Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image: photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image: photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Let’s look at some gifts you can give that will give health, sex, and happiness to the people you love.

Healthy

• Cleaning out all factory food from kitchen and restocking with real food—a great gift for your family
• A membership to a (Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) where you get the box of produce every week or so.  Here’s an example.
• Promise to cook dinner of real food every night at least for one month—it could become a habit
• Organic fruit/produce basket
• Organic Teas
• Organic Dark Chocolate
• Quality supplements
• A home cooked meal for a friend or loved one
• A juicer—My favorite gift. This would be a huge fantastic gift for anyone who is into health.
• A dehydrator so that you can soak and dehydrate nuts (to rid them of their natural toxins)
• Homemade granola—The recipe is at the end of this blog.

Sexy

• A promise to have sex twice a week for at least one month—and women you know what men like and some women stop doing that once they get married and that’s really unfair to men so get with it and make the promise and follow through
• Workout gear
• Pass for local gym, YMCA, yoga studio
• Organic cosmetics and personal care items (I’m going to feature a personal lubricant on my shopping page very soon)
• Work Out DVD or Nintendo Wii workout system
• Eye mask for sleeping well
• Baby Backpack carrier for people with babies so they can hike
• Massage
• Promise to walk the dog every day all year
• Give yourself your own bedroom if your partner snores—or if you snore giver your partner his/her own room

Happy

My top gift to give is brain health. So that sounds like a weird gift, you know I always say so goes the brain so goes the body. Brain health is achieved three ways: A diet of real, whole living food to rebuild your brain cell by cell. This includes real fats. So if you’re in a health nut family and won’t be exiled out into the frozen tundra for giving kooky gifts, you can give

• Cod liver oil, coconut oil, and Activator X which is the butter from grass grazing cows that contains vitamin K, A and D, and you know I consider butter the most healing of all fats, and Activator X is a therapeutic fat that you eat by the spoonful, like a supplement.

Aside from food, brain health is fostered through meditation. Meditation calms and soothes the brain. You don’t have to be a Buddhist and you can practice meditation regardless of your religion.

• Giving a gift certificate to a meditation retreat would be an amazing gift. And better yet, going with a friend or partner would be so nice.

• Give the gift of a vacation, even if it’s just a long weekend. Right now there are deals all over the place and you can buy a packaged vacation, or if you’re a good planner plan something yourself and give that as a gift.

I’ve only just recently in my life come to understand the importance of down time—I’m talking about vacations. In his book Life Unlocked, Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Srinivasan Pillay writes about vacations as “amydala servicing.”

So the amygdala is the part of the  brain that processes emotions.  Because our brain is survival oriented, the amygdala is going to process danger first. So fear is often what registers, and you know we live in a very stressful fearful time with terrorism, global warming, obesity and disease epidemics. So taking vacations is really important to give your amydala a break from having to continuously search for threats. What happens is that if you have positive experiences then positive emotions like feeling safe, secure, and confident take over. This in turn paves the way for you to be successful in your life, as in healthy, sexy, and happy. Vacations also give the thinking parts of your brain a rest and lo and behold you find that you’re starting to solve problems in your life that seemed insurmountable before you left on vacation. But the trick is to plan positive vacations because the brain has a pesky way of landing in what’s called the default network. If your brain is idling with nothing to do it will immediately go into the default network of worrying about the past and fretting about the future. For that reason you need to plan vacations that are filled with positive activities that you enjoy doing.

• Airline tickets and hotel reservations are nice but if you can’t afford that then you can still go on mini vacations—say take a couple of days in a local hotel and lounge and read a good book at the indoor pool
• Reservations to a day-long meditation retreat
• A good pair of walking shoes, with a few maps of trails that you and a loved one can walk together
• A National Park pass
• Lessons for physical activities–rowing, rock climbing, personal training at the gym, etc.
• A day of housekeeping or cleaning out the garage. There are lots of housekeeping services you can call. And then take your partner, friend, parent out on a mini vacation to clear his or her brain of stress and rest that stressed out amydala.
• Shoveling and snow blowing so your loved one can take a break
• Take a vacation in your garden. If your partner, family member, or friend is into gardening, then gardening books, seeds, planters and other gardening paraphernalia are great gifts they can use to plan out their gardens for the spring
• Acupuncture
• Hypnosis (especially if someone you know is struggling with addictions or emotional problems)
• Reflexology—an amazing gift for someone with painful feet

Death by Supermarket is on sale on my site and Amazon and I’m literally giving it away two copies for the price of one. For $10 including S&H you can get two copies of Death by Supermarket. It’s a gift that will change you life forever.

Hippie Girl Granola

Makes 10 Servings

1 cup organic rolled oats

1/4 cup each raw, organic pecans, walnuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds,

or nuts and seeds of your choice

1/8 cup coconut oil, melted

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon allspice

1/8 cup unrefined, organic honey

1/8 cup organic currants

(or any dried fruit—figs, raisins, pineapple, apples, bananas)

Pre-heat oven to 350°. In a medium-sized bowl, combine all ingredients except currants, which become teeth-shatteringly hard if you bake them too long. Spread over a cookie sheet and bake for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and stir in currants or other dried fruit. Bake another 10 minutes. Remove and cool. Keep in airtight container.

Some Very Interesting Facts About Nuts

Nuts contain protein and carbs, so you can’t just eat them indiscriminately or you’ll put on fat like squirrel preparing for winter. Equally important to know is that nature has imbued nuts with toxins to keep predators from decimating the entire crop. If you’ve ever downed a bunch of nuts with a glass of wine and ended up with a tummy ache and blamed it on the wine, it was actually the nuts.

If you’re going to eat a lot of nuts, you need to rid them of their toxins. Put nuts in a large bowl and cover with water and a couple of pinches of sea salt. Cover with a plate and leave the nuts at room temperature for eight hours (cashews get too soggy, so only soak them for six hours). Drain and place the nuts on a stainless steel cookie sheet and dehydrate at 150° for twelve to twenty-four hours—or use a dehydrator.

Listen to me talk with Stacey Powells on KMMT Healthy, Sexy, Happy Radio
Topic: THIS CHRISTMAS GIVE THE GIFT OF HEALTH, SEX, AND HAPPINESS

Om Shanti,

WHAT I KNOW FOR SURE ABOUT LOVE

By Arielle Ford

Here’s what I know for sure: finding true love is possible for any one at any age if you’re willing to prepare your self, on all levels, to become a magnet for love.

This wonderful Universe of ours is set up to deliver the people and things we draw to us that our consistent with our personal belief system.  If you don’t believe you will ever find the ONE, then, guess what?  You get to be right …you probably won’t.

If, however, you learn to believe that the ONE is not only out there but is ALSO LOOKING FOR YOU, then true love can be yours.

The basic Law of Attraction states that you will attract to you those things that match your state of belief.

Believing that your soul mate is out there is critical to the preparation of manifestation.

I believe that the Universe is always mirroring back to us our beliefs about our selves and the world.  If we believe the world is a loving and friendly place, then most of the time that will be our experience. But, if we believe the world is a chaotic, stressful and fearful place, then that becomes our reality.  So, believing and knowing that your soul mate is out there is the most important part of the formula.

What if I told you that it’s not your job to know HOW your soul mate is going to appear? What if I told you it’s only your job to be ready, willing and open to love. Think about it this way: you really don’t know where air comes from but you do believe that it’s always there for you, right?

The same is true for love.  It’s there for you.  It’s always been there for you.  You just need to remember the love that you are and once you do, the Universe will deliver to you the perfect soul mate.

Here is what worked for me and I know it can work for you: When I was in my early forties I decided to manifest my soulmate using everything I had ever learned about manifestation, psychology, spirituality, and the Law of Attraction.  My intentions became crystal clear while I simultaneously cleared out the clutter in my house AND in my heart.  I learned and invented techniques, rituals, visualizations and prayers that helped me prepare my body, mind, spirit and home for an amazing relationship.  And they worked. I met my husband, Brian, who has exceeded all of my desires and expectations. He was and is everything I ever wished for.

Big love is possible for any one of any age if you are willing to become a magnet for love.  Continue to live each day in the knowingness that you are in a loving, committed relationship as you savor the waiting for your beloved to arrive.

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Arielle Ford has spent the past 25 years living and promoting consciousness through all forms of media. She is the author of THE SOULMATE SECRET: Manifest the Love of Your Life with the Law of Attraction (Harper One). She lives in La Jolla, CA with her husband, Brian Hilliard. Please visit her website www.soulmatesecret.com

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