Moody in November?

Today, November 21, starts the Full Moon as we progress into winter (or Summer in some countries). Astrology says it is time to reevaluate our wishes that were made with the New Moon in November. Also because it is the month of Taurus, we may experience anger or become upset with people or situations that we normally would be able to handle or as we become aware of how current circumstances may not be supporting our larger goals. Then maybe we should take it easy these few days as the Moon stirrs the emotional energy around us. (This Moon cycle is definitely working on me, I feel the change in the energy around me so I believe in this now). It is also the time to dismiss negative thoughts as we exhale and welcome positive ones as we inhale. When I vision this while breathing especially during meditation it gives me strength and happiness and satisfaction as I realize again and again that the energy we spread inside and outside of our bodies with slow, deep yogic breathing is enough to move us forward in our lives.

Just some thoughts for you to consider as the month of November is coming to an end and December is coming closer where festivals and traditions start spilling into our lives. Remember that Patience is golden, Breath is essential and the Self is sacred. Close your eyes and remember who you are and where you are going, set aside the interruptions and focus on your personal goal...how do you feel now? Can you take a step forward or maybe 2 steps forward? or do you need to rest in peace for some more time? Consider your thoughts and open your eyes as you reach your decision on what you feel you need to do now to reach your personal goal.

Remember to nourish your body and soul with seasonal and local foods as much as possible which allows your body to get the maximum benefit from the foods to help you adjust to the changing seasons. As in Ayurveda, it is said that we should go with our instincts when winter and cold weather comes, when we want warming foods, such as soups and root vegetables as potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, garlic, etc. and some extra whole grain starches to make energy so we can warm our bodies. Of course this is said assuming the person isn't living a high stress life in which case you may think of reconsidering your goals.

Love, Peace and Beauty for us all!

Note the picture is how beautiful Bodrum is in Winter..

Would you like a Tangerine or Mandarin or Mandalina?

Tangerine, also known as Mandarin and Mandalina in Turkish is this very tasty citrus fruit, bigger than lemon and smaller than orange that come out especially in autumn and right now Bodrum is sparkling with orange lights from tangerine trees. It is grown on a citrus tree, Citrus reticulata, cultivated for its small edible orange-like fruits. End of October to November is the time for Tangerines. They especially smell and taste best picked right off the tree which I had the pleasure to experience this past week with some friends. See pictures.

What was interesting to find out that Tangerine also means a native of inhabitant of Tangier and it has originated in 1842, from tangerine orange  (1841) "an orange from Tangier,"  seaport in northern Morocco, from which it was originally imported to Britain. The place name is from L. Tinge . As a color name, attested from 1899. On the other hand, Mandarin which is supposed to be the same fruit is also known to have originated in China since Mandarin is the Northern Chinese dialect, spoken in and around Beijing and some places its called an Asian citrus fruit bearing lance-shaped leaves and flattish, orange-yellow to deep-orange loose-skinned fruit, some varieties of which are called tangerines. In the Chinese Empire, Mandarin was a member of any of the nine ranks of public officials, each distinguished by a particular kind of button worn on the cap. My favorite meaning: Mandarin is a person of standing and influence, as in literary or intellectual circles. So they all resemble each  other, possibly Morocco and China had some similar citrus trees that produced similar fruits and they were dispersed into our world in variety of kinds known as Tangerines and Mandarines and Mandalina.
And more interestingly and a quite amusing find is that there are about 18 varieties of Mandalina in Turkey which include names such as Nova, Okitsu, Satsuma, Ankor, Clemantin, Yerli, Fairchild, Minneola, Marisol and Ovari. Wow! Who thought of the name Ovari for a Tangerine:)) Hey would you like an Ovari?..:) Apparently, they originated in Japan in 1878 and I think the ones we picked and I'm eating right now are also Ovari kind and Satsuma kind, because this website says the Satsuma is very common in Aegean region of Turkey and they are in the same group as Ovari and both are seedless. Some great info in this Turkish website about citrus fruits, the varieties and where they come from and more: http://www.turuncgiller.com/

Well, in terms of nutritional value (of course I have to mention this since I am a Dietitian after all:)), these juicy fruits are a rich source of Vitamin A, which is important for eye, and skin health and it helps protect you from cancer. They're also good source of potassium, good source of vitamin C, which helps protect you from infections, helps to keep your skin smooth, heals wounds and cuts and helps to renew your red blood cells and repair them, and are good sources of soluble and insoluble fiber important for a healthy digestion and bowel. And 1 Tangerine is only 37 Calories! So you can eat many in confidence and increase the nutritional benefits. (Of course there can be slight variation in nutritional quality depending on if they are organic, which soil it grew with and what environment it grew in which is true for all foods we consume by the way!). Oh! Almost forgot, don't forget to get organic, you don't want to poison yourself do you, instead of protecting yourself with vitamins to fight the flu season! They also stay well in room temperature. If you have a yard full of these trees or actually they are like bushes, small trees, and can't possible eat them all before they fall of the trees or are bitten by worms or bugs you can try to add them to your cooking...For example, try to add peeled slices into salads, or vegetable dishes such as mixing it with cooked green beans and olive oil. You can peel the thin inside membrane or skin as well when adding to dishes but I recommend try it all natural, just peel the outside soft orange skin and pull apart the segments and add the segments to your dish. The skin and the inside membrane is full of fiber, both soluble and insoluble. You can eat the outside skin as well, you can cut it into small cubes and use it in marmalade or jelly making or in a marinade or you can zest it and add pieces of the skin to salads or dishes too.

Have a delicious and Tangy month:)

Life is Beautiful! La Vie Est Belle!

is a wonderful Italian movie which I highly recommend you watch if you haven't already. But regardless of this movie, and regardless of what might be going on in your life, Life! is really beautiful and that is what I would like for all of us to realize. Okay, don't be skeptical please, I'll explain how I come to this realization and how you can do it too...
Lately, I have been going in a spiritual direction, practicing yoga and meditation and chanting quite a lot (well about 2 hours per day or more sometimes which is more than I've done before) which could be why I've been feeling that every day is a beautiful day and life is really beautiful. And the more I do these rituals of mine I'm feeling I'm in a very special and new beginning where I can see material life and spiritual life separately and feel some beautiful energy around me like the cool wind blowing from all directions in a storm. I feel it in every little part of my physical body. It's an amazing feeling and I can see beauty everywhere with this energy. I'm inspired by Hare Krishna Consciousness and the Bhagavad Gita as well, and Kirtan music by Dave Russell and music by Mercan Dede who is an amazing DJ delicately composing sufi-electonica type of music inspired by the sufi poet Mevlana. Check it out on his website: http://www.mercandede.com/
Now, although I don't think we really need 2 hours or so of daily devotional practice for us humans to realize life and every moment of it is beautiful, these practices and my 6 years of yoga practice has helped me realize that we need some kind of practice every day to be able to keep this beautiful, heart-melting, loving feeling inside ourselves which then has the potential to dissolve and pass into other living beings.
But, please don't get offended if you're not spiritual or not into yoga at all. I do believe there are many ways you can achieve this feeling or at least get pretty close to it. It has to be an internal and very personal/intimate desire or yearning you have for a daily practice. A practice sure could be yoga and chanting but also could be some other exercise such as running, tennis, walking or could be journaling, singing, dancing or simply lying down on fresh green grass or warm sand and staring at the sky and simply BREATHING!...just something where you are really silent, alone and only listening to yourself, your breath, your inner feelings, your gut. So that you can connect with your inner-self, and learn about yourself, your feelings, real thoughts and desires and grow (mentally/spiritually). This will not only make you happy and feel every day is special and life is beautiful but also it will help you stay positive and get through every day of your life, and stay connected with the universe or whatever you want to believe in, but best of all it will make you love yourself! Love is a very powerful word...I wish people used it more wisely, knowing what it really means.
Anyway, you can also receive multiple benefits from this practice if you plan it well. For example, if you try out some daily simple exercises every day, not only is it making you feel happy and fall in love with your life but also its helping to strengthen your physical body which is important for you to do every day for your health and in order to think clearly and get through each day of your life. So, although you may prefer to just lay down on the grass or sit in a comfy chair and watch the sky or waves or something, if you can maybe just try to add some walking and then stretching your arms and legs a bit then you are going in a great direction and one day you may even feel you can start fast walking or running too or maybe different breathing exercises:)
Other benefits are if you haven't realized already, when you're happy and positive you look more beautiful and have an amazing glow surrounding yourself which attracts happy and positive people to you too and allows negative people or situations to pass by. So, in all aspects you will be in the direction to being happy yourself and also spreading that same positive energy around you which pretty much is a wonderful service for the community. Believe me, I have bad moments too where I feel angry, ugly, too fat for my bikini or moneyless, jobless, lost or hopeless and depressed. BUT NOooooooo! I wake up!! and you should also. Love yourself, Life is Beautiful!
And remember when I said in my previous post that I decided to make change within myself and share my energy with as many other souls as possible and asked Why in Turkey? Well...the south of Turkey, Bodrum is where I feel I belong to the community that really needs me, I can feel peace and love and freshness in Bodrum and feel that I can exchange these feelings with the community here and make it an even more beautiful place. I will let you know how it goes...

A side cute story from me:
Just before I left Boston, I was in moody days and came across one of those street sellers selling stone statues from Africa and bought this very interesting statue that has a carving of only half of a face and the other half is empty, carved completed as a hole in the middle of the stone. When I asked the beautiful seller lady what it meant she told me the artist meant it to mean that we should only look at the positive sides of any situation and that is why only half of the face is carved for our eyes to see. So, you see, I realized there is always and always a negative and a positive side to every thing and situation in our lives and it is up to the individual person to decide which side to see...well do you prefer to see negatives and be miserable or see positives and be happy. I am working on the positives and hope you can try it too, its wonderful!
So, let us all work on leaving negatives behind and welcoming positives, especially new ones to allow room for more growth and happy experiences and opportunities. I hope you feel and can share my positive energy once you read this and stay with that feeling. :)

And I apologize for writing so long. What can I say, I have so much energy in me that I like to share! Thank you for reading it all.

Transition or Transformation?

Well I know I have neglected my blog for quite some time. There is no good reason for this because this was very important to me, but my reason is that I have been going through a huge transition or maybe its a transformation. Let's see...3 months ago, I gave the decision to move to a different country and since then have been on an emotional roller coaster with happiness, sadness, confusion, doubt and every other humanly feeling thats possible passing through me like electrical waves, changing my mindset almost every minute...lets just say it was a good experience. So I did survive all that and finally moved in early October to Istanbul, Turkey. Mmmm not sure if I feel comfortable with the truth of this, but it has happened already! But now that it has happened I can't stop thinking of the tranisiton I went through during the packing, moving, and saying all sorts of good-bye's, see ya later's and the like...I have been trying to transition the moving experience into a positive experience although I've hated most of it. (of course any of you who have ever moved to another city or even to another country know what I mean). But I've questioned myself, as always, to create more learning experiences from all the actions I've been taking.
So, is this a transition or a transformation? Well, the dictionary explains transition as: movement, passage, or change from one position, state, stage, subject, concept, etc., to another; change. And transform as: to change in condition, nature, or character; convert.
In this case, I have been in a transition but with lingering transformation. I say this because in the past few years I have been going through transformations which has lead me to this transition and brave decision to change almost everything in my life. Well, not everything, but many things because I had been reading a lot and learning a lot and craving all sorts of positive changes as the world to me is not changing in the most positive way right now. So I decided to make the change within myself and share my energy with as many other souls as possible. Why Turkey? I can't answer that yet, I hope to get a good answer soon...
Anyway, the point is that I am realizing that it is very important and natural to go through these emotions and changes in life because it helps us understand and become the person we naturally are:) And guess what else, there is no age, time, location limit in which these changes can happen so be prepared and open your heart and mind to change because although it can be rough at times, it really is beautiful in the end!
A note/quote of the month:
"What we see or what we make publically available may not be as they seem, as a consequence of the positioning and contrapositioning of the unseen lying withing the whole.  Understanding what is seen rests, in all its simplicity or complexity, within the individual himself or herself. "

Ani Celik Arevyan, 2010, Photography exhibition at the Istanbul Modern Art Museum

"Is this art? What is art is questionable to me." Hüseyin Çağlayan - Fashion Designer/Artist

FRESH!

FRESH is a movie/documentary about Food of course, fresh food, fresh thinking, a fresh movement, sustainable living and all that good and delicious stuff. It is somewhat similar to the movie that was made before this, Food, Inc. but is supposed to give us ideas on what to do to promote a sustainable and fresher life-style and environment. So far, I know this movie is showing in several cities in the US. I hope it will spread abroad and maybe you and I can help do that. See their website for lots more great info and how to host a show! I recommend Food, Inc. as well and see my recommendations list for books about this issue.
So, its not really a new movement or thinking as organic and sustainable small farms have always been how our food was grown until the money maniac companies became powerful enough to control how food is grown or I should say made as in a laboratory. Oh damn the politics...but not that easy, it can be up to us individuals to get united to spread the word of the torture thats going on to animals, plants and out planet and to start taking little steps and developing it into bigger steps to eventually return to sustainable living and save our planet. See my previous post, Down to Earth, about what you can do.
But I know sometimes it seems like organic might be a new movement or new idea for growing food which is just too expensive for the general public to afford. Nope thats a Incorrecto! Like I said its been the way food was grown before, the food that smelled and tasted awesome and had all the necessary vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients we humans need to function well and not get sick often and just die from natural causes or aging instead of complications developing from morbid obesity and type 2 diabetes. And that is why it's not as expensive as you think, eating all the other non-organic food may not really have the same nutritional quality as the organic varieties and plus has the added growth hormones, antibiotics and pesticide residues which eventually could make us very very sick which would require a lot of money to treat. And at the end you keep spending all that money to get well when you are already sick but could have spent money on organics from the start to help prevent sicknesses. Well don't count me on all of this...this last part is partially my theory which needs to be researched better. So there you have it, a new post from me again on Organic Food, oh so boring. How dare you! Stop that yawning and go and buy fresh organic food (almost everything is available in organic now, well at least in US) and let me know how it goes...it's the only healthiest and sustainable food we can trust right now (oh yes unless you grow your own organics). All done for now...

Down to Earth...

It was such an inspirational weekend. So isn't each day and moment supposed to be an experience and inspiration for better living for the next days and years. Why are we not doing this all the time? Part of my job as a dietitian is to remind this to my patients, friends, family and most other people I connect with and myself. Well believe it or not reminding it to myself is the most difficult, and I am learning that for me the best way to remind myself of how important every moment in my life is by doing yoga everyday. If one day goes by I don't do it I feel horrible and miserable and worse if more days pass without any yoga. No one is perfect, I am not able to do it every single day, a few days may pass by but I try to get in some yogic breathing or awareness or consciousness or other exercises in my day to make it meaningful to me. Anyways we can't get anywhere without struggling through miserable times either. Well that was part of my inspirational weekend. I struggled a lot through my yoga class realizing that it has nothing to do with me being tired or hungry or out of practice for a day or 2, but that I am struggling through my life at the moment and that was why. I had to keep reminding myself to breathe and let whatever was stressing me get through me...most things have to end at some point. So its okay, struggling is good. When it comes to coping with stress, your breath is one of the best remedies there is...and its free!
Because, this breathing and struggling helped me to cope with the miserable, yet must-know and learn from type of journey in the later hours. So later during the weekend I read more of Harvest for Hope and miserably learned again that what we eat nowadays is not the product of nature or mother earth but is the product of food science made in labs with no care, no love, no concern for beings. Even if we think we are eating healthy and buy all organic and stuff...there is so little we know and even less we can control. But nothing is impossible!
So how can we give back to Mother Earth? We took so much from her, we poisened her soil and plants and water and played around with the genes of her useful products, melted the wonderful icebergs and destroyed coral reefs, rainforests to leave many useful living creaters to be extinct! We may not be able to return all the lost back to alive but we can give back to the Earth to help it heal and recover from the torture we have done to her so she can once again give us useful and healthy products for us to continue living.
Some Ways to give back to Earth and save Our Lives:
- use less electricity, gas, water.
-  unplug electrical devices when not is use such as toaster and cell phone charger.
- watch less TV and go out more to spend more time with nature.
- drive less and walk more or ride a bike or at least use public transportation.
- recycle paper, plastic, cans, glass and especially electrical stuff such as batteries.
- or resuse, plastic containers make good pen or crayon holders, glass containers can be reused to store dried herbs, coffee, teas, dry beans, dried fruits, occasional sweets, candy, pins, sewing materials, jewelry, etc.
- when shopping bring your own paper bags or hangbags or choose paper instead of plastic when asked and then recycle the paperbags.
- grow your own vegetables and herbs (all you need is a small garden or dirt and seeds in big pots in a balcony or window sill).
- As much as you can buy organic, local and seasonal fruits and vegetables.
- Eat more plant proteins such as beans, legumes, lentils instead of animal proteins such as meats, poultry and fish.
- drink mostly water and less of juices, sodas, alcohol and other sweetened and high calorie drinks.
- Whenever you get a chance protest against GMOs (genetically modified organisms- plants) and the use of pesticides.
- use organic cleaning supplies for your home such as vinegar and baking soda, and clorax and seventh generation products seem to be environment friendly. (http://www.clorox.com/, http://www.seventhgeneration.com/ )
- spend time with children to teach them about the environment and let them observe and learn from you.
- take action with Greenpeace or learn more about them: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa
I'm sure there are more ways to give back to Earth so let your creative imaginations take you forward and share some of them with me! Peace...