Kiss the Earth

I'm so grateful to see that more people are viewing the blog daily. It's really exciting, everything that has been happening. It's more than what's been happening, as it is the vibrations we are transmitting that are bringing in new things into our lives, into the beautiful dream we share. So I could say that it's what we have been creating. And I feel inspired to share with others how they can create whatever they dream of in their lives, too. It's truly magical, and it also is completely logical. We are here to live our true purpose, the desires of our hearts. It's so important to focus on gratitude and forgiveness, every day, every breath. Just being alive is incredible. Seeing colors, feeling temperature, tasting flavor and texture, smelling and breathing the bracing, wintery air, feeling the earth supporting our whole bodies.

Yesterday Jenna and I dug up a whole lot of old strawberry plants that haven't produced good fruit in years. We are still in this process. Once we get all the plants out of the bed they are in, we are transferring our compost process to this area, which will be perfect since not much can grow well there as the sunlight doesn't really reach it most of the day. Both of us are soo looking forward to and dreaming about all the working and playing we will be doing in our various vegetable gardens, the one in our yard and the ones we are creating in our neighborhood for the community to volunteer in. We also will be selling the fruits and vegetables at a stand to raise funds for the Brighton Heights community, and we will be selling our home-grown sprouts at these stands as well.

May you be content, grateful, and joyful every moment of the day.

Amanda

More Exciting Things

I have some more news for all of you. Our dreams are growing bigger just like the purslane in the front yard will once the weather warms up ;) New seeds inside our lives are beginning to sprout, and I want to share some of it with you...

Introducing...The NamaSisters New (And Probably the First) Pittsburgh-Based (e)Mail-Order Raw Food Snacks and Whole Raw Meals !!!

We have sooo many ideas in the works, and everything will fall together as if by magic. Soon we are going to start experimenting with coconut butter/date ratios for desserts. And we can start creating custom-ordered whole meals as soon as anybody wants something. We will only be able to do the meals for the Pittsburgh Area as the food will be as fresh and high water content as possible.

There are ways you can help us to realize our dream. First, you can tell as many people as you can about our blog and our new email newsletter list. Second, there are certain special tools and ingredients that are needed to create raw food delicacies, and these can cost a pretty penny. If you feel called at all to help us through a donation of any kind, please email us at namasisters@gmail.com .

Thank you so much and I am so excited to share more and more with you every day!

LOVE

Amanda

NEW NamaSisters email list!

Hey, you fruits and nuts. It's Amanda and I have some wonderful tidbits to share. 

Soon Jenna and I will be sending out newsletters via email to any who would like to receive them from our new namasisters@gmail.com. 

If you want to be on this list just send us a quick email that includes:

your name

how you found us/our blog

and what you would like to see and hear about from us

:) have a beautiful day.

  More important than the food we eat and the water we drink is the thoughts we feed our minds. 

(I know someone else said this but I cannot remember who, just know I am paraphrasing)

I would also add that the breath is the most necessary of foods for our whole being.

be well
A.

Eating mostly fruitas!

It's one thing to eat only living foods with active enzymes and another to eat mostly fruit.
I've been adding more and more fruits and vegetables and mushrooms to my consumption and decreasing the heavy fats like nuts and seeds and avocados to a very small amount.
Most people refer to this diet as 80 10 10 or low fat raw vegan. Personally, I don't have or follow a strict diet plan, I just eat what my body wants and what makes me feel the best.
I don't count calories or nutrition facts, I don't have a specific time of day that I eat or a certain amount of meals I eat in a day.
I just eat when I'm hungry.
Sometimes we obsess over following our diet, sticking to the routine, that we actually make ourselves stressed. We focus so much on the outcome rather than the present experience. This can cause us to focus so much on food that we actually eat more!
We want to lose weight, we want to be skinny so we can fit into a dress, we want to look this certain type of way so we that we can feel better about ourselves. But, the truth is how we look isn't going to make us happy. How we feel about our actions and how we take care of ourselves is going to make us happy. 
So when you're eating remember that you are eating to nourish your body, not to change it. 

Adding more fruit and eating less fat has helped my digestion greatly, I never feel bloated anymore and I always enjoy the foods I eat :)
I feel like my energy has gone up and that I can move faster! I feel less tired and I fall asleep really fast. And my skin has gotten smoother too! 
I feel like eating less fat has shown me the attachment I have often felt towards food. Sometimes I ate so many fats just to feel heavy because once I do that I have something to work towards: feeling light. So it creates this crazy, self rejecting pattern. But, if we just remember that we are eating to live not living to eat we don't have to do any of those things. We can have an intimate relationship with our foods and our bodies.

J

True Health is Not a Concept

Hi. Amanda here. I'm currently on a cruise, coming back from the Bahamas and will be in Miami tomorrow. I've been learning so much it's indescribable; well, learning could easily be interchanged with remembering. Remembering beyond the level of the conscious mind.

I want to address a topic that many people may find uncomfortable. Many may find it easy to understand, as they are already integrated with this. I am writing from this perspective because this is what I have experienced.

Sometimes people - whether they eat healthy foods or not - see health as a concept. You can be putting into practice steps to be healthier, such as abstaining from certain foods and replacing these with better options, developing new patterns, etc, and still see health as a concept. You can be on a SAD diet or a 100 % raw vegan diet and still be missing the point. It doesn't matter what you do that you believe will help you, if you don't let it work You must be willing to let yourself feel however, whatever you feel right now in this moment. Giving yourself rules can be - will be - a hell of a lot more damaging that listening to your body and eating what it really wants.

Of course, this can be a huge challenge, because you may, for example, see a sweet, buttery decadence and automatically you are salivating, thinking about how good that would be to eat; you really think your body wants that desert. But you will learn that you only think this because what you actually need, what your body actually wants, may be an apple, or a mango, or some fresh juice or any high carb vegetable with natural, easily digestible sugars and easily assimilated nutrients; it may be as simple as being thirsty - you may truly just need a glass of water. (by the way, I highly recommend getting a fluoride/chlorine filter for your home, or if you travel, a portable water bottle with a filter inside.) 

You may have given yourself rules to avoid foods that are GMO, or non-organic, or to only eat vegan, or raw, or local, or whatever. And these are great guidelines to follow. They are important, and you give yourself these rules so that you can be healthy, because you love you. That is a huge step!

Now, we need to look at what is actual and what is belief. It may seem backwards, but the actual thing is not whether the food you eat is either healthy or it isn't. That is the belief.

The actual thing is how you feel, whether you are nurturing and caring for your body, mind and soul with every action that you take. Say for example, (and I am using my own experience here) you are travelling and you are a raw vegan, or follow certain healthy guidelines, whatever they may be - so you are all ready to go. You are all prepared to eat as clean as you do on a regular basis, and then you get to where you are going, and absolutely none of the food there is organic. You will be here for over a week, and you can't bring any fresh fruit and vegetables with you, for whatever reason.

So what are you going to do? Are you going to starve? Are you going to whine and complain about it? Will that help you? Of course it won't. So you make some sacrifices; you let go of your beliefs about your rules and so forth, and do you know what happens? 

Freedom. There is something so liberating about doing what you believed was impossible, about letting go of the idea that a way of being could be "wrong".

And do you know what? This is true health. This is what being healthy is like. This is the ultimate goal of any healthy, holistic lifestyle - freedom. There is nothing sweeter.

Carrot Poop, Rats, Yoga and Self-Compassion

Hi there world. I'd like to start this post by saying how much I love you, yes, you, the person reading this. You are beautiful, magical, and extraordinary. This is the absolute truth, my friend. Anything that you are going through right now, I just want to encourage you to stick with it, stay in it, immerse yourself in it, like you're walking through water with rubber boots that come up to your thighs. Doesn't matter if the water is a crystalline cinote, a shallow pond, or a thick, murky swamp. If it's where you are, stay there, and keeping allowing it to be. You have to get through it to move forward to something new.

So, I've been drinking a lot of carrot juice over the past few weeks. At least two glasses a day, most of the time mixed with a bit on onion, lemon, and an apple. And I just want to tell everyone how excited it makes me every time I poop to see the color a beautiful, bright carrot orange :) It's really a lovely sight.

Recently a rat named Yama came into my life. Now there are two more, name Poetry and Shiroi. They are so adorable and fast and wonderful! :) And they love love love raw foods. They eat the same foods as us, pretty much. Sometimes we've been feeding them crackers and some other cooked foods in small amounts to help ease the detox process, since the food they were given at the pet store was most likely GMO crap. Every day they seem to get more energy, feel better, more comfortable, and more playful. I'm so happy to be with them every day, and they teach me SO much. They are like little furry mirrors, lol.

Also we've been practicing Yoga on a more often basis, since quitting karate, and there's really not much I can say about this simply because there's soo much I could say about this. It's a process of growing, a journey to compliment the totality of your journey.

And the last one: Self-Compassion. Self-Love. There's nothing that's more important to me to practice each day, each moment, than this. That moment when you want to flee, when you recognize this fear and face it, and see it for what it truly is - when you see yourself, vulnerable, in the present moment, in that moment you become invincible.