Often when meditation is mentioned people harbor some vague, albeit extraordinary, notion of hocus pocus incantation or yogis in India miraculously levitating a few inches off the ground by the sheer force of their consciousness.

While I cannot vouch for aberrations from the law of gravity, consistent meditation offers extraordinary benefits that might amount to practical magic in your life. The practice is helpful for anyone controlling errant thoughts that otherwise might swarm with chaos. Meditation clears clutter that might overwhelm a person in the alternative.

I dearly love the British-English term “ablutions,” which refers to washing yourself, brushing your teeth and other personal grooming habits to get ready for the day. Unfortunately, we may sometimes give ablutions for mental hygiene the short shrift.

Your inner recycler wants to live in a shipping container! Shipping containers are just that – reused containers that were once used for freight movement on trains or barges. Turns out, they can make a pretty sweet set-up on land, too.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we must walk again and again. To make a deep mental path we must think again and again the kinds of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

~Henry David Thoreau, Journals~

As simple as this sounds, letting go of pain is not always easy! There can be hidden aspects of pain that provide our ego with a pay-off, making it quite difficult to see our pain gone. In self-healing, the questioning of our ego’s investment in the symptom of our suffering is a vital modality and can often provide a pivotal shift in our healing process.

This zucchini bread is a delicious treat that both vegans and omnivores will enjoy. Moist on the inside and chewy on the outside, there are subtle notes of cinnamon and vanilla that pairs well with your afternoon coffee and a good book in the sunshine.

Since zucchini is a summer squash, this recipe is perfect for the months of June-August when you have an excess of zucchini needing to be harvested in the garden, or when they show up fresh at the market. As a plus, you can even use those overripe bananas that have been sitting on the counter a little too long!

We have all heard of the juice cleanse, green juice, juiceries and so on. Juicing is so mainstream now that one can find pressed, organic juices readily available in any major chain grocery. In fact, there are a plentiful number of businesses that only sell juice and they are doing well in the marketplace. This commercial success usually means a quelling of the buzz amongst the more dedicated “health nuts.” So, I feel that it is finally safe for me to come out as a (gasp) “Smoothier.”

We all know that the benefits of meditation can help reduce anxiety and increase happiness for the individuals who practice it. It can help reduce reactivity and have a positive effect on one’s internal dialogue and even one’s work life. What a lot of people don’t consider when it comes to meditation, however, is how big of an impact it can have on your love life—especially if you practice it with your partner.

It happened in 2004. I was living in Oregon at the time, attending my first year of college. I was surrounded by people who cared not only about what they ate but what it could do for their bodies and their well-being as well as where their food was coming from. While I was fortunate to grow up in a household where wholesome food was always served, that was more of an accident than anything. This was simply how we ate and frankly, I thought that was how everyone else ate, too.

Monocultures: you’ve probably seen them. They account for the majority of those squares you see on the ground when flying in an airplane. But monocultures are more than agricultural art: they are the crux of agricultural production in the United States. Interestingly enough, though, they could simultaneously prove to be the downfall of the agricultural system as we know it.