’ve experienced recently that touched me because the author truly went deep into their search or their fear or their desire to share and connect. And in turn took me to my own version of this place. Not in a bash-over-the-head way. But just through the process. You might like them, too.

1. Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest.

A quirky memoir of an eccentric as she grapples with managing her weirdness and various breakdowns via what is almost an ode to her shrink. It’s a tender, sad and real read. It could be accused of being self-indulgent, in a Prozac Nation way. But it dodges such a call with the bravery and rawness of her writing. It’s unapologetic. And this frees it from contrivance. And freed me to dig down deep with her and to feel the freedom of it all. PS a big part of the book is her battle to recover from one particular ex…who is clearly Colin Farrell. Buy it here.

2. This is Not the Story You Think It Is by Laura Munson.

This book started as a Modern Love column in The New York Times in which Laura details how she sticks by her husband when he announces he’s leaving the marriage. She refuses to buy his story. Not because she’s a martyr or damaged or desperate. Instead it’s because she chooses not to do pain. This means sticking by the man she’s always loved. It’s a fascinating and very pragmatic approach to love and I like it. As real as it comes. I interviewed Laura and you can read about it here. Buy the book here.

3. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tovey.

Another raw memoir of a woman who gets sick and waits out her illness watching a little snail that a friend delivered to her in a flowerpot. She learns from the snail about slowness. Her understanding of the snail’s stillness over the course of 12 months mirrors her acceptance of her illness “standstillness”.If you’ve ever been sick or held back from everything that’s defined you for some reason, I reckon you’ll get this sweet journey. Elisabeth Tova Bailey was struck down with a particularly virulent strain of flu while travelling and it developed into a much more serious illness – something akin to CFS – which left her debilitated for almost twenty years. Beautifully unassuming and in the unassumingness I was delicately taken to my own still acceptance. Buy it here.

4. Lovesong by Alex Miller.

This time fiction. Beautifully written and the treatment is clever – aging writer meets a younger man in Melbourne, who tells his story of love found in Paris. We read the story as it unfolds in the telling by the younger man, but also as the older writer takes the tale on as his project. So we get several takes on what is quite a simple and very believable love story. Of course it has raw and real twists and ugliness and catches. Like all lovesongs. Like all messy, needy, exploratory love. Elegant and full of grace. Buy it here.

5. How it Feels by Brendan Cowell.

I just finished reading this. I can’t say I like the characters.  A bit like The Slap – I HATED all the characters in The Slap. But it’s the ugliness of these people that brings me closer to me. I recognise a lot of the ugliness, not so much in what the characters say and do, but in the way what they say and do is deposited on the page in such eloquent “thought bombs” by Brendan. The story is of a toe-gazing artistic type who leaves The Shire to be more important than the people who stay behind. He fucks up his life, returns and has mirrors held up to his judgement. It’s suburban-familiar in so many ways. I felt grimy reading it. But had to smile. Mostly at my own attempts to escape my own griminess. Friggen well written! Buy it here.

Reading anything good right now that takes you to a raw/ugly/still/mesmerising place?

Illo by Erik Marinovich

I love the number three. It’s a thing (as they say on Twitter, preceded by a “hashtag”). When things come in threes – three knock-backs, three mentions of the same person in a week – I’ve learned to take note. And something always comes of it. There’s nothing particularly woo-woo about this predilection. I’m a wary, hesitant person – it takes three strikes, generally, for me to notice and trust something, and then to act.

This week University of Houston scientist Brene Brown told me she’s a three kind of a kid, too. Of course, I got around to watching Brown on TED.com only after three people mentioned her to me. Her talk on vulnerability has since become one of the most popular TED presentations ever. And so I contacted her to see if I could interview her for this column on Skype. And whattayaknow, she replied immediately to say she was due in Sydney the very day I was also going to be in town.

Woo-woo? Or just weird? Whatever. We met.

Can I just say, I was more excited about meeting Brown than anyone I’ve encountered in my weekly journey for this column. Three hands down. Brown’s spent eight years studying thousands of people to determine how best to live a wholehearted life.

It drills down to this: being vulnerable.

Her work found vulnerability was what all wholehearted people had in common, and that it led to authenticity and connection with others, and also creativity and joy.

To get truly happy is to strip our defenses.

But Brown goes further. She actually lives through the pain of this truth personally. AKA, she has a breakdown. Halfway through her research she realized her life was not wholehearted, that her control-freakish, white-knuckled grip on reality prevented her from being truly vulnerable. So she spent a year getting real and raw and stripped back. Before emerging with her groundbreaking conclusions. It wasn’t pretty, she tells me.

As a fellow control freak I had to know how she did it.  In the final, messy wash-up, how did she let go? On Thursday she shared her techniques with me. “It takes work and practice,” she says. She argues becoming truly authentic and compassionate and connected doesn’t happen magically.

“You have to get deliberate.”

I love this. Deliberate. As in, not flaccidly expecting it to just happen, but, making it happen with focused techniques. Applied with fired-up focus.

This means actively letting go of certainty. Do you stall on decisions by asking everyone else around you their opinion? Hey, me too. And, hey, Brown, too. She deliberately notes when this happens. “It’s a red flag.” It means she’s gripping at certainty. When this happens she stops and deliberately sits in the “not knowing” a bit longer. A gut instinct will then always emerge.

Her green flag is discomfort. When she feels antsy she turns a ring on one of her fingers and reminds herself ,“This is supposed to be uncomfortable…it means something is growing.” Sitting in discomfort also builds strength – a reservoir of resilience – for the truly tough times.

Saying I love you first, doing something with no guarantees, investing in a relationship that might not work, waiting calmly and maturely for your mammogram results….it flexes the wholehearted muscle.

I tried this during the week – being uncomfortable, not running from it, not blocking it with distractions or another handful of corn chips or pithy justifications. My weakness is an inability to be wrong. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m wrong often. But I’ve become really seductive at explaining it away before I can be seen in my wrongness. I got pulled up on something (too personal to mention here, sorry) this week.  It made me squirm a thousand squirms. Admitting guilt also meant letting a bunch of people down and looking a fool for doing so – a double shame-whack. I wanted desperately to bombard the confrontation with bombastic and diversionary reasoning. But I didn’t. I sat in the irkness and eventually said, “I got that so wrong. I’m very sorry.”

Then a lovely thing happened. The other person softened and simply said, “That’s OK. I can see you’re sorry.”

And that’s the point.

Being vulnerable is about going to the exposed, outer limbs of the tree. And being seen.

And then allowing the other person the honour of catching you when you tumble into the uncertainty. Otherwise you’re just hiding in the foliage.

Check out Brene Brown’s blog Ordinary Courage here. As I mentioned in a previous post, interviewing Brene was a column-writing highlight. Her book The Gift of Imperfection shifted me.

How do you get deliberate…do you have a mantra for getting solid and fired up and definite with your intent and your actions?

On Tuesday I got great news. All these years I’ve regarded the crazy array of careers I’ve dabbled in (restaurant reviewer, political speechwriter, TV dollybird, magazine editor and so on with no discernible theme), the disparate topics of interests displayed on my bookshelf (evolutionary biology to typography), and the endless hobbies I engage with, as signs of a weak, unfocused character. I’m a spray gun! A jack of too many trades and master of jack shit! A dilettante!

But Tuesday I was told I’m none of those things.

No, I’m a “scanner”.

New York-based author Barbara Sher, who coined the term, reckons I’m a classic case. A scanner, she tells me, is genetically wired to be fanatically interested in multiple things at once. “You love everything, right!” Well, yes. “But you get bored and go off on tangents! And you think it’s bad that you keep quitting things and moving on!” Yes, yes, I do! “Don’t! Have some fun with it instead!”

At 75, Sher’s written seven bestselling books, including Refuse to Choose! (a comfort manual for scanners), travels year-round on the speakers circuit (and is regarded as the godmother of self-help; the Observer ranked her in their Top Ten Self Help Gurus list in January), reads geography texts and spends spring in Turkey teaching e-commerce to village weavers. She breathes scanner theory.

Until the mid-1950s, scanners ruled the parlors and dinner parties with their erudite contributions on poetry, music, politics and science. From Aristotle to Asimov, generalists were people you wanted in your circle. Sher says the space race changed that. Funding to the liberal arts was cut and specialising (specifically in science and technology) became de rigour, while scanning was seen as irresponsible and somehow flabby.

Sher says scanners have come to doubt themselves terribly. We can’t decide on the one career path, because what if it’s the wrong one. We frantically think we need to focus, become an expert in something, but get bored when we have to do anything twice.

Her antidote?

Do everything and don’t finish any of it.

If you’re a scanner, such an idea has a delightfully twisted appeal, doesn’t it. Sher suggests keeping a “scanner daybook” in which you jot down every idea that excites you. I usually skip bits in self-help books that require taking out pen and paper, but this week I gave her daybook a crack. All the flotsam of potentialities that bounce around my cranium – ideas for radio shows, a herbal tea concept, a poncho product with profits going to a Peruvian village – got a fresh page each. I fleshed each one out, adding layers of revenue leverage and so on. Then I moved on to the next hair-brained project. Scanners are often very frustrated folk – they feel they’ll never get to all their ideas in one lifetime, which stops them from starting any, which in turn leaves them feeling resentful about the endless stream of exciting ideas that bubble in their brains. But this technique legitimizes the idea-forming process. And funnily enough, it was enough. Just fleshing them out satiated me. Who knows, one day I might come back to that charity poncho idea.

“Scanners are often deluded about how indepth their interest goes,” Sher says. Often we just need to play out the idea. Then move on. Or stay in a job right until the moment we stop learning. Then quit. “Scanners learn fast and need to move their passion onwards. A bee doesn’t hover on a flower if it draws the nectar quickly. Its passion isn’t the flower, it’s gathering nectar.”

Of course, we all have to finish stuff we start and hold down jobs. The godmotherly guru advises getting tasks finished by working in short sprints and developing a “scanner bag of tricks”, like taking notes of the banal conversations overheard from your dreary cubicle as you finish your annual report. And she suggests seeking out jobs that require generalist, pick-the-best-bits-and-reconfigure skills – from freelance writing to catalogue compiling. Or creating your own job, like the guy who wrote the ebook 100 Way to Get Rid of Moles and Gophers. He had no interest in moles or gophers, but liked interviewing people, compiling information and solving problems. He interviewed people he saw out watering their lawns, got their tips and put the best 100 in a book. Scanner genius!

In all seriousness, this IS possibly the most reassuring life advice I’ve been given. Do you relate? You a scanner… and do you need to be reassured that it’s OK to flit and not choose and to do it all…? Or do you do it already? (Bloody insightful of you if you do!!)

“The velocity of the ill, however, is like that of the snail,” Emily Dickinson.

If you’ve ever been sick or held back from everything that’s defined you for some reason, I reckon you’ll get this sweet journey. Elisabeth Tova Bailey was struck down with a particularly virulent strain of flu while travelling and it developed into a much more serious illness – something akin to CFS – which left her debilitated for almost twenty years. It was in the worst period that a friend gave her the little woodland snail as a (pretty weird!) gift.

The book opened me up. And it was beautiful to appreciate that some things have an inevitable pace. Meaning can be found in not moving, in being quiet. And that nature can find us and teach us what we need to know.

Happily, I was able to contact Elisabeth, who shared with me some thoughts on her illness. You might find it inspiring, especially if you’re reading this and currently experiencing illness. If you are…I send you my prayers…

Three Tips for Dealing with Illness, by Elisabeth

—When I was bedridden a friend rigged up my window shades so I could pull a cord to all three window shades at once thus opening them myself from bed in the morning, instead of having to wait in the dark for a helper to come.
—If you can’t get outside, terrariums are a great way to bring the outdoors into your home environment and they need very little care, since they rarely, if ever, need watering.
—Set up the space around your daybed with everything that you need right at hand. One friend once commented that my daybed looked like the inside of a rocket ship, as it had everything neatly organized around it.

1) Creatively solve the challenges of living with chronic illness so that you can still participate in the things you used to love to do:

—When I was too weak to sit upright to attend a favorite performance, a friend got permission for me to set up a cot on stage in the wings. So I enjoyed the concert horizontally and with a better-than-front-row-seat.
—When I couldn’t garden anymore there were times when I could still collect seed pods from plants at waist height and scatter seeds in other parts of the garden. I also invited friends who were making new gardens to weed my garden in exchange for taking as many plant divisions as they liked. These methods maintained my gardens for years.
—When I could walk only a short distance before needing to lie down, a friend built long wide benches in my woods. They were long enough that I could lie down completely, so I had resting places mid-walk.

2) Find something new to get excited about that you’ve never done before.

—When I was too weak to sit up and hold a book, I switched over to audio books and have discovered many favorite narrators.
—When I was too weak to sing, I learned I could lie down and do “vocal toning” which is a healing way to use the voice.
—While I couldn’t be out hiking mountains or sailing or kayaking or dancing I could very slowly learn some tai chi

3) Make your home environment as peaceful, beautiful, and nurturing as possible as chronic illness may cause you to spend more time there.

PS Bailey is not the author’s real name. It’s a pen name.  I read in an interview her reasons for taking the nom de plume:

“Due to my illness, I really have to lead a very, very quiet life. I think it’s just a helpful buffer for me in that way.”

Quietness buffers. Yes. They’re a good thing!

Do you have quietness buffer ideas you might like to share with the rest of us?

I’ve recently arrived at the same discovery as above. For the past month or two I’ve been coming home on a Saturday afternoon around 3pm and sitting in my cool loungeroom and reading on the couch.

But. My. God, it’s taken some work to get to this point.

Frankly I find it so hard to rest. I’m a gnarly, primordial beast who finds it hard to reverse my hyper, do-ing ways. But, as you’ve probably gathered, it’s become my priority for 2011. Reading, I’ve discovered, gets me focused on resting. It’s a forum for it. It’s still “doing”, but it’s doing in a very gentle, quiet way. I keep the light low and I make a pot of dandelion root, ginger and licorice tea. And I don’t move (which is key).

I’ve written in the past that I used to watch or hear about people who could “curl up on a couch and read a good book”. Just that phrase sounded alien. And would upset  me.  I’d never done it. Couldn’t fathom it. I thought it all seemed too indulgent. Possibly because as a kid if Mum found us reading she read it as “idle child” and would hand us a load of nappies to hang out. But now I can see the point. I’ve given it a broader purpose – to drag down my energy and rest.

And. My. God, I need rest these days. I bang on about it. I must find ways to DO it.

People like me (and no doubt you, if you’re following me on this blog) often need to trick our go-go-go, hyper-productive minds into seeing seemingly indulgent (non) activities like rest and healing as productive. It’s how we gradually get accustomed to new, gentler ways. We are so damn stubborn, we won’t even try it otherwise.

So, please, if you’re like me, try reading. And see if these work for you:

To be upfront: if you buy the books via that widget I get some affiliate percentage for suggesting it to you. But I thought it might be handy for some…hmmm….

I lived without a car until I was 29. And last year my car was stolen and I took the opportunity to spend 6 months car-free. It was  liberating.  I reduced my circle of influence to a 10km radius (the distance I could ride my bike in comfortably). It limited my choices and steered things to simplicity, implicitly. Creating circumstances that limit our choices are key to living a more streamlined life. I swear!

Anyway, Tammy Strobel of Rowdykittens has put together this ebook with practical tips on how to do it yourself. You can buy it through me direct…and I’ll be upfront, I get 50% via her affiliate program. It’s a lovely set-up. I pass on the good word, and she says thank you. Click here to buy Simply Car-Free for $US9.95