You can't LIVE without your LIVEr!

On Friday night Soul Shine Yoga & Wellness had our first nutrition workshop with Donna Terrazas. Let me just say she is AMAZING - a true wealth of information. She has been doing the whole natural healing, great diet, and energy healing before it was cool. She used to give her kids "ninja juice" green chlorophyl and juice mixed, named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the 80s version youngins). One of her children was doing his first anatomy project and he was diagraming our insides and she was telling him how important our livers are to the body. He perked up and said "Mommy! Liver, Live! See LIVE. You can't live without your LIVER!" He was right on.
In the West we do not give our liver its due. In TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) the liver is the most important organ in the body. We tend to focus on our hearts in the USA. The liver is the "general" he tells us what to do. Right now its time to create, live, plow the fields and eat greeeeeen.  We also need to eat tart, sour foods like lemons, limes and grapefruit. Herbs that support the liver are milk thistle and dandelion.

Here is a simple recipe for a gentle liver cleanse:
2 beets (raw)
1 - 2 lemons, juiced
1/4 - 1/2 cup of flax oil

Mix this all together and eat 2 teaspoons a day. If you eat more, the cleansing will be more intense. Trust me, beets are very cleansing! I juiced an entire beet one time, added some other stuff like apple and a cucumber. I drank about 5 sips before I had a headache, and then it was off to the bathroom I went!

Take care of your liver - just don't over do a cleanse.
Love & Light
H

Friends

Wow, its been 10 days since I have blogged! That is too long. Its amazing how time gets away from you during the holidaze. Honestly, I have spent a lot of time on the couch. Its been a rough 2 weeks. Since Hailey's seizure, I really have just not been "right," just a little off, if you know what I mean. It really freaked me out. Since her seizure, she has already had another round of chemo and is now resting at my parents house. We hope that she can stay well and stay out of the hospital this week. Usually she gets a fever and has to go back into the hospital for IV antibiotics and medication. I find it just plain crazy that someone with cancer can die of a cold because of the chemo. Just plain crazy.

Anyway...enough about cancer. I want to talk about friends. When you are stuck in the muck of depression and you feel like you are in a fog, you need some sunshine in your life. This is when friends become very important. I have never been one to have a large group of friends, particulary girlfriends. But in my mid 30s I have finally found a beautiful group of women that have come into my life at just the right time. We had a girls night this past weekend and it was so healing, so fun and just what the doctor ordered. I guess what I am trying to say is that for a long time, I have been trying to "do life" on my own, Mrs. Independent. But now, I have people I can call when I am freaking out and I don't feel like a failure. This may sound silly, but I bet some of you out there know what I am talking about. We don't like it when people see us at our weakest. We feel like a burden, a failure and maybe a little crazy. This is a trick of the ego - stupid ego! We need community! We were created for community and friends. God did not create us to be loners. He created us to be together, to hug each other and to wipe away each others tears. Why do we hide our faces when we cry? or run to the bathroom? or hide under the covers? What is the shame factor in crying? Have we be conditioned this way? "Jesus wept" - shortest verse in the Bible and it says so much. Geez...even God cries! So why do we hide? I want to say that I am so happy that I have people in my life that I will allow to see me all red faced, puffy, snotty and crying. I know that they will wipe away my tears and bring me a tissue. They don't think I am crazy, and even if they did I think they would love me anyway.
I know that some of you will read this and think, "wow, Heather, you have plenty of reasons to cry." but here is the thing, something inside of me (and I bet you too!) has this urge to "be strong." We are told that we "have to be strong for so and so." What a load of poo. No, I am not going to freak and cry in front of Hailey all the time and weird her out, but I do not have to "be strong" for my friends. My friends don't have to "be strong" for me, they can cry with me if they want.  I love them and they love me!