Ti Sana - Italian for "sort me out quick!"

Okay, so I have to confess (and I don't like confessing weaknesses), I’m still feeling rubbish.  Funny thing, loads of people lately have been saying to me, ‘Oh, you need to eat properly – you know, normal food.’ I suppose they mean as opposed to my usual funny diet of fruit, tofu and muesli (and lately not so much of the muesli).  But -  get this – I’ve only been feeling rubbish since I started ‘eating normally’ – ie proper meals (vegetarian still of course).  So maybe my body liked the light diet?  Or maybe I just need to be ill for a bit?  Who knows?

Anyhow…if I can just hang on a bit longer, I’m heading off at the end of the month to Ti Sana Detox Retreat, in Italy. Testing out their raw food detox for Natural Health magazine.  Oh yeah! 

And what do they promise?  ‘Bright eyes, a beaming complexion, a toned physique and a brand new positive outlook’ Bring it on, babes!  Cos, not to put too fine a point on it, I look like forty shades of shit right now. J

Actually I’m more than a little excited about this.  I love Italy (one of my bestest old friends is an Italian contessa) and this place gets great reviews.  Alongside a diet of organic raw foods and juices (with most of the ingredients home-grown), there’s a gym, a sauna, pool and steam plus plenty of exercise classes and I get scrubbed and massaged and generally fiddled around with… Okay, so I’m not quite so wild about the idea of the Angel of Water treatment (fancy Italian for colonics) but hey…I’m going with the flow. Basically I'm going to let them do with me what they will. 

Plus there’s a consultation with the spa doctor and a battery of tests.  And I like tests.  Hey, I even used to like exams.  So, all I gotta do is limp through the next week or so and then, I’m off, off and away…and the nice people at Ti Sana can sort me out. 

Where is it?  Oh yeah.  Forgot to mention it’s in an 18^th century village in Lombardy – the centre’s been created out of an old Italian noble’s house near the River Adda.  Not far from Milan, not that far from Lake Como…

Fancy coming? J

Wellbeing Escapes - a nifty UK company specialising in spa and wellbeing holidays are sorting it all out for me...Take a look at their website and drool...  

Living life with passion

The natural world is full to bursting in August - nothing is held back, nothing is begrudged or stinted.  Maybe we can learn by watching this wholesale giving.  There are times when we need to conserve our physical energy but this isn't one of them.  And it is certainly not a time to hold back emotionally.  In fact if we learn to live life with pure passion and joy we could find life a much more delightful place. 

You know how some people are so passionate, so full of life and the joys of living that they virtually leave you breathless?  Well, why shouldn't we all have that sense of wonder and delight?  It doesn't mean that we have to become different people; just that we try to introduce a little verve and enthusiasm into our daily lives.

People think of passion as something that is inevitably to do with sex. Well yes, it is, but passion itself is much deeper than just sex.  It can touch every corner of our lives.

I learnt a great deal about the power of passion from the absolutely gorgeous American lecturer and workshop leader Denise Linn who is the living embodiment of passion.  A five minute conversation with her is enough to kick-start your whole week.  ‘Passion is about living life to the full; it's about excitement; about making life really worth living,’ she says.   But surely passion is something you simply either have or you don't have?  How can you learn to be passionate?  Denise says that, although as children we are naturally passionate creatures, as we go through our teens and into adult life we gradually learn not to be passionate.   

We are taught that to be an adult is to be calm, in control, rational, considered - even cynical.  The passion is inexorably drawn out of us until we have forgotten what it means to cry at a sunset, to become lost in a painting, to giggle like a child.

Society regards passion as emotion out of control, as an irrational force that, left to run wild, would grind industry to a halt within the day.  In fact quite the opposite is true.  Live your life with passion and you will become more effective in your work, more pleasant to live with and, most importantly, you will enjoy life to the full.

Denise insists that risk and passion go hand in glove. By learning to confront our fears of looking stupid, of making fools of ourselves, we can begin to take risks in life.  Once we believe we can stretch ourselves and do more, we can start to find out what we really want to do with our lives:  instead of living life safely, we will begin living passionately, to the full. 

DENISE’S TEN POINT PLAN FOR RECLAIMING PASSION

1.  Look back and remember what made you passionate as a child.  Tune in to that sense of childhood joy and maybe try reclaiming some of those activities.

2.  Think about what you are passionate about now.  What activities make you really lose yourself?  What causes are you passionate about?  Get involved.

3.  What stops you being passionate?  Work out what beliefs or anxieties prevent you from living with passion.

4.  Take risks.  Even small risks help you to push through your fear boundaries and gain confidence.  Be willing to make mistakes.

5.  Be kind.  Random acts of kindness (leaving a flower on desks at work, feeding a stranger's parking meter if it's run out) have a chain-reaction, making everyone feel good.

6.  Make a commitment to include activities you really enjoy into your life. 

7.  If you hate your job, find something - however small - that you can enjoy in it. 

8.  Imagine you were at the end of your life, looking back.  What would have given you fulfillment that you didn't do?  What would you regret not having done?  Why not do it now?

9.  Maintain passionate relationships by keeping your imagination alive.  Be spontaneous every so often - whisk your partner off for a picnic, buy a surprise present.

10.  Get in touch with your body.  Experiment with movement and music.  Crank up the music and street dance round the kitchen.  Dance is a wonderful means of freeing the straightjacket self.

This is an edited extract from the August chapter of my book The Natural Year – a seasonal guide to holistic health and beauty. Now available in e-format for Kindle and containing a lot of previously unpublished material.  The book is a season by season, month by month guide to living in tune with the natural world. 

"I read (and re-read!) this book many years ago and it inspired me and filled me with great hope. After loaning the book to several friends it eventually found a new home and I hope someone is now enjoying it as much as I did then! The philosophy seems so simple, yet it is so meaningful..." (from Amazon.com review)

I have kept the price low - about £2 from Amazon.co.uk or $3 from Amazon.com - so, if you fancy living more in tune with the seasons of the year, go buy. :-)

Detoxing

Imagine waking up each morning feeling full of energy and vitality yet also feeling calm and relaxed about the day to come.   You know what?  Abundant health and wellbeing should be our natural state. We should wake up ready to launch into each day feeling joy, peace and a deep connection with our bodies. 

Yet it doesn’t happen, does it?  There are a whole host of reasons why we avoid total vibrant wellbeing.  But it’s always good to find something external to blame, huh?  So let’s scapegoat those nasty old toxins.

To be fair, the modern world is a bit of a toxic battleground.  Everywhere we turn we are assaulted by generally man-made toxins:  in the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink.  Allergies and sensitivities are on the increase, many caused by the growing levels of pollution in the environment, chemicals in our homes and additives in our food.  Should we eat organic if we can afford it?  Hell yeah.  Should we think twice about the chemicals we put on our skin, in our mouths, around our houses?  Er, yup.

It is not just our physical bodies which bear the brunt either.  Our minds are overloaded; we feel a rising sense of panic when we try to cope with our increasing work load and the deep stresses and strains of coping in an increasingly complicated world.  When mind and body are assaulted, our souls can easily become “lost” in the battle.  We feel physically unwell, emotionally drained and psychically bereft.

So a whole bunch of us throw up our hands, thinking that since toxins are so prevalent why try to combat them?  Equally others fall into the opposite camp, living a miserable life eating seaweed and permanently purging themselves with enemas!  But there is a middle way. You can have your cake and eat it - you just need to cleanse it out every so often. 

I’ve written two books on detoxing and more features than I care to remember.  I looked into all the research, tried out pretty well all the practices and figured out what was worth doing and what wasn’t.  Recently I’ve updated and expanded my first book on the subject, The Detox Plan and Kim has put it out in Kindle format.

The aim was simple. Provide a straightforward, sensible guide to coping with our toxic world.  I tried to take a realistic look at the toxic threat - with clear advice about how you can reduce your own personal toxic load.

There are two programs detailed in the book.  A full one-month program which can be easily fitted into your everyday life or a weekend “retreat from the world”.   

I’m no angel.  I may have known all the theory but I didn’t always put it into practice.  But, as I explained in earlier blog posts, I was inspired by Marek Stefanowicz and his books to smarten up my act.  I became vegetarian (verging on vegan), gave up alcohol and caffeine, and took up meditation and exercise.  I also started fasting (usually one day a week or fortnight) and juicing.  Net result?  I dropped three dress sizes, toned up and barely ever get colds anymore. 

Now, not everyone is gonna want to go that route.  Which is where this modified version comes in – aka detoxing.  If you do regularly overload your body, a periodic detox (now is the ideal time as the weather gets warmer and we edge into spring) is a boon.  Sorry, but there is no gizmo that will do it for you – it’s a case of cutting out the baddies (just for a while) to give your body a break.  It may be a bit tough to begin with (your body becomes addicted to some stuff – caffeine and sugar in particular).  But honestly, you will feel absolutely amazingly good after a thorough cleanse – so good that you may not even want to go back to your old ways!  But if you do, your choice entirely.  Just give your body a break periodically – at the change of the seasons works well.  I hope the book cuts out all the crap (so to speak) and gives a sensible, easy to follow, plan.  

What it doesn't include are the following: 

Colonics.  Seriously you don’t need to do this. 

Gimmicky foot patches, magnets and other malarkeys – save your money, honestly.

Expensive spa treatments.  A nice adjunct but won’t do the hard work for you.

You can buy the book by clicking here  - I’ve also put up a Pinterest board for a bit of added inspiration. 

The Natural Year...

There were primroses along the banks as the SP and I walked up into the woods this morning. The wild garlic was shooting up and a haze of green was shimmering over the forest floor. Spring is dawning. The earth is waking up again.  It put me in mind of my second book, The Natural Year, which I wrote when I was living on the Somerset Levels.  A very different landscape, flat wetlands punctuated by soft bosomy hills.  Every day I walked with Monty, our boxer, and noticed the tiny shifts in the world around me and felt how they were echoed within – in my body, my mind, my emotions, my ‘soul’. 

Certain times of the year resonated in different ways.  They had a different mood, a different ambiance and it felt to me that it was important to honour that, to shift the way I lived to fit with the cycles of the year.  That there were times to be all outward and gung-ho but equally times to go within, to bring the focus inside.

Yet society goes right against this – demanding that we’re always up, always switched on, always bright.  It completely ignores the natural cycle of life, the wheel of the year. 

So I wrote The Natural Year.  My puny attempt to redress the balance, to suggest ways of bringing more natural rhythms into our lives. 

We have spent the last century or so desperately running away from nature. We have sought to control the natural world, to bend it to our will, to allow ourselves to live free of its dictates. We have ignored the wisdom of the ancient earth-keepers, those who held faith with the Earth.  We have been arrogant and careless. 

And we pay a price. We become sick in body, sick in mind and sick in spirit. 

Anyhow.  I started The Natural Year with spring.  Because, to me, it symbolises new beginnings with the bursting of fresh life, the optimism that comes with lengthening days and increased sunlight. We come out of the mystical soul-time of winter into a season which is unashamedly about the physical.   It’s a great time to start on a new life-plan because you’ll be working with the thrust of the year, moving with the energy of its natural rhythm. 

So, if you want to make changes in your life, now is a great time to get started.

The Natural Year was originally published by Bantam Books but I recently had the rights reverted and now (thanks to Kim Jewell) it’s available for download to Kindle.  I’ve kept the price low – so hopefully it’s within reach of everyone’s pockets.  Check it out here and here. 

It’s a smorgasbord of all the stuff I learned from all the fascinating people I met when I was writing a weekly natural health column for the Daily Mail; plus my own interests and researching.  The idea is that it will take you through the year, offering suggestions and hints and tips. You pick those that resonate and let the rest drift by…it’s not a draconian plan or bullying regime by any manner of means. 

I’ve also created a visual board for it on Pinterest and intend to post up odd bits of information along with lovely images that sum up the shifting seasons.  So do drop by and check it out periodically. 

Let me leave you with some thoughts for spring. 

Key focus: getting into the body, working on your relationship with your physical self. 

Secondary focus: starting to think about your life, about introducing change, if that is what you need.

The main tasks: introducing a healthy diet; starting to exercise; detoxification; tonifying the body; boosting the lymphatic system; increasing flexibility.

Questions to ask yourself: How do I really want to live my life? The rest of my life?  How do I want to treat my body? Am I willing to take responsibility for my health? Am I willing to take responsibility for my mind? 

By the way, if anyone would like to review the book for your blog, drop me a line. 

My love affair with Autumn and, er, my book

I’d forgotten how much I love autumn.  The SP and I took our walk along the river today as even I am not quite feckless enough to wander through the woods when bits of tree are whizzing past my nose.  The wind was wild and crazy and the SP went crazy too, leaping like an impala over the long grass, spooking at things that weren’t there (or at least not visible to the eye) and leaping up at me as if to say, ‘Isn’t this the best fun in the entire world ever?’ I had to agree it wasn't half-bad and, with The Black-Eyed Peas blaring in my ears, we danced our way round the big field.

The hedgerows were stuffed with berries and hips – blackberries, rowanberries, hawthorn, rosehips, big fat sloes – and the scent of wild honeysuckle drifted on the breeze. And it all reminded me that the wondrous Kim Jewell had gone a bit nuclear on me the other day.  See, many many years ago (so many years in fact that, as was kindly pointed out on Facebook, most of the original readers are probably dead!) I wrote a book called The Natural Year, all about living in tune with the seasons.  

Anyhow.  I'd been thinking for quite some time that I really ought to get my old books out there as e-books.  But, to be honest, every time I started looking into how to do it, I felt a bit queasy.  So, I was whinging in an unattractively pathetic way on Twitter about all the things that were stopping me self-publishing, like lack of a cover, not being able to format etc, and Kim said simply, ‘I’ll do it for you.’ 

And she did.  Just like that.  24 hours later The Natural Year was up on Amazon and available for sale. I tell ya, that woman is scarily awesome.  You wouldn’t want to meet her down a dark alley, that’s for sure. 

Anyhow, here it is and here you go.  It seems I have self-pubbed my first ebook (or rather, Kim has).  You can find it here. if you're in the US and here if you're in the UK.  If you're in Germany, you will have to find it for yourself as it seems a direct link is verboten.  And if you're anywhere else you are entirely free to buy it from wheresoever you so desire.  Kim interviewed me for her blog and you can read that here. Incidentally you can also find links there to her own wonderful YA titles (James is a huge fan of the Justice series).

Sooo.  What did I say, way back then in the mists of time, about Autumm?  Let's see....an abridged snippet (love the word snippet). 

Autumn – Season of the Mind

"Autumn shouts ‘wake-up’ to the psyche - it's time to dust yourself off after the languor of summer and take life head on once again.  In spring you started to ask yourself lots of questions about your life, your path and your desires.  Now is the time to get them going, to take action, to shift your external world.  Autumn is the season of the mind but it also concerns our relationship with the environment, with the world outside, the bigger picture. 

Autumn is a perfect time to decide what you want to make of your life; what you want to achieve; where you want to be; how you want to work.  It is the key time for deciding on your life path or making moves towards it.  That may sound frightening, even off-putting, but it needn't be.  Often we automatically find ourselves making changes, shifts, in the autumn.  We may not be totally instinctual beings any more but deep within we are still moved by the rhythms of the year. Our hearts and souls still beat to the ancient drum.  It is no real surprise that schools and colleges use the beginning of autumn as their starting point for the academic year.  What better time to make a fresh intellectual start? 

This is the perfect time to get your life in order.  It's the time to start looking for answers to the questions you posed yourself back in spring.  If you need to shake your life around a bit, this is the time to do it.  Don't feel you have to change for the sake of it - it's more a case that if you have been looking for a change, this is a good time to think about putting things into motion.  As always, if the time doesn't feel right, don't do anything.  I'm certainly not suggesting that everyone should go out and get a new job or a new relationship or move house or emigrate on September 1st!  Simply that if you feel there are changes in your life (however small) you might want to make, the energy at this time of year will help you make those changes.  It's like a car being given a dose of high-octane fuel or a horse being given a feed of oats - you should be feeling frisky and full of energy."

Hellfire, did I really write that???  Shit.  Think I need to read the book.  :-)

Oh, and while I’m here, keep an eye on those rosehips…. A couple of recipes from later in the book...

Wild rose hips abound during the autumn and early days of winter - pick them (best after the second frost but before the birds get a chance to eat them all) and use them as a cold-banishing tonic, jam-packed with vitamin C.  If you have an abundance of rose hips you could make rosehip syrup as did all wisewomen and good housekeepers of old.  If not, try a simple tonic drink.  The famous herbalist Culpeper said that rosehips are ‘grateful to the taste and a considerable restorative, fitly given to the consumptive person, the conserve being proper in all distempers of the breast and in coughs and tickling rheums.  It has a binding effect and helps digestion.’  In all a wonderful free tonic. 

ROSEHIP SYRUP

Crush around 450g of rose hips and put them into a pan containing 900ml of boiling water.  Bring them back to the boil and then turn off the heat and allow them to stand for around twenty minutes.  Strain (preferably through muslin), and then put the fruit which will now be pappy and mashed, into around 300ml of fresh boiling water.  Once again allow to stand for a further twenty minutes and then strain again. 

Mix the two sets of strained juices together and return to the pan.  Boil on a low but steady heat until the juice has reduced down to around 600ml.  It will be syrupy by now.  Allow to cool, sweeten to taste with wild honey and bottle in sterilized bottles as you would with any preserve. 

ROSEHIP TONIC DRINK

Simply chop up two teaspoons of rose hips and add them to around 300ml of boiling water.  Allow to steep for fifteen minutes and then strain and sweeten with honey to taste.  You can make larger quantities and keep in the fridge for up to three days.  It tastes lovely too.