‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.’ Dr Maya Angelou
I’ve been thinking a lot about new year resolutions lately. How we create them and then feel all that pressure. Eventually we break them and then feel guilty, and the cycle starts again every year, or every time we create an ‘absolute’ attached to change.
Pema Chodon notes that ‘the problem with the desire to change is that it is fundamentally a form of aggression towards yourself’. That surprised me. The reason she says is that our hangups contain our wisdom.
She advises not to just get rid of habits and emotions but to make friends with them. To see them clearly with precision, honesty and gentleness. That means not judging yourself as a bad person, but also not bolstering yourself up by saying, it is good I am this way, other people are terrible. The gentleness involves not repressing the emotion but also not acting it out.
It is something much softer and more openhearted. It involves learning how once you have fully acknowledged the understanding of who you are and what you do, to let it go. You let go of the story line that accompanies the emotion and begin to see clearly how you keep the whole thing going. So, whether it is anger, craving, jealousy, fear or depression, the notion is not to get rid of it, but to make friends with it, to understand it with softness and learning and then to let it go.
The recipe…
This is a Sattvic recipe. A recipe that will be gentle on your system after a few weeks of ‘out of the box’ eating, it is spiced with gentle digestive and anti-inflammatory spices. You can add any vegetables that you’d like.
Ingredients
- 1 cup basmati rice, soaked and washed
- 1 tbsp. coconut oil
- 1 tsp. mustard seeds
- 2 cardamom pods, crushed
- 1-inch piece ginger, cut into strips
- 1 tsp. turmeric
- ½ tsp. cumin
- ½ tsp. coriander
- 6 curry leaves
- ¼ cup cashew nuts
- 1 cup coconut milk
- 1 cup stock
- 1 tsp. salt
Method
- Drain and rinse the rice until the water runs clear, set aside
- Warm the oil in a large pan, add the mustard seeds, cardamom pods, ginger, curry leaves and spices.
- Stir until the mustard seeds start to pop, c. 10-20 seconds
- Stir in the cashew nuts and sauté for 1 minute till they start to brown
- Add the rice and stir till the grains are covered
- Stir in the coconut milk, salt and the stock
- Simmer on low, covered for 20 minutes
- Take off the heat and fluff with a fork
- Pull out the cardamom pods and serve warm
