If we get nervous or angry we influence our health! Happy and unhappy emotions have an effect of either improving or weakening the quality of our blood. The same dynamic exists between emotions and our organs. If we feel calm and peaceful, this nourishes the liver. This is the same kind of energy that creates the liver and returns it to balance. If we feel courage and security, this type of deep energy nourishes our kidneys. On the other hand, if you experience strong fear, that can weaken your kidneys. If you become very angry, the opposite of calm and peaceful, that harms your liver; weakens it. And the more you experience an emotion, the more your organs are damaged by that. The balance works in both directions.

Emotions exist to make balance. Emotions have a natural state. That natural state is something flowing and changing. Healthy emotions are constantly changing. Some days we feel a little bit more up, some days more down, more tense. It changes from day to day and this is a natural state. It is something like the weather, which changes from day to day. We can tell when there is a problem with our emotions when we experience the opposite; when our emotions start to surge; to become too strong, forceful or extreme, or stuck, rigid or one-sided.

There are many ways to read and influence our health.

Certain sports are played alone. Certain are played as part of a team. Weight lifting, for example, is usually done alone. Football, on the other hand, must be played as part of a team. It requires team coordination and the results depend on everybody either working or not working together. Team sports are more yang.

Then there is competition, either individual or group. Competition is yang, an expression of energy becoming more and more contracted or condensed. Yin activities are those in which energy moves out to the periphery. The game of solitaire is very yin! Then there are social card games, played with others for fun: those are more balanced. Serious gambling, with direct competition, is by far the most yang. A social card game is more harmonious, played just for fun, either won or lost. It is more yang than solitaire because it requires social interaction.

Any sport you do by yourself is yin and has a yinnizing effect. Anything you do in a group becomes more yang, whatever it is. If you add competition to that, it becomes even more yang.

I hope you choose a good activity for yourself today!

The temperature has been high lately. When it is hot, it is more easy to be hot-blooded! If someone is feeling too emotional, we describe them as too hot, excited, off-balance, volatile or irrational. We can also think of that person as being too wet or wishy washy or overflowing. However we describe them, one thing is clear: for emotion, we need liquid! The liquid can be internal or external. If you want to have an emotional trip, you go to Venice or Niagara Falls or to the sea. You usually choose a place where there is liquid – some canals, water flowing, a lake, the seashore.

Another way to feel more emotional is to use temperature, to go to a warmer place. Finland is a great country but not associated with arias. For emotions we need a higher temperature. If someone is passionate we call them hot. That means they have a lot of temperature, a lot of heat. Similarly, fire is very romantic. It brings more heat and activity to the environment. An electric heater is not very romantic.

We also use fire. More fire in cooking activates emotions as well. Whether it is fire in cooking or in the environment, both have that effect. Stimulants like coffee are the same. In Southern countries they make espresso very well. Since it is roasted, there is a lot of fire energy there, and furthermore it is made under pressure. When you drink espresso, a lot of energy or emotion is produced!

I hope you have enjoyed this discussion and not become too heated up.

Food is our strongest desire. No one can conquer his or her appetite. If you eat in an imbalanced way, your appetite always wins. For example, if you take something salty, you are forced to drink. You can’t escape because the salt needs the water to make balance. If you eat something dry, you have to drink. With the best modern packaging, we still can’t keep pretzels dry. It is impossible, because the dryness seeks moisture, seeks liquid. If you eat salty pretzels you seek liquid.

We can say, who is thirsty? Are you thirsty or are the pretzels thirsty?

When you eat the pretzels it is the same thing. There is no difference anymore.

If your condition is not balanced, then you can’t control your appetite. Even though you know what to do, you can’t do it. The secret is learning how to make a balance for your condition, so that you can naturally start to control your appetite. Everything changes to its opposite. The current approach to losing weight is restricting yourself. But when you restrict yourself, you want to eat. Of course to lose weight we have to have some restriction, but the overall approach has to be one of not restricting, of satisfying ourselves.

In macrobiotics we look at illness as a developmental progression. The first major stage, which is not really an illness itself in many cases, is our blood starting to become imbalanced. Our blood, which has hemoglobin, iron containing protein at the center, is important for maintaining our direction in life. When our blood quality is strong, it is easier to maintain a good direction. When our blood quality starts to become weaker, it is easier to lose our direction. Also, our sensitivity is affected. Once we have a disorder with our blood, which includes allergies and skin diseases, we become much more emotional than we were before and emotional sensitivity starts to change. We start to become more sensitive, overly sensitive, or start to lack sensitivity in certain areas. It can go from one extreme or the other.

From there, illness passes to the next level, emotional disorders. Here, emotional imbalances, which started on a previous level of blood, start to become more fixed or deeper. This then becomes our state of being, where we have free-floating fears or anxieties and become more depressive or angered. Our view of life or our approach to life starts at this point to be affected, in the area of so-called emotional disorders. Finally, from emotional disorders, we develop organ or gland problems. This is the area where most modern problems fall, heart disease as well as diabetes and chronic hypoglycemia. Intermittent hypoglycemia we can classify on the level of blood.

It is not by accident that emotions are between our blood quality and our organs or gland quality. Emotions play a kind of balancing or harmonizing role in our lives. We will look at this more next week.

When a life of yo-yo dieting failures grew into a roller coaster of emotional ups and downs, Bridgette Kossor searched for answers. READ ARTICLE

One of the observations I have had again and again in counseling is that so many people I see who have serious health problems have spent their lives doing what they didn’t want to be doing. And often, when that realization comes strongly enough, it is already a very serious situation. Our career means something like our course or plan of action through life. A lot of people think of career as what they do from nine to five and that the rest of the time is their life. However, career is like exercise, which must be a kind of activity that is part of our life, not separate from it. Career is the same. Our career and our life should be exactly the same.

When people ask me what I do, I don’t really know what to say. When I go to different countries and am asked my occupation, I don’t know what to say. Teacher? I don’t know. Macrobiotic person? Human being? That is my career. Basically, to understand careers we have to know about our basic nature, because whatever we do in life has to complement or build on our nature. But the real question is, what is the purpose of our career? What shall we look for in the first place in understanding our career? Of course we have practical considerations to make, we have to support ourselves, make a living. But that is the secondary or minor part. Really, a career means: How to realize our infinite nature. How to realize our endless nature. Day by day we should try to have different experiences which take us further toward our full potential in life, or our endless nature. You can say, to the realization of our oneness. In essence, if somebody is coming to macrobiotics because of health, then, if they are able to overcome a terminal illness, basically what they are doing is realizing their endless nature, their endless ability to create, not only sickness, but health.

Career should be the same thing, but in a much larger sense. Day by day, we should have this deepening realization of who we are and why we came here.

Eating a diet high in processed food increases the risk of depression, research suggests.

What is more, people who ate plenty of vegetables, fruit and fish actually had a lower risk of depression, the University College London team found. READ ARTICLE

If we think “Life is wonderful; life is a long process; it goes on and on” then we are not too rushed. We are open. We can receive things and let things out. But if we think “Life is very short, we really have a lot of things to do; I must work hard every day, accomplish a lot and make a lot of money” then our minds get very closed, very tight. Whatever else we do with our diet and activity, in this case we are constantly sending heavy yang energy throughout our whole body. Throughout our so-called spiritual channel, our chakras, throughout every meridian, every cell. Very heavy condensed vibrations. These heavy condensed vibrations keep generating more pressure. Even though we are trying to eat well, in a balanced way, and have good activity, this heavy yang energy works against that. At the same time, opportunities are being shut of. We close things off because we do not allow openness, or for things to come in.

If we try to orient our view of life, to change how we see things, then automatically we adjust our condition through that, which affects our diet, activity and everything else, including how we choose foods.

Some people are willing to change their diet, but not their view of life. We like to hold on to certain views. We think that is us, so that is our security. However, by trying to hold on to those views, we often block ourselves from changing. We don’t open ourselves to new change and possibilities. This is an important consideration. There is a common point in the progression of illness, which is that as it progresses, our point of view gets more and more stuck and unchangeable. We cannot get away from the effect of what we receive from our minds and send down through our bodies. Choosing grains and vegetables automatically creates more openness. We also need to try to create more harmonious activity and a harmonious lifestyle. This includes a view of life that is accepting, embracing etc. Otherwise, we constantly generate pressure, difficulties and heaviness.

Living free from electricity, radio waves and EMF’s, etc. and communing with nature with no means of escape is an incredible experience and contrast to most of our daily lives. Eating wood fire cooked food in such a pristine environment has two unique benefits. The first is that it creates an unusually strong and deep physical and energetic alignment among the teachers, staff and participants. The second is that the environment and wood fire cooked food alkalize people’s conditions very quickly creating a positive, upbeat and helpful attitude among everyone very quickly that deepened by the day.

All together I felt that the learning was more organic and deep than is possible in other situations. I realized from being there that macrobiotic education in natural surroundings together with hearty cooking has a unique learning potential.