While on an amazing hike today with my three children, my best friend Katherine, and her two daughters, we had a really great conversation about our daughters and what it will be like for them when they begin to grow from a child and into a woman.  In other cultures it has been a long standing tradition to have a very clear right of passage.  When a girl gets her period it is considered a very special and sacred time.  In fact in certain indigenous tribes, when a woman gets her period she goes to a special part of the village to be only with other women, during that time.  She will rest and take care of herself because it is a sacred cycle of her body.

Both Katherine and I agree that we must be open and talk freely about the changes our daughters are going through.  If they have questions answer them, if they have concerns help them to understand that what is going on with their growth is helping them to grow into a divine woman.

We have it back wards in America.  Our right of passage of teens is to send them off to the mall.  It’s a form of Independence to be able to wonder the mall for hours on end with other teens.   Our teens are bombarded with so much information, and so much stimuli.  Our teens are so impressionable at this time in their lives so why the hell are we allowing them to be subjected to so much crap, excuse my french.  If you lived in a tribe, once you grow into your teens you are sent on a vision quest.  This is a time of quiet, of solitude, it is a girl or boys time to discover themselves and grow into a real man or woman.  It is understood that a teen is going through so much emotionally and physically, lets not forget hormonally and the vision quest is mean to guide them through all of this internal resistance.

We don’t live in small tribes here, it’s not common to send out kids on vision quests and celebrate right of passage, but as parents we can create this for them.  My husband and I are going to create something that works for our girls and our son, we as parents will give them a chance to have a right of passage and a vision quest, even if it is in the center of a modern country.

This can be fun and a bonding experience for all of you.  Try doing some research, their are other people in the US who are doing this for their kids too.  Check out and get some ideas so you can do this for your growing children.

Are you indoors right now?  Well then get up, and take a nice cleansing step outside.

Most of us spend a majority of our time indoors.  We work all day, and rush home, only to be indoors again.  Well it’s time to get outside and breathe.  As women, we are so connected to nature, to our mother Earth.  I really encourage you to get outside for a walk each day.  Nature has a rhythm and so do our bodies.  Walking is so beneficial for women because it puts your body back into it’s natural rhythm with nature.

One of my favorite things to do is watch the sunset.  I’m so busy home schooling our kids, helping my husband with our business, and taking care of the things that need to be done at home so I tend to do my walks in the evening before dinner.  My husband gets home and it’s my chance to step out for a walk.  I listen to my favorite meditative music and admire the world around me.  The sun setting always seems so therapeutic to me.  I go home feeling balanced and calm.  Especially if I’ve had a challenging day it’s amazing how a walk can make everything clear.

Remember if you feel tired or stressed out, instead of reaching for something to help get you by, like caffeine.  Try stepping outside.  Nature and fresh air really are the best medicine!

When you hear the word Courage, what does it mean to you?  What does it mean to be a courageous person?  Perhaps it’s someone who takes charge, takes action, and moves forward no matter what gets in the way.

Those things are all true but what does the word Courage really mean?  The word courage is derived from the Latin Language, the word means core.  And what is your core, it’s your heart.  So courage means to live from your core, “your heart.”

To have courage in your life means you decide to move forward and grow in your life.  This doesn’t mean things won’t get in your way, or should I say try to get in your way.  Of course you will have challenges, in fact the more courage you have, and the more you grow in life, the more resistance you will feel.  But having courage means you do it anyways, and your begin to expand and grow as a person.

Do you like to eat?  I know I do!

I don’t know a single person who doesn’t enjoy a good meal prepared with love.  But why is it that so many people seem to have a lot of issues when it comes to food?  Everything from over eating, eating disorders, and poor nutritional intake.  Truly the way we eat, and how we relate to the food we put into our bodies, is how we feel about ourselves and your life.  And what we put and don’t put into our bodies affects the quality of our lives.  Remember that your body is what carries you through this life and if it’s not treated with care, then your life will reflect that.

Now, I don’t mean you can’t go out and indulge in a wonderful meal but the way you approach your meal will make all the difference.  It will determine how your body accepts the meal and how your body processes the meal.

I can relate first hand to this lesson.  For years I struggled with an eating disorder.  I took me being brutally honest with myself and the people around me to stop the behavior.  It had little to do with being thin and way more to do with being happy with who I was on the inside.

As I have distanced myself from the eating disorder I have learned ways to respect the food that I eat.  I can now see the distinction between the way I used to treat food and myself, and how I now respect both food and myself.  It’s the difference of a totally different life.  Just a simple step of lovingly respecting the food I eat has changed my life.

Here are some ways that you can relate to food in a more loving, and positive way.

Remember to prepare your food with love.  Some people think of cooking as a meditation.  You can actually send good emotions into the food you eat.  I encourage you to slow down a bit.  Even if you are a very busy, fast paced person, you can still sit down. Put your fork down for a second and take and take few deep breaths before you begin to eat.  It is a totally different experience to breathe consciously while you eat, instead of inhaling your food in one bite.

At our home we began to have family dinners.  It’s a priority now.  This is our time to reconnect at the end of the day, encourage communication with our children, and have some good laughs.  Believe me whey I say our family dinners are far from proper.  We laugh, joke, and have a good time.  I tried to get my family to be quiet and calm at dinner but I found out quickly that it just wasn’t the way of our little family.  I stopped pushing and relaxed into having fun.  That’s what it’s all about, having a good time, and a good meal.

I like to lead our family in giving thanks. In your own way you could practice being thankful for your meal too.  Remember there are people who have nothing to eat, and you are sitting there able to nourish the body you were blessed with.  Thank God, the divine, or what ever you believe in for this meal. Allow your body to be nourished and loved!

In many house houses it’s the woman who makes and serves the food.   If this is the case in your family then this is a powerful chance for you to re create dinnertime for your family.  You can make it any way you want it to be!  Do it and watch how wonderful it is for your family.

It’s everywhere we look:  on television, in movies, and in real life.  Couples falling passionately in love, getting married, perhaps have a family, only to divorce years later.
It almost seems like the norm to divorce each other.  But what happened to, “till death do us part?”  They came before God, before family, and friends to devote their lives to each other.  And when times got tough, things were said and done.  Instead of sticking it out side by side, they decided it’s time to start over.

From personal experience, marriage is not always easy.  Not at all.  You two come together in marriage, both with a basket of things from your past.  You do your best to sort it all out while doing your best to keep your relationship going strong.

My husband and I had been through many ups and downs.  There were times when I thought, “This is the end.”  Thank God my teacher Guru Singh helped us through it and taught me what marriage is really all about, and what true commitment looks like.  To be honest, I’d heard of commitment but like most of us, I had not yet grasped what it really meant.  Commitment means, “I am here for you, you are here for me no matter what happens.”  It’s simply taking divorce out of the picture.

Just like Will Smith said when asked about his long lasting marriage to Jada Pinkett-Smith,  “We simply take divorce out of the equation, it’s not an option.”

Commitment is stronger than any emotion you could ever feel.  It means when you feel angry, upset, sad, or like it’s over, you know those are just emotions and they will pass.
Not only will this lesson save your marriage, it will renew it.  Your marriage will never be the same knowing that you are together forever.  There is no, “Till death do us part.”  You are committed through this lifetime and the next and the next.

Just think about your current relationship or marriage.  Are you committed to them 150%?   Is there ever any threat of one of you leaving?  Can you imagine for a moment how your marriage would change if you knew there was no way of it failing?  That kind of marriage feels secure, strong, and is so much happier.  Right now you can decide to be that committed to your husband or wife, even your boyfriend or girlfriend.  The quality and feeling you experience in your relationship will immediately change.

And if you have kids, just think about the kind of example you will be for them.  They will see you both committed to each other, and naturally that is what they will gravitate to in their own relationships. That is the biggest gift you could ever give them.

In marriage, no one gets off the relation(ship)-Guru Singh

When I became a mother, I honestly never thought I’d be a homes schooling mother.  I grew up as a typical American, going to public school.  I enjoyed much of my schooling as a child, but later on, in high school, I found it to be harsh and awful, to be perfectly honest.  I had no plans to be a home schooling family.  I had never been exposed to home schooling and was under the impression that is was only for kids from the country, or kids that lived on farms.  I got this funny impression from the way Hollywood likes to portray home schooling.

You may be wondering how we ended up making this decision.  Once my eldest daughter Kayleen began schooling, we saw very quickly that she marched to her own drummer.  She likes to learn at her own pace, and doesn’t always follow the status qou.  At the time we first put her in main stream public school, they wanted to put her in special education classes.  We agreed and she started in her class.

My heart and intuition didn’t like this new decision.  I didn’t like the labels they tried putting on my daughter.  These people knew nothing about her and yet they wanted so badly to have a nice little label to identify her. My husband and I knew we had to stand up for our daughter now and make some decisions.

I figured if those people can teach my child, so can I.  Besides, what better person to teach a child than the woman who gave birth to the child.  So our journey began, as a home schooling family.  It’s been about three years now.  I will admit, the first year and a half I didn’t really know what I was doing, and that is totally fine.  You can’t expect to get it right immediately.  It took some trial and error, but we finally found a type of home schooling that works so well for our kids.

I love home schooling so much.  Not only does it create this awesome bond with your kids, but there are literally hundreds of ways to approach home schooling.  For those of you who are parents, or who plan on having kids, I would do some research, talk to some parents of home schooled kids, and find out what it’s all about.  It’s not what parents expect, it doesn’t take as much time as you would expect, and you don’t have to be some professional teacher to make it work.

I’m sure we’ve all heard and used that old saying, “Don’t talk to strangers.”  We say and use these things without even questioning what they really mean.  When we say don’t talk to strangers, what are we really teaching our kids?

A stranger is someone you haven’t met.  But life is about relationship and communication.  How can we communicate and be in relationship if every person we don’t know is a STRANGer?  We must learn to communicate and make new friends in life.  You can be open to communicating in a healthy and conscious way, and this is what we must teach out kids.

We never tell our kids, “Don’t talk to strangers.”  We don’t want that echoing in their hearts, throughout their lives.  Instead we keep a good watch.  We teach them to communicate with awareness.  This isn’t always easy when they are young because children are totally open to everyone.  But as parents, that is where we must step in and be a watchful teacher.  Sometimes I see parents not paying attention to their kids at the park.  They are sitting back talking, relaxing, not watching their kids.  Bad idea!  Not only can kids disappear in seconds but, you never know who is at the park.  I would love to say, “We can trust everyone.”  But of course that is not true.  We always have both eyes on our kids, and if they want us to we play with them.   This is the best way to teach our children how to be aware of the people around them.

“WHAT VACCINATION A DANGER FOR OUR CHILDREN, NO, CAN’T BE, THEY MUST BE SAFE, DOCTORS ALL OVER AMERICA SAY THEY ARE FINE.”

I can still remember the first time I heard a mother talking about the dangers of Vaccinations.  This was about 8 years ago, she was talking to another mother about her sons challenges with autism.  This woman seemed very informed and knew information that I had never heard of before.  I remember wondering how her son got into elementary school?  Later I discovered that vaccinations are not mandatory for children to get into school.  All you have to do is sign your name stating that you exempt your child from vaccinations, the government can’t do anything about your personal choice.

Hearing this mother talk about vaccinations raised some questions for me and I wanted answers now.  This was the beginning of a lot of research.

For those of you trying to have a baby, going to have a baby, or already have children then this is a very important topic to do some research in.  My husband and I have read countless books on the matter and have had many conversations with Doctors and Homiopathics about Vaccinations.  First of all what we found was startling, in fact it discussed me.  You would not beleive the disscuting things that we are allowing to be injected into our childrens blood.

Try this test, go into your childrens doctors office, ask to talk to the Doctor or a nurse, then ask them what is in the vaccination?  I’ve never heard of a doctor or nurse knowing any of the ingrediance in them.  They keep it very hush hush for a reason.  If parents really kow what was in it they would’t do it.

I won’t go into all the details here but I will direct you to some sites that really shed light on this topic.

We decided against vaccinations for our children and they are never sick.  It seems that all our friends who have vaccinated children are always sick with something.  In my oppinion there is no need for vaccinations and I wouldn’t want to take a chance on something that has been linked to so many aweful side affects.

Here are some youtube videos that I like a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOPbTengJ18&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3vNp9dEVM

Our favorite book is the Sactity of The Human Blood (this book is jammed packed with information).

To be honest I had never given thought to circumcision until I found out I was pregnant with a son.  Then the question came up and I had no idea which path to choose.  Most Americans circumcize their boys at birth, and with no questions.  I ask every question in the book so simply going with what every one else does wouldn’t work for me.  I began my reading, my research, and I was so happy I did becuase I discovered some very important information that most new parents never hear about.

First of all lets picture this.  You go through this amazing birth, your babys birth was very tramatic for him, he was safe and warm for nine months in your womb and now he’s out in the bright and loud world for the very first time.  Then within hours they take him from the safety of his mommies arms and into the hands of nurses.  Now we know what come next, they snip, cut his penis.  Your little fragile baby boy cries in pain, it’s truly tramatic for such a fresh new baby.

There is so much debate on this issue but one things stands true.  If you are going to circumcize your son then wait a while.  Don’t do it within the first 40 days.  In all yoga practices they teach that it take 40 days to establish the babies energetic aura and any trauma done to the baby will really effect him on an emotional leve.  We don’t realize how specail those first 40 days are.  Your baby isn’t done baking yet so be gentile with him.

We chose not to curcumcize our baby boy and I’m so happy with this choice.  We will have the chance to teach him that God made him just how he wanted him and we can explain to him that we chose not to have his penis cut.  When you put it like that it sounds awefule.

So new parents choose wisely, if you choose to do it then please wait until your baby is older.  In Danmark they wait until the boy is 4 or 5, that is the norm, they understand that babies are just too young.

Good Luck!

Best friends are so important.  For years I didn’t really have what I would call a best friend.  Of course my husband is my real best friend, but I believe every woman should have a best friend that has many things in comman.

For years I wanted a best friend.  I seemed to have many girl friends but we had little in comman.  All of them were single and didn’t have children.  When we hung out I felt like we had little to talk about.  I put it out in the univers that I wanted to find a great friend with many things in comman with me.  What I love about life is you never know when the universe will deliver what you desire.

A year ago I briefly met a woman, wife, and mother, her name is Katherine.  At that time I had no idea that one year later we would be such great friends.  We had her, her husband, and her two girls over for dinner and we totally hit it off.  Now I understand what It is like to have a best friend.  We have so much in common.  We both home school our kids, we believe in attachment parenting, we don’t vaccinate our kids, we are committed to our husbands, we are vegetarians, and so on.

To me a best friend is someone you can share anything with.  This person is someone who shares and listens, and I feel honored to have met such a wonderful person and call her my friend.  Plus our kids play together so well, we have great play dates for the kids.  No more hanging out with single women with no kids.