Category: Mental Health

Five Unorthodox Reasons Why You Should Grow Some Your Own Food (A Little…or a Lot)
In no particular order: When you grow your own stuff, you can tell Monsanto to shove it. In September of 2014, GMO giant Syngenta Crop Protection LLC asked the US Environmental Protection Agency to increase the legal tolerance for neonicotinoid pesticides on crops. Neonicotinoids, as you may have read, are now widely regarded as the […]

The Luxury of Just Being Right Here, Right Now
Last night, my amazing niece called me (after I’d gone to bed) to let me know that she’s become engaged to a guy we all like a lot. I was smiling all over, listening to her voicemail. Almost in tears, really. Not just about the news, but about the fact that she took the time, […]

Happiness and Hedonism: Nudging Yourself Toward a Happy Life
People ask me why I write about what I write about. At least one person in my life gives me a hard time for “glorifying hedonism,” as though I’m advocating for naked drunken reveling with the Rockettes in a posh Gold Coast mansion (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I wonder about it sometimes. […]

Friday Freedonist: A Half-Hour of Pure Bliss
Do you know what yoga nidra is? Before your brain starts conjuring up images of twisting your body into odd shapes and stretching to rest your head next to your buttocks, hold up (Martha Beck once described her yoga instructor as looking “… like the very serene victim of a terrible, terrible crime.”) Yoga nidra […]

The Garden in Winter: Five Things Gardeners Can Do to Beat the Winter Blues
Confession time: At the height of the harvest in early September, I am praying for the peace and quiet of February. My kitchen counters are groaning with produce that needs to be chopped, blanched, canned, frozen, dried. There’s not much room for anything else, to be honest, and so it sometimes sneaks out into other […]

Happy Birthday to Me: Are You Celebrating Your Birthday (Week) in Green Hedonist Style?
Let me start by explaining that, here in our house, the concept of isolating a single 24-hour period to celebrate the day of our emergence on this planet is laughable. Twenty fours hours to celebrate 52 years of this wild, inexplicable, crazy, maddening, magnificent aliveness? Yeah, see, I don’t think so. So some time ago […]

Friday Freedonist: Combining 5 Luxurious Home-Made Indulgences for a Personal Spa Day
It’s been a hard week, or to put a more positive spin on things, I should say an industrious week. Work days that stretched into the evening hours, long workouts to try to start shedding some holiday weight, and too little time left over to just sit and take a deep breath. So I thought […]

Looking Forward to 2014: Five Things to Do Differently Next Year (to have more fun, live even better, and do more good)
I don’t generally make New Years resolutions, and fear not, I am not going to start today. But the end of the year usually finds me gnawing on a straw in a coffee shop somewhere, staring off into space and mulling over what I may want to change up in the coming year. (Yep, it’s […]

Friday Freedonist: Forest Bathing? It’s Free, It’s Luscious, It’s Healthy — And No Tub to Scrub
Today, I bathed with my clothes on. And it was amazing. Okay, I know, that’s weird even for ME. But for today’s Friday Freedonist, I was on a quest to groove on a little shinrin-yoku, the Japanese term for “taking in the forest atmosphere” or forest bathing. On this fantastic sunny autumn morning with tall […]

What’s the Ultimate Daily Pleasure? (Part 2)
Five Ways I Begged, Borrowed, and Bought More Time Yesterday I talked about the one shining thing that tops the charts for me in terms of luxury, hedonism, and selfish pleasure: Time. Today, a little about how I recrafted my life to have more of it to enjoy, and some thoughts on how you can […]
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