Blog « Kerry Ogden, M.A.

Vanilla Frozen Yogurt

posted on 06-29-10 at 7:00 am in Recipes - Treats

With so few ingredients, it’s important to use good-quality whole-milk yogurt. If you prefer the tang of yogurt, skip the vanilla. You can also use less sugar than what is called for here, say 2/3 of a cup.

vanilla-frozen-yogurt

3 cups strained plain or Greek-style yogurt (see below)
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix together the yogurt, sugar and vanilla. Stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Refridgerate for one hour, then freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Enjoy!

Strained yogurt
To make 1 cup of strained yogurt, line a mesh strainer with a few layers of cheese cloth. Then scrape 2 cups of plain-whole milk yogurt into the cheesecloth. Gather ends of cheese cloth and fold them over the yogurt. Place in refridgerator for at least 6 hours. For the recipe above you’ll be straining 6 cups of yogurt.

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Practice Forgiveness

posted on 06-22-10 at 7:04 am in Wellness 101

For better overall health, let go of the past, advises Brent Bauer director of the Complimentary and Integrative Medicine Program at May Clinic. “It’s amazing how many studies are bearing out the benefits of forgiveness.”

“When we cling to regrets and resentments, we remain stuck in the lower limbic brain, the very basest part. Every time you replay an offense, it’s as if you live it again,” he explains. “For better health, you want to be in the prefrontal cortex, where most of our higher functions take place and where we can choose to cultivate love and compassion.”

Practice forgiveness through ritual or meditation, or simply keep your attention focused on what’s happening right now. “Mindfulness is counterintuitive to resentment,” says Bauer.

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Attachment Style

posted on 06-15-10 at 7:07 am in Attachment

As a child the feeling of safety counteracts fear. If there is no feeling of safety, anxiety, the mother of all emotional pain, takes hold. Anxiety is rooted in the feeling of being alone in the face of danger. Because the feeling is unbearable, defenses soon arise to reestablish safety where the attachment relationship was unable to do so.

Children, being wonderfully creative, are capable of conjuring unlimited ways to maintain the attachment bonds that fend off anxiety. As we grow older theses clever coping strategies become internalized. In other words, they become unconscious blueprints of being.

Some ways of being are healthy and adaptive, while others keep us from fully experiencing life as we’d like to. Without full access to our emotional world, the internal compass used to navigate through the murky waters of relationships becomes compromised.

Many children had the big task of having to manage intense feelings without a map of how to make it back to the caregiver. Bumping into unforeseen life obstacles, children invariably suffer what are called “attachment injuries”.

The therapeutic work of attachment provides a second chance to heal these wounds. It only takes one relationship with an understanding other to transform the impact of trauma. From there, awareness generates change. Therapy is about taking that healing journey together.

Attachment Style Questionnaire
If your interested to know more about your attachment style a quick questionnaire is available on-line for free. It is not intended for clinical assessment, but is for educational purposes only.

http://www.web-research-design.net/cgi-bin/crq/crq.pl

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The Nature of Consciousness

posted on 06-08-10 at 7:28 am in Buddhism

The central tool for investigating consciousness is our own observation. With mindfulness, we can direct our attention to notice what is going on inside us, and study how our mind operates.

What we ordinarily call the mind usually refers to the “thinking mind”, the ceaseless fountain of ideas, images, creativity, evaluation, and problem solving that spontaneously streams through our mind. But when we look closely, we discover that the mind is not just its thoughts. It also includes a wide range of mind states or qualities around and below the thought process: feelings, moods, intuition, instincts.

But there is another aspect of consciousness that arises with each moment of experience and is flavored by that experience. This is the momentary, here-and-now single state of consciousness. There are joyful states of consciousness, fearful states, expanded and contracted ones, regretful states and loving ones. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh describes it this way: “The mind is like a television set with hundreds fo channels. Which channel will you turn on?“

With mindfulness, we can learn to acknowledge which channel is playing.

PRACTICE: The River of Sound
Sit comfortably and at ease. Close your eyes. Let your body be at rest and your breathing be natural. Begin to listen to the play of sounds around you. Notice those that are loud or soft, far and near. After you listened for a few minutes, let yourself sense, feel, or imagine that your mind is not limited to your head. Feel that your mind extends outward beyond the most distant sounds.

Relax in this openness and just listen. Let the sounds come and go, whether loud or soft, far or near, let them be clouds in the vast sky of your own awareness. As you rest in this open awareness for at time, notice how thoughts and feelings also arise and vanish like sounds in the open space of mind. Pleasant and unpleasant thoughts, pictures, words, joys, and sorrows – let them all come and go like clouds n the clear sky of mind.

Relax. Rest in this openness. Let sensations float and change. Allow thoughts and images, feelings and sounds to come and go. As you do, pay attention to the consciousness itself. Notice how the open space of awareness is clear, transparent, and timeless. This is your own true nature. Rest in it. Trust it. It is home.

This excerpt from The Wise Heart was graciously reprinted with permission by the author Jack Kornfield.

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Love After Love

posted on 06-01-10 at 7:32 am in Inspirational

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters form the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desparate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

-Derek Walcott

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Lemon-scented Quinoa Salad

posted on 05-25-10 at 7:28 am in Recipes - Summer

A recently rediscovered ancient “grain” native to South America, quinoa was once called “the gold of the Incas,” who recognized its value in increasing the stamina of their warriors. Not only is quinoa high in protein but the protein it supplies is complete protein, meaning that it includes all nine essential amino acids. Quinoa’s amino acid profile is well balanced, making it a good choice for vegans concerned about adequate protein intake. It is especially well-endowed with the amino acid lysine, which is essential for tissue growth and repair.

In addition to protein, quinoa features a host of other health-building nutrients. Because quinoa is a very good source of manganese as well as a good source of magnesium, iron, copper and phosphorus, this “grain” may be especially valuable for persons with migraine headaches, diabetes and atherosclerosis.

lemon-scented-quinoa-salad

Salad:
1 cup quinoa
2 cups water
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 can garbanzo beans, drained
1/2 cup cilantro
1/2 red onion, chopped

Dressing:
1 garlic clove, minced
1/4 cup tahini
zest of one lemon
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons hot water
1/2 teaspoon sea salt

Rinse the quinoa in a fine-meshed strainer. In a medium saucepan heat the quinoa and water until boiling. Reduce heat and simmer until water is absorbed adn quinoa fluffs up, about 15 minutes. Quinoa is done when you can see the curlique in each grain and it is tender with a bit of pop to each bite. Drain any extra water and set aside.

While the quinoa is cooking make the dressing. Whisk together the garlic, tahini, olive oil, lemon zest and juice. Add the hot water to thin a bit and then the salt.

Toss the cooked quinoa, beans, cilantro, red onion, and half the dressing. Add more dressing if you like and season with more salt to taste. Serve garnished with a bit of cilantro. Enjoy!

Serves 4.

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Lean on Your Friends

posted on 05-18-10 at 7:40 am in Wellness 101

Friendship is key to staying well, says Alice Domar Ph.D., founder of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health. “People who have inadequate social support are as likely to die early as people who smoke or have high cholesterol.”

She recommends keeping two kinds of relationships going. “You need your foxhole friends, who will be there for you at 2 am and your party friends, you make you laugh,” she says. What you don’t need? Unhealthy relationships. These can prove as bad for you as total isolation. “If there are people in your life who suck you dry, break up with them,” says Domar. “There is nothing wrong with that.”

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Play Time

posted on 05-11-10 at 7:00 am in Health

Play is one of the keys to good health. Are you getting your daily dose?

Quick, what’s completely pointless and absolutely indispensable? Why it’s play, of course.

Sadly, we don’t get nearly enough play time with negative ramifications for our health and relationships. ”We are pushed from play, shamed into rejecting it by a culture that doesn’t understand the human need for it,” according to Stuart Brown, M.D., author of Play: How It Shapes the Brain. “Playing is seen as a childish activity not done in the adult world.”

Phooey!

The remedy, luckily, needn’t involve hopscotch or skipping rope (unless that’s your thing). Brown defines play as any apparently purposeless, inherently attractive endeavor that makes us forget time and ourselves. Reading Shakespeare qualifies is you really want to do it. Same goes for knitting a scarf, studying algebra, or listening to Merle Haggard.

If you love it and lose yourself in it, it’s playtime.

Done with dread or out of obligation, it’s something else. “To really regain play in your life, you will need to take a journey back into the past to help create avenues for play that work for you in the present,” says Brown. In other words, think back to something that gave you that goofy, happy feeling when you were young, and dream up ways to re-create that feeling now.

Go ahead…I double dare you.

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Our Many Selves

posted on 05-04-10 at 7:26 am in Selfhood

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
~ Walt Whitman

Multiplicity
It is the nature of the human mind to be subdivided into parts. We all have them. We are born with them. Carl Jung referred to them as archetypes. Others refer to them as subpersonalities, aspects, thoughts or feelings. These can have specific ages, temperaments, talents, strengths and desires.

Parts exist from birth, either in potential or in actuality. All parts are valuable and want to play constructive inner roles. They came into being honestly (often as a response to the environment) and will gratefully return to preferred roles once they are reassured that it is safe to do so.

Polarization
Many past or current events can affect the balance and harmony of a person’s internal world. The most common of these influences include family attitudes and interactions, as well as traumatic experiences. Parts develop and take over to protect the Self by taking on burdens. When this happens the internal system gets out of whack and parts become polarized.

Thankfully even highly polarized systems can heal themselves in a safe, caring environment. One such place is in therapy where a compassionate therapist can help point the person back to their true Self.

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Spring Ragout

posted on 04-27-10 at 7:00 am in Recipes - Spring

It is important to have all your ingredients washed, prepped and ready to go before you get ready to cook. The whole thing comes together fast and furiously. Dark, nutty wild rice would make a striking contrast and tasty side for this colorful spring dish.

spring-ragout

20-30 fava bean pods, removed from puffy shells
extra virgin olive oil
fine grain sea salt
1 bunch thin asparagus, cut into 1/2-inch segments
1 1/2 cups peas, freshly shelled or frozen
zest of one lemon
splash of cream
pecorino cheese (or other hard, salty cheese)

Cook fava beans for about a minute in a pot of salted water. Drain, run under cold water and shell second layer. To do this pinch each fava to break the skin and gently squeeze to separate the bean from the skin. Set aside.

Drop a big splash of olive oil in a cold skillet, add two big pinches of salt and two tablespoons of water over medium high heat. When the water starts bubbling add the asparagus spears. Cover and cook for 30-45 seconds, longer if the asparagus is thicker. You want it to be barely tender and bright green.

Stir in the peas and cook uncovered for another 20 seconds or so, maybe longer if using frozen peas. Now stir in the lemon zest and the tiniest splash of cream. Top with a sprinkle of grated cheese. Enjoy!