Just had my first Yoga and Plant-based event!

So it's Monday again! What happened!? Well Maja and I had our first Yoga and Plant-based cooking event yesterday!!! Yay! We were at my house and we really enjoyed ourselves.

It feels so great to spread the message of yoga, meditation and plant-based eating. We shared our experience and the health benefits we have had in our lives since adopting a plant-based diet.

Open New Doors.

Good evening!

I had yet another wonderful lunch with my brother today. We meet once a month to have lunch together at Open New Doors in Gothenburg. I love that place! Everything is plant-based, gluten free and organic. You can have both raw and cooked meals and they serve the most delicious cakes.

Pearls of yoga tomorrow.

So, good evening. I just edited some of the information Maja and I will handle to the guests on our Home Party 2.0. When doing so I came over this Ted talk by Dr Dean Ornish. He has shown that heart diseases aren't only preventable but even reversable on a plant based diet. Did your doctor tell you that? I hope she has because otherwise she is not up-to-date with the latest data. Did you know that Dr Kim Willians, former President of American Collage of Cardiology once said:

"There are two kinds of cardiologists: vegans and those who haven't read the data."

 No, you can't force a diet on anybody. But everybody has the right to know what their choices are.

Today was my last day this week as a Project Manager och tomorrow I will work with my own company, Pearls of Yoga.

Snowracing!

Charlie and I had sooo much fun after I picked him up from his daycare mom today. He recently got a Snowracer as a late Christmas gift and he has been eager to try it. I promised this morning that if the snow that started falling yesterday would still be there in the afternoon we would try his snowracer. It started raining today but luckily it was enough snow left for us to try it!

And I think both of us enjoyed it as much. :) 

My strenghts and my needs.

If you picture me next to my cat Ruby this photo says more of me than you can imagine. I finished the Strength-finder test the other day and my five top strenghts are:

• Input
• Focus
• Activator
• Intellection
• Significance

As so often when you do tests like this nothing comes as a total surprise. But it's interesting to get an objective view on your personality. 

In my case the input means that I loooove reading. Seeing me sitting with five books as on the picture is not unusual at all. I looove it. 

The strength Intellection was very interesting to read about. I sometimes call myself a social introvert. I like to talk a lot and shy is a word I can't even spell ;) But what most people don't know is that I loooove being totally alone. With my thoughts. I think. A lot. I analyze and I think about ways to improve myself. I reflect and I listen to the words inside of me. I love being on my own. I wouldn't stand being alone all the time. That's not what I'm talking about. I have a family and I love them and I need them to be around. But if I don't get regular periods of just being alone with my thoughts I will not be the best version of me. Or alone with my books :D That will do too. This test reminded me of respecting this need even more. Cause if I don't nurture my needs I will be unhappy. And that won't benefit the people around me either.

Have you done any similar tests and found out interesting things about yourself?

How to create plant based food in day-to-day life.

Do you need to be a chef to create plant based meals? My answer is no! In my and my husband's former relationships we were both blessed with partners who loved cooking and made delisious food. Not plant based though but non of us ate plantbased at that time. I had no interest in cooking at all but since it wasn't Mattias greatest joy either both of us had to learn. Quite early though in our relationship both of us started eating plants. We had to learn something new together. When we first decided to only eat vegan food we had no idea where to start. We bought a couple of cookbooks. Though there weren't many around at that time. Vegeterian ones, yes, but not vegan ones. Vegeterian recipes are quite easy to change to vegan ones. Nowadays, thankfully, there are a lot of great vegan cookbooks around!

When I have set my mind on something I do it to 100%. But I realize that most people aren't like that. My sister-in-law came up with the brilliant idea to cook one new vegan recipe a week. That's a really good idea!  But don't go for the fancy ones, go for the ones that are easy to prepare.
Soon you have collected a bunch of recepies to save you on a busy Monday!

Beacause to be honest, most of us don't have eons of time to prepare a fancy dish, make it look perfect, fix the best light and make a gorgeous photo on Instagram. So stop comparing your meals with those photos and stop believing that cooking plant-based is difficult. It is actually super simple. It's just that you haven't trained that muscle yet. It's like when you learned to walk. You failed and you falled all the time but you didn't give up and suddenly cooking plant based will be as natural as your old meals loaded with animals products once were.

Me cooking a plant-based pasta sauce 

Follow your passion to be smarter and more kind to the people around you!

If you follow me on Insta Story you know that I woke up at 4:30 am this morning. One of the cats woke me up and I couldn't go back to sleep. I was too excited! I was excited about my new business. Finally, finally am I about to do what I have been wanting to do for years. I just couldn't see how it would be possible. But this summer I kind of let go. I knew what I wanted but not how and suddenly my boss said: Why don't you take an extra day off and start working with your business? It was as simple as that and so hard to figure it out by myself. And do you realize what a smart boss I have? She knows that if I can follow my passion I will be a better Project Manager as well. Yes, she takes a risk. I might resign. But she also knows that if I don't try to follow my dream it will always be in the back of my mind and it wont't make me the best employee. I actually love working as a Project Manager but I also love working with healthy food and yoga. I guess that is my passion.

On Thursday this week the very same boss invited a lecturer to talk about our brain. The topic was about what we can do to develop our beautiful brain even further. And one important thing to create a happy brain (and hence a smarter one) is to have passion in our lifes. This means that we should do things we really, really love. So my friends, doing these things not only makes you a happier person, which all the people around you will benefit from, you will also be a smarter person. If you live in Sweden and wish to learn more about this topic check out this page: www.hjaltebolaget.se

After breakfast Maja and I took the kids to the forest. I'm so happy to share my love for nature with family and friends! In the afternoon Maja came over to me to plan our Yoga and Plantbased Weekend in April. We will co-host this weekend with Sara and Jenny so we had set up a Skype meeting. It will be a retreat. But since lots of people I have spoken to, who are not in the yoga world, think that a retreat means that you are forced to be in silence all the time, we decided to market it as a Yoga Weekend instead of Retreat. On this Plant Based Yoga and Meditation weekend we will offer different kinds of yoga, meditation, lectures, delicious and healthy organic plant based glutenfree food. We will also offer private sessions.
You can be an experienced yogi or a newbie to attend.

Now, discover your strengths.

Good evening!

I'm reading this very interesting book at the moment:

I like the idea in this book. To focus on your strengths instead of your weaknesses. Yes, if you have extreme weaknesses it might be a good idea to strengthen them, of course. But today we ofthen put efforts on making peoples weaknesses stronger instead of actually use the good qualities in a person and make them even better.

I'm  about to do an on-line test now to discover mine :)

On the website you can choose among lots of languages and I think it's essential to have  your native language on a test like this. See you on the other side of the test!

My first day with Pearls of Yoga!

Yay! Fridays are the days I will focus on working with my new business Pearls of Yoga. Since I started working at my other job yesterday I have bit of a back log so today I will focus more on my work as a Project Manager.

But I have had some time to focus on Pearls of Yoga. The name might change, I might use my own name and so on but this is what I have at the moment.

Tomorrow we will plan our upcoming Yoga, Meditation and Plant Based cooking retreat in late April. We will offer three kinds of yoga: Kundalini, Yinyoga and Global Yoga. We will also offer cooking courses and lectures about plant based eating.

I will also attend a course in diet counseling. I already do 'hobby' counseling with friends and family (since this is one of my greatest interests) but as I want to work with this as a professional I think it's great to have a diploma. I will start offering diet counseling via Skype and I really look forward to that!

I also have in the pipe to make a Kundalini Yoga app or something similar.

My dear friend Maja and I are also starting this über cool Home Party 2.0 thing where we offer Yoga and plantbased meals (and cooking demos) at peoples houses.

So there are lots of fun things going on! :)

I hope I will be able to post here regularly too because writing and inspiring people to a healthier more authentic life  is also one of my passions.

Maja and my upcoming Home Party 2.0.

A scary time ahead!

Hello!

Tomorrow I will go back to work. Mattias has been working since Monday so it's been just Charlie and me. Mattias will have the rest of the week off so Charlie won't start at his daycare mom until Monday.

Charlie and I have had really lazy an fun days. We've been to the forest, we've been tidying his room, sorting out books he doesn't like to read any more, singing and enjoying healthy foods together.

This year is both exciting and scary for me. I will work less as a Project Manager and start building my business in health and yoga. It's a bit scary because it is hard do go down in salary. I went to a yoga studio near by to check out if I could give some classes there. But the salary they would pay was a joke. It was what you would be satisfied with as a teenager but I'm a grown up woman with lots of experience and a family to support. I cannot do charity work. I was told to see it as I was payed for doing what I loved, my hobby. But come on! When I worked as a Java Developer nobody said, hey, since you love programming as much as you do we will pay you a really humiliating salary.

Bolognese with beluga lentils

Today's smoothie

In the forest

My 40 days of meditation challenge.

I'm done. I've been doing the same meditation every day for 40 days. I felt like I needed to build a solid foundation. In yogic tradition we say that you need to do something for 40 days to experience a real transformation. Since Charlie came my highest priority is sleep. After that comes meditation, then yoga and finally running. I LOVE every single activity but when you need to prioritize you need to do the most important thing first.

The pros of making a decision to do something every day for a period of time is that you really carve out the time to do it. The meditation I did was about 30 minutes. And yes, sometimes it was boring. Sometimes I wanted to do something else. But most of the time it was a beautiful experience and it filled me with so much self respect for giving myself this gift every single day.

I will not jump into another 40 days now. I will enjoy the feeling that I completed this challenge and let my intuition guide me on how to continue. That's how I often do it. I tune into myself to find out what kind of meditation I need to do today. But of course that only comes when you have been meditating for a prolonged period of time and have become more tuned in to know what will suit you best in the present moment. I've been meditating on a regular basis for 9 years now so I have gained some experience in that field I believe.

Yoga.

My 14y old, Mattias and I did yoga together today. I simply love it! I love seeing their focus and their progress. I'm currently doing Vinyasa Flows because that's what I crave at the moment. Yoga for me is to get a stronger more flexible body. It is like playing with myself and see what we, my body and I, can do togehter in this moment. The feeling when the stiffness from a day at the office leaves my body is so relieving. Yoga for me is of course also meditation. I crave meditation too. Otherwise I don't feel whole. The first time I tried Kundalini Yoga I fell totally in love. And it was the meditation that gave me goosebumps. I felt that this is what I've been missing for so long in my life. It was like coming home.

Running - taking a shower in happiness!

I love running. Especially in the forest. Doing that is like taking a shower in happiness. The weather has been a disaster here lately. We haven't seen the sun for weeks. It's grey, rainy and cold. But even so, a run in the forest makes me just as happy as always.

This photo was taken in the summer but it shows exactly how happy running makes me feel.

How to sprout Broccoli and Alfalfa.

Good morning!

Maybe some of you are back at work and some may still have vacation. Whatever you do I hope you enjoy yourself.

I thought I should share how super easy it is to sprout at home. I have been sprouting for quite some years now but sprouting broccoli is something I started with recently. I googled and I found these organic broccoli seeds online:

For the Alfalfa I currently use:

My experience though here in Sweden is that Alfalfa are easy to find. It was the Broccoli seeds that were a bit more tricky to find. 

Well, let's start! 

Step 1

Soak the seeds over night. 

I always put some kind of lid on because otherwise the cats will drink from it. 

I leave it in room temperature.

Step 2

In the morning I pour them over to the sprouting box and rinse thoroghly. 

Step 3

I put the lid on and cover the box with a towel because the seeds sprout faster in the darkness. I leave it in room temperature.

Step 4

Rinse twice a day. This is very important. I do it in the morning and in the evening.

Step 5

The sprouts will be ready to eat in about 3 days. Put them in the refridgerator and enjoy! 

Broccoli sprouts ready to eat

Vegan 'meatball' sandwich with beet root salad!

On New Year's Eve, when Charlie was sleeping Mattias and I made ourselves some vegan 'meatball' sandwiches with beet root salad. A few days ago we started talking about how we both enjoy this meatball sandwich before we went plant based and of course we never have had it since. But yesterday we recreated it in a healthy, environmental friendly and non-cruelty version! What a joy!!! We used vegan gluten free home made bread, home made meatballs based on sunflower seeds and Mattias made the beet root salad and it was sooo yummy!

2018!

Our last day this year did not start well. Charlie was still ill. His fever started on Christmas Eve and we were getting worried. He has never been sick for so many days before. We were thinking about taking him to a doctor but after talking to his daycare mom we understood that many of the children here who goes to daycare mom had been sick from hand, foot and mouth disease (höstblåsor). They have had the exact symptoms as Charlie; fever that goes up and down. No fever in the morning but it started at noon every day. Some of the children had been sick for 2 weeks! Yesterday we where hoping and praying that it would be no more fever and finally it turned!! We could enjoy a dinner together and Charlie could enjoy some early fireworks through our living room windows. He had no fever today either but his energy levels goes up and down which is perfectly normal after having fever for so many days! 

Today we went for a walk in the forest, Charlie and Mattias played some table tennis on the dinner table and we also did yoga. I also did day 36 of my 40 days of meditation! 

Hopefully Charlie will have regained his energy in a day or two so we can see some other people :) 

I boost myself with healthy stuff like apples (great virus fighters), carrots (rich in betacaroten, also good for your immune system), fresh ginger and turmeric. I don't wish to experience what Charlie has been through. 

Cheers with a juice!