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The Gift of Peace: A Delightful Journey Inward Through Meditation

This gift is designed to bring health, balance, peace, pleasure, clarity, and relaxation to you in the present and over time. We encourage you to share it with friends.

Our gift to you this season is the often requested recording of Dr. Coleman leading the centering meditation. Practicing this mediation over time is like putting money in the bank of presence. You will be more centered, more clear, more open hearted to yourself and others, more grounded, and more in flow with your essence.

To listen, click the link below.

http://www.o-c-e-a-n.com//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=113&Itemid=133

Ultimate Hot Cocoa Recipe: Healthy, Rich, and Creamy Warm Chocolate Delight

By Dr. Rebecca Coleman

Take a moment for you in this busy season. Treat yourself to our magic delight. It is perfect to warm you up from the winter cold. Plus, the secret ingredient is boosts your metabolism. No one has to know its healthy. The kids will love it too – enjoy this radiant recipe!

Makes 2 servings

2 cups Soy and/or Almond Milk. (I use Unsweetened Vanilla Blue Diamond Almond Milk, Unsweetened Vanilla WestSoy Milk, or a combination of half of each)
1 tsp Organic Vanilla Extract
3 tbsp Organic Cocoa (Nature’s First Law Organic Raw Powdered Cocoa)
1-2 tsp Organic Coconut Oil (Jungle Organic Coconut Oil, Extra Virgin Cold Pressed)

Stevia powder or Agave Nectar - sweeten to taste

Mocha Option
Add ¼ cup Coffee (Fresh Brewed or Espresso)
or
2 tsp Powdered Instant Espresso (Medaglia D’Oro Instant Powdered Espresso)
or
2 tsp Mount Hagen Organic Cafe (decaf or reg)

Combine all ingredients in a 2 quart saucepan. Heat over medium heat until the coconut oil melts. Blend with a wand style hand mixer (if available for more frothy results) or with a wire whisk. Pour into mugs. Enjoy!

Adjust ingredients to taste.

Prep Time: 5-10 minutes (depending on how handy your supplies are)

For more fun stuff, visit me at: http://drrebecca.wordpress.com/ or
http://www.o-c-e-a-n.com

Can't you just have a nice piece of fruit?

Fasting has long been part of my spiritual practice so I'm used to such questions but I still get surprised sometimes how consistently weird people can get about fasting. While I'm happy to blog about it here for the purpose of exploration, support, education, and entertainment, I tend to keep the fasting quiet among friends and family. It's a very intimate practice that doesn't require or benefit from casual discussion. Besides, there's no convincing some people that not eating solid food for a prescribed period of time can be a good thing.

While I began fasting in my 20's to lose weight, I accidentally happened upon the power of it to connect with the deepest parts of myself and opened to a whole new world that included a direct experience of the divine. Grace engaged my vanity for the sake of my soul.

This particular fast is, in part, for healing. I'm utilizing juices and supplements to support my body in digesting the uterine fibroids that have caused me to be very severely anemic for the last 10 years. I'm a hairball away from having a hysterectomy but since I'm also a hairball away from menopause I'm trying some other options to avoid another surgery. Two and a half years ago I had a very minimally successful myomectomy which caused more complications than resolutions. Acupuncture and a raw-live diet have been the most helpful strategies for shrinking the fibroids so far.

And expressing myself! Which, being a narcissistic, deeply sensitive 4 on the enneagram and 33/6 in Millman's life purpose system, means it ain' the easiest thing in the world for me to do with grace. I feel A LOT, but withhold it out of fear of criticism, disappointing or alienating others, etc. Nice, huh?

Interestingly enough, fibroids are correlated with holding back expression in relationship and the world. Who'd have thunk? But is that really true? For me?

Before I even considered getting a PhD I was working on a book about an integral approach to weight loss. That's 20 years. Human years, not dog years. No, it's not writer's block - I have enough written for 10 books - it's finisher's block. I'm a perfectionist and have an inner critic that rivels the nastiest dictator our world has ever known. In other words, I dive into a self-induced shame binge when I receive criticism. And even before another soul can read a single word I overly complicate the creation process and confuse myself with impossible standards to avoid the possibility of criticism before I even begin.  Even simple constructive criticism can be fatal. Like, "Becky, that should be a colon instead of a semi-colon" can send me into a whirl of revising a whole chapter.

I wish I were exaggerating more.

Fasting has always been a way for me to lovingly confront myself - bullshit habits and essence both. It provides a powerful and direct encounter with the truth. While I squirm a lot in the beginning, kind of like that uncomfortable stage after taking the red pill or the psychedelic when awareness is reluctantly breaking free from it's usual ground of perception, I know the relief of freedom and expansion await me on the other side.

This is Day 1 of 92. I'll say more about why 92 days and the process later if anyone is curious. But for now, I'm just putting it out there.

Of course, I'd like your support. But even more I'd like to be able to stay with myself and keep writing the truth whatever comes.

I'm sure some will cry disordered eating (that's my area of specialty) or some other judgement about my mental, emotional, or physical soundness. And heaven forbid, someone calls me GREEN! It's bound to happen cuz there's still a lot of green in here.

Where I am right now is that even though I'd love something to eat I am feeling very grateful for opportunity to do this. For a variety of reasons, it has been nearly 3 years since I last fasted and my longing is huge. Rather than beginning some grueling torturous experiment in deprivation, it is a precious time of simplicity and concentrated nutrition which, unfortunately, cannot last forever, so I choose to enjoy every moment of my 92 days.

We'll see what the web will provide in terms of fasting weirdness, and the blog version of "Can't you just have a nice piece of fruit?" Regardless, the bottom line is . . . yes, I can but I'd rather enjoy this.

"Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area. . . . Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That's a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be. People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology." – James Hillman, The Sun, 1998

I am one of the people Hillman describes above. The "area of my trouble" was obesity. I've weighed nearly 300 pounds – twice.

Over 17 years ago I made a commitment to discover the truth about my issues with weight – whatever it took – and to pass everything I learned about the process of creating enlivening, soulful, permanent change. While my commitment was sincere, I believe that grace engaged my vanity for the sake of my soul. At the time one part of me was conviced that if I worked to "fix my weight problem" as hard as I worked at other things in my life – you know, if I really committed my type A personality to figuring this out – I'd be thin in a year and live happily ever after. I am the only one who thinks like that? Of course, that's not what happened at all. It's been a long and windy road. But today I would trade none of the truth of my lived experience for the fantasy that ignited my search. That naive but genuine commitment changed the course of my life and continues to inspire me today. I've maintained a 160 pound weight loss for over nine years and I did my doctoral research on the psychospiritual process of healing relationship with body, food, and weight. Embodiment, the felt experience of being in one's body and connected to one's feelings and intuition in a way that promotes wholeness and integration, is the path I followed and the process I teach. I created O C E A N Embodiment Center to pass on all the wisdom and knowledge that has been generously given to me.

"Women's stories have not been told. And without stories there is no articulation of experience. Without stories a woman is lost when she comes to make the important decisions of her life. She does not learn to value her struggles, to celebrate her strengths, to comprehend her pain. Without stories, she cannot understand herself. Without stories she is alienated from those deeper experiences of self and world that have been called spiritual or religious. She is closed in silence. The expression of women's spiritual quest is integrally related to the telling of women's stories. If women's stories are not told, the depth of women's souls will not be known." – Judith Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing, 1980

If this journey resonates with you, you can find my story, my dissertation, and other women's stories on O C E A N's website. Here you will find my continuing story and pieces about my view of an integral approach to issues with body, food, and weight. Welcome. Thanks for joining me.