5 Questions to Help You learn from Last Year and Make the Most of This Year

This year instead of just setting New Year intentions, I looked back first to see what I could learn from last year. The results were revealing, and I feel good about what I learned and the intentions I ended up setting. In this article I’ll share the journaling process I used. It works for New Year rituals, but it also works for other endings/beginnings too.

All "Empowered Thinking" Posts for 2021

Here you'll find everything I wrote in 2021 in the category of "Empowered Thinking."  There's also a companion post that lists all the 2021 posts in my "Practical Skills" category. 

Difficult Emotions are Allies in Disguise

This started from a gathering of few recent entries in my personal journal and grew into a post about difficult emotions, where they might be coming from, what might be amplifying them, and why it's important to be gentle with yourself when they show up.

Ginger in a Real Food Garden

Ginger has thrived at our place since I learned to think about what it gives and what it needs in terms of its connections to the other plants around it, to me as the ginger-grower, and to me and my family as the ginger-users.  

Planning a Food Garden Comes Down to Connections

Plan a food garden that’s easy to maintain and use, by paying attention to the connections between the plants in the garden and the gardener's needs.

Get off the Bus

In this article, the “bus” I’m talking about is entire populations of people all gabbling without listening to one another and without thinking clearly. The bus is hurtling toward a cliff, with no-one in the driver’s seat. The opinions, the conflict, the angst, are all fueling the bus.

Here’s how to understand what’s going on, and how to disengage from the insanity.

3 Ways to Bring Ourselves Home

Last week, I wrote a post in which I explained what I mean by the term, "empowered thinking." One of the things I said about "thinking," is that you have a limited amount of mental space and it's up to you to choose what to fill it with. In this post, I'll share 3 practices for using our thinking to "bring ourselves home."

Empowered Thinking for Deep Change

We're so in the habit of controlling each other or being controlled that we've forgotten how to think for ourselves. We're so overwhelmed by the challenges we face that we assume there's nothing we can do (and it's all our fault).  And we assume that controlling each other is necessary and failing was inevitable because humans are just basically bad. 

Let's explore how we might replace these habits and assumptions with more empowered ways of thinking.

Loofah - Grow Your Own Sponges

Loofahs are easy to grow. You can eat them when they're small, and if you let them get big they make great bathroom sponges. They also make pretty good kitchen sponges. Best of all, when they wear out you can compost them to feed next year’s loofahs.

An Introduction to Sweet, Crunchy Yacon

It's yacon planting time in the Southern Hemisphere tropics and semi-tropics. Yacon tubers are sweet, crunchy, and delicious raw or cooked, and are a firm favorite in our family. This post is a quick introduction to yacon and my experiences with growing and eating it.