Category: alternative lifestyle (Page 1 of 6)

Lunch lessons

As I double checked the children’s self-packed lunches, I confirmed they had indeed packed vegetables because the bowl seemed pretty full. The girls sheepishly opened theirs back up to add in carrots and tiny bell peppers. Then one of them said, “but mom, other kids make fun of my lunch.”

Sigh.

I knew it would happen. I didn’t get pushy about them packing the hummus they love because I knew it could create a bullseye for teasing. (Let’s be honest about the appearance of hummus.) Our quinoa salads don’t make the cut, and they rarely take vegetable soup as I believed they would as I purchased the thermoses. Our lunches are not exotic.

But they’re also not Doritos, a Moon Pie, a chocolate chip granola bar, and a piece of candy, like the girl sitting next to the eldest daughter. (Can I tell you how handy it is to have one parent who makes appearances in the lunch room? Bird’s eye view of their reality, right there. SO helpful.)

Here’s my conundrum: How do I talk to my kids about the importance of healthy eating without using mechanisms that essentially shame and put fear into those who don’t, especially when it’s not necessarily the child’s fault? 

I can tell my kids about the huge rates of childhood obesity and those indicators for later disease in life. But do I want my kids to go to school and say, “well, you’ll get fat and loose a foot and die” to their friends? That would be an emphatic no to that rhetorical question. Allow me to create a laundry list of reasons why:

  1. I don’t want my kids or other kids scared of food, even tasty treats that don’t serve much of a nutritional purpose.
  2. We have enough eating-based patterns of disordered behavior in the world.
  3. Kids don’t need yet another reason why they’re not good enough.
  4. Much of this has to do with parents.
  5. I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt and assume that these parents are doing the best they know how, with the information provided, and the time and resources available to them.
  6. Perhaps other families make decisions based on rubrics unlike our own, and that is fine, too.

So, now how to deal with our situation. I confirmed to my kids, yet again, that mommy shops and prepares food the way she does only out of love, and not because she’s trying to make their life miserable. They know that, but sometimes it needs restated. That was the easy part.

The challenge lies in helping them understand immediate gratification and looking at life through the lens of the long haul, which is hard for adults and seemingly impossible for children. My youngest still only thinks in terms of “yesterday” as the past and “tomorrow” as the future. Their understanding of time is small and slow, so the idea that he will benefit as a 40-year-old man has very little impact on the 9-year-old boy.

I’ve embraced the question, do you want your gratification to be cheap, fast, or good? We can pick two at the most. My children will almost always pick fast. I will almost always pick good. Our society has created freeways toward the cheap and fast, making it an upstream swim toward goodness. And while I maintain there’s a place for cheap and fast, because I’ll lean on those as well, I will riot against the fact that it has become the default setting.

When other people choose cheap and fast, I understand. My life probably looks nothing like theirs. So how do we talk about these kinds of things – what we eat, how we dress, which activities we choose to participate in – without shame?  I want to create space for children to make decisions about their lives that includes the answer “because it’s good.” It’s not cheap, it’s not fast (which can mean that I might not see its effects right away), but it is good.

I don’t want to shame people for making decisions that we don’t. But how do we help our kids grow into people who understand the long view that opting for goodness tends to take?

A Good Winter’s Sleep

Because the winter’s temperatures rose above 2° around here – nay, they rose to the 50s! – I resumed the morning walk habit for two days in a row. Yesterday the spring-like conditions drew my attention to the melting snow and wet grounds. Thankfully the earth is equipped with the capillaries to direct the water where it needs to go, even as a few deeper ditches kept hold of their dirty piles of ice and snow.

I find it fascinating that the earth – at least here in Ohio – comes equipped with this season where it hardens up and lets everything remain on top. It doesn’t let stuff sink in during the winter. It just sits under blankets of snow, doing nothing, creating nothing, though a wealth of energy still circulates through its inner body. This freezing, though appears as idleness, serves an essential role to the entire seasonal process.

When I was younger, my grandpa Bud – one of those farm men who knew how to do about anything (except drive a zero-turn lawnmower, but that’s another story) decided to grow an apricot tree from the pit of another apricot. He showed me the process: he took the seed, wrapped it in a wet paper towel, and stuck it in the freezer. He explained that the pit needed the coldness to learn how to break open and begin to grow.

We haven’t done a good job of taking cues from the earth and the apricot tree. We don’t make a season of being covered in blankets, allowing ourselves the sense of rest and dormancy that the natural world undertakes. Our culture of Go! Do! Accomplish! Win! beckons us to hurry out the door for another long day of achievement. Our internal systems have no opportunity to find dormiens,  dormancy.

The body heals itself during sleep. When we’re not spending extra time on the couch or in bed, we’re generally out and about with other people, spreading germs, and wearing down our physical selves. Thus, H1N1 outbreaks. Even our holidays, days added to the calendar so that people could be free to cease from the strain of work, add so much activity to our lives that we require a recuperation from our celebrations.

We’re taught that idleness is of the devil, that doing nothing is a recipe for a failed life. While I agree that a life of meaning includes work, I think we missed the design for effective work. Processes exist to allow a cycle of production, not a never-ending output. My friend (the notorious KLR) owns chickens which lay eggs based on the cycles of light. Because my fridge took a winter’s hit, I told her I would buy them a nice warm light, but the chicken doesn’t benefit from endless egg-laying.

Our bodies, our minds, our very selves, are designed for a period of dormancy. Quietness. Days of being covered in blankets without the need to absorb and create and produce. It’s in this long winter’s nap that our internal energy recharges so we can greet spring with a new life and begin the creation process anew.

So here’s what I’m advocating for, in our house, during this next round of winter weather: Blankets. Books. Naps. Movies. Popcorn. Minimal-effort baking. Gentle movement. Warm beverages. More books and blankets. Fuzzy slippers. Mindless tasks, like crochet or knitting or coloring. Board and card games. We’ll emphasize less what we can accomplish – unless it’s finishing the current novel – and more how we can simply be.

And if you need a permission slip to do nothing today and tomorrow (pending your speaking engagements and classes are also cancelled), here you go. It’s your Hall Pass to stop being productive. Now, go cozy up with a steaming mug of coffee.

 

The Healing Power of [Insert Modality or Company Here]

In my world of virtual (and real) friends, I have some who proclaim the wonders of essential oils. I have those who found healing in particular pro-biotics. There are a few who turn to herbs and even more that have changed lifestyles around ways of eating and experienced transformation. I’ve used all of these things in a season of my life – or even all of them in a given day – and have nothing negative to say about them. Use all of the things, I say.

I’m starting to wonder if effectiveness is not only in the science (and I do think there’s evidence to support any of them). I think the particular gift of any life-changing supplement lies in the gift of returning one’s personal power. We get to play a role in deciding the direction for our lives.

Listen to the stories of the believers (even my own testimonials) and you hear the undertones: “I had tried everything.” “I spent millions of dollars visiting all of the doctors.” “I couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning, but now I have the energy of a thousand racehorses.” Finally, something worked, and that magic sparked a belief in a new power at their fingertips.

I’ll maintain that it is partially about the product. These are not placebos. But if you’re wondering why your FB friends won’t just get over the magical snake oils already, the reason is partially their regained health and a whole lot of they reasserted their own power to decide. They’re no longer victims to this fallen, eczema-induced world, but co-conspirators to its transformation. I’ve noticed that the most financially successful products are the ones that remind people they can also earn a living while helping sound the bell for other people to regain their freedom. (This isn’t a bad thing. The world needs more free people.)

We feel powerlessness in our bodies. Illnesses that won’t go away. Babies that won’t stop crying or start sleeping (God, save us all). We feel hostage to our thoughts that won’t subside and havoc-wrecking habits. When you feel rotten, the powerlessness is nearly as overwhelming as the expressing symptoms. (Ahem, grief. I’m looking at you, October.)  Modalities that say, “hey, you have a choice” have the the double-positive effect of not just easing symptoms but reminding us of our voice. We’re no longer dependent on someone else to give us what we need*.

As the body, so the soul. 

What if our issues aren’t just skin deep? Maybe it’s actually reversed. Perhaps we feel so powerless in our life that it begins seeping out of our skin. Treatments, products, even yoga practices – they help our illnesses and they restore the soul because, Oh yeah!That’s right, I’m not a puppet in someone else’s play.

This, my friends, is the power of faith. I wonder if this might be what is behind Jesus’ repeated words, “Your faith has healed you.” I have to wonder about his tone of voice. Did he say it with an air of “do you see what you just did there?”

Like my oils and herbs, I’m not about to erase the power of God in these healing stories. Yet, I’ve been reading the gospels with this lens,  and I have to pause. When looking at people living in political- and religious-induced victim situations, Jesus gives them courage to assert their power, without demanding  they necessarily upend the entire structure of society. I hear his words in his most famous sermon telling people that when someone punches them in the face, they have the power to turn the other cheek, and with it challenge the character of the man who strikes him. When forced by political oppressors to carry the luggage, they have the volition to keep going, which would bring about reprimand for the soldier who issued the mandate.

There’s something about Jesus and the way he reminds people of their worth and their own intrinsic, given-by-the-act-of-being-born power. He seems to tell them Your response is your birthright. No one can take that away.

We don’t get to choose many of our circumstances. We don’t get to choose other people’s behavior. Certain institutional structures seem to be out of reach. But we do have our response. Even choosing not to respond is a choice we get to make.

And if you really want to exert your power, love anyways.

 

 

*Unless we become dependent on a product or practice. Then we mistakenly hand over our power again. Don’t do that.

« Older posts

© 2024 Michele Minehart

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑