Vanilla Mocha Truffle Balls & Lessons Learnt in Lockdown
Hello everyone!
Wow, it’s been a very long while since I last checked in with you all. I have missed sharing on The Healing Root platforms, but I know I also really needed to take a few steps back and re-evaluate my relationship to it. What this platform and community means to me now (because like everything in life, it is all in a constant process of change), why I do it and why I want to keep doing it, my intention behind it, where I want to go with it … basically, I needed to take stock and inquire into The Healing Root’s place in my life. And what a perfect time to do that. I feel I have a lot more clarity now. So, here we are, feeling excited to be back here with you today.
Thank you, by the by, for sticking around if you are here reading this & for being part of the ever-unfolding journey of this all, with and alongside me. And thank you for your patience and understanding when I have not been able to carry through on certain plans or timelines in relation to what and when I share on this platform. I have decided to keep my sharing on an ad hoc, spontaneous basis - this way, taking off all pressure around sharing by creating set times and plans for scheduled or planned postings and recipes (which I thought would help me be MORE consistent, but instead the stress that came with that made me avoid it and made me feel like I was losing the love behind it all which really is what underpins this space!). In coming to this point of clarity, I hope that what I share stays fresh, organic and a true extension of sharing from a place of proper & right intention.
It’s safe to say (and I am sure it’s a very similar case for many, if not all of you) that this year has been a lot. It’s been a lot of everything: good, peaceful, harmonious moments of deepening connection & intimacy with myself, with my own life & with the people therein (hence my extended break from social media). But it’s also been a lot of discomfort, anxiety, sitting with a lot of psychological stuff that had been put on the bench for a while and I wasn’t even aware of it consciously until life brought more space into my life. I will always be grateful for this time for bringing it all up to be worked through, grappled with, and healed, because I know that a lot of what I have sat with during this year has helped me to create a much more stable inner infrastructure from which the rest of my life can now unfold and blossom from. I am looking forward to sharing more with you on this point. But for now I will just share with you some key themes from my experience of this year.
My Ten Biggest Lessons During this Year of 2020:
Understanding my relationship to stress: learning how I had become almost addicted to stress, understanding that this comes from having experienced years of functioning from a place of chronic stress - your body & mind then don’t even need external stressors to create it’s own inner stress because it’s your default space of functioning, seeing how my stress responses play out in my life & daily situations, understanding why I have learnt to respond the way that I do, understanding my conditioned mind, learning to understand more of my subconscious mind and how this all plays a massive role in how I essentially show up in my life for myself and for the people therein (especially when under stress), finding ways to manage stress and create a healthier relationship to it.
Identity: working intimately with my ego: understanding, unpacking, excavating, healing, integrating, going into, going beyond and simply hearing and seeing it through a much more compassionate, understanding and inquisitive lens. I believe that approaching our egos with this attitude really is a pre-requisite to working with it consciously and giving it it’s rightful and appropriate space in our lives so that it doesn’t take over the show but that it isn’t also just vanquished to the dark corners of our psyches by labelling it as “bad” - which will always result in it popping its’ head up somewhere else in our lives that will likely be unconscious until further notice (and wreck havoc along the way!).
Intimacy: with myself & others - this has been a big one. Learning to understand that my fear of becoming close with others is often an extension of my unwillingness to get closer to myself and that a lot of this tendency came from feeling unsafe in my own body and in who I am - an extension of a trauma response from past experience. I finally did a lot of work with myself during this time and began to understand which life events had contributed to me relating to myself in this way. I read an amazing book by Peter Levine called in An Unspoken Voice which is all about how trauma is stored in the body, how we can re-work our understanding of what trauma is, and how we can release ourselves from the suffocating clutches of it. Being intimate with our own life requires immense presence, and often when you have severed your connection to yourself because of various life experiences or past hurts, being present is like asking you to go back into the lions den. So, be patient with yourself and just become curious - why is being intimate with yourself or another difficult for you? What core beliefs underpin your unwillingness to, in this moment, become present and vulnerable and open? Journal about it, meditate on it, take a long walk in nature and mull over these questions, talk through it with your therapist … these mediums of inquiry give our mind and body the space that it needs for these answers to come forward for you.
Creativity: I delved deep into what creativity means to me, the different mediums of creativity in my life, the importance of having various creative outlets as a means of keeping you in a state of flow & connection to your own creative life force & the importance of having creative mediums that are comfortable for you but ALSO, ones that are difficult & challenge you, thus enabling you to grow and learn about yourself in ways unexpected and new.
JOY: this is soooo under-rated, but I truly came to understand that joy is at the centre of divine connection to yourself and Source and to living in a state of gratitude and openness to life. And openness allows us to contain more of life, to be receptive to life in all it’s joyous tenderness but also it’s complex beauty. Joy is a great teacher and one of the most fabulous things about joy is that it comes in SO many different forms: from dancing in your room by yourself, to going out with friends and dancing together - something I think we all found a new appreciation for during this lockdown period - finding a more quiet joy through gardening or even sharing a good meal or sitting in the sun. Joy brings us back to spontaneous presence, which is a sublime gift and a wonderful bridge back to finding safety in intimacy.
Purpose: this one was a massive one, but I want to unpack this in a whole separate post dedicated solely to this notion of having a “purpose” and what that means in terms of how we approach and orientate ourselves in our lives. This was a big theme for me too this year, finding that delicate intersection between service to others and the collective (which can also become a way of avoiding ourselves, but can also be a bridge back to ourselves) & finding peace and healing in just being (and letting that be enough, which in a society driven by desire, instant gratification and achievement is very difficult!).
Trauma: more on this to come, too. This topic deserves multiple singular posts, but essentially this time brought me right into the realness of understanding how trauma has effected me in my own life & how it has consequently come to express itself in many aspects of who I have become, my psyche, my patterns and my perceptions. Working with trauma has gifted me more opportunity to do deep inner healing. Especially when working with past childhood experiences that were not fully acknowledged, integrated & given space.
Fear of my future, anxiety about fulfilment & exploring how I relate to social media: I think I am at this point in my life where I’ve been really having to make some pretty pivotal decisions. It’s been difficult, and it’s taken a lot of questioning, stillness and contemplation. But I think this year has offered this opportunity for making new choices for many people. Many people I have spoken to have completely changed their life paths because of what has surfaced for them during this year. And for me, it’s been the same. I had some fears around my future: which routes to take, which ones to put by the way side for now. I had anxieties about living into full potential, into “finding your purpose” etc. etc. I also had anxieties around my relationship to social media: just coming to terms with the fact that I am just not a very technologically-oriented person and so I made peace with the fact that The Healing Root will (at least for now) not be “what I do”. I love working with people directly too much to be doing my work predominantly behind a screen. How I relate to social media & my realisations regarding my identity were so intertwined, too. I really understood how healing it was for me to have this platform in particular phases of my recovery journey from addiction because it gave me a creative outlet, it helped me to bring a sense of “self” into the world in a way that felt safe & it also helped me to understand who I want to become & what I value - but in that I also got lost along the way by getting caught up in ego & how people perceive me. Which then came to my awareness and I was able to then work with bringing more consciousness to my relationship to social media - using it not as an extension of who I am and as a way to assert myself into life, but as a means of creative expression, passion & connection & sharing.
Working more authentically to heal my relationship to myself & to food (which really is an on-going process): this was a big one. I always thought to myself that “if this this or that condition” were put in place, THEN I would be healed & less reliant on my coping mechanisms. I thought that if all the stressing aspects of my life would disappear and I was left to my own devices and had no external pressure or expectations placed on me that then my addictive patterns and coping mechanisms would have no place in my life because there would be nothing that they were helping me to cope with. But, once everything “stressful” was taken out of my life (being locked in your house during a pandemic really does have a way of reducing external daily stressors) - I found myself gobsmacked by the realisation that the remnants of these patterns, addictions and coping mechanisms were still playing out - for they had come habits, they were in me and that no matter what external conditions were active in my life, the patterns themselves were what needed addressing, and that required a more in-depth look into what deeper needs the patterns themselves were fulfilling . This was when I realised I had to do a lot more inner work on childhood experiences and core beliefs.
And my number ten, ALSO A MAJOR ONE was: Learning to manage my energy, my nervous system & my adrenals to create a more sustainable and less taxing way for me to show up in my life. This also needs it’s whole own post because it is all about energy (physical & subtle).
I would really love to hear what some of the key themes for you have been this year? After a few conversations with friends that I have had, many of the above themes overlap, but there were also a few new ones that weren’t as prevalent for me during this time. So, if you do feel inclined to share - I would love to hear what you have been moving through during this crazy, bizarre year.
Some more CHANGES …
Peripherally, a few things have changed in my life: I shaved my hair (me and a bunch of close girl friends decided fuck it with the Western beauty standards and welcome to the bare, real self that precedes our outer appearance - we all had our own reasons for doing it, but doing it we did!). It felt incredible: liberating, healing, powerful, softening, feminine, empowering, nurturing, integrative, humbling, and so much more.
I have also decided to do another year of University, so I will be doing my Honours degree in Human Kinetics & Ergonomics next year (I cannot wait! After this time of doing “nothing” but inner work and having a solid break from studying, I am HUNGRY to further my studies and I am so grateful that I have studies that I am so passionate about, too!).
Adjusting My Diet
Yet another thing that has changed was that I decided to give a high fat diet a bash. For years I had been fearful of fats (until I did my plant based chef training where I delved into Ayurveda & Macrobiotics & begun to understand in more detail the healing properties and energetic components to fat as a macronutrient). But still, there were the remnants of fearing fat even though I had introduced more into my diet. Yet still, so much was out of alignment & imbalanced and I knew that something had to change more tangibly. So, I started doing research and then decided to give it a go. I wanted to see if it would help to 1) stabilise my moods, emotions (they were hectically turbulent & I was experiencing so many highs and so many lows) & energy 2) if it would help me in regulating my nervous system (which has been wrecked for various reasons) 3) if it would make me less addicted to sugar (even though I was eating healthy sources thereof, I was becoming increasingly reliant on sugar for more than just physical reasons but also for emotional comfort & support (which itself isn’t something to judge within yourself but it was becoming a bit debilitating and taxing my relationship to myself & to food 4) to see if it would help in my journey with creating a more healthy relationship to food 5) if it would help to normalise my hunger signals and help with metabolic flexibility. And, to my absolute joy, it did - all of these.
I have found so many AMAZING benefits in adjusting the way that I eat to a higher fat diet over the last couple of months. In brief, I have experienced a much more sustained energy, a massive reduction in my mood swings, less radical & often paralysing hunger, increased energetic stability & a sense of greater ease and flexibility around food, eating times and less food focus (for the most part). The benefits extend way beyond that. I will keep the longer explanation into why I decided to try a high fat diet in the first place, my experience of the transition, the more specific dietary shifts and how they look in a practical day-to-day basis, and more for another post.
For now, I am sharing with you one of the yummiest superfood ball recipes, dare I say, ever. It is high fat, moderate protein and low carb. But, no matter your dietary inclinations, this ball recipe will blow your socks off. It is so satisfying, satiating, delicious, decadent & nourishing. It gives really stable, durable energy (think: enjoying a delicious treat without the consequent sugar crashes - that to be honest, I wasn’t even aware I was having until I went higher fat! which now in hindsight I see as contributing to my emotional volatillity) without compromising on flavour or enjoyment.
What you will need,
1/8 cup macadamia nut butter
1/8 cup toasted sunflower seed butter (I used homemade sunflower seed butter, but any storebought variety will do!)
1/8 cup natural peanut butter
1/8 cup vanilla pea protein powder
1 scoop Vanilla Sky Wazoogles protein powder
1/8 cup cocoa nibs (or chopped dark chocolate chunks)
2 tsp cinnamon
2-3 tsp ground coffee
1/2 tsp salt
2-3 walnuts, chopped (or brazil nuts!)
2 tsp raw sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds
1/4 tsp stevia powder or 1/2 tsp stevia liquid
What you will need to do,
In a bowl, place all of your nut butters & mix well. Then, simply add the rest of the ingredients, mix well & roll into balls!
I made 8 balls - and I found these to be a perfect “small snack” size. If I wanted it to be a more substantial snack or part of a meal, I would roll them a touch bigger to make 6 balls. Otherwise, you can also just eat more than one ball until you are satisfied ;)
SERVING TIP: they are delicious as is, especially when served with a cuppa Joe. But if you want to make it part of a bigger breakfast experience, I would highly suggest making yourself a little sweet breakfast “Tapas” platter. I have two of these balls, with some extra nuts or chia pudding, some blueberries & strawberries, topped with toasted coconut flakes on the side and a yummy green juice or cup of tea. It makes for a very satisfying breakfast that will keep you going for a while.
