In this accessible ethnography of a small town in northern Mozambique, everyday cultural knowledge and behaviors about food, cooking, and eating reveal the deeply human pursuit of a nourishing life. This emerges less through the consumption of specific nutrients than it does in the affective experience of alimentation in contexts that support vitality, compassion, and generative relations. Embedded within central themes in the study of Africa south of the Sahara, the volume combines insights from philosophy and food studies to find textured layers of meaning in a seemingly simple cuisine.
Combining the wisdom of classical Chinese medicine with modern nutritional science, this book explores the concept of Yang Sheng, which means to nourish life by nurturing body, mind and spirit in harmony with the natural rhythms and universal laws, revealing the importance of nutrition within it and outlining how our modern lifestyle and environment challenges our ability to do that. A perfect guide for practitioners and students of Chinese medicine, the book explains modern diets and Chinese nutritional theory with a focus on prevention of illness and the impact of lifestyle and environment on our health during each stage of life. Lifestyle and nutritional advice for prevention and treatment of a range of illnesses and conditions is given for both adults and children.
A Taoist adept provides a reader-friendly interpretation of the Taoist teachings on health and longevity The teachings of Taoism, China's great wisdom tradition, apply to every aspect of life, from the physical to the spiritual—and include instruction on everything from lifestyle (a life of simplicity and moderation is best) to the work of inner alchemy that is said to lead to longevity and immortality. Here, Eva Wong presents and explains three classic texts on understanding the Tao in the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of the body that provide an excellent overview of the three traditional levels of the Taoist teachings—Outer, Inner, and Secret. The Outer teachings are concerned with understanding the Tao as manifested in nature and society. They are easily accessible to the layperson and consist of the Taoist philosophy of nature and humanity, advice on daily living, and a brief introduction to the beginning stages of Taoist meditation. The Inner teachings familiarize the practitioner with the energetic structure of the human body and introduce methods of stilling the mind and cultivating internal energy for health and longevity. The Secret teachings describe the highest level of internal-alchemical transformations within the body and mind for attaining immortality.
Nautilus Book Awards Winners for 2007 (category: Self-Help/Psychology/ Personal Growth) "Like many people, Kathleen Hall found that despite great success and material wealth, she had yet to identify purpose, meaning, and balance in her work and her life. She left her Wall Street firm and devoted herself to understanding the relationships between mind, body, and spirit, and between professional and personal fulfillment. Since then, she has studied with great spiritual leaders including the Dalai Lama, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and the exiled Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. She has also learned from medical experts like Dr. Dean Ornish of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and Dr. Herbert Benson at the Harvard Mind-Body Institute. Inspired by those diverse influences, Dr. Hall has written A Life in Balance, a guided journey to joy, peace, and an intentional life grounded in the four roots of the SELF: * Serenity. Find what brings us peace, and channel it into everything we do * Exercise. Align the body with energy and health through walking, yoga, martial arts, and more * Love. Build community and relationships that heal others as well as ourselves * Food. Pay attention not just to what we eat, but to what we experience through all our senses Our lives pull us in many different directions; to find happiness, we must first create balance. Filled with wit, wisdom, and compassion, A Life in Balance will help any reader identify and stay true to his or her authentic self."
Based on presentations given at the 1993 Common Boundary Conference of the same title, when authors, artists, thinkers & teachers were brought together to discuss issues of the soul.
You don't have to turn to food in difficult times. Well Nourished shows you how to develop a mindful relationship with food as you nourish yourself emotionally. There is much more to nourishing yourself than simply eating food. After a long day of feeling run down and exhausted, what you're likely really hungering for are other forms of nourishment. Well Nourished is here to show you how to live a life where you can feel nourished emotionally, intellectually, physically, socially, and creatively. This is your chance to be mindfully present as you receive, experience, and engage in the nourishing activities and moments that will sustain you on levels other than what your stomach is telling you. You will learn to maintain an inner sense of balance and nourishment even when the waters of life are pitching you around like a ship in a storm. Well Nourished gives you the tools and practices to accomplish all of this when you might otherwise turn to food in these difficult times. With Well Nourished, you will develop a mindful relationship to food and craft your well-nourished life.
The concept of self-care is, in fact, thousands of years old. This buzzword is rooted in a 2,500-year old Chinese philosophy. ‘Yang sheng’ means to nourish life – fostering your own health and wellbeing by nurturing body, mind and spirit. In this book, Katie Brindle teaches readers how to harness this powerful natural healing system to improve every aspect of their life. Yang Sheng fits and works brilliantly in modern life. Some of the techniques may seem unusual, but they are all simple, quick and effective. Even more appealing, a key principle of Chinese medicine is balance; that means not being perfect or excluding foods or having too many rules or pushing yourself to exhaustion with overwork or over-exercise. And so, Yang Sheng encourages you to have the green juice and the glass of wine, a full-on day at work and a night out dancing. For people who are overtired and overtaxed, stressed, lacking a sex drive, or who feel anxious or hopeless, the practice of Yang sheng restores balance. Our bodies are designed to self-heal – Yang Sheng knows the mechanics of how to activate this.
Zhan Zhuang, the Art of Nourishing Life is the exploration of an ancestral practice, that of physical meditative postures. Through this practice, a continual process of adjustment, learning and purification takes place; it is a process by which the mind and body mutually integrate, triggering the unification of the self and its surroundings.
Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and the embodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically differentiated yet shared elemental body of life of the myriad things, and being responsively attuned in encountering and responding to things. These critical and transformative dimensions of early Daoism provide exemplary models and insights for cultivating a more expansive ecological ethos, environmental culture of nature, and progressive political ecology. This work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history.
