On leaving and remembering..

I have the travel bug as kind of a permanent state. Travel does many things for me - it expands my horizons in seeing the different “normals” that exist in everyday life and I get a little window into the food, language and cultural practices of people born somewhere different from me. I also use travel as a way to get closer to things that matter to me when I notice that I have slipped away from these very things.

When I was in my 20s, I spent at least a month out of every year traveling in either Latin America or Asia. I was a backpacker, but what I was mainly interested in was not taking the cheapest travel possible but rather investigating how simply I could live. Could I survive for 1 to 3 months with just 2 pairs of jeans and a few shirts? Could I eat just rice and beans for days on end.. and be content? The answer, as you may have guessed, is YES. I am the most happy and at home in myself when I have the smallest consumer footprint.. (although maybe living on just rice and beans isn’t the best idea from a health perspective;))

I still travel really simply and am looking for the same reminders I looked for in my 20s. Orienting towards simplicity and inspiration for work and daily life.. but I do eat more than rice and beans these days.

Here in Tenerife, I get back to my usual daily routines (dinacharya) but in a slightly different and inspired way. I am staying by the beach so rather than greet the sun with sun salutations, I literally walk to the beach and look at the sun as she rises. The retinas are the portals to the brain and greeting the sun in this way sets my circadian rhythms to match what is happening with the sun and the tides. If your sleep got off in the last months like mine did, literally looking at the sun as it rises is a VERY good practice for balancing your circadian rhythms. Then I take a walk on the beach to wake up my physical and energetic body up before I wake up my mind. (I had gotten into a bad habit of looking at my phone first thing. Ugh! What a difference this makes!) And sit on the beach for a short meditation. All SUPER important if we want to live a full life connected to spirit, and not just a life lived in our minds. :)

I eat whatever is at the few local restaurants nearby and happens to look good and in season (including the yummy Spanish wine cuz hey, life is about enjoying simple pleasures - in moderation of course :) I watch the sun set from my balcony or the local restaurant not just because it looks so damn pretty but because it improves my sleep so much. Same reasoning as above. Muchas gracias sol!

In between, I do some work like this newsletter, a coaching call or online yoga class, or planning my next event listed below but it feels less like work because I feel more alive. And more GRATEful..

For me, the break from how I had been doing things always does something to reset my mood, my body and my mind. I have new ideas and feel more creative because I am living in the daily reality of the people in my adopted spot, and not the reality I acquired back home in Munich.

I am also rewarding myself for finishing nutrition school. So you are looking at the newest Nutritional Therapy Association graduate. For now, I am seeing people one on one and incorporating nutritional science’s approach to diet into Ayurvedas’. They are very complimentary and I am continually amazed at how smart and centuries ahead of time the Ancients were. And how much modern science backs up what the ancients have known for over 4000 years. Incredible.

Stay healthy and keep your head up. I would love to have you in my Spring course or on retreat in Greece or Spain this summer.