Archive for the ‘The Sylvan Plan’ Category

All Hail the Book of Noms

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

In the coming year one of my goals is to actually cook things out of my 55 vegan cookbooks – I’m compiling a list right now and I’m hoping to try a new recipe each week.  In addition to my umpteen cookbooks I have a pretty hefty stack of cardstock pages covered in magazine-clipped recipes I’ve never tried as well as quite a few printouts from websites and scans from library books.  There’s also my tried-and-true roster of recipes, which I’ve kept in page protectors in a crappy blue binder.

I hated that binder.  It was ugly and unkempt and badly organized.  Using it made me grumpy, and one thing the world does not need is a grumpy Sylvan, especially at mealtime!  Cooking is already kind of onerous for me, so in order to make the whole process more fun, I decided to redo my binder – to make it prettier as well as more functional.  When you’re moving toward a more compassionate, healthy life, your cookbook is more than just a random pile of recipes; it’s a culinary Book of Shadows, reflecting the values you bring to the table as well as your own personal cooking style.

I’m still working on the inside, but the outside at least is so cute I can barely stand it.

It’s a standard D-ring binder, of course, and I actually bought scrapbook paper for the covers and spine; me and my glue stick are like *this*.  My kitchen is mostly green and white, and I’m adding touches of red because red is my favorite color. When I found this paper at the HoLo I may or may not have squeed in public thereby frightening the frizzy-haired lady with the vacant-eyed purse dog.

You can’t really tell from the crap picture quality but the font is dark green and has leaves sprouting out of it – I think I got it for free from DaFont.com.  I do love a good font.

For the spine I did the same thing, but if you’ve ever dealt with a binder spine insert you know how annoying they are.  By some miracle (probably because I was using cardstock instead of flimsy paper) I managed to get the thing in without wrinkling it.  I didn’t even have to curse (much)!

The back cover is the same deal except I added a quote that felt appropriate:

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

~Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

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Posted in The Sylvan Plan |

In Which Our Author Hatches a Dastardly Plan…

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

So…I turned 34 on Saturday.

Remember when 30 was old?  *laugh*

Here I am in that liminal space where one year is winding down but the next hasn’t started yet, and I find a certain comfort in that threshold, knowing that if I can just lay down what I’ve been dragging with me, something new is waiting on the other side.  I can’t always do it – some of my baggage I’ve been carrying my entire life – but I have put down a few things, and I like to think it’s given me the freedom to reach for what’s next.

Source: theberry.com via Dianne on Pinterest

 

And rather than give in to the pervasive melancholy of the holidays – don’t get me started on why I hate this time of year – I am using the time between my birthday and year’s end to hatch a cunning plan.

As I’ve said, I have learned a metric ass-ton about myself this year, and while a lot of it has hurt, I’m grateful for all of it because it means going forward into 2012 I have a lot more confidence that this time, I can affect the change I desire, in the right way and on the right timeline for my body and mind so that all facets of this trippy little animal known as Sylvan will work together for our common wellness.

Remember how, when I married myself, I said that I had grown weary of waging war against myself and was ready to work for peace?  I’m taking myself at my word this time, and working on a project of sorts, a kind of New Deal.

What’s funny is this is one of the first projects I’ve undertaken that is of no benefit to anyone but me.  I’m not aiming to teach a class on it, or write a book about it; I’ll write about it here on my blog as a form of accountability, but I’m not selling my 30 Days to a Brand New You secret formula or any of that mumbo-jumbo.  At most, I hope that if I am successful in adopting some of the changes I have planned, my success will inspire my readers to give a similar Plan a try in their own lives, in accordance with their own temperaments and circumstances.  I don’t want to tell people how to live; I want to figure out how to live and maybe give people a few good ideas while I’m at it.

The Sylvan Plan for Badass Integrative Wellness will encompass several key areas of my daily life:  diet, spiritual practice, community, activity, creativity, and more.  It will involve some very specific tools, which I’ll talk about soon, taken from all over the place – in fact the Plan itself is a synthesis of what I have learned and want to apply from a variety of sources, including but not limited to:

  • Health at Every Size as set forth in Linda Bacon’s book for nutrition and movement without a focus on weight
  • Dr. Andrew Weil’s mental health plan in Spontaneous Happiness to help boost the efficacy of my mental health meds (more on that book later)
  • Colleen Patrick-Goudreau’s 30 Day Vegan Challenge (specifically her emphasis on being a joyful vegan and the spiritual aspects of the path)
  • Goddess Leonie’s 2012 Goddess Planner (a great resource for goal-setting)
  • Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project for breaking down areas of improvement and keeping charts (I love a good chart)
  • Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts for its inspiring gratitude practice

…and other influences as well.

I plan to go back through all of these resources and harvest the ideas and practices I want to incorporate, then from that create a 30 day sort of gentle immersion program to start making changes.

None of this will deal in absolutes.  I want to be a researcher of my own wellness, evaluating what works and what doesn’t, adapting and changing as I go.  I’m already assembling my toolkit (hint: it involves a lot of writing).

I do plan to blog about this pretty regularly, even if it’s a spectacular failure, because that will teach me just as much as anything; but at most I’m thinking I’ll blog on the subject once a week.  Just like with my TVD recaps feel free to skip ‘em, but it’s not going to be some boring food diary or anything; it’ll be my adventures, and misadventures, in trying to Get My Shit Together Fo’Realz This Time.

You know me. At the very least there will be a healthy dose of snark. Think of it as Eat, Pray, Love meets Bridget Jones.  Except without the mega travel budget or all those cigarettes.

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Posted in Ahimsa, Body Sacred, Spiritual Living, The Sylvan Plan |