Friends and fellow travelers have asked me to share more about how my journey has unfolded. Below is a bit about the various paths I’ve walked, transitions I’ve made, and a recent decision to take a large, yet Gentle Leap into the field of holistic nutrition.
Upon leaving the Zen Center, after 5 years of monastic training, I felt an opportunity to begin anew. How will that take form? My degree is in Finance, which I used for 8 years building a successful financial planning practice prior to moving to the Zen Center. Yet my life experience clearly led me away from the field of finance and into a contemplative practice, and now into a space of not-knowing.
So I dedicated time to travel with my partner, thus creating space to ask open-ended questions about how we want to live, where, and what type of work we can do to benefit others. This also included feeling into questions about meaningful work through meditation, movement, dialogue, and research.
By giving these questions space and time (9 months!), clarity has emerged.
This week I began a yearlong program to become a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner! In the first class we were asked to define our “why.” Why do you want to enter the field of holistic nutrition? This question has deep roots for me, which I wanted to share as I embark on this new path.
My desire to study holistic nutrition has many threads that weave together to create a cohesive narrative. The cornerstone of my philosophy is that nutrition should be practiced holistically. When I discovered this as a possible livelihood through helping people find optimal wellness, it became clear I wanted to enter this blossoming field.
Our body and mind (bodymind) are undeniably interconnected.
What environments we choose to be in directly impact our bodymind moment to moment. Being in tune with the rhythms of our nervous system assists us to make choices that are in accord with our bodyminds.
This is what I love about a holistic approach – it is an understanding that body and mind are intimately interconnected. The approach focuses on the whole person – nutrition, lifestyle, environment, habits, and worldviews.
Why Holistic Nutrition?
Throughout the past 10 years I have been eating a whole foods, plant based diet. I generally feel energetic and clear-minded. However, there are also many times during the week when I don’t fully understand how my food choices impact my bodymind. Often times there is an obvious correlation between food and how I feel, but sometimes it is just mysterious. I want to solve the mystery!
Why do I sometimes get a headache and feel dizzy after exercising? I just had a green smoothie! Hmmm. What is triggering these migraines that have been plaguing me for the past 15 years? Why is losing weight a constant struggle even though I eat a whole foods diet and exercise regularly? How do I improve the health of my microbiome? What foods work best for my body? Lots of questions! Hence, holistic nutrition school!
My passion to understand how to optimally take care of our bodyminds also stems from seeing family and friends struggle with cancer and other autoimmune diseases. When a serious illness affects someone you love, it also affects you in a myriad of ways. My focus has been on being present, having meaningful time to connect, and accepting what arises. This has also led me down a path of asking a lot of questions about food, herbal medicine, and how what we eat affects the health of our bodyminds.
During the time while I was training at the Zen monastery, my interest in food grew exponentially. To financially sustain ourselves we were running a large retreat business for individuals and groups. This meant that we were preparing high quality, organic, vegetarian meals each day for 15-50 people. I was typically in charge of making breakfast each morning and I enjoyed being able to prepare nourishing, balanced meals for our guests. There was a lot of time for experimentation (see pumpkin muffin pic)!
It was also a wonderful opportunity to develop my cooking skills, understand how ingredients work together, and appreciate how important nutritious food is to support and sustain a community.
The daily Zen schedule we followed is both rigorous and highly structured. We began the day at 4:30am (3:30am in the winter) with meditation, followed by breakfast, a work period, lunch, short break, another work period, exercise, dinner, and meditation, ending around 9pm. There was time in the schedule each day to meditate, eat, work, exercise, study, and sleep.
The ability to simply following a schedule like this and not have to make endless decisions during the day frees up our attention to notice the subtleties of each activity.
With regards to food, this meant that my attentional capacity to notice how certain foods and herbs made me feel throughout the day was greatly increased. I loved this! I experimented with eating fewer grains, incorporating more raw foods in summer, having green smoothies for dinner, eating more protein at breakfast, favoring hot foods in the winter, etc.
I also worked with a Traditional Chinese Medicine Doctor to develop herbal tea concoctions that would support my constitution. I studied with endless curiosity, how the teas affected my mood and ability to cope with stress. During a particularly difficult time, he recommended adding pink rose buds for the last 20 minutes of the brew as a way to give my heart a little extra care. So I gave my attention to noticing the effects of these beautiful little blossoms. Consequently I always have a jar of these on hand in my tea cabinet!
While not everyone liked how the kitchen smelled after making these herbs (understandable!), it was totally worth it to me. I would simply smile and tell them about how I was incorporating these into my self-care routine.
Since there were so many constants in the schedule, it was possible to tweak little variables, and then give attention to noticing the effects. The fascination was unfading! This investigation extended well beyond food to include studying: the amount of sleep I needed, type of sleep, affects of sound and noise, benefits of long baths, intensity of different types of exercise, ways of interacting socially, how my breath supports me…basically everything!
Being able to devote much of my days to these self-care practices was a gift, and now applying what I’ve learned in the context of the culture is my new challenge.
Through using my skills of running a financial planning business; the embodied knowledge and mindfulness training at the Zen Center; continuing my own Zen and self-care practice; and the knowledge I will gain through studying holistic nutrition, I hope to be able to support and educate others to live a healthier and more connected life.
Now it’s time for some more slow tea and my first course on the basics of nutrition. Gentle Leaps! If you’re inquiring into the question of how to find meaningful work or are in the field of holistic medicine I would love to hear from you in the comments!
Tea of Tranquility