I'm Sorry

I hate to do this, but I'm going on hiatus again. Real life is interfering, and right now I don't feel I'm in any sort of position to be giving any kind of advice on anything. I do hope to be back soon, but I can't make any guarantees on when that might be. Again, I apologize.

Take care.
- Sarah

Feel-Good Friday!

Happy Friday! May I recommend some cleaning?

Seriously! Give your place a good deep-cleaning if you haven't done so lately. We've already established that it'll make you and your home happy and if the weather where you are has started in on the late-fall grossness then it might be rather nice to just stay in and make things shiny. Get yourself a nice hot beverage to sip while you work. Put some booze in it if that's your thing! Spend part of a day this weekend making everything look awesome and then spend the rest of your weekend enjoying the awesomeness. We can compare notes on Monday!

I'll see you then.
-Sarah

Keep Some Heat On It

It has gotten a bit cold where I live, which I love/hate. Love because I'm a big fan of sweaters and scarves and big stompy boots, hate because I'm really cold-sensitive and live in a drafty apartment (there are always tradeoffs in old buildings with big windows). But as anyone who has ever taken a yoga class can tell you, there's a really easy to retain a fair amount of heat!

Hold your hand up in front of your open mouth and exhale. Feel the warmth that comes with your breath? Every time you mouth-breathe, in addition to being rather aesthetically displeasing you're also releasing some body heat and all you have to do to keep it in is just close your mouth. In through your nose, out through your nose. You don't even have to get fancy with the oceanic yoga breathing, although of course you can if you want to (I'll never discourage anyone from getting fancy). If you're feeling a chill, just spend some time intentionally breathing just through your nose and see how you feel.

The one wrinkle is, this is also a time of year when many of us have trouble using our noses for much of anything beyond goo-production and unfortunately I don't have anything new to offer by way of helpful suggestions. But definitely try a humidifier, or anything with eucalyptus in it, or spending some time with your face over a bowl of steaming-hot water (which feels awesome in and of itself, really. Put a towel over your head to really trap the steam. Maybe throw some eucalyptus in there!). I know a few people who swear by their neti pots, but I've never used one myself so I feel unqualified to comment there. Based on what I know about them, though, they're probably not a bad bet as long as you make sure you keep them clean. And of course a good decongestant can be worth its weight in gold, although in my experience it can be a bit of a project finding one that works for you.

So go forth and breathe freely! And warmly! Tomorrow is Feel-Good Friday, which I kind of can't believe - it's been another crazy-fast week, no?

Have a wonderful day!
- Sarah

Meat! (or not!)

So let's talk protein again, shall we?

How we process protein is a pretty individual experience and there's a whole spectrum of options, from vegan to full-on bloody steak carnivore. Where you land on that spectrum is something I'd recommend trying to let your body determine for itself.

"What in the heck do you mean by that, Sarah?" Good question! First of all, where on the spectrum do you feel drawn? Does the phrase "full-on bloody steak carnivore" make you feel barfy or does it just sound like a normal Monday night? Your own personal inclinations toward food are important and shouldn't be discounted, as they're often our own bodies steering us in the necessary directions. Children will often develop seemingly random aversions to foods that they're later determined to be allergic or sensitive to, for instance. And if you're one of the lucky ones who feel called to vegetarianism or veganism and attribute a whole host of fabulous improvements in your health and well-being to that diet change then that's awesome and you should absolutely keep on going with that.

However! It's also important to be mindful of how your body reacts to certain proteins, as well as how it acts in their absence. Personal example: I love the idea of being pescetarian. If it were up to just my taste buds and my brain I could happily spend the rest of my life getting all my protein from fish and quinoa and legumes and eggs. But even when I'm taking hardcore iron supplements I still pretty much require a good solid portion of red meat every two weeks or so - without it I get crabby and fatigued and I've gotten to the point where I can tell that that's what's going on, it's such a specific kind of fatigue and crabbiness.

Now, it's kind of my job to know myself and my body really really well, but I think you're totally up to this kind of self-study too! It just takes a little paying attention: does even free-range organic chicken make you feel a little weird and you've never been able to explain why? Do you go vegetarian every few months and spend the entire time inexplicably hungry even though you're eating everything in sight? Just a little careful attention paid to how you react to what's on your plate can open up a whole new world of information for you, so clue in, focus a little, and see what you can figure out!

I have absolutely no idea what's on tap for tomorrow. But maybe that's what makes it exciting? Anyway, I'll see you then. :)

- Sarah

Eyes On Your Own Work

I have a private client who is constantly comparing herself to other people. Often it's me, celebrities, or herself 30 years ago, but the main thing she says - and she says this at least once every session - is "do you think other people go through this?" By which she means a dizzy spell, or a moment of forgetfulness, or her latest health concern.

Now, this woman has a lot of physical issues (and, well, other issues too) and on the face of it I think that question is an attempt to find some inclusiveness and affirmation - she's trying to feel less alone, basically, in a body she feels continually lets her down. I absolutely understand that. It's an entirely natural impulse and should certainly not be condemned. But when combined with comparing oneself to others ... here's the thing: you have no idea what's going on inside someone. Many health problems do not manifest outwardly, and certainly mental or emotional problems tend to be invisible as well. You never know what kind of pain an outwardly "perfect" person might be hiding, and you also never know what they might be envying about you. My client can afford multiple personal training sessions every week and I don't think she's ever had a day job - I know a lot of people who would give up pretty much every enviable thing about themselves in exchange for that kind of security.

So rather than feeling bad about yourself because [insert your reason here], why not celebrate yourself for what is good? Whether it's your multiple college degrees, your children, or your absurdly delicious banana bread just find the good in yourself. Be proud of it, nurture it, and it will expand and grow and create more good things. Focus on your own good, and other people's good will stop feeling like a punch in the face.

The problem with comparisons is that they are almost never neutral - to compare yourself to someone is to initiate a competition in which no one ever wins, because either you decide that the other person is better than you and then you feel bad or you decide that you yourself are better and then what? What have you really achieved from that?

Some people derive their motivation from comparing themselves to others, and to those people I say: go on ahead with yourselves. Just be careful. Keep it healthy. Let yourself aspire but don't beat yourself up if you don't quite get there, and know when you've taken yourself as far as you realistically need to go.

And to those of you who find yourselves lacking next to seemingly everyone else: you are good. You are enough. You have beauty, and you have something to offer. I promise.

Tomorrow is Foodie Wednesday! I will see you then.

- Sarah

Welp.

So, I was in a pretty intense yoga teacher training all weekend and consequently I'm experiencing what can only be described as technical difficulties inside my own head. Therefore, this is another cop-out post, but I promise I'll be back with some real content tomorrow. In the meantime, here's some food for thought:

"You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away. But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realising this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude. Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar." - Jeff Foster

I will see you tomorrow. Have a lovely day today.
- Sarah

Feel-Good Friday!

I don't know what it's like where you are, but where I live it's a gorgeous fall morning, all golden and crisp. So this weekend, regardless of what fall is like in your neck of the woods I want you to get out there and enjoy it. Put on your favorite sweater and kick some leaves or drink hot chocolate or go to your nearest high school football game. Whatever fall looks like to you, that's what you're doing for the next three days.

I'll see you back here on Monday!
- Sarah

No, Darn It, I Am Not Going To Call This Post "Let There Be Light"

All righty, y'all, let's talk about light quality.

You'll get this advice in pretty much every decorating and feng shui guide you can find so I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know, but light is important in your living space. If you're doing a crossword puzzle or cross-stitching a pillow you want to be able to really see what you're doing, but if you're having a cocktail party a bunch of blazing lights aren't going to do much to promote the right mood. I didn't have to tell you that, right? But something I think people tend not to consider is how the light around them influences their daily lives.

For a while, I had a day job in which my office was lit by what felt like about fifty overhead florescent tubes. It was obnoxiously bright and the light had that horrible yellowish cast which already makes me grumpy but when combined with eight hours of staring at a computer screen also gave me terrible headaches. That office also had no windows, so when I decided to never again turn on the overhead lights and just instead bring in my own individual lamps it took two 60-watt desk lamps and one 100-watt floor lamp to make things mildly visible, but it became a much more pleasant place to work (at least in that respect) and I became a much more pleasant person for it.

So think about how you respond to light levels, certainly, but also think about how you respond to the color of light, or if in fact that's even a factor for you. I'm pretty color-sensitive, so buying light bulbs is a fiddly little trial-and-error process of discovering which ones keep everything more or less the color I feel it's supposed to be and which ones suffuse my space with sickly yellow or green tints. Maybe you don't think of yourself as being particularly color-sensitive, but maybe I also just helped you understand why you respond to certain places in certain ways, eh? If you just feel weird about a particular room in your house and you simply can't figure out why, try messing around with the light bulbs - most bulbs these days will tell you if they give warm or cool light, and once you figure out your preference life gets a little easier.

(Sidebar: I understand why incandescent lights are being phased out and I pretty much agree with it, but god it's making light bulb shopping even more of a process than it already was. But then again I'm rather compulsive about these things)

With regard to light levels, by the way, another thing to consider is where you need your light to be. One fixture over your bathroom mirror is going to make shaving or eyebrow-plucking tricky in terms of visibility, whereas a relatively balanced light source on either side of the mirror will ensure that you can see everything you need to. Your living room, on the other hand, probably doesn't need to be flooded with light and might feel more comfortable with a few carefully-placed lamps. And again, this is not new information, but it really does have an effect on your overall sense of self. Any time we can spare ourselves some small irritation, for instance the irritation that comes from wanting to do nothing more than sit in a comfy chair and read a good book but you can't quite see well enough to do so, we create in ourselves just a little bit of general goodwill toward the world. And that adds up.

Feel-Good Friday tomorrow! Already! Good grief this week's gone quickly. But it is very nice to be back.

- Sarah

Gotta Break A Few Eggs

Eggs are highly underrated, in my opinion. Why do we relegate them to breakfast if they're not deviled or made into salad? Which is nothing against deviled eggs or egg salad, by the way, I love both those things pretty deeply, but a good omelet makes a pretty fabulous meal any time of the day.

And by the way, let's just stop worrying about eggs and their relationship to our cholesterol unless our doctors specifically tell us to, okay? Egg yolks contain a lot of really excellent nutrients and egg white omelets are just sad. Anyway.

So yeah. Omelets! Here's how I make mine:

• turn your burner to somewhere between medium and medium-high, if that makes sense. Let your non-stick pan heat up a little and then melt some butter in there. You can probably skip the butter, actually, since you're using a non-stick pan but that's between you and your god. I will pretty much never skip butter for anything.
• while that's happening, or maybe before, crack two eggs into some kind of vessel - I like to use a measuring cup for easy pouring, but a bowl is fine - and beat the crap out of them with a fork or a whisk if you're feeling fancy. Get the whites and yolks as commingled as possible and make sure you've got a lot of little air bubbles in there. If you want herbs (dill and chives are always nice) or veggies in your omelet you can add them here.
• when your butter starts to brown (I have no idea when you should do this if you're not using butter. I guess when you feel like the pan is hot enough?) pour the eggs in and let them sit there until the edges start to firm up. At this point, use the corner of your spatula to drag the edges in toward the center, letting the uncooked egg spill over and fill in the gaps. I do this at three or four different places along the edge - I suppose you could probably just let the eggs just sit there in the pan until they're ready to flip, but the dragging is kind of fun and helps the eggs cook more efficiently.
• when the surface is mostly firm but still shiny, flip it! And then take it off the burner pretty much immediately, there'll still be enough heat in the pan to finish cooking the eggs.

What happens next is entirely dependent on what you're doing with your omelet: you can top half of it with cheese or sauteed mushrooms or some other kind of filling and then slide it onto a plate, letting the plain side fold over top of the filling, you can leave it plain and just roll it onto your plate as-is, or you can cut it into quarters and put it on buttered bread for a darn tasty sandwich. Totally up to you! Be adventurous, you could probably eat a different style of omelet every day this week, and I didn't even get into all the boiling or poaching options - throw that into the works and you could eat a different style of eggs every meal this week (neither I nor any sane doctor would really recommend that, though).

Tomorrow? There shall be light. Probably.

Have a wonderful day!
- Sarah

Off The Map

So here's the thing: it's all well and good to have a plan. In fact, it's generally a pretty good idea to have a plan - I know a few people who basically live only about a half-hour in advance and it seems to work okay for them but I think most of us need at least a little bit of a road map.

However! Don't get married to that map, you know? It's so easy to decide you're going in a particular direction and then just keep plugging in that direction regardless of whatever more interesting opportunities present themselves, but then who know what you might miss?

It's like hiking, if you're into that kind of thing. Yes, you want to have an idea of where you're going, lest your loved ones end up having to send a search party after you. But you have some options while you're on that trail - you can keep moving forward, paying attention only to the path in front of you, focused on getting where you're going as fast as you can, or you can slow down a little bit and take in the world around you. For one thing, there might be a bear nearby! But there's also flowers and interesting leaves and rocks and maybe other hikers around.

This applies on the small scale as well as the large scale, by the way. Definitely give yourself some flexibility in your overall life plan - I've known more than one person who almost missed out on really beautiful love because that person didn't fit into what they'd planned for themselves - but also let your daily plans change if an opportunity arises. I know I'm not the only person who has considered turning down social invitations because my apartment's a mess. And yeah, it's important to keep a tidy living space, and sometimes the invitations are to things that just sound like the very last thing you want to do and a messy home is an okay way out but it's all too easy to get into the habit of keeping to yourself and staying rigid in your schedule and subsequently never experiencing anything new. Sure, that new experience might turn out to be terrible but at least it's new! And chances are good that it'll actually be a good thing, but you truly never know until you're there.

I'm not advocating flittering around trying to experience absolutely everything, by the way. That's exhausting and ends up being kind of counterproductive because you're on sensory overload most of the time so your brain kind of stops processing any kind of information at all and you end up really not experiencing anything. But do leave yourself open to some options, I just don't want you to miss out on anything.

Foodie Wednesday tomorrow! It'll be yummy.

- Sarah

Ooh Ahh. Fascia!

Hello! As promised, I am back, and feeling (more or less) refreshed. The time change certainly helps one's outlook this time of year, no?

So, jumping right into it - there's a set of questions that I get a lot:

• "Why does my joint keep popping?" (usually asked about shoulders or hips)
• "Why am I more flexible in the evening than in the morning?"
• "Why can't I seem to correct this postural issue?"

And the answer to all these questions is ... fascia!

You know how when you cook a chicken, there's that membrane between the skin and the meat? That's fascia, and people have it too. And in people it can harden, depending on the person's level of activity and general postural tendencies, which is why we're all kind of stiff when we wake up - we've had at least a few hours of stillness, during which time our fascia starts to lock itself into place, but since that's only a few hours' worth of hardening it's easily corrected just by our regular daily movement. 

But that's also why it's so difficult to correct lifetime postural issues, because your fascia has had however many years you've been standing or sitting like that to make itself into that shape. The fascia becomes accustomed to the shape your body assumes and almost forms a shell around your muscles, holding you into that shape however healthy or unhealthy it may be for you.

And that is where the popping or sometimes crackling comes from (usually. Sometimes joint popping has other origins, but if it doesn't hurt then fascia is generally at least a contributing factor)! All those weird internal sounds are the sound of fascia loosening and rearranging itself, and you hear them less the more you stretch or move around because you're giving your fascia less opportunity to harden back up.

This is one of the reasons why regular massages are recommended, by the way. Not just to keep massage therapists in business, although we do want to keep the good ones around, and not just because it's a nice thing to do for yourself, although it is, but because (among other health benefits that I'm not qualified to intelligently discuss) massage is the best way to keep your fascia flexible and consequently help stave off the bad-posture-associated health issues I talked about way back when.

This is also why pilates and yoga are so great for one's posture, by the way, especially pilates - because the exercises are specifically designed to help retrain the fascia as well as strengthen the body's supporting muscles, which essentially builds us into a better literal shape than we had when we started.

So there you go! I bet you didn't think you'd be reading about membranes today, did you? But sometimes life takes us in unexpected directions. Which we'll talk a little more about tomorrow.

It's good to be back.
- Sarah