Recently I listened to a Podcast called "The Self-Led Journey Through Addiction Recovery and Trauma." It was about something called Internal Family Systems, which is an inner healing modality that I had heard of but had never explored.

I often turn on a podcast to listen while I apply myself to household tasks, as an incentive to get on with them. Sometimes that backfires because the podcast conversation is so interesting that I keep dropping the task at hand to take notes. This was one of those times, and this post came out of the notes I took and the related ideas that added themselves on as I went along. To make for a less interrupted reading experience, I've listed most of the references at the bottom rather than linking to them in the text.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not a therapist. This is entirely my own interpretation, part of my personal search for what works for me.

What is an internal family system?

We think of ourselves as a single entity, “I.” We say, “I am [____].” You can insert whatever labels you want in the space, and that supposedly defines you as an individual. 

But sometimes we also say things like, “There’s a part of me that wants [____].” Or,“There’s a part of me that wonders if [___].” Or,“Part of me wants [____] but another part of me doesn’t.”

Turns out, from an Internal Family Systems (IFS) perspective, all those "parts" are real.

Parts in exile

According to IFS, in our "internal family" we have two kinds of “parts.” The first kind are called exiled parts.

Exiled parts are lost fragments of you that went into hiding when you were a little child or even a baby.

These parts “split off” and went into hiding when you had the experience of feeling emotionally dis-regulated (over-stimulated, threatened, overwhelmed, unloved, unwanted, shamed etc) and there was no calm, attuned adult available to help you get back into a state of emotional regulation.

Whatever age you were when this happened, that lost part of you got "frozen" or stuck at that stage of development. It gets locked away to wait until you as an adult can reach back into yourself, rescue it, and help it grow and develop as it would have if it hadn't had to go into hiding. 

A state of emotional regulation: home base

Before I introduce the second kind of "part," I want to say more about what I mean by “a state of emotional regulation.¹

I think of a state of emotional regulation as a state of unconditional love and trust. I also think of it as being the natural state of well-being for a baby, a child, and actually, any human being.

A baby or child expects to receive help from a trusted adult anytime they lose that state, for support and guidance to get back to it.

A mature human knows how to lead themselves back to a state of emotional regulation as needed. (An adult who can’t get herself back into a state of emotional regulation after an upset has been taken over by one of her parts; she’s temporarily unable to access or inhabit her resourced, adult self. More on that in a bit.)

In a sense, the trusting, open state of complete emotional regulation is “home-base,” from which a child can safely explore the world and from which an adult can effectively relate to others, create worthwhile things, or do meaningful work.

Now stay with me. I’m going to give you an analogy for what it's like to be emotionally dis-regulated, and unable to calm yourself. 

As a child when you had experiences of coming un-moored from home base and finding that there was no calm, loving adult to lead you back and re-attach you, it was like being an astronaut floating in space whose attachment to the mother-ship has broken.

The astronaut drifts away helplessly, knowing she is going to die. There's no-one to bring her back and help her get re-attached.

When this happened to you in childhood, it was as if you said, “Never again. I will never allow myself to feel pain and terror like this, ever, ever again.”

So to achieve that aim, you sent the vulnerable parts of you, the parts that felt that pain, into exile. And you formed “protector parts” to make sure the hurting parts would never ever come out to have their pain felt again.

Protector parts

Your protector parts express themselves via behaviors/coping strategies/patterns that you formed to protect your child self.

They might be things like your “controller,” who tries to keep everything under control. Or your “avoider,” who scans the horizon and people’s faces for hints of danger and moves you away from things it thinks are a threat. Your “procrastinator” might be doing something similar. Or perhaps your inner family includes an “over-achiever” or “perfectionist” who tries to get everything right so you’ll be beyond criticism.

You get the drift. There are endless variations.

And remember, all these parts are functioning at the level of a small, lost child or even a baby. (No parent can ever be perfect. All of us get touched by experience like these, although of course the details, the frequency, and the intensity vary.)

When your “buttons are pushed”

Most of us are familiar with the expressions “my buttons were pushed,” or “I was triggered.” It’s when you find yourself having an extreme over-reaction to a situation or person. Its also when you find yourself unable to let go of it – hours or days later you’re still stewing over it and/or losing sleep over it.

Those two things—reacting out of proportion to the situation and/or being unable to let it go and return yourself to emotional regulation—tell you that one or more of your parts has been triggered or activated. The activated part has taken over. And sometimes, two or more parts all want to take over at once, each convinced it can do a better job of keeping you safe than any other part can.

With these immature child parts warring within us, it's no wonder our outer landscapes (which faithfully mirror our inner landscapes) are littered with misunderstandings, conflict, avoidance behaviors, and pain.

A resourced adult Self - the parent

Fortunately there is one more component to your inner family that we haven’t talked about yet. Allow me to introduce your Self, with a capital "S."

Your Self is the part of you that is not a part. One way to think of it is to call it your “core Self.” This is your resourced, rational adult Self, who has full access to everything you’ve learned and all the life skills of the adult you are now.

This is also the part of you that’s connected to the Divine, in whatever ways you want to think about that. Or, if you prefer to think in more scientific terms, your Self is connected to what 20^th and 21^st century science might call “the underlying field of Intelligence.”

When you’re grounded in your core Self, from that place you can observe the behaviors of your parts, you can be the witness – as opposed to getting caught up in one of your parts and allowing that part to hijack you and become all of who you are.

Observing your parts—paying attention to all the feelings, emotions, sensations, imagery, etc, inside of you—is a way out of the trap of thinking and acting as if you are those feelings. It's a way out of feeling that an activated part is all of who you are. 

Your core Self, whom you could also think of as the Observer or the Witness, brings compassionate awareness to all that you are made up of. This is awareness without judgement. It’s acceptance, curiosity, openness towards all your parts.

Why your parts act out, and how to help them realize they don't need to do that any more

It's helpful to get very familiar with this practice of giving attention to your parts,  because this is what your parts have been begging you for. This is why they "act out" -- become activated and try to take over. It's to get your attention.

Your undivided attention and unconditional acceptance is the soothing, healing attunement that they missed out on back when the trouble started. Giving it to them now--no matter how many decades have passed--helps them begin to feel safe enough to relax their obsessive grip on the steering wheel of your life.

Your observing Self asks of your inside parts, “What's up?” and,"Really? And what else?" and then really, truly, pays full attention to the answers that come. The answers may not come in words -- remember you're talking to a baby or a child.

(When I do this exercise, which I'm learning can be done in almost any situation and can take anything from a second or two to an hour or more, I pay attention to things like:

• feelings or emotions like fear, anxiety, confusion, resistance, opposition, rage, grief
• physical sensations like tightness, shortness of breath, or pain
• imagined colors, shapes, or textures that I can sometimes find inside myself.)

The point is to pay attention and become aware of and attuned to whatever is happening inside you, even briefly. It will get easier with practice.

Then, from that place of compassionate attunement, your adult Self can begin to lead your child parts back to the mother-ship. Through attunement and non-judgemental presence, your adult Self helps your child parts re-attach to the home base of acceptance and belonging.

As you practice this, ever so gradually your child parts will learn that they can relax. Exiled parts can come out of hiding, and protector parts can let go of the controls a little bit. They'll never disappear--you wouldn't want them to--but they'll soften and allow you to lead them. They''l develop into a cohesive, cooperative, functional family.

The term "inner healing" can be misleading, because your parts don't need you to heal them. Your parts are not sick or broken, so this is not about fixing them. It’s about observing them, holding them, seeing them and loving them exactly as they are. When you turn your attention inward and ask without judgement, “What is it like in here?” you step into the role of Witness or Observer. Through that portal you can step into your adult Self.

It’s not easy, no. It may be the hardest work you'll ever do in your entire life. It certainly is for me. But it’s also not complicated.

It's worth it

Accessing your core Self, the parent for your inner family, is like building a muscle or learning a skill. It takes time and repetition.

It’s worth it.

When you do the work to develop your core Self and to inhabit it, and from there to bring the whole of your inner family into emotional regulation, you are developing the capacities that our wider world requires of us now.

The clarity and accuracy of this as a paradigm for what is happening in the outer world is very clear to me.

Your parts are not broken. They don’t need to be controlled, changed, or fixed. Its just that the system they are part of has gotten out of balance and twisted them into what they are. When you can inhabit your larger Self more often and more fully, you can lead all the parts back into balance.

Then each part can make its unique contribution to the whole, and there can be peace inside you and power flowing freely through you.

And so it is with the outer world too. Collectively we are being invited to inhabit a larger understanding of who we are. We're being invited to bring compassionate awareness to the impulses we feel to judge, condemn, and control the “other,” so that we can help all the different and diverse parts re-align, re-connect, re-balance, and invite them to contribute their gifts to the whole.

Welcome your parts

As an adult who was wounded and fragmented by the absence of attuned carers at critical points during your infancy and childhood, you have the potential now to tend to your inner family and evolve it toward wholeness. In the process you will be practicing how to do the same thing for whatever is wounded and fragmented in your outer world.

A wound is a portal, I read somewhere. Open to your pain, turn inward, bathe your inner parts with attention, acceptance and compassion. Feel the release, the relief, the energy that is freed up when your inner parts feel safe enough to soften. Let the tears wash through you. And repeat. Repeat. Repeat. 

Your parts are immature and inexperienced. They've been trying to keep your pain under wraps because they don't know that feeling pain is one of the processes that matures us into the kinds of adults who can do the work that needs to be done. 

Welcome your parts, pain and all. Yes, even THAT part. Especially that one.  

References and resources, including "shadow" stuff

Besides being interested in this concept of an "inner family of parts," I’m also very interested in the concept of the “shadow.” "The shadow" is a name sometimes given to unconscious aspects of our personality that don't conform with our conscious ideas about who we should be, and so we repress and deny them. (We also unknowingly project these aspects of ourselves onto others.)

 As I listened to the "inner family" concept I realized that the "parts" hiding away inside of ourselves are part of what makes up our shadow. I've mentioned the shadow and the things hiding in it, in these posts:

• "What Will the Full Moon Reveal For You?" a post on journaling prompts to use around the time of the full moon, to help reveal whats hidden "in the shadows."
• "3 Ways to Bring Ourselves Home" 
• in "Difficult Emotions Are Allies In Disguise," I share some personal journal entries and ideas on how and why to turn toward uncomfortable emotions -- parts of our shadow -- when they arise.
  

The podcast I listened to that started this post off was "The Self-Led Journey Through Addiction Recovery and Trauma"

Some resources about Internal Family Systems:

• The book, No Bad Parts,  by Richard Schwartz, PhD.
  
• Internal Family Systems Training Australia
  
• About Internal Family Systems
• Internal Family Systems Institute

Two articles I enjoyed that further explain inner family and shadow work concepts:

• "The Most Effective Way to Practice Shadow Work"
  
• "How To Access Greater Healing Through Internal Family Systems"

The Path is Everywhere   and other work by Matt Licata, PhD. (Note: I really enjoy Matt Licata's short posts. But I recommend The Path is Everywhere with a feeling of reservation because although it did contain some jems, it was a very difficult book to read. That may partly be because I was barely ready for it, and also because it could have done with a good going over by a better editor than whoever edited it. I can't speak for his other books, which I haven't read.)

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This post is about how our social routines and our physical environments shape our grocery shopping habits and nudge us in our buying decisions. Once you see these influences at work in your life, you'll be able to respond to them in more deliberate ways rather than just being prompted by them without realizing it.

This is Strategy #5 in a series of strategies for reducing our reliance on the globalized industrial food system. If you haven't read the previous two posts in this series please do that first, then come back to this one. The previous posts are:

1. "3 Supermarket Strategies to Help You Spend Less, Tread Lighter, and Live Better"
2. "Strategy #4: to Help Parents Spend Less at the Supermarket"

Who is in charge of your grocery shopping habits?

We think we're running our lives with rational thinking, logic, and will power. But studies show that in actual fact our environment has much more influence on our behavior than we realize. (I wrote about how our environment can distract us from our goals or guide us toward them, here.)

We'll start this post with some examples of how our physical and social environments shape our habits. Then we'll look at how the environment inside the supermarket is designed to prompt us to buy more, and I'll share a specific example of how a family routine was prompting me to go shopping more often than I needed to.

Finally, I'll give you some suggestions for how you can make use of all of this and become more aware and deliberate about your shopping choices.

How our environments shape us

For a very obvious example of how our social environment can support or hinder us in making changes to our behavior, think about a habit like smoking. If you were a smoker who wanted to stop, it would be essential to put yourself in environments where no-one else smokes. Hanging around with smokers would make it extremely difficult to break the habit and sustain the change for the long term. 

Our physical environment shapes us too, literally as well as figuratively. For example if you took all the raised seating out of your living area and replaced it with a mat and cushions on the floor, you'd gradually adjust to sitting on the floor with associated changes in posture, flexibility, and mobility over time.

James Clear, author on habits and behavior change, calls this “choice architecture,” and says it’s “the number one driver of better habits.” (He should know; he wrote a New York Times best seller on the topic of how to change our behavior.)

Marketers know all about how our environments influence our behaviors, and they make full use of it. In the next section, I'll show you how the environment inside a supermarket is specifically designed to prompt you to buy more than you had planned to when you walked in there.

How "a few things" becomes a trolley-load

Everything about the way supermarkets are laid out and the ways the shelves are packed is designed to prompt you to buy: 

• the size of the shopping trolley (research shows that you buy more if your trolley looks empty)
• delicious bakery smells wafting over you as enter, to whet your appetite for all the foods you're about to be choosing
  
• fresh fruit and veg near the entrance to give an impression of healthful freshness that lingers for the rest of your visit and to give you the feeling that you've already selected healthy stuff, so further along it's ok to indulge in a few extra "treats"
  
• placement of specific items at eye height for you and your kids 
• the placement of items on hooks that protrude out a little from the shelves and are a different, but related, category to the other items in that aisle 
• stacks of snack foods at the ends of the aisles - high traffic areas that you can't avoid passing by
• and of course, at the check out, the magazines for you to help yourself to as you wait in line to pay, and the sugar snacks for you to pick up since you're now hungry and light headed from all the stimuli you've just been subjected to

If I were a supermarket manager, perhaps I'd make similar decisions. I hope I wouldn't, but then I'd probably go broke or get sacked. I'm glad I'm not a supermarket manager. 

***

The next section is an example of how our weekly family routine was putting me in close proximity to the supermarket which was prompting me to go shopping twice as often as I needed to, and what I did about it. 

How a good book is helping me take care of my grocery shopping habits

This example showed up in my Supermarket Notebook a while ago. (I introduced the idea of keeping a Supermarket Notebook in Strategy #1.)

First, some context: we live in a rural area and we’re home educators. Our daughter does dance lessons every Tuesday afternoon during school term, which is a reason for a weekly town trip. During school holidays, there’s no dance class so there's no regular weekly requirement to go to town.

Now, to the point of the story: a while ago, I realized that during school holidays we only go shopping about once every two to three weeks. But, during school term we seem to need to go shopping once a week. On dance class day. Now isn't that interesting?

Being in town on dance class day, in close proximity to the supermarket, was prompting me to “just go in and get a few things.” And then before you know it, "a few things" turns into a trolley-load. Which, as we discussed in the previous section, isn't by coincidence.

Now, I go shopping every second week, at the most, all year round. But how did I break the habit of weekly shopping during school term?

Every second week when I drive my daughter to dance class, I take a good book. I park outside dance, let my daughter out, then lean the seat back and take out my book. (Ahhhhh... I LOVE a good book. And as I said in this post, reading is a great way to immerse yourself in something that makes you feel good.)

So there I stay, reading my book rather than marinating in marketing messages, until it's time to drive home. I save on fuel and grocery costs and I get to relax for an hour and a half that I would otherwise have spent running around shopping. 

Necessity is the mother of invention

This strategy helps me re-affirm to myself and my family that we don't need the grocery store every week. Our efforts at growing some of our own food, making our own bathroom and cleaning products, and generally being as frugal as we can, are all paying off.

But what if it doesn't work? What if you get near the end of the "non-shopping week" and realize you forgot to stock up enough on this or that, and now it isn't going to last until the next shopping trip?

Necessity is the mother of invention. By putting yourself in this predicament you have actually set up your environment--specifically that empty spot on the bathroom or pantry shelf or in the fridge--to prompt you to be more resourceful than you otherwise would have to be.

The consumer economy wants you to be reliant on shopping frequently. But you don't have to be. You can train yourself, gradually, to be less and less reliant on the quick and easy fixes that are dangled in front of us like peanuts for monkeys.

Take action

Understanding why supermarkets are set up the way they are enables us to avoid falling for the trickery quite so easily. And seeing how our behaviors are linked together in our routines enables us to tweak our routines to support the kinds of behavior change we want in our lives. 

Here are some suggestions for ways to use your Supermarket Notebook (from the first post in this series) to figure out how you're currently being influenced and decide what you want to change about that. 

1. Think about what prompts you to go grocery shopping as often as you do. Are there things in your physical environment, your family routines or your social routines that make it easy or logical for you to go on certain days? Do you really need to go that often? Could you consolidate your trips so that you go less often, shop more efficiently, and build your "resourcefulness muscles" between grocery shopping trips?
   
2.  Think about how your buying decisions are being influenced once you get into the supermarket. Go through the list above, of ways that the supermarket environment is set up to influence your choices. Which ones have you been falling for? Remember, they're subtle. They're designed to work without you being aware of them. What can you do to make yourself impervious to them? (There are tips in Strategy #3 and Strategy #4 that might help.)
3. Scribble the answers to all these questions on the Notes Pages in your Supermarket Notebook. You haven't tried to change anything yet. Just begin by getting it all out on those pages so you can see what's really going on. Gradually (give it time) you'll see ways you might be able to make changes. Write those ideas down as they come to you. 
4. Try one idea at a time (remember Strategy #2, take it in small steps) and write down the outcomes so you'll have a record of what you've tried, what helped you spend less or shop smarter, what didn't, and what you learned in the process. 

An important tip is that useful, actionable answers may not come right away to the questions you ask in your notebook. Be patient. Ask again next week, and the week after, until gradually the answers and insights start to flow. Give yourself time to find ways to make positive changes to your routines and habits that will really stick. 

References and resources

Here are two short videos, (each a little over 2 minutes) and a short read (less than 2 minutes) about how supermarkets are designed, from a consumer advocacy website called FoolProofMe.org, who suggest that we "make healthy skepticism a habit" in this commercialized world.

Are You Being Super-Marketed at the Grocery Store? - video

The Untold Truth About Grocery Stores! - video

The Low-down on Super-Marketing - short post

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In a recent post, “3 Strategies to help you spend less at the Supermarket,” I said I believe we can gradually re-build food sovereignty in our local communities by making tiny shifts in our thinking, values, and habits.

These are shifts that help us move away from the supermarket giants towards healthier, more ethical, and still affordable ways of sourcing our needs. I see them as very effective because they address several needs at once:

Furthermore, we're addressing these needs while doing something we'd be doing anyway: feeding our families. 

Envisioning the food system we want

Many people have already made big shifts. For example, one reader who commented on the last post has drastically cut her supermarket reliance by shopping at the local co-op and using a local milk man and green grocer.

That’s an inspiring picture for us to hold in our minds. Imagine if, in every neighborhood, you could trade eggs for excess greens with a neighbor, receive your milk from a farmer you know by name, and shop for your other needs at a local co-op, knowing that your dollar helps keep it thriving².

Lots of neighborhoods don’t yet have access to food systems like this. How do we build them?

I don’t have a quick and easy answer, unfortunately. But I do feel sure that if we just do what we can to put one foot in front of the other toward more localized and ethical food systems, things will shift. It's not possible or necessary to have this all sorted out by lunchtime tomorrow.

Just to be on the look out for what steps you can take and to take them when you can, is enough. 

So, with that vision of healthy food systems in mind, here is another strategy to help you on your journey of small steps away from industrial food and toward healthy, ethical food. This strategy is especially for parents.

(Please, if you haven't read the previous post with the first 3 strategies, do that first. Then come back to this post.)

Strategy #4: Set yourself and your child/ren up for success before you leave home

What could you do before you leave home, to set yourself and your children up for success at the supermarket? Your exact answer will be unique to you and your children, of course, but here are some ideas and suggestions to get you started.

Scribble one or more of these down in your Supermarket Notebook (from Strategy #1) and make it happen next time you go shopping.

Eat before you shop

If you can, eat a decent meal before you go shopping. At least have a snack that wont spike your blood sugar and then leave you feeling hungry an hour later. The reason for this is that the last thing you want to be feeling as you push that trolley along the aisles is hunger or light-headedness. Hunger triggers buying decisions we otherwise wouldn't make.

Feed the kids too! And/or consider having healthy snacks for them in your handbag that you can reach for if you need to. If your child has a snack to much on, especially an interesting one that they don’t get very often, they’ll be less interested in snatching things off the shelves.

When my kids were little, one of the first items I would buy at the supermarket was a small packet of soft cheese for them to much on as they sat in the trolley. I would keep the empty packet, and pay for it at the check out counter along with everything else. It was a special treat that the kids loved, it kept them occupied, and it didn't spike their blood sugar or excite them.

Supermarket-only toys

Consider keeping a  supermarket-only toy ready for your small child/ren that’s just for playing with while they’re sitting in the shopping trolley. It’s difficult to compete with the novelty and glitz that a small child sees in a supermarket, but a toy that’s just for her, that she never sees any other time, will help a bit.

(One word of caution: I never used screens as toys or distractions for my kids. Now that they’re older they use the computer to research things they are interested in and to do creative work, but they have never used screens for gaming or socializing. In fact, the creators of digital products expressly say that they don’t allow their own kids to play with them -- which should be instructive for the rest of us!³)

Enlist the kids' help instead of fighting with them

Have a plan for how your older child is going to help with the shopping rather than hinder it. If the child is old enough, consider giving him his very own short list of items that he is responsible for noticing and putting in the trolley. The list can grow as his capacity grows.

A child who feels that their contributions are valued will be much more cooperative than one who is constantly hearing, “No! Don’t touch that! Put that back!”

Be clear

Be clear with your kids before you leave home about why you’re going to the supermarket.

(Hint: it’s not to spend your heard-earned money on spur-of-the-moment purchases and strange substances masquerading as food, to line the pockets of wealthy executives at the expense of your health and well-being.)

Consider having a short family meeting, perhaps during a meal the day before you go shopping, where you assert some variation of: “Here’s what is on our list. We are only going to buy anything that is not on our list if it meets such and such criteria.” An example of the criteria might be: it’s a real food or a needed product that is on special and has a good use-by date.

Your kids won't remember the details the first few times you do this, but it will be clear to them that you have a plan. And s/he who has a plan invariably gets to lead the way.

Building self-directed lives

Even very young children will gradually take all of this on board. You’ll be shaping their supermarket expectations ahead of time, which reduces disappointments and friction.

You’ll also be teaching them something incredibly valuable: how to hold to a meaningful course of action rather than be swayed by the noise and distractions that are aimed at parting us with our our money and our ability to lead a self-directed life that respects other lives on Earth.

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I intend for our grandchildren to grow up connected to their food supply and liberated from the consumer economy. When they learn about the destructive mono-cultures and global-corporate supply chains that supplied the supermarkets we relied on, they’ll wonder what we were thinking. 

Not to mention what they might wonder when they hear about the toilet paper debacle.

I've been thinking a lot about what we can do to make it easier on ourselves to begin (or continue) to gradually replace the weekly supermarket shopping trip with something healthier. Here's some of what I've come up with so far. 

Basic principles and broad strategies

We know that most of the stuff on supermarket shelves is not great for our health, and that it’s terrible for the health of ecosystems, farming communities, and local economies.

On top of that, we can see food prices rising as packets and bottles get smaller (or their contents do). And then there’s the skyrocketing cost of the fuel required for driving to the supermarket.

Whether we view it in terms of health, ethics, or affordability, it's making less and less sense to drive to the supermarket frequently.

But how can we find the time and develop the resources we need to become independent of the supermarket? How will we replace our weekly supermarket trip with affordable, local, healthy, ethical ways of sourcing our needs? What would that even look like, and what are the steps to get there?

Without sitting down and discussing your personal circumstances, I can't suggest how you should embark on this journey or which ways to go. But there are some basic principles we can apply to the process of figuring this out. I’ve been thinking about them (a lot, for a long time) and I’ve come up with some broad strategies that might be helpful. 

The first is to know where you're at right now, and to do that you're going to need a way of keeping track of your supermarket-related habits.

Strategy #1: Create a "Supermarket Notebook" 

Before you can make a map, you have to get to know the terrain. You have to figure out where you're at right now and what the habits and tendencies are that have put you there.

Get a dedicated note book and label it your "Supermarket Notebook." Then you can keep your shopping lists instead of throwing them away after each shopping trip (or not having a list at all), and you can gradually build up a record of your buying habits. Date each list, and scribble at the bottom what you spent. Or staple the receipt to the page. 

Keep the next page blank, for notes. That way, as you're writing your shopping list or when you get home and you're stapling your receipt in, you'll have space to scribble down a few notes about whatever comes to mind that might be relevant.

You could also turn to the last page/s of the note book and put down a few notes about how  you’d like this journey to look, why its important to you, and/or where you’d like it to take you to.

Personally, being a bit of a nerd, I keep supermarket note book and a spreadsheet on the computer. 

The spreadsheet has columns like “fruit and veg,” “cold section,” “packaged/processed,” “bathroom,” “laundry,” etc. I have one I created years ago with what things I regularly bought in each column before I started this journey. And I have more recent versions that I fill in from time to time so I can see my progress.

When I feel despondent about how much I still rely on the supermarket, it's encouraging to be able to look back and see how far we've actually come. 

Strategy #2: Keep the steps small

It’s important to be kind to yourself in this process.

Ditching the supermarket is a bit like trying to eat a whole elephant: the only way to do it is one bite at a time. You only need one criteria for how to tackle it: KEEP THE BITES SMALL. You'll never get your elephant eaten if you choke yourself on the first few bites. When we want the changes we're making to actually stick, bigger or faster is definitely not better. 

As you build the habit of keeping your “supermarket notebook” up to date, you’ll already have achieved something that’s worth a small celebration: bringing more mindfulness and awareness to your shopping habits and needs. How will you celebrate this first, important step?

As you live your life, go shopping, and take notes, be on the look out for small improvements that suggest themselves to you as you scribble and scan your notes.

If you see two you could implement this week, I suggest you restrain yourself. Use just one of them, pat yourself on the back, and save the second one for next week. 

You never know, you might even build up a backlog of delicious ideas you can look forward to trying out

As you make each small change, note them down on your "notes pages."  This way you'll have a “breadcrumb trail” to come back to if (when) you temporarily fall of the wagon and revert back to where you started.

Strategy #3: Get Clear on What You Really Need

Ask questions. Question everything, because there's always something to learn. 

In the context of writing your shopping list and shopping at the supermarket, I have two kinds of questions for you to ask about the products you’re considering.:

1. questions about whether you really need an item 
2. questions about who is influencing your thinking about this item

Lets take a look at both of these types of questions as they relate to your supermarket shopping habits.

Questions about whether you really need something

Ask yourself, “Do I/we really need this? What would happen if I didn’t buy this?”

If the answer is “Yes, I really need this,” then go ahead. Put it on the list, put it in the trolley, and move on.
(As time goes by your concepts of what you really need might change, but there’s no hurry. Remember: be kind to yourself!)

But maybe the answer that comes up might be more like, “After a year of not buying this I would have saved a small fortune and kept a small mountain of trash out of landfill.”

If that kind of answer comes up, you know what to do. Leave  it off the list, and leave it on the shelf.

Questions about who’s influencing your thinking

Items on supermarket shelves that our grandparents never heard of or imagined have become “necessities” today because of shared ideas that nobody is questioning. 

Now I have a surprise for you (not). Most of those shared ideas, if not all of them, were planted in the public psyche over the last 100+ years by clever, manipulative marketing. 

Who runs the marketing campaigns? Profit-focused corporations. Not health-focused. Not ethics-focused. Profit-focused. 

Are you surprised? Me neither. Ask yourself, “Who says I need this thing in my life? My mother? People on my Facebook feed?  Someone who will profit from my purchase?”

We love our mothers. We love our friends and family on Facebook or where-ever we interact with them (hopefully that’s in person at least some of the time). But loving them doesn’t mean we have to shop like they do or live like they do.

And as for the profit-focused corporations funding the advertising campaigns that generate that sense of inadequacy and lack and the need to keep up with the Jones’s… well as far as I’m concerned, they can go jump in a lake.

So those were the first three strategies I came up with when I asked myself, “how could we make it easier to begin (or continue) to de-throne the supermarket and its destructive supply chain and replace it with something healthier?”

I hope you've found this helpful or thought-provoking, and I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions to help my thinking along!

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What are my intentions (what new “seeds” do I want to plant) for my inner garden? What new beginnings do I want to make in my life?

What do I see growing in my life?  

Or (if I see “weeds” growing in my life) am I "fertilizing and watering" the wrong things? What adjustments do I need to make?

Am I using my resources (time, attention) wisely in my inner garden?

How am I doing in upholding the intention/s I set, or tending to the seeds I planted, at the beginning of spring?

What am I "harvesting?"

What results do I see; what grew from the seeds I planted at the beginning of spring and tended all through the spring and the summer? 

What good things do I see in my harvest basket, things I can be grateful for?

What difficult or uncomfortable things do I find amongst the harvest? Do I see old, no-longer-useful ways of being and doing that need to be broken down and composted?

How might I turn the “weeds” (lessons, insights, realizations) from the previous seasons of growth, into fertility (wisdom, perspective, increased inner resilience) for next spring?

What do I want to let go of now, so that I don't take it into the next cycle with me?

What do I envision for the next round of seasons in my life? What kind of seeds will I plant, when spring comes again?

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Turmeric - an easy to grow super-food

Turmeric grows so easily in the tropics and subtropics, and has an insanely long list of health benefits. That has led to a plethora of information on the internet, mostly aimed at selling turmeric in one form or another. And, I'm sure, all well-intentioned.

The good news is that if you grow even a little of your own food, live in the tropics or subtropics or can dedicate some sheltered space to it, turmeric is incredibly easy to grow yourself.

Turmeric enjoys the same growing conditions as ginger, which I described here. The only difference is that turmeric is tougher. I've tried my darnedest to neglect my turmeric out of existence, and it just keeps popping up, year after year.

And when you eat the whole food, fresh from the soil at your place, you can bin all those other supplements, save yourself a packet, and enjoy all those fancy health benefits without having to sort through the bullet point lists of what they are. This is RealFood. 

The most delicious way to enjoy fresh, whole turmeric that I know of is in a hot mug of turmeric milk, also called golden milk, of Ayurvedic origin.

Golden Milk Recipe

Here's our basic recipe:

• a few bits of turmeric root (enough to give 1 to 2 tablespoons when grated) fresh from the garden, washed under running water, towel dried, and grated (don't bother peeling)
• (optional) a small bit of ginger root (about a teaspoon grated). You don't have to peel this, either. Note that if you use super fresh ginger, it may curdle your milk. Go for the ginger you dug up last week and haven't gotten around to preserving or replanting.
• (optional) a pinch of pepper (Pepper famously has a compound in it that may help you better absorb the beneficial curcumin in the turmeric. Keep in mind that if you're eating an isolated compound from a food -- such as curcumin from turmeric--then you need all the help you can get to digest and make use of it. But if you're eating the whole food as we are here, there are countless co-factors included in it, all available to your body in the exact balance it needs -- so don't get too hung up on the  pepper thing. Read more about all this, here.)
• a desert spoonful of coconut oil (optional -- I add this because I like the flavor, coconut oil has many health benefits, and turmeric may be better absorbed by your body in the presence of fat)
• three cups of milk (whatever kind takes your fancy)
• honey to taste

Heat all the ingredients except the honey in a pan till barely simmering. Keep it there until you can't wait any longer, or for up to 5 minutes. Cool slightly, add honey to taste, and enjoy.

Serves 3. Or 2 if one of you likes this as much as my son does.

Makes a comforting and delicious bedtime beverage. (Go easy on the pepper if you tend toward poor sleep, as pepper is a stimulant. Without the pepper, it should aide sleep or at least not hinder it.)

Read more about golden milk from an Ayurvedic perspective, here.

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I’ve just finished reading The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks, and I really enjoyed it. In particular, I got a lot out of his take on time. 

The scarce kind of time

Chapter 6 of The Big Leap is called “Living in Einstein Time.” In it, Hendricks points out that when we feel a scarcity of time, or when we say “I can’t do X because I don't have enough time to,” we’re living in “Newtonian time.”

“Newtonian time" is the kind of time that’s finite and must be portioned out carefully so that we can do the things we need to do. 

The things we merely want to do often have to take a back seat or be abandoned all together, because in this paradigm there is never quite enough time. Time is scarce. Time is money. Time drives us. Time is associated with an uncomfortable feeling of urgency and stress, even victimization.

Who's in charge?

After describing “Newtonian time,” Hendricks introduces the concept of “Einstein time." (Einstein time is also called "Relativistic Time," and it is fascinating. Check it out here.)

Einstein is said to have described relativity with something along these lines: "an hour with your beloved feels like a minute, and a minute on a hot stove feels like an hour." (An effort to find the exact quote was made here.)

In other words, how you experience time is a function of, well, how you experience time. And who is in charge of that?

Your answer will depend partly on whether you have a reactive approach to life, or a proactive approach.

With a reactive approach, first life happens to you and then you react. It’s a game of dominoes in which you are a domino somewhere in the middle. Something acts on a domino further back along the line, and its consequences travel down the line of events, knocking you flat along the way.

With a proactive approach, you look for ways to be the something that acts on the earlier domino. 

A proactive approach has to do with looking for ways to “set yourself up for success,” and using "prior and proper preparation to prevent poor performance," as a mentor of mine used to say.

"I don't have time..."

In The Big Leap, Hendricks suggests that we quit thinking of time as something that’s “out there,” happening to us, and take ownership of how we experience time. 

He says:

When you say, “I don’t have time to do X,” you’re lying to yourself and the person you’re speaking to.

The truth would be something more like,“I don't want to do X.”

Or, “I would rather do Y than X."

When you say, "I don't have time," you’re blaming your inability or reluctance to do X on an external thing, an out there, happening-to-you-without-your-consent thing, which you call “time.” 

Time’s victim

By placing time “out there,” rather than “in here,” you shift the responsibility for your choices away from yourself. You make it "not my fault."

But by making it "not my fault," you also make it "not my choice," and thus you become time’s victim. 

When we lie to ourselves and others in this way, we have the best intentions about looking good to the other person or not offending the other person. 

And sometimes, we don’t even realize it’s a lie. We've even fooled ourselves. We truly think we haven't got time because we’re existing somewhere in the middle of all the dominoes and not paying attention to what’s happening back up the line. 

But these lies keep us trapped in a state of being that lacks personal sovereignty, integrity, and power. They keep us trapped in a state of scarcity and lack, in this case, a lack of time. 

"I choose..."

So how can we follow Hendricks' advice, and take ownership of this game we are playing with time?

Try this:

1. Get in the habit of noticing how often you say “I don’t have time to do X," and the many variations on that statement. 
2. Replace “I don't have time to do X,” with, “I choose not to do X, because Y.”

At first it will be hard to remember, and possibly very uncomfortable. But gradually, if you keep it up, you'll notice that the more responsibility you take the more choices you have. 

You are building personal sovereignty and dismantling the lies that have been keeping you trapped in a scarcity of time. 

Finally, some questions for you to ponder...

• Are you a bit addicted to the tension of "not enough time?" 
• Is it possible that "not enough time" is serving you on some level that you haven't explored?
• Or are you ready to be done with being time's victim, and get your life back?

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Arrowroot (Canna edulis)

This is Queensland arrowroot, photographed in mid August about a week into our Southern Hemisphere spring. You can see tired, yellowing foliage that's been hanging on all winter, old dead stumps where Alain has been cutting fodder for the chickens, old tubers for the pigs, and in the middle foreground, a new shoot just about to begin to unfurl its first green leaf. 

This clump needs to be lifted out, divided up and put to use as I described here.

The next pic, below, is a new row of arrowroot that Alain planted a couple of weeks ago, when I wrote this post.  

Chickweed (Stellaria media)

Chickweed is a salad staple in our garden whenever and where-ever it can find a cool, moist, protected spot. I don't know how to grow it on purpose; it's a generous volunteer whose presence reminds me that abundance is all around us, if we're looking. 

This time of year, when the weather is cool and has been consistently damp, chickweed is everywhere. In the images below, it's growing around the bases of our blue barrels and coming up in between the things in the barrels. As I see it beginning to volunteer, I often clear a space for it. It's a prolific seeder; once you have it, you have it forever

Chickweed needs regular harvesting to keep it from becoming stalky. Cut it with scissors, take it inside, and chop it into a salad or put it in a bag in the fridge where it will keep well for many days.

You can read more about chickweed here. 

Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale)

I love dandelions. Most of us know them for their persistence in lawns and roadsides, their sunny yellow flowers  (from which you can make wine), and their fascinating seed heads.

Your grandparents know that dandelions are deeply nutritious, both the roots and the leaves. Eat the leaves and flowers in the spring, and the roots in the autumn.

Dandelion leaves have an amazing array of nutritional benefits. Even their bitter taste is beneficial, which is an idea that takes some chewing on in our sugar-addicted culture.  

You can make, very simply at home, a medicinal tincture from dandelion roots (sorry 'bout the ads in this video).

Did you know that the word "officinale" in the Latin name for dandelion refers to its "official" use as a simple, safe, and effective medicine for a wide array of ailments?

Here is a great read on wild greens; scroll down to find dandelion near the bottom. Finally, I mention dandelions in the section on wild plants in this post.

Pepinos (Solanum muricatum)

Pepinos are related to tomatoes and potatoes, so they're similar, only tougher and don't seem to get as many pests or diseases. They can sprawl on the ground or be supported by a low trellis or cage. Super easy to propagate from cuttings and tolerant of neglect, although they will fruit much better with plenty moisture and mulch/compost top ups. Read more, and see pics of ripe fruit, here.

Taro and other water plants

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) is an important staple food that grows in moist to wet conditions throughout the humid tropics. You eat the large corm at the base of the biggest plant, the mother plant, leaving the surrounding small plants in the ground to grow big in their turn. You can also replant the top of the mother plant. Taro is starchy and filling and can be eaten in many ways... search online for recipes and you'll find they're endless. 

In the pic above, you see taro planted in a wet area where our rainwater tank has a persistent leak. This was only planted toward the end of last summer, so it hasn't had much hot sunny weather yet to help it get going. 

And this (above) is taro planted in a container submerged in water. Its not looking very happy in this spot because its been cold. I'm hoping/expecting it to perk up as the weather warms up. 

You can learn more about taro here. 

Also in the pic above, floating on the surface of the water you can see azolla, which we grow as fodder for our chickens. Learn more about azolla here.

Finally, to both sides of the taro tub you can also see kangkong, or water spinach (also looking very sad and wintery after the unusually cold winter we've just had, but it will soon perk up). That's kangkong runners you see trailing out across the water, with leaves smaller than the taro but much larger than the azolla.

Kangkong is related to sweet potato and looks similar. You can learn more about kangkong here, and this article has a short video about growing  it in water.  

Another post I've written about water-loving food plants is "7 Steps to a Frog Pond That Also Grows Food."

Taro safety note: There are many, many plants with similar "elephant ear" shaped leaves to taro. Some are edible and some are poisonous. There is a great deal of confusion on the internet about their names, and I would love to learn more, especially about how to identify them effectively as they all look similar to the untrained eye.

Please, when you grow plants that look anything like these for eating, do what we did and get your propagation material from someone who has been eating it themselves, and whom you trust to be providing you with the correct plant.

Also, all parts of the taro plant must be cooked to make them safe to eat. 

(There is one exception, with the common name of celery stem taro or tahitian spinach, which we have in our garden. We put the stem of this one in salads, uncooked, and have had no trouble with it. But if you try this, again: get your planting material from someone who is already eating it raw; don't find out the hard way that it was the wrong variety!)

Modular veggies

I'm finishing this post with a couple of pics from our "modular veggie garden," which has lots of things in it but especially any European veggies we grow, because its set up to allow for netting to protect from insects.  You can learn more about our modular veggie project, here.

The reason I call them "modular veggies" is because I love the idea of taking care of one or a few barrels at a time, in small chunks of effort, rather than having to maintain a large annual garden area. We tried that in this earlier, larger veggie growing project, and found that we couldn't sustain the care it needed. 

That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and please leave a comment below

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"We are at an important point in the wheel of the year, the ongoing cycles of life... Imbolc or the first day of spring (Southern Hemisphere). 

If there was a beginning in the cycle of the Earth's seasons, it would be Imbolc. What we do, think and feel at this time, the beginning of spring, the beginning of the growth season, will be what will grow and unfold over the next year."

~ Jane Hardwicke Collings

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"Honey has [been] used for a wide range of diseases. ... Studies have validated many of these uses, especially in regards to respiratory illness respiratory illnesses (including sore throats and coughs), eye disease, and wounds and burns. ..., eye disease, and wounds and burns. ...
Honey is hydrophilic, which means it draws water from the plants. When fresh herbs are infused into honey, it creates a syrupy mixture, thinner than honey itself, that’s alive with the taste and benefits of the herbs you used..” 

~ Rosalee De La ForÊT, "Herb-Infused Honeys"