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I hope your holidays are feeling warm and festive despite fewer get-togethers this year. We made a 100% plant-based Thanksgiving and my son, the non-vegan, could not tell the difference in the recipes...except for the deviled potatoes instead of deviled eggs. Ha! He still ate about eight of those smoky little devils. Seems like they passed the test. I wanted to share with you what I am up to this week.

Eating

I am making a conscious decision to add more ground flaxseed into my diet. Flaxseeds are a part of Dr. Micheal Greger’s Daily Dozen which are the foods that we should be eating every day for good health. Studies show that adding one tablespoon of ground flaxseeds to your diet each day can improve digestive health, relieve constipation, lower LDL cholesterol, reduce hypertension, and aid weight loss. My plan is to add one tablespoon of ground flaxseeds to WHATEVER I eat for breakfast whether it is breakfast cereal, oatmeal, upma (more on that later), nut butter...

My husband was listening to a podcast recently in which an older man was speaking to a group of high school kids. He was telling them that he and his wife worked hard all of their lives and did a good job of accumulating wealth. However, they lost most of it due to health care costs as they aged. He shared with them that some of this could have been avoided. The kids wondered how. And he responded, “By staying healthy.” But how could they have done that? He said that he now knew if they had focused on eating inexpensive foods like fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, they could have avoided many of the lifestyle diseases that they now had to endure. 

Most younger people want to stay healthy because of beauty goals or energy needs. However, many may not consider how their accumulated lifestyle choices will affect their health and pocketbooks in the future. 

In addition to eating a simple, plant-based diet, practicing yoga also supports...

In the Bible, Jesus says, "Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled." (Luke 6:21) In The Yoga of Jesus, the yoga master Paramahansa Yogananda elucidates this passage saying "Blessed are you who thirst for wisdom and who esteem virtue and righteousness as the real food to appease your inner hunger, for you shall have that lasting happiness brought only by adhering to divine ideals - unparalleled satisfaction of heart and soul." 

What does it mean to thirst for wisdom? Wikipedia says, “Wisdom is associated with attributes such as unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowledge, self-transcendence and non-attachment, and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.” These are tall orders to be thirsting for! 

We are all thirsting for and hungry for something. Everyone has deep seated hunger and feelings of emptiness and lack. We try to fill this hunger by satisfying our desires and sense pleasures. We eat and drink,...

My entry point into yoga came in 1996 when I was teaching English in Beijing, China. I was teaching Chinese graduate students at a medical school. In general, the students were amazing, hardworking, humble, brilliant, funny, and pure.

In my spare time, I was looking for “something.” I studied Tai Chi with a teacher at five in the morning, I took buses for hours to study Chinese medical massage, and I read many, many self-help books. To aid my inner quest, I had almost no distractions. When I turned on the TV in my flat, all I saw was Chinese news or dramas in Mandarin (which I did not understand); it was the time before the internet and cell phones. I was open to new information and experiences to come into my life. 

My first yoga teacher was my friend Barrie Risman. Barrie was also teaching English in China. She made a cassette recording of her yoga teaching for me, and I moved my body into yoga postures for the first time in my life, by myself, in my...

The following is a letter written to a friend about a type two diabetes diagnosis based on my courses in plant-based nutrition. 

Dear Kathryn ,

After our last phone call about your diagnosis, I began to do some research into Type 2 Diabetes. It seems that the rate of Type 2 Diabetes has tripled in the last thirty years, and there are links between obesity and diabetes. Namely, people who are overweight are seven times more likely to get diabetes. Dean Ornish, M.D. and Caldwell Esselstyn, M.D. have both demonstrated in published studies that people who switch to a whole foods plant-based diet lose (and keep off) on average about 20 lbs. There is also evidence that a plant-based diet may help heal or sometimes cure Type 2 Diabetes. For the last 80 years, observational research has shown that a low fat, high complex carbohydrate diet, such as diets eaten in Japan, produced less diabetic deaths and lower rates of diabetes. Some research has shown examples of people getting off of...

About twenty years ago, my architect brother shared with me a legend from the Japanese tradition that was meaningful to him. This story made a big impact on me as well, and I have shared it many times over. This is the story:

“A long time ago In Japan, there was a seeker who went to an
enlightened master. The master told him to build a house. He worked
really hard, and it took him a long time. Finally, it was finished.

Shockingly, after looking at the house from top to bottom, the master told him to tear the house down. The seeker was crushed and confused, but he grudgingly tore it down. After a few days, the master told him to build the house again.

The seeker rolled up his sleeves and put his whole heart and mind into it. The thatched roof curved gently up to the heavens.  The interior was made of fine wood, bamboo, silk, and rice straw mats. He knew that he master would be most pleased.

The master came to see this new house, nodded to himself as if he was in a...

In yoga philosophy, all matter including food is organized into three Gunas:

• sattvic - promoting goodness
• rajasic - promoting passion
• tamasic - promoting darkness

A yogic diet consists of sattvic [pure] foods that calm the mind and sharpen the intellect. These are pure, wholesome, and naturally delicious, without preservatives or artificial flavorings. They include fresh and dried fruits and berries, pure fruit juices, raw or lightly cooked vegetables, salads, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, whole-grain breads, honey, fresh herbs, and herbal teas. In the book Yoga, Mind and Body it says, "A sattvic diet is easily digested and supplies maximum energy, increasing vitality, strength, and endurance. It will help eliminate fatigue, even for those who undertake strenuous and difficult work. Yogis believe that people’s food preferences reflect their level of mental purity and that these preferences alter as they...