Have some nutritious soup

Did you see the movie Julie and Julia yet? I caught it on a flight back to California from Florida after attending the memorial service for a girl I grew up with back in my native state of South Dakota. She was only sixty-six and died of breast cancer.

So, I was admittedly in a pensive mood, thinking existential kinds of thoughts. I was captivated by the basic premise of the movie: this girl Julie has always loved Julia Child and decides to cook all of the 524 recipes from her cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a year and blog about her experiences. As we all now know, she has this amazing response to the blog with thousands of followers.

I found myself thinking about how interesting it is that we humans are so fascinated with nourishing the body and how difficult it is for us to find time to nourish those deeper levels of ourselves: what we could call the spirit or just deep self.

I know there is a longing for nourishment of these parts of ourselves. In my practice as a psychotherapist and as a teacher of classes in Universal Wisdom, I hear people cry, I hear people despair of their disconnection from their essential selves and the resulting disconnection from others. I have many who, like my client last week, tell me they don’t have time to quiet their minds, think about guiding universal wisdom teachings or do simple meditative practices. I was suggesting ten minutes a day. My friend and teacher, Yuan Miao has told me the two Chinese characters which written together mean busy, separately mean heart and death.

Miao is one of my teachers of universal wisdom. Her lineage comes from her Tibetan grandmother, Yeshe Tsuomu, meaning Ocean of Wisdom. Grandma taught keeping things simple and pure: she made soup said to have amazing healing power from three garden roots. Her teachings of universal wisdom are like this soup: simple, pure and powerful.

Like Julie in the movie, I am devoted to my teachers and committed to incorporating their teachings into my life.  So, the idea to do this blog came to me. I will be choosing a universal wisdom teaching, a recipe so to speak, and I will be trying to practice it in my life. If you are as interested in food for the spirit as folks were in French Cooking, you can come back to my blog once a week, pick up a teaching of universal wisdom and hear my tale of how it was to try to incorporate it into my life. I promise to keep it shorter than this, and simple.

If you want to “cook” along with me, I’d love to have you share your experiences.

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