Seasonal Eating: Spring

Comfort food in winter? Duh.

Salads in summer? Of course.

But what about spring?

Seasonal eating is a formalized version of everything you ever learned about eating in the common sense variety - Think Globally, Act Locally, and oh, don't forget that means how you eat as well.

Think about it this way: the foods that result from the seasons you experience as you experience them are foods that THRIVE in the midst of whatever you are experiencing. Seasonal Eating experts argue that hey, if that's the case, wouldn't we derive more life energy by eating what thrives under the same conditions?

Unless you're a farmer, chances are you're not sure exactly what thrives in the springtime. No worries - a simple search online will result in a bevy of websites to bring you up to speed on your local food sources. In general though, focus on tender, leafy vegetables that represent the fresh new growth. The greening that occurs in springtime should be represented by greens on your plate, including Swiss chard, spinach, Romaine lettuce, fresh parsley, and basil. Given the bounty of Spring, check out this awesome chart tfrom the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture to find exactly the foods that will help your body thrive!

Peace For Peace

Happy Birthday to the Peace Sign - this month marks it's 50th year. Hard to believe that such an icon isn't actually some ancient tribal shape adapted to modern sensibilities. After all, from protest signs to fashion design, it's become one of the most recognized shapes in the world.

The creator, London-based graphic designer Gerald Holtom, never made a dime on the shape. Motivated only by the desire to create a symbol to represent nuclear disarmament, he never bothered to copyright it despite it's wild-fire adaptation. Interestingly, the notion was never to "fight for peace", rather just to remind folks not to fight to begin with.

The act of contributing his design ability to his own passion and love of peace spawned an iconographic common-ground not only for his contemporaries, but for all of us who followed. A great example of doing what we do out of passion and love, in his case war tugged at his heart and put his frustration into an action he was capable of. He never asked himself if he was capable of creating an icon for an enduring ideological movement. He simply gave his passion to what he COULD give to.

Rather than feeling "deer in the headlights" about your own form of DOING, Appreciative Inquiry Maven Robyn Stratton- Berkessel shared this as way to get into action, "To be reminded that the seemingly smallest acts of kindness, acknowledgement, appreciation: a smile, a hello, holding the door for someone, telling a child how good she/he is, a wave to the neighbor can have a profound effect and made a big difference. It is the compounding effect we can't anticipate. You never know how far positive kind work or action will travel and for how long. What we can do is make those little acts of kindness a more conscious behavior. The moments will add up to hours and days and months and lifetimes. "

Greening your own actions in this way, you move constantly from contending with life as you know it to being deeply connected to that which without we could simply not BE.

Green Your LIFE - Just say NON!

What can't you live without? Beyond jokes about Ipods or subscriptions to Vanity Fair, let's take a rudimentary look at what truly puts more life in your life? What rejuvenates you? What restores your inner sense of "yes", your joie da vie? Can you think of what those activities might be? If you had to list them right now could you commit them to paper?Because the truth of the matter is, we forget to do them. Sure, mom always told us to take a nap or eat our vegetables, but whether you're one to go on week- long carry-out diets or push the three hour night's sleep habit, most of us have more intimate relationships with the habits that burn us out than the habits that inject life, or SUSTAIN us.

For this reason we created the Sustainability Schedule. We use a little chart when we teach this in workshops, but for the purposes of this newsletter, check out the bullet points below and make your own. The key here is to actually write down the things you can do at each type of interval no matter how crazy your day/week/year/life gets so that even if you can't go to the gym, get the massage, eat right, or spend time with friends 'cause you're on the road, you have a ready set of tools to turn to to keep you in the livin' zone rather that the o-mi-gosh-I-feel-like-I'm-dying zone.

• Daily - okay, so say you've got a packed day with meetings, presentations, lunches, coctails and dinner. All the activities you use to get you through the crunchare out of the question and you've got to shine. What can you integrate into such a day? Parking at the far end of the parking lot? Five conscious breaths between each obligation? More water than coctails? Turning off the crackberry during meetings? Make a list of every peace & well-being enhancing action you can take when nothing you would like to do under more ideal conditions will possibly happen.


• Weekly - The week went pretty well as planned, meaning nothing unfolded the way you wanted it to and next week doesn't look any better. What are you going to do to make sure you refresh/revive & renew? Is it planning on a single solid night at home reading? A walk through the park on the way to work at least once this week? A massage on Sunday night to make sure you can get a good night's sleep? What exactly can you do to make sure you put a little YOU back into your universe on a weekly basis?


• Monthly - for some people the massage is weekly, for some it is monthly. Some folks make sure they take weekend escapes once a month. Still others work in a trip to a museum or a phone date with a far-away old friend. What is a monthly activity that would feed some aspect of you that might otherwise go 'round hungry? Even though "America Runs on Duncan", your soul doesn't.


• Annually - Yoga retreat, 10 day vacation, a trip to a state park, a course to develop new skills or explore new topics. What can you identify that if done annually would help you feel more alive year upon year?

The point here is not to create to do's. By identifying things that can be done in any timeframe, you've got a go-to for the moments when you've mistakenly come to believe that life ails you - as if it ever could. This go- to list reminds you that the only thing that can ail or enliven you are your own choices and actions, and provides a remedy for whatever the situation or timeframe you are dealing with.

So go ahead, take responsibility for your quality of living and green yourself. Remember your own "that which withouts", and the next time you're feeling burnt out just say NON!

We Got Greened on NBC!

It's true that I learned everything I needed to know about green from my hippy parents. Unfortunately, Earth Day '80 was a long time ago, and I haven't applied much of that knowledge very consistently.

Enter the folks from OpenSpace NYC. They invaded our apartment and left me feeling a little greener - inside and out!

On Fox

Whether your company is cool enough to bring us in to help address the impact of stress or not, no worries. We've got you covered and relaxed with some de-stress tips we shared last week with Anna Gilligan: check it out by clicking here!

Self Care Secrets Debut at The Economist

We were speaking at The Economist this week and a question came from one of the employees about what practice I find most helpful as a self-care preventative against stress. Without thinking I said "dry brush and self massage". Silence ensued. Aside from being unintelligible to most people, to a twisted mind acutally sounds slightly tawdry.

Truth be told, this is just one of the many ancient "secrets" emerging in the mainstream. My husband's VERY conservative General Practitioner swears by his neti pot (details below), and even insisted my husband start to use one to keep allergies and colds/flu at bay. Check out three core daily self care practices we've inherited from the ayurvedic folk. Whether you adapt them now or later, there's no doubt they're on the rise!

1. Neti Pot - A neti pot is a little ceramic pot shaped much like a teapot. You fill it with room temperature water and a small portion of iodine free salt. You then tilt the spout into your nostril (yes, bear with me) and turn your head to the side so the saline was can run freely into one nostril and out of the other. Sound gross? Wait until you get through multiple winters cold free. Wait until you get through allergy season without becoming a sneezy, snotty mess. You'll see gross in a whole new way, and after all 'tis the season.

2. Tongue Scraping - (pictured above)No we don't mean the sensation of being licked by a cat. Tongue scraping is performed with a little bendy horseshoe shaped piece of metal that you brace in one hand to scrape bacteria off of your tongue. Why would you want to do that? Because bacteria is the reason for many icky things - colds and other illnesses, plaque, bad breath, gum disease, etc. It takes just a moment and is easily worked into your dental hygiene routine. Besides, once you see what you're scraping off your tongue, you'll be glad you did.

3. Dry Brush/Self Massage - Not just for the lonely among us, this practice is considered mega important among ayurvedic practitioners for stimulating "the body's natural pharmacy", or your lymphatic and immune systems. A dry brush is usually made of natural bristles and fits easily into your hand. Before you shower, you take the brush and sweep it over your entire body, usually from feet up. It shouldn't take more than a minute or two. Then you take a moment to rub organic body oil into your skin. This practice is a 1-2 punch that increases the immune system, softens your skin, improves tactile response and relieves muscular tension.


Whether your company sponsors someone like me to come teach about these things, run, don't walk, to the health food store to stock up on these instruments and make their use a part of your daily routine. When world renowned yogini Shiva Rea taught me these practices, she warned me they are addictive. They are, but in the very best way because they WORK.

The Balance of Doing Good

Welcome to the blog for Balance Integration Corporation. This is where we explore ideas and perspectives about staying whole while navigating the challenges of daily life. So why is there a picture of a dying dog on this column header? Why are you about to read a couple of paragraphs about a Costa Rican artist who captured a street dog, chained him to a wall and forced him to starve as a form of art?

Because “Balance isn’t about hating your job”, to quote my buddy Heather Green of BusinessWeek. She’s right. Leading a balanced life isn’t about achieving a perfect distribution of moments between home and work, self and family, recreational and professional. Living in balance is remembering that you are a full being in everything you do, in all the moments of life – no matter the venue or topic defining any given moment. Living in balance is showing up powerfully in relation to the world around you. If balance is the change we wish to feel and see, far from copping an attitude of not-my-job thinking, we have to step up and make our goodness felt and we need to do it more often.

Because in 2007, Guillermo Vargas Habacuc did exactly the aforementioned act. The story goes as follows: In the ghetto streets of Managua, Nicaragua, Mr. Vargas paid some children the equivalent of a couple cents to catch a dying dog so he could chain the animal to a gallery wall and make “art” out of the animal’s suffering. The artist spelled out in “Eres Lo Que Lees” – translated as you are what you read – in morsels of dog food on the wall of the entry to the installation. Just below, the animal was tied to the wall, denied food and water and left intentionally to die. In one corner of the installation was a pot in which crack cocaine and marijuana smoldered while Nicaragua’s national anthem was played backwards. Gallery patrons walked through the installation watching the dog’s life slip away.

Uproar ensued. As the news of this installation hit the web, waves of blogging fury rippled out first from observers in the art world and then from the animal rights community. Adding fuel to the fire, Vargas was invited as part of a select group of artists to participate in the Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008 – an honorific art exposition. Since then petitions have emerged, verbiage created and made available in multiple languages for people to send to the galleries showing Vargas’ works. In his own defense, Vargas has been quoted as saying, "The important thing for me was the hypocrisy of people: an animal thus becomes the focus of attention when you put in a place where white people go to see art but not when they are on the street dying of hunger.”

The irony of protesting cruel hypocrisy with an act of cruel hypocrisy aside, this is not about analysis of the act. Sure, we could talk about the value of life in distressed economies. We could talk about the legacy of cruelty in post-colonial nations. We could point to the cruelty of dominating nations and power-wielding groups and individuals around the planet and throughout history. We could paralyze ourselves into apathy with the notion that he’s right – after all don’t we all see suffering on our own street corners and often do nothing?

That we instinctively cringe in reading this story, in the view of images from Abu Ghraib or any other cruelty, we feel our relationship with life. That we shudder in the face of suffering, we know our relationship with what is good. That the grace of human kindness rises within us/among us and manifests as our outrage is the act of balance. When we protest and petition, when our outrage drives us to take up an action that aligns us with beauty, it is then that we know our mettle. Our acting upon these inner urges is the coup de grace that brings balance into the world.

Because suffering exists everywhere, make some balance and do something to ease an injustice you see. It might be signing an online petition against the Bienal 2008 honoring of Mr. Vargas (which you can easily find by googling the topic). It might be giving money to Kiva or some other funds distribution arm. It could be taking a piece of fruit or bottle of water along with you in your daily migrations to give to whatever homeless person you meet. Just do something. Do something to remind yourself that you are not powerless in this exciting world of ours. Indeed, recognizing the depths of just how bad our worst can be, we have the opportunity to revive our dedication to good.