Jag har flyttat!

Hej på er!

Den här platsen i cyberrymden har varit min länge. Jag har bytt namn några gånger på bloggen men adressen har varit densamma. Men nu har jag flyttat och jag hoppas att ni vill följa med mig dit :) Mitt nya tillhåll finns numera på jessicaisegran.com.

Ni hittar allt under samma tak: min hemsida och min blog. Jag har även, tillsammans med Jenny Larsson startat en podcast: The Game Changers Podcast där det övergripande temat är en hållbar kropp, själ och planet. Du hittar den där du hittar dina andra favoritpoddar! Om den inte dyker upp i din sökning så testa att söka på 'Jessica Isegran'.

På JessicaIsegran.com hittar du också numera de tjänster jag erbjuder i form av privatlektioner i Yoga och Meditation. Jag coachar dig även om du vill äta mer växtbaserat i ditt liv! Jag erbjuder också retreats, vi har ett nu på fredag och nästa retreat är 12-14 oktober. Du hittar all info på JessicaIsegran.com .
Vill du komma direkt till bloggen hittar du den här.

Till sist vill jag säga ett varmt TACK till alla som har följt mig här genom åren. Jag hoppas att ni följer med och skriv gärna en kommentar på nya bloggen så vet jag att ni hittat dit :)

Do I want to live alone?

Do I want to live alone?

Are you like me? A person who crave time totally alone from time to time to thrive? A person who loves your family and struggle within because you almost die because of lack of time on your own?

I think this is an issue really important to address. This has nothing to do with the people around you. This is a part of your personality.

Firstly, drop the guilt part. This is who you are. There is nothing wrong with this personality trait. On the contrary, I believe it is very important to accept and honor this part of ourselves. To explore it deeper, to really go within and curiosly watch it. Because if you shut it down you will probably become frustrated without knowing what's wrong with you.

Involve the people around you. Explain to your partner, friends and family how important this is to you. How much you love them but how important it is for you to have your space. I once talked to a couples counselor and she sad that one of the hardest things in relationships is to express our own needs. But when we don't express our needs we will most certainly be unhappy.  Some of us will be bitter, others angry or frustrated. And honestly, is that the person you want to be in a relationship? Isn't it better to be honest and express your needs and desires? Expressing our needs and desires doesn't mean that we always can fulfill them. But if we never express them we will certainly never fulfill them.

When I was a child I witnessed myself 'leaving' my girlfriends because I felt suffocated when they wanted to spend all their time with me. Instead of telling how I felt I cut the bond and ran away.

There is an accepted idea around that men need time on their own but women don't. That women wish to be taken care of. That misunderstanding can create problems in a relationship. I know that I'm not the only woman who feels that she is desperatly longing for time on her own. To recharge. To be able to give again. Especially when she has become a mother. Because honestly, if we never recharge we will  not be able to give.

And another important thing to be aware of is that this need for time on your own might trick you into believing that you shouldn't be in a relationship. This thought has crosssed my mind. What is wrong with me? Who wants to be away from her partner if she loves him? But these two things have nothing to do with eachother. It is totally possible to want time on your own when you are a part of a family. To nurture yourself. To fullfill your own needs for a while. Not everybody elses.

And if you are the partner of a person who craves time on her own? The wisest thing is to give him or her that. Because the more you attach yourself to your partner, wanting for her to spend more time with you the less she will enjoy your company. But if you provide her with as much space that she needs she will bounce back to you. And yes, this might sound scary. What if I let go and he or she doesn't come back? I want to spend more time with my partner, not less. This letting go scares me! Well to you I would love to say, give it a try. Give him or her the space. Be clear in your communication. Okey, I will give you some time on your own. How much do you need? How can I support your needs?  If this doesn't work you can always go back to the old way but unless you try you will never know, right?

So the answer to the question is: I do not want to live alone. I thrive in relations but I need my space within.

I hope this will encourage everybody out there to respect and honor your needs.

Morning Pages.

I feel I need to share about morning pages. Morning Pages was created by Julia Cameron and you can read about it in her book "The Artist's Way". I first heard about morning pages on the Rich Roll Podcast a couple of years ago. I bought the book and started doing morning pages. At that time I dealt with lots of anger so it was perfect to let that out and release it from my system. For some reason I didn't continue but a couple of weeks ago I opened the book again and got inspired and added morning pages to my morning routine.

So what is morning pages? It is a super simple tool to find out what you want to do with your life. Or boost your creativity or release emotions you are holding on to that no longer serves you. I believe it is multi-functional. All you need is some papers and a pen and then you start writing 3 pages the first thing you do in the morning. And at first you may not know what to write. Then just write: "I have no idea what to write, I'm sitting here with theese empty pages and a pen and my usually active mind is just quiet". The thing is to just start writing, whatever crosses your mind. Don't censor yourself, don't judge yourself. Don't show these writings to anybody. It is even not recommended for us to read them ourselves the first couple of months. The goal is to listen to ourselves without judgement. Just let the words flow out and dance on the paper. Some mornings I feel so creative I just can't finish after three pages so I just continue.

They are called morning pages for a reason. The morning is the best time to start writing because your chatting mind hasn't started going nuts yet. That makes it easier to find out what's really hidden inside and needs to come out.

I use a beautiful notebook for my pages. To me that is a way of showing respect for this process. But any notebook will work. The most important thing is to start writing! Keep it simple!

What I eat in a day.

Sometimes people ask me how much fruit I eat during a day. The answer is, of course, that it depends on how hungry I am and how active I am.

At the moment I start my day with a glass of water with some fresh lemon juice. After that I juice a whole bunch of celery stalks.

After this routine I make my breakfast smoothie. It often consists of:

• 5 bananas
• About a cup of frozen berries 
• Some sort of leafy greens. I rotate. I can use kale, spinach, romain or some other lettuce.
• 1 tsp of barley grass powder
• I often vary between nettle powder, rose hip powder, mesquite powder and raw cacao. I let my intuition guide me here.
• And water

For lunch I always have smoothies during the week. They are similar to the breakfast smoothie but I might add some more bananas or dates or hemp seeds or add some other fruit like pears to make it higher in calories. And if I have spinach for example in the breakfast smoothie I try to have some other greens in the lunch smoothie. 

When mangoes or persimmons are in season I might exchange one of the smoothie meals with whole fruit. During the summer I often have water melon for breakfast. 

I love having whole fruit but it's easier to bring a bottle of smoothie to work. At least that's how I see it. 

In the afternoon I often snack on grapes, oranges or dates. And some leafy greens.

For dinner I enjoy eating the same as the rest of the family so then I eat a plant based cooked dinner. Unless I'm feeling a cold is coming then I switch to fully raw until my body is feeling ok again. In this way I rarely get ill these days. 

This is a cauliflower curry I cooked the other day which is a typical dinner for me.

Throughout the day I try to drink about 2 litres of water. 

I hope this gives you a clearer picture of how I eat and hopefully it inspires you to perhaps replace one of your meals in the day to a healthier one. 

Vegan cookbooks I recommend.

I got the question what vegan cookbooks I recommend and here are some of my favourites:

"Maten är min medicin" by Janesh Vaidya. This book is actually vegetarian but it's super easy to modify the recipes to be vegan.
"VÅR KOKBOK vegan"
"Vego Hela dagen " by Mattias Krisstiansson.

The first three ones are Swedish. The "VÅR KOKBOK vegan" is not the fanciest looking and not filled with beautiful pictures of the dishes but the recipes tastes sooo goood! I highly recommend it and please don't let it down because of the not so fancy design. It contains one of the favourite recipes in our family.

The book "Vego hela dagen" is actually for teenagers but I think it's a perfect source for day-to-day recipes. They are simple and delicious and contains a beluga bolognese that we often cook in our family.

These too I recommend for my international readers. They are sooo beautiful and inspiring. "This cheese is nuts" is a book on how to make vegan cheeses and the warm cheese sauce to put on your home baked pizza that you find in this book is a go-to in this family.

My final tip is actually not a book but a Swedish Magazine. It's incredible inspiring and I recommend anyone who is curious to try the vegan diet to buy this magazine and start cooking!

Sprouting time again!

I missed having my sprouts yesterday so I took some alfalfa and broccoli seeds and put them in bowls to soak over night.

This morning I rinsed them well and put them in the sprouting box:

From now on I rinse them twice a day and in three to four days we can enjoy fresh sprouts! 
Do you sprout to? What are your favourite sprouts?

Back on Facebook again.

Yesterday I posted on my Facebook page again. It has almost been 4 years ago since I last posted! I realize how much I miss the beautiful community there. I'm not very active on Facebook myself anymore, I'm hanging around on Instagram instead but I miss the questions and the interactivity that I used to have on my Facebook page. I love to get some response otherwise it feels like I'm not talking to anybody.

We had a very sunny morning here today and even the cats enjoyed the sun. I started with a celery juice:

After that I had a fruit, berry and greens smoothie.

For lunch we enjoyed chickpeas and spinach served with rice.

Focus - throughout the day.

Good evening!

I hope you have had a lovely Friday. I started my day with yoga and meditation to be prepared to meet the challenges during the day. It can be challenges with relationships, with lack of my own motivation and so on. That's why it's so great to start the day in a prepared and focused way. As a project manager I wouldn't start a project without any preparations and I should actually value every day to be important enough to be fully prepared. This life is precious. Something to value high. And we should respect ourselves enough to make the best out of every day.

Me enjoying a smoothie this morning. I filmed 3 meditations today. One in English and two in Swedish. It's been over four years since I edited and posted videos though so I have to kind of start over again. What video editing program should I use? And so on.

Greens, greens, greens.

I confess. I'm filling up with lots of greens at the moment. Just look at this lunch plate:

Where is the food!?!?!? Ha, ha, ha. We cook almost all of our meals from scratch because we like it that way. I also want it to be simple to have a mixed salad to the meal. Therefore we buy this bag with mixed organic leafy greens. It comes rinsed and it's perfect to throw on your plate!

Smoothie!

You know I've said it before. Dont't be afraid of fruit but don't forget about your leafy greens either!

My container is stuffed with bananas, strawberries and blueberries!

On top of that I put barley grass powder and lots of leafy greens! 

After that I just add water and blend! This smoothie is loaded with energy and nutrients. What more can we ask for? Oh yes, it tastes delicious as well! 

My Tuesday.

Charlie had a fever yesterday so we stayed at home today too. His appetite return at dinner time so tomorrow I think he will be ready to go outside and play. When we are ill our bodies wants to focus on fighting the virus. Not be forced to eat. Charlie often prefers fruits and raw veggies when he is ill and the old Jessica would have been a bit worried about that. Now I know better and I also know that the appetite will return. Honestly I don't know any child who loves eating healthy as Charlie does. One reason is that he is used to eat healthy since he was a baby and another is that we never force him to eat. Since Mattias and I are on a healthy diet he has also always eaten what we eat. No special "child food". I see so many around me giving their children a boring tasting child food while they are eating something more tasty and delicous. When I started feeding Charlie something else than breast milk when he was a baby it was fruit. Children loves fruit! Fruit are also one of the healthiest food on the planet. It is so, so sad that so many people don't eat fruit because of "all" the sugar it contains. Download a simple app called cron-o-meter and start education yourself on all the nutrients you find in fruit. Your body will love you!

Before Mattias went to work I went for a run. It was quite a tough one because it was hard to run in the snow today. The snow was hard and soft at the same time so it was like running in sand. It was a really good workout for my legs though.

Charlie and I played with lego and did yoga today. After I had put Charlie to bed I meditated. So today I have done all of the three things I believe is an important foundation in my life: running, yoga and mediation.

My beautiful boy doing his version of meditation.
 

Yoga and meditation saved my day today.

Yesterday something happened to me that made me feel like I was overrun by a bulldozer. I took this feeling with me into bed. Unfortunately I was too tired to change any feelings or mindset so I hade a restless sleep with very strange dreams. Naturally when I woke up the feeling was still there. I felt exhausted and I didn't want to leave my bed. But I did Kundaliniyoga with asanas, breathing excercises and some chanting and it transformed my feeling. I went out of the bed and made myself a celery juice. I decided to go for a run in the winter landscape. This strengthened me even more and the day that started so bad changed to a good one.

This evening my mother called. Apparently she is having a manic period. She is bipolar. She also suffers from schizofrenia and some other diagnoses. She was telling me things that I know aren't true. And suddenly she shifts and talks like everything is normal. Like someone in the early stage of dementia I guess. If I hadn't made an effort to really change the way I felt this morning this most likely would have been too much for me to handle. Now it makes me sad but not devastated. Yoga and meditation doesn't put up shields around us that makes us like non-feeling zoombies. Instead it makes us feel our emotions without losing our mind and our stability.

How yoga and meditation can change us.

Yoga means everything. It gets me through the shifts of life. It's like my home. A safe place where I always can go back to when I forget what is most important in my life. And to me yoga and meditation goes together. Today I started with a grounding and calming meditation. I was about to teach it in my class this evening so I did it this morning to feel and be able to share my personal experience with that meditation. In Kundaliniyoga there are more than 1500 different meditations so there is a meditation for everything! All we have to do is to do them. To experience a real shift in our lives we need to meditate on a regular basis. If you sit down in meditation you will feel lots of different things. So you can't really tell after just one session. But when you do it regularly you start seing a shift in yourself. You will get more aware of your thoughts. You will be quick to detect negative thoughts and then you will also be able to shift them. Because you have to be aware of something to be able to make a change.


Why we are recommended to do yoga and meditation in the morning is because that will lay the foundation for the rest of your day. You will be much more prepared to meet the challenges during the day. Just think about it, imagine that you stress the first thing you do. You rush away to school or the office or what ever you do. You are tense. You bump into somebody else who started her day the same way. You start yelling at each other. Perhaps not loud, maybe just in your head. But the damage is done anyway.
Now go back and start the day over again. Start with yoga and meditation. This will make you feel balanced, focused and yet relaxed. When you bump into that lady you will not start yelling and you will not be offended by her yelling. That's how yoga and meditation works and it changes you.

Wednesdays means a day off with Charlie!

Hi there! I love my Wednesdays with Charlie. On these Wednesdays we try to have no schedule but enjoy the day as it unfolds. We often stay in bed a bit longer and sometimes we read books in the bed. Often Charlie orders an early breakfast consisting of grapes and dates. We enjoy smoothies together and cook delicous  plant based meals. Today we tried a papaya for the first time! There are not many things that makes me so happy as eating a ripe juicy tropical fruit. I can truly feel that we are meant
to eat fruit.



Before lunch we went out to play in the snow and had sooo much fun!

These days are totally de-stressing for the whole family. No deadlines and no rush. Like a very welcome break in the middle of the week! On these days it's also easier for Mattias who goes to work. He can just think about himself in the morning and he can work late if he desires. Or come home  when the dinner is served. On Thursdays Mattias is home with Charlie and that's why it's perfect for me to have my yoga classes un Thursdays for example.

And of course this is just wonderful for Charlie! Being with mom and dad. Play with his own toys. Just be. Be able to express all his feelings. Because he, like all of us, often play roles when we are not at home. He has to act in a certain way. He might not show all his tears and anger. But with his family he is totally safe to express all his feelings which is very important when it comes to building ones self esteem.

I hope this will inspire you to take that time off. To be with your children. Because they grow so fast. Me and my older boys father did the same thing with them when they were younger and I don't regret it for a second.

Recharge.

I love spending time in the forest. Here in Sweden the forest shifts with every season and I really love it. Now, in the winter, many of the trees are sleeping. I think that is a beautiful thing to learn from. This is the season when we should rest more and accept the fact that the energy will not be the same as during the rest of the seasons. It is a cycle. To be in full bloom we need to rest.

Nevertheless I can always count on the forest when I need to boost my energy. Actually it doesn't matter if it is heavy rains and the rest of the world looks grey. I always feel uplifted while in the forrest. And to get an extra deep boost I combine it with a run.

These photos were taken during my lunch break today. 

Yoga Thursday.

I just gave my second yoga class in my newest group. It is such a blessing to watch them leave with relaxed faces and bodies. To watch the shift taking place fills my heart with love. All of them are women and as women we are created to give. Give life and give love. Nurture. But in a yoga class they get to focus totally on them selves. They get to give back to them selves. Refill. In Kundaliniyoga there is always a longer rest. And giving yourself the opportunity to just lay down on your back for up to 10 minutes is luxurious. I recall when I was pregnant with my second son and I went to prenatal yoga. I recall thinking that the rest was the best part of the whole yoga class! 

On my way home from the yoga class I listened to the Rich Roll podcast. Rich is one of the best interviewers I've heard. It is more like a conversation than an interview.

When I came home Mattias had made a delicious dinner. He had his day off with Charlie today. I love the fact that Mattias and I take one day off each every week to be with Charlie. Tomorrow Charlie will go to his daycare mom and I will work with Pearls of Yoga.

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. :)