Emma Lovell Yoga

This content shows Simple View


Category Archives environment

Everything is connected

I thoroughly recommend watching this film.

‘Home is a 2009 documentary by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The film is almost entirely composed of aerial shots of various places on Earth. It shows the diversity of life on Earth and how humanity is threatening the ecological balance of the planet.’

Here’s the trailer:

You can view the full film here

 




You eat how you move

Really interesting article from Katy Bowman on the relationship between how you eat with how you move:

‘In the natural world, how you eat is based on your ability to get and prepare your food. By being directly involved with your food at every step throughout your life, you maintain the skills and physique necessary to continue to eat. In the natural world, you eat how you move...Historically the work (forces created by human movement) necessary to eat included not only the hunting and gathering bit, but also the mashing, banging, rubbing, beating, tearing, pounding, soaking, spreading, turning, hanging that it took to make nature edible. Said another way, most of the food you use to make your meals–even the “whole ingredients” like nut and coconut flours, oils, milks, and syrups you pour with ease, meats cut with precision, and veggies clean and separated for your convenience–has been processed. Not like in the “I just made this food by putting different chemicals together” kind of way, but a “hey, we performed 14 hours of labor so you could have these whole foods to now cook for your meal, you’re welcome,” kind of way.’  Full article here

Having spent basically a whole day trying to make apple juice from scratch, my movements included picking, pounding, pouring, grinding, pressing, lifting, among other less violent ones.  I could have bought the apple juice and saved myself a lot of time, but when looked at from a movement perspective, if I had  just skipped to the end bit, my movements would have probably just been pouring and sipping.

Here’s a couple of foraging recipes I’ve tried recently:

Hawthorn fruit leather

Ingredients: 1/2 litre hawthorn berries (you can add any hedgerow berries like sloes and rose hips- just improvise, but make sure you use approx half the volume of water to fruit.), 2 dessert apples (chopped), 1/4 litre water.

Method: put all the ingredients in a pan and bring to a slow simmer for 15 mins. Mash with a potato masher then rub through a coarse sieve onto a parchment-lined baking tray (approx 25 x 35cm). Spread out evenly with a spatula then put in oven at the lowest temp until dry. In a fan oven this may take around 3-4 hours. Or use a dehydrater if you have one. Discard the parchment paper, cut the fruit leather into strips and store in an airtight container.

Recipe from Native Hands

 

Nettle soup

Image result for nettles

Ingredients: Half a carrier bagful of stinging nettle tops, or fresh-looking larger leaves, 50g butter, 1 large onion finely chopped, 1 litre vegetable stock, 1 large potato, peeled and cut into cubes, 1 large carrot, peeled and chopped,sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, 2 tbsp crème fraîche, a few drops of extra-virgin olive oil, a few drops of Tabasco.

Method:  Wash the nettles and drain in a colander. Melt the butter in a large saucepan, add the onion and cook gently for 5-7 minutes until softened.  Add the stock, nettles, potato and carrot. Bring to a simmer and cook gently until the potato is soft, about 15 minutes.  Remove from the heat. Purée the soup and then season with salt and pepper to taste.  To serve add a teaspoonful of creme fraiche on top. As this melts, swirl in a few drops of extra-virgin olive oil and Tabasco.

Recipe from River Cottage




The long body

‘The long body is a Native American term which refers to the individual body plus the life support systems around it. It is a much bigger conception of the human body than we have in western culture, and considers the body continuous with the larger environment.’

I’ve been working my way through the excellent Liberated Body podcasts.  This is one of my favourites so far- Frank Forencich talks about the importance of slowing down, getting outside, and putting down the phone.  Here’s the podcast and here’s Frank’s article Habitat is Tissue.




‘ It is not until you become physically aware of how your own health is entirely reliant on the health of the great web of life, that ideas such as deep ecology absorb themselves into your arteries, sinews and bones.

If the air that filled my lungs became polluted, if the nutrients in the soil that produced my food became depleted, or if the spring water which made up 60% of my body became poisoned, my own health would suffer accordingly. This seems like common sense, but you wouldn’t think so by observing the way we treat the natural world today. Over time, even the boundaries of what I considered to be “I” became less and less clear.’   taken from ‘Living without money: What I learned’ by Mark Boyle, aka ‘the Moneyless Man’.  Full article here




‘In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call “participation mystique,” we were as one with our world as a child in the mother’s womb.

Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began — the lonely and heroic journey of the ego. Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought us great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights.

Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again — and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.’  Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self

Rose window , Erin Case via here

 

 




Posted on by Emma

‘Unfortunately, the extensive moralizing within the ecological movement has given the public the false impression that they are being asked to make a sacrifice- to show more responsibility, more concern, and a nicer moral standard.  But all that would flow naturally and easily if the self were widened and deepened so that the protection of nature was felt and perceived as protection of our very selves.’  Arne Naess

 




Posted on by Emma

‘The environmental crisis has deep attitudinal roots.  To restore our environment we need to heal our relationship with it, and that means healing the split in the psyche that cuts us off from the material world.  It means revisioning the relation of mind and matter.  The bulldozing of nature and the abuse of our own bodies reveal the depth of this separation, the fear it engenders, and the need to control… Matter itself, if we attend to it mindfully and gracefully, can help liberate us from delusion; for it is mind, not matter, that is in bondage.’  Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self