Sacred Kitchen Alchemy

How do you honor your body temple? How do you listen to your body's messages? In what ways do you bring your spirituality into your kitchen? Do you prepare your foods thinking about the energies that they will bring to your body, mind and soul? Perhaps it is time to bring sacred kitchen alchemy into your home.

What is sacred kitchen alchemy? It is a way of recognizing that every item of food we eat contains essential energies. Understanding these energies and how they can serve us is the everyday magic we have access to. Understanding that eating mindfully is about far more than counting calories. It is about choosing foods that serve our body well. It is about intention setting. It is about recognizing that eating seasonally insures we are getting the most nutrition that food item can offer us. As we learn to listen to our body and soul's needs, we then can respond accordingly.

Sacred kitchen alchemy is also about bringing some of your spiritual practices into your kitchen. Ritual is a part of our day already. We celebrate with food during holidays and on special occasions. But making the "ordinary" days special with ritual brings a mindfulness to our meals. We can honor ancestors, celebrate the season, invoke certain energies, awaken our senses with different plant spirit energies through spices and vibrant produce and more.

Color magic is an important aspect of sacred kitchen alchemy as well. Every color offers us its own unique energies. Knowing what these are, we can make food choices to generate these energies within and we can decorate our tables in specific colors to create that energy as well. There are so many possibilities.

The season and the phases of the moon can be celebrated and explored  in sacred kitchen alchemy. Recognizing these and incorporating their celebrations brings a new awareness to our food preparation and meal choices. Each moon honors a new cycle, each season an new phase and our bodies respond in harmony.

We often find ourselves in a rut when it comes to mealtime. Or in our busy lives we find we make poor choices when it come to honoring our body through food. Bringing an awareness to our meals, our food preparation and our body, mind and soul's needs creates a relationship with the sacred and cooking. Delight, honor, intention and wonder can be a part of what is often looked at as ordinary and mundane.

To learn more about Sacred Kitchen Alchemy and to join in an upcoming 4 week program, beginning March 8th, visit http://www.womenwithinsight.com/sacred-kitchen-alchemy/

Blessings, Lisa

Understand Your Intention

Do you understand your intention? The one you set today, this week, this month or even this year? Why are you seeking this intention? Why are you doing what you are doing? What is your motivation?

Usually we set an intention because of necessity or inspiration. Knowing this has much to do with how we approach our intentions and how we embrace them. We need to know the energy we are bringing to our intentions in order to become effective in manifesting them. Knowing if we are setting these intentions to be in service, to be better liked, or even for "selfish" reasons...the energy is very different for each reason. Whatever the reason. Now we have an understanding of our underlying motivation for this intention and how to approach it, what to bring to it, what to let go of that may get in its way. We now have a fuller understanding of the flow of this intention.

Also, knowing the motivation behind our intention gives us a broader understanding of our intention and our energies. When we know our motives we then can reflect upon where we are in the relationship between our soul and out intention. Are we in the way, creating the perfect block? Are we uncommitted? Have we not shown up? Or are we open, receptive, and attentive?

All this insight is an important part of the recipe of living mindfully, setting intentions and trusting. If we do not recognize or are not being honest with our motivations and energies between our intentions and our dreams we are not fully present to the unfolding. Showing up, being authentic and remaining flexible adds to the fluidity of the energies. It also incorporates our personal power in the equation. And when we do this we have a very different ownership of our intention.

It now breathes in our passion. It now dances with the music of our soul. It now inspires our actions. Our intention becomes alive to us; vibrant, awake, and resonating. Suddenly we become our intention!

Blessings, Lisa