Slow Sunday, Ayurveda, a recipe & when the boat came home

Homemade Sauerkraut

Today has been, a soggy day. Which was just perfect for playing around in the kitchen.

Seeing the beauty

Early this morning, I went out walking through rain in the Sunday morning city, to see what I could find. I found cars slooshing along wet roads and cyclists getting wet. The main road shops were readying themselves for the buzz of Sunday shoppers. I cut off into a park and found piles of wet leaves, muddy grass with pools of water laying across the surface, worms having a feast and the caravan cafe, had come and set up its chairs and tables no matter the weather, loyal to any dog walker that may want a cuppa and homemade cake. The sky was a mix of dark charcoal blues, with hints of sun rising behind. It was a beautiful wet and windy start to the day, where everything was wrapped in a half light.

Later, as the rain eased off, the wind increased and all the pearly raindrops fell in a big swoop from the tree branches. The sound of the wind in the top of the trees reminded me of when I was young. I loved falling asleep to stormy nights, rain on the windows, wind in the treetops and sometimes thunder and lightning. I’d get up then, to look out of the window as the sky lit up, and the night air rumbled.

By the time I arrived back home today, both the wind and rain had disappeared. Some of my neighbours were in the street clearing up the leaves. A young lad had swept so many up into big piles. I stopped to help put them into the green bins. This is the first time since moving here 18 months ago that I have met my neighbours, it was nice to discover they did exist, such is life in a city. Perhaps we will meet again. It was nice, this brief interlude of community.

I can see the church across the road, now that the tree out front has lost its leaves. At night, the man who turned it into apartments and strung lights up out the front, sometimes turns them on and it looks like a little palace. Last year he put a tissue paper nativity scene in his windows and the whole thing looked like a little Christmas card. I used to leave my curtains open so that I could watch it as I fell asleep. No matter how old I get, I never really seem to grow up.

The three pillars of Ayurveda

When I work with people, the hardest thing they find to do is change their habits, and often that’s what needs to happen, if they want to create the conditions from which good health, naturally arises.

I think the problem is that here in the West we have become accustomed to a pill and a quick fix, but Ayurveda doesn’t work like that. If you focus on Ayurvedic herbs to make you well, further down the line, nothing much will really have changed.

There are three things that need to be addressed for any Ayurvedic plan to work—resetting your circadian rhythm, renewing your digestion and rebalancing your constitution. And, it’s amazing how long it can take a person to do what’s needed to achieve all these things. That’s why I often repeat myself. And, I keep coming back to these basic things. It really is quite amazing how well you can feel if you get these three things right.

Ayurveda has always explained that we are a miniature of the universe. The energy of the universe has qualities. I’ve talked about the gunas of Sattva, Rajas and tamas here. These gunas allow the elements of ether, air, fire, water and earth to exist. And it is these elements (qualities) that form our constitution, as well as the natural world around us.

Throughout the day, and the seasons these qualities change, and we need to live in sync with that through our choices. This is how Ayurveda explains how to live in balance with our circadian rhythms. The Ayurvedic daily and seasonal routines are all aimed at keeping us in balance with our circadian rhythms. And, that’s what chapter one of the book I will start writing in January, will introduce you to. It will include seven days of practice so that you can try the ideas out, and get an overview of them.

I would love it if you became a paying subscriber and shared the journey into Ayurveda with me. But if you don’t I will still be writing these Slow Sunday letters with warm words, joy dots, meandering thoughts and recipes for everyone.

Joy dots

Grey blue sky with shafts of light

Mountains of leaf piles

Worms

Leafless trees silhouetting

Warm tea

Wind in the treetops

Friendship

Neighbours taking care of their street

Slow Sundays

Chocolate and cream

Warm thoughts

Seeing the beauty

Recipe

Homemade sauerkraut

This gut friendly food is just so easy and cheap to make. And it’s a real boost to your gut microbiome.

I used a red cabbage and a green/white cabbage, made them separately but when decanting into jars I filled two of the jars with a mix of both. The green/white cabbage in the mixed ones ended up all these lovely colours—bottom two jars!

Method

For every pound of cabbage I used 2 teaspoons of mineral rich rock salt.

Simply shred your cabbage by cutting into quarters then finely slicing. Put this into a large ceramic or glass bowl with the salt and massage the shredded cabbage for about 15 minutes, or until lots of water has been drawn out and you can feel the fibres in the cabbage have broken down. Pack into a large glass or ceramic container making sure the liquid covers the cabbage when you have put a weight on it—I used a mason jar with glass weights.

Leave for a few weeks—2 weeks light ferment/4 weeks stronger ferment—then jar up.

If you grow the cabbages in living soil then it’s even cheaper and full of your local biome, which is one of the best things you can supplement your diet with for a healthy microbiome. Good health doesn’t have to cost the earth.

When the boat came home

You can find the last part of this fall asleep story here (my fall asleep stories will be recorded, I will use the Hypnotherapy pace for recording to ensure your brain rhythm shifts from beta—waking consciousness—or high beta—stressed consciousness—to theta—relaxed.

In the morning, smoke could still be seen making its way from the fire, in a spiral stream into the early morning sky. Underneath this there were still a few embers glowing. The woman with the salty hands was bent low, as she fed these embers a breakfast of little dry sticks and blew, ever so gently.

The rain didn’t come last night and everyone slept out under the stars. They were still asleep now, except, for the lady with the salty fingers and hands. Even the dog was sound asleep, curled up with children. They all snoozed.

But the lady, she walked down to the sea with two buckets. One she filled with seaweed, the other with water from the stream that was trickling into the ocean. Then she danced barefoot on the wet sand, under a sky where the sun had not yet risen, while crabs scampered into the ocean and jelly fish floated out of harms way. All that was left was the lady, her buckets of seaweed and fresh water, and a few lugworms making patterns on the sandy beech, where the outgoing tide had made ripples.

When the lady with salty fingers made her way back to the fire, it was glowing and there were little flames dancing. She placed some larger sticks onto the warm flames then set up a tripod made of three tall fat sticks, hanging a pot over it into which she placed the water. Then, just as the dog began to wake, the lady walked across the top of the beech collecting leaves.

The dog followed her, yawning and walking ever so slowly. Together they made their way to a rock and sat to gaze out at the sea. The lady’s eyes came to rest on her boat and a smile lit up her face. Soon, it would be time to go to sea again.

Wishing you the warmest of weeks,

Lucy x