Immune Boosting One-Bowl Turmeric Balls & Ayurveda on OJAS
In today’s post I am sharing a SUPER quick, delicious, healing Turmeric ball recipe. It literally takes ONE bowl, 10 minutes and then BOOM BOOM BAM you have some delicious, really healthy, scrumptious snacks right at hand for when you are needing something yum & delish but something that also delivers the goods to the bod.
By now it’s no secret that turmeric is a highly beneficial root & has potent anti-inflammatory & immune-boosting properties. All of which make this delicious sweet treat the perfect way to joyfully support your immunity during this time where our individual immune health is of utmost importance!
This is going to be a relatively short post, so the sharing will be brief but I want to talk for a moment about CARE. I would love to hopefully invite you to contemplate the nature and quality of your care: the care that you extend to others and the care that you extend to yourself (before we, of course, get to the recipe).
I also want to talk about trusting the power of your care, why it is important to care for yourself FULLY and intently in order to care more fully for the wider collective. I touch on how this can really bring about transformative and powerful inner change that can help to propel you forward into more tender engagement with yourself and your life. When this change occurs internally, we begin to see the changes externally, too. This is what the world is needing more of right now. What the world is currently experiencing with this pandemic is asking for more care on both an individual and a collective level to each other but also to our Mama Gaia (Mother Earth). So let us listen and move forward, treading lightly but powerfully with more care and awareness.
It really is my belief that more honest self-care will then bleed into universal care because when our own self-care cup is full, where else is the excess care to go but outward? So, caring for yourself in a way that is in alignment with intuition and a deeper awareness is by NO means selfish. It is serving others through attending to your needs and desires, because we can only really open ourselves fully to caring for others once we’ve done that for ourselves.
One of my all-time favorite quotes is this:
“Before all else, every action begins with strengthening the spirit.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
And, one of the best ways to strengthen the spirit is to care for yourself. This looks different in each and every moment. But, if you are wanting some extra guidance into some of the ways this can be expressed you can head over to two articles that I wrote under the well-being section of the blog that are all about self-care routines and rituals wherein I highlight the importance of self-care and some of the ways you can actually do it.
From an Ayurvedic perspective, caring for yourself is one of the best ways to increase OJAS. Ojas is the living vibrancy and radiance that arises when there is full wellbeing and health in a person. It is seen in the sparkle of the eyes, the soft glow of healthy skin, the strength and sturdiness of healthy nails and the lush flow of healthy hair. In energy, it is seen in the open, receptive and expansive auric energy that we know and associate with true health on all levels of our being. Other ways to increase your ojas are to:
eat a dosha-balancing diet
get enough good quality sleep
move your body
meditate
spend time in nature
explore fulfilling and loving relationships
change your routines and rhythms in accordance with the seasonal shifts
Connect to your primal sexual energy in a mindful, loving & empowering way
The quote above by Clarissa is from a book that is literally changing my life in a very REAL way. A book called The Women Who Run With the Wolves. If you can, get your hands on this book. It is all about the divine feminine, integrating darkness and light, making contact with the Wildish nature within and reclaiming a strong, vibrant and healthy relationship to female energy and the psyche (and this isn’t just about/for females, we all have both energies: masculine and feminine, so guys, this book is an insightful gem for you too!).
Starting my days with the awareness of: “I want all of my actions to stem from a strong spirit” has really begun to give me agency in how the shape of my days unfolds because I more consciously choose to do more things that 1) strengthen my spirit OR 2) to do things with more intentional energy and gusto as a result of an already strengthened spirit OR 3) I try to become more aware of that which is no longer serving the goal of strengthening my spirit so that I can begin to make choices that better serve me.
This conscious thought process has afforded me the gift of allowing myself to slow down and become acutely aware of how the things that I spend my time doing effect me. As a result, I am finding myself moving from present moment to present moment instead of being on a hamster wheel of constantly trying to achieve at the expense of strengthening my spirit.
TRY THIS EXERCISE:
For the next few days wake up and say to yourself: today, all action will begin from a strengthened spirit, and if my spirit isn’t strong enough for that right now, I will put it down and do something that will strengthen my spirit instead. If the option of choosing not to do something because it doesn’t strengthen your spirit isn’t available to you (for real like reasons like your job requires you to do this or that) then at least become aware of how it does affect your spirit so that when you can, you can perhaps make a different choice. Over the course of the day(s) notice what you let go of because you are aware that it is no longer serving the strengthening of your spirit and what you change in your daily routines to serve the strengthening of your spirit. This exercise will hopefully invite you to become more aware of how your activities and actions effect your spirit (either serving it’s strength or not or having a more neutral effect) and will also hopefully give you the space to re-evaluate what you prioritise doing and expending your energy on in your days.
HOW do we begin to trust the power of our care? How do we begin to trust the purity of the heart’s intention? These are really important questions to ask in a time where self-doubt and insecurity are a very real individually and collectively dominant feature in the psyche and in the experience of being human. But instead of damning these very real aspects of humanness, let’s approach them with a real curiosity. Because left un-investigated, self-doubt and shame can obscure our ability to truly offer ourselves a wider space of care and self-directed healing energy in our lives. And can consequently greatly limit what we are able to bring forward in life, to life. So, keep curious and investigate the quality of your care.
Here are some processes/prompts that I would like to invite you to practice or explore that have helped me to open myself up to a wider care offered by myself, to myself:
Notice what triggers uncomfortable emotions within you, investigate where they come from and why they arise when they do
Some key emotions to look out for and investigate deeper into: shame (this is a big one), guilt, worry, fear-based thoughts, anxiety, dread, hopelessness, suppressed anger or resistance, low mood/depression. Investigate their origins, the role they played and how they have served you and how they have not served you & then try to notice when they come up again for you & work with consciously trying to let them lose a bit of the tightness and urgency of their grip on your psyche. This helps to cultivate a strong internal trust with yourself and creates more space for you to bring different life experiences IN, and it invites different ways of BEING in your world.
Once whatever emotions that pertain to you and your journey are somewhat released of their intensity (even if just in this moment - they will likely re-emerge as healing and re-programming the mind is a continual process because you are likely re-programming YEARS of habitual thought patterns) think about what feelings you would like to invite into your inner world that might be able to take up some of the space that the previously dominant ones inhabited. Some examples of emotions you might want to try bring more of IN are: peace, equanimity, balance, harmony, contentment, joy, open-heartedness, receptivity, wholeness, non-judgment, radical acceptance, non-attachment, centred stillness, grounded-ness, up-liftment, calmness, excitement, quiet, steadiness, warm, healed, full, strong, empowered, badass, ambitious, motivated, inspired, nourished, comfort and the like.
Once you have identified what you would like to allow IN, (try to) allow it in. Right now. Regardless of what your external conditions are, invite that feeling in right this moment. Close your eyes and feel what you want to feel, let the feeling spring up from WITHIN you. This exercise makes you realize that actually whatever experience you experience in your life is experienced from WITHIN YOU. From the seat of experience which is your consciousness. This is behind your physical form, behind your mind and underpins it ALL. You are the only common denominator in your lived experiences, all of your experiences stem from your inner perception filter. So, let yourself experience this moment as you wish. Just try it, free yourself to experience. Be conscious of how you want to think and how you want to feel. Whatever you WANT to experience is actually truly available to you right now, even if the external experiences or conditions that you previously thought were absolutely essential to enable that internal experience of joy or contentment aren’t there. You can still feel how you want to feel. Obviously certain external situations and circumstances can make this really challenging, but without denial of that, try to exercise the POWER of emotion and the power of the mind to get imaginative and creative with the ways that those emotions can be brought up for you.
I hope that these brief chats can provide a little gateway into some inner contemplation wherein your relationship to self, to life, to emotion, to care, to healing can be explored further with awakeness.
But, while you contemplate these things, you can get crackin’ with this delicious recipe. One bowl. Few ingredients. 10 minutes. Snack time along with some contemplative magic.
Ingredients:
1 cup of quick-cook oats
2 heaped tablespoons of peanut butter, smooth
2 heaped tablespoons of honey
1 really ripe banana, mashed thoroughly
2 tablespoons raw sunflower seeds
1 tablespoon of ground turmeric
2-3 teaspoons of ground cinnamon
Big pinch of sea salt
Desiccated coconut to roll the balls in
Option: You have total liberty to add in a few teaspoons of any other superfoods or powders you would like to (some add-ins that I love are Maca Powder, Goji Berries, Cacao Nibs, Ashwaghanda, Shatavari etc. just know that the more powders you add the drier the balls will be so you might have to adjust the amount of honey or mashed banana in the recipe!)
Method:
In a big bowl, place your ripe banana and mash it really well.
Add in the peanut butter and honey to the banana and mix it all together until well mixed.
Add in the rest of the ingredients (except the coconut) and mix together well - you might want to get in there with your hands, now! This is also a really fun, easy recipe to do with kids :) Helping to get kids more involved in the kitchen from a young age (which is SO important!). Once a dough forms, roll your desired size balls and then coat in the coconut. You can keep them in an airtight container for over a week in the fridge!
