Thursday, December 31, 2020

Last Breakfast of 2020

Last day of 2020, and I had a fine breakfast! I toasted a banana muffin, had my almost daily savory oats and something new I fashioned up. I had some granola hanging out in the cupboard so I poured some in a bowl. I added raspbeerry pudding in place of yogurt from the Engine 2 Cookbook and topped it off with some blueberries.

This coffee isn't really coffee but Teccino Dark Roast Chicory Root "Coffee". It is close enough to real coffee that I don't really need coffee anymore. One of my goals last year, unspoken though it was, was to wean myself off of caffeine partiularly in the form of coffee. But i really like coffee, dark and black. Even Decaf has caffeine in it so I really wanted to get off caffeine. This helped me do that. It is close enough to a dark roast coffee that I was able to convince myself it was acceptable. I actually made a pot of "coffee that 1/4th was regular dark roast coffee and the rest this and I could tell almost right away the effect of caffeine on my system. I did it again yesterday and decided I don't really like the effect even though it does provide you with some focus. I decided that other than really necessary scenarios I will not be drinking coffee and even so if I want to have some caffeine I intend to get it from green tea not coffee.

Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Intermittent Fasting - Gonna give it a try

So I am going to give intermittent fasting a try. I don't really like the name or the fad but the practice of it seems to make sense for me right now. As you know fro my last post, I am slowing pulling together what I want my goals to be for this next year. I have already begun the process of starting the transition to getting up earlier again as I've fallen back to my night owl ways. In fact, I got up at 5am today, yay for me. Getting up to do my Morning Sadhana consistently will take time and I should be getting into the swing of it as it begins to get lighter in the mornings. However that does mean I'll need to be getting to bed earlier than I have been. This in turn impacts when I should eat dinner. So I've been thinking about that.

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Coming Down to the Wire

It's coming down to the wire - it is almost the new year and I haven't figured out my goals yet. I know it will be similar to the goals I have set year over year for the last couple of years. However, 2020 was such a failure that I may need to step back my goals a little bit. I'll still have a mix of yoga and whole food, plant-based goals but I think for 2021 I may be a little bit more specific about achieving certain milestones. For example, taking a 300Hr yoga teacher training, and/or getting a certificate in Plant Based Nutrition probably from eCornell.

Monday, December 21, 2020

Change Your Brain; Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman

I just listened to this podcast. Wow, it was really good. It is Rich Roll's Channel on Youtube. I have been subscribed to Rich's podcast for several years now. I discovered Rich when he spoke at the Cleveland Vegfest in what 2016, maybe 2017. He was one of the keynote speakers, and his wife Julie Piatt co-taught the yoga class the kicked the vegfest of with my teacher, Marni Task. Mostly because via the Esselstyn's I knew he was a vegan ultra marathoner, but when I heard his story at Vegfest it was his story of recovery from addiction that really hit home with me (I'm a recovering alcoholic of 25 years) and the connection to a whole food, plant-based diet.

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

New Website: First Thoughts

I've been playing with Django again and playing with Google Cloud services though I may end up trying Amazon's AWS Services. Part of it is to remember what I used to know as well as learn what's new in the cloud service world. It's been close to a decade perhaps a little more since I've really played with it. It's kind of fun getting back into it even though I'm not a coder in and real sense, but I can do simple stuff - like a django website.

Arisa and I are preparing for when we "retire" from regular work jobs. However, we'll never have enough money that we can stop working so we are loosely planning our "second careers". We both have begun our own journeys along completely separate path than we would have ever imagined. We hope to combine our separate "specialties" into a multiple service wellness business. For me that means Yoga, Meditation, and whole food, plant-based dietary lifestyle coaching. For Arisa that means Reflexology and Kikou (気功), or it's more well known Chinese name of Qigong. It is similer to Reiki (霊気) which is probably more well known in the US than Kikou. Since we are thinking about that, I figure I can kill two birds with one stone and start on our new website as I learn django and all this cloud computing stuff.

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Finally To Chapter 4: Kaivalya Pada

As you may recall, I am reading three different version of the Yoga Sutras - the first being T.K.V. Desikachar's translation and commentary, Swami Satchidananda's translation and commentary, as Edwin Bryant's tome. I generally read on sutra per day, and read it from each of the books. Often Edwin's version will have a lengthy discussion as well which is really educational.

Long story short, it has been taking a while to read through the Sutras but I have finally reached the last and final chapter Kaivalya Pada, or as one of them translated it Absolute Independence.

Progress is progress but I'd probably be making more of that if I were only reading one, but more importantly weren't taking a Yoga Sutra's workshop with Dr. Bryant Which I have now extended to include his study group, or Svādhyāya-śālā on Friday nights. This class is currently studyig the Sāṃkhya Kārikā. Dr. Bryant says on his website:

This is the primary text of the Sāṃkhya School – it plays the same canonical role for Sāṃkhya as the Yoga Sūtras play for Yoga. We can note that actually Yoga and Sāṃkhya were originally one system (as the Gītā also notes: V.3-4), with Sāṃkhya occupying itself primarily with the metaphysics of prakṛti, and Yoga with the practices leading to puruṣa.

If you are interested feel free to come on Friday evening's at 6pm. Check his side for the specific dates.

Friday, December 04, 2020

Started Okinawa Program

I actually read the Foreword and first Chapter of The Okinawa Program. I read this book in the early 2000s when it was first released. I may have mentioned in my earlier post on it that I lived in Okinawa at the time the book was released and I've met all three of the authors as well as Dr. Weil who wrote the foreword. As I suggested in that previous post, the Okinawa Program does say it is not simply diet, but exercise, spirituality and community that help define what makes Okinawans so long lived.

Tuesday, December 01, 2020

Playing with Django

It has been quite a while, probably close to a decade, since I have played with Django. Motivated partially by watching my son Ken creating an app I decided to take a look at it again. I may look at moving my website away from Google Sites which is getting worse and worse website tool. Well that's not completely fair, it makes it really easy to create really simple sites that are not awful to look at and are accessible to multiple devices (cell, desktop, etc). It is also really nicely incorporates GSuite capabilities. Maybe because I am used to being able to tweak what I use more I feel really restricted by sites.

If I do move over to Django for my website the other question is what to do with this blog. Blogger is more that sufficient for my blogging purposes and ties nicely in with photos and youtube making some of the things we probably want to do with our website. But it would also be nice to have everything in one place.

Plus it is just fun to "develop" (cut and paste code) a web site.